Ep 19 - Building from first principles
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Hi. This is the 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 19. Joel is my co host, and we are sitting down with Pac Man, who's the cofounder of Blur and Flask. As far as I can remember, Blur was the first example of a challenger completely disrupting an incumbent with a better product and power of incentives. Blur overtook the leader open secretly after it launched and has been in the lead ever since. P
show back, man. Jam jam. Thanks for having me.
Right. So let's start with your history as in, like, how you got around to starting Plur, about your MIT stint, and how you met your cofounder there. Yeah.
So I have a bit of a atypical background. I first dropped out of high school to work in Silicon Valley as a software engineer. So I started working at this company called Teespring, and I was just really infatuated with startups as a kid. So I got really into startups, went and got a job at at Teespring as a software engineer. Worked there for about a year. And then after a year of that and I left high school to do that. After a year of that, I, started a company and got accepted into Y Combinator, and this was when I was 17. And I did that company for about a year. And afterwards, I really wa
when you were thinking about building Blur, I think OpenSea had north of 80% market share. So what was the plan there to take on the incumbent?
Yeah. It was honestly a pretty intuitive motion in the sense that as a trader, I just knew that it was not a great experience. I just knew that there was something missing. It was just so slow and so painful and, you know, yes, they had the market share, but I also just knew that for myself, you know, if there was something better, I would switch over. And, you know, you talk to a few other people and and a few other traders, and pretty much everyone has the same experience. I mean, it wasn't a particularly novel insight. Right? Like, everyone on Twitter was complaining at the time, but it's j
You know, just so that people are reminded of what was wrong with the NFT markets back then, I think it would be good to just double down on what was wrong. Yeah.
Absolutely. There were a number of things. But first is, you know, as a trader, typically, there's a lot of information that I wanted to see. I wanted to see the rarity data. I wanted to see the sales data. I wanted to see what the listings were and what the bids were. There is a lot of trader oriented information that I needed. And if you trade tokens, you probably have already experienced this sort of interface. Right? If you use Binance or use Coinbase Pro, any of these things, you know, you have this real time trading experience where all of the information is updated instantly. It's very
think part of the reason was that people didn't have a mental model of what NFTs could be. Right? Everybody knew that NFTs are purchased and sold, and you make gains on them. But nobody thought of it being as fluid or liquid as, tokens at the time. And that's likely why you never had data around it.
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