The Peterman Pod - Robinhood SWE Turned $1B+ Founder on Non-Linear Careers, Being Jaded About Promos, Startup Learnings

Episode Date: November 30, 2025

Jayendra Jog left Robinhood and raised $35m to start his own crypto startup (Sei Labs). Before he left, he got jaded about software engineering career ladders yet was coasting through promotions at Robinhood. I asked him about how he did that along with a bunch of questions about when to leave your job, how to raise money, and what to expect as a founder.𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀:• Transcript: https://www.developing.dev/p/quitting-robinhood-and-raising-35m?open=false• YouTube: https://youtu.be/f4eeoetb8t4• Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-peterman-pod/id1777363835𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗺𝗽𝘀:00:00:00 - Intro00:00:54 - Big tech internships00:04:51 - Joining Robinhood00:07:58 - Big tech vs startups discussion00:10:16 - Getting jaded about Robinhood career growth00:16:04 - Coasting and getting promoted00:18:54 - Gamestop stories from the inside00:22:34 - Leaving Robinhood00:30:25 - Learnings from raising $35m00:34:07 - What value does crypto provide?00:37:47 - Learnings and when to leave00:40:41 - Advice for his younger self00:41:58 - Outro𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗝𝗮𝘆:• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayendrajog• X/Twitter: https://x.com/jayendra_jog• His Company: https://x.com/Sei_Labs𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗥𝘆𝗮𝗻:• Newsletter: https://www.developing.dev/• X/Twitter: https://x.com/ryanlpeterman• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanlpeterman/• Threads: https://www.threads.com/@ryanlpeterman• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanlpeterman• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ryanlpeterman

People tend to be way too scared of leaving their jobs. This is Jay Jog. He went from a software engineer at Robin Hood to a successful founder raising $35 million, and he shared everything he learned along the way. You were playing the game, doing the minimum, but still getting promoted. How'd you do that? I think it Robin Hood was probably easier than it would have been at like a meta or like one of these other bigger companies. You worked at Robin Hood during the whole GameStop saga?

That day there were so many people that just reached out to me. like, yo man, what the hell is going on? Eventually, Jay left Robin Hood to start his own company after getting jaded about career growth. You raised $35 million. You must have learned something in that process. That was one of the worst times in the history of crypto to be raising money. What's the clear case of here's the value that crypto provides the world? Here's the full episode.

You started your own crypto company where the market cap of the coin's worth over $10 billion. I kind of want to go over your career story, hear each of the last. legs and, you know, Facebook, Robin Hood, what made you want to leave. So maybe we can start with the Facebook part of the saga. So, you know, how did you first get into big tech? What's the story behind that? I feel like life is not linear for anyone. I mean, ups and downs, but I think when there are ups that happen, they tend to be kind of like step function improvements versus just being linear growth. And in the case of myself when I was in college, I really wanted to get like one of these brand name internships. I don't have a good reason for why. I think it was just kind of like

memetic in a way. Like I just wanted what everyone else wanted. And at that time, it felt like there were two internships that were like the cream of the crop, which were like the Facebook and Google internships. So I'm like, I really want to get this. And when I was a sophomore, I was basically just grinding all the time. Like I was fortunate where I was in a spot where I was able to get interviews with a lot of these companies. And I'm like, okay, I'm just going to like go into Hermit mode and try to get, try to get one of these internships. And at that time, I was not necessarily like very good at the lead code type of problems. So what ended up happening was there's one of our friends, Vic, he organized this event called LeadCode and Chill. And it's basically where a bunch of like,

honestly, like a bunch of CS guys got together one evening. It was like Friday night or something and we're just solving lead code problems together. And sounds hell of nerdy. And I mean, honestly was. But there was one problem that we went over there, which is called Number of Islands, which is a pretty kind of classic problem, which is like you either do a breadth for search or depth for search to be able to identify the number of like connected islands that are there. And that end up being the exact question that I got during my second, like during the onsite of my Facebook internship interview. And yeah, it was just like bizarre. Like if I had not gone to that event, I would not have gotten my Facebook internship. And without that Facebook internship, I don't

think any of the things that happened afterwards in my career would have really materialized. So, yeah, it was just like a totally random lucky coincidence. You said Google and Facebook with the cream of the crowd. What about those other ones? Like, if I recall correctly, Palantir was pretty good back then. It was also, you know, the finance ones too. That's true. That's true. So I think what you value is a function of what other people around you value and are talking about. I think my social circle wasn't really talking about those other companies as much. Like, uh, you know, you know, If, for example, you went to a difference college, then maybe like these high frequency trading shops

would be viewed as more prestigious. I think amongst my social circle at UCLA, it was very much at that time, like Google and Facebook. And then I noticed after I became older in that circle, there were other companies that started to be viewed as more prestigious, like the Palantiers to like a lot of these pre-IPO companies as well. You got the internship at Facebook year,

which is the dream at the time. And how was the experience when you actually were doing the internship? It was not that fun. to be completely honest from my perspective. And I think it's just because it felt very impersonal in a way. It was better than in some ways in the previous internship that I'd had the summer before. But I did want to try exploring being in a smaller environment.

