EthCC 2: Justin Ahn

hi my name is Justin I'm the co-founder and CEO of Quigley we are a company that is kind of working on a kind of lair it started out as a protocol but now it's a layer of program ability on top of security tokens yeah and my I'm very thankful you guys are here I know it's 5:30 on the last day of the conference and I'm sure you guys are looking for better things to do but yeah I'm very happy to kind of share this topic with you on the programmable equity and what we think is kind of the difference and the differentiator with the security tokens and why we think kind of a better focus to take in this regard is with small small medium enterprises and even startups so but yeah basically as we move into more kind of like solid foundations for asset tokenization it's I mean it's pretty much I think the topic that most people here have been kind of disgusting it's like where is where is the real adoption going to come from and so for us that quitly the idea is that we we see it coming from startups from small businesses from from newer companies that are more agile and nimble to kind of change and accept and adopt new technologies in the way they grow their businesses so real quickly just to introduce myself a little bit so I started off my career as a as an M&A analyst at KPMG working mostly in Asia Japan and South Korea but then I joined in the kind of internet e-commerce worldwide craze that was started by rocket internet here in Europe I joined their launch team in Vietnam and so my experience was kind of start of equity starts there where I was largely driving the launch and growth of silora which is I don't know if you're familiar if you're european you'll be familiar with like Zalando I guess if you're American you'll be familiar with Zappos but I built the Vietnam arm of that and we were acquired by a pride type a Thai private equity firm and then yeah I've been in Europe for six years now and got into the blockchain game last year to start quickly with quitly the idea originally was a work for equity platform we we built a large off chain solution which was mainly spreadsheet driven at the time but with that MVP was enough to get interest from consensus ventures and we received the precede backing from them as well as participation in their tachyon accelerator so in addition if you have any kind of questions on tachyon as well I'd be very helpful very happy to address those later on as well feel free to follow me on Twitter I'm not very active I joined last year but I mostly talk about my baby and make startup make comparisons about how raising a baby is the same thing as building a startup so you won't find many crypto kind of or blockchain related things there but if you want another follower or following please please follow me so yeah if we get into the the crux of things for us the the real focus is on startups and SMEs if we just look at if we just think about our host country right now France alone according to the OECD more than 30% of the population is employed by companies that are no bigger than 10 people for large companies in this case the benchmark is over 250 that's that's less than 10% you look at the case of the US which is kind of skewed here it shows that a large percentage almost almost half are employed at large companies if you dig into that a little bit you see though that actually for for the u.s. to standard is companies that are hired that have more than 500 employees so in fact this is a very I mean this goes to show you I think SMEs pretty much across the world are the backbones of most of most economies globally having said that excuse me having said that it's it's incredible that we see how integral s enemies are to local economies yet they faced so many challenges you I mean especially with tech startups today you think for a lot of for a lot of small businesses for a lot of ventures funding is available from from VC VCS and things like that but in fact they're mostly interested in tech companies in kind of new emerging kind of companies in new emerging sort of industries if you're a regular small business access to capital is extremely difficult you you're probably not gonna qualify for from like institutional players like banks you probably not gonna qualify for loans you you can't you can't finance with debt you can't finance with equity what can you do and this impacts a lot of things like growth hiring in terms of your own kind of personal motivation so yeah it's there's an extreme kind of contradiction at the economy between like how SMEs are very important to our economies yet at the same time they don't find much institutional support so for us we we take the approach of considering company equity as a solution the idea is that if equity is used effectively if it can be used effectively it can help SME its kind of overcome the challenges we mentioned to be fair large companies face the same challenges as well however they fortunately will have the financial resources to kind of overcome these kind of challenges effectively but so the question for us is so for small companies for startups how do you slice the pie in a meaningful way so that your employees whether they're full-time whether they're part-time whether they're freelancers how will you do it in a way that you can increase value as well as share it basically the idea is that sharing ownership I think it's analogous to a lot of the crypto community a lot of the blockchain community because you can see you can see a very real parallel with with tokens utility tokens with bounties to things like that I think the concepts are all in place obviously but unfortunately we live in the real world and I think we've seen with the kind of the crackdown that's been happening recently with across regulatory board said