He grew to $90M ARR, was about to exit for $1.5B—and then, it all fell apart. | Yanni Giannaros, Co-Founder of Wyre

Yanni started building in crypto back in 2013, when you could buy one Bitcoin for $20. At one point, he was playing poker games and betting 1 bitcoin each round!

He built an extension that let people use bitcoin to buy anything, anywhere on the internet. Then he pivoted to building the first on ramp for bitcoin. And finally, pivoted into Wyre, which was like Stripe for Crypto, a platform to let developers build Web3 apps.

In a couple of years he scaled it from nothing to a $90M run rate. In late 2021, he started working on an exit with Bolt. By mid 2022 the deal was signed. The company was to be sold for $1.5B.

Yanni would make hundreds of millions of dollars himself.

And then, at the absolute last minute, the world changed. Stocks fell, crypto plummeted— and the deal fell apart.

Startups are often one call, one customer or, in this case, one day away from complete success—or total failure. That’s the game you’re playing. 

And there are few stories better than the one you’re about to hear.

Why you should listen
- Why if you want to be a founder you can't avoid taking punches to the face

- How Yanni found Bitcoin just a couple of years after it was started

- Why it often takes multiple twists and pivots to find real PMF

- How acquisitions tend to happen and why they can always fall apart 

Keywords
startup, acquisition, Bitcoin, Web3, entrepreneurship, crypto, payment processing, innovation, technology, business, crypto, infrastructure, product-market fit, Web3, acquisition, startup challenges, fintech, business growth, developer support, market downturn


Timestamps
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:01:50) Buying Bitcoin in 2013
(00:04:48) Creating a Hacker House in San Francisco
(00:19:08) Creating Crypto Wallets
(00:26:41) Becoming Wyre
(00:33:56) Making the Decision to Go All In on Crypto
(00:41:18) The Acquisition that Didn't Happen
(00:47:33) Learning from All the Mistakes
(00:52:03) Some People are Builders

Chapters

• 1:50 Buying Bitcoin in 2013
• 4:48 Creating a Hacker House in San Francisco
• 19:08 Creating Crypto Wallets
• 26:41 Pivoting into Wyre
• 33:56 Making the Decision to Go All In on Crypto
• 41:18 The Acquisition that Didn't Happen
• 47:33 Learning from All the Mistakes
• 52:03 What it means to be a builder

Transcript

Pablo Srugo (00:00)

Dude, so you have one of the craziest stories. You know, startup land is all about, frankly, taking a punch to the face, but like some punches I think hurt a lot more than others. I went through like a near acquisition. So I have some sense of what you might have gone through, but yours was on like a, you know, two orders of magnitude, kind of bigger scale, right? So you started, you know, why are you running it for like 10 years? You crossed like $90 million in run rate, had a $1.5 billion acquisition that was announced and like live like ready to go like you can look it up still today and then it all fell apart because you know it got announced kind of like mid 22 and then that's when you know it was the is a broad based winter like a macro winter but obviously crypto got hit exceptionally hard- 

So I have really bad news for you. The show actually now costs money so I'm gonna need you to Wyre $10,000 to my account if you want to keep listening. I'm kidding, I just need a review. Now you thought you had the pay doesn't look so bad, right? All you have to do is take your phone out, hit a couple buttons, hit five stars and you're done. Thank you.

 Well, Yanni, welcome to the episode, man. Welcome to the show.

Yanni Giannaros (1:08)

Thank you for having me. Nice to be here. 

Pablo Srugo (1:10) 

Let's start at the beginning. Honestly, my first question, I'm just looking up here. I've got, I was looking at the- you know now Bitcoin is over a trillion dollar market cap. So I'm looking at this chart more and more, just seeing what I missed out on. And dude, when you're starting in like 2013, the market cap is like, 150 million for Bitcoin. Now it's 1.5 trillion. It was 10,000X, which is just insane. My question to you is to start in Web3 that early, what did you see that even made you want to do anything in this space? Like it was basically this weird side fringe project thing going on. So to build a startup on it, I mean, it takes a lot of foresight.

Yanni Giannaros (1:50)

Yeah, so it wasn't even Web3 back there. It was just Bitcoin. It’s literally just Bitcoin and you know in 2012 when I met my co-founder , both he and I got into Bitcoin in different ways. So I found out about Bitcoin through my last company I worked for I used to work for a large data encryption company called safe net they hire more cryptographers and than any other than the US government , than the entire world and I was doing a lot of work for them mostly on the web side. for them in marketing and web development on that sort of side. And found out about Bitcoin there. They posted something on the intranet in their Microsoft Access, intranet, portal about Bitcoin white paper. And usually no one comments on anything in there. They post some links once a month, but every once in a while you get one post. And then somebody posted the Bitcoin white paper in there, and there were 300 comments in there on this. The intranet for this, my last company. All right, this has got to be something interesting. I have to read about this. And I read about the Bitcoin white paper there. I read the first page. I don't understand this. I don't really care. This is not interesting. But on the Bitcoin white paper, there was bitcoin.org. And I went on bitcoin.org, and there was this weird Bitcoin floral of just the weirdest fringe people just talking about this currency. It was like a really interesting community. And I got like, was super big into like all my meme groups back in the day on Facebook groups. had like, we were doing like a lot on just building communities online when it was on Facebook pages back in 2011, 2012. And I was doing a lot there and I'm, and I was super fascinated about the internet in general and super fascinated about, you know, different Reddit channels and different forums. And I found this community. I just like signed up and I just kept posting in there.I didn't buy any Bitcoin, I should have probably bought more Bitcoin then. But it was like an interesting community. And when I met my co-founder, he was just fascinated about this. And I'm like, wow, we share this similarity there. But the first thing that we did was nothing related to Bitcoin. We met at a hacker house in San Francisco in 2012, and we just started launching different products. And every day was a different idea. We went through The first idea was like, we dressed up as superheroes and picked up people's laundry and we did this like- 

Pablo Srugo (4:19) 

No way. Get out of here.  I need to learn more about that. What do you mean?

Yanni Giannaros (4:23)

Yeah. Your hero delivery. There's like a lot of articles written about this. It blew up, and the other fascinating thing about that was like, we just like, you know, dressed as superheroes and the only reason people ordered us is cause like the parents’ kids would get to see Spider-Man pick up laundry or something like that. 

Pablo Srugo (4:42) 

How'd you do it? it that? I know this is about Wyre, but ,what's the origin story? How do you decide, dude, we should show up with Spider-Man. 

