How to Build a Successful Blockchain Start Up | Enya.Ai Founder
Release Date: 01/12/2023
The Secret To Achieving Product-Market Fit - With Lama.ai Founder
Billion Dollar Tech
“Something that doesn't slice the pie differently or steal someone else's breakfast, but something with a potential to grow the overall pie,” is Omri Yacubovich’s description of Lama.ai, of which he is co-founder and CEO. Lama.ai provides business lending to banks, credit unions, SaaS companies, fintech and B2B brands. Through his research, Omri found that 80 percent of businesses that applied for a loan through their primary banking relationship were declined. Alternative methods included exorbitant APRs that could reach as much as 400%, as well as a very high cost of acquisition and...
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How to Develop Emotional Intelligence - Public Company CEO Shares
Billion Dollar Tech
“You probably can’t overemphasize the importance of your co-founder relationship,” says Noah Abelson-Gertler, founder coach and former public company CEO, explaining that 50% of startups and scaleups that fail do so due to co-founder relationships. Co-founders have an intimacy that is like marriage without the romance—you experience highs and lows, make major decisions together, you’re dependent on each other, and can often spend more time together than you do with your actual spouse. That is why it is so important to be as thorough as possible in getting to know your potential...
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Top Hostage Negotiator Teaches You How to Be a World-Class Communicator
Billion Dollar Tech
“We're emotional beings that think, not thinking beings that feel,” says Scott Walker, leadership coach, former Scotland Yard detective and one of the world’s most experienced kidnap for ransom negotiators. Scott joins the podcast today to share what engaging in covert counterterrorism and kidnapping operations has taught him about communicating in life and in the corporate world. The process, Scott explains, is a matter of taking your emotions—as well as your ego—out of the equation. At the same time, you must be very aware of the other person’s emotions, what they want and need...
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A Revolution in Blue Collar Jobs - How Sh1ft Creates 10X More Opportunity!
Billion Dollar Tech
“We started to feel like there was something bigger here, that this could be transformational,” says Jason Radisson, co-founder and CEO of Sh1ft, which brings push button technology to blue collar and middle class work, and is transforming HR in the B2B spaces by implementing gig economy-style automation and efficiency. Sh1ft promises to eliminate 80 to 90 percent of a traditional HR employee’s role by resolving issues such as schedule inefficiencies and time fraud. Sh1ft is currently making great strides in the professions of engineering, construction, and nursing. Born to a...
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From $0 - $3B | Peek Inside Crypto Unicorn Anchorage Digital
Billion Dollar Tech
“What if we could do it better than anyone else in the ecosystem?” Nathan McCauley asked himself while co-founding Anchorage Digital, a unicorn assets platform that provides instantly settled key storage and custody—holding investments on behalf of investors—for digital assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Before starting this venture, he worked at financial services platform Square, where he performed what he called “financial security” for four years with his future Anchorage Digital co-founder Diogo Monica. There the two helped to design the digital card reader with Jack Dorsey....
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Magic Words: Master the art of persuasion | NYT Best Seller Jonah Berger
Billion Dollar Tech
New York Times bestselling author Jonah Berger’s cutting-edge research reveals how six types of words can increase your impact in every area of life: from persuading others and building stronger relationships, to boosting creativity and motivating teams. He labels them SPEACC (“speak,” phonetically), and they are crucial to understanding if one wants to be a more effective and charismatic speaker. Meanwhile, Jonah explains–using words like seems, think, should–-lessens the effectiveness of speech overall. More specifically, though, there are certain hedging phrases which yield more...
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The Entrepreneur Success Story of Tony Jamous [Secrets of Building Two Unicorn Companies]
Billion Dollar Tech
“What drives me is the mission,” says Tony Jamous, founder and CEO of Oyster HR, a business that, as Brendan puts it, is “stewarding the remote work revolution.” Oyster, Tony’s second unicorn company, works to allow businesses to hire anyone from around the world without restriction. With their needs fulfilled, companies can then focus on their growth. This starts with everyone establishing their mission, collectively and individually. As Brendan points out, being mission driven ensures that your business is solving an actual problem. Yet, so many workers don’t know why they are...
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$1.6B CEO Reveals Secret to Identifying Undiscovered Niches
Billion Dollar Tech
“I had one job, which was to get the data right. Why was that so freaking hard?” asked Barr Moses, co-founder and CEO of Monte Carlo, the world’s first data observability platform, discussing what motivated her to create the product. Having worked with data for 15 years, she realized so many people across the industry couldn’t seem to get it right, nor did they have a systematic, scalable way to make sure data was accurate. In the world we’re living in, where so many people have access to data, just a few minutes of inaccurate data can lead to poor customer experience and millions of...
