20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo

Paul Erlanger is the Co-Founder and CEO of FOMO, the social-first trading platform building the future of on-chain investing. Since founding the company in 2025, Paul has raised approximately $94 million, including a $17 million Series A led by Benchmark and a $75 million Series B led by Index Ventures with participation from USV, valuing the company at $550 million. Today, FOMO has grown to 600,000 users, processed over $4 billion in trading volume, and is adding thousands of new users every day—all with a team of just 17 people. AGENDA: 00:00 – Building a $550M Company with No Salaries, No Managers & No 1:1s 03:58 – Why Traditional Brokerages Will Lose in the Next 10 Years 09:30 – Why Robinhood's Strategy Is Wrong; The End of the Financial Super App? 13:05 – "Markets Aren't a Casino" — The Case for Retail Investors Fighting Wall Street 16:45 – The Radical Hiring Bet: Giving Employees Founder-Level Equity 23:40 – AI Kills Org Charts: Why FOMO Will Stay Under 25 Employees 29:30 – Why Taste Beats AI & The Biggest Mistake Most Consumer Startups Make 33:10 – The Social Media Playbook That Every Startup Gets Wrong 39:20 – How Benchmark, Index & USV Won the Deal—and the VC Advice Founders Need to Hear 46:10 – The Future of Investing: Social Trading, Creator Economies & Financial Networks

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I think we gave non-founders a percentage of the company that usually founders get. For the first eight months to building, no one on our team took any pay. The best people are just so much more valuable now. One thing that I discovered was if you're trying to raise another round, wait to announce your last round. Everything is about momentum.

• 0:21Harry Stebbings?

  I am Harry Stebbings. This is 20VC. Today, we have Paul Erlang, a co-founder and CEO of FOMO on the show. Now, FOMO is a wild story. For the first eight months of building the business, none of the core team members took any salary. Despite the company being a wild success today, they only have 17 team members, no internal hierarchy, and they have no one-on-one meetings. They've just announced a $75 million Series B at a $550 million valuation, led by Index and Fred Wilson at USV. I love non-obvious stories, and when you unpack this one, there are so many gems to uncover. But before we dive into the show today, have you ever felt a little stuck at work?

• 1:03Harry Stebbings?

  Maybe you're stuck in back-to-back meetings, stuck without clear feedback, or trying to learn a new AI workflow? Well, now you can move work forward with Loom, the AI-first video platform from Atlassian. Use Loom to simultaneously record both your screen and yourself, to share a quick update, provide feedback, train a colleague, and everything in between. AI instantly adds a title, a summary, and edits to your video so clarity travels with the work. Finally, you'll have more focus time, fewer unnecessary meetings, and more effective ones. It's a real team changer and game changer for personal productivity. Try Loom today at L-O-O-M dot com. Once Loom gets the message across, Finn keeps the conversation going with customers. As AI agents become more common in customer experience,

• 1:48Harry Stebbings?

  teams often end up juggling multiple siloed tools for every job. Well, Finn was built to change that. It's a single unified agent that works across your entire customer experience, from service to sales to success and beyond. Finn is the agent making perfect customer experiences possible for thousands of customers. It's powered by custom models, trained on years of real Customer interactions, so it understands the nuance and complexity of customer service better than any other agent. That means faster resolutions, more consistent support, and just better experiences for every customer. It's also designed to be fully self-managable, so you can easily improve and adapt it as your business evolves. No third parties required.

• 2:29Harry Stebbings?

  Leading companies like Gamma, Asana, DoorDash, and Crypto.com already use and love Finn to deliver better customer experiences. So for a limited time, you can get $500 a month in Finn credits for your first three months. Learn more at fin.ai/20vc. While Finn helps answer the customer, Framer helps impress the next one. You know that moment when marketing wants a landing page, design mocks it up, and engineering says, "Yeah, we'll get to it." Thousands of businesses from early-stage startups to Fortune 500s are choosing to build their websites in Framer, where changes take minutes instead of days to solve this very problem. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder that works like your team's favorite design tool,

• 3:13Harry Stebbings?

  and it's used by companies like Perplexity, Miro, Mixpanel to move faster. Designers and marketers can fully own the site with real-time collaboration, a robust CMS built for SEO, and advanced analytics that include integrated A/B testing. So you're not just shipping pages, but you're maximizing what works. And when you're ready to ship, changes go live in seconds with one click: publish, without relying on engineering. Plus, Framer is built for scale, with premium hosting, enterprise-grade security, and 99.99% uptime SLAs. Whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages, or migrate your full .com,

• 3:52Harry Stebbings?

  Framer has programs for startups, scale-ups, and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site fast. Learn how you can get more out of your .com from a Framer specialist, or get started building for free today at framer.com/20vc for 30% off. 30% off a Framer Pro Annual Plan. That's framer.com/20vc for 30% off. Framer.com/20vc. Rules and restrictions may apply. You have now arrived at your destination. Paul, I am so excited for this dude. Listen, I'm so thrilled that you're able to join us in person, dude. I want to start with one that I'm always fascinated by, which is, are you more motivated by the thrill of winning or the fear of losing?

• 4:36Speaker 00

  This is gonna be a hot take, but I don't think I'm driven by either too much. I think it's more of like doing the thing for the pleasure of actually doing the thing. Like me and my co-founder talk about this all the time, where I think the biggest fear is losing what we have now. I think like every day, waking up, going to the office, getting to work with an incredible team and building what we're building. I think one specifically because of what we're building, but also just getting to work on something really cool, like an interesting problem with amazing people. I think that's what actually motivates us.

• 5:06Harry Stebbings?

  I think it's important to set context. For those that don't know what FOMO is, how would you describe FOMO in 30 seconds?

• 5:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, FOMO is a mobile trading app. Right now, it's mostly on-chain assets, meaning like on-chain native assets, Bitcoin, Ethereum, attention-based assets, et cetera. But we're soon gonna launch globally access to equities and perpetuals, non-US obviously, we'll kind of work with the government there as that comes. But the goal is to be able to give global access to markets, to individuals that don't have that access. It's also social, so you could see what your friends are holding in real time, follow them. I know everyone's wanted like a real-time Nancy Pelosi stock tracker, so maybe if she trades on FOMO, we could finally get one.

• 5:49Harry Stebbings?

  I think that'd be an interesting addition to the angel round.

• 5:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:52Harry Stebbings?

  Speaking of interesting additions to the angel round, when we think about early rounds, you did an only angel round in the early days, no institutions, and you had 140 angels. Why did you decide to do this? And how would that inform how you advise founders?

