Infrastructure, Empathy, and Grit
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Welcome to the Deco podcast where we bring you stories from founders and investors in Web 3. Before we get started, this is not a financial or legal advice. It's just a conversation about things we find interesting in Web 3. Views expressed are our own personal opinions. Deco members or guests appearing on the show may have positions on assets they talk about. Alright. Welcome to yet another episode of the Deco podcast. We are doing something different today. I have my co host Brandon, from layer 3, and we are thrilled to welcome Matt from Caldera. Let's begin with Brandon, and he will lay us
Yeah. Super excited to be here. So we, you know, have Matt from Caldera. The goal for this conversation is really to discuss operating lessons behind building in crypto. You know, we all, I think, have been inundated with podcasts that unpack the underlying businesses, but very few conversations talk about what that journey is like in operating lessons. And, you know, I think there are some similarities and there are some differences relative to building in traditional early stage venture, and so that's gonna be the goal of the conversation. But, Matt, I mean, to jump around chronologically he
Yeah. So you're totally right. Being at Stanford, you definitely get that sort of feeling. I don't think there is a single moment for me, but candidly, like, you just kind of see it repeatedly. And I don't think this is necessarily a super healthy mindset to have, but, like, you know, you see someone raise a bunch of funds and you're like, oh, I was, like, 10 x better than that person. Like, what you know, in intro to CS. Right? Like, I don't really consider that person all that smart or or, like, high aptitude. And then, of course, you have a bunch of other peers who do look up to and respect
Well, take us back to that period of time. Right? So 0% interest rates, a lot of innovation is kind of happening seemingly around pretty much every early stage venture market that exists, and it was amplified in crypto. You come to the conclusion that you wanna start a business. What was it about the market that Caldera is playing in that gave you conviction that this was the market you wanted to start your 1st venture backed business in? Totally.
So I've been in crypto on and off since I was, like, 12. So, you know, funnily enough and initially, it did kind of come and go, you know, with the price and the cycles. But, like, I had always found myself coming back to crypto. And part of that was just, like, an alignment with the values and part of it was just an interest in the technology. When I came into Stanford, it was, like, 2019. So crypto was kind of at, like, a a low point. And I candidly was not super into crypto. I thought that was, like, a phase, you know, of my life that I had kinda passed me by. But then, like, when I came in
so fast forward to today, how many people work at Caldera? Yeah. We're about 20. 20 now. So when you started, did you have any prior experience managing a team of 20 people?
So I had co directed the hackathon on campus called Tree Hacks, which actually was a team of around 20 people, but 20 people working extremely kind of part time. So in some sense, I had some experience there. Candidly, at the time, especially, I was a really terrible manager. So I learned a lot of, like, thing probably not to do. But, yeah, I hadn't had any kind of formal management experience. So
maybe I mean, walk us through you've kinda gone through this journey over the past 3 years coming out of what was, you know, sort of a very well funded market environment into
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