I am exploring startup ideas in crypto at South Park Commons. I live in San Francisco, CA.

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I’m looking for a cofounder! Learn more about me and what I’m looking for.

Experience

Previously, I was a product manager at Uniswap, the largest decentralized cryptocurrency exchange with $2T of volume, working on NFTs and backend. Here’s why I left.

I joined after they acquired Genie, an NFT marketplace aggregator that did $800M of trading volume, where I was head of product.

Before that, I improved Lyft’s pay and matching algorithms, saving $67M/year while increasing drivers’ earnings by 4%. At Kite, I scaled our AI code completion plugin from 1 programming language to 13+. At Microsoft, I led the Windows and Mac PowerPoint teams and grew usage of AI design features by 10x.

I studied computer science at the University of North Carolina on a full-ride merit scholarship. I won UNC’s first hackathon as a team, and 2nd place (solo) in “most web3” at Uniswap’s company hackathon. My strengths though, are in user research, design, and go-to-market.

Exploration

I’m excited to build a mainstream business that uses crypto behind the scenes. Currently fascinated with new business models, incentive design, and new technology.

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Public crypto infrastructure: Building a fee-less marketplace and/or open-source software; and doing so in a financially valuable manner, such as a positive expected value lottery

Megapot: World’s Largest Raffle

+ why I’m not working on this

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Open, fee-less marketplaces that are financially valuable

General thoughts

My belief is we can build an open source product that people want to build on top of, yet be financially valuable. This is a hyperstructure.

The world runs on open-source, yet the only business model is to sell optional SaaS alongside it. Marketplaces build closed networks so they can extract fees, so no one wants to build on top of them as a platform. What if there was something else?

My theses on where protocols are uniquely well-suited:

Where assets of value are pooled, and these pools are fragmented due to competition → Software platforms that cannot exclude anyone means everyone cooperates instead of competing
Asset types with a long-tail distribution → Software platforms with limited restrictions allow for any market to be created

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Unorganized notes

Let’s pick a few areas that are “trending” and figure out value chains:

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Long-tail

What doesn’t generate enough liquidity to deserve a dedicated marketplace?
This is where crypto has good PMF.

Could you issue high yield bonds for new projects? High yield bonds financed hostile takeovers

See an undervalued business, entrepreneur buys the business with $20 of own money, $80 of debt that the company is liable for
Could be a way to finance takeovers of NFT projects that aren’t doing well, securitized by the NFT project itself. Sort of like Twitter takeover.
Based on assumption that there are many projects that would benefit from new management and also have debt that is attractive on risk-adjusted basis

ICO → IBO?

Both susceptible to rugpulls
Bondholders have the right to get $PAT at face value in 1 year
If you raise $100 of bond from a bank, and can’t be paid back, goes back to bankruptcy proceeding

Problem is no long tail oracle

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Debt financing

Uniswap lets people launch equity, is there an equivalent to let new projects to get debt financing?

Loan refinancing

Allow someone to get better terms than what they get at a bank
Allow any bank to offer better terms
Unclear: How do you keep information private?

ForEx

Price is tied to real monetary markets and generally has low variability.
Is there an equivalent to “I’ll sell at X% above the prevailing price, buy at Y% below” that doesn’t have impermanent losses?

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ForEx value chain

Banks
Currency exchanges
Speculators/traders
Exporters and importers
Multinational corporations

Onchain betting markets

Polymarket / Kalshi → move onchain with no fees.
NVM - Polymarket is a non-custodial prediction market protocol built on Polygon. Polymarket was founded by Shayne Coplan and launched in 2020.

Hedging market risk - this is generally for sophisticated traders only

Generally you buy an options contract on the opposite side
Is there a way for a user to say “I think X will go up by Y” and we offer different strategies with different stop losses / hedges which have a cost but reduce risk?

Bundled asset loans

Allow you to put different assets as collateral (WBTC, NFTs, etc)

Why not

Securities - there’s enough legal risk here.

The SEC asserts that all tokenized securities need to be registered. Tokenized stocks that do not register their issuances will be regarded as illegal.

