Podcast

Dima Romanov & David Cao are the Co-Founders of Layer N, and Patricia Xiang is the Head of Growth at Layer N. Backed by Founders Fund, Amber Group, Kraken Ventures, & more, Layer N is a hyperperformant rollup network designed to scale financial applications on Ethereum. In this episode we chat about why blockchain scalability is so important, the market dynamics of their particular space, earliest challenges and surprises in building Layer N, what crypto’s getting right (and wrong) in 2023, & much more.

Fabio Berger is the Co-Founder & CEO at Blowfish. Backed by Paradigm, Uniswap, Dragonfly, & Hypersphere, Blowfish enables proactive defense for web3 wallets: making it easy to identify & stop fraud before it happens, with 10+ chains supported. In this episode we talk about his journey into crypto, what got Fabio to conviction on the Blowfish concept, their product evolution over time, what piques his interest/curiosity the most right now across web3, & much more.

Jaemin Jin is the Co-Founder & CPO @ Magic. Backed by PayPal Ventures, Lightspeed, Social Capital, SV Angel, as well as angels like Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srinivasan, Scott Belsky, Ryan Hoover, & more, Magic provides the leading wallet-as-a-service (plus essential NFT capabilities)—enabling all the benefits of web3, and none of the stress, for brands like Mattel, Animoca Brands, Magic Eden, & more. In this episode we chat about how Magic began, what their market is like, the earliest surprises and challenges in building Magic, working with big brands like Macy’s or 7-11 (and how to think about solving for their needs), how crypto has changed since his start in the space, his most generalizable advice for crypto founders, & much more.

Chris Were is the Co-Founder & CEO at Verida. Backed by Launchub, Gate Labs, Qwerty Fund, & more, Verida is creating a new era of hyper-personalization, where user data is privately and consensually used to create new products and services. In this episode we discuss what becomes possible as Verida scales, thoughts on self-sovereign identity, Verida’s experience launching the first mobile crypto wallet supporting zero-knowledge credentials issued through Polygon ID, & much more.

Tejas Kulkarni is the Co-Founder & CEO at Common Sense Machines. Backed by Intel Capital, Toyota Ventures, & more, Common Sense Machines (CSM) is an end-to-end generative AI platform that creates game-engine ready content – enabling users to generate 3D Worlds from images & text. In this episode we discuss Tejas’ fascinating journey through MIT and Google Deep Mind, the remarkable bet on the pace of technological advancement, what CSM gets uniquely right about approaching their problem set, how gaming and entertainment could change because CSM exists, his best advice for early-stage founders, and much more.