Fireside Chat With Thirdweb CEO Furqan Rydhan & Kartik Talwar I Pragma San Francisco 2024

[Music] and for our next session we're going to have a fireside chat with Fon from third web we're going to talk about all the things that you can learn from them going hard into Building open source tooling and getting more and more developers in this space and uh also why we should be all excited about the Bay Area so without further Ado let's welcome Peron from third web all right um I'm excited to chat today because there's a lot of things that uh are very complimentary to what you're doing and has helped make a massive impact over the last couple of years in this space but uh before we kind of get into the specifics of all the stuff that you've put out in this ecosystem I'm kind of curious about what actually made you start the company uh what's kind of the history behind it why did you choose to build it and uh what got you excited originally yeah well uh thanks for having me here and uh should be an exciting time um I'll give a little background because uh I got a kind of a decent story in terms of Entrepreneurship and um like I grew up here in the Bay Area I uh got started in Tech very young uh I'm old so you know this was I worked at a doom when I was 15 that was 1999 so I got a chance to see the early internet uh I built an e-commerce company in 2001 which has a ton of parallels to crypto like I've been banned from Banks and payment processors because selling online was too risky and it feels a lot like what we experience now um and I've built stuff on every era of the internet as a Founder as a somebody on founding teams I would say I'm not going to tell you about all those things that didn't work but uh I started a company called app Loven which is publicly traded now in the mobile gaming space and I got a chance to see what mobile looked like up front um what it sounded like when you're trying to sell mob mobile games to Big Publishers who were selling console games and they're like this doesn't make any sense and turns out mobile gaming was gigantic um and then I built a lot of stuff in consumer social at a company called bio I was part of the second half of that um we bought it back from AOL um and we built many social products um you know live streaming products items and Creator tools eventually we end up selling to Amazon and twitch and uh spent some time there and so had a few exits and I'm like what am I going to do with my life uh you know I was investing a lot lot and um you know investing is a little boring you meet great Founders you get excited and then you just kind of are a monthly update away and I'm like this is not fun and so I created a company called Founders Inc this is like my family office I invest through it it has a studio where we get to build companies this is where third web was born uh in 2019 we were building kind of like social like products online on chain um and we were doing a lot of work kind of like three months we'd kick something off ship it get some people to use it pivot the idea delete all the code start from the same framework and about a year doing that it felt like hey why isn't there a framework here that I could just build apps with like we believe apps are going to be the biggest dominant thing on blockchains and you know the apps we use on the internet like they look a certain way they're in a browser they're on a mobile app they're in a game the tools are very similar if I build something else I have these great Frameworks I have nextjs I have you know Jango and python I have many different tools why is it missing in this e system and I think that that was a light bulb for third web and uh when that happened we literally spent two weeks just sprinting and hacking together this kind of rough tool and I just talked to everybody I you know I could get a hold of about it and turned out they needed it and that was the Inception of third web that's awesome and uh I mean the the developer World in 2019 was even more nent than uh than what it is now and uh kind of the best you had was opens up in libraries but uh nothing else about structure or or best practices so uh I I have a lot more stories from from that era too uh the the question I'm kind of curious about is it seems like you were your own customer and that's kind of why you built it but was that the the intent or did you actually kind of were like hey this is something that everybody else should have and that's kind of the first reason why we're doing it or because you were prototyping so much that you just didn't want to start that whole Loop every time yeah I mean it's really nice when you're your own customer you get to feel the pain and you understand it very well you're not kind of thinking out loud and wondering if somebody else has this problem you know they have the problem because you had it um but we did see that um we would be what better suited not to build an app in the ecosystem but just to unlock this and um the starting point was we want to see apps like real apps uh using blockchains and you know we've seen a few of them at that era but the majority of them were very simple products I click this button and meant this thing and uh the tooling just wasn't ready for that and uh you know I've got a chance to build a lot of stuff on the internet and you know Cloud was probably one of the big transformative things that like accelerated the internet why it made you know developers it gave them the ability to develop simpler faster better products for their users and just take away some of the pain right so like we pay for compute on Amazon AWS to make the servers closer to you to do database work to do cashing and that helped people develop faster bigger products and I think this industry felt that we felt that we needed the same thing in this industry and so for apps there was a variety of things that you needed and you know the first starting point was hey this smart contract thing is weird new and it's a new language it's kind of hard to just get up and go from zero to one and get something out to production in almost every other industry you could just hack something together in a night and get something out and in this