In this episode of The Blockchain Startup Show, I sat down with Orion Parrott, Co-founder of Orange DAO and GP of Orange Fund.

We talk about the macro and the micro - and most importantly - what Orion's learned about startup success and how to replicate it from years of funding and working with early-stage teams.

Episode Outline and Highlights:

[00:02] Welcome and Introduction

• Harrison introduces the show and guest Orion Parrott
• Background on Orange DAO and Orion's advisory work

[02:23] Orion's Journey into Crypto

• From defense electronics to fintech entrepreneurship
• Early interest in crypto dating back to 2013
• The evolution of Orange DAO from Y Combinator connections

[08:19] Current State of Crypto Markets

• Analysis of recent market movements and meme coins
• Discussion of Trump-related token launches
• Balancing community value with token economics

[11:17] The Evolution of DeFi and Market Focus

• Contrasting DeFi's current utility with 2021
• The dichotomy between gambling trends and product development
• Real-world applications versus speculative activities

[20:15] Strategy and Founder Success

• The importance of problem definition in startup strategy
• How to approach product-market fit in Web3
• Common pitfalls in startup positioning

[38:23] The Remote Work Revolution in Crypto

• Impact of digital transformation on work culture
• The rise of crypto conferences and in-person events
• Building communities in a digital-first world

[50:23] Ethereum vs Solana Debate

• Analysis of recent market movements
• User experience considerations
• Cultural differences between ecosystems

Key Insights for Founders

Orion emphasizes the importance of understanding your market and executing with clear advantages. To succeed these days, you need both solid tech skills and a way to get people involved and excited about what you're doing.

What's Next

Web3 communities keep changing, and the trick is to bring in new ideas while actually giving users what they want. As things settle down in the industry, founders need to be ready to adapt, but shouldn't lose sight of what they stand for and what matters to their community.

00:02 - Speaker 1 (Announcement)

Welcome to the Blockchain Startup Show with Harrison Wright, a podcast dedicated to dauntless blockchain leaders building our new decentralized future. You'll hear stories, successes, trials and tribulations as we channel into the lives of high-performing leaders in crypto and Web3. Whether you're currently a Web3 founder or leader, or you one day aspire to be, you'll gain crucial knowledge and insights to accelerate your learning curve. Hi everyone, this is Harrison Wright.

00:36 - Harrison (Host)

Welcome back to the Blockchain Startup Show. I'm really excited to be joined today by Orion Parrott, our special guest. Orion is co-founder of OrangeDAO, which is the largest credible community of builders in crypto. Orion is also a tenured advisor both to funds on one side of the equation and founders on the other. Really excited to have Orion here today for many reasons, not least to which he's just a great guy. But Orion has a wealth of experience and expertise to offer, especially for founders. And, yeah, we could talk about fundraising, but also strategy what makes one team successful over another and from my discussions with Orion we've had in the past, he just deeply cares about the success of founders and I always really appreciate talking to people who've worked in the fund accelerator, incubator sort of space, because they always seem to have the most fun of anyone in crypto. Um, working with founders and helping to be successful in early stage seems to be super rewarding. Um orion, welcome. I'm guessing you'd agree with that hey, harrison.

01:35 - Orion (Guest)

Yeah, thank you. I'm thrilled to be here and, yeah, definitely agree, it's been a blast. I know the one one uh investor says that venture capital is the most fun you can have with your clothes on, so I tend to agree and, yeah, just all about supporting founders building the future. So it's amazing opportunities that we have to be at the center of everything that's being created.

01:57 - Harrison (Host)

My only question is if your friend has tried riding motorcycles before.

02:01 - Orion (Guest)

Yeah, I don't know, not sure I do love riding motorcycles as well. Yeah, I might't know, not sure I do love riding motorcycles as well.

02:06 - Harrison (Host)

Yeah, I might have a bone to pick on that, but you know we can put it number three.

02:10 - Orion (Guest)

Okay, that's fine.

02:10 - Harrison (Host)

That's still pretty great, right? Absolutely. So tell me tons of interesting stuff I'm looking forward to diving into with you on macro and at least a strategy. But before we get onto that, could you tell us a little bit about you and your journey? Yeah, certainly.

02:25 - Orion (Guest)

I started my career in defense electronics after studying electrical engineering. I spent a lot of time in various software languages, also doing simulations for wind turbines. I had also been a real estate investor on the side throughout the years, so from the beginning I had a pretty broad base of experience, forming me as a generalist. I've also enjoyed studying different languages. I've lived abroad twice, in Israel and England, and ultimately did an MBA at Berkeley about 10 years ago, which got me into the startup world.

