Podcast

Jess Houlgrave is the CEO at WalletConnect. Backed by Union Square Ventures, 1kx, & more, WalletConnect gives developers the tools to build secure, interactive, and powerful experiences that users everywhere can enjoy. In this episode we discuss Jess’ remarkable journey to the CEO role, most exciting possibilities at WalletConnect, what crypto’s getting right (and wrong) in 2024, what mistakes she most often sees from others building similar products, & much more.

Tomer Afek is the Co-Founder & CEO of Spacemesh . Backed by Paradigm, Spacemesh is a L1 blockchain protocol, focused on the qualitative aspects of permissionless decentralization. In this episode, we discuss Tomer’s philosophical journey that led to the creation of Spacemesh, why they’ve spent so long working on Spacemesh, a deep-dive on some of the technical aspects of the protocol, and his most generalizable advice for founders in the web3 space.

Helena Gagern is the Co-Founder of Salsa. Backed by IDEO CoLab VC, Inflection.xyz, Dan Romero, Balaji Srinivasan, & more, Salsa is a web3 native messaging platform currently focused on creating community tools for musicians. In this episode we discuss the origin story of Salsa (and the story of how the co-founders met), earliest challenges and surprising opportunities, what kind of impact Salsa could make if they continue to execute, best advice for navigating web3 as a crypto founder, & much more.

Burnt Banksy is the Founder of Burnt. Backed by Animoca, Circle, Multicoin, Spartan, HashKey, & more, Burnt is a web3 foundry, on a mission to advance society’s financial and creative freedom, by any means necessary. Burnt is currently building XION, the first blockchain built to make crypto, human, by empowering developers & brands to create frictionless Web3 experiences with a toolkit that removes technical barriers for any user, anywhere. In this episode we discuss the genesis of Burnt Banksy’s journey in crypto, what it means to “rebuild broken systems of ownership by any means necessary,” some interesting ways XION is seeing adoption, how to build the right team for a studio model, what’s changed in crypto since 2021, his unreal plans for XION's mainnet launch, & much more.

David Furlong is the Founder at Openframes. Backed by a16z Startup School & Dan Romero, Openframes is enabling developers to build mini-apps that are open, interoperable, and permissionless, now available for Farcaster. In this episode we discuss the nature of pivoting (what makes pivot good vs. bad), how to adapt in the fast-moving world of blockchain technology, why what’s happening within decentralized social matters so much, how to stick with your principles (in an especially tricky field to do so), & much more.