industry it's like I need audits I need security I need to know this new language I need to do all these things and we said what if we just made this part easy and then we let people connect their apps to it and that was the starting point and we saw just so much demand it was basically like nine months straight of sprinting is what it felt like at the start just to cover the ground of what people needed different Frameworks different capabilities better caching like and then you know we started discovering well damn like I also need an RPC and I need this other thing and I need wallets and so it turned out that like yes this starting point for us was help developers connect their apps to Smart contracts but to do that you needed five or seven or eight things and actually for most app developers the blockchain part is one box out of six boxes and for most app developers it felt like there's six slices of this box and there's too much overhead and then I fumble it and so we ended up with this full stack platform we think about front-end tools backend tools and onchain tools That's What We Believe full stack is now like you have to include on chain otherwise it's not actually full stack and that's kind of like where the development of our tool set grew and but it was really like we just talked with users we heard their pain points we actually just debugged with them and we're like man this sucks like you know 60% of the problems are because they didn't go get a paid RPC what if we just gave them an RPC what would it look like guess what all those problems went away it was literally 250 support tickets a week we were getting that I just need a better RPC because my app blew out a little bit I got more users and just going in and plugging that in was very helpful for them and so it's kind of identifying those things in real time and then figuring out how the hell you build it really fast and so that's been a bit of it yeah it's also actually super interesting framing because um we're in the business of telling people hey this is possible and build stuff in web 3 and uh every time you kind of have that conversation the the reaction that people have is oh this is a new thing I have to learn but they don't naturally think it's complimentary or actually it's one additional slice of the stuff that you built um even if we're working on a smart contract I still interface with that on versell most of the time um and it's not a either or scenario at all um but the thing I'm kind of curious about is uh the part that is Sometimes good sometimes not good about our ecosystem is things change way too fast you have anywhere from thematic like spikes of like what people are excited about you have a whole change in philosophy you have a whole change in architecture and if you started in 2019 you kind of saw everything from defi to stable coins to l2s to nfts to all the da stuff to rollups now um how do you prioritize what's worth spending time on how do you think about what is good feedback or what is going to be sticky or what is a layer that you want to be under instead of kind of supporting everything that people want at that time and uh how how do you make decisions like that yeah I mean really good question um I think the first thing for me is like I saw ethereum when the white paper first came out I followed along I invested I wrote stuff I was a hobbyist in it there's a long story that's being written and you have to remember that that you're part of this story you're maybe in chapter one or chapter two or three and you just don't want to become a maximalist about chapter three like I think that's like the number one thing is like there is something now but what's this Vision that's building and you know when I first you know I had seen Bitcoin before that when I first saw ethereum I'm like man this is cool we're going to program on these networks like that's awesome like I'm not that excited about you know Financial use cases like I don't think about trading on Wall Street or anything like that and other things I built when I was like this we're going to program like this is like public internet like this this reminded me of like Bridges and highways like isn't it really cool that we have freeways between cities so we can get around that's what blockchains are they're public infrastructure for the internet and man like we're we literally live only in private infrastructure that sucks like at Apple OV I saw like a database with like a billion plus phones information it's kind of wild right and like I could just go in and do whatever to change the algorithm to do something or like show you a different ad or do something like that that's weird it's a weird feeling and I just saw this world that was going to form and I think that was a centering Point like we want apps build we believe everything we do on the internet we already enjoy that we like social we like gaming we like some utility we like communicating with people we've already declared what we love on the internet how do we do that here and that was our centering point so we tried not to get caught in every cycle and I think when we launched third web the nft cycle was the thing that was peing and you know everyone was running around telling you that 10K pfps were everything we found the magic number guys it was 10,000 that was it that wasn't it and it was kind of like leaning on experience of seeing other eras of the internet seeing e-commerce in 01 seeing mobile like you don't get caught up in the now too much you try to get to where you want there's a promised land to kind of go find and I think to me for us it's apps and games like we use on the internet using public infrastructure um things that are now trustless permissionless and ideally decentralized allow you to kind of get there these words make public infrastructure to me and um so we just centered around that so try not to get caught in the now try to keep a vision forward and your job is to inch it forward so yes I can't make the leap you know in 2019 2020 from where the tooling is to every single person on the internet using it you know what three years later there's tools now that like you know anybody can use it every launch a roll