And I think that led me the next summer to work at Pinterest. And that was like as a Kleiner Perkins fellow. So I'm like, oh, I'm going to get like ideally the full kind of like startup exposure. Pinterest was definitely a much better, I would say, experience. I think part of it was just that it was based in San Francisco. So it was a much better culture just like being in the city of the time. But I think also because it was a smaller company, there was a much closer-knit intern class. And that allowed me to have much more meaningful friendships.

Like from my Facebook internship class, I'm not really in touch with too many people. I think from my Pinterest internship class, I'm still in touch with like four or five guys. I'm like, I'm super close to them. So it was just very different in terms of the kind of atmosphere that it created. Yeah, the Pinterest internship. And then after school, you decided to go with Robin Hood, right? Exactly. So at that time, I was about to graduate.

I mean, this was like September, October, so like my senior year. And at that time, I had a couple of options. I could either go back to Pinterest. And I was like not too enthusiastic about that. Like I had a great internship experience, but a lot of my friends weren't going back over there. So I was like, it might not make as much sense to go back over there. The biggest reason was like more this social reason. The second thing was getting a master's degree.

And UCLA has this like fifth year, or I guess you can automatically get admitted to the master's program. So I was like, this is something that I'm like seriously considering. And then I just decided to interview for a few different places as well. And what I was basically looking for is a small environment where I felt like I could be surrounded by people that would be doing pretty significant things in the future. And Robin Hood was one of the places that I talked to. So I went to this thing called Greylock Tech Fair. they basically rent out, what's the called now, Oracle Arena, the big stadium and SF. And they basically invite a bunch of interns to come over there, but it's like invite only.

So most companies don't have very long lines to go and talk to these companies, to the booths. In the case of Robin Hood back in 2017, that was like the longest line that they had. Like there were like a couple hundred people that are waiting in line to talk to those folks from Robin Hood. Now it was like, okay, this is actually pretty interesting to look at. like to learn more about because I didn't know too much about trading back then. I wasn't fully managing any brokerage accounts. And that led to me like talking to the folks over there. And I just thought it was a really, really strong team. I ended up going over there. And in hindsight, I feel like that was absolutely the right decision. Like getting a master's

degree, I don't think that would have mattered at all for my career. Going to Pinterest, I think that would have not been as positive as going to Robin Hood. In Robin Hood's case, I think there were some things that ended up being just phenomenal. First of all, I think the caliber of person that was joining at that time was really, really high. So even from my new grad class, around a third of the people in that new grad class, they went on to raise money. So they basically started venture back companies. And I think that's a much higher percentage than you see at most companies. But I think there was a lot of really strong people over there. And on top of that, when you're at a company that's scaling so quickly, when you're running into like all these scaling problems, like,

you just end up getting exposed to a lot more stuff. So you learn a lot more. But I think you also have much faster career growth as a result of that. Definitely more so than you would. A smaller startup where things don't really change year to year where you're just trying to find PMF, it doesn't work. You do the same thing again. It doesn't work. Third time.

So yeah, I'm definitely very grateful for that experience at Robin Hood. What series was Robin Hood at the time? When I signed the offer, it was Series C. When I joined it was Series C. But when I signed the offer, it was around 100 people at the company. And so it was basically one building, like two buildings across the street from one another. And one of them was actually a house. So they had like bedrooms in that house that people were working from.

So they're like standing desks where engineers were actually working from. Yeah, it was a much, much smaller environment than Pinterest was. I think the most common take for, you know, the high heavy job for a new grad is go to big tech, get the stamp. And you go into that big environment. I feel like you have a completely contradictory opinion to that. So what is the rationale for smaller in this case? To be fair, I think I did have the stamp from the internship. So I think it was...

Yeah, it might have been a different decision if I didn't have that. But I do think that you basically have to pick what you're optimizing for in your career. If you're optimizing for, I mean, T.C. let's say. I mean, you're not going to be hitting the ceiling by going to a big tech company. Like, the only way you can get like the max upside is by going to a very early stage company and kind of hitting it out at the park. But if you're trying to optimize for learning, you're going to definitely have much better learning opportunities at a smaller company that's actually growing very quickly. So I think you kind of need to figure out what that thing you're optimizing for is.

