Beyond The Code

Maulik Sailor (00:01.855)
All right. Hello and welcome to yet another broadcast from CodeMonk. Today I'm joined by Oleg Giberstein, if I pronounced that right. He's the CEO of CoinRule. And today we're going to talk more about his journey founding a startup, going through YC and getting some tips about that. So why don't we start with you, Oleg? Tell us about your background. How did you get into crypto?

Oleg (00:27.438)
Sure. Thanks, Maulik, for having me on. Quite exciting. Yeah, a few words about myself. I was raised in Germany, moved over to the UK, studied here. Straight out of uni, I went to work in banking. Did that for a few years. Kind of got a bit, lost a bit my interest in it and then left to start my first startup, which at the time was a career mentoring platform. That...

Did that for about a year. We had some users, some revenue, but wasn't really like taking off. And at that time I really started kind of go more into tech events, came across crypto. At some point really blew my mind. I went down the rabbit hole. This was like 2017. So we were in the middle of the ICO boom at the time. That's like two bubbles ago now. And then at some point, you know, I stuck around and ended up starting Coinroll with

Maulik Sailor (01:18.463)
Yeah.

Oleg (01:23.502)
to co -founders.

Maulik Sailor (01:25.983)
Okay cool, tell us more about Coinroll, what's the proposition of Coinroll?

Oleg (01:29.582)
Yeah, so we help normal people build algorithmic trading strategies for crypto, but also for stocks. I mean, we are really now at the point where we are cross asset, cross market in a way. But basically you connect your exchange account. It can be, you know, Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, but can also be something like Robinhood. You connect it to CoinRule through an API key or even just one click connect.

then you can build strategies or select ready -made strategies on Coinroll and then they will execute on your trading platform on your behalf.

Maulik Sailor (02:07.999)
Okay cool and are you just basically taking the orders or are you also the custodian of the funds?

Oleg (02:13.838)
So we don't hold the funds and we don't have any withdrawal rights. And that was a deliberate decision we made because we did not want to have to deal with things like custody. We did not want to. If you're in control of funds, the regulator sees you also in a very different way. Right now we are just a piece of software. If we were in control of funds, we would be a financial institution. So we would have to do things like KYC, AML, get financial licenses. And we try to stay away from that as far as possible.

just because we want to focus on building the best product at this stage of the company. Maybe after our next fundraise, we would consider going down the regulated route, actually register for a license, and then start offering custody and other products as well. But that's not currently something we're doing.

Maulik Sailor (03:03.807)
Cool. Cool. I have an interesting question, right? So right now we are seeing some boom in the crypto market. I think Bitcoin has been treading to its all -time high. And as you said earlier, there was like two boom, like there was an ICO boom cycle, there was this whole NFT boom cycle. Two years back, we saw the whole crypto market collapsing massively. What's your take on it? What do you think? Where the market is heading?

Oleg (03:30.734)
Sure. Yeah, I mean, crypto has been seeing these cycles for years now. And it's kind of it's a funny thing if you think about it. Most technologies go through this kind of hype cycles. Just with crypto, it's different because there's a price attached to the technology. So because there's a price attached, you see it on the front page of the Financial Times, of Bloomberg, et cetera. If the price goes up, everyone gets formal, everyone joins the market.

Usually they join when the bull market is already at the later stage and then the market crashes because people realize that actually the technology is not yet as advanced as the price will tell us. And then those who have been in the space longer term end up taking profits, the market crashes, players who are over -leveraged go out of business, everything becomes very dramatic.

So it's kind of like, you know, it's the usual cycle. Now the thing is, if you look at other technologies, something like, you know, virtual reality, even AI, people have been working on AI since, you know, the 60s and 70s, right? But because there is not a price attached to it, the hype cycles are much more localized. So people don't really, you know, pay attention to them so much. Like I remember a time when everyone was talking about 3D printing.

or for a brief time, people were talking, no, no technology. And then suddenly those things kind of disappear a little bit out of the public eye. So it's the same thing with crypto, but in crypto it's much more pronounced. Now, what I think will happen, now, I don't like to make short -term predictions because tomorrow a war could break out or a pandemic or whatnot, as we have seen in the last years. So any prediction,

is only as good as whatever happens in the world the next day. Generally, usually what happens to happen is we break the Bitcoin all -time high. Usually that will happen after the Bitcoin halving, which is happening in April. So the halving is when the Bitcoin emission rate halves, which happens about every four years or a certain number of blocks. So usually the Bitcoin all -time high is reached after it.

