Crypto's Service Industry: A Survival Guide w/ Kevin Simback (Delphi Labs)

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome back to the Strange Water Podcast. Thank you for joining us for today's conversation.

[00:00:24] A few weeks ago I was browsing through Twitter when I saw a post by Delphi Labs Chief Operating Officer Kevin Symbach, which read,

[00:00:34] over the past two plus years at Delphi Labs, I've interacted with hundreds of firms who provide various services to Web 3 companies and I've got notes on all of them.

[00:00:46] I'm talking law firms, accounting and payroll, banks, auditing firms, outsource dev shops, market makers in OTC desks, exchanges, recruiters, marketing agencies, custodians, KYC providers, and many others.

[00:01:02] One benefit you get from being part of an accelerator is the ability to tap into all of this and to save a ton of time not having to research all these various firms and figure out which one is good for you.

[00:01:15] Happy to share my notes with builders who want to save some time on these topics.

[00:01:21] As I read this tweet, I was struck by how much it goes into building a business that isn't just about bleeding edge technology or next generation financial markets.

[00:01:33] Building a company is about organizing a specific group of people, skills and assets towards a specific mission, all while operating under a highly constrained set of resources and time.

[00:01:47] And so inevitably every founder must ask themselves, when should I outsource? Why should I outsource? And of course how do I outsource?

[00:02:02] Over the next hour, I do my best to pick Kevin's brain on some of the most important rules and pitfalls of working with professional services like lawyers, accountants, and recruiters.

[00:02:16] And is often apt to happen when exploring the bleeding edge of technology. We'll also look into how blockchain might have huge implications for some of the way, not only web three companies but all companies may interact with professional services in the future.

[00:02:36] One more thing before we begin, please do not take financial advice from this or any podcast.

[00:02:44] Ethereum will change the world one day, but you can easily lose all of your money between now and then.

[00:02:53] Alright, let's go to Kevin.

[00:03:01] Kevin, thank you so much for joining us on the Strange Water podcast.

[00:03:04] Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

[00:03:06] So before we dive too deep, I would love to just hear a little bit about your background, how you found crypto, and what brought you to Delphi.

[00:03:13] I come from a pretty conventional background. I'm a good bit older than most people in crypto, and I had a pretty long career before I officially got into the space.

[00:03:22] I started off in tech back in the calm days. I got a taste for my first really speculative bubble trading stocks back then. And then after the crash, I ended up in business school and found my way into finance.

[00:03:35] And from there, I went into consulting, did that for a bunch of years. Mostly with some big trade five firms on a bunch of different types of projects.

[00:03:43] Then I went into big tech for a little while. I was a Fortune 500 executive for a bit and then also worked as a COO at a smaller SaaS Fintech company.

[00:03:51] So just a bunch of different experiences leading in crypto.

[00:03:56] I guess the bottom line is sort of I've been around the block in a bunch of different ways. And I guess, you know, somewhere along that old journey that I just described, I cut wind of Bitcoin probably like 2014, 2015 era and the idea of it just really resonated with me on a personal level.

[00:04:13] But I guess to my financial detriment, I didn't take it too seriously.

[00:04:17] It was kind of like early to the space, but not really early to buy into it. And then sort of same things during the ICO era, I was a spectator, but again, I didn't really take it too seriously.

[00:04:29] It wasn't until D5 became a thing that it really started to click for me, that there was something much bigger here. And so I just started falling down the rabbit hole. And as you probably know, once you get far enough down, it's really hard to come back out.

[00:04:43] And so as I was going down there, part of my educational process along the way, I was reading the Delphi reports and listening to their podcast among a few others.

[00:04:54] And I had a lot of respect for what those guys were doing. And when the Delphi labs founders were looking for a COO, it just seemed like a really good fit.

[00:05:03] So the past like say two years in change, I've been in that role. And for the listeners that maybe aren't familiar with Delphi, there's actually three separate companies.

[00:05:13] They all operate under the same shared brand. There's Delphi digital. That's the research unit. And that's where Delphi all started.

[00:05:21] There's Delphi Ventures. That's the crypto native VC. And then Delphi labs, which is essentially a venture studio where we incubate and accelerate new crypto projects. And that's where I spend the majority of my time.

[00:05:32] So after joining, you know, officially joining into crypto, I had the pleasure of enjoying a few months before the bear cycle started. And then, you know, of course, have done a lot of work through that whole bear cycle.

[00:05:44] And now kind of feeling really good about having this conversation on a somewhat important day is Bitcoin is sort of tapping along the all time high. So it's been a pretty well ride to say the least.

[00:05:54] Cool. So thank you for the background on Delphi. And I think that where I'd like to start this conversation is to really like unpack what it means to be a COO in this industry and at a place like Delphi.

[00:06:09] And I think maybe we can start high level for in such an entrepreneurial industry. Many people might not be aware of what achieve operating officer kind of does on a day to day.

[00:06:20] But can you just describe a little bit about like what your job is and how that makes like the Delphi construction, like run smoother than it fit was like really just about like innovation and like moving forward as opposed to operations.

[00:06:37] So the CO role that I play is a little bit different like there's a aspect of it that is traditional COO responsibilities.

[00:06:46] That's kind of running all the business operations that includes things like finance and accounting, you know, the whole HR process and managing the people working on various projects working with different service providers.

[00:06:57] So doing all that stuff internally on behalf of Delphi labs, but as an incubator and accelerator.

[00:07:05] You know we create new project teams around what we're building and each of those new project teams ultimately the goal is to have them spin out will be their own entity that's funded.

[00:07:16] And we have to go through the sort of setup of all their business operations as well and some of those might be a little bit different depending on the type of product that they're building some of them have different needs and different services than others.

[00:07:29] So part of my role as well is to work with these project teams to help kind of advance their setup of their business operations and then make sure that they're in a fully functional and operational as they move about their life cycle.

[00:07:43] That's super interesting because like not only do you have the, I guess opportunity to like run operations for your company but you kind of get this opportunity to try new things to iterate and to be a mini CEO like over and over and over again.

[00:07:59] And I guess my question to you is to problem question one when you're comparing the work you do in web three and in crypto versus the operational roles you had in like web two and more traditional finance.

[00:08:13] What are like kind of the big differences and I think like the follow up question to that would be what are some of the like the more nuanced differences that you're starting to pick up because you have this kind of unique opportunity to be a mini COO for a bunch of different kind of like portfolio companies.

[00:08:32] I think just having been in the space now a little bit and seen it as we've worked with about a dozen companies in the past two plus years.