In my case, it became clear. I didn't care as much about money as I did about growth, both from the learning standpoint and also from the career growth standpoint. And that's why I decided to go to Robin Hood. I don't think my career growth is actually as fast as I had anticipated it to be over there. It kind of felt just like a normal company. for your growth, but I do think it ended up being much better from the kind of learning standpoint. Yeah, that is a common thing that I hear. It's like you go to the small company for learning.

I do kind of feel like the small company, it's like the high variance path. Like I could see a case where you learn much more, but I could see also a case where like the company, you know, stops growing and it's like, you know, you're really not learning as much. Yeah. But I can also see cases of big tech where the team is like getting reorienting. like crazy. Yeah, I think, I mean, across the board, it definitely depends on how lucky you get with whatever position you end up in.

Probably the biggest thing you can control is the kind of person you're going to be working with because you don't know what the career prospects are going to be for any startup. Like, maybe you're working on something that sounds brilliant at the time, but then it just isn't able to get as much traction as you need to raise next round of money, for example. So I do think optimizing for like surrounding yourself with really smart people gives you the best chance of learning a lot more than you otherwise would. And that could be like a pretty good heuristic people. when they're deciding where to go.

Definitely. And so you said you started working at Robin Hood. You were expecting a lot of growth. And it sounds like it was not what you expected. I went in thinking that I'd be able to have pretty fast career growth. And for context over there, I think I honestly just joined a bit too late. Like by the time I started it was Series D. The people that are joined around Series A, Series B timeframe,

I think they did end up having the kind of growth that I was hoping for, which is like moving up the ladder really quickly. becoming engineering managers for like even higher than that in like a two, three year time horizon. In my case, I joined and I think at that point it was already starting to manifest into more of like a big company type of progression. So at my three month mark, they were having performance reviews, but I couldn't participate in them because I joined like one or two weeks to it. So I had to participate in the one six months after that. So at my nine month mark, I like went through the entire perf review process. And I'd been like busting my ass for the nine months before then.

There were several days where I was working to like 2 a.m. just actually working. And our on-call rotation back then was also horrendous because there's this thing called overnight batch where after market closes each day, you need to do a bunch of stuff before market opens the next day. In our case, there was a lot of manual intervention that was required. Hopefully now it's fixed. So if there's any Robbenot engineers listening, hopefully is better for you now. But back in our day, which is horrendous. So, I mean, honestly, there were several times that it went to like four or five.

5 a.m. and it was like actually dangerously close to causing like a business issue for open to it. Because if you're not done with the batch process by the time market opens the next day, there's like yeah, definitely a lot of downside there. What is the batch product? Like what do you need to actually do? So there's things like trade settlement that needs to happen. So you need to be working with a lot of different counter parties externally just to make sure that like everything, like all the different parties have accounted for everything to be the same across all their systems. It's basically just a bunch of batch jobs need to run one after the other.

But if any of them fail, you need to figure out why it failed and then fix it if there's some kind of like issue from like the actual code-based side, get it out, and then move on to the rest of the process. So imagine that there's like some deployment that happened. And there's like hundreds of different batches. So there could be like three, four different deployments that happened that day. There might be two issues that got deployed. And then these batch jobs fail at, let's say, 11 p.m. at night.

You need to page the person who wrote that. They need to fix it. They need to like deploy it the new code. Then you have to go through that process again and kind of just like, you know, go through with it. So I do think that Robin Hood's code base has not been architected in the most kind of stable way possible. And they did end up having a bunch of tech debt as a result of that. But yeah, I guess the core point was that I felt like I'd been working really hard. And then I got like the performance rating, which was the performance rating itself was like five out of

five. So I'm like, okay, that's pretty atypical for people to get. So I'm happy about that. But then there was like nothing else tied to that. There was like no promotion, no compensation change tied to that. And I was just like, why did I do this? Because when you're like 22, there's a lot of things you could be investing your time into. And I thought like if I had just been not investing so much time into work, I would have had a lot more happiness. I don't know if that actually would have maturedized in the same way if I hadn't been. But it did feel like the amount of time I was putting in was not commensurate with the reward I was getting. And I was just like, okay, so then I should just kind of be a little more checked out and just like trying to go through

the motions of like playing the game in a way. And that just made me super jaded about like this kind of big tech kind of environment because it does feel like a lot of people are just going through the motions playing the game. And I felt like there could be something bigger to work towards than that. And that happened nine months in, but you were there for three and a half years. Yeah. So my situation was a little complex because of a couple of reasons. There was like a death in the family which made it harder for me to leave. On top of that, they also gave us. options that were expensive to exercise. So it would have cost me $400,000 to exercise my options, which I didn't have 400K lying around. I would have needed to take out loan or something.