03:07

04:37 - Harrison (Host)

Fantastic. If you were starting it today, you could almost be a little catchy with it and call it X Combinator. Same with the whole Twitter obsession in the space, but it's funny. It's a cool origin story. You're saying about Coinbase. That seems to be a common thing, wasn't it? I might be making this up If this is not the correct story. There's a similar story, something like Steve Jobs tried to get a job at Microsoft and they turned him down, so he created Apple. I don't think it is that, but it was something very similar to that.

05:11 - Orion (Guest)

Right, yeah, there was definitely lots of back and forth between the two companies in the early days, yeah, phenomenal.

05:16 - Harrison (Host)

Any regrets?

05:19 - Orion (Guest)

I do regret not getting into crypto sooner, but overall, with life happening and the excitement around technology, I'm just glad to be here.

05:27 - Harrison (Host)

Hey, you know, there's a surprising number of people that work in the space that don't know any Bitcoin. Yeah, true.

05:34 - Orion (Guest)

True, I've been learning that and hearing that. Yeah, so I'm glad that I was plugged in a long time ago on that side.

05:41 - Harrison (Host)

06:31 - Orion (Guest)

Uh, yeah, that can definitely happen and, yeah, some folks check out, but I think there's a lot of folks. Um, I think another possibility is when, when that happens very young and people see the possibilities and they've still got a lot of energy left to run, then they're really in it for the glory and for hey, what can we create to just continue doubling down on the world that they love, the future world that we're building?

07:02 - Harrison (Host)

You know, one of my favorite calls I had. This was maybe two years ago now, I think. Someone who joined an early stage team as one of the very first employees in his early 20s as well very young for working in crypto rode with the team four years exited. He had $50 million in tokens. He booked a call with me because he wanted to discuss his next career move. The first thing you do, you walk out with $50 million. Hey, what's my next job? That was pretty cool.

07:32 - Orion (Guest)

Yeah, very much.

07:33 - Harrison (Host)

That's awesome. Not everybody would do that, yeah, that's right.

07:39

08:12 - Orion (Guest)

has in store for us. Yeah, I think it's going to be. Yeah, the headline is very exciting, very positive, but also a lot of variance in that, a lot of unknowns. I'm highly confident that it's net positive, but there's going to be some big bumps along the way. More specifically, referring to the meme coin that was launched by Trump, I'll say I didn't vote for him, but I'm excited about what his presidency is going to lead to for the crypto industry in particular.

08:44

I did get in on that coin. I was fortunate to hear about it within six hours of its launch from my community, so I didn't make crazy money, but it's a nice boost for the month. But some of the things around the way it was launched, I think, is informative. But some of the things around the way it was launched, I think is informative. And so this token did a lot of the things that the industry does not want to be known for, namely, having an 80 percent insider allocation really makes it look like a money grab, and there's there's debate about who owns that Right. The easy answer is the Trump family, but it can also be, you know, proxy, through royalty or licensing deal, where someone is able to use their name.

09:31

Either way, there's going to be some value accruing back to them, and this token is doing what tokens usually do. When they don't have, you know, an underpinning community or value to be to be gained, they're, they're going down right, and so some folks made money. Ideally, in investing there's a value creation component, so that it's not simply zero sum with money transferring hands. So when you think about it and go a little deeper, it's a little harder to get excited. I do think there are also meme coins that drive real value, and I don't think it's over for the. I think there's going to continue to be. I say coins because I'm referring also to the millennia coin, and maybe there's others as well, but it's going to be interesting to see how that gets leveraged throughout the next year and the next four years, and so maybe there, you know, I'm hopeful for there to be some upside and true community benefit derived from it.

10:30 - Harrison (Host)

11:09

I was professionally interested in it. I didn't use DeFi, I was a buy and hold guy. Now DeFi is at the point pretty much, where you can get rid of TradFi altogether. It's a much better investment vehicle. You can take out self-custodial loans into Bitcoin that get repaid by appreciation. With Lava. You can use DeFi insurance to protect your stable coin yields from losing everything to hacks or de-pegs. It's just getting into a state where it's a real suite of products that real people can use and yet all the attention's on the hyper gambling, which has gone to new stratospheric levels, and no one seems to care that much about putting their traditional investments on stablecoin rails, so it's a very interesting time.

11:49 - Orion (Guest)

13:29

14:45 - Harrison (Host)

15:28 - Orion (Guest)

It's the opposite of Bitcoin, but people seem to appreciate that and want to play with it and make tons of money. Yeah, that's interesting. I think there's a strong interest in creating the same kind of mechanisms. You know, wherever value can be created, extracted, people are going to find opportunities to do that, and so, yeah, you're absolutely right. Now it's elaborated to smart contract insurance, ways to hedge on de-pegging that you reminded me of today, and leverage and lending and borrowing, and it is possible to end up with systemic risk on top of this system again, depending on what the incentives are.

