Tech Brew Ride Home - (Portfolio Profile) Mesha

Episode Date: August 14, 2022

Smart money management for web3 organizations. Find out more at Mesha.club. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another portfolio profile episode of the TechMeme Ride Home. We're going to talk today to another company that the Ride Home Fund is invested in. But this is a new field for us.

This is the first crypto and Web 3 company that I've been able to share with you. We're going to talk today to the founder, one of the founders of Misha, Tahem Verma. Tohem, thanks for coming on the show to. talk about MESHA. Of course, Brian. My pleasure. Super excited to be here. So give me the sort of two-minute top level. What are you guys up to? What is the product? What are we creating here? Yeah, of course. So at MESha, we're building the financial stack for Web3 organizations,

such as Dow's and other Web3 startups. So what we do is you provide a simple, super easy to use Treasury and expense management tool that helps teams scale their financial operations. So the best way to think of it is, let's say you're a Web3 startup with crypto assets. You come to a product to help manage those assets, custody in a secure multi-sig wallet, being able to access defy and diversify your tokens or earn yield, getting really interesting insights into your finances. And then finally, expense management, which includes a corporate card program. It's the best way to think of it almost in essence is that we are like a crypto-native bank and card program for you.

So let's deal with the last of those first, because I feel like this is maybe the easiest analogy for people to understand. One of the sponsors of the show right now is Ramp, which does a similar thing in terms of providing corporate cards and expense management and cards and things like that. So is it too cute to say that this aspect of it is sort of ramp but for Web3? I think there's an angle where we could say, yeah, we are similar to Ramp in that sense. We love Ramp, and I think what they've done is amazing to the point that we've been customers of them in the past. Where we differ is that one, obviously, we're super focused on Web3 native teams. That means both in terms of the fact that we would underwrite you based on your decentralized wallet, rather than your Fiat bank account, but also that we are global.

Ramp obviously focuses on U.S. teams. And then finally is the fact that what we really solve for also is the fact that you can pay in Fiat using your credit card, but you can pay back your balance in crypto. So we really have designed this program to bridge the Fiat requirements for crypto-native teams. So it allows crypto-native teams to function in both worlds, even as you're building in the Web3 world, you still have that sort of channel and the ability to manage finances with your feet in both worlds, essentially. Yeah, exactly.

I think one of the illusions that a lot of early Web3 teams have and they get shattered really quickly is the fact that a lot of the world is still sitting in traditional Fiat rails. And so even if you've got a multimillion dollar treasury that's sitting in crypto, there are a lot of bills that will come in Fiat, AWS, Facebook ads, but also just a variety of different vendors. And that process for a lot of teams to convert that crypto to Fiat as an organization is super tiresome, super complicated, and really expensive also. So like a great example is we were speaking to a team yesterday itself, and it takes them 45 days to transfer the money from a crypto account to their Fiat bank account. It's super expensive. So they lose 1 to 2% on the conversion. And so by time they're done,

they've just wasted a lot of manpower and money just to pay a simple bill. And we're trying to solve for that. So it becomes easier. And then let's them focus on what they actually signed up to do, which is build. So obviously, I mean, you know, again, to use Ramp as an example, there's sort of expense management and Ramp as well. So using corporate cards and things like that. But let's talk more about the Treasury management stuff.

So feeding into that also, managing your team's funds can also mean managing the overall project's funds, like the Treasury that the project has, the ability to move those funds around, swap tokens, but also invest in Defi to earn yield and things like that. So what, again, is the idea to build sort of like a full-service, like Treasury management platform that allows a project to do all of the financial stuff that they need to do in the Web 3 rails? Yeah, 100%. So one of the unique parts of Web 3 is that even the smallest team can access Treasury, which is historically and Tradify, as we would call it, a traditional finance, been the realm of larger corporates. So if you are a team and you're holding

crypto assets, you can use our product to one, just hold it. We sit on NOSIS Multidis which is a multi-signature wallet that's used by all the largest teams. But Two, you can then use that for payments, making it really easy to just pay your vendors or pay your employees or your Dow members. And then accessing D5. So if you need to make token swaps, which is a really helpful tool if you're earning in a non-stable currency. So let's say you earn in Ethereum, obviously that price fluctuates. You want to convert it to a stable coin. Having a really simple, easy-to-do process, that's what we try to do for you.