it's a solution that needs to it's a solution that needs real-world frameworks to be applied to make it really effective if and with that argument I think it's it's necessary to take a little time to kind of understand what is equity to define what is equity if you just take a fairly accounting standard of the definition it's it's it's your assets minus your liabilities it's it's what's left after it's what's left in your business after you deduct all the costs and expenses that go into it so it's really the value creation of a company from the accounting standpoint legally it's also it's an indicator usually in the form of like a certificate some some form of documentation that shows that you own the asset and financially yeah it's its stock or stock options in a company yeah I mean as you can see from these definitions alone you'll already see implied are a lot of kind of legal and compliance issues that are involved which clearly show why tokens in the in its original form will not suffice from a regulatory standpoint as kind of a medium for actual real world value I think additionally why people are very interested in equity today clearly a lot of the tech startups in the US have shown what could happen with employees who take equity as compensation yeah all the all the Java startups Google Amazon Facebook everyone knows kind of like the urban legend of how like well I don't it's not fair to say it's an urban legend because I think it's true like the masseuse they they hired a masseuse they can pay or they offered shares at Google and in like five years she was suddenly a millionaire I mean I think that kind of those kind of stories really drove the interest in like becoming shareholders in owning equity and businesses especially from tech companies which is why it's become a very very common tool for tech companies to hire to to use to compensate and attract talent over to their side so however given given the kind of interest in equity when we look at it that way we should we should take a moment to think about the limitations that are on equity today what one of the big things that I think it when especially for startups I think founders get a very significantly high premium is that fair is that not I don't know I mean surely it is true that you're taking a big risk starting the initiative giving and getting think getting everything off the ground but I don't think it's I don't think it's normal I don't think it's a usual to consider that value a hundred or two hundred times more what employee five or six does for the company right I mean at that stage you're still there's still a lot of there's still a lot of value that's being created from people just just because you weren't there from day one doesn't mean you don't deserve as much as the pie having said that one problem in this regard is in order to increase the pie a lot of times one problem is that in order to increase the shares there's often dilution and that usually comes from the founders shares not not investors this leads to a lot of short time short term misalignment and then in terms of the concept that being paper rich there's no there's no place to liquidate your shares so you could you could own if you were if you're at Google in the early days and you owned a significant amount of shares if there's no place where you can cash in those shares what do you do and you hold them but for options then the real world kicks in again if there's suddenly a valuation on those shares you will be liable to pay taxes on those options and so is that really fair I mean if if you only have 90 days to exercise on that strike price money to cover that I mean if you don't have that and you don't have the value on that is it worth it and so ultimately there's little transparency because it's not in it's not in the interest of the founders to share that with their to share that with their employees and it's it's it's it's employees should know like I mean basically in today's world where we're trying to empower more and more kind of doers to become owners they should kind of understand what their slices of the pie actually represent entity in the entity that they're helping to build so yeah basically if that was kind of a mouthful but if you didn't want to kind of listen to all that the problem we really see is that there's the biggest friction in private equity today is that there's a lack of liquidity that doesn't mean we should kind of advocate like immediate liquidity for companies I think that would be a bad sign for many companies and you see that in the token world with a lot of the I see as you see kind of the the proxies to what happened in in the public markets a lot of pump-and-dump kind of kind of scenarios but it is a major friction that could potentially if if resolved in a certain way help small businesses to grow unfortunately they're there there is nevertheless some equity has become a very kind of abuse term that we see from especially from a lot of founders and CEOs you see the term sweat equity a lot of people use the term sweat equity to kind of incentivize participation and and to to attract talent but if there's no real actual kind of agreement if it remains forever a theoretical split sorry not forever but if it remains at their theoretical split really where is the true incentivization for your for your contributors for your fellow kind of stakeholders and what you're building so one idea that we're looking at is let's go after the I mean we see that private equity really means stuck in the past the process for public companies to trade has become much much better much more streamlined well audited but if small businesses want to provide real equity to their to their contributors it's it's very complicated founders waste a lot of time trying to