Yanni Giannaros (4:48) 

So we met in a hacker house, which was basically an orphanage with wifi in San Francisco, a bunch of bunk beds.  a lot of people travel and just stay in this hacker house and try to figure out what to do. Some people are fundraising. Some people are launching companies. Some people are like, you know, working in tech, trying to figure out the next step. So we met in a hacker house. And then after that, I was like, wait, this guy's making $20,000 a month just selling us beds or bunk beds in this, was Sublease place. I'm like, we should just be doing this. So I ended up starting my own hacker house. And then I was like, all right, I could resign and start working on a project with Michael and we have some income coming in. So we did that.

Pablo Srugo (5:28) 

 so you quit, you quit that job where you saw the white paper and you're just doing the hacker house thing.

Yanni Giannaros (5:33) 

Yeah, we quit. I quit pretty fast. They moved me out here to San Francisco for a project and pretty quick, within a month I quit.I was like, this is like, why would I be doing this? I found my people. I, this is what I need to be doing. I was doing some startups in Baltimore, but the ball, the scene in Baltimore was completely different than San Francisco. And I never found my community of people that think similarly. And when I moved to SF, I'm like, my God, everyone's me. Everyone's thinking about ideas, building companies. This is super cool.

Pablo Srugo (6:03)

I think dude, just as a quick tangent, you know, that's the magic of these places, right? I went to visit a friend of mine who's a creator. This was many years ago, it was 2016 and he was in LA and the whole building was just, all they were doing was YouTube, like you walk into anybody's condo. all, they all know each other, they walk into a condo. There's cameras going, they've got a scene happening. this just, this is just a thing, right? And SF is like that but for building, right? you go and there's a hacker house and everybody's just like, I mean, some are going to make it, some aren't going to make it, but everybody's kind of in that, in that zone.

Yanni Giannaros (6:32)

That time period was really special in San Francisco as well. The 2012 to 2015 era of San Francisco was really, really special. It's kind of tamed down a little bit in terms of like, you don't really find these hacker houses anymore, A, because they're illegal, massively illegal. can't fit 20 people in a bedroom anymore. And there's a lot of rules, they're cutting that down. Airbnb's not allowing that anymore. But there are a lot of these weird makeshift hostels for entrepreneurs. We launched one, it was just a unique time period for San Francisco, a subgenre of San Francisco as well. But we were just doing a bunch of ideas. We always wanted to, we had the first version of Snapcard, which was Wyre before we rebranded in 2016, it was called Snapcard. But the first version of Snapcard was like, hey, it was like a browser extension that allowed people to buy anything on the internet using their browser shopping cart. So we built this shopping cart that sat on the browser. And you could add different products and all throughout every single website and then press one click and then literally buy everything through your shop, your, your browser. So , imagine shopping across Amazon and all these different platforms. You just add it into your shopping cart. You press one button.

Pablo Srugo (7:47)

Did you need to integrate?, do you need to add these merchants or it just worked? 

Yanni Giannaros (7:51)

It was an extension. so the consumer would just add it into the shopping.

Pablo Srugo (7:56) 

It sounds like Bolt before Bolt and I don't mean to foreshadow but.

Yanni Giannaros (7:59)

Yeah, it was like a combination of Bolt and like, what is that? Look at coupon saving paper, like honey.

Pablo Srugo (8:06)

Honey. Okay. 

Yanni Giannaros (8:08)

Yeah. Bolt, honey. But the cool thing about that is that you didn't have to use the payment methods that were inside Amazon's only preferred payment methods. So we just added a lot of different payment methods. And one of the payment methods was Bitcoin back in 2012. 

Pablo Srugo (8:23) 

And by the way, how did that work? Like I had stuff from Amazon and from whatever Walmart let's just say into my snap card shopping cart. And then when I click buy, you kind of go into those sites and buy it for me or what was the method? 

Yanni Giannaros (8:36)

Absolutely. So we would literally use my personal credit card at that time and just buy from the store and drop ship it over to the user. And then I'd get 2% cash back on our card, which is a revenue model. And then we'd have some fees as well on the transaction. And this was even before Affirm, it was you could put it on your shop cart and have installment plans on, I want to buy this thing. And this is like, we were way ahead of it. Like we were doing a lot of stuff. I remember, if we would have stuck with that, it would have been a really big idea. Like I think that would have been-

Pablo Srugo (9:10)

 you had all the stuff. you had the Affirm plus the Honey plus the, there's a lot of billions in there. 

Yanni Giannaros (9:15) 

There were a lot of benefits to using the browser shopping cart and all the payment methods. if you were buying from, you could use your local payment method and shop from Amazon in the US and get the job shipped in Mexico or something like that. So using websites across borders, able to facilitate transactions. But one of the payment methods that we added was Bitcoin. And just because we both like Bitcoin, wasn't like, we both enjoyed Bitcoin for different reasons. And we added Bitcoin as a payment method. posted this when we launched into the Bitcoin Reddit forum. And on day one just blew up. They're like, you can now use Bitcoin in 2012 to buy anything on the internet, which is unheard of. you couldn't buy anything using your Bitcoins back then. So once we found this weird community that was like, die hard for using this product, we just went all in on that and just took credit card products.

Pablo Srugo (10:09)

 Bitcoin was almost like your eBay for PayPal. Like that was the community that really, know, PayPal blew up because the eBay sellers or buyers or whatever loved it, loved to use it there. They tried a bunch of other things, but nothing took off. For you, that was the community, because it's true for them it's a zero to one. For everybody else, it's kind of like, okay, it's convenient. But for the people that are Bitcoin believers, you go from basically not really being able to use it except on these fringe websites to it works anywhere, which is very much a zero to one event. 

Yanni Giannaros (10:36)

Yeah, and that flywheel just blew up day one and people were diehard. Like we had the worst UI. it was literally me like Microsoft Paint just UI, like really, really bad UI. But people were going out of their way to try to use their Bitcoin to buy things on the internet. And that just completely blew up and we were super, and that's all we did. we- 

Pablo Srugo (10:58)

How did that work? Like just mechanically for Bitcoin? you have to create a wallet or did people connect there? Like, I don't even know what infrastructure there was back then, but how do people load their Bitcoin onto your extension? you know what I mean? 

Yanni Giannaros (11:09)

We were able to grab everything that's in the shopping cart and put it into an item within your browser shopping cart. So that was already built out. We spent a little bit of time building , hey, taking everything that's inside an Amazon shopping cart and adding it to your browser shopping cart, your SnapCard extension. And then once it's there, then we created Bitcoin invoices. So BitPay was around then as well. We had a big partnership. I think we were the largest client of BitPay back then. We would just create the invoice. Somebody would send their Bitcoin into BitPay. We would receive the Bitcoin and convert it into US dollars. I would use my credit card in the backend. Everyone thought it was magic in the backend, but it was literally just Michael and I going into the websites and buying the products.