Oleg (05:53.006)
This time we reached it already before. You never know with these things how much cycles are going to repeat versus how much change you have in it. But generally, one factor I look at a lot are kind of like hype variables. So for example, is usually at the all time highs of Bitcoin, the search interest in crypto on Google was extremely high. The Coinbase app was number one in the app store.

Maulik Sailor (05:56.319)
Okay.

Oleg (06:22.158)
things like that. Now we are nowhere near those previous highs. I've got actually, I built a script that tells me every day the place of the Coinbase app in the App Store. Globally, it's like not even in the top 100 at the moment. So I do think there's still a lot more hype space to go in this current site.

Maulik Sailor (06:37.823)
Oh well.

Maulik Sailor (06:42.847)
Yeah, just talking of technology there, I think the whole notion of crypto, you know, or the underlying technology is basically decentralized ledger, right? Why do you think that decentralization is important in today's time? What do you think could be some of the applications around that?

Oleg (07:05.678)
That's a really good question. What excited me in the first place is that there are so many areas this can touch, but the two applications that really got me excited. One is using decentralized technology to counter a growing centralized state authority. And the other one is decentralizing the financial system. Both obviously...

really big topics. So I'm sure we can only touch them somewhat briefly. But in terms of let's say decentralizing state authority, I think over the last 20, 30 years, we've been seeing a growth of states ability to interfere with a person's privacy rights. Before September 11th, it used to be normal that your funds on your account,

There is a financial secrecy here. You don't have to disclose it to everyone. All those things are gone. Encryption technology messengers. People are like, oh, but these terrorists talk on telegram about attacks. But before that, they used to talk in letters. And they would meet in coffee shops. And it's not like the state could overhear every single one of those conversations. And the world still kept turning. But.

I'm talking now about, let's say, the developed world, but in certain other countries that are even more authoritarian, encryption technology and decentralization can do even more good. I mean, imagine if any kind of payment to the state in a setting where huge corruption destroys everything that people and business people would be building. Imagine if every...

financial flow would be fully transparent on chain. It's a complete game changer in terms of how you can fight corruption. And corruption is really the cancer that keeps countries poor. So kind of stepping in the context of this, I'm extremely excited about the potential of, for example, zero knowledge proofs to help achieve privacy, but in a, let's say, compliant way. You kind of, you know, you obviously still want to make sure that people are not, you know,

Oleg (09:27.15)
funding terrorists. But if you could prove that without actually having to show what funds you have on your account or what transactions you made, that's an incredibly valuable contribution to society. And that's actually powered by zero -knowledge proofs backed by blockchain. In terms of the finance use case, so as someone who worked in banking and just generally follows the financial system very closely,

I think the financial system is broken in a lot of different ways. A lot of it is run on complete legacy technology, but also more importantly, finance does run on not even web too, but on pre -web technological rails. The way at each country, sometimes even within countries, each region has its own financial technological quirks. Imagine you could take...

all this and put it on a technological rail that is interconnected, permissionless, anyone can push code, anyone can swap and exchange liquidity. The tremendous amount of value gained that this will unlock is mind blowing. And those are the two really quite distinct yet also correlated through blockchain use cases that get me really excited.

Maulik Sailor (10:55.647)
Yeah, I think there's a lot of points over there, to be honest. I think you can always talk about pros and cons of decentralizations, regulations, central authorities and all. Just to give you some insight, actually, we considered decentralizing CodeMonk as well, the overtax platform. And we still are evaluating it. It's not the case that we have put that in the back burner.

