Molly Mackinlay, Swaroop Hegde, Ayush Ranjan, Masa 'Senshi' Kikuchi I Pragma India 2023

[Music] all right thank you guys all so much for joining us very honored to be moderating this panel with these fantastic Builders who have been working and hacking in this space since 2020 probably even before but 2020 is when um all of these folks got their start at the first hack Fs in July 2020 and so excited to introduce to you all um swu P who's uh the co-founder and CEO of powerloom uh aush ranan who's the co-founder and CEO of huddle 01 and MSA who's the founder and CEO of secured Finance so uh excited to be leading this group um I really wanted to start by winding back the clock um back to those early days when you all got your start at hack FS 2020 um this is before filecoin M that launch people are building on janky protocols and tools um I really want to hear from you guys about your hackathon experience back then what sort of a hacks did you put in place in in your uh early projects um as you were getting started what inspired you to work on this problem area um and how has it iterated and changed over time okay hi I'm Masa um at that time uh it was the just before the FCO Mane launch and I was watching the YouTube and one minute you know is saying we need the filecoin a lending market and also I saw the you know there's a 100 hackers on idea mostly written by one and then Top Line is actually if I a lending Market it actually okay I have a traditional Finance experience looking like a okay nobody's building it definitely we should build it and that's the initial thought and yeah actually then the hacks is you know I also have a computer science background and what I like about ethereum is uh the concept of global computer right and uh what I like about computer science is basically I really enjoy the designing the computer processor it's all about Finance State machines the idea is to rewrite the entire Finance in a network setlement network in as a finance State machines and that is the idea of the you know the initial submission as a secur finance and uh we still keep building this so I'm so happy to uh be here yeah for me uh so I'm aayush co-founder and CEO of fan uh I graduated back in 2016 I was an engineer and from 2016 to 2020 I did product and growth at a lot of b2c based startups in India uh especially in Bangalore and then I write a book called Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel canman and emo storki in 2020 and I realized that hey I don't want to do product and growth anymore I want to uh get an over world rise and behavioral economics so uh that was my wife dream and I applied to University a couple of universities in uh Europe and I got through one of them in 2020 Co happened boom my admission got deferred by 4 months and that's when I had stumbled upon Bitcoin white paper I started doing a couple of boot camps I realized that I want to do something uh in this space and that's when e Global hackfest happened uh so I I was just looking forward to hey I want to build this with someone uh who has already worked on this before so that's when I met my now co-founder sushith who was also from my same University and we and it was 30-day hackathon so and we didn't have any kind of like plan on what we want to build at that time but since there were 30 days hackathon we were just observing the market and we observed one of our Mentor called Andrew from textile powergate at that time he was mentioning a lot about decentralization and over time we saw that every all of these calls were happening over Zoom even e Global hacks and we realized that we need to solve this this communication infrastructure that was the whole uh start of the journey and that's when Zoom bombing used to happen uh where anybody would be able to join the calls so the it is pretty simple that we'll just build something in a peer-to-peer fashion uh where it's much more secured much more private and your call Quality is also better and at that time Co used to in because of Co in India the connections were not great and because of that a lot of people were not able to do uh video calls in a very effective manner so that led us to uh basically build uh what was called Cadbury back then but now hard L and yeah so that was the journey yeah uh hi everyone my name is faroo uh yeah 2020 feels like a long time ago and also not so long um I think at that time I had just started working um sorry I was already building a developer tooling and uh running some boot camps for a bunch of students and aush was also at it and I know some more people are in the audience as I walked in and as I used to encourage people to um work on um not only you know what they were learning from us but also take part in hackathons and then hackes was one of them so e Global we sort of work together with them for all these things and but for me it was like you know I got a walk talk so I remember it was just one night before the deadline when anumi and I were like hey we have the side idea and maybe we should also do this so that we can experience what our students are experiencing and we started to build um what was then just a use case of what we building today um it was quite the interesting finale when we presented it but I think that got so much attention um it actually encouraged us to continue working on it and yeah we've come along way since then but um it's exciting I'm curious I'm getting an impression from from these answers but was starting a startup the goal were you already planning to start companies and and take these ideas forward when you entered the hacks hackathon um and if so like how did this you know process of going through a hackathon help you get clarity on the idea and and start building momentum toward it but if not where where was that moment when did you decide like all right I'm going to do it I'm going to go make this happen yeah for us it was uh when we started building uh the we were starting dabling with web RTC protocol and we over time started realizing uh that what we are building in terms of the communication rails is actually very