Pablo Srugo (11:55)

Like manually,  you just click, click, click, buy, put the right address in.

Yanni Giannaros (11:58)

And everyone thought, they built some mechanical Turk on this. It was literally just Michael, myself, and our first employee. All he did. he wasn't an engineer. Our first employee was literally somebody just processing orders.  we had an admin panel with  order number one, you'd go in, use my credit card, buy the product and ship it out. we do that. 

Pablo Srugo (12:21) 

You used to have to do that. Because you people are used to you click buy and the orders kind of done.

Yanni Giannaros (12:25) 

Like we were doing within 24 to 48 hours, so we were locking the price and , so we'd receive the cash the next day. But we were going through, that blew up. I mean, we were doing  three to $400,000 a day through my credit card. A lot of the work that I was doing was literally making sure Amex wasn't stopping us. If each transaction is ,

Pablo Srugo (12:47) 

How did you pay for that? let's say $300, that's a thousand transactions, how do you even manually go through that? That's a lot of time, no?

Yanni Giannaros (12:56)

 It was a lot. The average of the purchase, the cart, it was a lot higher. People were spending thousands of dollars buying … Back then, mining chips, a lot of people that had Bitcoin wanted to buy more Bitcoin, so they were trying to buy a lot of mining chips. We were selling a lot of sex products as well. Our number one product that we were selling was the Fleshlight for sure.

Pablo Srugo (13:25)

No way. Because I guess the thing is, what would Bitcoin people that are fringe Bitcoin people, what are they buying? Fleshlight and crypto. crypto mining products. 

Yanni Giannaros (13:39)

It was a lot of that. A lot of  high end goods , Prada, stuff like that. But the average purchase price was pretty high. And we were charged , you we made some money on the exchange rate and then we also made money on a service fee. So on every transaction, it didn't made money on cash back. So we charged 2%. We made some money on the exchange rate and then we also made money on the 2 % cash back that we got from the cart.

Pablo Srugo (14:03)

So it needs a silver-fisted idea or you guys are just doing this kind of bootstrap at that point. 

Yanni Giannaros (14:07) 

We bootstrapped it for the first bit and then we we launched it on Reddit and then immediately reached out to boost. They were one of the only  crypto accelerators at that point. And then we got into the boost VC program. 

Pablo Srugo (14:22)

How much into the journey did that happen? How many months?

Yanni Giannaros (14:26)

 From within a month after launching them. Yeah, it wasn’t. And then all we were , all we were joined during boost was literally processing orders. Like we were, we built some products,  we launched Canada, we  set up a bank account there and did a bunch of stop by. No one knew anything about Bitcoin back then. It was like, I'd just go to Canada and be like, Hey, we have this Bitcoin company. , cool. You're like a tech company and they'll just give you bank accounts. And it was , you could literally set up, infrastructure wasn't a problem at that, you know, at that point. And then two years later, it starts becoming a massive problem. That was the first version- that's how we got into Bitcoin. That's the first version of SnapGuard and you know, the, the, that's yeah, that's a lot, a lot more stories after that, that's the- 

Pablo Srugo (15:14)

Well, yeah,  I guess what does, what comes next,  I guess my first question is, cause this is where my goal is try to automate, try to automate now. Like is that, is that, did you try to do that? Was it just not  really feasible or did you go a different direction? 

Yanni Giannaros (15:27)

Yeah. so 2012, 2013 was a bull market, if you remember. That was  one of the first big bull markets. So the Bitcoin price went from like 50 to 1000. And so we were getting a lot of orders. But then in 2014, there was our first Bitcoin bear market, where the price went back down to like 300 a coin or something like that. And the problem with this business was , it just gets affected massively when Bitcoin's about at 200, no suspenders. 

Pablo Srugo (15:56) 

So wait, you were running this version of Wyre Snapcart, you were running for like two years?

Yanni Giannaros (16:01)

 We were running this for a year and a half, yeah.

Pablo Srugo (16:03)

A year and a half, and the whole time it's manual, or did you automate some of the order processing piece? 

Yanni Giannaros (16:09)

We were automating some of the processing, but the more of the features that we launched was like, let's launch different countries, so  take in credit cards from a different area, or  take in different websites that we can use our… launching different countries and that usually meant  just setting up a bank account to receive local CAD or something  that or local euro. So that's a lot of the features that we launched. We also launched Snapcard Black, which was  an exclusive program where if you wanted to buy , we were, some people wanted to buy real estate with their Bitcoin and we were  facilitating real estate transactions as well. some months we were selling  big warehouse facilities so people can set up mining rigs.

Pablo Srugo (16:53)

And what was the back end of that? Like then I'm assuming at the Wyre. I'm assuming it was in credit card. 

Yanni Giannaros (16:59)

Yeah, just sent over the Bitcoin. We would convert it into cash. We would send a Wyre over to the bank and that's it. And like we just are facilitating the wire in. But we did a lot of those and yeah, that's . A good portion of both my co-founder and I’s, Bitcoin, came from tips that we got for those sorts of transactions. So if somebody was sending a few tens of thousands of Bitcoins back then, they'll shoot us a little bit of Bitcoin as a tip there. Yeah, like here's 10 Bitcoin. Yeah, I just let it fry. It's like, thanks, thanks for my million dollar purchase. We'll send you $100 worth of Bitcoin. Thank you very much.

Pablo Srugo (17:42)

The key was to hold it. I've got friends who had … I'm the dumbest one because I just didn't buy it, but I've got friends who did have it and then they bought socks with it, they bought pizza with it. As you know, that just happened all the time.

Yanni Giannaros (17:53)

I'm more in that camp too. I still have some Bitcoin, I used to have a lot more. But over the years, we didn't pay ourselves a salary until 2016. So we were just ramming through, trying to live, figure it out. But it took us a really long time to start paying our salary at a principle for both of us. But I was just living off Bitcoin for a really long time. We used to have poker games, dollar, or one Bitcoin poker games. Most of the time it's a poker game. I die thinking about it.

Pablo Srugo (18:25) 

 And how, so in that year and a half that you're running this business, like at peak, know, how big was it, let's say like transaction volume wise or revenue wise?

Yanni Giannaros (18:34)

 So we, transaction volume wise, was like what I mentioned,  three to 400K a month. And then some months we have  crazy months if we're doing  a real estate transaction or two.  and through the Safeguard Black program, that outside of that We're making  hundreds of thousands sub a million in revenue per year.

Pablo Srugo (18:57)

Yeah, a year. Yeah, because obviously the margins and the fees and all that stuff are kind of thin. Okay, cool. And so you're you're doing that and then you're mentioning the the first bear market. 