So my game plan at the time was to just stick around until there was some way to get out of that, which would have either been, the way that they set it up was if you stayed long enough, then you wouldn't need to exercise the options before leaving. They give you seven years afterwards. That was like one strategy or the other strategy was to just wait for the IPO to happen. And the IPO ended up happening in July of 2021. And that's when I kind of had like my handcuffs removed in a way. I could like do whatever I wanted to at that time. That's when I started like just going a lot more deep,

a lot deeper into crypto and kind of exploring like what we could be building over there. When you look back, because you mentioned like, you know, compensation starting at a pre-IPO startup compared to like as if you had worked in big tech. Did it net out to be higher pay? Yeah. I mean, it's like an order. of magnitude higher than it would have been at like a spending three and a half years at like a Google or Facebook type of company.

I mean, yeah. So I think financially that was like a fantastic decision in hindsight. But at the time I kind of felt like I was locked in without really having too much flexibility. I think that also distracted from my happiness. And I think we definitely got lucky over there as well. Like most of my friends that joined pre-IPO companies, some of them ended up IPOing. So they were like pretty happy about that. But a lot of them just still have an IPO.

So they're kind of, they felt like they've invested all this. time and then their stock options and really end up being worth anything. And I think we got pretty lucky too because I graduated in 2018. There are a lot of tech IPOs that happened in 2021. So like my graduate in class, your graduate in class, we were pretty fortunate with that timing. I think after that the IPO market cooled down and there's been less and less IPO. So like someone that graduated in like 2020, for example, I don't think they would have had that same kind of liquidation opportunity. When it comes to your career growth, I mean, sounds like you were a little bit checked was there were you going for promotions or getting them or you're kind of coasting I was I mean I still got

promoted the second performance cycle and then afterwards before leaving I was technically up for promotion um so at that point I was playing the game still but I wasn't really investing too much mental energy into it or like too much time into it one way of thinking about it is I was putting in the bare minimum to make sure that I was like close to average um and yeah then I was spending my time elsewhere. When you think about, I guess, because you were playing the game, doing the minimum, but still getting promoted, like what, how'd you do that? Yeah, I think at Robbner, it was probably easier than it would have been at like a meta or like one of these other bigger companies because I joined and the company just wrote 10x after that. So I like became a

domain expert pretty like just just because of that in a way. Because like we are hiring a lot of people we're starting to build a lot of new services. So just by the fact that I existed and I was in the seat at that time. I was the only person that knew how to do like 10 different things. And once you're given that much kind of responsibility, then it's pretty easy to become someone that's viewed as like an expert and can be relied upon to like solve different problems. So I think I was a competent engineer that just knew a lot of stuff. And that made it very easy for me to get promoted the second time. And I think that's what was happening as well for my second promotion if that had ended up happening. Like I was already an engineering lead because I was like doing stuff for

like a few different systems. So I think I was just kind of. given that responsibility. I see. So it sounds like just by default in a high growth environment, if you are competent, you become load bearing. Yeah, I definitely think that. If it's like a high growth environment where both the team grows and like the work to do also grows, then 100%. And because of that, there were also a lot of opportunities I got that I probably wouldn't have gotten at a bigger company. Like I mentored three different people. Like my first person that I mentored was like a year and a half in roughly to the start of my job over there

and I feel like a lot of bigger companies that might be less common. Like you don't get your first mentee or like your first intern until you're like much more senior. Right, right. So it sounds like, I mean, you know, a lot of career trajectories and things are opportunity, luck,

you know, things outside of our control. But it sounds like two things that were, you know, a through line here was that you sought out talented people. or like you went where talented people were, and you went towards like a high growth environment. Yeah. And those things just kind of, you know, working together led to promotions,

even though you weren't really even trying for them. And also your compensation was also good as well. I understand that you worked at Robin Hood during the whole GameStop saga. What was that like from the inside? Yeah, I mean, so for anyone that doesn't have context, to it. Like, when the GameStop saga happened, there were like 12 stocks. It was like GameStop, AMC and like 10 other ones that I don't remember right now. All of them were just like straight ripping because this is like when COVID was happening. So people had gotten their like stimmy

checks as well, if I recall. And yeah, I mean, people were just like gambling a lot in a way. And these stocks started going up in values like hedge funds and a lot of institutional traders were like, okay, we think that this based on a fundamental analysis, like this valuation no longer make sense. So we're going to short it because we think it'll eventually return to normal. The issue with shorting a stock, though, is that you have to borrow the stock, then you sell it, and then when you want to close that position, you have to buy that stock back and then return it. So when you buy that stock back, it leads to the price of that stock going up. So when the price is going up and people have to start closing their short positions,

that leads to more buy pressure from those shorts being closed, which causes a short squeeze. So all these stocks that short squeeze is happening on them. And in a way, it was like the little guy was beating the big guy because these institutions were leading. Robin Hood was the place where everyone was going to trade. And then I think it was like January 28th of 2021, Robin Hood just turned off buys on all these meme stocks. And it was insane because I found out about it when I woke up and I was like, damn, this is crazy. And then that day there were so many people that just reached out to me like, yo man, what the hell is going on? Because a lot of them I think were actually financially invested in this as well.