impactful and at that time we didn't know that it could be something which could lead to a advanced M of humanity but we saw that this is something which is very impactful and both me and suid were very impact driven Sumi had built India's first decentralized exchange back in the day and I wanted to go and pursue something which is completely out of my engineering uh work so yes during the last 10 days of the hack even though if we wouldn't have won the prize even though we wouldn't have gone to an accelerator we would have uh kept on building it uh in a most rugal fashion but thankfully uh for us uh Gabriel rang up and uh uh Tech happened and that led us to basically like accelerating and building hle one yeah yeah so for us um at that time 2020 Summer I was uh the Community member of ipfs filecoin and um my idea is basically contribute to the uh Community um not the the purpose is not for the you know uh founding a new company so I I wasn't intended to set up a new company to become an entrepreneur actually didn't have any of this idea but when it turned into this ideas basically the the result of the hack FS we luckily got some um like honorable um Awards you know best def project and best Li project something like this and that attracted uh one of the judges of hacks and um they actually connected me to the accelerator program and that's how I get into the accelerator and I I just I didn't know about what is accelerator and then okay and then got this kind of offer and see oh you I got some money and then oh you guys have to make company oh okay that's okay then I have to set up a company and in US Singapore and Switzerland because uh I was so serious if you do uh this I have to be very serious so for the long-term success and then I chose Switzerland to set up the company and that's how gradually become the founder but thanks to the accelerator program Falon accelerator and tum I gradually train as a founder and pit practices is very very helpful so that's how I became founder yeah I think I I had a very different experience from them because I'd been building companies for at least what 15 years by then so for me actually wasn't enough I I actually thought thinking back back like this is a bad idea we probably don't want to work on it um but yeah I think it's a lot of things sometimes you need that um they are in motion but you actually don't realize and they all sort of connect like a bunch of dots um and things just happen and I would say because I I remember um there was it was still remote and was the next hackathon where we presented the actual idea that we were like okay this is probably what we want to do and filecoin was giving out grants at that time and the accelerator was the option and then I decided okay maybe there's something to build as a company there and again du this is co so it's a very different environment from now and um you know it's it's kind of weird to think about it that I had it took that little bit of effort to make that jump uh but I'm very glad we did I love it there's many different paths in that founding story of like you know we we latch on an idea and we're just we love it and we need to work on it we need to see that impact in the world or I think there's something here but you kind of need that activation energy to like pull you into okay it's going to be a company now versus like maybe it takes a couple hackathons to actually refine and get the idea to a place where you you think it's there I'm curious looking from like a a network perspective like how did the pl Network how did these resources like mentors like accelerators like um you know Dev grants how did those help you get through some of the biggest challenges in the founder journey and the founder experience because it's not easy so so how did which which of those were most useful for you um and what kind of like uh hurdles did they help you jump yeah so for us uh I think Journey started with I think gitcoin Grant happened first uh uh actually Kel happened for us and then it was called getcoin Apollo which was the first batch by sain and the team um and post that we went into the accelerator which was like this three months I think all of us will remember that there used to be this big rocks those big rocks really helped us because it was a public public kind of a uh discourse where you you need to you were answerable of what you had done in the last 7 days and the last 14 days uh that was first and the second was that I think what what PL Network did the best was they gave us a spreadsheet of all the people with their uh calendar link uh so it was one for anything regarding fundraise it was U regarding product strategy it was ZX regarding crypto economics it was um like someone else regarding legal so what we used to do was that we used to book calls with everyone and we used to get as much knowledge as possible and that really helped us uh like really move very fast so I think for me the personally at H1 the best thing was this calendars and the big rocks which compress the whole journey for us uh in a really fast fashion yeah yeah so uh for us um I think the pl Network helped us is the creating um as many touch points as uh possible with the similar minded people uh like this today you know you know protal LA and ethereum created this opportunity to get together with you know iOS SW you know we all started at the same time and we can see from time to time and how how it's going you know actually you know the one of the biggest problem for f founding a company is to kind of like making decision alone so but I I never feel like I'm alone I mean we have friends we have you know all like ecosystem partners and protocol Labs actually creating a many opportunities to say hello and then they always ask me hey what's your problem how can I help you and this kind of altruistic and then you know this more like a help each other this kind of sense of in the same ecosystem really helps and it give us a confidence I think that's most benefits that I get yeah I think um for me it was for us at least it was a bit in the beginning and a lot