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Let’s work together

TLDR:

  • San Francisco, CA
  • Technical
  • Interested in crypto
  • Full-time exploring startup ideas
  • Can do design, eng, sales, GTM
  • Worked at 4 startups (2 acquired)

About me

I’m exploring startup ideas in crypto. I was most recently at Uniswap, after they acquired Genie, an NFT marketplace aggregator that did $800M of trading volume where I was head of product.

I want to build a mainstream business that uses crypto behind the scenes. I’m excited to bring together my DeFi and NFT expertise with my consumer software experience working at Lyft and Microsoft.

I enjoy coding, though my strengths are in user research, design, and go-to-market. I iterate quickly by evaluating markets, brainstorming ideas, and validating problems before writing code.

I’m looking for a cofounder who is also technical and is excited to go from 0 to 1.

My Background

Impressive accomplishments

  • Improved Lyft’s pay and matching algorithms, reducing costs by $67M/year while increasing top drivers’ earnings by 4%
  • Built a system at Kite for scaling our AI code completion plugin, growing language support from 1 to 13+.
  • Grew usage 10x of PowerPoint’s AI design features by shipping 30+ changes and running 100+ A/B tests
  • Won UNC’s first hackathon as a team, and 2nd place in “most web3” at Uniswap’s company hackathon as a solo hacker
  • World-class Go (strategy board game) player, representing Canada in international tournaments

Education

  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (on full-ride merit scholarship), BA in Computer Science, 2016

Employment

  • Uniswap, Product Manager, 2022 - 2023
  • Genie (acquired by Uniswap), Head of Product, 2022
  • Lyft, Senior Product Manager, 2020 - 2022
  • Kite (acquired by Affirm), First Product Hire, 2019 - 2020
  • Microsoft, Product Manager, 2016 - 2019

Life story

I have always worked on my own projects. I resold candy when I was 8, sold candy kebabs in middle school, ran a tutoring service in high school, and built apps in college.

I am disciplined and focused. I stopped watching TV or played video games in 2007, when I wanted to focus on academics in middle school, and haven’t gone back.

I love scrappy growth. I won election to student council by a landslide with a rick-roll-inspired candidate poster, got enough Lyft and Uber credit to take it for free for years by posting in freshman orientation Facebook groups, and sold hundreds of t-shirts in one weekend by writing in chalk around my campus.

Then, I got a front-row seat at 4 startups as we grew from pre-fundraising/PMF to Series B.

Now, I just can’t stop thinking about ideas. When I was taking the night shift for my newborn daughter, who woke up every 45min from 9pm to 5am, I chose to build prototypes rather than sleep.

More notes

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I have startup experience from 4 startups
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I have work experience doing UX design
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I have an edge in fundraising, and especially so in crypto
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I work hard and efficiently
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In my free time

Links:

Potential Areas to Explore

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

Links:

About you

I’m looking for a true thought partner who:

  • Is also technical. Ideally, more technical than me. I’m a coder and am looking for a partner to build with.
  • Lives in the SF Bay Area. I prefer in-person collaboration with the flexibility of WFH.
  • Is passionate about crypto. I’m solely exploring crypto for the next 6 months since I have founder-market fit there, and I’m excited about completely new applications, business models, and go-to-market strategies. You’re similarly excited, and know that it’ll likely be a long difficult slog during this bear market.
  • Wants to build a scalable business, rather than tinker with new tech or indie hack. You’re problem-oriented, rather than solution-oriented, so if a customer’s problems can be simply solved without using new tech, you find that ideal. You’re also willing to take the time needed to find founder-market fit and build conviction.
  • Generates lots of ideas and is methodical about evaluating them. I’d love for brainstorms on one idea to generate many more ideas as we bounce off of each others’ enthusiasm. You are then open to iterating on, or discarding, ideas based on market sizing, research, or customer feedback.
  • Has an obsessive focus: There’s a thousand things you could be doing, but only one of them is the most important, so you tune everything else out. Our product and users is all you can think about on nights and weekends.

Equity expectations

Equal split

Next steps

Would love to hear from you, even if some of the above don’t match. Contact me at:

✉️
firstinitial lastname g at gmail
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