But to my mind, like any traditional consulting companies take any big names for instance, like Deloitte or Accenture or Infosys or anybody else, they're more or less like a partner led business that every day you would have a partner in charge of a line of business, that partner would have a team of delivery managers, bid writers and all whose job is to win the business.

deliver the projects, and then they are free to make their own decisions. The only premise is that they have to operate within the operating guidelines of the holding company or the group. And so they are already operating in a lot of decentralized manner in reality. And so we took a notion that, hey, there are kind of decentralized orgs.

but a lot of value is created at the lower end of the pyramid, the organizational pyramid, but a lot of that value is actually captured by the partners at the top. Now, of course, they have worked through many years to get to that level, but in terms of that value creation and consumption is not balanced. So we wanted to disrupt that and make it like a completely flat decentralized organization where...

the value creation and consumption is happening at the same level by the same members of the protocol and so on. So we actually created the whole protocol design. We created the whole token flow and token economics and everything else. We were actually funded by Outlier Ventures to actually go and develop the whole proof of concepts around that, which we did. But I think we got the timing wrong. As we concluded,

Oleg (12:49.902)
Mm -hmm.

Oleg (12:57.614)
Mm -hmm.

Oleg (13:06.798)
Oh.

Maulik Sailor (13:16.415)
our studies just when the whole crypto winter sat in and we were right in the middle of that and fundraising at the time, launching what you call the ICOs and all was not really working out. So we decided to just put everything on hold and just continue operating as our normal business, which is what we are doing right now. But hopefully, we'll revisit this in a near future.

Oleg (13:39.566)
Mm -hmm.

Oleg (13:44.59)
Yeah. Yeah, no, no, I just I was going to jump in. I think the trickiest part with these kind of experiments is to get the tokenomics right. Because at the end of the day, you want to build something that works in Bowen Bear Market. And it's like coordinating people is already hard enough. And then kind of coming up with the token that works is really a hard problem.

Maulik Sailor (13:46.463)
But just talking of this whole decentralized, sorry.

Oleg (14:14.19)
And I think we are one of the reasons why crypto is still so volatile is because it's such a new design space. So people are still really coming up with ways, hey, do these tokenomics work or do these work? Does this game theory make sense or not? So there's actually a lot of experimentation happening. So when you were describing what you were doing, it's really something I've come across in different shapes and forms. It's a very interesting problem.

that someone for sure will solve and it will really innovate organizational structures, I think, once that really takes off.

Maulik Sailor (14:50.527)
Yeah, totally, totally. I think just talking more about this trends, you know, like, you know, you picked an example of traditional industry, which can be quite easily disrupted by, you know, this whole decentralized technology and same thing with us. We think that the whole consulting already people led business can be easily decentralized and could be made a lot more efficient. Just stepping more towards coin, coin rule, you know, you're sort of that something you're working on right now.

What's your vision there? What do you want to achieve? Any disruption or any big wave change that you guys are hoping for?

Oleg (15:29.902)
Sure, there are multiple elements here. One of them is algorithmic trading and also AI driven trading. So generally what we've seen in the market is that...

whatever is available to professional investors, hedge funds, with a delay of a few years becomes available to retail traders. That's what happened with electronic trading in the 90s. That's what started to happen then when ETFs started to emerge. All those robo advisory firms were basically creating a product out of index funds and things like that. Then,

companies like Bridgewater started to use more and more machine learning for their analysis. And obviously, you've got the high frequency traders pop up that would use algo strategies to outperform the market. The retail investor would always be a few years behind that curve, but eventually catch up. And we are part of this wave. So ultimately,

what we are bringing right now to the table is to make those algorithmic strategies that are just accessible to hedge funds and the institutional traders, we are making them more available to the mainstream trader and user, like the so -called retail investor. We have seen this rise of the retail investor since COVID, with Robinhood, with a lot of that. And actually, also crypto has driven quite a bit of this.

retail interest. But the other thing that's really become a big component of this is AI. In the future, AI will enable everyone to have their own personalized financial advisor that can kind of customize a portfolio based on your personal financial needs and priorities in this moment. And the AI will be able to come up with strategies for you that fit what you're trying to achieve.