later on as well because I think PL as a network matured uh um you know if I think about it in the beginning of course it brought in that little bit of credibility for us um you know during like fundraise I'd done that for many times but when I was doing it this time like I had like one PL was packing and when I would talk to people that hey there's uh not only protocol laps but we working on the fcon ecosystem and we are so closely connected so there's that less bit of Challenge and then as time progressed uh I remember when uh I met Molly for the first time and literally I think it was somewhere in Canada which I wasn't expecting uh and we were like outside on our laptops and like hacking on trying to get that ipvs to work and I think one of my lead Engineers is here in the audience and he can appreciate that time it was like I would think that oh this protocol is not possible I've already given one year of my life what's going to happen so I think it's all those moments right and then leading up to like something obviously I can't talk publicly but we just stopped backstage so all of these small things definitely help with which is hard to explain to people because you have to sort of live through it because most companies end up not surviving um because it's lonely it's hard and even though I've done this so many times it doesn't it's exciting but it it's not easy it doesn't get easy yeah and doing it alone is so much harder so much more draining and having having a a network of support makes a big difference um you mentioned the the fundraising process a bit um James was telling me a fun fact that the tachon cohort that you all were part of raised $ 56.5 million do collectively across all of the startups in that cohort which is pretty amazing that's 4.5 million average yeah how about can you guys tell me a little bit about kind of your fundraising process and experience and especially any tips and advice for um Founders or would be Founders um who are thinking about going through their first fundraise uh for us uh personally we had never fundraised before uh so for us the major importance was to understand how uh these structures work the safe the equity uh the overall structure of sfts and all the others uh what was really helpful for us was uh to understanding the so one great thing which used to happen by the pln network was to give us all these uh YY uh structures of how safe Works what is a post money safe what is what is a pre-money safe so we understood all these Concepts uh over time that okay this is how valuation cap works I think that becomes very important because uh though you're building a product though you're building uh any kind of things it's very important to understand the structures of uh on which you are able to raise money so I think for us that was very important and we we learned that uh uh over time and I think uh second was that since the network was so uh uh like so well connected we were able to get a lot of Angels first on board who were really excited about what we're building so so and that that angel led to that domino effect where couple of major uh investors came in and that's how we were able to raise the first round which was around 1.7 million uh U and that was the precede round of hard one and po that we became very confident okay this is how the structure works this is how uh this is how you create a pitch track and this is how you pitch to a VC this is how you do a uh one great advice by Gabriel which I think everyone who is building a startup should follow was you need to build momentum into your rounds to do that you need to compress your calendar in 2 to 3 weeks basically get all the uh Venture capitals or angels in 3 weeks time and try to fill up your round as fast as possible soft commits what that leads to is that it leads to a kind of foro um inbuilt into the around itself and you are able to close it very fast uh so I think these kind of small nuggets really helped us uh close the first one then POS that uh it doesn't become easy but you get uh adapt to it because now you know the nuances of how to erase yeah yeah yeah for us uh fundraising is uh um in some point it's uh difficult to manage kind of a conflict of interest between project and investors and investors its purpose is make money right so there are many different kinds of uh investors for like who really want to support us for the long-term growth or shortterm might it you know just to profit for purpose so what I had a really great help is uh uh introduction to really high quality investors through brols networks and I think it's really helpful so you know introduction via uh good investors is really meaningful and uh because uh I also had this is the first time uh I you know fun the fundraising process I don't know about D structure and evaluation thing and when I talk to you know the um like a greedy investors then the deal structure is maybe just for them not for us so it's really hard to get this right information for us but Procol is it always gives us a neutral point of view and a good investor always give me for us so that is very very yeah helpful yeah the power of like founder friendly investors and and Angels like if you if you get your first set of money from other Founders like they're rooting for you they know they know what you're going through and they are trying to like help you set up something that's actually going to work to make your idea work in the long term totally uh yeah I think this is I I actually still hate fundraising after doing it for so many times um but it was a different time different Market it kind of feels very similar now you know in its own way uh as we were you know one we were all also still stuck in our Apartments we couldn't travel um I still remember doing everything on Zoom like the standing desk and things like that but um the advantage that um I had was I sort of put in a lot of homework this time right because I knew clearly what we were doing we were going through an accelerator so you have that sort of I'd been done that previous time so I knew what to like all the things