[00:08:39] What doesn't get enough credit in crypto is just how truly hard it is to be a founder in this space.

[00:08:46] Like people that have never done it they just see token prices going crazy and they really just don't appreciate the work that goes into getting there.

[00:08:54] Like for a founding team in crypto you have all the struggles that a traditional start up out.

[00:08:59] You got to get investors, you got a higher talent, you got to build products, you got to find product market fit all that stuff but with crypto you have this added dimension of managing a token community and you know assuming you have a live token like that sort of like asking an early stage tech company to go public and then have that startup team manage the process of reporting earnings handling Wall Street analyst calls dealing with shareholders.

[00:09:23] And it's all that much crazier in crypto because it's 24 seven.

[00:09:27] And so there's an obvious reason why companies don't go public really early on.

[00:09:32] It's just very consuming and so in crypto it's just really friggin hard and for all the builders out there I just want to really acknowledge that that it is super hard.

[00:09:42] And so like that's kind of the macro higher level differences of crypto and you know non crypto space.

[00:09:49] You asked about some of the nuances in there and I'll just touch on a few.

[00:09:54] Like first of all on the hiring side of things I found that hiring people is just it's a different beast in crypto.

[00:10:02] The traditional resumes just don't give the same signals as they would often in non crypto industries.

[00:10:10] I've seen people that have you know liabilities in a maybe a traditional context those can sometimes be assets in crypto and depending on the quality there.

[00:10:20] So there's just a bunch of different things that you have to do and think about an approach differently for something is basic is hiring talent on your team.

[00:10:29] And in a non crypto world you likely go to recruiters depending on the size of your company maybe you have an internal recruiter or an HR team that handles all that stuff they're going to go out linked in.

[00:10:41] They're going to kind of ping a bunch of people that fit various criteria and they'll just kick off the process that way.

[00:10:46] And that just fundamentally doesn't work in crypto so you have to figure out kind of this new way of hiring.

[00:10:52] I mean it's much more common to get a job in crypto via interacting on Twitter and that's just something that you don't necessarily see very much outside of crypto.

[00:11:03] So this is just one of the the nuances that you have there.

[00:11:06] The other one is just like from a basic business operational standpoint, it can be really hard for some startups to get things like basic bank accounts depends on where the company may be incorporated in the background of the team and things like that.

[00:11:20] But it can often be hard and so just basic things like how do you set up and figure out how you're going to pay your AWS bill or if you've got other tools that you're trying to use, you know Slack or other internal productivity tools.

[00:11:34] Who's paying the credit card bill on that? If you don't have a bank account for your project team because many banks obviously don't want to deal with crypto projects.

[00:11:43] And so it things like that that should be there are really simple and easy for most regular startups can be challenging for a crypto startup.

[00:11:51] And so there's just a couple of them. I mean, we could keep on going down this list but like it there's not many things that you do that are easier in crypto on that regard to like running a business than they are in the traditional world.

[00:12:05] So like right off the bat, you're in a disadvantage. It's just harder kind of goes back to that macro picture of like it's just hard being a builder in crypto.

[00:12:14] Well, I guess just to push you on this a little bit, I think my question to you is like there has to be some stuff that's like a little bit easier in crypto and the things that I would imagine are like on the one hand, you have to manage a community on the other hand,

[00:12:28] it's a lot easier to gather a group of people that have like a financial stake then just maybe some sort of brand affiliation.

[00:12:35] To that effect, we have access to capital markets in a way that until you're being emphasized like you really don't intradify.

[00:12:44] Are there any like maybe small maybe nuance maybe even like not that big a deal things but any points where you see like building a company in crypto has some advantages?

[00:12:57] Yeah, I think one of the biggest advantages is just how token incentives can work to accelerate a company or a product beyond like what you do in a traditional sense.

[00:13:08] It's very uncommon to find suicide normal tech startup and to have their early users be such for the evangelist of what they're building and going out and tweeting every day about the product and the company and the founders and like all of that stuff, you just don't see it.

[00:13:25] You don't see that same excitement. It makes sense because they don't have a ton of incentive to do that.

[00:13:30] They're paying for a service most likely maybe if they're early, they're getting you know a discount or they're getting some early access to things but when you throw in the token incentives all of sudden those early users can be

[00:13:42] a true evangelist of your product and they can do a lot of the marketing for you.

[00:13:47] And sometimes that can just help jumpstart the flywheel.

[00:13:51] Like ultimately you're trying to get enough users to prove out if you have product market fit.

[00:13:57] And in some cases that can take a couple of years to play out in web too, but you could potentially short circuit that and have it play out in a matter of a couple of weeks or months in crypto because you have such a rapid feedback loop.

[00:14:11] Built in because of the incentives with your product and sorry last question before we'll move us into the services conversation.

[00:14:18] But do you think that this like hyper quick feedback loop and financialization?

[00:14:24] Does this put crypto founders on a shorter timeline or or does it not affect the timeline from a like Web 2 or traditional startup founder in terms of the expectations from VCs?

[00:14:37] Yeah I mean comparing crypto to you know traditional tech investment that the timeframe is definitely shorter.

[00:14:44] I mean people are looking investors are often looking for liquidity events with a token unlock in a matter of a couple of years versus in traditional web 2 you might have a much longer you know 10 year type horizon.

[00:14:57] I think as a result you know this space moves super fast and you are probably going to know within a much shorter period of time whether what you're building is actually going to work and is going to create some value for those investors.

[00:15:12] And so generally speaking I think that the runway tends to be a little bit shorter, but it does depend on what you're building.

[00:15:20] So somebody that's building something like a truly differentiated or unique infrastructure level type project.

[00:15:27] I mean that can take multiple years could have you know good bit of R&D upfront to truly try to build and prove that out.

[00:15:34] Versus something that is you know a bit more simple in concept you know that's something that you may be able to deploy and find out within a matter of months whether it's got legs.

[00:15:45] Makes sense and I like just a very quick story like I do know that Sri Ram Kanan of Eigenlayer was working on pre Eigenlayer it was called layer labs and he was working on that like before the pandemic even so I think to your point maybe in general our timelines are accelerated but like we also have space for like big ideas

[00:16:07] and we also have like VCs that understand that like sometimes things just need to cook and you know is generalized but like it really comes down to like individual stories and people and players and like plays.

[00:16:19] Yeah I agree completely.

[00:16:21] Alright so let's pivot into the meat of this conversation which is about like how crypto companies can effectively use services companies.