up in 30 seconds now yeah you launch a rollup in 30 seconds you can plug in wallet very easy social logins like there's so much there now developers can sponsor gas that's like me paying AWS Lambda cost I could just do that now well guess what there's apps doing hundreds of thousands of daus that you know were built three months ago that wasn't possible two years ago but it is now and it was our job to inch it forward and there's more of this it doesn't stop here right so does that mean that you are actively deciding hey we're not going to support this specific case like I mean it's a not the best example but with a 10,000 pfp nft crazy era was there a decision that you cons consciously made that hey like not going to enable oneclick minting of this process for somebody to repeat or was it like hey what matters is a solid nft minting infrastructure and we'll just give you just that API and you figure out how you want to use it because we're not going to be opinionated about the implementation but we'll give you the API yeah I mean as a early stage startup you're always thinking about like I need to know if people love and need my thing that's like the thing that I'm really hunting for you need it like hair on fire problem if I have a fire extinguisher your hair's on fire you need it right like that that's kind of what I'm looking for and because everybody was thinking about nfts if our tool wasn't useful for people building nft products we're not a useful tool nobody needs this so while we don't necessarily have to agree with what they do with the tools they still need to use it and then our job is to translate it like this is what they're doing today are we building an nft minting company are we building a general purpose web 3 Dev tool helping folks get on chain right like which one are we doing and we chose that second one we were a general purpose tool now these were particular use cases this is where your guides your content your documentation it helps guide people this is where your Solutions teams understands the use cases that are happening like we understand defa we understand when people want to take payments in stable coins we understand how you want to use nfts and actually we see so much of it that like we're really good at like helping other teams like hey you're doing it this way why and they're like well that's just the first thought that came up like do it this way it's better for you it gives you these advantages and by the way here are some like modules that help it make it easier because you're doing stuff that other people have also done and your product's different like you use infrastructure in a general purposed way and so we think about ourselves as software infrastructure we embed ourselves in apps and games we help those things work but we're a general purpose and so you don't try to you know kind of squeeze into one one vertical or one use case and I think that's what we ended up doing that's awesome hopefully uh you get to translate that for uh for what you're doing U as you're build your companies um one other interesting piece that's uh unique or somewhat unique to to third web is that everything most of the things you're doing are open source um so the thing I'm curious about is how do you kind of think about building something entirely that's open source and usable by everybody and having a sustainable business um how do those things intersect for you yeah I mean uh so first I've used a lot of Open Source in my life I would say that my entire career is built on open source I've contributed a bit uh in different ways but I've never gotten a chance to build an open source company and so there's always this want and this industry is by default open right like when you go to the blockchain by default you can see what's happening and it just felt odd like we're going to build this thing in an open you know industry that's just mostly visible and talking about you know Pro you know the ability to audit something the ability to look at it and then we're going to close all over our stuff it felt it felt a little weird you know and so that was kind of the starting point we wanted to make sure that was there I think 90% or 95% of the stuff that we do is open source and it's a very permissive license and people should use it I think open source cannot be your marketing tactic if that's what you're doing it for it's a huge mistake especially in the system ecosystem yeah yeah definitely table Stakes yeah exactly and so um I I think that can't be the reason and so what were the reasons for us I think there were two critical reasons that we picked it one was we wanted to make sure that we got the most amount of feedback from users in any capacity so if they could go in poke around inspect our stuff our users are developers well what do they want to look at they're willing to look through code they're willing to find bugs in your code or better opportunities or send PLL requests this is a behavior that I've done and other people have done we wanted to make sure that that was capable because we needed to know how do we build the best product I can't sit on a whiteboard and invent it that's not how it works you sit there user by user and you learn it you see the pain points you see how they do it you see how they interact with it and that was important the second thing was our engineering bar like I think if you write code and you hide it behind a wall it's much easier to have a lower quality engineering output and there's all these best practices you need when going from a private to a public repo if you start there you don't do those mistakes you don't put keys in your repos and you don't do a lot of weird stuff why because somebody else needs to do it you make sure that when the server runs there's environment variables configur it why because that's how it needs to happen when somebody else runs it now how do we build a business on this and I think this was a big challenge for us to think about as well uh we spent the first two years of third web open source and free that was just purpose we needed to figure out what to build how to do it uh and then there were ideas there's these open core models that I've seen especially