figure this out instead of focusing on their businesses it's expensive if you want to go through proper channels like going through a law firm but using lawyers and at the same time it can also give the wrong incentives especially because a lot of the standardization with the process for example the typical arrangements are it can be something like a one-year cliff and four years vesting I mean with today's trends in today's workforce is that really the way it's almost like handcuffs is that really the way you want to to work in a business really the way you want to kind of grow your work culture I can give a very good example of that my co-founder from Bose in Jay sitting right there in the middle actually I'm glad he's here I didn't I wouldn't I wasn't sure if it or not but he built a start-up in 2015 called skylights his virtual reality in in-flight entertainment very cool product it caught the interest of YC the he was able to be part of that he was a co-founder he's able to be part of the team get it towards a Series A level of fundraising but after a certain after almost four years on the project he felt like it was time to move on to something else unfortunately as a co-founder were fortunately and unfortunately as a co-founder he was he kind of became deadweight on that cap table he owned a significant number of shares but what can he do with it on paper he's a millionaire but for a tastes at a start-up that's still at its series-a level there's not going to be that much liquidity that you can find for these shares so what can you actually do this is I think where blockchain has become extremely interesting interesting for us we now have like decentralized networks on top of the internet where we can build kind of applications and things that you that can be processed across this network and then there's tokens basically used to incentivize and kind of power the the respective kind of network agents again as I mentioned in the very beginning when we saw what was happening with ICS when we saw what was happening bounties and it was very analogous to the the the to what's supposed to happen with equity kind of rewarding people value with what you're creating together and I mean yeah you can see that with blockchain people are selling their tokens I mean this is a very recent this is a very recent graphic made it still happy it's passed the bullet it's it it includes the crypto winter and you see people are still kind of still selling tokens and their projects in order to I mean for the argument that they make is they're using the the sales to build their businesses and and and reward the people who believe in them at the Year at the early stage that that in itself it doesn't take a rocket science scientist to realize that that in itself is a form of equity and so again really at the end of the day the idea is people want liquidity they want to realize the kind of gains from the contributions they're doing unfortunately what we're seeing from the the the kind of tokenization and the ico structure is that it's illegal they're they're trying to use tokens and justifying it as a form of utility when in fact what they're doing is just they've created a financial instrument in order to to convey value to the people that are contributing so so we've come to the so basically we've come to security tokens now today which is I think the natural kind of evolution of things I think it's certainly more realistic it's certainly more tied to real world legal frameworks when they're when there's an actual when there's an actual asset underlying what a security token is whereas compared to the utility token it's it's all based on kind of the future values a security token is it's it's backed by the asset it's an asset ization of of an actual security hence the name and so yeah STL's have become have become all the rage right since I think q3 of 2018 if you keep looking you see something like on average now twenty stos kind of being being being being run every month I think what in was it October November Petros the the Venezuelan coin I mean that's supposed to be a proper sto it raised over 700 million so yeah I mean I think people have really embraced that that idea that there's real assets that needs to be underlying it but at this time at this at this airport only a couple months after the real kind of the the resulting the results of Krypton winter like simply slapping the name sto on top of a token sale doesn't really make it an sto does it I mean in the case of Petrus I think you can at least assume that there's some kind of real fundamental asset that's behind that's behind the token itself but in general I think most of the if you if you dig deep into some of the sto sets that have been held over the past few months there's really nothing underneath the surface so is it really a nest you can truly call something in sto if it's just basically an ICO with a different name on top of it no I don't think so and so I think this has also been kind of a key theme of SCC this year standardization is really key particularly for security tokens because if you really want interoperability with these things there needs to be a common standard for the for the construction of it for the structuration of it I think two of the big kind of initiatives at the moment our our polymath and their ERC 14-hundred as well as it's a bit dated now I haven't been keeping up with it as much lately but Harbor and there are token basically these are new kind of ERC standards I think ERC 1400 is based off the 700 series and our token is more on the existing ERC 20 but they're basically new structure Asians to kind of create a model more real-world assets and real-world securities and stocks and things like that and I think it's it's becoming pretty common across