A Few Thoughts from San Francisco

I had a blast in San Francisco this past week! It was such a great experience to return to SF to go to a crypto conference and meet a ton of great people. I wanted to share with you seven of my thoughts from the trip.

Idea/Business Model

A truly great company starts with a solid idea/business model. We met a whole bunch of new crypto companies in SF. Some had more solid business models than others. I think it is important to even give your business model a possible grade how likely it is to succeed. This will provide clarity on some of the challenges and opportunities it will face.

Product Design

One of the great things about being in Silicon Valley is the incredible focus on world-class product design. It’s amazing to see how much time money and effort goes into building digital products for hundreds of millions of people in a very professional and high-end way. We should aspire to build truly great digital products. We should try to continue to level up all aspects of our business and attempt to execute at the high standards of other similar Silicon Valley type crypto companies.

A few ways to do this:

use GitHub and have some of our work be public. This will help us recruit world-class developers.
Use Zeplin for design and have our designs shared with the team for iterative feedback.
Continue to hire truly great product designers and engineers

Fundraising

One of things that I really realized from this trip, is the importance of large scale fundraising. A lot of projects that we were able to connect in Silicon Valley were raising between $10-$40 million. It just cost a great deal of money to build a company.

“$10 million, that’s it?”

- Michael K.

You need a lot of gas in the gas tank and order you something great.

Warm, Smart People

It is really important for the entire team to be able to execute a high-level. This includes everybody from the CEO down to the interns as well. Everyone should be working to build truly great digital products that help millions of people.

Growth

What are the important things of the trip was my ability to connect with one of the founding members of Facebook. His experiences growing Facebook by hundreds of millions was amazing to hear. He had some very educated insight into what it takes to build large scale digital products. Growth is so essential for additional business. It is one of the most important metrics to be able to close the truck. I think that any type of product design or hiring or new business model should directly focus on the growth of the company.

My heart was broken to see so many people living in brutal poverty and mental illness.

Conclusion

I’ll be honest with you, I have had a good time at different crypto events. There are often a lot of business crypto people. However, when I went to San Francisco this past week, it was a whole new ballgame. We were able to meet digital product focused crypto people that were building truly great companies. It was amazing getting a chance to spend time with them and learning from their experiences. I feel very blessed to be connected to these warm and extremely hard-working people. It was very eye-opening to see how high of a level that they were on, and it made me think of many ways for us to improve our company and continue to level up and get shit done. If you have any additional questions for me feel free to reach out, I would love to tell you more about this.