The Founder’s Journey (And Return) | Antonio Juliano, dYdX

Only the founder can unilaterally make some of these decisions. And if they're bold decisions, then, you know, sometimes you have to stand up there and you have to have every single person in the company disagree with you and be willing to do it anyways. I've just accepted that this is an extension of who I am. This is what I want to continue doing. I really care about the space. Like, I've been in it for in crypto for 9 years at this point. And I face this question on, is this what I want to keep doing for the rest of my life? And the answer is yes. Scale

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Thanks so much for having me. Good to be back. Is

is it good to be back? It

is, actually. Yeah. I mean, we can dive more into it, but both here in a lot of places in my life.

Nice, man. Nice. Alright. So let's jump right into it. There was this tweet, October 2023, basically, exactly a year ago. You said, for myself, I have truly never been happier as CEO of dydx. It is the perfect job for me. I'm proud of what we've built, sad of what we've sacrificed to get here, immensely appreciative of the journey, and believe strongly in what we will do next. In May of 2024, so, like, 7 months after this tweet, you stepped down as CEO. So before we jump into coming back as CEO, I'd love to just hear about this journey at dydx. And tell me about the journey, and tell me what l

First of all, as I alluded to here, and I continue to feel this way, I've just been immensely fortunate to be able to be on this journey. I think being a founder is just something that makes you experience more of life more quickly. That that's basically my theory on it. And, yeah, as you saw in that tweet, so in 2023, that was probably one of the best times for both dydx and myself personally. I was at the company for about 6 years at that point, and just dydx has been a huge focus of my life, obviously, since then. I'm a solo founder. And at that point in my life, I I think I had gone throug

what do what do you mean by connect it's actually a different story than I've heard other founders who have left their company share. Like, usually, the reason that founders leave their company is oftentimes, it comes down to peep actually, the people as well, but the way that they describe it is very different. Like, the the the typical story is, I just you know, running the company was fun. Sales was going great. Marketing was all good. Our product, we're still shipping stuff. But, like, the people problems were just exhausting, and I just couldn't keep doing the people problems. And that's

good. So I faced that as well, and I think what I'm saying is actually very aligned with that. It's maybe just one step deeper in terms of introspection and how I personally deal with it. I'm not like there's any right way. But of course, we've had people problems at the company, too. Every company does. I've heard it described like every human basically has one really significant issue in their life for years. We talked about this exactly. And so if you're mana