Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship | Technology
00:08:32 · James Pringle
[00:08:32] S0: Yeah. And I'm sure that the process is very well thought out, but naturally, there sometimes are hiring mistakes. How do you go about correcting that? What's your process when someone joins? How do you prove now that they're in the building that they are at the standard? And, you know, what's your probation period? How do you manage that early stage to correct any mistakes that do happen?
00:08:57 · Shah Ramezani
[00:08:57] S1: Yeah. Mistakes happen. I think first we try to understand the process, what was wrong in the process. I think that's important. We try to tweak it, learn from it. And then I think sometimes we hire people that are great. We thought they're great. They had great energy. They're... Everything was great, but this is wrong role. Literally wrong role. Like, the person thought it was made for that role x, but actually they were made for role b. And often they have a bit of a hesitancy, but then, you know, we try to convince them, but then often they do it really well. And then, yeah, think mostly like switching the role or trying to give feedback. I think one good sign for us is like if someone takes feedback really well. I always tell people, I mean, what you don't wanna have is people if they're giving you good feedback because that doesn't do anything. Right? I mean, if anything just makes your ego bigger. If you make people comfortable just to give you feedback all the time, you learn them fastest. And by way, you don't have to take everything to heart. You can just say, okay, from the tenth thing I heard, I think five are bullshit. I can't change anything about it, but that's up to you. But if you're a difficult person to get feedback from or, like, at least accept feedback, people will stop giving you feedback. And at some point, they will just remove you or put you in a different position that you don't want. So I think that's a good signal. We don't give up on people who are working really hard, and they're trying to get better, and they're learning fast. We never give up on those people because I think we see that in a three to six months, they will get there.
00:10:03 · James Pringle
[00:10:03] S0: Yeah. And a bit more on the business and the sector that you're in. Some of our listeners will know about stablecoins and some of them might be really knowledgeable about them, but others may have only just heard the term or know that much about it. So can you explain what stablecoins actually are and also explain the benefit of using them to construct payments infrastructure?
00:10:28 · Shah Ramezani
[00:10:28] S1: So stablecoins are basically a dollar issued on the blockchain. I mean, any currency. Right? You have issued on the blockchain, which moves through the, like, permissionless blockchain that is like 20 fourseven speed settlement. Like, you know, you have all these benefits where it just like it permeates more better with the entire need of the today's economy, which is like 20 fourseven instant. You know, WhatsApp is instance of why is money an instance. Think stablecoin fits that profile really well. Whereas before money would move through banking systems and maybe alternative payment networks like SEPA. So you had like these different systems and stablecoin is a bit of a better standard that just like makes any effects move pretty much like frictionless across the globe. I mean, see also with like the entire agent needs. I mean, tomorrow you will have agents negotiating each other. They're not going to be able to manage a JPMorgan account from a regulatory perspective, compliance perspective. Going be a lot of... Stablecoins are much more native to what we need today to be able to fulfill the money part and the transaction part. And that's kind of like the kind of the evolution of money. And that's why it kind of took off so much. You know, I think we are at 330,000,000,000 market cap for stablecoins now, which is still small to where it's going to go. Think the prediction from Scott Bessent and a lot of the key figures in the Trump administration is that it's going to be by 2,030 to 4,000,000,000,000. That's basically a bigger buyer of U. S. Debt than top 10 countries in the world. So it's pretty like a fast growing industry. And I think with AI, it will even accelerate further.
00:11:49 · Hector Mason
[00:11:49] S2: And who who are like your customers? There's something quite interesting with the space like Stablecoins where there's some question around timing, you know, when you got started. As you said, the use cases weren't obvious. You thought there was something under the hood that was gonna be great. But as a VC back in those companies, you're kinda thinking, okay. Well, we wanna get in there early, but not so early that the company runs out of runway. But if we go too late, then someone else is gonna be already doing it. And you have your own version of that as the company founder. So how were you convincing people to join you? How were you convincing customers to pay? So for
00:12:20 · Shah Ramezani
[00:12:20] S1: me, maybe as a founder, I think it's very important that you often start a company not really for the first idea that you're pitching to investors. I think that's, like, the best idea. You just get everyone together like a team. We we pivoted many times. It's just, like, get everyone excited about something. But really what this is is the most important asset here as a new upstart is that you are with a ready team who is like knows all the tooling, all the technology, who's constantly tooling around, playing around. Plus, you are in the market listening where the market is moving more than anyone else. Okay? So you're like there. And then once you spot something like a torpedo, you can just move much faster than anyone else because the team is basically not doing anything. They're just waiting. They're just, playing around, like... Because normally, if it's another company, let's say, like, it's a big payment company, all their engineers are allocated to existing customer base. Like, okay, you have to pull out 10. Like, no. Thanks. You know? There's, a team of, say, let's say, people, like, constantly searching with the conviction that there is something there. And then I called them almost like the tiger in the wilderness waiting for the next bait. Think the best time to build companies is when market crashes happen because it's very hard to build around right now because everything seems like a good idea. Everything sells because a lot of customers are buying because of the hype. But then the market crashes. Everyone's like, oh, yeah. So I don't need this actually because company A says the same thing. We don't need this. So what so happened in crypto crypto crashed, you were like one year in, two year like FTX. Everything went to which like zero. People were like, it's over. Regulatory is gonna kill it. All that stuff. One thing you could have spot is that Tether and Circle were growing. And then you were like, why are they growing? Crypto is dead. So then you were calling around like, oh, actually, people are using them for payments. And, actually, they don't even care about the stablecoin. They really don't care. And then what happened as well is you noticed that Tether was starting to make crazy amount of money. It was like hundreds of millions per week. It's crazy.