the ecosystem overall across the ethereum across all across all blocks change them there needs to be now standardization and if particularly for tools like securities it makes sense it can't be fast and loose anymore like it was with the like it was at the peak your peak ico times and so yeah again I think over the course of this year if people's predictions that this will be the year of the sto there really needs to be a stronger adoption of standards and so the way the way we look at it at Quigley is we consider basically with what we do we consider we've considered constructing a security token stack obviously at layer 1 it's it's the blockchain then you have the the token layer and then legal compliance you see again players like polymath Harbor securitize yesterday they unveiled doriel from consensus France these are very awesome tools to really reflect the the actual real load assets that under that are underneath the tokens that people can offer and then finally I think even though I clued in I included it in this diagram of the stack liquidity is kind of a ways off a far away's away but yeah I mean in terms of the exchange protocols like 0 X is it's gonna be a very strong part of this stack guys like err swap finance more and more as these dissenter as we can more and more as the security token concept standardizes there's going to be there will develop ways to kind of contribute to that liquidity and this is where like finance and air swept air swap will help and as in those regards so yeah I mean a a security token stack I think is important it's necessary to construct in order for for real kind of securities trading liquidity to happen in in in the token world in the crypto world and unfortunately for us the major players that have kind of already made a lot of progress in this space polymath harbor securitized they've all very publicly kind of made their intentions clear that they're going for the big fish they're going for like they basically want to take fortune 500 companies multinationals I guess Jack Courant here in France they want to take those guys do IPOs with tokens basic sorry you shouldn't even use the parallel IPO and they just want to do stos for these companies and so yeah I mean I think this kind of rounds out with the way I start at the beginning that's very ambitious and and can play a very interesting role in like public markets and everything but where does that leave the majority of today's businesses they're not large companies they're startup store they're small to medium-sized enterprises and so that's where we've came in with Quigley kind of to build a system where we can grant we can allow companies to leverage their ownership equity to accelerate their businesses once equity becomes more flexible once equity becomes tokenized you can just distribute faster almost like in the sense like cash and so while it doesn't solve the entire liquidity spectrum because you don't necessarily Knable the you won't necessarily be able to cash in for value right away the idea is that at least with a token form with with the contracts action on the blockchain that you can offer equity as a in a legal framework in a compliant legal framework almost like a form of cash to people who really believe in the business you're building so yeah this was the good texture for quitly version one which is what we what we had we had constructed the off chain version prior to the consensus backing and then while we were in the tachyon accelerator we were able to roll out a first working on chain protocol to for companies to share their equity so yeah we thought it was a very cool tool utilized blockchain very well it was largely inspired by will flaunt built his last company completely on work for equity so he was he had a huge vision on that part as well as if you're all familiar with maybe Hyperloop transportation technologies they do a large kind of a share per hour kind of system where all the contributors can contribute on their own time and so long as the the deliveries are validated and deemed useful for the project it Korea they would be they would be compensated in terms of shares for the time they put in so yeah we built this version but then we found that actually most companies don't want to build themselves that way they like the idea they like the value proposition of building companies and being compensated in terms of equity but the entire kind of end-to-end system it turned out to be way too granular for a lot of the early clients we were going for and this kind of ran the gamut from like bootstraps early-stage startups all the way to startups that have already closed on series a and series a rounds and even companies that weren't necessarily considered startups there were young companies but they already had up to 50 employees they were very much interested interested in turnkey solutions for distributing equity to their employees but they didn't want to be dictated by a system that that wasn't how they wanted to split equity within their company and so yeah I think we reached the problem that many people in the blockchain ecosystem today have kind of reached a product market fit we built something really cool we built something that the blockchain community was really excited about then we put it out in the wild and people were kind of like WTF for like what do I do with this it's--we and not only from a granularity perspective of the inputs necessary the data necessary to run it but for example just for non crypto companies to convince them to deal with meta transactions to convince them to install a install meta mask via extension on your browsers maybe for the founder for the CEO you could convince them to make those steps but if you wanted to transfer tokens and equity tokens to your employees I