From Apple & Uber to Creating a Multi-Billion Dollar Wallet Industry | Magic Labs Documentary

Intro

00:00A big lesson that I learned at Apple while I was there was the obsession with detail. There was like a great sense of ownership and craftsmanship. Everyone deeply cared about making it right. Also, when it came to design, building, and shipping, there was so much thought put into it.

00:12When you build a product, it's not just to solve a problem. It's almost like storytelling. It's a message. Great storytelling is really about that wow factor. If you're talking about from a product standpoint, you want to identify what the wow factor is and show that to your users as quickly as possible.

00:34And that's like kind of part of reason why like Steve Jobs were very obsessed about the computers saying hello. Whenever you're developing a product, you're kind of almost telling a message to the world what you're about. So yes, the best UI is an abstraction of the UI that doesn't need to prompt you for login, that doesn't need to prompt you for approvals.

00:53It should just happen automatically. Our ultimate goal for magic is making technology feel invisible. One thing that I would say has expanded is we're now not just thinking about humans, we're also thinking about AI agents. You're able to trust that AI agent is making the right decisions and right actions even while you're asleep.

01:12Hi. Hi everyone. Uh, my name is Sean. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Magic

Founder & Magic Labs

01:19Labs. We are on a mission to make crypto more accessible to everyday people. We were known for inventing the first embedded wallet. To date, we have onboarded over 50 million wallets and 200,000 developers across various breakout crypto applications like Poly Market, Helium, Immutable Wallet Connect to enterprises like Naver and Forbes, but also getting reinvestment from PayPal ventures that at the time we were able to raise over $80 million in funding throughout this whole period.

01:50Magic is also the developers behind the Newton protocol, which is the world's first policy protocol to help secure and on board hundreds and trillions of new assets on chain across AI, institutional crypto and beyond. Our vision is to upgrade the trust infrastructure in the world and help billions of users move on chain.

02:16[Music] I was fortunate enough to have a

From Jazz Dreamer to 50M Wallets

02:23computer very early on. Kind of over the years was just really interested in the computer. Um played a lot of games and eventually was very interested uh in Starcraft but at the same time I was very uh very interested in music. Uh I thought that was what I was going to do.

02:36I really love playing jazz music. I played the saxophone. So I talked to my dad and as a Asian parent, he found a very clever way to convince me. He was like, "Hey Sean, if you do software engineering, you only need to work one job and play music on the side."

02:53And I'm like, "Oh, that sounds great. I like computer. Jazz is kind of like creating uh uh music, art. Uh why don't I learn building and creating for real in school?" So we applied to uh the waterl software engineering program and uh luckily I got in that's how I went on the journey to um to truly like learn to build things but at the same time waterlue has a very uh strong startup culture.

03:23It was a super great environment where you can learn from each other you can learn from your seniors. So I was like very involved in that culture with the previous uh co-founders. Uh the project was out kitematic. We went through a lot actually like we went through just so many like ups and downs uh from working on kitematic.

03:40When we uh launched the Dropbox for your code kind of product, we we got like 20,000 developers in one month and it was growing really really fast. We had to raise money. We applied to Y Combinator and we actually got a recommendation there.

03:57But after we pitched, we were rejected from Y Combinator. So we actually had to like ramp down the service is to keep it running. Pretty challenging time. Um we're just like kind of new grads at like our our most desperate moments. you know, we got an opportunity uh from Lightseed Ventures to come to the Silicon Valley for a summer and they kind of sponsored the whole summer and so we came and they got all these great mentors uh to teach us like how to build not only how to build but to sell as well.

04:33Essentially from that process we were able to iterate on kitematic. We were able to get the requirement from actual uh devops people at companies who actually just wanted to run docker for their team locally on the computer. And at the time Docker is not very smooth like you can't really run it locally on Mac or Windows that easily.