And when Robinna turned off by, as the price of GameStop started to go down, so they were like, understandably quite pissed about that. And yeah, I mean, it just makes you feel super powerless when you're an insider at a situation like that. And one thing that I realized is just how that really reinforced me just how archaic our current financial system is. In the case of Robinhood, that happened because there's this concept of T plus two settlement. Back then, it used to take two days for trades to settle. And during this time, Robin had needed to have collateral for the positions that people were opening. So they needed to actually give counterparties like billions of dollars on January 28th if they wanted to let people keep trading these assets. And like normal people don't know about any of that stuff.

And it only exists because these are like the ramifications of the traditional financial system that was built like whatever. The current version I think was built like 40 years ago, for example. It kind of made very clear to me that we will need much better financial rails in the future. And that was one of the things that led to the inspiration for say. Oh, that's interesting. So, because I remember that moment when they turned off the buys. And I think the public narrative was that they were doing it on purpose to manipulate the price. But it sounds like you're saying it was just logistical.

They just couldn't support the trades. Yeah. So Robin Hood did not turn off the buys because they were trying to like fuck with the price or whatever. They did turn off the buys because they needed to put up more collateral. And I think they miscommunicated this potentially on purpose. They were saying that we didn't turn off the buys for XYZ, even though that was actually the case. And I think that's because they were actively fundraising because they needed to raise billions

of dollars at that same time. So it was like this really difficult thing that Vlad and Bejou were trying to do at the time. I don't know what the right way to do that would have been because it was basically they were fighting for their company's existence at the time in a way, especially when regulators didn't really like them to begin with. So things could have gone very, very wrong over there. So I think all things considered, they did navigate that in an okay way, but I think they could have communicated to the public a lot better. Okay, so it sounds like you were getting promoted, but you were disengaged and trying to leave.

What's the story behind you eventually leaving and wanting to start a startup? Yeah. So, I mean, growing up in Silicon Valley, the people that are the most respected there are not like sports stars or like Hollywood stars. It's basically entrepreneurs. Like growing up, everyone would talk about like Steve Jobs, for example, instead of like Madonna or whatever. And yeah, I mean, I think everyone, if you're growing up in Silicon Valley, like consider starting something at some point. In my case, I did that Kleiner Perkins Fellowship where it seemed a lot more accessible in a way. Like, there were a lot of folks there that had started their own companies or a lot of folks that are considering starting it.

So I think being surrounded by that kind of group when I was 21, I was like, okay, it's doable to start something. And then in 2019, me and my co-founder, my current co-founder, we decided to actually start trying to build things together. So this is like after promotion didn't work out, I'm like, what should I do with my life? So nights and weekends, we're basically trying to get this like AWS cost management start up off the ground. And it's such a boring, boring space to be in because literally your job is to help people cut down on cloud costs. And what that means is if there's a super high growth company, they're not going to be interested in working with you because they're growing so quickly that it'll be easy for them to raise more money in the future. So the only kind of companies that you can really work with are ones that are like kind of atrophying in a way. And because we're small, it's not even going to be like the big companies that are atrophying that it work with us.

It'd be like these series A, series B companies that have kind of stalled out in growth and need to start cutting their cost. That's a horrible customer to have. Like, that's not someone that you want to really build your business off of. So, yeah, I mean, we didn't find too much traction with that. Honestly, thank God for that. Because I don't think I would have, like, spending several years of my life working on that. That's, like, the first thing that we did back in 2019. Then 2021, we decided to, like, start spending a lot more time in crypto.

There are different ideas that we kind of looked into, but ultimately what we decided we wanted to do was building something like Robin Hood, except building it in a decentralized way. And the thinking is that if it was built in a decentralized way, you'd be able to solve all the issues that were happening with the Romano T saga, like the graemstops saga that we're talking about. And that led to us initially building a central limit order book based exchange on chain. And I guess I'll avoid going too deep in the details over there. But essentially we're initially trying to build an exchange, which is an application.

Then we realized it's actually better to build the infrastructure or that application, which led to say. And that's around when I quit my job and we just went kind of all in on it. What did you need to see before you win all this? So in our case, we had basically a team of people that was like willing to work part-time with us. I think that helped. We had a good relationship, me and my co-founder. And I think that we started seeing some initial kind of excitement around what we're building.

And that's when I kind of pulled the trigger. I think my bar for pulling the trigger was lower than it would be for a lot of other people. Because like the IPO had just happened. Financially, there wasn't much downside for me to do that because I was hitting the end of my four-year grant anyway. So I was like, this is a time. And in hindsight, that was like a fantastic time to kind of pull the trigger. Imagine that Robin Hood had a, like, compensation-wise, let's say it had a middling performance. Or like it was just, you know, normal.