• 6:09Speaker 00

  It was pretty intuitive to us. So I think if you're running a B2B business, you hire a big sales team and it's not an easy job, but it's a lot of outbound repetitive. When you're starting a consumer product, it's a very different problem space, because there's a lot of great products that just never get off the ground. So we knew we needed to solve this cold start problem, like get people on the app. So when we raised the initial round, the goal was to create distribution and we think that- Our best users should have some ownership in the product. And early on, what we were able to do is get people motivated by allowing them to invest in the product and create as large of a distribution channel as possible. And not all those people are traders. Like, there are definitely builders in the industry and we've been able to leverage tons of them as we continue to build.

• 6:52Speaker 00

  But I think that initial round was really core to the success of FOMO.

• 6:55Harry Stebbings?

  Who is the single best angel?

• 6:58Speaker 00

  There's this angel investor named Aaron Harris. He is X Y C. You know, Aaron?

• 7:03Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, I had him on the show years and years ago.

• 7:05Speaker 00

  Aaron is an incredible angel investor. He is an incredible partner. He understands financing really well. And I think that when you're financing for a business, it is one of the most important decisions you make because a small change in a term sheet could completely change the trajectory of your company. So I think having him there in our court to really help us work through some of that as first time founders was really helpful.

• 7:29Harry Stebbings?

  That's so funny. I, he was like one of the first 15 guests I ever had on the show. He was a Y C partner at the time. Can I ask you, when you reflect back on that journey, if you were to advise a consumer founder on how to scale to your first 1,000 users? I love Kevin Kelly's essay, A Thousand True Fans. If you were advising on first 1,000 users, what would your biggest advice be?

• 7:48Speaker 00

  Talk to them. You need to keep iterating until you have 10 people, 100 people, 1,000 people using it. And when you have 10 people using it, get the feedback from them and then iterate on that feedback. And then 100 people. This is actually one of the largest competitive advantages for our company is in the on-chain and crypto industry specifically, the users are very passionate about using the products. So we have Telegram channels with a lot of the top traders on FOMO. And when we put out our web app, for example, we did it a week prior and we gave early access. The web app probably became twice as good just in that week because we were able to get early feedback from people who were actually passionate. And these people are just users of the product. We didn't pay them. There's no other strings attached, but they just loved it.

• 8:30Speaker 00

  So I think that the most important thing is just getting user feedback and iterating on it.

• 8:34Harry Stebbings?

  I have a product too, which is the show itself. And my challenge is user feedback varies. Some people love some things and some people hate the same thing. How do you determine when a user is right and you should ingest it and make changes versus when you should stick to your core product roadmap or thesis and ignore their feedback?

• 8:53Speaker 00

  I think you just have to be super epistemically modest. Because sometimes a user doesn't even know what's actually best for them. When you get feedback from a user, you really need to like, listen to your instinct on what the fundamental product experience is, and your intuition, and then see if that fits in your larger vision. Honestly, I think that certain product additions could potentially kill the product like that one. So ones like that, that actually have this large potential outcome, you need to be very thoughtful in implementing.

• 9:22Harry Stebbings?

  Why do you not agree with the financial super app theory then? You know, if you have a Revolut, or a Robinhood, or a New Bank, or any of these big providers where it's like, the bundled provider is the one that wins. I trade on Revolut today. Why is that the wrong approach? And actually, you need a trading app?

• 9:38Speaker 00

  Because everything app means not intentional. It means let's just throw everything in there for the user to access. What is the glue between these things? At FOMO, we think it's the social graph. We think that you can express a thesis. I think that the straight of her muse is gonna close. Well, I can buy oil on hyper liquid perps. I could short US equities that are relying on oil. I could buy the prediction market that the straight's gonna close. And I can express my opinion in all these different things. And the reason these different market types exist is to you express conviction on a belief. Whereas all these other apps are just everything super apps, and there's no intentionality behind why all those things have to exist in the same place.

• 10:16Harry Stebbings?

  Do you compete with a Kalshi then?

• 10:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, we haven't integrated prediction markets yet, and I'm not sure exactly where it fits in on our roadmap. I think it's very interesting there. Our first version of the product would be built on something like a poly market in Kalshi. Those are great businesses. And I think that there's a lot in flux around the regulation of these businesses. So we want to watch and see what happens, and then move from there. But I think it's really important because public markets have been how retail gets access to capital, and we talked about this. And we were talking about Shopify and how amazing that was, that retail investors got private scale returns in the public markets. When it launched, what, 2 billion, and is where it is now? This is becoming earlier and earlier, right? If you have perps that are pre-IPO

• 11:03Speaker 00

  IPO and then you have prediction markets that from a year ago.

• 11:06Harry Stebbings?

  And just so, just so people understand, what is a perp that is pre-IPO?

• 11:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, so what a perp is, is you're placing a bet on a price, basically.

• 11:14Harry Stebbings?

  I think SpaceX will go up.

• 11:15Speaker 00

  Will go up.

• 11:16Harry Stebbings?

  You think it will go down.

• 11:16Speaker 00

  Exactly. And instead of me selling you SpaceX stock, I just bet you that SpaceX will go down. You're betting me it's going to go up and then we trade money. So what you can do is you have a price on the exchange that people just agree. Like you're like, I think SpaceX should be this much. I think I'm willing to sell this much at that price. So I will sell you that much at that price and then we're betting on it going up and down as a side bet. And you actually don't need the transfer of the underlying asset because of that, because it's synthetic. What's beautiful about that is you can trade these things without necessarily having that underlying price. So what we saw with Cerebras is when the IPO happened, the hyper liquid price started to converge to that price at IPO.

• 11:56Speaker 00

  And there were people, there are pictures of people on the New York Stock Exchange with the hyper liquid UI up and, and people looking at those markets. And I think that's really cool and interesting, but with pre-IPO, with prediction markets, retail gets access to these markets earlier and earlier.

• 12:11Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask you, when you look at Robinhood today, who provide or want to provide a lot in terms of trading capabilities? Do you think they were wrong to go so broad so quickly?

• 12:22Speaker 00

  I think a lot of people that are on Robinhood would have never been on a brokerage otherwise. I see some criticism of like, do I want to have my retirement account in the same place as I can trade prediction markets and sports bet? I think that they can do better tooling for users to self-guard against some of those products. But I understand why they horizontally scaled. They grew their business and they were able to saturate the US market, but they weren't able to go global. And I think this is why they're focused on on-chain assets, because on-chain is global from day one. And if they could tokenize equities and a lot of the stocks that are existing on Robinhood, then they could give global access to these assets. I think that as they go global, they could be less focused on horizontally scaling all these products and really capturing a larger market.

• 13:05Harry Stebbings?

  Do you worry about the casino-ization of public markets? And what I mean by that is just like a detachment from reality. Because of social media, because of retail exuberance, businesses were based on core fundamentals. Now, GameStop is a good example.

• 13:21Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 13:22Harry Stebbings?

  But social media and movements can drive such price swings that it just becomes a fucking Wild West and a casino. Do you worry that now the public markets is just a Wild West and a casino?