Secondly, if you want to be able to invest in yield generating strategies, especially in today's bare market, being able to even earn one to one and a half percent on your assets can extend your runway by months. And we provide all of these under one hood so that you don't need to go and like seek out each protocol, like navigate the world of Web3. And finally, because we're providing all that under one roof, we can provide you with like really easy to understand analytics of like what money is coming in and what money is going up. So I'm assuming that there's integration with all the major dexes and things like that to allow this sort of thing.

Exactly. So we have integrations with all the leading DFI protocols from Uniswap to Associ Swap to also yearn so you can access yield generating strategies as well. Our goal really is that we don't need to make a lot of those decisions of having to figure out what's like the decks to go to or what's the you know, the Defi protocol to access by us providing everything under the hood. You're able to access it and make an informed decision. Explain to me the Dow angle. Is there sort of push-button tools for launching DAOs, or are you focusing on management primarily?

Yeah, so we focus much more on the management side. Being able to spin up a DAO is at this point largely been solved for many, many amazing teams of doing that. where we come in and we speak to a lot of DAOs about this is the fact that like whatever problems a Web 3 startup is facing, a Dow is facing that times 10 from a coordination issue, but also just from the fact that DAO's have more difficulty opening accounts, things that are that.

So we're trying to simplify their lives as well, helping them understand their finances, managing everything from even a simple thing, like a spending limit so that you can give spending limits to different Dow members so they don't need to like a proposal to approve every single transaction. transaction that needs to go to every single person. So making life easier for them is a really core aspect of us, because we're super bullish that Dow's will be the future of Web3, but helping them actually, again, like, focus on what

they're building or trying to solve for, rather than spending six hours a day, trying to, like, figure out, you know, approvals for sending $25 to someone. That's important for my. Well, this is one of the things that I'm so excited about with what you're doing, because, you know, one of the things that I've said on the show many times is that, um, Web3 is still so abstract for normies and consumers, but that doesn't even get to the fact that to build successfully in Web 3, we need to abstract away all of the complications that are involved in just creating something in Web 3. So I like this idea of sort of taking away all of those layers of complication and making it simpler to, like you said, build, basically, right? Yeah, it's a really good point. I think one of the interesting things we've seen is that when we speak to a lot of Web 2 founders who have migrated to Web 3 is that all the things that they took for granted, either as a startup founder or as a Dow member, they're now experiencing like that in its most, as you mentioned, abstract or fundamental form as a problem in Web 3, which is because it's not been solved for yet.

And so things like making payments or even something like a mass payout is just a fairly new phenomenon for a lot of teams to be able to do. do scheduling payments, all these things that you take for granted are still being figured out in Web 3 and a really easy to use intuitive way. And because it's so early, a lot of things are fragmented, you know, like one protocol is solving for one thing and another protocol is solving for another. And as a team, like, you know, you didn't sign up to like have to spend most of your time trying to find solutions for daily operations. You've signed up to like solve for a specific problem.

And so these kind of daily financial operations, we're trying to bring it all together so that you can just again focus on running your organization, running your Dow, and that's really what we hope to do, so that we can actually expand the Web3 ecosystem. What about NFTs? What sort of platform tooling are you guys working on for the NFT space? Yeah, we actually do it on two different parts.

So we have a lot of NFT projects who are using us to manage their treasuries and their financial stack. we help them do a bunch of different really interesting things. One of the unique things that we help them with is just helping track their royalty income. So again, going to that abstract angle, like, just the fact that if you earn 5% of every sale on your NFT, that everyone's using like Google Sheets to have to track, you know, what their income is. And as you can imagine, if an NFT is being flipped 35 times over, then that's a lot of, like,

rows on your spreadsheet that you've got to track. So if we automate that entire experience so that they just have an easy way of understanding, like, look, this is how much I earned this week on royalties. But on the flip side, for a lot of Dow's and all who are holding NFTs, we provide them with a really simple way of purchasing NFTs. We're integrated with OpenC as well. But also just being able to view their NFTs, understanding, you know, what's the current potential rarity and other analytics on the NFT.