that I sort of talked about like making sure the meetings were done in uh way but um there was something new for us was um structure itself because we went for this very futuristic mindset which is like we're literally just launching the protocol now and that's three years ago thinking into the future that this is probably what we want to do and coming over with a legal structure especially was not easy because everything I'd done before was on saves so I had to work with lawyers and then make sure and they are not cheap uh I remember we got some help from the legal council Who currently is the chairman of the Fon Foundation uh Mara and um you know I I was like I don't talk to these people but they they introductions help right so that sort of sped up a lot of the process and then if you have the momentum obviously the market there was that whole bull market sort of kicking off so that definitely helped and I think I was a bit early in the batch raising I remember that as well um you know but in the end um sort of worked out and but we kept we stayed Frugal since then um so yeah that also helps for Founders just while I have you all on stage are there any feature requests any things that are big big CH challenges pain points struggles for you right now as a founder that you wish there were more resources around either in the pl Network or um in some of the other amazing communities like this that that you're a part of I think for us what was the I think what suu also mentioned was the the legal uh part of things is something which we are still basically the the structures in which you can get uh kind of more clarities what I've also understood over time is that even if you don't have money uh don't haven't traced money but you have let's suppose a Firepower of 100k which you get from any kind of accelerators it is a good idea to get a legal team involved uh by getting them an equity uh into the route itself if you are not able to pay them uh via the uh because that really helps you in the long run is what I believe so over time I think one of the biggest burden I um I'm sure maybe uh surup as well as Masa would have faced it legal becomes a kind of bottleneck you're able to do other things because you have done that before or you know you can read those things but legal is a kind of a gray area which I believe and there is something which you don't have an exact Clarity on what is right what is wrong so having a great legal coun really helps uh I think that's what would be one of my only things which I'll say for anyone uh who is building anything and is into the uh into the Venture Land of uh crypto is that having a good or even in any kind of structure is that understanding and having a good legal team helps you uh think and also an accounting Team B basically who helps you in the whole bookkeeping really helps you in focus on what you do best which is all the other tenets yeah yeah um so aside from legal legal is so important and um probably the hiring process and I learned a lot from Pro laabs hiring and then looking at the talent and I kind of understand the process but it actually took time to develop our own uh hiring process and then especially the young startup the one one new team member's impact is really big right so it's really important to have it could be very toxic but it could be really super power so in that case I was you know I want to hire soon but at the same time I have to be cautious you know it's kind of like this it's really um challenging but propas gave us some the like a pipeline you know management something so it really helps me so the hiring really important yeah both of them covered two of my favorite topics but something that I'm going through right now so I feel like that is hard to save in your early stage sort of extends into what aish mentioned um we are in a space which there's a lot of regulatory uncertainty right and it changes constantly I feel like what was three years ago to now has changed what was 6 months ago to now has changed so even when you plan and I think that is where um especially companies in wet3 uh who are nonsense right like if you're not going for the traditional business models kind of weird saying traditional but um for the weet three business models um that's one thing that Founders don't know because if you haven't done it very few have actually succeeded some had to see jail time so it's such a risky situation because it's already hard enough to build the company so I think that's one aspect that Founders would want to know because usually we ignore it thinking once we get big we'll we'll see when we get there and I don't think that's a good way to go around it and then probably where it'll be most helpful awesome great great answers all around and strongly agree with all three um maybe looking looking forward to the the next six months for some of the founders Builders um people who are are part of this web3 ecosystem what are some of the breakthroughs coming that um you're excited about that you think are really interesting New Opportunities you all were getting your start before filecoin was even live and launched so building startups takes time so what are some of those like Trends or um kind of like pieces of ecosystem momentum new launches new releases that you think are are really exciting moments um that maybe other other builders or hackers um in the ecosystem should should know about those growth Trends I think a couple of them for me because I've been tracking the filecoin ecosystem for the last three years is the launch of fvm and I think I'll recommend everyone to watch the filecoin master plan of how filecoin has evolved so much from storage to compute and to the whole network so you'll be able to you can build a lot of things on top of fbm is what I believe is one of the uh bigger things that I like to highlight second is on the uh on the aspect of uh web3 social I know that web3 social has become kind of a cliche term but I I definitely believe that uh you need to build solid clients on top of the social graphs uh there are a couple of them uh but