• 13:35Speaker 00

  I think casino is kind of a derogatory way to view it. I think it's somewhat empowering, right? Like hedge funds have determined the value of stocks for the longest time. This group Wall Street Bets saw a bunch of shorts on this stock and it was like, screw the hedge funds. We're going to have to have them cover call the shorts and the price is going to skyrocket. It was kind of cool to see a group of retail investors coalesce and be able to kind of fight back against the institutions. I think this is a really cool corollary to FOMO because FOMO is a public network. Whereas you had to be on Wall Street Bets on Reddit. In FOMO, everything happens on real time, so people in retail can coordinate there. And I do think that attention drives a lot of things. I think whether it's sports cards, like everything is speculative to a degree, right?

• 14:20Speaker 00

  Like, why are you buying diamond rings? It's because we've kind of agreed as a society that this is worth this value. Why are you buying gold? Most financial assets are speculative. I understand the view on fundamentals and when you're buying business, you're buying the cash flow in that business. But most people, when they buy a stock, they're not looking to get dividends. They're looking to just sell at a higher price. So in that framing, everything becomes speculative and I'm not going to take a normative view of whether that's good or bad.

• 14:47Harry Stebbings?

  Going back to the story, when you had the angel round and we got to the thousand true fans, what's your biggest advice to founders on product market fit?

• 14:55Speaker 00

  I think you have to stay humble because at any moment you could lose it. Everything is about momentum. So when you have momentum, instead of like taking the gas off the pedal and be like, okay, like this is working. It's like, no, you need to double down 10 times harder. And every day we come in and we're like, listen, we need to ship these features today or else we're going to lose everything we have now. I guess it's somewhat of a fear mindset, but it's really just like trying to continue to keep pressure on. So we continue moving forward because once you lose momentum, the boulder starts rolling down the hill. You know, you need to keep pushing it up.

• 15:27Harry Stebbings?

  One of the biggest mistakes I think I see with founders is like they're terrified of launching and not having any adoption. And so they make it a more diluted diluted message for more and more people. It doesn't mean anything to anyone. And then they launch and it's like, it's the most mid-product ever because they tried to make it so bland for everyone.

• 15:45Speaker 00

  A hundred percent. Actually, Chathin had a really good point here because there's this balance I've always tried to find between shipping fast and doing things perfectly. And I've been a perfectionist and I'm like, this detail, everything needs to look perfect. And now I'm like, we have fifty, sixty thousand daily active users. We need this to be perfect from day one, or else we're gonna lose that user base. Chathin was pushing us like, well, what if you shipped faster? Just like, think through this. Let's steal me on that side. And I was like, well, look at Apple. Everyone envies that company. They always ship perfect products. And then we were talking about how lithium ion batteries exploded, how the first iPhone like was glitching out all the time. And looking back, you look through hindsight with rose colored glasses. But actually, most companies don't ship perfect products.

• 16:28Speaker 00

  And you have to find this balance between shipping something, a good framing is the one you're using, that a specific user base might want to adopt and it could grow from there. Rather than just building something for everyone and something that what you think meets this bar of perfection.

• 16:42Harry Stebbings?

  I think now you have to ship faster than ever.

• 16:44Speaker 00

  Exactly. Because you can, and everyone else is.

• 16:46Harry Stebbings?

  Okay. And so then tell me, we have this kind of product market fit moments and we see these strategic inflection points. How does Benchmark come into the fray?

• 16:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we did this angel rounds. We were making some money. Most of our team was not taking any pay. So like for the first eight months to building, no one on our team took any pay. And it was mostly because most of us are senior engineers and we were taking a bet on the company and that was really important to us.

• 17:12Harry Stebbings?

  Most of you are not taking any pay.

• 17:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:14Harry Stebbings?

  Everyone will be going, what? Slaves, slaves.

• 17:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:17Harry Stebbings?

  You have a very generous ownership program. Can you just talk to me about that and how you think about giving employees a lot more equity?

• 17:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, we capitalized the founding team extremely well. I think this is gonna become more and more true.

• 17:31Harry Stebbings?

  When you say extremely well, I'm so sorry to be a dick, but like, what does that actually mean? So many founders listen, like, should I give everyone one percent each?

• 17:38Speaker 00

  Yes, top performers 100%. In fact, more than that, right? I think we gave non-founders a percentage of the company that usually founders get. And it was mostly this core group of original people that didn't take any pay. And I think what's really important here is all those people feel like owners of the business. Because if those five to seven to 10 people build this business for the next 10 years, there's literally nothing stopping us. And we talked about this and work-life balance and how do you push your team to work harder? And our team is senior enough and also has enough ownership where they feel like FOMO is theirs.

• 18:17Harry Stebbings?

  So if you basically give five to seven, two to three percent each, then they're so bought in that you get kind of extended founder team?

• 18:24Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 18:25Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, get you totally. So we haven't been paid for eight months. Cool. Sorry, please.

• 18:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it wasn't necessarily just the pay. I think that was fine. But we saw Robin Hood and Coinbase, and those are both very volatile businesses. Like, you've seen their stock price movement. It's because financial markets are volatile, right? You have like the short and long-term debt cycle. And we were taking a big risk in starting a company. And we were starting to feel like we found product-market fit. But why are we going to take the risk of a sudden market turn just wiping us out? And we were five to 10 years focused. So at first, we were like, let's not take any venture capital. We'll do this angel round. We'll just build and find product-market fit. And then when Benchmark kind of came around, we were more open to the idea to take money to protect the downside.

• 19:10Harry Stebbings?

  How did they come around? Like, they slide into your DMs?

• 19:13Speaker 00

  So no, for the Series B, that was all inbound. But the Series A, we actually did run a process because we were like, we should have raised money here. And the Benchmark intro came from Aaron. So going back to the most helpful angel. One thing that we discussed earlier that is kind of funny is Say and I didn't really know the venture game. And we're just builders. And we didn't really know who Benchmark was. I had heard some stuff about how they invested in Uber, but I didn't understand kind of like the tiers of VCs or anything like that. So when we met with Chathin, it was just a very natural conversation. And out of all the conversations we had, he got it instantly. Like, he had this deep intuition about what we were building. We had very high conviction on what we were building.

• 19:54Speaker 00

  So to find someone else who has the same vision and conviction off the bat as us, who doesn't historically do deals in our industry, it was, yeah, just an amazing conversation.

• 20:04Harry Stebbings?

  How is the partnership meeting?

• 20:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, the story is, we met with Chathin on Friday. We ended up talking with the whole partnership that following Monday. A funny story from that is, we were talking with the entire partnership and we were going through the pitch deck. And I remember Peter Fenton was actually on his phone most of it. And I was like, kind of bummed out because I was like, damn, he's not interested. He's focusing on other things. He's doing emails. And I remember as soon as we finished the pitch, the first thing he said to us, he goes, guys, I love the app. I've been on it the entire time. And that was kind of this like deep breath moment where we're like, okay, he sees the vision like we do. They love it and it just really felt like a natural fit.