[00:16:32] So again this is like kind of what you referenced in your tweet and what I'd love to talk to you about but before we get into like how do you effectively communicate with like a law firm a recruiting firm an agency these kinds of things.

[00:16:45] Let's start with the big question which is like how do I think about which parts of the business I'm trying to build should be brought in house and I should hire people and dedicate my resources towards versus like how do I see a business problem that really should be addressed by

[00:17:01] you know like an external person that I'm just going to pay to take care of this.

[00:17:06] Yeah it's a great question and I think every tech company faces the same question not just crypto specific but in general I think early on that founding team needs to be hyper focused on building a product and evolving towards being able to find out if they have product market fit.

[00:17:26] And everything else that they're doing to run that business if it can be outsourced or procured from a service provider it's probably worthy of consideration and then you know sometimes the cost of going with somebody outside is just doesn't make sense because you could do it in house.

[00:17:43] If you hired somebody and just had them focus on that so you know it depends on the situation some areas you absolutely need to go out and get somebody outside.

[00:17:54] Because you just wouldn't ever expect to have that expertise in house like for example when you're early on I mean you're going to go to law firms and accounting firms and specialists like that to help you as you evolve.

[00:18:07] So I think again it's very situational it depends on the project the level of funding that they have and what they're trying to do but I tend to take a perspective that if it's not really core to your product.

[00:18:19] I give it is not going to be something that you're differentiating on or creating a different type of experience for your users based on it.

[00:18:27] Then you might as well just not reinvent the wheel find the best service provider that works for you and bring them in.

[00:18:34] Now that said like that takes time it takes effort you have to step away from coding and building and start to look around and say okay I need to incorporate let's say you know a KYC element like if you're doing something that involves honor offer.

[00:18:48] So the need for KYC are you going to go build a KYC solution from scratch probably not there are other companies that specialize in this so unless again you're trying to do something in a totally differentiated way.

[00:19:01] It's probably best to go work with one of those service providers and when you do that though like it is can be an I've seen this happen many times where founders sort of get a little bit overwhelmed by that because now they're like okay how do I figure out who are the right firms

[00:19:16] and then I've got to go reach out teach one of them I've got to learn about their product and how much it cost and you know how they could integrate with us.

[00:19:24] And they've got to go down this whole exploratory pathway that takes them away from building the core product that they're trying to build.

[00:19:31] And I kind of get I'll make the parallel to some of my pre crypto days where you had oftentimes groups that manage vendors within the company and you would go to them and say hey we're looking for a provider to do X and they would come back and say okay you know here's the short list of five providers we've

[00:19:49] vetted two of them to these three like they help short circuit that whole process for you but is a small crypto founder trying to build like you've got to go figure all that stuff out on your own and that's what takes out a lot of time.

[00:20:02] And that's again you know part of why I posted what I did is just that when you work with an accelerator where you partner you know with a team like what we do at Delify Labs, you generally get the benefit of all of you know the network of service providers

[00:20:17] that they've already worked with or you know explored and can often help save a ton of time by just saying okay if you want to look at KYC providers like here's the top three you know I can reach out make introductions to each one of them gets you on a demo call in the next couple of days and then you'll you know be fully up to speed.

[00:20:36] And so that that sort of process I think is what oftentimes can take a ton of time out of the founders days that they would otherwise be building product and where I would generally say don't reinvent the wheel just find somebody who's been there and done that and like get their knowledge from them and then pick up from there.

[00:20:58] Yeah that makes a lot of sense and I think we're definitely going to spend some time talking about like how to find the right professional for you and spoiler alert it's networking.

[00:21:08] But before we get to that, I just want to like kind of unpack that a little bit more like I think the perfect example is lawyers right where even the most like sophisticated well the most sophisticated biggest firms like have like entire in house legal teams but you have to be pretty big.

[00:21:27] In order to like justify that or directly related to legal stuff and so it's like really easy when you're starting a startup just to make the decision that you know the legal aspects are not part of our core competency and so we're going to go find a trusted lawyer who's going to like basically take care of this for us and and based on everything you said like that totally makes sense to me like awesome but what I'm thinking about are these moments where early on in a conversation.

[00:21:56] So early on in a company you make it a pragmatic decision because like you don't know anything about legal you just want to be moving forward you just want to be working on tech and you don't like put the like the real time and energy and resources into like managing your external vendor like they're an internal team.

[00:22:18] So that's my question to you is like for example when you're thinking about hiring an external team like a legal team should you be thinking about also hiring people to like manage those relationships like how do you think about incorporating your external teams into like the company you're trying to build and not as like this more just transactional we take something from them we walk away and then when it breaks in six months like what do we do.

[00:22:45] Good question. I don't know that there's any just straightforward answer to that because again so much this stuff is situational teams that have the resources and are funded to a level that they can have people internally that can manage some of those relationships and be able to have the time to go and interact as much with say outside counsel for various strategic conversations that oftentimes you know are not being had like that's a luxury and not all the teams have that luxury.

[00:23:13] I think law is just a very unique element of crypto and there's a there's a big gap that we've seen and I'm very thankful to have worked alongside Gabe Shapiro who's been the general counsel of Delphi Labs for a while you know he's one of the top crypto lawyers and he's seen this gap for quite some time too

[00:23:32] and is I'll drop a little bit of alpha here but he's forming a new startup that we're incubating called metallics and it is kind of a combination of where tech meets law and it is designed to solve in a more repeatable fashion some of the common challenges that crypto start up space around legal

[00:23:49] and so you can go get some general crypto start up strategy advice but you can also get some products that are going to be pre designed to solve common problems that we believe should be industry standard type solutions for some of this stuff.

[00:24:03] So when he comes to law and like the gray area around that you absolutely as a builder want to have relationships with somebody that you could have general conversations with and understands what you're trying to build

[00:24:17] and where some of the legal landmines may exist based on what you're building and it could be something as nuanced as who's on the multi-sig and how is that multi-sig being managed if it has say upgrade authority over smart contracts they control user funds.

[00:24:33] So there's some things like that that often teams probably are not thinking about unless they have a really good lawyer who's advising them on strategy

[00:24:42] not just there to provide a transaction like we have a funding round can you do some term sheet and deal docs for us or you know we need to craft a legal agreement for confidentiality or something like that.

[00:24:55] You need to have somebody who can talk to you can talk to on a legal strategic level.

[00:25:01] Now that to me internally like that's not the job of somebody unless you have a general counsel it's that's really the job of the the founding team and probably the head of product to be involved in those types of conversations.