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Peel Back the Curtain! How To Build a $3.7B Technology Brand
Billion Dollar Tech
“Harness builds software for teams that build software,” says Scott Sanchez, CMO of Harness. Scott and his team recognize that software developers at larger companies spend an increasing amount of time doing everything but coding. Harness provides a series of end to end products which ensure that that coding is high quality and delivered quickly and securely. He explains the importance of positioning and individuating in an industry in which an increasing number of people are selling a similar product. A large part of setting your business apart is providing thoughtful, valuable...
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From $0 to $3B Valuation - Marcelo Lebre, Co-Founder Remote.com
Billion Dollar Tech
“We knew we wanted to address the pain of remote work,” said Marcelo Lebre of the goal he and Job van der Voort shared when the two founded Remote.com in 2019. As it turns out, it was a worldwide pain. There were countless freelancers who were waiting to be matched with opportunities and vice versa. Remote.com scaled the problem on a global level so that the right talent could be pooled from anywhere. Currently, the majority of the site’s business is inbound and via word of mouth. As Marcelo points out, this is due to the power of the brand, but also of the pain itself. A major feature...
info_outline“You have to be really agile and flexible, but also really stubborn about the problems you’re going to solve,” says Alan Chiu, co-founder of Boba and its contributing company Enya.ai, about the dual attributes successful founders must possess. Blockchain technology, similarly, is a balance of traits. On one hand, it offers a number of opportunities. The open source format and permissionless entree allow people who might otherwise be hindered by their geographical location, race, gender access to a business’s information. This transparency has the potential to decentralize power, and form a system of checks and balances that keep everyone more honest. However, this type of demand on the system leads to slower performance and higher costs. This is where Boba comes in, as it’s the only blockchain platform that takes advantage of blockchain’s features while utilizing the sustainability of Web 2 infrastructure.
Alan discusses how the blockchain model makes money, how to identify the right time to execute on a plan. He talks about the most difficult aspect of scaling and how he approaches risk. First and foremost you must evaluate the founders when deciding to invest in companies, and that those founders must have a balance of strong convictions and openness to new ideas and methods.
Continuing the theme of balance, Alan discusses how he manages both the longterm and shortterm goals of his team. He gives his thoughts on the most common mistakes founders make when starting a company, and the most common reason they fail to scale.
Quotes:
“If these cryptocurrencies increase in value, you are starting to build a pretty interesting portfolio without being subject to biases against age, gender, ethnicity, geographical location. And that's really powerful. This is the type of opportunity that used to be reserved for Silicon Valley engineers. Now anyone in the world can have access to. (9:05-9:29 | Alan)
“The reason blockchains are always going to be much slower than a traditional web two infrastructure like AWS is because there's a cost to synchronizing all of these mills that the mega blockchain network with these centralized, the decentralized nature of blockchains is both a feature but also puts a limit on how many transactions you can do per unit time.” (13:26-13:47 | Alan)
For any disruptive technology, in the early days, it's really hard to come up with something quantifiable and justify that with data, because everything is so new. (17:48-18:01 | Alan)
“One of the most difficult aspects of being a founder is, on one hand, you’ve got to have strong conviction around your vision because there's going to be a lot of headwind and a lot of uncertainty, if you don't have strong conviction, it's really hard to sustain. On the other hand, you've got to be really open to advice and feedback, especially feedback from customers, whether they want what you're building or not. You're learning and adapting and changing to your customer feedback, and also to a changing competitive landscape and market dynamics and new technologies that continue to evolve.” (20:47-21:20 | Alan)
“Sometimes the best path forward is actually not commercializing the innovation itself. But finding some application for the innovation in a product or service. And commercializing that instead, and using the core innovation as a creative driver of a competitive advantage.” (52:01-53:01 | Alan)
Links:
Connect with Brendan Dell:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendandell/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendanDell
Instagram: @thebrendandell
TikTok: @brendandell39
Buy a copy of Brendan’s Book, The 12 Immutable Laws of High-Impact Messaging: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780578210926
Connect with Alan Chiu:
Twitter:@alanchiu
https://www.enya.ai/
Check out Alan Chiu’s recommended books:
Connect: Exceptional Relationships with Family, Friends and Colleagues
https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780593237090
The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander
https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780142001103
The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey Through Anguish to Freedom by Henri J.M. Nouwen
https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780385483483
The Brains and Brawn Company: How Leading Organizations Blend the Best of Digital and Physical by Robert Siegel
https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781264257775
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