04:54So we saw an opportunity. We brought the server software down to a local desktop environment so that like you don't have to pay the server cost and then we open sourced it to get maximum distribution. And so we launched Kitematic. It essentially took off and we were able to get interest from investors who gave us term sheets and also uh companies like Docker who reached out who wanted uh to acquire us as well.

05:19I would say the most important part of the journey was where you end up is never originally expect. Progress is not a very uh linear process. It's actually a lot like art. You know, the more you're like super super focused on one very specific outcome, you're kind of blocking yourself out of all different kinds of possibilities.

05:44But you also can't like get swayed too much. you want to commit to to some kind of like mission, right? Like like for example, for us, it was like we really want to make it easy to build software. Just something like that. But with that mission, how you get there is very flexible.

06:03Uh it's never like 100% clear, right? And you're also at the same time dealing with a rapidly evolving environment at the same time as like your own customer need and your own company's limitations, right? They say these things like uh like artists work with constraints, right?

06:15So you're like there's all these constraints and and changes and I think diamonds come from the friction right that you are dealing with in this process just over the course of this many years just building 0ero to one again and again. It's really getting the groove of this.

06:34So, so, so when I hit like a friction point, I'm actually like excited because it kind of becomes an opportunity for you to find the truth that others wouldn't be able to see. So, definitely like a big part of the lesson that I've learned over the years.

06:53We were able to work very very closely with uh the founder uh of Docker learning about decentralized technology at the time. uh by working with him, we we were talking about IPFS when like I didn't even know about like Ethereum. I was like what the hell is Ethereum and I was googling under under the the table.

07:14Uh after that just something about it really stuck with me. I went to uh some Berkeley meetups where I met a lot of the OG like web 3 folks and they were talking about all these like use cases that like blockchain can enable. Honestly, like it kind of felt like a renaissance where people are in these like I don't know coffee shops, bars just talking about like really cool ideas and these were like really big ideas, right?

07:34It's like moving finance on chain like how it's going to change governance, how it's going to change uh music, uh art, like everything I I wanted. Super interesting from an infrastructure perspective, but also from a use case perspective. It kind of showed me that blockchain is more than just cryptocurrencies like you can buy and trade and transact but also these use cases, right?

08:03So that's when I saw the vision. Yeah. I got like goosebumps everywhere. I remember calling my mom. He's like, "Oh, I'm going to do this. I don't know what I'm going to do, but I have to be in this space." So Sean and I go way back. We actually both graduated in the same program called software engineering from Waterlue.

08:21Sean graduated 2 years ahead of me. We first both uh went off in our own direction. He sold the startup Kitematic to Docker and his product is now known as Docker Desktop. And for me, I joined Uber early in 2015 when the team was still very small and I got to ride through the hyper growth phase.

08:32So both of us dabbled into Ethereum around 2016 and or uh 2017. And for me, I heard about Ethereum when I was uh just about graduating uh university and I heard this guy named Vitalik and I heard this word Ethereum and he's creating this new blockchain called Ethereum and at the time I only knew about Bitcoin.

08:50So it really got me interested in looking more into technology and what I liked about that was for me Bitcoin was more about just a value transfer and at the time it was really fast. Now it's more considered as like a digital gold but with Ethereum it was adding logic into the blockchain.

09:06So imagine there's no middleman and uh you can pretty much peer-to-peer not just transfer value but actually add logic to it. Any form of contract whether that agree on a contract on real estate when you sell like assets tied to let's say prediction market that's all can be facilitated through Ethereum.

09:26I got interested into that. And then for Sean I remember he told me that he was trying out a couple projects on Ethereum and he noticed that it was really hard to onboard new users. And for me, when I tried out Ethereum, I saw the potential of technology, but also I noticed the broken user experience as well.

09:38Funnily enough, we actually got to know that we both had seen the same painpoint. We actually reconnected in person. So that was in 2018. Uh we met at a arcade bar in San Francisco called uh Coinop and it it started as casual drinks and then became more like a 5-hour deep conversation.