And so we just, again, we see NFTs as an asset rather than just a collector's item. So it needs to be part of that financial staff. for a lot of DAOs. And so we need to provide those insights as well as an easy way to manage them. Where are we on the development right now in the sense of, you know, are we still very much sort of an alpha where you're working with teams and it's like, hey, what would you like to see us build for you or are we fully mature at this point? Basically, I'm asking, are we still learning and still sort of refining the product?

or do you feel like you're mature and fully going to market at this point? That's a great question. I think no matter what stage we are at, we'll always be learning and refining the product. I think that's when you get stagnant. But we are in a very early public beta. So we're just starting to onboard projects. We've just opened the doors for teams to be able to web three startups and DAOs to be able to sign up. We've been working closely with a bunch of DAOs and Web3 startups to get their insights

and help build products for them. But we're still at a really unique phase of the product development where when users come to us and say, hey, like, you know, I have this problem. We're able to, like, incorporate that into a roadmap pretty easily if it's an important problem to solve because, you know, we're like not ossified as an organization yet. So it's still a really good time for teams to come to us and say, hey, I have this unique problem. And if we can solve for it, we would love to. If I were such a team listening to this right now and I was interested in finding out of out more, what's the quickest way to get in touch with you and start working with you? The easiest way to get in touch with us is either through Twitter or Discord.

We are a traditional Web3 team in that sense. So you can find us on Twitter at M-A-Ch-Clob or on Discord. Or you can just contact us by our website, which is M-S-H-D-C-C-Lub. M-E-S-H-A. That's M-E-S-H-A. No, I'm sorry, M-E-S-H-A. dot club, yes. So let me ask you about you a little bit or your team, if you don't want to get so personal.

But what's been your personal journey in crypto and Web3 and or is this your first rodeo founding a company? Just give me a little bit of your background on all the things. Yeah, of course. So a bit about me is that I actually. grew up in Dubai in the early days, so it was a fascinating experience to actually watch a city be built in front of you. I think that informed a lot of my life choices. One of the really interesting parts of Dubai, which I now look back at, is that it was a very cosmopolitan, like, melting pot of cultures, and that has really informed my,

like, world view of, like, that things should be borderless. And so, as you can imagine that there's that affinity to Web 3 right there. After Dubai, I moved, I went to the U.S. to study at Penn, and very soon after graduating, I moved to India to actually start my first startup. I co-founded it with my college roommate called Engaroo. It was a tech startup that teaches you English in a mobile app. So literally the inverse experience of Duolingo. If you spoke French, we would teach you English through French. It's just an amazing experience. One learned how to build a product to scale. We were able to get millions of users and we successfully exited. But also, this was still in the early days of the Indian startup ecosystems.

So you really learned a lot of things. And you've become a very greedy founder in that sense. There's a lot of things that you take around it in Silicon Valley. India didn't have in those early days. After the exit, it came back to the US. And it was actually New York that I met my current co-founder, Gaurav, who was the CTO of Meshra. And when we started working together,

we were trying to solve for borderless fintech as a whole in terms of different angles. And many bruises and pivots later, we are here where we are today, which is MESHA. And we've just managed to build this amazing team of people from some of the largest scaling fintechs across Asia, across Asia, sorry. And it's just super excited to be working with a lot of my teammates.