mean every single employee it ended up being a very messy kind of huge learning but again we ideally if you're a good entrepreneur you learn from your mistakes and and and and you talk to the clients to the test the users that you've tested with that you've used with and you try to develop you go you get back on the horse and you try to develop a new product and so we really stripped down quitly to be just a legal equity distribution tool a tool to distribute equity directly from your browser but the split the number of shares it's it's you who determine and so we again we we move most of the things off chain due to the kind of the complexity still with user experience that people see with blockchain and the idea is to only really at this at this stage hash the contracts and then provide on the side in parallel legally binding documents that provide the real world tether to the the asset that we're providing the contributors we have we we now released an open version unfortunately with a lot of the complexity when you deal with the real world when you deal with security tokens that need to be backed by a real world asset this this then creates complexities in terms of legal in terms of the legal frameworks you need to have you need to have the documentation in the in the in the procedural way that needs to be done in each respective generation in each respective jurisdiction to be to be backed by that token and so we had a choice to make started off as a when we started off as an IC L company we made very bold claims of being able to handle all jurisdictions we we shrank that down to the US and France after we decided to kind of concentrate on legal documentation and then when we finally came down to the next level of MVP our third MVP in fact them if that kind of tells you how difficult it is to find product market fit we've we're now on our third MVP in in the span of a year and so we made the decision to focus on Delaware C corporations in the u.s. just because the idea was the majority of technology companies technology startups in the US or Delaware C course and most of the processes for incorporating Delaware C course for creating equity benefit plans for employees of Delaware C course and distributing equity to employees of Delaware C course can be fairly well automated in a very streamlined way from your browser so that's kind of the status of quitly today and why and that's kind of why we think that's kind of that's why we describe ourselves not really as a security token issuance but more of as a as a kind of programmable equity tool a way to get users used to understanding what it means to take a program we'll approach to equity just like without a lot of crypto deals with money in that regard we we think equity can be done in the same way and just to share again I think I kind of went over a lot of it in this in just the past few seconds but um I can I'd be very happy share our learnings so far what I can do tell you what I can positively tell you right now is with we've spoken to and we've worked with almost over a hundred companies now and we what we can tell you this startups small businesses new CEOs CEOs of the new workforce kind of they want to share ownership it's I think it's a real it's a real trend that's happening in work today in the future of work people are more happy to share value with the people they work with with the people who are contributing value and definitely on the technical side the friction solvable it's more the legal side as I mentioned the biggest friction for us today to make this a more Universal tool is it's just legal jurisdiction it's it's just the regulations for each jurisdiction that your companies are in we've also learned that it's it's it's better to make the tool as flexible as possible when we tried to kind of dictate how splits we're done companies don't like that additionally I think it was mentioned by I've been in this room for like two speakers now that I forget her name but the woman who spoke before me about business development I think it's true I mean I think we tend to be very what do you call the horse blinders we have blinders when we come to conferences like this because everyone's an enthusiast or has a certain level of knowledge on on on cryptocurrency on blockchain when in fact in the real world and in our case when we want to deal with with with startups and SMEs CEOs don't have time to think about like how to deal with how to deal with the idiosyncrasies in blockchain how to deal with how to handle crypto currencies wallet things like that I think it's very it's very I think her advice was good you have to kind of you have to take adopt their language and and make that I guess that's the human layer of blockchain like you really have to make it to convey the message in a way they understand because literally telling them that you can you can there's an immutable ledger that they can put their shares so that it can never be corrupted for a CEO that's the least of his his or her problems so yeah I mean definitely blockchain web 3 elements should be as minimal as possible I think if if we're kind of trying to continue to drive progress on web 3 for quickly I can tell you how we see ourselves in that stack I shared for you earlier for us to pet the path forward is to again as I mentioned earlier to kind of become a thin layer of programmable equity over the more kind of robust compliance tools that are being built by guys like what do you call polymath I mean doriel we saw yesterday was excellent it was is really cool robust tool for companies this kind of issue and trade equity but for your again for your average entrepreneur for your average CEO it's extremely complex so there needs to be more layers on top in terms of user experience user interface that