09:55We kept circling back to one question. Why hasn't anyone tackled in simplifying onboarding in blockchain? Why hasn't anyone tried building a very easy login with email? And that's the moment when it clicked. That was a solution to the fundamental problem of blockchain uh with the broken user experience.

10:14So we built the conviction there and we decided to team up and start magical apps. At Apple, I worked on a couple things.

Apple’s Perfectionism vs. Startup Reality

10:26One was integrating Apple Maps into Siri. The other one was uh directly working on the tokenization pipeline. A big lesson that I learned at Apple while I was there, the obsession with detail and especially it being spread through the leaders like Steve Jobs, Tim Cook and Johnny I.

10:39Couple things that I noticed was there was like a great sense of ownership and craftsmanship. Everyone deeply cared about making it right. Also, when it came to design, building and shipping, there was so much thought put into it. At Apple, every task or every idea that we had, we approached it with perfectionistic mindset.

10:59When I started Magic with Sean and all the times we're building along the way, one thing that I realized was perfection takes time. There's no way you can get it right as a small company going from 0 to one to come out with a product that's perfect.

11:10I don't think anyone in the world can do that. When it came to zero to one, we focused on shipping fast, getting the product out so that we can get user feedback. And we focused on really leaning into their feedback, but also trusting our intuition of what the next stage of the product can be.

11:22So after multiple and multiple iterations, that's when I started to kind of slip in certain parts that we can perfect. And also um with a lot of user feedback, you see these patterns where it helps you build confidence on investing in certain features to make it very perfect.

11:34So my overall lesson is it's something that should always stay with you, but it's very important to find the right time and find the right opportunity to practice that profession. Before magic came into the scene, the only people that could use blockchain was crypto enthusiasts or technologists.

11:52At the time, I would say using a blockchain kind of felt like trying to assemble IKEA furniture without any instructions given to you. You had all these unfamiliar parts and at every step along the way, you have to figure out on the fly. It was so confusing that most people had given up even before finishing a setup.

12:09And for example, like uh in crypto, you have to first download a browser extension and then you have to write down the seed phrase and also figure out how to store that safely. Also, you had to read and sign these unreadable blockchain messages without really knowing what you're agreeing to.

12:22On top of that, there are gas fees and there are more and more blockchain jargon. Uh it was definitely overwhelming. And where magic came in, we came up with a very simplified onboarding solution. login with email, phone number and and social login.

12:33What we did was we took blockchain that was powerful but yet it was inaccessible and we made it feel familiar, seamless and secure. So the biggest reason to why people didn't do that at the time because the de facto standard was using browser extensions and there were a lot of dogmatic sort of sentiment web 3 space where as an end user you have to manage your private key 100%.

12:58By like writing it down and like burying it like a pirate treasure right that was kind of where the space was at just from like a sentiment perspective. uh we saw the opportunity is that there's a lot of frustration from users from developers from having to deal with this dogma but the vocal minority was like really pushing the full decentralization narrative.

13:24What we were working on was extremely controversial at the time and we actually got like a lot of like uh heat on Twitter at the time for even doing this or even like thinking about doing this. So I think that naturally deterred people from working on this.

13:42Also at the time because people were deterred from doing this, they assumed that there's no other way to build a non-custodial uh key management solution because they haven't like really looked into the solution in the first place. They say, "Oh, it's very difficult.

14:00People are not going to want this anyway. People want decentralization." Whereas for me it's like hey can we do more on the technical part so we can actually get the best of both worlds. We can both offer web two style login but also web3 style like non-custodialness went down the rabbit hole to solve this specific problem because we also noticed in our like sales calls a lot of the DAP developers were asking hey how is it non-custodial if it's too centralized it's too risky we don't want that so we

14:34actually had to solve this problem and this showed up in like investor conversations as well all of that pressure actually forced us to solve the problem because we were already on the path to solve this. We were able to kind of invent the first non-custodial key management patent called delegated key management and we ended up like filing a patent for it.