16:02 - Harrison (Host)

And I think what spurred me to think about this was when you mentioned about meme coins. Well, you could say they're having no utility, but actually the community is a utility. So to me, putting a token to a community or a sentiment or a person, it is very much a form of hyper-financialization, right it's. It's attaching a market to something that ordinarily would not have a market attached to it. That can then drive speculation.

16:25 - Orion (Guest)

Yeah that's right and yeah, I think, fundamentally, the goal is that this can create value that the community can capture, and then participants are rewarded right, unlike major Web 2 and Web 1 platforms, and so how can we allow communities to capture more value? And then, of course, founding teams still get to do that as well. So I think that is a primary ethos. I think a lot of it's been really challenging for people to actually make that happen, let's say, but there have been a couple of teams that seem to be pulling it off lately. I know Hyperliquid has been praised for the way they launched and driven by how they honor their community launched and driven by how they honor their community.

17:19 - Harrison (Host)

It makes you wonder, if there were more projects launched like Hycolic, would people still be so fascinated with meme coin?

17:22 - Orion (Guest)

Yeah, I think so. I think there are many great projects out there. So, yeah, it's interesting to think of how can tech alts value creating startups in the traditional sense you know get the attention that they deserve.

17:40 - Harrison (Host)

It brings to mind something, cause there's a, I know there's a, I guess Murad would talk about this, but there's this theory of mean points. Is hey that the outsiders rebellion against the insiders getting the first dibs investment on things. It breaks the mind. Something I still kind of get my head around all these years later is the concept of the accredited investor in the US.

18:00

So there's a law. If you're not familiar with this, yeah, if you're listening to this and you don't know what being an accredited investor means, is that you're not allowed to invest in private realms or certain investments unless you have a certain net worth that you can prove. It's just such a bizarre concept to me. So sorry, you're not allowed to get richer because you're not rich yet. Only the rich can get richer. It makes absolutely no sense to me. Um, I I think sort of juxtaposes that philosophy against hey, anyone can gamble on mean coins. It's an equal opportunity casino.

18:36 - Orion (Guest)

19:56 - Harrison (Host)

Crowdfunding is a really interesting topic. I have a habit of doing this I'll go out of left field somewhere, or seemingly left field, but on a philosophical level I think crowdfunding and its success level versus, say, traditional VC investing is an example of how decentralizing things doesn't always work like you expect. We'll give you another example. So in hiring now it's quite popular for you to have these bounty platforms like things like HireChain or Paraform, and what they essentially entail is, as an employer, you can go on the platform, you can post a bounty. Okay, If you submit the right candidates for this job, we will pay you X amount of money and, depending on the platform, X amount of money is usually somewhere between five and $40,000. So it's a little less than you pay a recruitment company. But then on the other side of the platform, anyone can be a recruiter. You can just be a guy that knows some people and submit some recommendations through the platform and get a bounty fee, or you can just work through that platform. There are recruiters that do that right. They don't want to do business development or they don't know how to do business development, so you just work things off the platform. So theoretically this would produce a great result and they do okay in certain circumstances.

21:05

I think there are times and places where these bounty platforms make sense, but they have not, and I think ever will, replace working with a headhunter or having an in-house headhunter or whatever you're going to do to approach that problem with ownership, because there's no ownership of the problem, I think, with crowdfunding. Say that if you're a VC, you're going to do all the due diligence to make sure you're going to, on average, make a retirement investment. If you're a headhunter and you're engaged on a project, you're going to make sure you deliver that project. When you diffuse the responsibility against thousands of people, there are times and places that works well, but it's not a good solution for every scenario. I think you can see that also in if you notice that there are much fewer DAOs now than there were a few years ago.

21:44 - Orion (Guest)

It's not that DAOs can't work you co-founded a DAO but they are fraught with problems and incentive traps that people, I think, didn't appreciate when they began the DAO journey yeah, I think that's a super interesting conversation that's relevant for anybody launching a community, with or without a token, is how to think about those incentives, and I think what people sometimes forget is just the human relationship component and how these decisions are made.

22:12

And so you, to what extent is your new product or business requiring people to do something that they've never done or doing it in a way that they haven't done it? You know, even if the target customer fits the profile of an early adopter, it can still be hard to you know the profile of an early adopter, it can still be hard to make those changes, and some things are the way they are for a reason, right. So the strength of recruiters is that human connection and building your network. It's just really hard to replace that with other mechanisms because there's a vetting process that goes on, as you said right. That's really this face-to-face human understanding and relationship.

22:56 - Harrison (Host)

Yeah, you could even see it with. People have been predicting for years now that we'd see the end of realtors. Because hey, why do you need a realtor when you can just do everything on-chain on the platform? And I say the argument for replacing realtors with a platform is much more straightforward than the argument for recruiting recruiters. It's a much simpler process and there's less nuance involved in it. But even then it just hasn't happened. Like we're talking to realtors right now, we're in the process of moving. Could I use a platform? Yeah, but I'd rather just have someone who knows what I want and helps out. I'd be surprised if that goes away.