[00:25:14] So who internally manages some of these external relationships with service providers is going to depend a bit on what they're building and the stage and the resources of that project.

[00:25:25] But I think it is important to have those types of relationships that are not as transactional because oftentimes the service providers have seen so many different situations some may be very similar to what you're doing and they often you know have good input on how you're going about doing what you're doing they could save you time or money or some headaches down the road.

[00:25:45] Yeah for sure and I totally point taken like in startup world like the name of the game really is scarcity and resources and making and founders making decisions and like that's the difference between a maker break start up right it's never the idea to always the execution.

[00:25:59] And so like I totally hear you that these are hard problems to solve and like if you have the luxury of dedicating people to manage these relationships you should consider that but that's a luxury.

[00:26:09] I think so let's just start progressing through the professionals and since we spent so much time talking about legal will start here so first on when we're working with legal professionals like my first start like the most important question is in crypto how much more important is it to be engaging and working with like lawyers while you're building you're getting your company off the ground versus.

[00:26:37] Companies that don't have like an integral tie to a alternative financial system I guess my question is like for founders that are just starting what is your advice to them on like when to start engaging with you know the protective part of the legal system.

[00:26:53] It is early as possible and I say that meaning it is early as you have the resources to engage with good outside council you want to do so there's just so many gotchas or landmines that you might face and the further along you getting your journey of a product the more those things that you're going to be planting along the way they could blow up for you in the future.

[00:27:14] So that's the relation to things like how are you dealing with the equity for the founders and how are tokens going to be granted in a way that could be tax optimized because I've seen teams that have gotten too forward on the path.

[00:27:29] And then it's time for them to get their nice big team allocation of tokens and they realize they've got this massive tax liability that they can't really avoid had they thought about that much earlier in the process they probably could have saved themselves quite a bit of headache and you know being a much better financial state.

[00:27:45] The same thing goes for developing on the product side you could implement your product depending on what you're building only to find out a little bit later that for example the way you've rolled out your decentralized governance has got all sorts of exposure points to potential regulatory issues and if you engage with somebody early on about how you were going to proceed with decentralizing your protocol you might have found a different pathway that would not be in the process.

[00:28:15] So I think that's probably one of the most important things that a team in crypto can be doing is just making sure that they have really good legal counsel and that legal strategy is something that's not just transactional or point in time base but it's something that you will absorb through multiple interactions over time.

[00:28:37] And it will get you into a mindset of starting to think about like are we creating any sort of legal exposure whenever you try to do something new and even as simple as I'm putting out a roadmap for my project is that even giving us some regulatory exposure that we should be thinking about.

[00:28:55] I think most teams that aren't really engaged on the legal side of things tend to miss a lot of the stuff or take it for granted or just kind of have the naivety to not really know that they're creating exposure when you know they most likely are.

[00:29:09] Yeah, I used to work for a giant company like the second largest consumer product goods company in the world and I remember my relationship with lawyers like I love lawyers and I felt like I was the only one in that whole company that had positive things to say but I feel like if you come to a lawyer.

[00:29:25] I'm just a lawyer with the attitude of this is what I'm going to do now help me do it in a way that's not illegal versus like all these guys all they do is say no it.

[00:29:36] Like you can recognize that lawyers are there to help you're paying them they want to help you and it should be like a collaborative.

[00:29:43] So this is how we achieve your goals conversation and not like a like you suck don't do this like I if you want my name on it you're basically not to ruin your product.

[00:29:52] And so I think like you're totally right it's about engaging early but it's also about engaging right and finding like a relationship where like it's the lawyers supposed to be on your team you should if you ever feel like you're fighting with your lawyer like there's a problem there.

[00:30:08] I mean at the end of the day as a builder and a founder you're responsible for your decisions legal should be an input and ideally it's a trusted well received input.

[00:30:19] It doesn't mean you have to always listen to every bit of legal advice that you get but you should build a judgment along the way to know when to truly follow what they're saying by the word and when to sort of take the principle of what they're trying to tell you and use that is sort of a guiding principle for how you're building and running the company.

[00:30:38] So I guess joke earlier that we'll talk about how to find like good lawyers and the answer is networking and I would if you have a better answer than that like I would love to hear it but I think the more interesting question here is can you help us understand like if you're interviewing law firms or lawyers like what are some things that either in the interview process or down the line like you know

[00:31:05] are like major major red flags and like what are the things that you should be like looking out for on the negative side when you're like considering getting into a working relationship with a lawyer.

[00:31:17] When I think about any service provider that you're going to use I mean the number one thing that I tend to do myself when I'm evaluating them and recommend other startups to do the same is to ask who else has used them and if you don't know anyone that's used them

[00:31:33] that should be part of your initial conversation with them tell me about what other companies in the crypto space have you worked with and if possible get them to introduce you to someone at that firm so that you can get a sense from them directly just like you would do a reference check on somebody you're thinking about hiring.

[00:31:51] You want to reference check vendors you want to find out who's been down in the trenches with them because sometimes when you commit to a solution or you commit to a law firm for example it's not easy to just pick up and switch and go to somebody else so it's just a lot easier to figure out who's been there and had time with them and what were their experiences so that's absolutely number one is just do that reference check.

[00:32:19] You know the second thing is to understand whether or not the service provider is crypto native or do they happen to serve projects in crypto as like a little niche segment alongside all these other traditional businesses because you'll suddenly want to know how important are you going to be to the service provider and chances are if you're working with a big company you're not going to be very important unless you are a big well funded startup.

[00:32:46] And that may not be a big deal but it may if it's something this time sensitive and you need to get things from them and they're you know prioritizing other customers ahead of you so just understand how important are you going to be to them as a customer and whether or not there's somebody that's serving the crypto industry in a very specific way meaning they know crypto or just happen to service crypto alongside many other industries.

[00:33:13] And then again like it depends on the situation but like if you're talking to a law firm that you want to engage in strategy for ongoing legal advice as opposed to something like handling a fundraise you want to know do they do they get crypto and you know simple things like passing them personally what are some of the crypto projects that they engage with or you know what are some projects that are exciting to them and just going to see

[00:33:42] what they say like is this a lawyer that I might be getting ongoing strategic advice from have they been down there and you know are they doing you know DGN things online chain or are they are they really getting crypto or they just happen to be in a performing law for crypto companies.

[00:34:02] So that's another thing as well like how how well do they know crypto and some of the unique aspects of what you're probably going to bring to them.