Yanni Giannaros (19:08)

Yeah, the first bear market comes along and volumes decrease massively. We kind of at that point, we saw the writing on the wall a little bit as well in the sense that, you know, the business is cool. But if Bitcoin, we believe that Bitcoin is going to be the dominant currency. And if that happens, then every single website will accept Bitcoin at some point. Right. Meaning that they won't need to use this  kind of stopgap solution.

Pablo Srugo (19:33)

 Yeah, because it's almost a hack. Exactly. It's like a bridge too. But yeah. OK.

Yanni Giannaros (19:36)

So we were like, okay, cool. Well, you have all this data of  where Bitcoin are shopped. Why don't we start building a Bitcoin payment processor and then go to the merchants and then  have them accept Bitcoin directly. instead of  selling,  go to Bitpay essentially. So that was the second version of StackCard. And we did that for a few years. actually- 

Pablo Srugo (19:53)

And what was the difference? Yeah,  so Bitpay is already there and you're leveraging it. What did you do that they weren't doing? Or was it just  a direct competitor? 

Yanni Giannaros (19:59)

Yeah, direct competitor. They were just , there's one option at that point. They're moving really slow. We thought we could build a better solution. And we did. we built a really really good big Bitcoin payment processor. 

Pablo Srugo (20:11)

was that already-? that was  Wyre that this version you're now? 

Yanni Giannaros (20:15) 

No, That was called snapcard still. So on so we that was also snapcard So that was  so 2012 2013 was the bookmark late and then we moved 2014 to 2015 we built the merchant payment processor and we did some cool things we made we had our POS system on a tablet and we went to merchants and gave them free tablets to accept Bitcoin. So we had more merchants in San Francisco accepting Bitcoin than any other city in the world, all through snapcard’s like POS terminal. But once again, that was still , you needed a reason to spend your Bitcoins to do that. So we quickly realized that we built this infrastructure, got a lot of merchants, but no one was using the Bitcoins to actually buy anything. So we were not making any revenue. And then we quickly, after that, we pivoted, we had a client that was , could we have the customers buy Bitcoin and then use the merchant payment processor? So we're , okay, let's build a wallet and use the major merchant payment process,  an eBay,  a PayPal situation. So, and it'd be, the thesis was , these consumers want to buy Bitcoin, they don't want to sell the Bitcoin. So let's try to move to consumer side and help people buy Bitcoin.

And there were like few people back in, there was  Mt. Gox, there's Coinbase, there's  early players. The crypto wallet market was really, really slim. 

Pablo Srugo (21:39)

This was in 2016 or so?

Yanni Giannaros (21:41)

This is 2015. 

Pablo Srugo (21:43)

2015, okay. And once this, I'm not sure I fully get it. You're still working with merchants or you go in direct consumer now in this place? 

Yanni Giannaros (21:51)

We never  pivoted out of any business. Like we just kept every business as it went along. It stacked along. And that was just  a lot of lessons learned. Then in 2018, we made the decision to just wipe everything out. So it took us a really long time to do that, but we kept every single business. had merchants, , you know, we had customers on the extension, we had customers on the merchant payment processor. We didn't want to just rip them out. And then we built the wallet and that wallet first was  the first trend where we saw a lot of traction. 

Pablo Srugo (22:22) 

That wallet. that product was a direct consumer product?

Yanni Giannaros (22:25)

direct consumer product. 

Pablo Srugo (22:26)

come here to buy your Bitcoin or move your Bitcoin here, hold it here,  that kind of classic wallet service. 

Yanni Giannaros (22:33)

Exactly. So we built the wallet, very similar to Coinbase. We built the wallet. It was the third largest wallet in the US. It did really well. And the reason why it got so big was because we were the first crypto wallet that had an API released to the public where you could use the API to actually build infrastructure. So like Bitcoin ATMs could use our wallet infrastructure to manage our Bitcoin ATMs. Like there's a lot of merchants that just needed Bitcoin wallet infrastructure that they didn't want to go out and build themselves. So we had a really nice API. 

Pablo Srugo (23:04) 

So like ATM, a physical, I, that's the other type of business I remember crushed. And I remember I had a, not a friend actually, this other founder that was in this game accelerator again, 2013, like I had no idea. And the guy's like, yeah, dude, I got these Bitcoin ATMs. I'm just like, everywhere I did this guy's making so much money. I'm like, what is happening?

Yanni Giannaros (23:21)

So we were, we had big relationships with the Bitcoin ATMs and we built APIs where they needed places where they can custody the money, right? They needed actual like crypto wallets where they- 

Pablo Srugo (23:34)

Yeah, because you go into it and you put in like literally dollar bills or whatever, you get a Bitcoin, but where is that Bitcoin? And I guess some of them didn't want to build that. So then that's where you come in. 

Yanni Giannaros (23:41) 

Yeah, exactly. So we provided the wallet infrastructure and then also the exchange rate. So somebody puts in dollars and they need a whole, we lock in the rate where, okay, cool. We're like, ok convert this one Bitcoin to some amount. And we make fees on that. all the crypto exchanges, all the wallet infrastructure. So we built APIs and we're one of the only companies in the US that had this Bitcoin wallet infrastructure. So we grew pretty fast on our Bitcoin wallet. Not only we had a lot of people who were using the product, but we had a really, really nice API. That's the number one reason why that product grew. And then as that product grew from 2015 to 2016, we started adding different countries. We're like, OK, cool.

Pablo Srugo (24:20)

Walk me through that growth? in that year, you're talking about how much growth? You're talking about what?

Yanni Giannaros (24:27)

In revenue, I think we crossed our first million. Like we were doing over a million, like two to three million, somewhere around there in 2016.

Pablo Srugo (24:40)

 And is that the biggest, were ATMs the biggest partner that really needed your API or was there another kind of sector that really loved this kind of API wallet?

Yanni Giannaros (24:49)

The wallet infrastructure, there was like payout companies really liked it as well. So international payouts, we were selling that. Everyone's talking about stable coins, but we were doing payouts with Bitcoin back in 2015, 2016.

Pablo Srugo (25:07)

 Like money case for like cross border payments stuff?