14:51So actually that technology was a key factor to how we were able to complete our seed round. Um because at the time there was like these huge like crypto exchange hacks really scared the investors around investing in any kind of centralized key management solution.

15:09But we were able to kind of bring this new innovative tech which made a huge difference and that's how we were able to grow very quickly early on because it strikes the best balance in both worlds instead of like kind of leveraging fully smart contract wallets at the time which didn't scale super well or like super centralized solutions which had a lot of friction in terms of adoption.

15:33So that's how we were able to um really get to where we were. The Bitcoin blood bath continues as the cryptocurrency is stuck below 6,000. Can crypto traders expect more new lows over the weekend. Bitcoin falling below $6,000 overnight amid a broader cryptocurrency bloodbath.

15:51Now slightly off those lows, we're seeing Bitcoin futures trading near their lowest levels of the year. However, so yeah, in 2018, the crypto market had completely taken a downturn. I remember uh crypto was being called a scam from media headlines.

15:58ACS had pulled back and the ICO bubble had burst. Definitely the people that are left over in the space were the true believers of crypto and the true uh builders of crypto and we're definitely one of them. For us uh even though the market had completely taken a downturn, we saw an opportunity to solve a real fundamental problem and that was the broken user experience.

16:18Sean and myself, we weren't discouraged at all. That's something that we truly believed in that needed to be solved. And at the same time uh for me at Apple I learned that user experience is actually everything and someone in the space had to jump in and really start from backwards as in start from the user experience and back towards a uh blockchain technology.

16:42And we felt like we're the right people to be able to tackle that. Uh we jumped on it, founded Magic Labs, pursued our vision of making blockchain accessible.

One Month of Runway: Innovation Pulled from the Brink

17:01There are multiple times that I doubted and Sean doubted as well if we were taking the right path. There was one time when we had only one month of runway. We did doubt if we were taking the right path because if we were then we probably wouldn't have ended up with only one month of runway.

17:13uh we're pretty much close to running out of money and closing down our startup. So that's the time I doubted. At the time there are actually not many people left in the space. So no one told us to quit. As I said, people had written crypto off.

17:26A lot of pulled out. There are not many builders left in the space. It was more about just growing with the community of builders that were left over and we're all true believers of crypto. For myself and Shawn, we just felt this great responsibility of needing to deliver the solutions so that at least even if it's an experiment, it can be tried out on the blockchain and show to other developers, but also show the world that there is this seamless onboarding solution that can be tried out.

17:54And luckily, it worked out. But even if that hadn't worked out, I don't think Sean and myself would have quit because we just loved working on everything related to crypto and uh we fundamentally believed in the technology to keep me not distracted from that thought.

18:08I continued to uh talk to our customers and partners and I knew that they really enjoyed using our product and they enjoyed being our customer. So that really helped me not be too distracted the runway problem. At the same time, we felt like it was very important to be transparent with our team.

18:21At that time, we had a team size of probably 8 to 10. They're all working very hard, super motivated, and really loved working together with them. And we let them know that there could be a chance that we may not be able to process payroll for the next month or two.

18:32But it's our focus to ensure that we uh extend our runway. I think for me, I I believe in it so much. If Ethereum died, then my company dies too. So, I just built as hard as I could. it keeps going and keeps raising money. Fortunately, like we were able to close with like close to a month of runway left.

18:51I have to make sure to take a loan. So, the money hit the bank without running out. But at the same time, I was still hiring. I was still trying to find a new office space. Back then, we were like in person in SF. I think for me, it's like just keep pushing until the last the last minute, right?

19:10Kind kind of thing. And cuz like I I did I did hear the Docker story too. It's like they were very close to running out and then the founder created Docker as an open- source alternative and then launched at Pyon. It was a huge success. So really just turned the company around.

19:23So I kind of believe in those those very special uh moments and yeah for me I I kept going both I believe in the space but also just from what I seen heard that I should just keep going. Yeah. at the time because the space was really small.