[00:34:12] So I'd love for you to answer this question in the context of like law firms but also just in general and you'll see it's not that applicable to like tech integrations but when you're interviewing a service provider do you think about interviewing

[00:34:26] the company or the firm or do you think about interviewing like the individual that you're going to be working with.

[00:34:32] It's a little bit of both I mean if you are let's say looking for a good accountant somebody that can help you you know file what might be fairly complicated taxes involving crypto and whatever jurisdiction you're in it's really going to come down to whoever's your contact it's going to be doing your taxes.

[00:34:49] The firm is probably a little less important than it is the person other things like if you're you know I mentioned earlier that KYC vendor if you're going to use a product that you're going to integrate into what your offering is and especially if it has any bearing on the customer experience of what you're trying to deliver then it's much more about the firm and the product and what they're going to offer you versus the person oftentimes you probably interacted with.

[00:35:17] Customer success managers or your service representative from you know one of these Web2 productivity type products they will interchange those every six months to a year like it's just it really doesn't matter who's in that role you just need to go ask a question I can't do this what's the problem or how can you help me do this as long as somebody answers that question you're fine but when you're talking about clear bespoke services that you know I think like law and I think that's not the right thing.

[00:35:47] And accounting fit into that you really want to get the right person and that's where it's important.

[00:35:53] So I think this is a good pivot point to move on to the next service which is account or accounting and I think that for this first question you've already given us a lot of answers in this in the previous segment but I would like to know what does it mean what is a good crypto accountant and how do you find one and I'll remind you and remind the audience that so far what we already know is we start with reference.

[00:36:17] We start with our network and then we look to make sure that these firms are you know focus on crypto or crypto native and not just like this is like one pet project of one guy there that like he's willing to do it for you so without his background like what do you look for when you're looking for a crypto accountant.

[00:36:36] Yeah I mean I think you can hit the general idea there somebody that's going to be doing your accounting a lot of times they're just going to say all right send me the general ledger.

[00:36:46] Send me your P and L and balance sheet and then they'll go off and they'll do some stuff and then they'll put some draft statements back in front of you and you kind of hope that that's all good and you sign off and they get submitted.

[00:36:57] In crypto just producing a general ledger if you've got a bunch of on chain transactions like if you've got a treasury that's your managing on chain and you've got different forms of potential income on that treasury you've got transactions in crypto how are you generating an integrated general ledger that includes your bank.

[00:37:15] Financial transactions in your crypto transactions in a way that's.

[00:37:20] Disciproble to somebody that's going to do your your accounting like that sometimes is two different people or at least two different sets of work that you have to.

[00:37:32] Have done you got to do the general ledger first part of it and then you've got to you know have somebody run the it be accounting for it.

[00:37:41] If any of the listeners know great recommendations on the accounting side i'm always you know open for it.

[00:37:48] You're probably not going to get this from into the big four it's just not their core business unless you're a really you know big crypto company in a that you could afford you know one of them you're most likely going with a small shop that's specialized in whatever jurisdiction where you're located and incorporated and you can sometimes get recommendations from your law firm.

[00:38:10] Like that's a good source they usually are connected with the count so they may be a good place to start and ask for some recommendations and again you know go through your network and see you know who's got some good recommendations.

[00:38:22] I will say accounting firms tend to be the most capacity constrained of all this providers they obviously have a lot of bulk of their work is being done in you know a portion of the year and it's very very common particularly and you know what I'm saying.

[00:38:39] I'm not going to ask you all like for a personal recommendation because I am very aware that there's like six crypto accountants on this planet and all of them have like decades long wait list but I do think that I guess my question to you is I have my own perspective on this but when you think about it

[00:39:08] and you know what I mean is that kind of a cost that needs to be done and you kind of like deprioritize it just make sure it gets done.

[00:39:19] Or when you think about finding a good account is that like something that's critically important like the best accountant is at like a hundred ex contributor like how important is this decision for building the business.

[00:39:31] This really isn't that important and especially for early stage smaller startups it's really not I mean chances are your financial statements are going to be fairly simple you're probably going to have some on chain activity so the most time consuming part is just going to be putting them together into a general ledger

[00:39:50] and at that point you know you give it to somebody they can do it for you it's not a game changer for you I think the only thing that you want to really be aware of is just making sure you're not creating any sort of financial liabilities as you go about doing things and not understanding the tax consequences that might come from certain actions

[00:40:10] and so that you're not hit with a liability after the years over that you now have no way of dealing with other than you know paying the tax ban.

[00:40:19] The last piece of the puzzle on the finance side that I wanted to talk to you about is banking and like this is just like the very traditional bread and butter like my company is going to make some revenue it needs to go somewhere that revenue needs to like pay out to you know cogs it needs to pay out to my employees it needs to pay

[00:40:40] out to insurance that eventually gets turned into income which were in startup world so that'll probably be reinvested but maybe not so much today in March 2024 but at different points it has been incredibly difficult for crypto related enterprises to like have access to the banking system.

[00:41:00] So first question is do you think that just like the ease and the willingness of banks to deal with us is changing at all and to follow that up like what do you think it means to find a good crypto bank?

[00:41:14] Well that landscape changed quite dramatically last year and I went through that personally because one of the banks the primary banks that we used at Delphi Labs was part of that set within the US that got sort of shut down you know

[00:41:29] in that whole spring time frame last year and so it was a challenging situation for us just seeing very suddenly that a banking partner that we use is no longer going to be available and now we've got to go find another one.

[00:41:44] And depending on where you're incorporated it can take quite a while to get set up on a bank particularly one that's on US rails.

[00:41:52] So I think it is something that is really underappreciated is how hard it is to get a banking partner just to do basic things but what I'm also seeing is that after in the wake of the SVB and some of the others that crashed you had a couple of banks in the US at least step up that said hey we'll service this niche because we saw how you know important that business was to those previous banks.

[00:42:19] So those stepped up which was great to see at the same time I think we're starting to see service providers that will enable projects to spend almost everything on chain and then they'll handle the conversion to Fiat rails.

[00:42:34] So for example if you're a project you get funded in let's say USDC you hold it in a multi-sig or in some custodian.

[00:42:42] You can link that up to some service providers now that will allow you to generally pre fund a USDC account and you can set up virtual debit cards from that you can send USD wire and ACH payments from that most of them are working on international wire capabilities

[00:42:59] and so you can very soon in some cases already can operate without a bank account as a project in this space.

[00:43:08] All you need is the ability to pre fund some accounts with stables in USDC.

[00:43:14] So there's many more solutions like that that are available today that weren't available a year or two years ago.