Yanni Giannaros (25:09)

 Yeah, like the whole vision around stable coins is like you do small payments, right? Like you can send somebody that a content creator that needs to wait to get like $30 out of Twitch right now every couple of weeks. Instead of doing that, you can now pay them like a dollar every day so they can receive some income instead of waiting for this mass payment because there's like a minimum fee that like the bank's charged to actually send a payment to like a Twitch streamer that's in the Venezuela or something like that, right? So like Bitcoin payments were really, really solid for when we went to all these marketplaces, we were like, hey, you have all these payments, it costs you X to do this. All your consumers can just receive Bitcoin and they could deal with it on their own with their local exchanges and they can receive cash immediately. Like they don't need to wait 10 days, pay all these fees. So we were going all in on like cross border payments marketplaces by using Bitcoin as a means of payouts back in 2015 and 2016. we were, and that was like a big, big thing for us. Like we were working with like freelancer.com, which was like Australia, like before there was like a big freelancing community and there was a, that was a big sector for us as well for the API. So like host the crypto into the account and then withdraw, exchange it back into local currency and withdraw out. 

Pablo Srugo (26:24)

We have tens of thousands of people who have followed the show. Are you one of those people? You want to be a part of the group. You want to be a part of those tens of thousands of followers. So hit the follow button. Okay. So that's 2016. So now you're on this. It's like you're doing like one to three million in revenue filling that poll. 

Yanni Giannaros (26:41)

Yeah. So one to three million in revenue and as we started adding new countries to our jurisdiction, we started realizing the pattern of buying Bitcoin here in the US and then selling Bitcoin within the same wallet in pesos, like Mexican pesos. So using Bitcoin as a means to actually transfer money in pesos and then withdrawing pesos out in Mexico, all within their account. we're like, they're just literally using Bitcoin as a rail of some money transfer. Why aren't they using TransferWise or something like that? then we gave the realization that it takes like a week to receive pesos and transfer wise, there's like all these hidden fees and we could just transfer the money using Bitcoin rails as money transfer. And we're like, this is incredible. Like this is a real use case where instead of buying and selling crypto, like there's a real use case where we can build a massive business and help money transfer you on Bitcoin rails. And then at that point it was like Mike and I, my co-founder and I, we just went all in. We're like, this is incredible. We should just focus on this. And we rebranded the whole company to Wyre. So we were called SnapGuard and money transfer Wyres like WYRE and that's like where the brand came from. And then at that point around 20, like we grew that from 2016 to 2018 and got it to maybe like 5 million in revenue. 

Pablo Srugo (27:56)

And this is still like a kind of boost because you did the accelerator, I assume. Like how much did you raise, let's say in this entire time?

Yanni Giannaros (28:03)

 Like maybe 7 million in different cards. every pivot, like we were raising some capital during this period, growing the business and

Pablo Srugo (28:11)

But it was like a couple million here, a million there. Like it wasn't like one big round yet. 

Yanni Giannaros (28:14) 

Yeah, it was not one big round. it was a hard story because we kept evading around. 

Pablo Srugo (28:23)

 I’m assuming it wasn't really hot. Like Web3 became a thing, like you said, later. That was just big 2020s. 

Yanni Giannaros (28:28)

Yeah. It was not a hot thing. And then also it was just super early. Everything we wanted to do wasn't proven out by the market. Like we were extremely early on. The Bitcoin wallet stuff. we were extremely early on the Bitcoin game processing. Like the widget was extremely early. The good thing that we did was like, we just built infrastructure though. Throughout the years, at every point and every pivot, there's more and more infrastructure that we kept building, more regulatory infrastructure, more banking infrastructure, more FX infrastructure, liquidity. So by the time we were ready, by the time our business grew, we were able to capitalize on a lot of that growth. We just didn't die. Literally, we just didn't die. There's so many opportunities that we could have hung up the jacket, the hat, and be like, all right, this is it. 

Pablo Srugo (29:24)

There were so many opportunities. There was never nothing. You had pull along the way, but there was always these problems. It was never like, this is the thing that's going to get to 100 million. And in any given one of those pivots, the other choice is just, okay, shut it down. Let's either go back to work or say something completely new.

Yanni Giannaros (29:39)

Yeah, it's a weird fit, product market fit. Like we have instances of product market fit, but the market just wasn't big enough. people, the people that wanted to use it wanted to use it, but like the market, there weren't just a lot of people to do it. And so like we knew there was some, it's like we kept getting pulled in. like, Hey, there's something here, but it's just like, no one knows anything about Bitcoin or knows anything about crypto. It's like the market wasn't there yet. 

Pablo Srugo (30:04)

And I think it's also, you know, the other thing that I'm, that I'm noting, and I think only in hindsight, can you see this is like, you were enabling things that were a bit moment in time, okay, nobody's allowing you to buy Bitcoin, but some people want to do it. So here's this thing. But obviously kind of you figure out at some point the merchants themselves will allow it. And then the API piece with the ATM is especially is like, okay, nobody knows how to buy Bitcoin. So you have all these ATMs. Like nowadays there's so many ways to buy Bitcoins. People bypass, you know, I'm sure there's some ATM businesses still there, but like, it's not the core way people are buying Bitcoin anymore. like that changes the cross border one. That's a real thing. Like that's not going anywhere anytime soon.

Yanni Giannaros (30:41)

Yeah, that was a real thing. And, we went all into the point where we actually just took Bitcoin and crypto out of our branding. Like, so when you went to Wyre's websites, like it was just like, we were the faster way and cheaper way to actually transfer money from these jurisdictions. Cause like, we built sales teams who grew the company. Like we raised around, we're like, Hey, this is on Bitcoin rails. we're using crypto rails to actually transfer money and it's a new FX pool. And we could save people a lot of money on their FX. And we built boiler rooms and sales teams where they would call merchants every day. like, hey, do you want to save 10 % on your FX? like, can you test out a payment? And it was very boiler room FX teams that were growing. But we had a nice API in the dashboard. And that did really well.

Pablo Srugo (31:26) 

and did that work because Bitcoin, I don't know what the liquidity was like. There's still fees associated with buying and selling Bitcoin, no?

Yanni Giannaros (31:34)

There's still fees, but it was cheaper than the spread and the fees that you have. So that was one thing. Just overall, it's cheaper. And it worked really well for specific payment flows. So if you're trying to send $100 to freelancers or marketplaces or Airbnb hosts, if you're trying to a few hundred dollars, the percentage of fees of the fixed fee that these platforms have, it just doesn't make sense. they're charging, it ends up being, you know, people are charging like 20 % or something like that on fees. So it was just like, it gets really insane. So there were like really, really good flows for crypto and still today there are, that market hasn't gone anywhere. But this was still early. Like we had to convince people like, hey, we're this regulated institution that has a new way of transferring money. And then they dig into the flow and they're like, okay, you guys are using Bitcoin. And it's like, I don't know if we're comfortable with this. Yeah, yeah, but we can do other things. But we were just using crypto on its rails. So it was just a hard sell. It was a very, very hard sell. But it wasn’t an impossible thing. The company grew over the next two years. So from 2016 to 2018, we just focused on that. As the company grew, the crypto market started getting big as well. And we still had all our APIs. So we still had all these  APIs, dashboard, all the infrastructure that you can use. It's basically like a Mercury bank account, right? Where you can host money in there. You can actually use our APIs. So in 2018, we started noticing that a lot of crypto developers were coming back onto the platform and using us as their main bank account. Because all these crypto developers couldn't get bank accounts. We were the spot where you can go. We'd give you a way that you could deposit money into your account. We'd give you routing number, account number. You can hold your crypto in there. can hold your bank, your Fiat in there. And we just, and then people use the API to actually manage the money between their apps and then like their entire crypto business work.

