Ep 12 - Mike Silagadze from EtherFi

Speaker 0: Hi. This is the Deco podcast, and I'm your host, Saurabh. Before we begin, views expressed here are personal opinions. None of this is any kind of advice, let alone financial or legal. It's a conversation about things we find interesting.

Welcome to episode 12. Our guest today is Mike Silacuzzi. Mike is the CEO and cofounder at EtherFi, a liquid restating protocol with more than $6,000,000,000 in TPL. When he was at the university, he founded TopHat, a platform that allowed educators to create highly engaging learning experiences for students. A unique piece of trivia about Mike is that when he's not thinking about T5, he flies planes.

We discussed LRTs, Tiger lair, Eta 5, airdrops, and much more. Onto the episode now. Welcome to the show, Mike. I hope I didn't butcher your name.

Speaker 1: Thanks for having me. No. Yeah. I I think you did great. Okay.

Mike, I saw

Speaker 0: in your Twitter bio that you were a founder at TopHat. So why don't we start there and understand your journey, like, how

Speaker 1: you started Etherpad? Yeah. For sure. So, you know, I I've been in startups and tech forever, basically. I started TopHat out of the university.

I went to the University of Waterloo in Engineering and then started TopHat, which was an education technology software company. And the goal of the company was really to make learning more engaging for students. I ran that the company for a while for about 10 years. It was a really awesome and, you know, kind of wild experience. And by the end of it, we were about, almost 500 employees and about 60,000,000 in revenue, so it was a great run.

And then we sold the company to a private equity fund. I stayed on the board for a while and then, you know, decided to focus fully on, on Etherfry. But yeah. But when I left, Top Hat, you know, I'd been doing crypto stuff on the side since 20, 2011. My first Bitcoin I bought when, it was 80¢ a coin before there, there were even any exchanges.