[00:43:19] So I think now this is becoming easier but it is just a function of kind of understanding the landscape of who offers those types of services.

[00:43:27] What's the process for getting set up with a service you based on where you're located and how you're set up?

[00:43:33] But I think it's probably the better option to go with if you're a young startup than trying to go down the path of getting traditionally US bank account especially if you're not incorporated in the US.

[00:43:46] If you're incorporated in the US it's usually pretty straightforward.

[00:43:50] So I'm kind of excited and this is a space that I keep my eyes open for our projects that are building to enable crypto companies to be able to transact in both Fiat and various international

[00:44:03] international trend fire rails without ever having to have like a traditional Fiat bank account.

[00:44:09] So sorry let me repeat back to you just to make sure I got it. Are you saying that if you're a US incorporated company like yeah maybe you'll have to argue with a few bankers but honestly it's not that big of a deal even if you're a crypto company.

[00:44:22] And if whether or not your US incorporated or not like we're starting to get to a point where there's a lot of other like banking adjacent solutions that can solve all your needs but isn't like part of this like regulated and by regulated I mean anti crypto financial system.

[00:44:40] Yeah, that's right. I mean if you're let's say the standard Delaware C-Corp you can go get a bank within a day or two it's a fairly simple process if you have all your company docs in order.

[00:44:50] Some banks might not want you because they'll ask you what you do and you know you have to provide some information about the company.

[00:44:56] They might see oh you know they're doing crypto we don't want crypto customers so you might have to go to a couple different banks but it's not a hard process.

[00:45:03] If you're saying corporate it in you know the BVI or the Cayman's or you know somewhere in one of these offshore jurisdictions it's generally a lot trickier and the options are much smaller to get a traditional bank account and it takes a lot longer I mean like weeks or months as opposed to a company.

[00:45:19] And then you know again it depends if you're incorporated in you know home con or Singapore they're banking partners out there that locally specialized working with crypto companies so again it depends on where you're located but all that said if you're located anywhere you can use some of these banking adjacent services that will give you most of the functionality that you may need just to do you know basic financial operations.

[00:45:48] And we've been pretty careful 45 minutes into this recording to not like call out any individuals but I'm going to just because I think they're in the class of their own.

[00:45:56] What do you think about solutions like Anchorage which are like natively crypto banks that like were created specifically to service our industry.

[00:46:06] One do you think that they're providing a differentiated service that like whether or not you can get in is like interesting for crypto companies but two do you see that this is the way that we're going that we're going to start to see some like dedicated crypto banks or do you think it's more likely that every bank starts to come up with like a crypto arm and a crypto strategy and crypto services.

[00:46:28] Yeah you know I can't speak to Anchorage specifically because I haven't worked with them so but I'm kind of bearish on seeing crypto native banks.

[00:46:37] I just think that that's a really challenging middle ground for a regulated bank to try to walk and I think what's most more likely is these banking adjacent services become better and better and cheaper and easier and kind of eliminate the need to have a crypto bank.

[00:46:57] So you would be left with two options I can go with a general bank and you know there's some banks like Mercury that service or kind of cater to startups and so you could go down that path or you could get with one of these banking adjacent services.

[00:47:10] I don't really see these crypto native banks are really going to find a footing in this industry but I could be proven wrong and would be happy to see that they do.

[00:47:23] Yeah for sure and that's the best part about this space is like prove me wrong and we all win right.

[00:47:30] Cool okay so at the last like 10-ish minutes here I would love to pivot outside of kind of like the finance and just like the least sexy part of building business and into like more of the growth parts of the business so the big ones on my head are in growth marketing specifically like marketing agencies like this kind of a lot of money.

[00:47:52] And so you can see that there's a lot of currencies like this kind of thing we see a lot more in the trad world and also which you've already kind of touched on it and how it's not really working yet in our world but is recruiting.

[00:48:04] So let's start with marketing first as just like a setting the base like do you see that we're starting to get.

[00:48:13] So crypto specific marketing agencies in this industry that are like built directly to support to outsource and support startups in their marketing effort.

[00:48:22] Oh yeah we absolutely do we have a whole sort of cottage industry of of Web 3 crypto native marketing firms.

[00:48:29] Now I think many of them do a really good job because they understand the space pretty well and they could be you know really used your advantage depending on what your needs are around marketing and what you have in house versus you know what.

[00:48:42] You know have gaps that you need help with but I think that it's absolutely critical when you want to get into the growth stage and I tweeted about this I think earlier today just kind of i'm a big believer in the concept of the attention economy.

[00:48:57] And I previously thought you can just build the best product you put it out there and that best product is going to win because users are going to see it and they're going to you know love your product but in reality you know especially in a world full of memes and things that.

[00:49:11] Drive attention it's really distribution that is so important and marketing is what's going to often help you get really good distribution or at least gets you somewhere you know that puts you in a position to have good distribution.

[00:49:25] So I'm a big big believer in getting a good marketing partner and the very least talk to some of these outside marketing agencies and you'll start to get a sense for what services do they provide and.

[00:49:40] What are you capable of doing within your own team and then how big of a gap that is and so you don't know what you don't know until you start talking with some of these.

[00:49:50] And they talk about some past engagements that they've done and you're like wow you know I never could pull that off on my own so that's where you know you'll need the help.

[00:49:59] For these agencies like so so we've taken all of our insights from the last 45 minutes we've used our network we've talked to the people that we're going to be in the trenches with we were confident we've identified the best possible agency partners were ready to go.

[00:50:16] Talk to me about like as if I were a founder asking you Kevin should we sign this deal with this agency like when are the moments that like you know you're in a growth phase like this is a good place to be putting your money.

[00:50:28] Versus like when are the moments you had tell a founder like hey I know you're super excited.

[00:50:33] Take for everyone to be talking about this but you're not really very yet like how how is a founder can I figure out like when it's time to start thinking about growing so fast that we need external partners to help.

[00:50:46] Yeah great question I guess I'll start by giving some like Boomer management of which is just like if you can't measure it then you really can't.

[00:50:57] Manage it so if you're talking with a marketing firm for example and trying to understand should we go with this proposal they put in front of us.

[00:51:05] You have to think about what are the metrics that you're trying to drive like very specifically are you trying to.

[00:51:11] Drive up your social engagement if so what channels and what types of metrics are you looking to get are you trying to focus more on.

[00:51:19] You know unique token holders or you know what are the metrics that are most important to you monthly active users daily active users etc and make sure that the proposal or whatever you're considering is actually tied back to those metrics if not directly at least.