23:36 - Orion (Guest)

Yeah, that's right, and I think some of those human roles that are really at the interface have a place. Right, that's what we're saying, and you can improve these roles through the backing of technology. But in the end I think it speaks well for service provider type companies that provide a human service that can be enabled by technology. Scalable startup venture is a different thing. Maybe that means consulting and professional services survive better. I guess, as an investor, you've got me thinking already which startups are going to be able to grow a scalable business out of that by being the interface for the human component. We even talk about DAOs this way in the early days of Orange, we're talking about technology being an enabler and DAO voting and DAO tools as enablers, and what's left at the end of the day, right? Are humans even involved? And there could be this pure human connection with no technology in the way, based on relationships enabled by a lot of technology behind the scenes, but not removing that human to human connection.

24:54 - Harrison (Host)

What is it? I'll give you a case in point. When, um, with the whole AI thing, everyone in sales started getting obsessed with, oh I can just have an AI send cold emails for me and I can automate my sales process. No, that's never going to work, because it's competitive landscape. Make my sales process? No, that's never going to work, because it's competitive landscape.

25:15

26:02

So what I find interesting maybe this is a lesson for contrarian thinking and founders and what to build the moment everyone realized, oh, I can have AI sales. They're really excited about that. I'm thinking the opposite. I'm thinking this is going to mean that the value of personalization and one-to-one connection and vetted communities and face-to-face meetings and real interactions that you can't scale is going to become much, much more valuable than it was. And what do you know?

26:34

26:57

Now that doesn't work, because everyone knows they're automated and everyone's sending them Back. Then it worked. Now I pretty much don't automate anything outweigh-wise because the opposite assumption was effective one-to-one and I actually get responses. I'm kind of veering off topic here, but speaking of emails, maybe I shouldn't give this away, but something I found really effective. If you do ever need to send cold emails, I'm on another channel. I found something really effective as sending it to two people of the same company and putting high both, and my theory for why that's effective is because people know that can be automated. It had to be you sending it, because there's no tool that will do that and you see Right.

27:39 - Orion (Guest)

Even if they don't know that, they know it.

27:40 - Harrison (Host)

They know it? Yeah, exactly, it's subconscious. Oh, maybe I should pay this attention. That's smart, and you see the script Well, there's a nugget for the audience.

27:49 - Orion (Guest)

That's awesome. I'm curious a question you're making me wonder with attempting to automate emails can you just write them so that they're personal enough that it's really you talking, and, and personalized like, how can you tell the difference from, uh, you know, an individual email that you wrote by hand?

28:14 - Harrison (Host)

it sounds like you're saying that it can't be personal enough or it's going to always feel automated I think the problem is the saturation of this stuff has destroyed the channel itself, for the most part um, which I think should be a warning to anyone who wants to chase after shiny objects like this. So I know that I'm not an expert. There's a level of engineering skill in this that I do not possess and do not need. But people who have large markets say crypto is a small industry, but say you're selling a software product that has 100,000 potential customers, then you can do things at massive scale. For me, I might have 500 potential customers at any one time, so this would not work.

28:55

The average cold email positive reply rate now is something like 0.2%. You need thousands and thousands of people to reach out to make it work. But I know there are ways that people have mastered to use multiple passes of LLM stuff to make hyper-personalized cold emails that look like a real person had written them. But that's part of the problem is, now people get. If you have a high end job title at a big company, you're going to get bombarded by these. So I find more success reaching out via different channels. If we're recruiting, for example, I would prefer to approach someone on Telegram.

29:27 - Orion (Guest)

It's a really nice one, right? I see, yeah, not email on telegram, right?

29:30 - Speaker 1 (Announcement)

not email.

29:30 - Harrison (Host)

I see, yeah, not email at all yeah, okay, that makes sense you can't automate a phone call and no one wants to make them anymore. So I find much success there if you get someone's name, but I'd be curious if we actually, before I go on to that, just thinking about this yeah, there's a lot. There's a lot of talk on on twitter at the moment about, you know, founder-led marketing and crypto, which is another thing that you now have to do as a founder be on twitter all the time that founders didn't used to have to be responsible for. But I think that's another reaction to everything being automated. And you know the obsession with events in crypto as well, which I've never seen in another entry. Everyone wants to do in-person events all the time. It's to the point people are starting to complain about there being too many conferences, but I think that's also a function of being a remote industry and people craving actual connection.