make that make blockchain applications accessible in fact yeah we shouldn't even be using terms like that this that make these our applications accessible and so for quickly the approach we're gonna be taking from this point on as we can continue developing it is to become that thin layer on top of more blockchain oriented protocols and applications to to make it accessible to to normal businesses today so yeah I mean I think in a long long story short for us we see that's why we tried to kind of stay away from the security token titles from the security token nomenclature we we've adopted a programmable equity as a way to kind of explain our product and we see that to be fair to be honest we see that as a bridge to tokenization we just don't mention those parts anymore we definitely think security tokens are the future of equity will will do the value pit will will do the pitch that every like polymath Harbor does it's a trillion dollar market we definitely want to be it's big enough that we want to be a part of it but honestly yet businesses normal businesses don't care about blockchain so if there's a learning that you can take from quigley if you're building depths or anything today definitely try to find real-world accessible entry points to get into building your your your products and your and your protocols and and your your contributions to the web 3 ecosystem so yeah that's about it I hope I didn't speak too fast I tend to but if if you have any questions or comments or feedback SIF if you don't want to ask it now feel free to Gillman email me or get in touch with me we're always happy to talk product and Quigley thank you [Applause] thank you very much fold this token especially the last part I was quite honest and to be showing some experience in the field we are discussing this yesterday in part of the decentralize finance track that happen here and one point is you mentioned the standards and how important it is to be interoperable but something that struck me is your stock you mentioning about security token is still very much a blockchain base stack you know and so have you looked into n discuss with and as you say two entry points to the existing market of securities and so from banks to young exchange is existing have you looked a bit into how you could work with them and also how it could be standardized some interface between what you're doing and what yeah no that's a very cool question actually when we started we did we did kind of take that approach we were very open like most SEO companies do we shared a lot and we tried to be very vocal actually I'm to be to be to tell you I'm based here in France actually I'm based in Paris at the moment and when we started we were very quickly invited by being people got to to talk about what we were doing because they thought they thought programmable equity and and greater liquidity via equity could have good good applicability emerging markets that they're that they're providing services and unfortunately as is the case with a lot of big companies it was just taking too long too many actors involved and discussions were just they weren't really going anywhere but I mean we we see the kind of potential that you're talking about to interface with big companies and to provide our kind of technology to larger companies but we to be frank we just haven't had much success in getting past discussions which is kind of why we started focusing on startups and SMEs because they're just more faster nimble they're agile they accept our message a lot a lot better and they're also patient with our MVPs they're also patient with our early stage products so yeah I don't know if they answer you a question but I think in terms of for us we have very limited interaction with larger players like banks institutions like that and we have very deliberately focused on just interfacing with mostly small companies private companies and startups so in terms of that we haven't had much friction in in terms of interfacing was that your question or yeah one side of it is as clients I understand that it might be slow but also I mean if we player that's involved in for instance for a lot of type of securities in general you have a lot of players and even independent that are placing you know like some con tries to to investors and so so you know look at what's existing in the shape of the market and how you could play with it sure maybe you're hinting towards like liquidity I guess really actual like trading and everything in terms of the product at hand just we focus on allowing like CEOs and companies to give equity to their employees so on that side our our legal framework is tight I mean we've done we work with lawyers we work with law firms to make sure that end of the of the contractual ization of the asset is in place I think if you're kind of hinting towards them like how would we interface in terms of the exchange part in terms this to be honest yeah I don't think we're there yet us as quickly I know for example the way it works with public companies there's a lot of due diligence that needs to go in when you decide to list and if you're at that stage you can probably afford financial services and and and and service providers who will do that kind of due diligence and audits for you yeah and to be frank we haven't really dug into that part yet because as I mentioned I don't know if you were here in the beginning of the talk when I mentioned them we do have the caveat that this is not true liquidity at the moment because you can't just trade it in for for cash right away and that will be a challenge I'm hoping I'm very excited about things like prediction markets and things where where you can list lesser-known coins hopefully and including securities hopefully and you can find a way