[00:51:34] The elements of the campaign are going to address the most likely behaviors to drive those metrics where you want them to be and get a baseline for where you are set some targets be aggressive with it figure out you know what you're doing.

[00:51:48] Figure out you know what you think is going to get you to where you want to go and then make sure you're measuring the work that they're doing against those metrics to see if they're adding the real value that you need.

[00:51:58] So I think like whatever you're trying to do you're going to want to try to describe some value that you're going to get from whatever you're paying and the time is taking to engage with this outside firm.

[00:52:10] And so the more you can quantify and have metrics around that the better you're going to be to know if you're getting good value or not.

[00:52:17] I love that and you can call it boomer advice if you want but I think that that's like one of those truisms that like maybe you pick up like from a mentor or from business school or whatever and like it becomes one of those things that's so obvious that like you don't even say it but I do think it's one of those things that in this industry

[00:52:36] and for half of our founders or high school kids who never had a real job like it is worth it to understand that like you really shouldn't be spending money towards a goal if you can't measure if that goal was achieved.

[00:52:49] And so you know that's like particularly important in marketing where it's easy to like do something flashy and like a sexy animation and get you really excited and like then maybe walk away without thinking through like what was the point of that but with marketing in particular.

[00:53:05] But with everything like if you're ever spending money just know why and then know how to measure it.

[00:53:11] Absolutely and same same goes with market makers if you get to a situation where you're engaging market makers because you've got multiple trading venues or you're trying to release a token on multiple trading venues.

[00:53:22] You get very specific with the metrics that you want them to do because they're going to ask for a lot and you're going to want to have really quantification on what they're delivering and be able to assess whether that's getting you the right value in exchange.

[00:53:34] For what you're giving them man okay we're going to take a hard left turn and then I want to end us on recruiting but let's talk about market makers real quick so I've never been a founder of a like super finance based protocol.

[00:53:46] So I haven't had the pleasure of you know interacting and like trying to.

[00:53:52] Inca deal with a market maker but real briefly can you just talk through like what are the like traps and pitfalls and like what are the things that make a good market maker a good market maker and what are some of the things that a bad market maker is going to tell you.

[00:54:07] That may seem like signal for good but really is a problematic there's a bunch of market makers out there service this space and you know a lot of them kind of operate under similar approaches so you kind of need to know going in that like there's two.

[00:54:21] Common ways you engage a market maker you either pay them a monthly retainer or you give them a generally alone of your native token and then alongside of that comes either a call option or warrants for the market maker to purchase those tokens at some future date at some set price.

[00:54:41] And so when you know that going in then it really is a matter of understanding what they're going to do for you and what the metrics are going to be and should that be a good value investment for you and your team because it's going to be a big investment either way.

[00:54:59] You're going to want to make sure that you choose very carefully.

[00:55:03] The thing with like engaging market makers and why I think it's important for if you have advisors that have been through this to pull them into this process because as a founder maybe you go through that process once maybe twice if you're lucky to have two projects that kind of get a token to the point where it's you know worthy of market maker action.

[00:55:23] So you're usually figuring out how this all works for the first time and you don't want to have the market makers educate you you want an advisor or somebody who's been through that process to educate you because the market makers are obviously going to try to get a good deal for them and what what I think differentiates a lot of them is just.

[00:55:44] Whether or not they are going to work for you or if you're just going to be one of hundreds of token issuers that they're going to be supporting and so you know like a lot of service providers you'll get a bunch of activity up front you know they're really engaged they want to sell you on you know their firm but then you know you may not be very important to them and therefore once you've inked the deal and you go live.

[00:56:13] You find that you just you know don't get the responsiveness that you want but like the one of the warning signs I would definitely you know think about here is how much of your token supplier they asking for and how much incentive are they going to have to dump that token

[00:56:32] and you know that's something that you want to be very cautious of is at some point in the future market makers are going to look to take profit on the deal that they've made with you

[00:56:43] and one of the ways they can take that profit is by dumping the token and so understanding what their incentives are going to be at different scenarios down the road

[00:56:53] and whether or not that becomes a PVP type of situation that's what you want to really look to avoid so you know beyond that you want to have somebody that's been there

[00:57:04] to sanity check some of the metrics that they're proposing like the depth and you know some of the commitments around providing liquidity

[00:57:11] make sure that those are in line with market standard.

[00:57:14] Yeah and again this is not my space like I just want to talk about like cryptography and like ZK stuff right but my question to you is is it possible to have a long term like positive some relationship with the market maker or at the end of the day do they need to take your profit their profit that profits always going to come out of your community

[00:57:35] and therefore like you kind of need to have this more adversarial relationship with your market maker or is that not really how it works.

[00:57:42] No I know it absolutely can be kind of constructed as a partnership and I think that there are market makers out there that they want to provide a good result

[00:57:51] and a good outcome for the project team and they obviously want to make money for what they're doing as well because they do take a certain element of risk

[00:57:58] they're going to hedge whatever they can hedge but they're taking some amount of risk and working with you.

[00:58:03] So you want to be a good outcome for both sides and you'll find some projects that really want to work with you in a very collaborative way because they know if they provide a good outcome for you

[00:58:12] you may become a founder again and have another token to bring to them.

[00:58:16] You may tell your friends, your fellow builders and refer them so I mean that's another way that they can differentiate themselves.

[00:58:23] So I absolutely think that it doesn't have to be a PVP type situation but if not kind of constructed carefully it could end up that way.

[00:58:33] Alright so man I pushed us right to the end here but I have to ask you about this last topic which is recruiting and I find it very interesting because one you know I've gone through this process like I understand how recruiting works both in crypto and without

[00:58:49] and I think like there's a lot of opportunity but I guess the first question is are you seeing this ecosystem of like recruiter and like sourcing talent through these like back channels and kind of like private networks if you will.

[00:59:06] Are you starting to see that take shape in a similar way that it happens in Trabi or in sorry in Trabi business

[00:59:14] or do you think that there's something special about our industry and the way we organize over Twitter and discord and telegram and just the permission list of it all that means that what our industry is not going to look the same people wise as it does everywhere else.

[00:59:31] I definitely think it's different than everywhere else and some of those reasons I mentioned earlier about you know that there are different signals in crypto that I think are just not really is accepted

[00:59:43] in the traditional world that can be good in crypto. I have mostly been since I've entered this space and I've worked with many recruiters in my pre-crypto days and generally that's what you do you know you interact with an internal or an external recruiter, you give them a job description, you tell them kind of what you're looking for profiles they'll go out and sift through LinkedIn and their own internal databases and they'll send you a bunch of resumes and that's common.