30:19 - Orion (Guest)

Yeah, that's interesting. I guess I know what you mean and I was wondering is it just the evolution of work being, yeah, more global and more remote? But it's probably particularly acute in this industry right, where, um, decentralization and and globalization is absolutely a virtue, whereas in some it's not. But, yeah, so I haven't looked outside of crypto venture and crypto entrepreneurship to see you know, how are these other industries doing? On the conferences, because, yeah, absolutely, I mean even going to ETH Denver, one of the main conferences. I know of two other significant conferences happening at the same time, which really tells me that the calendar is pretty full if people need to schedule their events during ETH Denver but in another part of the world.

31:11 - Harrison (Host)

You know, other industries I've been in have just been nothing like it. I mean, my first industry was industrial automation and there was industrial in the UK anyway, I can't say for worldwide, because another thing has changed. Recruiting was very local. So there was one conference that would happen once every two years and it was two days, and that was it. People show up for that for two days. If you wanted to get anything done, you better do it on the first day, cause on the second day everyone will be hungover. So forget doing anything useful.

31:36 - Speaker 1 (Announcement)

And that was it.

31:37 - Harrison (Host)

That was conference. I know people that spend hundreds of days on the road a year at crypto.

31:43 - Orion (Guest)

Yeah, Yep, yeah, I certainly could. I mean I get invited to events in Bali, um, everywhere. So you know, sideshow to the world economic forum that's happening, uh, this month.

32:01 - Harrison (Host)

And you could argue, half the crypto industry is actually just creating a market for meaning and connection, because it's happened so quickly that I think those of us on or approaching the wrong side of 40 maybe don't appreciate it, because we grew up in a different world and suddenly we're in this one. If you're under 30 now, you haven't known anything different, but it used to be the case that you would live in a certain place. Your life was tied to that place. You might travel or you might know people in other places. You know, fundamentally you, you would be in one place. You would be surrounded by friends and family. Yeah, your work was something you did to make money, but you know, then you would come home and you would do something else, even that separation between work and home.

32:44

32:58

Uh, once you left the office, you know we would turn the phones. We had a physical phones. Um, you know, if anyone called the office after that, they would leave a voicemail, but we would get until the next day. If anyone sent an email after 5 PM, we wouldn't see it. So there was that. You know that work was a place that you went to, you did your thing and then you went and had the rest of your life. Now it's all intertwined. I mean, I'm I'm truly sure most people work in crypto and looking at Twitter at least five hours a day, round the clock. You're replying to messages, telegrams coming in at midnight oh, let me just get back to that and, uh, I know this is true for me. I think it's probably true for most people now who work in the space. I have those. The vast majority of my friends and network are nowhere near me physically. Uh, they, they exist online or we, you know, we see them occasionally.

33:43 - Orion (Guest)

They're not in physical space where you live right, yeah, there's an interesting, yeah, dichotomy between, like, I'm based in San Francisco and there's a real cost to doing that. I do love it and even you know, my day sometimes could be 50% talking to Singapore, japan and Hong Kong. So, yeah, it's interesting and I think, yeah, as you said, it's just as technology allows more things to be possible, the expectations shift and so, yeah, the distinction of home life like today I don't need to leave the house, but when I do, sometimes it's like I'd rather not. But I think, yeah, that's why we probably see so many more crypto events is most people are able to work from home remotely and then need to get out and see people, and you do need that face time.

34:50 - Harrison (Host)

Yeah, and I think this, as geography has stopped being a barrier. It's created different types of groups. So when everything was geographically based, even in businesses, for example, before it would have been unheard of 20 years ago for someone sitting in Europe to do recruitment in the US. Now people do it all the time. I live in Mexico. I have zero business interests in Mexico. I doubt that I ever will. It doesn't matter. It's really no different to being in the US. I can take a two hour direct flight to Austin. It actually doesn't matter.

35:25 - Orion (Guest)

It's the same time zone.

35:27 - Harrison (Host)

I love that. But yeah, and when things were more geographically bound, they also were more generic. So you know, and I I keep using recruitment as an example, just as what I know, right, but back in the early days of the recruitment industry, recruitment companies didn't specialize in things, they were just recruitment companies. They would recruit any job and then gradually they would get a little more specialized over time as the industry matured. So then you might have someone that specializes in the legal industry in the UK or something like that, and now they've got more and more hyper-specialists as geographies have grown. So now you know, the specialism might not be geographical but it is instead focused on a specific niche. Like this is a whole nother story.

36:10

But if I didn't already run a crypto recruiting firm, a niche I would be quite interested in is running a recruitment company for compiler engineers, which is an extremely difficult job function to recruit, for there's only a few thousand of these people in the world and that would absolutely be a space for a compiler recruitment company that just recruits compiler engineers all around the world.