Oleg (17:35.822)
And that's in a way the direction we are going. That's what we want to enable. And finally, we want to enable this across different asset classes. So today we run on top of CIFI, so centralized crypto exchanges. We run on top of the NASDAQ, so you can trade through us stocks and ETFs that are listed on the NASDAQ. We are expanding to decentralized finance. So we'll be running on top of some of the decentralized exchanges. And really, ultimately, we want to be able to connect

all of them, so to give our users as many possible channels and platforms and empower them with AI to actually optimize their strategies and really use the tools that are available to the most sophisticated traders, but make them available broadly. That's the vision. That's what we are fighting for.

Maulik Sailor (18:26.655)
Yeah, that's good. You know, just listening to you, I was in India recently and I just got back to UK last week. And on my way back, I watched this movie in the flight called Dumb Bunny, if you know that. It's about, you know, yeah, the big squeeze around the game stock and how they call it like Dumb Bunny because the hedge fund guys don't really...

Oleg (18:40.494)
Yeah, it's a great movie.

Maulik Sailor (18:55.103)
consider the normal people as knowledgeable or valuable in their trading. So that was an interesting one. Do you think something like that could happen more frequently with apps like CoinRule or decentralized exchanges?

Oleg (19:09.07)
Absolutely. I think that trend is happening. If I would be making a prediction, like as much as I would like to say, you know, that the world will become more democratized, I do think it will become somewhat more democratized. I do think decentralizing finance will give more opportunities to people all over the world, not just, you know, the ones who, you know, happen to live in, you know, Boston or New York or London. Having said that,

If you have a lot of capital, you're a hedge fund billionaire, you will probably still have an edge, right? But the same way how, you know, billionaires today use the same phones and drive, you know, go to the same countries on holidays, broadly speaking, as normal people, the same way investment opportunities will become more comparable.

Because today, if you are a retail investor, there's no way you'll get to invest at an early stage into like a new hot AI company. There's no way you'll get to take advantage of the most sophisticated algo strategies. But I think in 10 years time, those things will be more accessible to the normal person, relatively speaking to that hedge fund billionaire than they are today. Now, I think the distinguishing criteria will still be that...

the AI that will enable this will be owned by the hedge fund billionaires unless we manage to decentralize AI and decentralize AI models. But that's a different story and different topic. But I do think that those hedge fund billionaires will probably manage to keep a step ahead of the curve. But I do think that that gap will narrow thanks to technology like coin.

Maulik Sailor (20:59.263)
Cool, cool. So like, you know, given that your app is targeted towards normal people, let's say like myself who may want to invest a few grand here or there, what do you think? Where should I get started? You know, I am not currently investing. So, you know, what would you suggest? Now, just to clarify, this is not a financial advice, you know, not something regulated by FCA. So it's just a friendly chit chat, okay?

Oleg (21:17.774)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course.

Of course, of course. And I'll be very careful and I'll be also very honest. What we found so far, like our mission is to empower normal people. But so far, we are best for people who trade a bit more actively, people who know a bit more what they're doing. Like if you just want to put your money into something and let it run and forget about it, we are currently not yet the right platform for you. I have to admit.

And the reason for that is because trading is really hard. Markets move fast, markets change. The traders who get the most out of us are able to select between different strategies, customize their strategies, test their strategies, improve them, and so on. The regular person who just wants to put their money into something and forget about it, they don't have the time to do it. So what we think will help us to actually expand to, let's say, users like

yourself will be a market -based strategy, so kind of more customized, ready -made strategies, but also using, as I was saying, using AI, for example, to help you automatically choose between the right strategy for the right market. So ultimately, this will be like your personal fund that trades on your behalf. Right now, we are not quite there just yet. So today, if you were with a relatively small portfolio,

looking to use us, we would be a great fit if you were keen to actually learn to trade and become more of an active investor. We have a really helpful community. We have a lot of resources, a lot of learning material. So it's kind of like, if you want to trade, we will make it much easier for you to do so than if you have to just look at charts and, you know, press buy and sell on the crypto exchange or on the NASDAQ. But we won't take away 100 % of the pain.