19:40There wasn't a lot of competitors who have who had as much as adoption as we did. A lot of our barrier was talking to VCs who are not really bought into the web 3 vision like most investors at the time. It just couldn't work. No matter how many developers or dabs that we on boarded, it wouldn't convince them.

20:01But there fortunately still a lot of investors who kind of share that vision and excitement for the space who really see the saw the value in us. Uh when you resonate from like a fundamental level in terms of vision and belief and they like the team they like the technology and you're also like kind of a leader in the category then naturally like an investment will work out.

20:24Like it was a really tough time for me where where where I had to like really really learn to fundra. Yeah. Like that seed round later was so much different from the preede round uh earlier on just in terms of difficulty especially in a in a bare market right and actually like we had so many competitors at the time after we started and after the bare market there's like only a couple left.

20:48Yeah. I think that was the the reason uh I didn't know that we were going to be working with enterprises at first but I think it was really important to be very secure and and follow like compliance procedures. So we were actually the first embedded wallet who ever achieved the sock 2 type two compliance very very early on uh even though we weren't really working with enterprises at the time and that standard actually paved the way to us uh starting to talk to enterprises because when we mentioned that we have it as a startup like they're they're impressed

21:25right that we're able to achieve that and hold that standard even till today we are the most compliant embed wallet solution with both socks type 2 and ISO right uh standard which is like a payment compliance standard. So I would say that's the baseline right that's that's kind of like a hard requirement to be able to work with enterprises but also over the years we were able to develop a lot of use cases really well-known success stories like poly market helium Immutable able to get Macy's Mattel and eventually led up to

21:59neighbor but also getting reinvestment from PayPal ventures that at the time with the PayPal ventures round we were able to raise uh over $80 million in funding throughout this whole period. And at the time we were um working with uh over 30 million wallets and now we're like over 50 million over 100,000 developers now like over 200,000.

22:16Yeah. That was like a great moment for us to like capture the market opportunity uh at the time. Yeah. And definitely that gave us a a very a lot of resource right for us to capture the market there. Yeah. I spend probably the most amount of time with Sean uh having known him for for a long time uh during our uh days at Docker.

22:43You know, sat down together and he kind of walked me through the broader vision of what he was building. It immediately struck a chord with me in that consumers began to embrace uh everything that is web 3, real solutions, real financial services tools uh that can make all of our financial lives much easier.

23:00uh his vision really captured what I think was the ultimate identity problem. And I think Magic's vision at the time was to allow people to complete that journey or that migration without having to ask the users change their behaviors or adopt new behaviors.

23:14They don't have to go to MetaMask, sign up for account, memorize the 20 keyphrases, promptly forget them 2 minutes later. All you have to do is use your original login and what they do is they spin up a crypto wallet for you on the back end that allows you to connect naturally sort of natively to all the web 3 services.

23:33We talk about what's the easiest adoption or way of adoption. It's when you don't have to do it anything differently and that's why I think early on they were able to grow the number of users or number of identity as they manage to the millions sort of scale that they were able to achieve at the time and that I think spoke volumes about how important that user experience design is for that mass adoption of web 3.

Beyond the Numbers: What Makes Investors Truly Believe in Founders

24:08Having conviction is important and the conviction comes from a few places, right? One, do you believe that the market is large enough? They're attacking a big enough problem. And of course, having the numbers that Magic had early on definitely gave us confidence that this is tapping into a large enough problem.

24:25Enough people need access to this. and two uh like you alluded to earlier is there a technical differentiation or a a product differentiation from the competitors and I think the growth that it demonstrated uh the early customer buyins that they uh were able to get uh showed us that there is a good amount of technical differentiation like I mentioned having your own private key management and getting into some of the more specific features which I won't bore you with is is important right the nitty-gritty sometimes do win deals win customers.