Commodities

there’s tokenized gold already, unsure if there’s a “why now” moment

Market evaluation

	Hyperstructures - online transactions
Market selection	Insights - Few are aware of hyperstructures as a way of making money. Interested - It’s cool. I like the idea of building public infra. Can work on this for 10 years.
Market evaluation	Advantage - worked at Uniswap. small knowledge, but also resume fits Large/growing market - people are looking to trade more, speculation is inherently human New tech - decentralized protocols to execute transactions, get best prices
Talking to people	Value chain: - Asset types: Securities, commodities, ForEx, Indexes/ETFs - Transaction types/stages: List, sale, escrow, contracts, options, margin; reducing complexity via intents, debt financing - People: Day traders, trading desks, hedge funds, institutional funds

Idea brainstorms

Idea	Market selection	Market evaluation
Loan/debt financing	Low - low interest, no insights	Low - Unlikely that initial loan happens onchain
Refinancing	Low - low interest, no insights	Low - Contracts may come onchain (eg. mortgage). Value prop is known (get a better rate) but this is not a new problem.
ForEx	Low - low interest, no insights	Low - These markets are generally as efficient as possible. Largest volume, relative stability, also trade happens this way.
Betting and prediction markets	Low - not that motivating to work on purely speculative stuff	Low - Polymarket and many other prediction market protocols do this already
Hedging risk - giving people who need to hedge a more efficient way to do so	Med - Have a thesis that any time there’s forced sellers, there is market inefficiency - Could be impactful	Med - Different from below, since this is related to specific types of assets that are generally traded
Individualized insurance - creation of insurance market	Med - Interesting - Follows thesis above	Low-Med - Don’t know any real world insurance products that are crypto - Insurance is basically a betting/prediction market, but localized. Eg. Earthquake insurance - instead of per house, state it as if 5.0+ on Richter scale, and epicenter is <50 miles from your house. Which makes it OK if your house didn’t collapse, you still get paid out. - How do we handle claims? Quite complex → Can we tie this into specific, verifiable events? - Do you need KYC? You could make a bet on it. - Timing: Prediction markets are mature, and settlement on events is figured out. - Difficult to handle pricing of insurance - High probability of arbitrage if pricing is public, and sale is irreversible
Bundled asset loans	Med - Interesting math problem	Low - Don’t see much of a need for this. Cool to do, not really much benefits.
Carbon credits	High - Isaac is very interested Low - Patrick doesn’t know anything about this	Low - Important to solve, but not the right founder market fit - Much harder than just a market problem, it’s a standards / regulation problem as well - Multiple companies and DAOs in this space
Commodity markets	Med - MEV is similar, there are relevant crypto concepts - Seems interesting	Low - Fragmented, geographic markets - Low liquidity markets because constrained, forced demand: people need downside protection

I’m exploring

1) different financial and digital assets and how users interact with them

What type of asset or transaction is missing from protocols today?

Fungible tokens - Uniswap (sell, earn yield), Dydx chain (options)
NFTs - Zora (create, list, sell)

2) evaluating peer-to-peer marketplaces, exchanges, or pooling of money, to see if there is an opportunity to build a protocol as a platform.

Best things to tokenize are things that involve some sort of consensus
Blockchains allow the transmission of different types of value over the internet that wasn’t possible before
Best markets lower interaction friction
Thesis that any time there’s forced sellers, there is market inefficiency

Separately, if we believed in a fat apps thesis - or building apps and interfaces on top of popular protocols - is there an opportunity to build a payment software platform (eg. Stripe, Visa) on top of a stablecoin like USDC, where the software is 1) open-source 2) is fee-less but has a fee switch?

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Global access to capital: Connecting non-crypto borrowers with restricted access to capital, to deep onchain liquidity, such as peer-to-peer cash advances.

CashNow: Payday lending at affordable rates

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Zero knowledge proof applications: SaaS to enable trustless and private whistleblower programs, streamline verifications of airline status matching, etc.

Proposals

Enable trustless and private whistleblower programs

Prove you’re an employee of a company or a user in an email group list without disclosing your identity. This can be done via zkemail on a welcome email that all users get, or on an email that only a select group of employees received.

Streamline verifications of airline status matching

Prove you have status in a trustless manner. Currently, users submit screenshots of their account page and customer service does labor-intensive validation. This can be automated using TLS Notary, which could prove that a user had a certain # of points on their points page.

Brainstorming around applications:

Zero-knowledge proofs, attested data, and escrowed transactions

Thoughts:

Attested data and escrowed transactions. It’s like having a magic wand to be able to privately prove something without sharing who you are, use private data from any service without API access, build trustless escrow systems, and ensure code was executed correctly among a non-trusting group.
My takeaways

People trust third parties to verify identity or assets for the vast majority of pseudonymity use cases
Anonymity is not desired by businesses and especially governments
Finance problem space has 10x more product-market-fit than identity. That said, I haven’t identified large opportunities outside of peer-to-peer payments coordination (eg. zkp2p), which have a number of players now.