• 20:41Harry Stebbings?

  Did Benchmark offer the highest price?

• 20:43Speaker 00

  I think it was close, but not exactly the highest.

• 20:46Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think VCs can king make? And what I mean by that is when you have a benchmark behind you, do you see a needle moving trajectory change?

• 20:54Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, I definitely think Benchmark being on our side helped us in that sense. But that's not the reason we did it, mostly because we were naive to that, right? Which is kind of a funny set of circumstances. But yeah, definitely, I think that there are some venture funds that their strategy is just to follow on companies like Benchmark, et cetera. And we had a lot of inbound and the partners we ended up working with were not those partners. I think there were like very intrinsic reasons why we worked with the partners we did for our Series B. But yeah, I think a lot of people just kind of follow investment. And this is a little bit of a separate topic, but one thing that I discovered was if you're trying to raise another round, wait to announce your last round.

• 21:36Speaker 00

  Because as soon as you announce a round, you get tons of inbound from other investors. And it takes up time to kind of tell them, no, we're not raising right now. So in the future, that's kind of a note to self that if you really want to raise capital in the near future, you can just wait to announce your round until you're ready.

• 21:52Harry Stebbings?

  I completely agree. I also think like it's really important for founders to know that just because a VC wants to meet you, it doesn't mean they want to do your round. Like VC's job is to meet companies. And I always say this to our companies, but don't get distracted to a point. Like focus on what you need to do because a VC's job is to meet with people. Like never forget that. Okay, so we have them leading the round. Do you think that founders should take a discount for tier one investors?

• 22:17Speaker 00

  This is the person you're gonna call every week for every decision you make. You have to like them and they have to be someone that you trust. If you trust them more than the other person, like I don't think the decision should be pick the highest tier VC. I think it's pick the person that you trust will help you scale your business the best. And it's not gonna be someone who's giving you product advice. Like the founders have to build a company, but someone who might know how to build a company because you don't have experience doing that. Or someone that just trusts you and your intuition. So.

• 22:45Harry Stebbings?

  It's one of my biggest concerns, actually, is always when founders say, oh, I'd love the help on either product. I'm like, bah bah, or hiring engineers. I'm saying, in all honesty, if you're not the one hiring engineers, we got a problem.

• 23:00Speaker 00

  That's the founder and CEO's main job. It's like sales, selling to future employees, selling your product and vision.

• 23:08Harry Stebbings?

  I can help you get some employees, but like hiring core Eng. Sure, I'll jump on final calls, but I shouldn't be doing pipeline for you there.

• 23:17Speaker 00

  The best people you're gonna hire are not gonna come from a recruiter and they're not gonna come from like a one-time intro. It's people that you spend months building a relationship with. Those have been all our best hires.

• 23:28Harry Stebbings?

  So we raised this round from benchmark, right? And suddenly we have like 20 million bucks or so in the bank. It changes when you're scaling from zero to one to one to 10. In that scale phase that pre this latest round, which we'll get to, but in that one to 10, what are your biggest lessons and reflections on that?

• 23:45Speaker 00

  Hiring too fast is something we're very, very vigilant of. Some of the biggest mistakes I've seen in other people scaling from one to 10 is they start to acquire businesses. And when you acquire businesses, you're not interviewing all the people that you're bringing over. So you end up just adding tons of bloat all of a sudden to your business. And I think that could be a huge issue. So.

• 24:05Harry Stebbings?

  It's so funny. I think we're in like the biggest paradox moment ever where like we're replacing everyone with tokens. We don't need engineers anymore, replacing everyone with tokens. And then you speak to every single founder and you ask, what's your biggest problem? And they're like, oh, hiring.

• 24:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:18Harry Stebbings?

  I'm like, which one is it?

• 24:20Speaker 00

  Well, I think how you reconcile it is the best people are just so much more valuable now. Because it's like you could use ChatGPT to make art, but you need to have like the creative direction behind it. Your software engineers are your architects and they're doing amazing things. But now they can use AI to do like the lower level things maybe a B tier or a lower level engineer would do.

• 24:39Harry Stebbings?

  So do we just have dramatically smaller teams?

• 24:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think so. And which is why it's okay to give more equity early. That's that's kind of how we saw things and.

• 24:47Harry Stebbings?

  How do we think about structuring the teams of the future then?

• 24:51Speaker 00

  So currently FOMO is extremely horizontal. We don't have meetings, one on ones. We don't really have any hierarchy. Everyone is kind of self-reporting. And I think as we scale to a certain number, that will have to change.

• 25:05Harry Stebbings?

  What number are you at today?

• 25:07Speaker 00

  Seventeen.

• 25:08Harry Stebbings?

  What will you be in a year's time?

• 25:10Speaker 00

  Hopefully below twenty five.

• 25:12Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, we are really not scaling pad count.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  Listen, maybe maybe things change, but currently we really don't see a need. We did have a bottleneck on our engineering side. We just hired two to three incredible engineers.

• 25:24Harry Stebbings?

  Uber and Microsoft have both put question marks around the productivity gains that come from AI tooling in engineering, saying they are questioning it. Do you think that's moronic and you unwaveringly see it? Or do you actually say, yeah, we get a load more code, but we're not faster?

• 25:42Speaker 00

  I think it's definitely faster. It's not just a lot more code. It's a lot faster to thoroughly review even than write. For example, Tina, she's a staff level front engineer of ours. She built our feed. She is building sliders for our new product. There's like all these like small things on the front end that probably would take a while to implement and learn. You have to go watch YouTube videos or or go search to find libraries. And she's experienced with a lot of this, but some of like the small components are new. But if you could ask AI to do it, they'll kind of give you an overview of how to build this thing. They'll even write the code for you. And then Tina will go back through and even restructure and rewrite most of the code. But having the framework of understanding how to write it, I think just speeds up the learning process significantly, even for the best engineers.

• 26:27Speaker 00

  The product velocity, like I told you that we just dropped everything to ship this new product we're shipping next week. We built this product in three weeks and this product is basically what entire other apps, their entire product is. We built our web app in one month.

• 26:40Harry Stebbings?

  So funny, Paul Graham said last night, the new question that he asked all YC badge members is, how do we like AI protectify your product? How do we put in non-AI features that build defensibility? And I think the social graph for you is unwaveringly one of those.

• 26:57Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 26:58Harry Stebbings?

  Which I think is really interesting. When we go back to the enabling powers of AI that come from, you know, some of the tooling that we've mentioned there, what are the team using today? Is this all Claude code? Is this cursor? Is this codex? I'm just fascinated by distribution of tooling.

• 27:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we have an internal AI policy to make sure that we're only using enterprise account, that there's not sensitive things being uploaded, et cetera. I think that's really important. And then within those guidelines, most of our engineers are using Claude code and codex.

