How I built $3B Next-Gen Identity Startup for AGI Era | World, Alex Blania

Intro

00:00then I got admitted to the Celtic research program went there Sam and Max which were the two other founders of roine reached out to me like a true liner basically he was like hey here's this paper ro road coin do you want to meet is by far the craziest Story of My Life first of all I didn't sleep all night it I slept like an hour drank like six espressos or something on the way there 10:00 a.m.

00:19right when the sun was going up I get this email by Sam it's like hey you want to come by now we sat down then the first question was I am Alex B the CEO of K tools for Humanity is building critical infrastructure for AI driven Road the company got started together with Sam Alin around 4 and a half years ago the idea was what kinds of tools will we need on a global scale to react to the change that will come the major project is World coin which is one it is a way to verify humanness on truly International global scale on the internet because we think it will be

00:51really really hard to distinguish if you're interacting with humans or AIS that will turn out to be a very very critical problem second it is Broad coin which is a digital currency that launches we giving ownership to every human eventually we are now at I think over 12 million users 6 million or so that verified yeah we're scaling rapidly around the world so we roll out these physical devices around the

Chapter 1. Sam Altman asked me to become the CEO

01:14world so when I was very young I was already a lot into technology so I read a lot of books about computer science but also the basics of mechanical engineering I think when I was around 12 I was on the front page of their spedal which is one of the largest outlets in Germany there was an article about Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is this place where all these people go and build the future and build this new technology basically since then I was I was a very set that I will go to Silicon Valley and I will build companies and that's what I want to do with my life so

01:44when I started studying right next to my university was a new Max plunk Institute one of the professors and directors actually of that Institute was flen markart and he was a pretty well-known theoretical physicist that decided to go all in into AI back then it was actually a pretty small field because of that I studied kind of the beginnings of of deep learning and kind of what later led to Transformer and these things like very very deeply and then did a research stay at Caltech in Los Angeles and when I do my PhD there the actual story is actually I applied at a conference

02:18called YC 1220 which uh Sam hosted and so the idea of the conference was that it would be hundred of smartest students of the world together with like 20 of the industry leaders of the world and you would bring them together somewhere in the US and would be like it's amazing time and I got declined I was really angry so I just wanted to fly there there was no address there was no idea how to find it in that application period another venture capitalist from San Francisco lik a picture of the car I built when I was 16 and it was part of the application for Y2 so I thought that

02:51this VC is probably part of the application process of voice 120 and so I sent her my application video and was like Hey I'm going to meet you wherever you are as think I think you made a huge mistake of declining me to Y 1220 she was like I have no idea what you're talking about but the video is awesome I will just let you interview by all these associates that I have and then because of that I flew to San Francisco for the first time I met a lot of very influential people in basically a twoe period Then I got admitted to the celtech research program went there and

03:19then through a series of coincidences which was like partly driven by people I met before on that trip Sam and Max which were the two other founders of roine reached out to me like a TW liner basically he was like hey here's this paper ro ro coin we looking for selft engineers do you want to meet is is by far the craziest story of my life I think first of all I didn't sleep all night because Max let me sleep in in the office and there was no blankets and it was like freezing it SLE like an hour 10:00 a.m.

03:47right when the sun was going up so it was a little warmer so I could like finally catch a little bit of sleep I get this email by Sam was like hey you want to come by now so I did sleep didn't even have clothes R me really I just s there Dr like six espressos or something out the way there so I come in and then we sit down my first question is explain me the standard model of theoretical physics in detail cend model of theoretical physics is like really it's quite a thing I also think it doesn't make much sense or like there's actually deep flaws in that in that

04:14model and so those when my first response and he just laughed that's how we we hit it off I was definitely a software engineer I was also not CTO I was like something in between I actually brought on the rest of the feline team uh which were kind of the most Talent people I met on my University Journey Journey most of them were physicists that was kind of a technical team then I became Co roughly one year in or 8 months 9 months in I think like after 8 months we started raising the series 8 so it was the first fundraise and during that fundraise I became the

Chapter 2. What I learned from the best CEO coaches

04:45CEO when I became CEO I got a lot of coaches there so like actually four of them and so every Thursday I had a couple hours with each of them basically in a row 70 80% of my Thursday was just being getting grilled and learning like what are all the things I did wrong this week and what should I improve next week and how should I run a meeting and so this was like a supercharg uh learning experience probably but then the second thing which I think is actually probably much more important is like I think being a CEO what that actually means I think is that you're problem solver in