I’m exploring SaaS instead, in areas with zero trust (eg. whistleblowing) or marketing/sales opportunities based on private data (eg. offering VIP benefits if you prove you’re a top customer of a competitor).

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Unorganized notes

Idea brainstorm -

Idea	Market selection	Market evaluation
Whistleblower program	Med - Interesting!	Med - Enable any company to build a whistleblower compliance program. Employees don’t have to trust that HR will leak their info or get retaliation. Uniquely ZK-enabled - Proof of concept, hacks, hacks
Giving VIP benefits to top users of competitors	Med - Interesting! - Not uniquely zk enabled	Med - Winning over users from competitors already happens (eg. TMobile), but could be cool to provide VIP onboarding as a service (product + ops) to companies - Can give you free trial if you use competitors, are a top streamer or influencer, VIP benefits (eg. if you are top gamer, get credits in new game), etc.
Bootstrapping social graph	Low - Interesting	Med - Automatically being friends on a new app if they’ve ever emailed you, etc. Export social graph without API access in a way that’s better than connecting your contacts
Private networks of likeminded individuals	Med - Interesting! - Quantification of an aspirational value for an individual	Low - Zk verify some credential, organization, verification, assets for pseudonymous discussion - Most are fine with a third party doing verification - Teamblind for work, Backchannel for founders, Benjamin for net worth, many VC/founder gossip groups - For many use cases, it’s good to know who someone is (YPO, EO Network)
Donation matching	Med - Could be impactful	Low - Zk verify you donated, and onchain funds are dispersed - Tough to take money when the subject is donations - Public wants to know that the matcher did actually donate, but this doesn’t need blockchain to solve
Airline points P2P transfer	Low	Small - Feature of zkp2p / zephyr, also small market given that most airlines/hotels don’t let you transfer, those who do charge you a lot
Concierge for crypto degens	Low - Low cost business - Not zk enabled	Low - Concierge service for crypto degens / money laundering - Crypto degens don’t want to deal with friction of offramping, the wait time, etc. - Wants to have all money in one place, not have to worry about money in different places - If you can buy stuff in crypto, will never have to offramp anything - Chrome extension. Before you pay, click a button and fill in virtual credit card, - Doesn’t use zk - Running afoul of tax laws
Provable AI doctoring detection tool	Low	Low - Not a trustless problem. - Using zkml to prove that an image or video wasn’t doctored - More a community notes product since a lot of context needed. Eg. it could be multiple videos stitched together, incorrect captioning, etc.
Rebates	Low	Low - Zk verify that you bought something, then get money back - They’re designed to be high friction, so likely not a business need
Proof of financial reserves for mortgages	Low	Low - Zk verify your financial assets. Why not just use Plaid? - Someone is already doing this at Pineapple.mortgage
Public proof for flexing	Low	Low - Only useful for specific Twitter influencers, but doubt it’s a high priority for them - Zk prove that their dashboard from Stripe (indie hacking) or trading account (trader influencers) is real - RealReturn built at ETH hackathon

Questions to ask, when I think about “Plaid for the internet”

What data do apps not want to share? eg. banks didn't want to share a user's checking account balance
What data is helpful when aggregated, or presented differently? eg. i want a portfolio tracker, or deep analytics into budgeting, etc

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User-owned platforms: Vampire attacking a web2 platform that doesn’t reward its top users, with a capital-efficient go-to-market strategy, such as Stack Overflow for web3 devs

Disrupting network platform companies

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Feed and algorithm control: Controlling the content you view, eg. Only happy content, filter out political content, prioritize launch announcements, deprioritize threads via a Farcaster (Twitter alternative) feed customizer.

More to be added.

Links:

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I’d love to hear from you. Please reach out if anything piques your interest!

Personal Life

I’m a dad who used to surf, hike, and social dance bachata. I’m shaped by my past:

I’m a world-class Go player (6 dan rating), having represented Canada in international tournaments. I also played competitive chess (1600 rating) and grinded online poker.
I performed with bachata, salsa, and hiphop dance teams.
I lived in Toronto, North Carolina, the Galapagos Islands, Beijing, and Seattle.