to find buyers at a certain point I'm not we haven't fully fleshed out the regulation side of that we should our our team should talk about them more and if that's I know that you're I think you're a lawyer I guess if you have any ideas on that we're happy to kind of brainstorm with you but definitely prediction markets like gnosis and with checks and things and and diffusion those are very exciting kind of possibilities to extend towards liquidity later in the future any kind of decks really is a great way to provide true liquidity but I hesitate to say that because people get very excited when they hear things like they're like oh I can trade it right away that that really isn't the the legal compliance at the moment so in that regards yeah I don't I'm sorry if we haven't provided a good answer for you well guys it's like six and you're still here I'm very happy yeah Justin thanks for the talk and how to appreciate the honest entre neurofeedback that I think the problems that you described a lot of the other products have as well that they don't really I don't really find product market fit and they they come from technology first standpoint and then real I say nobody actually wants that and great presentation the only only negative he pick is a bit like the gifs they were a bit too much there were a lot of chips in between but other than that a question I had you mentioned you guys didn't I see oh I understood correctly and and if so and you had a token actually because you're kind of moving a lot of stuff off chain now and you probably had like a token model back then I assume and I think this will probably be the case for a lot of startups that raised money with an IC own have a token what is your experience with a investors and what are you doing about it yeah to answer that question I let's hope this stays in here between us I think my co-founder floor is always horrified when I talk about our ICO days because it's something he wants to like forget we started in February 2018 and we come from like like startup startup backgrounds like we we weren't like og blockchain kind of guys we worked on other startups before I'm a rocket guy he's a YC guy and we were just really excited about the fact that you could find ways to crowd fund your products not having to deal with terrible VCS we were constantly like judging you and like on your product and things like that and not even really giving away equity which is a very kind of cool thing and we saw the kind of parallel with bounties and everything as a way to do that and so and flan really like he's just a true believer in like work for equity building companies that way and so we saw a lot of green lights to go and unfortunately this was February 2018 so I'm sure many you know by the time like April May rolled around like everyone was like dying to like get rid of their coins and like um and in liquidate as much as the better coins as possible so yeah unfortunately we didn't get to go full-out ico but we did start out as an I see a company we even did the whole like we got like a lot of people to contribute to the project by giving away our quit tokens so we have them on your list actually still so if you are a quit holder don't worry we remember you and during our next ideally during our next fundraising around will get back but yeah that was very tough and we weren't sure how to proceed at that point but we really felt like we had built enough traction and we had built enough kind of interest in what we were doing and we ourselves had a wasn't just a white paper we had like a working product and everything and and and companies that were interested in using using the product so fortunately we were connected with consensus consensus ventures and with tachyon I guess we were at this stage that they were looking for they were not necessarily fully scalable products at the time but with enough interesting ideas and a good enough team and interesting enough team that could kind of bring it to fruition I would have to say I mean even within the people in this ecosystem there's probably a lot of skepticism and a lot of cynicism and what to do and for sure I think geo Lubin is a giant contributor to a lot of what's happening in this ecosystem but really the consensus guys for better for worse are largely driving the growth in this ecosystem so we we were very happy to connect with them mostly very young people so not like your typical guy especially on the VC arm not like your typical VC VCS who especially like in Europe who are asking for like five-year ten-year business plans to how you how you'll reach profitability especially in kind of emerging frontier tech I would say yeah wherever you're from try to connect as much as possible with mesh companies with with people who work in the mesh people work in consensus very open culture very positive culture very open willing to try new things so if you're if you're looking for kind of investment levels now I think tachyon too might have just closed but they're still doing other kind of initiatives to drive growth they still do grants ECF also does grant there's so many grants in this community that I think you can find ways to circumvent VCS for the time being until you reach a certain level of scale where you can actually interface with them having said that I think B C's may come around again security tokens from what we're seeing is becoming like a hot kind of field to get sticky I mean security and I think gaming is another thing that shockingly is becoming very very right intuitive on crypto so if you're in those kind of spaces and you can show some sense of traction and real use cases I think you do have you you you will have interest for sure I'm not sure if that answered kind of yes thanks cool no problem thanks [Applause]