As if you had like worked at Google or like a big tech company. Do you think you still would have left to start your own company with the same conviction? Or do you think that money is a big part of that? that. I think it would have been even easier to make that decision honestly because the six months of equity that I left on the table was still a dollar value that was pretty high to me. If it had been a normal kind of compensation that I'd be leaving on the table, I don't think it would have been a hard decision at all. In general, I think people tend to be way too scared of leaving their jobs. Most of the time, if you're competent, things will work out anyway. I don't know too many people

that are like that are good at their jobs at company A that are not. not able to find any work again after that. Actually, I don't know anyone like that. Typically, if someone's good at company A, they have no trouble finding a job somewhere else. So yeah, I think people tend to overindex on how much risks they're taking on when they leave to start something. I see. They see. Okay. So you're saying it's not that big of a deal and you can just go back or you can find another opportunity if it failed. Exactly. I mean, if you're a software engineer working in tech, I think it's such a little downside in a way. There's just the opportunity cost for the most part. If you spend like a year trying to get something off the ground,

it doesn't work out. Not only are you like, I would actually say you're more valuable to a startup or like to any kind of company. If you've been through the reps of actually trying to start something, then you would expect. Like I think a lot of people worry that like, oh yeah, if I'm not working on anything, like if I'm not working as a software engineer for a year, then it'll be hard for me to get a job. But if you're going through the reps of like actually trying to build a product, you end up learning a lot more that makes you more valuable to any kind of business. Like what are those things that you learn? Like for example, getting, product validation, like coming up with a product idea, being able to see if people actually care

about it, then working through the entire life cycle of designing the product, actually building it from the engineering side, going to market with it, like the marketing side around that, the business development side around that. So there's just so many things that as a normal engineer. You don't have to do it all. And in this case, you end up just learning all of that, which when you go as an engineer to any company, if you're able to play the roles of like being a marketer, being a product manager, like being a business development guy as well. I think you're able to do a much better job

of building the product and you're also able to play a much bigger role on like the eventual go to market of that product as well. What about in the bare case? I guess let's say you quit your job, you are working on something that where you don't establish PMF and you don't have a, I guess a marketable milestone in that thing that you did. But you did get the skills, but you know, who's going to say, who's going to give them credibility if you just wandered and explored ideas? So I don't think big companies will give you that much credibility.

I think a lot of early stage startups would. Like if you go and interview at a startup as a seed or pre-seed startup, they would be very happy to work with an engineer that's been a previous founder, much more so than they would a normal engineer just because that engineer can be much more impactful in the zero to one process that you're getting started with.

Right. Okay. So it's kind of, I mean, if you do choose to make that career decision, it doesn't necessarily pigeonhole you, but your career starts to bias a little more towards smaller companies. I think smaller companies is where you're going to excel more. But I also think there's this other side of it where people that try to start a company, they're already biased towards smaller companies. So they're much more likely to only interview for these smaller companies after their startup

doesn't work out. And that's going to be where there's like more interesting problems for them to work on anyway. So you probably do see more examples of that if like people leaving to start a company failing and then going to another small company. But I don't think that's just because big companies hit, though. I think that's also because that's the environment that those founders want to find themselves in. Yeah, no. There's definitely some confounding factors for sure. And I've seen examples of people, big tech, left big tech, started something failed, came right back to big tech.

So, you know. That's true. You can definitely do that as well. I want to talk about fundraising because, I mean, your startup, thankfully, was successful and you raised a lot of money. I don't know the total. Maybe you could... We raised 35 mil in total. Okay. We raised a 5 mil seed round. And then afterwards, we had like strategic rounds that ended up being for 30 mil.

Okay. So you raised $35 million. You must have learned something in that process. I'm curious. What was that like? Yeah. So our seed round, we started raising it right after there was this blockchain called Terra. which is one of the biggest blockchains out there. It collapsed. And then we started raising our seat around three weeks after that. That was one of the worst times in the history of crypto to be raising money. So we learned a lot about, I mean, rejection, obviously, because most investors said no to us. I mean, we obviously learned what the N2N lifecycle for fundraising looks like.

We hadn't raised money before then. So, like, the intro calls, then eventually meeting the partners and, like, kind of talking through the team, the product, the vision, all that, all that kind of jazz. it's actually not that scary in a way. And there is a bunch of group things that happens. Like initially everyone's kind of like skeptical. And then once one fund becomes excited about something, it makes it much easier to convince other funds to get on board with it. And there's a lot of investors that are just like kind of on the sidelines trying to maintain as much optionality as they can.