in big data and other Industries where people develop services on top like the typical internet one is hosting so we have a backend server called engine this is an HTTP API that's paired with a backend wallet it allows developers to immediately be able to to sign in with ethereum do mints do transactions from their side now this this system you could just selfhosted it's a Docker container it's kind of annoying to manage and scale it well we offer a managed service so we can offer kind of value for that um there are solutions and support so there's a business side that we were able to kind of create some value there and then lastly we've built products on top of our own open source tools that are paid products and so that's kind of what it looks like we look at the top end of the ecosystem folks that have raised a lot of money and generating a lot of Revenue as our customer base and then we look at kind of this long tail of developers the solo person to starting out few persons start up like we want to give a lot of free cap capabilities here for me this is like GitHub GitHub was like this I use GitHub for I don't know 10 years without paying them a cent it's great I ran companies where they paid him a lot and Enterprise GitHub and it worked for them and they made a lot of Revenue and so sustainable yeah exactly and so I I don't think open source limits you you just have to be very intentional and purposeful about what it is and I just think the biggest mistake I see Founders do is they use it as a marketing thing it's not it has to be a core value because otherwise the business team comes in later and they're like oh we need to close this because our customers are just doing it for free it's like that's that's you're going to hit that wall and so it must be a value our engineering team is like better they're better because people can see their code it's also tougher it's bigger challenge you open up yourself to a lot of criticism and in this case you need this uh to make something better exactly the criticism actually just fuels us and helps us like I I'm I'm literally not worried about somebody saying your code is bad I'm like great thank you for spotting that we'll go make it better tomorrow like that's exactly what we want to do you know no it's that's a that's a really good way of framing this um you are based here in SF a lot of your team is here uh and interestingly that's uh not the Hub of where crypto is uh it's not that there's a single Hub it's just spread all across the world so how has that sort of impacted the way you think about product development or do you think it's uh it's been net positive neutral negative uh what's kind of been your assessment for building for crypto yeah I mean I think the world just changed in general right so 10 years ago when I was building companies it was most of the people were around me here in SF and it was very easy to do things now you're going to be a digital first company like you're going to by default communicate probably via slack and other messaging communication um and I think that's the same for us we do have a good concentration here in SF it's very powerful to have somebody right next to you that you can interact with but there's also just great talent all around the world I I would argue just slightly I think there's a lot of crypto builders in the SF and bay area but it just hasn't been wrapped together it's a fragmentation yeah it's a fragmentation problem and so I think one thing that's why we did this event yeah this event is great and uh you know similarly like that's what we're trying to do as well is just Coral the community like do events do things do working sessions and so uh just trying to find a way to do that but the inperson time is is special um we do as a team we do a lot of offsides uh we bring them here we get them to see our spaces we get them to interact we have an offsite next week with 25 people from third web coming into SF and it's going to be awesome you're going to feel a lot of energy and there's a lot of technical Innovation happening like most most places in the world you're not seeing self-driving cars and you know things like that on the road and it just inspires you I think to think bigger and go next and this industry is the next variant of things on the internet this is happening every app will be a crypto enabled app there's no doubt in my mind because we need this public infrastructure we're going to bring our data with us to apps we're going to do a lot of things and I think we want to be inspired by everything that's happening and so I think SF is a massive Tech up I think there's many others I'm you know I'm born and raised here in the Bay Area so I'm not like you know I don't know another place in the same way like I've I've never lived somewhere else for like years um where I'm like this is my home um but I just think that like SF is one of those key plac that you should come you should you should see the people doing Innovation and you'll be surprised at how many of those products will use blockchains in the future and I think you should be the first touch point and so for me I think of myself as like somebody here in San Francisco that people can go to to learn about blockchains to learn why it's awesome um you know I'm not talking about meme coins and the g gen and the trading stats I'm talking about what you can build with it and how your app can use it I think just last week I talked to a developer I showed them our third web connect product and they're like wait this is a whole user login system I'm like yeah turns out public infrastructure comes with a user login system like you get an account ID you get something that you can use as a unit of account like that's awesome and it it just you got to get that click to happen and so uh I I don't know I just use the opportunity and where to kind of speak about it and this is the best place to do it I think as an ANF native I agree well thank you so much for this amazing conversation I think we'll wrap this up here it's been amazing to hear the story and uh how you think about this whole space and hopefully you got some good advice please give a big round of applause [Applause] [Music]