• 27:25Harry Stebbings?

  Has that changed over time?

• 27:26Speaker 00

  I don't think so for us. I think we have seen some frictions, like these models degrade and then the Claude code credits got really expensive recently, so there's definitely some frictions there.

• 27:37Harry Stebbings?

  How price sensitive are you?

• 27:38Speaker 00

  Not at all. We don't have enough engineers that it's really, really hurting our bottom line yet. Once it starts to do, maybe we'll have some kind of quota there, but no.

• 27:46Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think there is a time when it will?

• 27:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think depending on how big we get and how much we use it maybe, currently the trade off is, it just makes no sense to limit it.

• 27:55Harry Stebbings?

  For me, the core question on AI bluntly is an industry and it is determined by one question, which is like, what percent of developer salaries will we see spent on tokens? Right now, you know, if you look at Mark Benioff, he said they spend 300 million on Anthropic. That's about 3.8% of developer salaries spent on tokens. If it stays there, paying a trillion dollars for OpenAI and Anthropic is grossly overvalued. If it goes to 20%, which is what many think is 20% of dev salaries goes to tokens, they're five trillion dollar companies. Can you feasibly see yourself spending 20% of dev salaries on tokens?

• 28:29Speaker 00

  Definitely. I mean, it depends on the price of the tokens. I, I hope that there's a race to the bottom and these major models are kind of commoditized and they get cheaper and there's not like price collusion. Yeah, so hopefully they get cheaper with time. Energy gets cheaper, compute gets cheaper, and then these things get cheaper. But at the current state, absolutely. I think 20% is definitely within reason.

• 28:51Harry Stebbings?

  Going back to what we said there about like, hey, you just have like the really great people. In terms of like design to edge ratios, does that change in this new world?

• 29:01Speaker 00

  Right now, we only have one designer. But yeah, I do think that design becomes more and more important, especially for like some of these bigger businesses that do have a lot more mid-level engineers and doing tasks that AI can kind of take over pretty easily.

• 29:13Harry Stebbings?

  If design becomes more and more important, do we double down on Figma? And that is the stage where art and creativity is fundamentally performed. Or to your point earlier, do we move to a world of speed and iterations? Where we just prototype it and we use other tooling, Rapid and Lovable and you name it, to get fast product out the door?

• 29:33Speaker 00

  I think it's somewhere in between, but mostly the latter, actually. Figma has a huge advantage here because humans want some control. So for example, on FOMO, we could just be an LLM, you execute trades, et cetera. Maybe in the future, we have an interface that allows you to do that. But I still want to go to Harry's profile, see in this beautiful view everywhere you've traded and be able to track that through a graphical user interface. Someone on Figma will be like, I want this design. It generates you the vector file and then you could still manipulate it and do whatever you want. And I think that's really important to have the hybrid because humans still want to feel like they're in control. So with Lovable, it's much harder because they haven't built the human-centric software. I think it's much easier to add the LLM on top, especially as it becomes commoditized by all these major models.

• 30:18Harry Stebbings?

  Why have we not had a big social company since Snap?

• 30:22Speaker 00

  It's really hard. Consumer is so difficult. Some small mistakes could be pretty existential. Like for example, Clubhouse, that started to take off, that was doing really well. Everyone was using it during COVID and they had a very core user base that loved them. But then they started bringing on all these celebrities and it overshadowed the core user base that actually would love the product with people that don't really care about the product.

• 30:46Harry Stebbings?

  I remember when it was like Marc Andreessen just sharing wisdom on a Sunday evening.

• 30:50Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 30:51Harry Stebbings?

  And it was the most amazing behind the scenes, fascinating lesson from the back. And it was so spontaneous and cool. What do you learn from that?

• 31:00Speaker 00

  That it's very important to find native creators to your platform. So instead of going out and bringing on all these creators from other platforms, they already established that. Like Logan Paul, he got big on Vine, right? For the first time. And I think when there is a new social platform, there is a outsized strategic advantage for creators to build an audience on that platform early, because they'll be known as the creator of that platform. So I'm not trying to get LeBron James to trade on FOMO. I want these native creators.

• 31:31Harry Stebbings?

  It's so interesting to hear. It's like Charli D'Amelio, I think, you know, obviously.

• 31:35Speaker 00

  On TikTok, yeah.

• 31:36Harry Stebbings?

  On TikTok, where it's like, the lesson there is you have to make internal champions and you can't bring an Instagram star to TikTok and say like, hey, Paul, your audience. Really, really interesting.

• 31:48Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 31:49Harry Stebbings?

  BeReal was another one that I was in. Is there any lessons for you from BeReal? Because that too had the clubhouse hype cycle that didn't sustain.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  I think BeReal didn't have the feedback loop. It required people to do something every day and people don't want to have to do something every single day. And I think as soon as you lose that, you lose momentum very quickly.

• 32:10Harry Stebbings?

  Is there a way to synthetically create momentum within a user journey?

• 32:14Speaker 00

  Absolutely. So for example, one of the most important things on FOMO are the share cards. So when you, if I go to Harry's positions, I can see all of your positions and share any of your positions in these beautiful share cards on any other social media platform or your fumbles. So let's say you sold too early and then the price rockets, then I could see how much you missed out on. And what this does is it creates this feedback loop where I can fully publicly share your things on other platforms and then people want to see that in real time, so then they come to FOMO. And then you're building this growth feedback mechanism within the app that every single time, there's a top person that's having a top trade, whether it be this guy Iceman who turned, he turned 10K to $2.5 million overnight in one night on FOMO.

• 32:57Speaker 00

  There's another guy Remus, he turned, I think it was $300 to $1.5 million in a month. And then these are being publicly shared on other social media platforms and then it's driving attention to our platform.

• 33:07Harry Stebbings?

  Why aren't you also a media company? And the reason I say that is because if you were to do amazing shorts with each of it, maybe they don't want it and they want to stay anonymized. But if you were to do amazing shorts on turning $300 into a million dollars, I mean, that is the most viral crap content for TikTok.

• 33:26Speaker 00

  You have a great intuition. We're building a huge media arm of FOMO. Right now, it's external to the product. So we're doubling down on content creators. We're doing tons of partnerships with streamers. We're trying to do like a lot of the clipping content, et cetera. And we want to become one of the largest media businesses for a tech company in the world.

• 33:44Harry Stebbings?

  You mentioned Clippers there when we were talking about media. It is a new form of media. It is a dominant form of media. How have you approached that first?

• 33:53Speaker 00

  It's kind of a game you have to play because of how attention works on these social media platforms now.

• 33:58Harry Stebbings?

  How do you budget for it? How do you work with UGC? What does that actually look like?