Pablo Srugo (33:39)

 So this is now the world of, it's not just like it was ATMs, simple stuff that was building on wallets. Now you've got developers that want to build apps, leveraging something related to Web3 and crypto, and they still need a wallet and API. And this is where your old product kind of makes sense for them again.

Yanni Giannaros (33:56)

Yeah. And then at that point, Mike and I were like, okay, let's look at where we are right now. We are doing well with the money transfer business, right? Like this is like business, people are using the API for it, like cross border payments. People are doing extremely well. Like it's doing well, but we looked at it and it's like, okay, this is a traditional business. So race the bottom. Like we are, we can spend, we need to raise like a hundred million dollars to start competing with transfer wise. Like we need to build like orders of magnitude, a larger team to even like. Like there's a lot of marketing dollars required to actually build an FX business and like a whole walk money transfer business. It's a long path. And we're like, all right, do we have a good shot at this? Like, and I think we did have a good shot. And I was like more on the fence actually keeping that business. Like we had a big hard board meeting in 2018. And I was like, why are we, this is working. Like, we noticed this trend happening inside our company with like all these developers on, on crypto. And Mike was like, super gung ho. He's like, this is going to be the future. Like we need to be doing everything that we can be doing to support all these developers and for their businesses in crypto. And I was like, I like this business. It's like really like, you know, we know everything about it. There's like a path to it. We could easily raise this. Like, and I think at the end of that board meeting, we, came to the decision that we're going all in on crypto and like really focusing on this, like back into our roots in crypto, supporting all these crypto developers with our APIs and - Just being honest, I was not for that. It turned out to be the right decision. I think both decisions could have worked out well, but I think it was a good decision that we went that path. But we had a really hard conversation. It was hard to... We ended up taking our entire book of business of our money transfer, and then we sold it to World First, which was a money transfer company. There's a bunch of articles on this, but we ended up selling that book of business to them. And then we just went all in on how do we enable these crypto apps to accept, buy big crypto and use the apps? How do we enable web three developers to have bank accounts and be able to interact with money and crypto? And that would like set up, that set us up for, you know, it took us like a, from 2012 to 2018 to find out what the business is going to be.

Pablo Srugo (36:16)

then at that point, timing could have been better. Like obviously you didn't know what was going to happen, but 2019 to 2021 was to have an infrastructure that people could build Web3 apps on. I mean, you can't ask for a better time than that. 

Yanni Giannaros (36:31)

Yeah, exactly. it was the right call. Mike made an incredible decision. He he knew a lot about Ethereum, was like an early investor in Ethereum, knew how like dapps were going to develop all these applications built on like Web3 were going to develop over time. And he's like, all these people are going to have problems buying - No one's gonna like, wanna go to CoinBase and then use the app afterwards. So we were like, hey, we have the infrastructure, we could take cards and like actually connect to smart contracts and like send crypto into the smart contracts, let people buy NFTs. So he just had an incredible foresight on that. And we built our first widget. So we had the widget that enabled developers to accept funds into the Web3 app. And now we wrote a blog post on this and we called it OnRamp. and we were like the first on ramp widget and today that's a whole category, but we're like the first people that point that that term, back in 2018. And so that was our, our checkout widget and then we saw our API and that was our product that we grew, for the next couple of years.

Pablo Srugo (37:34)

 And walk me through - what did that, maybe next year, like we won't go through all the years, but just like, what was that like post 2018 post that decision, you get rid of the other stuff, you sell it off, you go all in on this infrastructure play. How quick is that pull? What does that end up looking like?

Yanni Giannaros (37:52)

It was insane. We went from maybe a few million in revenue to doing 50 million in revenue within two or three months. 

Pablo Srugo (38:00)

Two or three months?!

Yanni Giannaros (38:02)

Yeah, two to three months.

Pablo Srugo (38:04) 

In 2019? or did it take a little bit to launch it? 

Yanni Giannaros (38:06)

It took a little bit to launch it. We raised our Series B under this, and Tera came in, we had crypto investors come in on that. It took us a little bit of time to pivot out. There was a lot of company morale that we had to navigate because a lot of people were like, whoa, what just happened in the company? We're just like doing this money transfer stuff. wanted to scale. 

Pablo Srugo (38:26) 

How many people were you when you made that?

Yanni Giannaros (38:28)

 I mean, we did the money transfer stuff. We were like 60 people. 

Pablo Srugo (38:33)

It's a good amount of people. Pivoting at that level is not that easy.

Yanni Giannaros (38:36)

 It's not that easy. We sold off the entire business. So we were like, all right, we don't need, like we need like maybe 20 to 30 people right now. So we had to scale back massively and not because  we didn't have cash. It was more so like the company just didn't need to be at that size like take a big bet on like this crypto check out legit. But there's a lot of morale. Like I remember that just being a really, really tough time. Not just not just for myself, like my co-founder, there was like that 2018, 2019 time period was really, really tough. And, you know, we were getting merchants like no one had the solution. So we were getting OpenSea, we're getting all these huge platforms that were literally doing zero dollars a day in volume. We're like, hey, do you want this way people can use your product to openSea and all these huge merchants? And they're like, yeah, we love it. Everyone's integrating the product. then we go along with them.

Pablo Srugo (39:33) 

So $50 million revenue, is that 2020 post-COVID when this stuff really took off or is that before? 

Yanni Giannaros (39:40)

It happened late. Yeah, early 2020, like early 2020. So we had merchants starting to like integrating in 2019 and really positioning the checkout widget, launching that in 2019. And then early 2020, my co-founder got burnt out and he left the company. I took over as CEO. And the only thing I did was like, all right, we just need to focus on this. Like we're just going to do, this is working. Let's just focus on the checkout widget. Like merchants are starting to blow up. Like we don't need to do much else. And, and that's what, that's all we did, but it mid 2020 was like really, really humming. The business was really growing and scaling. 