05:16charge there's like always this like confusion about what it means to be a COO it's like okay now you can run Performance Cycles and you can do this and but all of that actually really doesn't matter most of the things you have to do is a complete distraction what you actually should be doing is you should understand Technical and product challenges you should understand the biggest problems the company's facing and so while running Performance Cycles and doing this and that like I hatte it with passion I do love solving problems and that's what I did my whole life and

05:43I was always pretty good at and so while there's a lot of new things the core of it is what I always did the most unexpected one which is actually something I took away from Ben hitz is this idea that and as a Founder you're successful mostly because of two things your competence and and your confidence this idea that you need to manage your confidence and see it as an actual kpi for yourself and if that falls below a critical threshold you will fail and everything will crash and burn almost certainly you need to be very conscious who you surround yourself with because

06:15what you certainly learned in your private life is there's always people that are pessimistic about everything all the time and they they drag me down in a company these kinds of people exist but completely to chart because it's so easy to be cynical about everything and be negative about everything and but the problem is what it does to you as a Founder it necks on you on a daily basis it takes away this one thing that keeps you going which is your own confidence and so your leadership team the people around you need to be people that increase don't decrease your confidence

06:43otherwise you will die by a Thousand Cuts essentially and because it's very in obvious somehow like no one thinks about these things but that was probably the biggest unexpected learning I think in terms of coaches every mentorship relationship that's actually not even specific to business because I had the same relationship with my professor in University is much more one of situational so it's like you're you're faced with a certain situation and as an unexperienced person you don't know what is right or what is wrong what you what you can be doing so a lot about growing

07:11up especially as a Founder is learning when to send your ground when to be direct when to be indirect and that you can really only learn by reference I think the biggest donate from Sam was just indirectly seeing how he deals with certain situations very early on these kinds of things I think are the biggest invaluable learning lessons that you cannot write down you could write a block post about these

Chapter 3. Solving problems that have never existed

07:33things you really think about it many of the Great companies started with uh Keith for I think has the saying that the best companies are much more like a Hollywood script than a problem what do you want to see in the world and you for relate that you hire the best actors that you can find and then you go after it if you think about it open a was like that open like what's the problem we don't have artificial super intelligence Ro primy river right that's not a problem that's a positive thing that would exist the RO and Roa was pretty similar how would the road look like if

08:02you would have truly multi-billion people come to the own Financial Network that would be completely crazy and would certainly reshuffle a lot of things in majority a very positive way so how do we get there so it started very similar it was like okay how do we get to this crazy outcome then outlining basically step by step what would it take first one we will need to solve proof of person or proof of unique humanist second we launch a digital currency by giving ownership in EN every human and so self Pro a personal La currency scale and show initial utility which is what

08:34we currently do and then fourth decentralize the whole network to scale even way further one of the earliest debates that we had was around essentially having more like a developer focus and try to talk to companies explain them worldo ID all of those things versus what s coed as scale first which was like such a ridiculous statement at least it sounded like it usually the device would be you do a you talk to companies you explain them World ID and they will be so pleased that you have built World ID and they will integrated everything will be great Sam was like well what we got to do is we're

09:07going to completely ignore that and we say we just run towards a billion signups and we do everything we can to get to these bil setups and we're going to have a religious Obsession about that we're going to make it a company value because on the path to get there we'll resolve all of those questions but we will resolve them much much faster and his point was that he felt he learned in his and observing companies like Reddit that they have this like very strong emergent effects happening as a result of the user base things will start happening that you didn't even predict

09:38and I think that was probably the biggest bet we took as a project and still were taking and it feels like it was the right call and pretty early actually before we raised series a Sam's idea or question was essentially we realized we have to build H otherwise we thought we could solve the problem Sam's definition of when we already to actually raise money is you take such a hardware device you go out in the city on a street and you can sign up and verify people and they're actually interested or willing to do that for whatever reason and you can do that at a

10:14scale that would show you that with reasonable Capital you could scale it up to millions of people the simple math we did back then was well we would need somewhere between 70 to 100 signups a day with one of those devices and if we would achieve that we could scale it up drastically and we just built the first prototype so it had two eyes because it actually had two cameras it injected a physical coin in the middle of it so it looked like a very ugly face because like the coin injection was basically the nose and it had like these like two stupid eyes it looked like a very stupid