• 34:03Speaker 00

  So we actually have this all in-house. We have these creator managers. They're fully in-house and we manage a group of 30 to 40 creators. We're constantly getting rid of the bad ones, adding new ones and doubling down on them.

• 34:14Harry Stebbings?

  What makes a bad creator?

• 34:16Speaker 00

  It's honestly a numbers game. It's just based on their impressions. So like when you're building a product, it's a lot about intuition, what your users will like. When it comes to like growth, especially on these platforms, it's just based on metrics, like how many impressions they're driving, how many conversions they're driving, et cetera. And the ones that whatever the CPM or the CAC based on the acquisition cost versus the lifetime value of the user. If that ratio isn't right, then you'll just kind of churn out that creator.

• 34:40Harry Stebbings?

  How do you determine acquisition costs? Is it on a per download basis or is it on a per funds and like deposit basis?

• 34:47Speaker 00

  It's revenue to us, right? So it's someone who has to deposit and trade. So depositing is free. If you trade and then we take the total amount that we earn on any given month, I guess, from people who trade from those channels that are directly attributed. And then how much it costs us to get those users.

• 35:02Harry Stebbings?

  Do you see commonalities in talent that works and that doesn't?

• 35:07Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And this is the most important lesson that I've learned. Early on, you create a form of content or you find a creator that has a form of content and they're working. And you're like, okay, now figure out the next thing that works. Works, that is completely wrong. What you want to do is continue to iterate on that and make it better and better and better until it works better and better and better. And then replicate and just have that type of content being replicated. This is something that we're still building out the muscle for. Users are more likely to convert if this is the type of font, if this is the color of the font, if this is the placement of the font. If it's this person talking versus this person talking and you figure out these things and you kind of just double down on what works.

• 35:44Harry Stebbings?

  Any reflections now from UGC building this Clipper content management system that other founders should know if they're thinking about it?

• 35:52Speaker 00

  So, so I guess there's two things here. One, you need to make sure that you're at the lifetime value of the user is actually worth it. But two, you don't always have to go for the lowest hanging fruit. And this is a journey that we're on now where you have someone whose lifetime value might be, let's say, $30 and you're only spending 80 cents on them. But then there's another user that you actually need to spend $3 on because they need to see it 10 times instead of two times to actually convert. You should actually start to increase your CAC, even if the LTV stays the same, to capture a larger and larger audience. As long as the CAC is lower than the LTV.

• 36:29Harry Stebbings?

  Does CAC go up or down over time?

• 36:31Speaker 00

  Up. Well, I guess there's opposing forces, right? The force that makes it go down is that you get better at the game and you iterate. But the force that makes it go up is that each incremental user, usually you get the lowest hanging fruit, right, to convert. So each incremental user is harder to convert, so they cost more to convert.

• 36:49Harry Stebbings?

  And then also it goes down because of like brand proliferation, which is like when you just become the default provider or the number one. Inherently, you just get people because you are the number one and, you know, we're an ambassador in this business at Wallex. And like they're on the side of shirts, football shirts. And so like brand marketing comes into play. Brand marketing is a very difficult one to understand.

• 37:13Speaker 00

  Brand marketing is actually one of the hardest things because you don't see the direct benefit. It's so important, but it's not like you don't really even know what the CAC is, right? And you could spend infinite amounts of money and not even see conversion and...

• 37:25Harry Stebbings?

  You try attribution by looking at kind of like hyper-local search results, by looking at conversions on a per-account basis and whether that was like in the vicinity of North London where Arsenal played at a certain time of the game, but it's really fricking hard. The thing I say actually on brand marketing is look for immortal assets. And what I mean by immortal assets is like, if you sponsor a podcast, make sure that the podcast has it in perpetuity. Like if you sponsored an episode that we did with Bill Gurley, it still gets thousands and thousands of plays per month, even though it was recorded three years ago. That's quite valuable. If it's a billboard and in two weeks it's gone, it's not that valuable.

• 38:03Speaker 00

  What are some other examples?

• 38:05Harry Stebbings?

  A football shirt. There are kids all around the world wearing Man U shirts from 10 years ago with a Vodafone logo on it. That's pretty valuable to have people still wearing your massive logo in the thousands and thousands from 10 years ago. Do you see what I mean? And there's a lot of assets like that which are immortal versus very transient. Every single big founder I've had, Nick at Revolut included, said the single biggest mistake he made around marketing was he did not appreciate brand marketing enough early enough.

• 38:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, at a certain point, building a product transfers from like a game of intuition to a numbers game. Because you just have so many users that, like one of the early stories from Robinhood I love is that the deposit amounts from people with iOS were twice the ones from people with Android. And their assumption was just, oh, like people with iPhones just have more money. So they're depositing more money. And what they realized through data is actually there was something on the loading screen where it took like twice as long to load for Android. So people were just churning off and not using it. And as soon as they fixed that, then the prices converged. So I think there's a lot of unintuitive things that data can explain. And at a certain point, when it becomes a numbers game, it really is data-driven. And that's, we haven't gotten there yet, but that's something we're aware of.

• 39:20Harry Stebbings?

  As we move forward, a very exciting announcement on Index and USV doing the Series B, two of the best ambassadors in the game. I have to ask, how did that come about?

• 39:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we weren't in a position where we necessarily need to raise capital and we were pretty opportunistic about it. I think after the A, we got some inbound and we took some time. We didn't really talk to investors. We were just building products. And we were talking with USV for actually a few months. We really like Fred. We spent a lot of time with Fred. He's incredible. Talk about VCs not being focused on the product, but Fred actually has a really good product intuition. I think it's very rare for VC and just the conversations with him and.

• 39:57Harry Stebbings?

  Well, this is like the combination of two of his biggest passions in decentralized networks and their network effects.

• 40:03Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 40:04Harry Stebbings?

  This is like right in the mesh.

• 40:05Speaker 00

  So I think it was actually the one of the other times besides the chafing conversation where there was this aha moment. But we didn't get to speak with Fred during the series A.

• 40:14Harry Stebbings?

  Why not?

• 40:15Speaker 00

  I don't exactly know. I think Fred was traveling and the times just didn't match up, but it worked out now, right?

• 40:22Harry Stebbings?

  No, this is what I fucking hate about my job though, which is like a holiday like that. I'm not saying it was Fred, but like a holiday in general can lead to like hundreds of millions of dollars lost.

• 40:30Speaker 00

  It's all opportunity cost.

• 40:32Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah.

• 40:32Speaker 00

  It's all opportunity cost.

• 40:33Harry Stebbings?

  But like, okay, and so you meet him for this round.