36:27

You also see the same thing with people's social groups, so engineers all around the world. You also see the same thing with people's social groups. So you know, if your social connection was your town, you know, back in the day you would all sorts of wildly different people that you grew up with know all different ages and interests and so on, and you would get on with them. Now you know, now we have the internet people, social groups, other people who are also five foot seven and like these three interests and are interested in this thing and have these beliefs five foot seven and like these three interests and are interested in this thing and have these beliefs. You know these hyper niche groups. That wouldn't happen before and it seems that was sort of. I don't know really where I'm going with this, but I think there's a message in here for something around founders and building communities and meaning and how yeah, well, I've got one for you.

37:04 - Orion (Guest)

one of my brothers was in a facebook group dedicated to people with his exact name, so it's like as if you joined the Harrison Wright Facebook group and everyone was named Harrison Wright.

37:17 - Harrison (Host)

You know it's funny. I've had a. I don't I don't really use Facebook anymore, but I've literally had an outstanding friend request for something like 13 years now. Another Harrison Wright wanted to add me and yeah, whatever. But I remember looking on his profile one time and he'd added and I had no idea there were so many harrison rights in the world, I thought my name was unique. But yeah, he added all the harrison rights he could find.

37:37

Uh, it's kind of hilarious that's great what if we um, we kind of gone. We started talking about the macro and kind of inadvertently got onto positioning and community and these sorts of topics, but we're going to talk about strategy, at least a strategy for founders. This feels like a potentially good tie-in.

37:59 - Orion (Guest)

Yeah, yeah, definitely one of my favorite topics.

38:05

This is something I've been working with several founders on currently.

38:10

So, after founding OrangeDAO, as I mentioned, I've recently stepped away from the management of the Orange Fund and have some availability for connecting with founders to work with them on their fundraising and their company strategy, and so I think the way I think about strategy for startups is you really want to just be to make sure that you're working on the right problems and that you've defined the problem properly, and it's really a back to basics methodology that I find a lot of companies need.

38:41

You know I could rattle off many aphorisms, such as make sure you're talking to customers, but you absolutely must sound my role spending time with founders, helping them look at the largest picture of what their business can accomplish and what problems they're really solving. You know, I worked in a certain industry and they come with their perspective and they define the problems, particularly of web3 or crypto, with respect to their industry, but to see the the broadest perspective and this is where investors can add some value to of helping you get to see that and challenge the assumptions of who's the customer that you're solving this problem for and who's banging down your door to solve the problem that you're dealing with.

39:38 - Harrison (Host)

I don't even know how many hundreds of startups or potential startups you must have interacted with, but in your experience, how common is it that founders even think about the problem first? Is this common practice now? What difference do we want to make in the world? What problem are we solving? How common is it that they even think about the problem first? Is this common practice now? What difference do we want to make in the world? What problem are we solving? How common is it that they're trying to come in and say, hey, I believe in this thing, that I want to push on everybody, listen to my ideas.

40:00 - Orion (Guest)

Yeah, there is an old meme about this.

40:04

At this point, that it's.

40:05

I just learned about crypto and I'm here to fix it, and so, honestly, I struggle this with myself in terms of innovation, sometimes feeling the need to have the entire picture of all the possibility of solutions and what is getting created out there.

40:20

Um, and you really want to be able to time box that process to see who's working on what. Um, but uh, you do see it, with people who come into the space, you know, and maybe they want to offer the web three version of a web two product, that can be a great idea, but these things come in cycles and there could be other companies that aren't around anymore that already worked on that, and so for investors, the idea might be played out right and we say, oh, that's, that's from the last cycle. And so you see this sometimes where there's a real excess of, say, neobank I've not been seeing this lately but a lot of startups offering, you know, a couple of years ago there were too many offering undifferentiated financial services such as a savings account and a debit card, and, you know, some moderately high yield, single digit percent based off of crypto, and it's hard for them to cut through the noise and have a differentiated set of features. So those are getting consolidated and reorganized now.

41:27 - Harrison (Host)

Yeah, and you could also point to the. There's been so many memes and jokes go around in the house. It would seem like for a while that every day there's a new layer two launching. Yeah, yours does 10,000 TPS, ours does 10,001. And it's 3.6% cheaper, yep, do you know? I appreciate you might not know off the top of your head, but what's the? Any guesses on what percentage of crypto projects that get funded actually succeed as in get real sustainable?

42:01 - Orion (Guest)

success. We say either 90% or 95%. I think those statistics are hard to make sense of unless you know exactly like what stage we're talking about, right? And so guess that's going to depend on the macro situation of where the hype cycle is. You know, I think there's even more hype, probably with AI right now, although crypto is gaining, you know, given the current US political events, and so there is a lot of hype. As investors, I like investing in a bear market because things get quieter and the people who are still building are the real believers and you don't have to sort through as much noise of who really knows the field. No-transcript.