So they like give excuses a lot of the time like, oh yeah, we're like still doing diligent. We'll get back to you in like a week or something just to see like how the deal plays out. So there is definitely that aspect of like trying. to get people more excited about the investment. I see. And so it sounds like the most impactful thing here is you get a good lead and then all the sheep will come. Yeah.

If you get a tier one lead investor, everything else is super easy after that. So then how did you get your lead investor and like what's that process look like if you're just an engineer with a product? Yeah. So in our case, we just got an intro to a bunch of different like, I mean, basically every investor that's like a top tier investor in crypto. One of the funds we talked to was Multi-coin. Multi-coin was the biggest investor in Solana,

and they'd made in billions of dollars from that investment. So I would say that's like, their regard is like one of the top five to ten investors in crypto. And we had really good conversations with them, and they ultimately decided to invest in us. And after that investment, I think everything just became much, much easier. Because initially when you're getting started with something,

if you don't have a track record, everyone's kind of skeptical of a few. But once you get that stamp, it becomes much easier to open a lot of doors, whether it's for business development opportunities, whether it's for future fundraising, whether it's for like anything required for the actual launch as well. It just becomes significantly easier. The other thing that I'll say is that for crypto, it's very different than traditional kind of venture. I think in traditional venture, it's probably even harder that it is in crypto. Because in crypto, there's like a very different

type of process. There's like typically most projects, they have like a seed round, a series A, and then afterwards, there's some kind of token launch event that happens. And then they don't typically raise institutional venture capital rounds too much after that. Whereas in like AI companies are like most Web2 companies, there's like several rounds of fundraising that need to happen. And there's like a lot of like revenue and like financials that people look at. In crypto, there's a lot of like software metrics people look at, but there's not really the same concept of like revenue if you're like helping build a blockchain.

And as a result of that like web two companies, like, companies like, okay, this is your ARR. And then that's like a very fundamental metric, like how quickly are going around that. In the case of crypto, it's much more like how much excitement is there around this project, how many teams are actually building with this. So it seems reminiscent of like 1995 to 1997 in like internet investing, where there are a lot of like alternate metrics people came up with like number of eyeballs that like are looking at a website, for example, stuff like that.

So I think it is much more of like a subjective space. to be investing in if you're like an investor in crypto. Let's say I'm a skeptical, you know, software engineer and I'm looking at crypto, I think there's a lot of grift there. What's the bowl case or what's the clear case of here's the value that crypto provides the world? Yeah. So I guess, I mean, two separate kind of streams of thought over there.

The first is that any industry that is in early stage industry, I think it tends to have a ton of grift and a ton of things that don't make sense. When Web 2, when like the internet was getting started. for example, arguably the biggest use case for it was important. That was one of the biggest things that was taking off in Web 2 back in the mid-90s. And I would make the argument that the internet has just completely changed society. So I think it does take time. And I think there does tend to be a lot of grift in any kind of new industry that's getting started.

I think even with AI, we're probably seeing semblances of that where there's like a lot of people that are raising money that aren't really building anything super meaningful. And they're probably like misusing a lot of the funds that they're getting. In Cryptos case, I think, yeah, there's been a ton of events like that. And I think that we're starting to move, like those events are becoming less and less typical. I think through a couple of different things. The first I think is there's starting to be more and more regulatory clarity. So once the government gets involved, sets clear guidelines around like what is acceptable, what's not acceptable. I think that grift naturally goes away.

And then there's also like the kind of social policing that happens as well. Like if you're seeing patterns where if people do XYZ that results in bad things, happening. Other people tend to be less supporting of like investing in founders that they think might do those kinds of things. So it's becoming much less common to see that kind of negative stuff happening, I would say. In terms of where I see crypto going. So my view on this is that crypto will be playing a very big role in changing the financial system in the future. And right now there's two things that crypto has been really, really good at. It's been really good at payments, and it's been really good at trading. And the reason for that is when you have this kind of distributed

ledger, it adds in a ton of cost because you're basically doing the same thing many, many times across a bunch of different machines. But the benefit of that is verifiability. So you're able to verify that you can trust whatever this computation is because you're like doing it yourself as well. So the only use case that really, really makes sense over there is finance. Like when there's actually the money at stake, I think that's going to be the biggest use case where crypto can be really, really impactful. So right now, I think it's already playing a big role in terms of like international remittances from the stable coin side. And I think in the future, like when you start seeing more and more stable coin adoption,

that'll lead to more financial rails being built up around those table coins. So I think in the future, like we're actually going to have some version of just completely decentralized Wall Street getting built as well. That'll be globally accessible that anyone's able to trade on and basically make use of. Another thing would be if you're in a country that doesn't have a stable currency, what do you actually hold your money in? Like unless you're investing it into some kind of like stock market. market. You don't want to be holding a currency that's like inflating, let's say, 30% in the