Oleg (23:19.566)
Like you still need to engage with it.

Maulik Sailor (23:23.391)
Yeah. And if I'm not wrong, you went through Y Combinator with your co -founders. How was that journey like? Tell me more about that.

Oleg (23:33.966)
Yeah, that was really a fantastic experience. So Y Combinator, for those who don't know, it's pretty much the best accelerator program in the world. Companies like Reddit, Stripe, Airbnb, Coinbase, and many others went through it. So we had applied, I think we got in on the fourth or fifth application. So really, we just kept applying and kept applying. And they always look at your previous applications as well.

Like they, it's not just they look at it in that moment. Now there were two, three things that happened. So my co -founder had messaged Michael Siebel, the CEO of YC on LinkedIn and told him, look, hey, we're growing like crazy, which we were. This was, you know, 2021, the market was booming. We really started to grow extremely fast at that time. So he messaged Michael Siebel. Michael Siebel was like, look, just apply for YC.

And then we applied. We told them the application. We wrote to MicroSybil, told us to apply. And obviously, this is not the kind of thing that by itself gets you in. But it's the kind of thing that is maybe tongue -in -cheek that makes them pay a bit more attention. But also, of course, what helped was that we actually had the numbers to back it up. Now, a lot of people ask, do I need to have revenue to get into YC?

Maulik Sailor (24:43.391)
Mm -hmm.

Oleg (24:53.006)
Generally, no. The majority of startups in YC are pre -revenue. But it really depends on what you're doing. Each story is different. But generally, my advice would be to kind of keep trying. And what they always tell you is to focus on pre -product market fit. You just want to build product and talk to users. And if you can communicate in the application clearly what you do and what you're doing in terms of building product and talking to users,

and what you're learning in the process, they will pay attention to your application.

Maulik Sailor (25:26.815)
I was the founder. Do you think I should apply?

Oleg (25:30.542)
as a solo founder.

Maulik Sailor (25:33.951)
Yeah.

Oleg (25:35.374)
So there are solo founders in YC, but being a solo founder is hard. Generally, my advice is to always apply to YC because even the way the application designed actually helps you think through some problems and questions that you're trying to solve. So I think it's a good exercise, but generally because founding a company is so hard, it's always, they prefer strongly if you have a co -founder. Let's put it this way.

Maulik Sailor (26:01.663)
Okay, cool. Understood. I mean, that was the only reason why I'm not really bothered applying so far, because normally they do prefer a team and being a solo founder is normally not a preferred one.

Oleg (26:13.518)
So small anecdote, actually Coinbase, Brian Armstrong was a solo founder in YC. So when they applied, there were two founders, but his co -founder dropped out just before YC. So he went through the batch as a solo founder, which is very impressive. It's really tough.

Maulik Sailor (26:19.999)
Yeah.

Maulik Sailor (26:30.751)
Yeah, now Coinbase is a pretty good app. I have it installed and I do check it out. I think that the app is really good, is well designed and it just makes crypto trading quite easy. But anyways, I just want to go back to that YC stuff. I've spent some time in the Bay Area and you guys are based in London. How would you compare the two ecosystems?

Oleg (26:42.958)
Yeah.

Oleg (26:57.518)
I was just talking about it this morning with someone else actually. I love London and I think the ecosystem here has come a long way. But what I find what Silicon Valley has is a level of energy that is just unmatched anywhere in the world. The number of things and events that are happening and the profile of people that you meet at those events is immense.

One thing that I don't like about the London tech ecosystem, let's be honest, London is a very professional city. You go to tech events and you meet bankers and consultants and accountants. You don't actually meet as many builders and technical builders as you meet in Silicon Valley. You go to Silicon Valley to an event, half the audience has computer science PhDs from elite universities.

and just the level of conversation. I feel I go in London to events, everyone tries to sell me something. I go in Silicon Valley to events and people are talking to me about using the hottest new tech to go to Mars. And I think that's a big difference. In London, we should probably get more into this engineering builder mindset than where we are at the moment. And I do think some tech ecosystems, I think for example, India, from what I hear,

is becoming better and better really for those technical type of founders. In fact, a huge number of Indian tech startups are currently going through YC and have been over the last years, which is for me very, very positive and bullish for India as a country, as an economy, just as an example.