we need more of them to make sure um and for that you need to require a very good product uh uh jobs so that you're able to build this really high quality products we really still don't have a lot of consumer facing products we have built that at hudo one we have built that in public and we have uh massively uh in public actually also failed uh in scaling but that really helps you over time you get all these feedbacks and you're able to use those feedbacks to build a very high quality product over time um and I think the third one would be uh something on uh on the def5 side on staking side so there's a very good uh video in which uh I think it was in multi-coin Summit which was about uh how the staking has evolved uh of from the the normal staking which was two to three days to a kind of long-term staking uh to a reaking liquid staking reaking now a long-term staking where now you can uh lock up uh the money for like for years and years uh into the protocol itself and how and there is a lot of value into that which will lead to your protocol actually becoming kind of an effective bank so I believe that for someone who's interested in the D5 side of things uh this kind of uh long-term staking kind of things are very uh interesting to move forward and lastly I believe that on the communication rails which we are building uh I believe you can build fantastic applications and you can um on top of it which will really help Drive uh uh collaborations Communications and Innovations at a much more faster level um uh making sure that humans are able to coordinate in much more better fashion so these four five things is what I believe is a next set of toolkits which will help yeah yeah so uh as you know everyone is uh expecting the you know Brew Market coming in and um along with this uh I think uh more like a regory Clarity is coming and then more institutional coming in and then I'm what I uh I'm expecting in the Falon ecosystem is the more the growth of the retriever Market and Saturn and actually it creates more use cases and entain the intrinsic value of the file coin and actually helps us to you know promote our product and actually next year we're going to go live December 15th um starting from Global itos and then December 29th is opening up the new market what I'm expecting what is this impact is uh opening up a new chapter of the finance what it what we do is basically creating a bond market and interest rates market and it's similar to you know satoshi's impact is a what he did is the decentralization of money transfer you know without intermediary the money flows without permission and our version is basically Bond flows without intermediary so we can create something like this impact to the finance industry and obviously the next big topic for Define is fixed interest ratees Market fixed rate Market fixed income business so but this is more like an Institutional uh topic but I think uh by having this in capital and then the next year's Bo Market we definitely fit to this Market opportunity and uh yeah we're so excited to see this gross I know we're running out of time so I'm going to keep this shot um I'm very excited about more and more scaling Solutions because they were definitely not possible just like file con actually needed to exist for us to start um a lot of things moving onchain because we have seen like last year was quite the disaster and all of it if you sort of look at it was more to do with things not happening on chain right in a space like web 3 um and for more Primitives including a little bit of self shout out to ourselves uh for building things differently that was probably not possible before right um and on that note I actually just pressed a button before coming on stage so all of our contents live on paoio uh thanks for all the team members on the a audience responsible for it and uh I I think that's what like if you see the crowd today here and there's going to be massive at eth India tomorrow that is a big shift from probably a year ago where we were all still like not unsure about is are we going somewhere like there was that direction missing and I think that's there's a lot more clarity there awesome in our last minute let's wrap it up around what advice would you give to people who are hacking at at eth India this weekend if they want to become web 3 Founders like you up on this stage three years from now um how can they use their time really well during this hackathon uh I think in the in the hackathon what we had a very good thing was that it was a 30-day hackathon so that really helped us in basically getting more time into it uh what I believe is that when you're building something uh in the hack uh one thing which you should avoid is not adding a lot of sponsor prizes just to G G more uh like get more price money but build with your heart on what you believe is the uh which you think that you will take it Forward because then you develop an affinity towards the product which you're building and that leads you to thinking long term for 5 to 10 years that okay I want to keep building this so the more Affinity you uh develop and if your notar is not to uh basically get $10,000 of priz money but it's actually to build something which is really impactful then you'll be able to think in mindset that okay I want to keep building this for next 5 years because I think that's the most important thing can you build this thing uh for next 5 years because if you're able to do that then only your your hack or a project can become a Founder so I think that's the kind of shift as a as a mental shift which is needed is what I'll recommend everyone who is hacking around e India this time yeah I'll make a show so um um web stre is uh very um unpredictable so and enjoy selling DV and then don't hesitate to talk to next people so that's uh my advice I'll do it as a hot take I think it's a hackathon please go build something that you have fun building building a company comes after it especially with people that you trust that's it awesome you heard it here thank you all so much to our fantastic [Applause] panelists