course of like a couple of days. So in that case, you'd actually want to hold on to US dollars. But if your country doesn't want you to get easy access to US dollars, like, what do you do? Well, crypto is becoming one of the clearly used solutions over there where people just buy USDC or USCT and they hold on to it and that's what they transact in. So I'd say that's another use case where crypto's been picking up. In Southeast Asia, Latin America, it's being used a lot more for just actual payments as well. I think that it's just starting to become more and more widely adopted over there. Yeah, I mean, I definitely think in the long term,

the verifiability that crypto offers is going to be really, really useful for allowing computation to happen between people that don't trust each other, which will be like a lot of financial use cases for people basically around the world. Coming to the end here, when you look back on your career, like which time do you feel like you had the most growth in why? But 2022 was the year that I had the most growth, undoubtedly. And that was when you started the company. Yeah, when we, that was like the, yeah, when we started to say.

When you're at a job, I think there's a lot of rails there to help support you. When you start a company yourself, like you're all by yourself and you need to figure everything out by yourself. And yeah, as a result of that, I think I learned a lot. But I think basically every single year since then, I've probably learned more than I did during my, like any of the jobs that I worked for other people. I see. And these things that you're learning are more of like the non-engineering things. Oh, yeah.

Like, okay. It's like, you know, how do you start a business? How do you fundraise? Exactly. I think the engineering side of things is generally pretty easy. Definitely, I mean, once you're like going up the ladder at like a meta or something, you're solving really, really difficult problems. But I don't think most businesses need, like they have those kind of problems and they don't need support to solve those problems.

Like most businesses are solving pretty mundane kind of problems. So from the aspect of like building a product that people use, I don't think you typically end up facing those kind of scaling problems. So if you're a competent, let's say, I forget the leveling that meta uses now, but like it Robinizes like L3 is like a new grad, L4 is there a level above it. If you're a competent L4, then I think you can do perfectly fine as a founder in any kind of from any kind of engineering side. So let's say I wanted to start my own company. I'm a new grad. Would you recommend stay in until you hit that minimum bar of technical competency? Or just go for it. If you know what you want to build,

I think you should just go for it. I think you'll be able to either build that technical competency or more likely higher for that technical competency. Because if you have a good idea, you have like, and if you have a good idea, it'll be pretty easy for you to raise money. And if you raise money, then it's gonna be pretty straightforward for you to grow a team from there as well.

And I mean, when we look back, I mean, obviously hindsight's 2020, but your startup has, been successful. How has the team grown over the last few years? And I'm curious, like, we can think about that compared to, like, maybe big tech levels and stuff. And we can see what those promos kind of look like. Yeah. So when we got started, it was around, I mean, there were like five to seven of us. This is in 2022. Now across, like, there's multiple entities, but we could combine all the entities. It's around 60 people working full time on, say. So we've been

pretty lean in terms of our growth relative to what I've seen in place like Robin Hood, for example. And I think that was absolutely the right decision. Like, if you grow slowly, it allows you to maintain the culture. And it also prevents all the scaling issues you see with like bureaucracy and people kind of being clueless on what to do. So that allows you to move more quickly as well.

I think the last thing that I want to ask you is, you know, if you were to go back to yourself right when you had graduated from UCLA and give yourself some advice, knowing everything you know now, what would you say? Yeah, I mean, the main thing that comes to mind right now is to not be so scared. There's, I think I'm naturally more of a risk-averse person.

And as a result of that, I've been more hesitant to basically take these big leaps of faith. There's other people I know where it's like very, very easy for them to do that. And I do think optimally, like there is some kind of middle ground where you think through any decision you make, but then afterwards you pull the trigger quickly. And I think that I shouldn't have been scared at all about

leaving my job at Robin Hood, even potentially earlier on. So in a perfect world, actually, you would have left earlier. In a perfect world, I would have left earlier, but then I don't know if things would have played out the same way, because I might not have started a crypto company in that case, and I think that it had been like that AWS cost management company. I don't think it would have been the same kind of outcome. Makes sense.

Cool. Well, thank you for your time, Jay. You know, at the end of the interview, is there anything you want to plug? If you guys want to learn more about to say, you could just follow the same network quitter, S-E-I-N-E-T-W-O-R-K. Thanks. Cool. All right. Thanks, Jay. Thanks for listening to the podcast. I don't sell anything or do sponsorships, but if you want to

help out with the podcast, you can support by engaging with the content on YouTube or on Spotify if you want to drop a review. That'll be super helpful. And if there's any guests that you want to bring on to, please let me know. I feel like sourcing very senior I see. there's no well-studied list out there on Google that I can just search this up. So if there's someone in your org or at your company who you really look up to and you want to hear their career story, let me know and I'll reach out to them.