Pablo Srugo (40:25)

So let's fast forward a little bit. because I think we got through a lot of the- how do I call it? Like, you know, it's, those, those like night fights, you know what I mean? That get you through the first for you is just like literally blindfolded, like in the dark, trying to find where the gold is, right? And like, you found it. You grow, know, exceptionally fast to 50. You keep growing, obviously, over the next year or two, or year or so to like 90, huge numbers. And then, then, Bolt comes in, walk me through, like, the acquisition piece, like, where did that come from? And then we can go through that. I mean, most of anything, dude, I'm curious on the emotional valence of all of it because again, I've gone through it, but it's one thing with my numbers and it's totally different with your numbers. So we get to dive into it.

Yanni Giannaros (41:18) 

Bolt was an interesting thing. mean, and I mean, so by the end of 2021, you know, we had a really, really nice API. Like we had a beautiful API that people were using building crypto applications and we were kind of like a stripe for crypto, right? So if you wanted to build inside crypto, had a SaaS based API where you could build infrastructure inside crypto. And then we had our checkout widget that would enable like any crypto wallet to accept crypto without needing to go and get licenses and integrations with all these payment methods. Those are our two products. Then Bolt came along, we weren't looking to sell, we were raising our series C and that was fairly going well we had like, you know, larger investors like BlackRock come in on that round. But we were raising it seriously and during that conversation, Ryan Breslow, the founder of Bolt came and he's like, hey, I think there's like a massive opportunity here where we can add crypto as a means. His first idea was like, we can enable a whole NFT marketplace within Bolt, one click checkout, NFTs, this is going to be huge. And I was not bought into this vision. Like he had this vision of like NFTs like...one click NFTs type situation, they could get open C. I think that was like the first conversation. I'm like, this doesn't make sense. Like, we're not interested. I kept having conversations with Mahju and Ryan, and I came to the realization that their biggest value prop was that they had hundreds of thousands of merchants on the platform. And the thing that they were missing was wallet infrastructure to get the consumers to actually put them in a consumer and then API to get developers, which is like infrastructure that we had. So, you know, they had hundreds of thousands of merchants, which is the hardest thing to do. Like getting hundreds of thousands of merchants is not easy. Merchants are harder to get than consumers in any business, but they had that figured out. And I'm like, okay, cool. We'll bring the developers and build you guys an API and then we'll add the, we'll add the wallet and then everything can be built on top of stable coins in 2021. we have a real shot at actually creating a new PayPal type business, like a bigger PayPal, again, payment rails where you can pay out using stable coins. It's like a new way to actually operate. And I thought that Wyre plus bolt vision was like a $10 billion opportunity. was like a way larger than what the acquisition price would be for where the company could have, it could have been a hundred plus billion dollar business. I saw like a 10X from where we were together. of building that entire payment ecosystem we're creating a new PayPal. And I saw that vision, I'm like, this actually is, this is awesome. Like I'm not going to just sell here. We shouldn't just sell here. I see this vision where we could take Wyre into a whole new thing and really build a massive business. And I saw that and then we got interested and we got the deal and you know, during the whole process, like we sold at the top of the market. So we got an excellent price on that. We sold at the top and then like Luna Terra situation happened and you had FTX. 

Pablo Srugo (44:28)

Like when you say you sold it at the top, you agreed to terms, because there is an article and it says $1.5 billion. So it was agreed to and kind of announced and I guess entering diligence.

Yanni Giannaros (44:39)

 Yeah, so we signed a definitive agreement. So we actually sold the company. So we sold the company. And then there was kind of like your period where you need to integrate, right? You have this period where you integrate and you have the closing conditions on the deal. Like everyone has this sort of like-

Pablo Srugo (44:58)

 okay, so you signed the thing, but you hadn't met the close. It's not like the money got transferred, money got wired and pulled back. just like you signed the PO and then you were in that closing phase where, you know, some things need to happen.

Yanni Giannaros (45:08)

 Yeah.basically you always find definitive agreement. And then, you have closing conditions that usually take like a year. Like we had to transfer our licenses over to them and meet all these closing conditions. And then, we had a closing, there's like some period that we had for a closing period period. And, then they backed up the bill on closing date. it was like, you know, a lot of things happened in between there. Crypto went from, it just didn't become as hot as it was early on. It was, I think there was, I'm not going into specific details, but there was a lot of stuff happening in their organization as well. But they just backed out on the closing date. And that left us in a really tough spot. A, we didn't close enough money in series C because we were happy. We thought that this deal was going to go through and we didn't need it, we only closed enough capital. that we needed and we tried turning the company around after that and it was super hard. 

Pablo Srugo (46:00)

Your own revenues I assume would have fallen too just because the volume of crypto activity in track. 

Yanni Giannaros (46:06)

Yeah, I think we went down to like 30 million at that point, which is still healthy now. So that was similar to the pullback that happened as well in the market. 

Pablo Srugo (46:16)

Yeah, exactly. And what happens to your existing investors? just like at that point everybody's panicking and so nobody wants to kind of save the company and just come in with,okay fine, you do these layoffs, but here's 10, 20, 30 million and kind of write the ship.

Yanni Giannaros (46:33)

 Yeah, there's a lot of hard conversations that happen.  we did receive kind of like a lifeline right after that, because we were running out of cash immediately when the deal was supposed to close. So we did receive a lifeline right after that. And then we had a couple months to basically turn, like restructure the company and like get back on track to focus on like, We're going to be growing and stuff like that. and then we just couldn't get that deal across the line, we went out to raise another round around December time period, and I couldn't get that deal across the line in December. And then that quickly moved to a fire sale situation. So it was kind of like a situation where we wanted to fundraise. If we would have had maybe two months more left to run away, we could have probably gotten across the line. But then everyone started panicking and all the investors were like, all right, we need to fire sell this business and push us to make different decisions. And yeah, we ended up by our song, the, company in the beginning of 2022.

Pablo Srugo (47:33)

I have to ask  my top of my questions now and it's not a business one at all. It's purely like, you know, psychological, whatever, like, but being honest, like. I mean, you go, this is the thing, man. Like, you know, the highs of highs, the lows of lows. Like, it's hard to find anything that has more volatility than a startup where you can go from, you know, I'm worth like a few hundred million dollars are going to come into my account in a matter of a month or so to my company's worth, you know, zero or close to zero. Like that happens in four months. You know what I mean? it's hard. I mean, humans aren't built for that. Like we're not built for, you know, for expectations to change that dramatically. So I just, and especially now like with, with benefit hindsight, like thinking back or whatever, how do you get through that? Or what does that even feel like, like, you know, in the moment, how do you even just keep fighting, you know, whatever, like where were you at? 