Maulik Sailor (28:43.647)
Yeah, no, I would tend to agree that, you know, given that I'm from India originally, I spent a long like about 20 years in London. So I'm fairly familiar with London and India as a tech ecosystems. I would say 10, 15 years ago, possibly London was probably the best ecosystem outside Bay Area. I would challenge that now, you know, challenge my own judgment now. And I think India has really boomed, you know, some of the tech startup that has come out from there has been amazing. They have been super successful.

And the good thing about the Indian ecosystem is now, like, some time back, people were just literally copying business models from, let's say, the West and tried to get to the market in India and try to take an exit. But now the current breed of founders, they're really focusing on the local ecosystem, the local problems and the local solutions and try to scale within that market.

without even wanting to go out of the market because the market is huge. I think they have 1 .5 billion population of which about 800 million are online with internet access, which is a huge number and far bigger than the US in terms of the number of users, not in terms of the monetary terms. But even then,

AI, let's say if you're doing an AI startup which needs a lot of data, then that's probably the market you need to go into to collect all the data you want. So yeah, I would tend to agree over there. Anyways, I think we talked about your journey, we talked about your startup and just the ecosystem in general, we talked about your experiences in the Bay Area and the startup ecosystems.

I think it's about time that I would like to, you know, we start wrapping up our discussion. But before we do that, you know, there are a few questions that we ask all of our guests. It's the same questions we ask them all. And we would like, I mean, you can answer the way you like, right? So if you're ready, I'll ask you the first question. Like, given that you have experience of working in multiple countries in a lot of different settings, you know, what advice would you give?

Oleg (30:43.438)
Mm -hmm.

Oleg (30:50.126)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Maulik Sailor (31:04.223)
to recent graduate or junior folks in tech industry on how to make their career. Now, their career could take different routes. They may want to acquire like a senior role within a large company, or they may want to go and do their own startup. But based on your experience, what would you suggest? What are the few tips you would give to them?

Oleg (31:23.502)
First of all, I would focus on skill development. I think we are at a time where just having a little bit of technical skill and using that together with, you know, chat GPT and all those AI tools coming up, you can go a really long way. But if you have zero technical skills, you will struggle to even communicate with the AI. So never before has it been...

as valuable to even have, you know, you don't need to become a master hacker, but just having that, you know, 80, 20 knowledge of how to, you know, talk to a machine will really propel you forward. And the other thing I would say is in a time where technology, but even intelligence in a way will become more and more commoditized thanks to AI, your human skills.

will matter even more. So your ability to communicate with people, your ability to feel empathy, your ability to meet people, make friends, get into groups, get into networks, will be like, the human touch will become even more important than it's ever been. So if you work on these two distinct things, your technical skill on the one hand, and your ability to communicate, make friends, network, empathize with people,

that will really set you apart. And finally, just make yourself helpful. If you're just starting out in your career, be really curious, go to a lot of events, meet a lot of people, let kind of, you know, Seneca said that luck is when preparation meets opportunity. If you are prepared and you go out there and you just pull those opportunities towards you, luck will happen in your career. And that's what I would say to new graduates.

Maulik Sailor (33:19.743)
That's good. That's good. And we already talked a lot about decentralization and AI, but is there any other tech trend that you think will disturb any of the industries in the near future?

Oleg (33:32.75)
Interesting question. I mean, like I've made that career decision a few years ago to really focus on crypto and blockchain because that just touches all my passions in life. So I don't follow, there's a lot of interesting things happening in biotech and even in AI, I'm not following some of it as closely as I could because you have to be focused, right? I am...

Maulik Sailor (33:46.559)
hehe

Oleg (34:01.07)
really curious about where virtual reality will go. I do think that it will really disrupt the way we work and in connection with some of the technologies that we are talking about anyway, will really change the way things look in the world. But yeah, that would be my two cents on that topic.