10:45face and it was blue because that was the 3D printer and it was polished so it basically looked like a a stupid Smiley boning ball and then it also talked you had like a a blue bowling ball with two eyes and a stupid nose that was telling you in a female robotic wise C closer and it was also actually blinking it's like red LEDs in there so I guess we could have had ideas why that maybe would not work but and so we went to this park we worked like for months on this device so like the whole team was like super excited and so we had the team behind me with cameras and like

11:16everyone's like taking pictures so I approached two girls in the park and was like hey do you want to verify with this device you get free Bitcoin and we just need this device to make sure that people don't fool the system essentially so first was like absolutely not and the second was well you're kind of cute so sure but I need you number then after that was basically it that was like the success for the day we couldn't verify anyone else that was basically it team was like super demotivated and kind of everything somehow failed but then what we did is so first of all we were

11:45working 7 days a week and we were basically living together in the office it was a pretty small team back then it was Co it was nothing better to do anyways and so I said there's shipping Saturday and so every Saturday we need to ship a completely new version and I will be out every Saturday with this new version version and we will test it so then we just iterated it through like okay maybe it kind of looked like a molding ball and maybe it needs to look a little bit sexy and then like the miror Optics came in and was like somewh interesting to people and then maybe it

12:10shouldn't say come closer then we at some point we went to burland and one of the fing team members Sandro did 70 SES a day and that was done the ser and we called Inon pits that was how we then initially raised the series a s had this mental model that okay 70 S A Day multiple with 50,000 devices that can you can get to a growth rid that can lead to billions of saps I think with any startup I think the the much bigger threat is that you always face an existential threat essentially like whatever it is but that's by you're a startup I think developing anything was

12:41generally not the hardest thing the company was probably about to die certainly more than two times probably four times theia CEO talks about that quite frequently is like all of those companies are even a thousand times harder than you imagine them going into them so it's like Essen you sign up for years of paying p and suffering and you saw need to push through and I think that's a really hard thing it's not one particular piece of technology there was like a lot of technical things we had to figure out along the way but keeping going was the much harder

Chapter 4. Thoughts on Founder Mode

13:13one yeah I've read about Founders mod recently I uh spoke to my heart when you run a company and the company gets bigger and bigger there's like strong pull from people that are coming in that try to convince you that running a well oil machine is what you really really should care about we want to set the processes and you want to run like all these like great programs and then everything that happens is like you just sit down with the leadership team and everyone is happy that's like what people describe to you versus basically as far as it gets from how it actually

13:45should be in companies as well as in things like science almost everything comes down to one or two or three problems you can really only do that if you go really really deep and you really understand it because otherwise people will tell you all kinds of things why doesn't work or why it cannot work and it's really really hard as a Founder to have that fortitude of ignore all the people that try to tell you that shouldn't you should not be involved everything is great keep yourself out of it ignore all of that chatter and just keep going deeper and deeper and deeper

14:13until you really understand the problem well I think there's actually one more comment that is maybe important to make you could also use that as an excuse to be a horrible manager there's like a a big difference of you are a very capable Problem Solver and you should nail down problems and that's your job as a CEO and no matter what people tell you that's that's it and you should understand them you should get them and you should not let them lose and they are solved versus you're just an that runs through the office and keeps annoying everyone and just like wants to

14:42be involved doesn't add any value then leaves the room again and which is another thing that happens right so like yeah I think found remote is Problem Solver in charge figuring things out not being an the world is a really large place and there is great governments and there is places where just nothing is working in there's even places where the government works against their citizens actively and I think there is some kind of infrastructure the what the kind of infrastructure that makes you truly a human no matter who you are or where you should come from you should have a right

15:14for and how do we build systems that can do that independent of where you come from or what you struggle with and I think that is why rcoin and that is why if such a change would happen if we have strong AGI systems we need to rethink how we handle our economy how we handle handle our social systems it should not be just for the 50% in the world that are living in great government it should be for everyone because getting it to scale is actually the thing that truly matters you know people in Germany having better lives and the margin like that that will not change the world

15:46empowering those the people will change the world [Music]