Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship | Technology
00:07:19 · Shah Ramezani
[00:07:19] S1: So normally, first of all, like, why would someone join? I'm... First, understand the angle. Right? Like, so, okay. If it's, someone who's super hungry and just wants to move up the ladder, I get it. You know, I get it why we joined the company because we'll provide that. But then if it doesn't be clear, I try to understand it. So I try to like really dig in and understand you just want a job. That's not the place for you. But I would say we try to scare them a bit with the amount of work and intensity. And normally I see two reactions. One is the person starts not speak and get quiet, and I can see that they're almost scared. And then the second person would be their eyes are literally lighting up. They're like, this is exciting. You know, I I worked at a company where I felt I could have had done more, but they didn't want me to do more. So I think we're trying spot those guys that were actually wanna get thrown out a lot, wanna get a lot of complexity thrown at them and work through solution finding and and work with team who are incredibly in ambition and learn as a result a lot. So you normally see that in the nonverbal communication quite quickly. As you can imagine, the verbal communication people can manipulate that, but they'd have no control over the nonverbal part. So... Yeah. So I think we are knowing that with people that we don't get it why they wanna join. We just don't understand it, and everyone just like, dig it, dig it down, and understand what is the real motivation, and sometimes we're missing something from the profile or interview. So, yeah, it's a very big component for us to try those guys away that are really not understood that what this place is about.
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