• 40:38Speaker 00

  So he comes, he comes to the office. We're building a relationship with him. He was actually super helpful on a few things, even when he wasn't an investor and we just really appreciate that. And then we got inbound from some other investors and I remember the first time we talked with Index Ventures. They were just amazing partners. I think Benchmark doesn't really have as many resources. Like these multi-stage funds have so many resources for founders. The series A announcement, we did all the PR in-house. Like we didn't have anyone, any help with anything. And having know the history of Index being very involved in Robinhood and USV being very involved in Coinbase. And then even aside from the fact, just Julian and Jan being such amazing partners and same with Fred at USV. We were opportunistic and thought it was time to do the round.

• 41:21Speaker 00

  It was really great timing for us. I think the capital is going to be high leverage for us to.

• 41:26Harry Stebbings?

  How big's the round?

• 41:27Speaker 00

  It's, we're raising 75 million.

• 41:29Harry Stebbings?

  75 million. How much did Index do?

• 41:31Speaker 00

  Index did 55.

• 41:33Harry Stebbings?

  55 and then USV did?

• 41:34Speaker 00

  15.

• 41:35Harry Stebbings?

  15. And the price?

• 41:36Speaker 00

  The price is 550 million.

• 41:39Harry Stebbings?

  Okay.

• 41:39Speaker 00

  Post-money.

• 41:40Harry Stebbings?

  Did you come? To them with like, this is the round size and this is the price. Did you kind of come to it together?

• 41:44Speaker 00

  There was an early conversation far before the term sheet where we discussed what price range would make sense for us. I think we weren't looking to do a round. So they were like, what price would be interesting to you? And we set a number and I think that kind of helped anchor the conversation. And yeah, when they were open ears to that, I think that, yeah, that anchored the conversation away where we had a great conversation from there.

• 42:05Harry Stebbings?

  In rounds like this, often founders take secondaries. Did you take secondaries?

• 42:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think I've watched a podcast actually with, who was it? It was Evan Spiegel. He was on the Dyrus CEO. And one thing he said is that like, our goal is to build FOMO for the next decade. And he mentions that him taking some secondaries early on was really important for him saying no to Meta, right? When they came to acquire him. So I think founder secondary is a good idea as long as it's not extravagant. We took a little bit off the table, but it was, it was very little amount, nothing that would really change our lifestyle in any way.

• 42:40Harry Stebbings?

  When you have 75, 80 million bucks in the bank following around like this, what can you do now that you couldn't do before?

• 42:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. So there are a few things. One, it obviously kind of helps us even more in the former point about market cycles. Our team is scaling. I mean, we're making money. We have much more money in the bank than we ever raised.

• 42:59Harry Stebbings?

  Is that difficult? Actually, Brian at Coinbase has said before the chat, I think he said it on the show with me, which is like the challenge of his business is just like volatility and how it impacts culture and morale. In some cases where it's like, it's just hard when it's a fucking depressed crypto period.

• 43:13Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 43:13Harry Stebbings?

  And you're like.

• 43:14Speaker 00

  Exactly. And that's why, I mean, that's why giving away so much ownership is important, but also having this capital really keeps motivation high during those periods. Cause we know no matter what we can build through it. And it's not like we're scraping by, right? We're like building in a way where we're really being able to take the risk that we need to, because we have the capital to back them. Our plan is to kind of verticalize all of our infrastructure and own as much of it as we can in-house. Cause it just makes the product experience that much better for our users.

• 43:40Harry Stebbings?

  How do you determine what you buy versus build?

• 43:42Speaker 00

  It's a really good question. Anything that has to do with the core product, meaning the things the users face, you kind of have to build yourself. For example, some of our competitors, they just acquired trading terminals and then built that into their product. But FOMO web is like a whole different experience. You have the same social graph. You could place a trade there under one identity, open it on your phone, and it's this social trading experience on a web that no one has ever done before. So that's something that was like very obvious that we just have to build this. But then something like data infrastructure, maybe someone who's already set up bare metal servers, so we don't have to pay so much money to AWS or Google Cloud, or someone who does indexing for us, or these things that are behind the scenes that would take

• 44:25Speaker 00

  so long for us to build up the expertise to. That's something that obviously makes sense to kind of acquire to bring in-house.

• 44:31Harry Stebbings?

  America likes to shit on Europe, but when we look at the numbers, right now, Europe is kind of shitting on America when it comes to fintech. It's our fintech provider, Revolut, which has stolen the show. And on the next round, we'll be considerably more valuable than Robinhood. Why has no one in the US built something that Europe has?

• 44:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's true. I mean, listen, because every country has different brokerage laws, Europe is a lot larger in terms of, like, there's so many countries in Europe. And I think Revolut has been able to kind of saturate all of Europe at once, and has been able to grow globally a lot faster than Robinhood. Robinhood has done a great job. I think they have a little over 20 million funded accounts in the United States. And we were discussing before how they've horizontally grown to other product categories. Their biggest move with on-chain tokenized equities is to be able to finally distribute these things globally. And I think it's really important. Look at Facebook, look at WhatsApp, like, all of these business, social businesses that really scaled are global from day one. And I think that's really, really important. So I don't know if it necessarily answers

• 45:34Speaker 00

  your question of Europe versus US, but I think the reason is your ability to saturate a larger group of people.

• 45:41Harry Stebbings?

  Are you a social company, or are you a financial company?

• 45:44Speaker 00

  We're trading at first. I think that's really important. What the social features do is they, at least right now in its current form, is they allow you to become a better trader by having transparency to what the best people are doing. So you could instantly discover, you could instantly get notified, you could follow people. I do think over time, you want to create momentum for people to use the app, maybe even if they're not trading. You don't want to obfuscate what the app is good at. We have to always be the best trading app in the world because the top traders won't use us otherwise. However, over time, if you build these other social products, maybe the people who aren't necessarily trading every day can interact on the platform more. So I'd say we're much heavier on the trading side today, but heading in the direction of becoming more social.

• 46:29Harry Stebbings?

  Dude, I want to do a quick fire round with you. I could talk to you all day, but I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. That's okay.

• 46:34Speaker 00

  Okay, let's do it.

• 46:35Harry Stebbings?

  So what have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?

• 46:39Speaker 00

  How important social is on FOMO? I think we were doubling down on the trading product and assumed that people will come to trade and then the social graph will grow from there. But you need to be very intentional about the social graph. And I think that's something that is very momentum based. And as soon as you start losing momentum there, people stop using the app and then the whole thing could kind of unravel.

• 46:57Harry Stebbings?

  Revolut versus Robinhood?

• 46:58Speaker 00

  I'm a Robinhood user because I'm in the US, so I'm going to say Robinhood. But I do think Revolut is very well positioned. Maybe Revolut.

• 47:06Harry Stebbings?

  Biggest advice to someone studying computer science at university today?

• 47:10Speaker 00

  Use less AI.

• 47:12Harry Stebbings?

  Use less AI?

• 47:12Speaker 00

  I think use less AI because you're going to have AI at your disposal. And all of the best engineers today had to learn not using AI to become really, really good. And I think that when you're in practice in your job, you're going to use AI. But I think this is a controversial take. I try to use AI for as little of my writing as possible because I think if I use AI for all my writing, I'm not going to be able to write anymore and I'm not going to be able to remember what is good writing. I'm pretty scared of that, to be honest.