We're all remote. But what's really inspiring in some ways is the fact that everyone is so excited about Web3 that every problem that we face is like actually met as a learning opportunity as a team. And I know that may sound cliched, but it's like a weekly experience to like come across an infrastructure problem in Web3. Well, you know, that was actually going to be my next question because as I said, this is the first portfolio company in the Web3 space that we've featured on the show. And, you know, I'm very much a Web 2 founder myself, Web 2 era.

being a founder in tech is all about always being nimble and staying ahead of how things are evolving. And my sense is, is that in the crypto space and Web 3, that is true times 5 or 10 or 1,000. So I'm just curious if you had any sort of learnings or advice or insight for someone that wanted to found a company in Web 3, just in terms of, like you said, said, you yourself have had multiple pivots when the space is changing and evolving so much because it's still so early that, you know, there aren't necessarily well-trodden paths for a lot of things yet. What's your advice for staying on top of such a dynamic space as a founder and being like, okay, this is where we're going to plan our flag. This is where we think we should

plan our flag. And then, oh, no, six months from now, we've got to plan it over here. What's your advice to someone founding in this space? Yeah, it's a really good point. I think it's changing and evolving at such a rapid pace, especially because it's early still, is the fact that you can't all have a full handle on it. You've just got to know your stream and try your best to be as up to date as possible. But being up to date as possible means, like, you have to spend a significant time of your day, like, ensuring that you're up to date. But I think what advice we've given in the past as well to other Web 2 founders is just first to do a sanity check on whether or not this needs to be a Web 3 project and whether or not you are okay with the core principles

of Web 3. I think we're seeing a lot of migration of founders and teams to Web 3 without appreciating the ethos of why Web 3 exists, from decentralization to like censorship resistance. These core principles, if you're not okay with it and you just want to be like a founder who controls like 60% of super voting shares and things of that, then it's not the best space for you to be in. You need to accept the core principles. Because if you don't, one, it's so community driven at this point that the community will see

through you. That's one. But then two, like you could just build this product and web too. Like people will understand that you're trying to just do a cash grab if you're doing that. So we are really, I really suggest these things. And that's a mental framework shift in how you build. It's very much a community first.

You need to be transparent. you're building with your community rather than here, I'm building it, and now go, use my product. So go to market. All these things are very different. And it even took us, a lot of our team and even me a bit, a lot of a, you have to, like, change the way you view product development and your mental frameworks that you've been taught for the last 10 years working at, like big tech, for example.

Let's, let's zoom out to the macro for a little bit. I think it's sort of undeniable that on some level we're in a crypto winter. And yet, this is not my first crypto winter as an observer and even a participant. When the whole DeFi boom, not DeFi, but ICO boom sort of went away. Like people sort of went underground. Like I stopped hearing from new projects and new teams and things like that for a while. And then they came roaring back. This time, even though you look at the market, prices and market caps and things are down,

but there is, at least from my perspective, been almost zero sort of cooling in terms of the energy, in terms of new projects that I'm hearing, in terms of new investments in the space. From your perspective, what do you feel like the health is of the crypto space generally? Am I right in feeling like even if things are more? difficult than they were maybe a year ago, there's still a lot of activity and a lot of energy. You're working with a lot of these teams, right? Oh, 110%. Yeah. So one of the unique aspects of our, like, where we stand as an organization is that we are working with a lot of these teams. So we're at that tip of the sphere of seeing

what's happening. And the energy is actually compounded in some ways. I think if you look at the last year, especially with a lot of the news around NFTs and all, that's what you were largely hearing about, you know, like NFTs and things to that. And now that the retail market, like the retail investing market has kind of cooled, you're hearing this nonstop building. And I said this to someone the other day, actually, that it feels like every day a new project is being launched. So like the amount of like activity that's happening on the startup building developer side is just unbelievable. You go to meetups, you go to conferences, they're still packed. There's still like a lot of energy there. And really what's happening is that people are just really

heads down in some ways and just like building and pushing out products. And it's a really exciting time. I feel more inspired now. I mean, obviously, like, my token portfolio is not doing so well. But apart from that, you can just see the fact that, like, teams are really focused on, like, building for different use cases. And there's just a lot of energy in the space. And we're seeing that almost every day that different teams are either starting up or they're pushing out new products. And the rate of development has, like, actually increased in some ways because of the renewed focus on actual product. Again, you guys, like you said, are sort of at the tip of the spear and seeing, you know,