25:01Just like your UX design really matters, right? The little things, one extra step in terms of authentication will probably result in incremental but and a significant amount of drop off in conversion rates. So, I think paying attention to all of those little details, whether it's the feature design, UX design, all really matter a whole lot.

25:20Ultimately, it also comes down to the founder or the founders themselves. one, do you really believe they're serious about building what they're building? Like I mentioned earlier, you know, when the market turns, tourists tend to leave, right?

25:33And the true believers, the true builders will stay because they're committed to doing this. That sort of grit, that sort of personal conviction that they demonstrated uh was also a critical part in terms of getting me conviction ultimately.

25:46That's probably the three biggest things, right? You look at overall size of the opportunity, whether they have the right to play or the right to win, but ultimately are the right people, right? You can bet on the right horse, but is it the right jockey?

26:03So, I think those three things kind of really converged on magic that made me invest in them. The most important principle when it comes to making decisions between tech and UX is finding that right balance between user experience and technology.

26:16I think it really comes down to customer obsession. And this is one thing I learned at Apple, right? Um, every design, every step of building and shipping, there was just so much attention that was uh attention to detail that was put into it.

26:30But more importantly, people just really cared about uh the user experience and their customers. It's more like when they're feeling the pain, you're feeling more pain yourself. You know, how do you react to that? You go about solving, right?

26:42When you build a product, it's not just to solve a problem. It's like, of course, like it's got to solve a problem, but it's almost like storytelling. It's a message. That is kind of like the soul of the product. When I think about storytelling and how a founder can get great at storytelling, kind of why I I really gravitate to naming the company magic, too.

27:07It's like a magic show, right? It's kind of like a performance. Like if you just like showed everybody exactly how the magic works, then like it won't be like, you know, magical. Great storytelling is really about that wow factor. If you're talking about from a product standpoint, you want to identify what the wow factor is and show that to your users as quickly as possible and like make that a goal.

Building the ‘Perfect’ User Experience Philosophy in the Age of AI

27:43back to kind of the philosophy right around technology being invisible. I do envision a future where people can truly focus on what they really want to do. Like they're not just dealing with the manual things like it would just be yeah fully integrated in my day-to-day life in a way that's really really simulous.

28:04Maybe there's going to be like new hardware that you can kind of talk to, right? payment, identity, authentication, those things should be ambient. They should happen in the background without us having to intervene. Fully autonomous agents should be able to do things without us having to constantly look over the shoulder.

28:15So yes, the best UI is an abstraction of the UI that doesn't need to prompt you for login, that doesn't need to prompt you for approvals. It should just happen automatically. In some ways, you see, you know, we're in San Francisco, right? We see Whimos running around.

28:34We see Tesla robo taxis being being uh tested. I don't know if anyone had had experience with riding in one lately. Uh I remember my first Whimo trip a while back. You know, the initial 2 minutes I was a little I was a little nervous. Here I am sitting in this car with an empty driver's seat taking me through the busy streets of San Francisco, which pretty challenging for me as a driver.

28:59Now there's this thing that's taking me around. But quickly I began to really just look out the window looking at a street and and got back on my phone. I completely forgot I was being driven around by AI. And that's sort of the becoming ambient or abstraction moment that happened for me when it comes to self-driving.

29:18The best technology J will put it the best UI is no UI is an abstraction. is because you've designed the experience, you've designed the tech to be so good, so secure, so seamless that users forgot that it exists. So I think yes, absolutely that philosophy will continue to guide development not just within web 3 but also within AI going forward.

29:51We're now living through a great emergency. AI agents are becoming better. So that's how magic unit will play a key role in this uh ecosystem. Thank you. [Applause] Our ultimate goal for magic is making technology feel invisible. Sean and my vision still hasn't changed to this day and we continue to believe in our vision being realized.

30:09One thing that I would say has expanded is we're now not just thinking about humans, we're also thinking about AI agents. In five years from now, what we see is it'll be your AI agents or multiple AI agents pretty much managing your money, managing your contracts, booking travels, and doing all the daily activities that you do today, being fully automated through AI agents.