[01:00:07] You would end up usually hiring somebody from the batch that they brought back to you. But in crypto I found that most recruiters that tried to operate that way, they don't produce good candidates.

[01:00:19] I mean they produce it okay candidates but nothing that I felt like was any better than the people we were getting through our own personal network.

[01:00:26] The problem with their own personal network is it's always limited versus what you know the candidate pool that's out there.

[01:00:34] I will say in the past couple of months I've been impressed with a few crypto native recruiters that I think are taking a much more like crypto view into how they're finding and sourcing talent.

[01:00:48] It's not the traditional like let me go search around LinkedIn it's much more about looking more analytically at GitHub's it's more about you know going to conferences and hosting seminars participating or being involved in hackathons and identifying people

[01:01:03] and sort of building that proprietary pipeline of candidates that are already in crypto.

[01:01:08] And so I'm more optimistic that we've got a recruiter set to sort of graduating into a true crypto native mindset and offering services that I think are going to be you know more likely to produce good candidates for teams that are hiring in crypto.

[01:01:23] I'm also thinking and I'm seeing a few attempts at this.

[01:01:27] I think there's an opportunity for somebody to create a true Web 3 solution with an incentive model that could address kind of the common you know situation you have a two set of marketplace you have people looking for candidates and you have candidates looking for jobs.

[01:01:42] And so in the middle sits recruiters or job boards there's definitely an opportunity there for a Web 3 type approach to come and disintermediate the middlemen there and probably create incentives that could allow anyone to effectively be a recruiter and could reward both sides of the marketplace for taking certain actions.

[01:02:02] I'm seeing a few projects that are addressing you know some parts of that so I'm kind of optimistic that maybe in addition to having some recruiters that are much more crypto native will also have some solutions that might you know use true like Web 3 differentiating elements to solve this problem too.

[01:02:21] That's super super cool because you know when I think about like what the whole purpose of like the recruiter industry is it's trust right like companies don't trust that all these like thousands of resumes that come in when they put a job application are like real or like good people or quality people or whatever.

[01:02:41] And so they like need to go spend money to someone they trust to go solve this problem for them and like say what you well about crypto but like the one thing that I think we all can agree that agree that we're solving for is trustlessness.

[01:02:55] And so like I can totally see whatever it looks but like some sort of solution that leverages blockchain that does all of the coordination but instead of through the traditional trusted just find a centralized firm to do this for you through like the untrusted decentralized magic of crypto and so I have not heard one single person talking about how to use blockchain for recruiting until right now but I'm really excited that's very very cool.

[01:03:22] Yeah I think this is an area that we'll see you know some more stuff emerge in this cycle it doesn't it's not as sexy as defy and some of the other you know gaming and fun stuff we produce in crypto but I think there's real opportunity for it.

[01:03:37] And there was one project I won't name them right now but I met with them recently and they had taking they had taken electric capital's database of crypto companies and then they went and downloaded the repos for all of those companies

[01:03:51] and then they were able to identify something like 25,000 unique developers and they could with pretty good confidence tell if that person was a full-time worker at that project or just a you know maybe an external contributor to it.

[01:04:04] And you start to get data sets like that that you can use and then bring in both sides of that marketplace you now have a much more trustless solution where you can have companies that can have some candidates that are already prevented in certain ways based on what they've done

[01:04:20] and the contributions they've made on chain and you can have candidates that can come in and kind of have a profile that's already got them you know some some credibility elements to it that makes it a lot easier for them to stand out.

[01:04:31] So that's just one such example I think there'll be many more and I'm kind of optimistic if anybody's listening and is building or interested in that space I've talked to a bunch of teams and continue to look for ones that are doing something interesting in that space.

[01:04:45] Yeah, no man super exciting and that's why I love like blockchain because it's although our conversation is entirely about like finance.

[01:04:55] I really believe that what we're building here is like so this is about computation and like as we see in the real world in 2024 computation is about literally everything.

[01:05:05] And so I think that like yes we'll see some more financial stuff of course but like we're going to start seeing stuff that is not related to finance like as we've been promising since denta coin in 2015 but I think like we're here and I'm excited for it and like whether it's this behind the scenes stuff of recruiting like you're talking about or like much more like consumer facing stuff like you know

[01:05:32] generative AI with some like security say whatever right like the point is is that we're here and the technology is like finally capable of doing something more interesting than swapping shit coins so very exciting and in order to actually achieve that vision we're going to need to build not protocols but actual companies to like get us there and Kevin I'm just so thankful for

[01:05:56] like the work that you've done to shepherd all of your companies forward but in that like developing this like deep experience that is so relevant but more importantly that you're willing to share with the community on how to deal with professionals so I just I'll take this opportunity to wrap these this up and just say Kevin thank you so much for sharing your insights.

[01:06:18] And I hope that in the future as this industry matures we can keep checking in with you and figure out like are there best in class recruiters are there new services that we haven't even talked about yet is the legal industry changing to support us better and on and on but for the sake of your schedule and our and all of our attention spans a lot cut us off here so again Kevin thank you and really appreciate it.

[01:06:42] Yeah I really enjoyed the discussion thanks for having me. Of course and before I let you go can you just share with the audience where they can find you I guess where they can find Delphi and if they're interested in like just like learning a little bit more and how to like take their startup down the path of like legitimate company like what are the best places to like start finding resources for that.

[01:07:06] Yeah for me personally I'm pretty active on on X so you can get me there. Okay Simbeck I'm also playing around a little bit with Forecaster so you can find me there as well and then Delphi Labs and you know the other Delphi brands all have Twitter accounts as well or X accounts so that's usually where we put out a lot of our content in terms of you know where to find all this other great information I mean I think if you're a project team and you're building your early stage really I would advise you to consider.

[01:07:36] An accelerator type program it doesn't necessarily need to be Delphi Labs but they're plenty of other good accelerators out there I think they really do add a lot of value and can help you cut through a lot of the noise of the things that we talked about today and then you know beyond that just have some good advisors they can help short circuit some of this stuff for you so you don't have to spend so much your time dealing with all these fun topics that we just explore here.

[01:07:59] Yeah awesome yeah advisors aren't just so you can put their name up on a slide and raise more money like they're here to help like just share their experience and their knowledge in these kinds of things with you.

[01:08:10] Very much cool well Kevin thank you so much once again and have a great rest of your day.

[01:08:15] Thank you.

[01:08:29] you