what the new projects and the new energy is. Again, from sort of not as deep in this clearly as you are, there was this ICO moment and then a winter and then things came roaring back with Defi. Are you, is there any sort of direction just broadly? I'm not asking you to like name names, but like, is there? something new on the horizon like what's the new sort of space that is like defy that you feel like there's a lot of energy around or that maybe you're excited about yeah i think we're seeing it in one or two interesting areas at least a lot of teams that we've seen trying to solve for so one

is on the gaming side which is obviously not news to anyone but there's a lot of interesting work happening there and then secondly on like the intersection of dows and social we're seeing a lot of interesting where people are helping with Dow discovery or understanding and what's the right Dow to join. And one tangent on that is that we're seeing a lot of teams start up as decentralized organizations themselves. So they're already starting up as DAOs or as collectives rather than being a founding team that then becomes a Dow in some ways. So we're seeing a lot of really interesting activity there where just staying true to the core principles of Web3. And I would say the final thing that we've seen a bunch of projects in the last few months is around,

like what you would call B2B solutions, which are helping other teams, either with API development or with payroll and things that, even HR managing just the basic nuts and bolts of a business. We're seeing a lot of activity there. One more, and this is kind of personal, but you mentioned it earlier, and I didn't even have this as a question, but it's something that I've wondered about myself. You talked earlier about how to be in the space, you always have to sort of stay on top of it and spend a large portion of your time making sure you know where the new stuff is and the energy

is. So sort of advice to me or anyone else that wants to try to be better at staying on top of the space, like, do you have any best practices? What are the tools? What are the things that you do, aside from the insight that you gain by working with new teams, what do you do to stay on top of this space? Yeah, you need to spend 23 hours a day on Twitter, basically. Twitter is actually fascinating for Web 3 and crypto in the sense that there's a lot of activity happening there. Discussions, Twitter spaces, these are all really helpful places to be. And then the second is, again, Discord or like real-life meetups.

Discord, if you join the right. right servers, you'll find a lot of interesting activity and conversations happening there. But I would say if you're just starting out and trying to figure out what's going on in the space, Twitter will give you a very good overview rather than like your traditional media outlets. Well, spending 23 hours a day on Twitter, I knew there was a reason why I'm qualified to pay attention to the space. So let's let's end by, you know, to get in involved, again, MESHA.club, M-E-S-H-A-C-A-C-Club. Do you have any asks, again, even if people aren't in the space or are interested in getting involved,

or if there are teams obviously listening right now that feel like they could work with you? What would you like to ask of the audience or tell the audience to get involved? Yeah, of course. So the first is the fact that, you know, we are hiring and we're a growing team. If you are excited by the space and what we're building, we would love to talk to you. You have the opportunity not only to help build an organization, but in an entire ecosystem. So it's actually a really exciting opportunity there. And secondly, if you are a team that's building in Web 3, we'd love to talk to you and just understand your pain points and how we can solve them.

And yeah, those are, I would say, our asks. Well, and I would underline that last one. in my mind, to not be too reductive about it, one of the reasons why I invested is because I feel like this is a solid picks and shovels play, that if you want to found in the space in the same way that in the Web 2 era, we now know, like, you do a startup and you pick these five or six pieces off the shelf. And before you know it, you've got HR running, you've got, you know, back end, front end running, all this stuff. I feel like solving for that in Web3 space is something that's going to be very powerful. So if there are teams looking to launch, struggling with launch, struggling for traction or whatever, get in touch. And I think Masha will help you out. And also Hires, tell them Brian sent you, because the Mutant Podcast Army has a lot of smart people in it.

Tam, thanks for coming on and telling us all about that. and I love Misha and I'm really excited about this. And I love being involved in this space in a way that I fundamentally understand, which is just helping people build, right? Exactly. Yeah. It's like it's a privilege to just like see what's happening and help other builders just focus on building. And it's actually inspiring for us as a team because whenever you're having a difficult day, which you do as a startup, you can just see

what you're helping and you see what's happening in the ecosystem around you and back at it you go