30:33But Newton will ensure that they operate within the guardrails that you have set. You're able to trust that AI agent is making the right decisions and right actions even while you're asleep. like magic already solved onboarding with crypto and with AI we see crypto being the main rails for the agentic AI and that's where mutant comes in.

30:50So mutant is a trust layer that acts as a policy engine defining and enforcing programmable rules such that users and AI agents can safely and autonomously interact with blockchains. So think of mutant as system on your phone. So you get to control apps that can access your location and use your camera and send notifications etc.

31:10So with Newton, you're able to set these permissions. Just trust that AI will be able to safely interact with blockchains on behalf of you. I would say my biggest learning was that

The Greatest Risk Is Not Taking Action

31:22um progress is not linear. I always like to make this like battlefield analogy. You're like fighting a campaign, right? And you don't really know too much about the landscape. There's a lot of like fog of war. You know, in Starcraft, you don't really see, right, the map until you kind of explore it.

31:34All you see is this hill, right, that you can get on top of. So maybe you get on top of the hill, you can see more. Like you can remove some fog of war and see more. It's like, oh, maybe this is not the right hill. I need to go there. And then you go there and then it's like a little bit higher and you can see more visibility into this landscape.

31:58But if you don't take any actions to explore this fog of war, then maybe you get crushed, right? like you don't really know what's going on. So inaction is actually not an option. So you have to like constantly keep going, keep exploring, keep learning, keep iterating, keep pivoting.

32:16Sometimes it feels like 180. Sometimes if Yeah, it just feels it's like a very chaotic and unpredictable process. Where you end up is never where you start. And most of the greatest companies have gone like through a lot of these very drastic pivots, right?

32:29So I think that would be the biggest advice. Kind of think of it from that perspective. Commit to your mission, right? Commit to what you believe in your principles, but extremely flexible on your strategy and and approach. I think that should be like the right balance.

32:48Yeah. If I could go back, I would tell myself to really stress test how deeply I care about the problem that I'm solving and how badly I want to own my own destiny. Because the truth is when it comes to startups, there will be a lot of pain.

33:01When I had joined, I was just excited about building cool stuff and I did not know that I was going to go through so much pain. But what really kept me to here and I know that I'll stick it through until the end is and how much I care about the vision and the problem that we're looking to solve.

33:18The other part that I would tell myself is you got to be really obsessed uh with the problem and you got to be obsessed with building what matters. If you're not obsessed, then it'll be really hard to make it through. It's like a roller coaster where there will be highs when you feel amazing, but there will be a lot more lows where it'll feel brutal.

33:35So, if you have other goals, you're trying to make money doing a startup, I would advise not to do that. It really has to be something that you're so passionate about that you would wake up every day thinking about it. It's not just a job. Like, it has to become your life.

33:48So, it is big commitment. It's not for me to scare people, but it's also for me to just let people know that it's going to be a long journey, but I can guarantee that it's worth it. Yeah, the truth is like a person's personal motivation should evolve right over the course of years.

34:01Yes, like I think my excitement about the future of web 3, steady drum beat, right? That pushes me forward. But just in terms of sometimes, you know, when things get difficult, there's all these like personal motivations that come in play, right?

34:14When I first started, I tried to remind myself uh why I got in like I wanted to develop these skill sets, make more impact. I want to grow to be a leader. I want to learn how to work with other people better. So in the beginning that motivates me and then later on were pioneers for embedded wallet.

34:34Uh I want to take it as a new challenge to see if I can create a second album right with Newton protocol. So I I took that as a as a personal challenge as well and we were able to to deliver on that too and to me that's like very fulfilling right uh personally and I think you know as we continue to grow and and evolve we're going to find like other motivations as well but yeah like those are just a few examples and there's just so much more along the way.

35:01Yeah. [Music]