Maulik Sailor (34:26.431)
And who is the one person who influenced the most in your life?

Oleg (34:34.254)
The one person, I mean, you know, let's exclude parents and friends for a moment because obviously, you know, whether I am the father of a small son, so I can see how much I'm influencing him already if I want it or not. So obviously, let's exclude that. I think from, let's say, from a career point of view, I've had some great influences from some of my first bosses and during my time in banking, some of them really taught me important skills.

Maulik Sailor (34:38.815)
Hehehe

Oleg (35:03.854)
But I would say on my tech journey, what really kind of got me hooked in the early days was actually Tim Ferriss, which I'm sure a lot of your listeners are familiar with. He's a very famous podcaster, author, just the way how he kind of combined the right ethics, the right mindset, but also with curiosity, kindness, sense of experimentation and open -mindedness, but also this...

thinking outside of the box, that's really like, you have to imagine I was in banking and I was deadly bored. You know, everyone was so corporate and just kind of reading Tim Ferriss and listening to Tim Ferriss was like, wow, there's like all these things that are actually possible if you start to think outside the box. So I think in terms of actual impact from a non -family member on my life, this was probably the most impactful person.

Maulik Sailor (35:58.367)
Yeah, I do listen to his blogs as well. Cool. Anyways, who is one person that you would like to meet living or dead? It can be anybody.

Oleg (36:09.102)
Yeah, I would love, so I've been lucky enough to meet some of the people I would love to meet like Balaji Srinivasan. I'm a huge fan of, he was the former CTO of Coinbase and kind of like just generally brilliant, brilliant guy. I would love to meet Navara Vikant. He is the founder of AngelList and a few other companies and he's really also dedicated himself to crypto and blockchain over the last years.

It's just the way he thinks about the world and about technology seems to be always like five levels above everyone else. And I've learned a tremendous amount from like listening to him on podcasts and reading his writings. I would love to spend like a day just talking to him about the world and like kind of learning the way how he thinks through problems.

Maulik Sailor (37:00.735)
Right. And the last one, right. Who do you think we should invite next to our podcast?

Oleg (37:07.118)
That's a good question. There are so many cool and interesting founders out there. I mean, if you could choose anyone in the world, I would love to have Gary Tan, the president of Y Combinator on there. Sadly, it's not something I can easily make happen, but I'm happy to introduce two various, various really impactful crypto founders in the industry.

Maulik Sailor (37:18.527)
Yes. Yep.

Maulik Sailor (37:30.175)
Yeah, definitely. I'll reach out to you for that. But you know, on that one, interesting, we had some interesting names suggested to us, some really, really top people, right? And we said, okay, you know what, we are just starting this podcast series. Eventually, we hope that this one will grow and we get to a stage where we are able to invite them and we can invite them today, but not sure they will join us. But we get to a level where they think they consider...

Consider us valuable for them to come on to our podcast. So we hope we really hope to get there get to that level So anyways, thanks a lot Oleg for your time today, you know, it was really interesting to hear about you your journey You know the the impact you are trying to make with your startup coin coin rule I'll definitely check it out. I haven't really downloaded your product yet, but I'm going to check it out You know, let's see whether this hot crypto market may

Oleg (38:03.854)
Yeah.

Maulik Sailor (38:29.183)
may help me earn some extra bucks or not. You never know. But I'll definitely check it out. So that's it, folks. Thank you all for joining us for today. If you want to listen to more such podcasts, then please subscribe to our YouTube and Spotify channels or alternate with your newsletter. If you're a tech talent, then do sign up to our website, codemong .ai. Invite to a click, create your team, and start working together on new projects.

Or if you're a tech manager looking to build a tech team, then just sign up as an employer and see the magic on how you can optimize your existing team or find new talent to augment your team. That's it for thanks. Thank you for listening. Thank you. Good. Thank you, Oleg. I'll just stop. And.

Oleg (39:11.054)
Thanks so much for having me, Maulik

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