• 47:39Harry Stebbings?

  I agree with you, especially on social posts. I completely agree with you. Some of my team were using ChatGPT for social posts and I was just like, it's shit. And I can tell. There's no humor, there's no personality, there's no texture to it. But I'm like, with engineers and with coding? Fuck, if I'm advising CS students, use it as much as fricking possible because you're going to...

• 47:59Speaker 00

  I'm not engineer, so don't take my advice on that one.

• 48:02Harry Stebbings?

  Tell me. That's very funny. What investor do you not have that you would most like to have?

• 48:09Speaker 00

  Ribbit Capital.

• 48:09Harry Stebbings?

  Have you pitched him?

• 48:10Speaker 00

  We spoke with them, yeah. I really like Mickey and the team. They're great.

• 48:14Harry Stebbings?

  Sponsor any sports team with FOMO. What sports team do you want to?

• 48:18Speaker 00

  The New York Knicks. Not even a question.

• 48:20Harry Stebbings?

  You can give one piece of advice to yourself starting FOMO again. What would you tell yourself if you knew everything you know now?

• 48:27Speaker 00

  Have the hard conversations sooner. I think the hardest thing about being a CEO is having hard conversations, whether that's with employees, whether that's with early investors, whether that's with friends who are helping you, all these things. And I think that people try to avoid confrontation, avoid having the hard conversations because it sucks. But have those sooner. Just be completely transparent and honest and come from the best place you can and they'll understand.

• 48:54Harry Stebbings?

  Often when you have a hard conversation, it's not as bad as you think. You feel a sense of accomplishment. And then you actually take on more hard things because you're like, it wasn't as hard as I thought. It leads to like a domino effect of taking on hard things. Do you know what I mean?

• 49:07Speaker 00

  That's exactly what I've realized too.

• 49:09Harry Stebbings?

  996, how do you feel about this grind, slop, hustle culture?

• 49:14Speaker 00

  I think at FOMO, there's no, we don't put numbers to it. There's no 996. I think if you give, and this might be unique to our business, but if you give a lot of ownership to a team that takes a lot of ownership, like these people are fully autonomous and they really care about what they're doing, they all feel like they're owners of FOMO. They feel like they're owners of the business. So I trust that they're going to do their best work. And there are times where people don't have to work on the weekends. And then there are times where we're building a new product like this week and we're working all weekend, but people love to do it. I think you can't beat a team that's having fun and we're just loving what we're doing. So I'm always on in the sense that if something comes up, I have to work on it, but we love what we do.

• 49:54Harry Stebbings?

  What's your greatest strength, but also your greatest weakness?

• 49:58Speaker 00

  I have loosely held strong beliefs in the sense that sometimes the downside of it is sometimes you just need to make the decision. But I always listen. Like whenever there's a decision at FOMO, we're asking every single person, especially the core team, what they think about it and we're talking it out and coming to the right conclusion. I think it's definitely more of a strength than a weakness because it's a forcing function for us to strong man the other side always. Cause we're always like, what if we did it this way? Or I have the opinion that's inverse to yours. Let's talk it out. But I do think that sometimes you need to just make a decision and we get hung up on things.

• 50:33Harry Stebbings?

  Has Trump made business better in the US?

• 50:36Speaker 00

  I think there's been a lot of positive movement on regulatory clarity. But at the same time, I think that sentiment for crypto has also gone down significantly from the general public.

• 50:46Harry Stebbings?

  What has driven that crypto sentiment downgrade?

• 50:49Speaker 00

  The goal for FOMO, as cheesy as it sounds, is to be a beacon of light. It seems like everyone else in crypto has always been so short-term focused. And I think in any early industry you go to, the industry at first is kind of like riddled with like the short-term gains and the people who are like taking advantage for themselves. And then someone's got to like come with the broom and sweep up the mess. And our goal is to like create a product that's for our traders and something that they'll love and something that's with them for the long term. And I think what's given such a bad rep is there's no consumer protection here on a lot of these products. So people will buy it. It's so hard to do in the first place, but then they get over the leap of actually doing the thing and then they just lose all their money. And it's not because they didn't know that this coin might go down.

• 51:33Speaker 00

  It's because it was a scam coin and there was actually a real one they were trying to buy, but they bought the wrong one. There was no warning signal. And I think people just got burned so many times in a row that it led to all this negative dogma.

• 51:44Harry Stebbings?

  That's called a triple-layered anthropic SPV.

• 51:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, there you go. And this, Harry, is why perps are so important because with the perp, you don't actually need to trade the underlying thing. So like we could have a perp on whether Anthropic will go up or down, but we don't need to actually transfer the underlying anthropic asset. So if Anthropic goes, all secondary asset transfers are null. It doesn't matter because we're just betting on the price of the thing. You're never actually exchanging the underlying thing with me.

• 52:11Harry Stebbings?

  Does that remove SPVs?

• 52:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, you don't need an SPV for a perp. Yeah.

• 52:16Harry Stebbings?

  How do you expect and the, because you're going to now have Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX.

• 52:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:23Harry Stebbings?

  Where you'll have perps on the platform, I guess.

• 52:25Speaker 00

  It's going to be really interesting to see what happens. I think there's only so much demand in the retail markets. I think SpaceX being first to market, it's going to be very interesting. I think like 30% is devoted to retail now. Will there still be a ton of retail interest if people get burned on SpaceX in Anthropic or OpenAI? I think if SpaceX performs well, the OpenAI Anthropic IPOs will also go very well. I think if SpaceX performs poorly, then those are going to have a hard time.

• 52:51Harry Stebbings?

  Final one for you. What's the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?

• 52:55Speaker 00

  I mean, the true answer is like, my parents giving me everything I have. That's like, I feel like maybe everyone kind of has a similar thing there, but yeah, I do really owe them everything. I think that there were parts of my upbringing that were tough, but like my dad, for example, didn't have much savings and like worked his way to help pay for my college. And like, that was like one of the most incredible things anyone's ever done for me. And my goal is to just continue to give back to them. But yeah, I think like my, probably my parents giving me everything I've had today, so.

• 53:24Harry Stebbings?

  My mother is absolutely the same. My mother taught me it's not what you say, it's not what you do, it's how you make people feel that matters.

• 53:30Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 53:31Harry Stebbings?

  I always say like, call your parents up and tell them how much you love them because there's a time when they won't be there and you'll regret not making that call.

• 53:37Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 53:38Harry Stebbings?

  Dude, this has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for letting me be a part of the journey. Thank you so much for coming. It is so good to do in person and you've been fantastic.

• 53:47Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me on, it was a pleasure.

• 53:50Harry Stebbings?

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