Yanni Giannaros (48:31)

Yeah, I mean, it was tough because we basically parted ways with the company as soon as we did that fire. So it wasn't like a zero deal, but it was somewhat of a deal. Some investors got paid back. I don't actually know the details of that, but basically, as soon as I parted ways and stepped into a board executive role, basically a non-role in the company, it was tough. It was a really tough experience for the next two to three months just because you get alienated and you blame yourself for everything that happened because you just take the whole responsibility. So like it was a very tough thing, but dude, I have a great support system. Like I have a great partner. I have great friends. And then you start building your confidence. And the thing that really pulled me through is like my partner was like, you should just reach out to like some founders and like start offering feedback or advice to them. I'm like, what? No one wants to hear from me. Like I, like, I don't know anything. Like, and she really pushed me to do this. And I posted on the YC channel. like, Hey, like I’ve done some stuff in the past, just like this so sad message. I read it now. like, I feel so weak just writing that. like, hey, I've done some stuff. I might know some stuff on payments, crypto. And got like a bunch of P-Cores reach out to me. And like, yeah, we want to chat to you. And the first conversation I had was just an instant game changer to me, where it's like, holy shit, I've learned a lot in just doing this business. Chatting to some people that were building similar businesses to Wyre at some point. And I was just giving them game plans and them sending me like viable thank you messages. like, dude, you just saved us years of just like, there's like, I've through the wringer. And I'm just like, this is how you get banking partnerships. This is what you need to do to get licensing. This is how you should structure your business. This is where you should think about building flywheels. Just like I've been through the wringer and this is what you did.

Pablo Srugo (50:34) 

And you did it, the difference between you and a hundred million dollars is like a month, man. It's not even Like literally it is a macro event and if that deal got inked in Q1, it probably closes. You know what I mean? Like it's just, it's crazy, man. It's crazy.

Yanni Giannaros (50:48)

Yeah. Yeah. It'd be nice to have like three to $400 million in the bank.

Pablo Srugo (50:52) 

I don't mean to keep bringing it back up. You might've just not been thinking and I just keep bringing it back up. So my bad, 

Yanni Giannaros (50:56) 

I was like, the money was nice, but like I was really, really excited. I mean about the Bolt Wyre. And then now you look at Stripe Bridge, that deal came through $1.1 billion and you know, Bridge has 10 % of the infrastructure. Bridge is the same company as Wyre, but has 10 % of the infrastructure that we had. So you see deals like that come to life and be like, hey, this is like the vision that we were pushing for. And 1.5 was actually a really cheap deal for you. We probably should have asked for more on that. We just didn't find the right buyer. Like we weren't looking to sell. 

Pablo Srugo (51:29)

Zach is coming on the podcast soon, by the way,

Yanni Giannaros (51:32) 

Oh he's awesome. Dude, they were also like a month away from quitting their business. They weren't doing well during this. They almost didn't pull through the bear market, but Wyre went under, Prime Trust went under. There's a few other of these vendors, the Crypto as a Service Stack, and then all the businesses went to them and they just pulled through, which is really cool. So, he’s actually an awesome guy. Tell him I said hi. But yeah, basically, they're the Wyre story, but that actually completed-

Pablo Srugo (51:59)

That made it through, yeah. That's epic, man. Well, dude, I must say, and now, for full disclosure, we're very proud investors in your startup in Axel, which takes- I'll say to you cause I don't know that I've said it, like frankly, when we met and you took me through, you know, probably the first five minutes of let's say your pitch or whatever, or, know, the Wyre story. And honestly, I just said to myself like, man, if somebody can go through that amount of high and then low and then decide to go back in, I'm in. Like I'm just in, you know, I do think what you're doing makes tons of sense. You know, AI is just for compliance. Obviously it's also a space that you know and understand and all that stuff I think matters tremendously. Like if you'd come and said, you know, I don't know, I'm doing something that has nothing to do with anything I've ever learned. Maybe I'd think about it twice, but frankly for me, it's like, this is so much about the DNA of people and like who people are and what they're willing. And I don't know that I'm- personally, I'm on the other side, partially because of that reason. Like I'm not sure that I would take those punches to the face and continue to move forward, right? But you are. So for me, it's just, that's the defining thing. Like some of them, they're gonna work. Some of them are not gonna work, but there's people like you who I think are just builders. And now obviously there's a decade worth of experience and knowledge and especially within FinTech. But yeah, like for me, it's just, I don't know what the word is. I guess inspirational or something like that. You know what I mean? that you're willing to do it again and see it through. yeah,it’s friggin' awesome,

Yanni Giannaros (53:37)

I appreciate that. And it's been incredible this time around, like, we were able to partner with different investors as well. Like, being, like, having those relationships, like, all while we really appreciate the relationship we have. It's been awesome, like, working with incredible investors here. But yeah, I think there's just, like, you know, after chatting to a lot of these founders and, like, building my confidence almost immediately, I was like, holy shit, I've learned a lot. I was like, I just couldn't think of anything else I wanted to do. I went down the VC route. I started thinking about, do I become an EIR or something like that? And I was just like, why would I do anything else? i literally don't know how, A. I don't know how to do anything else. I love building companies. i love getting products out to individuals. And I love the whole art of building a company. It's just such a beautiful thing and solving problems that people really care about. Like I really care about that a lot. 

Pablo Srugo (54:35)

I love that. For me, you have to know who you are. You know what mean? Like you can't, you can't fake it. I think if you try to be a VC, you'd be bored to death. also I think you would feel very, you'd want to do it, man. Like you're the type of person I think you are, you'd want to do it. And I don't, I was, don't mind not doing it. And I don't know that I could, you know what I mean? So it's like, you have to know who you are and you can't, especially as a founder, man. Like I think there's a lot of things you can gain. Like that's another thing that I remember someone telling me. You can game a lot of things in life. Like you could probably join a big company, move through the ranks by never really being great, but like find a way to all take your way. Dude, you can't game getting to product market fit. You have to go through the knife fight. And so like, there's no point in faking it. Like you got to know who you are and you got to know if that's what you want to do. And if you do, it's freaking awesome.

Yanni Giannaros (55:18) 

Yeah. You can't fake that. That's awesome.

Pablo Srugo (55:22)

Cool, man. Well, dude, thanks for jumping on the show. It's been awesome. 

Yanni Giannaros (55:25) 

Thank you so much, Pablo. This is incredible. Thank you.

Pablo Srugo (55:29)

So guess what? I met this founder who listened to every single episode of the product market fit show. He just called me and he sold his company for over a billion dollars. That's right. If you listen to every episode of the product market fit show, that's what's gonna happen. That's just, I can't say it's guaranteed, but it's what I've seen. It's just, it's what I've seen in the past, but you won't know for sure unless you, you know, try it out for yourself. So go back, cause there's over a hundred episodes of the product market fit show and you haven't listened to most of them. Check them out.