43:29 - Harrison (Host)

Mm-hmm, that makes sense. What have you again? This might be a gut feeling thing rather than any hard data, but I would say, broadly speaking, you have businesses of innovation and businesses of improvement. Business of innovation ie, this thing has not existed before. We're building it. And then business of improvement it's like X, but better. What have you seen? The trends in crypto as to which type of business is more likely to be successful.

43:56 - Orion (Guest)

Yeah, I think as investors. Well, I tend to refer the innovative businesses that are doing something new, right, and we can describe that as going from zero to one instead of going from one to two, where it's an innovation. But I think there is a lot of room for um, you know, the types of businesses that you know, say, web two, businesses getting moved on to web three, and these are really founder bets, right? So it's going to depend a lot on on the execution of the team and their connection. So we you know, for any founder, it's extremely helpful if you can find your advantage in going to market, because if your go-to-market plan is a list of the possible ways to go to market, it is really showing that you don't have an advantage, but you really need one, and that can be your network or your connections, your insights on the industry of where to put ads, who to talk to and how to pitch the product to customers in the right way that fits their needs.

45:15

So any type of business I want to say any type of business can be successful. I don't mean that any idea is going to succeed, but it really depends on, you know, most on the advantages and having the right team that can, that can execute on that to get the product in front of customers. And so one of the things we love hearing, that I love hearing as an investor, is I've done this before right um, when the founder says that, and um, and, and, if, if they can prove it, then then that's a really strong play, that they do have an advantage because they know what they're doing.

45:54 - Harrison (Host)

It's funny because we look for the same thing when we're hiring. There's a and I'm going a little bit philosophical here again, but something that I keep coming back to. This manifest in many contexts is a lot of the ways that people think about doing things. They don't consciously know where this sort of mental model of the world came from, but it came from a prior era where it was applicable, but it no longer is. So you know I talk about that in hiring a lot and I won't get too much into that now. But for example, you know people when they're hiring. What do they say they struggle with? They always say we struggle to find candidates, but if you actually think about it, it doesn't make any sense because everyone can find candidates. They're online. You can look at LinkedIn, you can look at Twitter. You can hire a minimum wage person in India to go make you a great list of candidates. That's not a skilled job anymore.

46:42

The reason people talk about finding candidates is 20 years ago, before we had all these internet technologies, that was the bottom line. How do you find people? There is no database of that information. We used to physically call into companies who's your sales guy for the East Coast and we'd build maps. It was a very time consuming, difficult process. Then if we did actually headhunt someone, we'd call them hey, I'm a headhunter. You'd get this reaction Wow, I've never been headhunted before and flattered. Can you imagine that now People get 20 LinkedIn messages? They are headhunting whatever.

47:15

So the mental model of finding candidates is a holdover from decades ago. That no longer holds true and it influences how people approach the entire hiring process for ill, because they have that. They don't even realize they have this poor mental model. So where I'm going with this is you think about that in terms of business and product market fit. I think product market fit is far more important than it used to be, because in a pre-internet age you could brute force a business to success in a way that you can't do now. For example, the most important skill in any B2B business until not that long ago was cold calling. You could have a room full of skilled cold callers. You could sell anything pretty much. What mattered was the quality and quantity of sales activity. That you did over and above any other factor, because you could have the best product in the world.

48:02

In a pre-internet age. No one's going to know about it unless you've got an army of people phoning people about it in B2B, in B2C you think about restaurants before we had Google reviews you could be a terrible restaurant and survive. Just put it in a tourist area, people will still come, doesn't matter how good it is. You know, I was thinking. I'm thinking of a specific experience.

48:20

I used to live in Malta, in Mediterranean obscure level country, and I was just late. One time we're trying to find someone to go for food or about to stop in this place. I looked all right, checked it up on Google Maps One star, absolutely terrible. Oh no, I'm not going there. And I looked more into it because it was fascinating, because the stories were horrendous, right, but they'd been around for decades and I think they used to be successful because nobody had Google reviews, so they would go and eat a terrible meal but there were enough people coming in to make it viable. And I think now, if you have a bad product, everyone finds out about it. You need these viral growth loops built on fundamental problem solving, because all the competition is exposed in public now and all the value is accruing to the best teams, versus being more distributed by who's doing the sales and marketing activity.

49:14 - Orion (Guest)

For founders building software. You're really going to need to optimize for that, that stickiness, and it can be just yeah hard to get attention. Um, I say hard, but it's really, um, you know it depends. It depends on your positioning. And once you get them in, how does the product meet their need? It's really hard to tell from a screenshot. Letting people try the product is the best way to see. Everything should be an experiment. And how can you adjust and how can you make them happier and find what your customers really need?

49:49 - Harrison (Host)

Speaking of what customers really need. What do you think we can learn from the whole Solana Ethereum debacle?

49:58 - Orion (Guest)

Yeah, I think I'm a long time. You know ETH maxi, as it were. I'd say not to the exclusion of other chains, but as being a diehard believer, and I think I see for a lot of folks that that's crumbling a little bit right now. I think we've often said in the past, like with Ethereum, it's about the culture and that it's this strong technical focus and the ethos around Vitalik, but I think it's wearing out, and so I think the reason that some of this is wearing out, what do these customers really need? At the end of the day, there's a simplicity to it, which is people want to see the price appreciate so that their trust and faith by holding the token is going to be rewarded. People are not seeing that, and so it's rather banal, rather simple, um, but, but I think that's a. That's a big part of the issue, right, and the culture would feel better if it um, if it kept moving. So there's this interesting tie-in where, um, you know, the culture only takes you so far and, and I think over the last, well, I don't have the data.

51:13

If you pull up the chart, you have the data, right of utility and a lot of community and really stylizing themselves as one of the key meme coin chains. I think base has done really well in that respect too, you know. And then the Trump coin that basically broke Solana last week is really kind of a culmination for that right, and so you know, if you missed it, the ETH or Solana price shot up from 200 about all the way to 280, right, and so this was well whatever gain. That is 30 or 40% and it's backed down a bit, but it just makes it an exciting place to be, and I think Ethereum is losing some of that and that maybe it's been too technically focused, and I see people saying, well, you know that they're not focused on the right things, they're not aggressively growing enough, and so that's been interesting, and I think we've seen even some limitations in Vitalik's posts of their, you know, the ability to deal with this in a vibes positive way.

52:34 - Harrison (Host)

Yeah, it's an interesting thing, right? Because I'll openly say I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this on other episodes I did not remotely predict the Salama comeback at all. That took me completely by surprise. I thought it was dead a couple of years back, whenever it was I really did Ethereum.

52:51

You know, philosophically and as a product, I think I personally much prefer Ethereum. But if you, hey, you know, load up, load up Radium, load up a Phantom wallet actually use Solana apps. They're so good, yeah, they're so much easier to use than Ethereum apps, the whole layer. Two thing from a UX perspective, I could bridge to there, and even you know maybe this is just me being ignorant and I should be more knowledgeable about actually using crypto products but how do I ever figure out what gas fee I need to send? Well, transaction's not working. Okay, let's try increasing the gas fee a bit more. Let's try again.

53:25

It's just very unintuitive to use and I think the lesson I take from this which is much easier in retrospect than to predict it. But you know, solana kind of knows what it is, what it's for, who it's for and what it does, and it does what that thing very well. I don't think solana is the answer to crypto as a whole, um, but for the one, the one thing it's designed for, it's exceptionally good at. And then you've got eth Ethereum, where it almost feels like the people behind Ethereum are trying to dictate what people should want. They're not listening anymore. They're sort of in their ivory tower. We know better than you. We think we should want this, whereas that's not how markets work. It's more like an aristocracy than a merchant approach.

54:06 - Orion (Guest)

Yeah, and I think that held back Ethereum and Bitcoin from the early days. I say that I mean ideology and religiosity around decentralized values, and I think that's just coming into play for Ethereum right now.

54:22 - Harrison (Host)

Maybe, behind all the frustrations and drama and so on, maybe crypto is starting to grow up and how to run real businesses.

54:32 - Orion (Guest)

Yeah, I mean I will say I've enjoyed trading on Solana for a while, and in particular recently, and I've been trying out more tools beyond just trading but also, you know, contributing to liquidity pools and staking and a lot of stuff just feels easier and faster and it's nice. So I remember getting really involved on Ethereum three or four years ago. Sometimes transaction fees were $60 to $90 and just to do anything.

55:10 - Harrison (Host)

55:47 - Orion (Guest)

Yeah, I think I guess what I'm thinking about right now from our conversation is to for founders to really, uh, give yourself the time to step back and think about your business and do everything as an experiment, um, usually by talking to customers, um, and and really make time for that, because otherwise time can slip by. And so, you know, time boxing works on an hour or day scale, um, but for any project like hey, we think consumers are going to love this feature or product we're launching, you want to time box that too, to be able to set expectations and learn from it.

56:31 - Harrison (Host)

What's that? There was a quote that I had one time, and I can't remember the source, but it was like markets are extremely selfish, so if you insist on being selfish, too, you have no chance. The market wants what it wants. Better deliver, orion. It's been a real pleasure having you here. Thank you so much for everyone listening. Thanks for tuning in to the Blockchain Startup Show. We'll be back again soon, ryan. One last thing before we go.

56:57 - Orion (Guest)

How can someone get in touch with you if they'd like to? Yeah, you can reach me on Telegram at Oparot. That's parrot with two R's and two T's O-P-A-R-R-O-T-T.

57:07 - Harrison (Host)

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure to have you All right. Thanks a lot.

57:12 - Orion (Guest)

It's been a pleasure.