Draper U Changed My Cardano Startup

I went to Silicon Valley thinking I needed to refine a startup idea. Four weeks later, the idea had completely changed. I pivoted all over the place. The way I thought about building companies had changed.

And honestly, the way I look at myself as a founder had also changed as well. And I pitched in front of Tim Draper. I interviewed potential customers. I had mentors and investors question assumptions I hadn’t really thought about before.

And I watched other founders completely reshape their businesses. There were many late nights, rewriting pitches, investor conversations, networking events, trips around San Francisco, and absolutely ridiculous amounts of food. And somewhere in the middle of all that, what started as a bounty platform turned into something much bigger. So in this video, I want to take you through my experience at Draper University as a part of the first Cardano Genesis program.

Not just what we did, but I want to talk about actually what I learned and what changed me, what I got wrong, and what I’m building as a result of that experience. Looking back at it now, I think the bigger change was pretty simple. I went from thinking like a developer and came out thinking a lot more as a founder. Now for anyone that hasn’t been following my daily videos, the Genesis program was held at Draper University at San Mateo in California.

And this particular cohort was centered around founders and builders from the Cardano ecosystem. Now I’ve been building on Cardano for years. I’ve built the WordPress integration through Cardano Press. I’ve run the Learn Cardano YouTube channel that you’re watching now.

I’ve worked with projects across the ecosystem. I’ve run a state pool, organised events, I’ve built various different products. So I wasn’t going into a completely new to business or completely new to building things. But I realised quickly that building things and building a scalable startup are two very different skills.

And that became one of the recurring themes throughout the whole program. Now one of the earliest things that really changed me was looking at the market size. I’ve traditionally built things because I see a problem. I understand the technology and I think, yeah, I could build something for that.

I can fix that problem. And that’s how a lot of developers operate. And that’s how Cardano Press came about. I understood WordPress, I understood Cardano, NFTs were becoming really popular and projects wanted a website that could interact with a wallet and the blockchain data.

So I started connecting those two worlds together. And technically, I think we did some really interesting things. But when I started to look at it through the framework we were being taught at Draper, the market became the problem. Crypto itself is already a niche.

Cardano is a smaller part of crypto, so a smaller niche. And Cardano projects using WordPress is another smaller segment again. So we’re going from something really big to smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. And then businesses within that group that actually need that particular integration, your building is smaller again.

And you suddenly realise you’re several niches deep. And that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t build niche products. There are plenty of very successful niche companies out there, but you need to understand the market you’re entering, how many potential customers there are, what’s the value of each one of those customers and how much does it cost you to acquire them? How many of them actually have a problem that you’re solving?

And most importantly, are they willing to pay to solve it? That sounds incredibly obvious when I say it now, but as developers, I think we’re very good at skipping that bit. And we think the technology is cool. We can build this.

People should want it. And then six months later, you’re wondering where the users are. And that’s probably one of the first big shifts for me. So instead of asking, what can I build?

I started asking, what is actually worth building? Very early in the program, we had to start pitching. Actually from day one, we got in front of Azure and we started pitching our projects straight away. And there was nowhere to hide when you’re standing in front of a group of founders, mentors and other people who have heard thousands of startup pitches.

You can’t waffle your way through it. What problem are you solving? Who has the problem? What are you building?

Why now? What’s the big opportunity? Why are you the person to do it? And can you explain all of this in a few minutes?

One of the early sessions was with Azra Nadeem, the managing director at Draper University. And from there, we had sessions around testing business ideas with David Bland. And this is where things became much more structured. Don’t just assume it’s true, test it.

If you think freelancers have a problem of getting paid, go talk to the freelancers. If you think businesses don’t trust existing payment systems, talk to the businesses. If you think people want crypto escrow, don’t ask. Would you use a crypto escrow?

Because people are generally kind of nice to you and they’ll say, yeah, that sounds great. I’ll use that. Instead, ask them, what do they do today? Ask them about the last time a problem occurred.

What did it cost them? How did they solve it? What frustrated them? Did they actually spend money trying to fix it?

That’s a completely different conversation and you get a lot more out of that. Jim Morris ran sessions with us around customer interviews, ideal customer profiles and validation. And this was one of the most useful parts of the program for me. At the time, my idea was much more focused around web bounties.

The concept that someone could create a job or a bounty, funds could be locked into a smart contract, someone completes the work and the funds are released. Pretty straightforward, I know. But instead of immediately disappearing into a room for six months and building everything, we started to test the assumptions around it. I spoke with people who had been using freelancer platforms for years and I started looking at both sides of the marketplace, not just freelancers, but people actually hiring them.

We tested the bounty flow. I put real test bounties together using USDM on testnet. The important thing wasn’t whether the particular bounty system was going to become the final product. The important thing was learning what people actually cared about in that entire process.

What problems existed in that flow? Were there any friction points? What did people trust? What didn’t they trust?

Who takes responsibility when something goes wrong? And one question eventually became really important. Was the bounty platform actually the business? Or was the interesting part, the infrastructure underneath it?

So this became probably the biggest product change that came out of DraperU, where bounties was the original product and idea. But the more I worked through it, the more I realised that the escrow contract underneath it was potentially much more interesting because that bounty platform is one application. But escrows is that primitive, it’s like a layer underneath. And that can be used almost everywhere.

So you can use it in a freelancer platform, you can use it in a marketplace, an auction website, job platform, and you can potentially use it for grants like Project Catalyst or even the Cardano Treasury. You could use it around important exports, insurance, vehicle sales, real estate, agent to agent payments, human to agents, and the list just keeps on going on and on. So the thinking starts to change. So instead of let’s build Web3 Bounty Platform, it became, what if we build escrow infrastructure and then build products on top of it?

And that was a massive shift in how I was thinking about the company. And even that idea got challenged later, which is exactly what you want. Around day 10, we started doing our proper stage pitch rehearsals. Leah and Alberto were mentoring us through the pitch process, and I volunteered to go first, which probably was a mistake.

I got up there, started pitching, and I think within the first minute I started swearing. I was reading the script, it wasn’t flowing, and I just swore my head off. Just a natural reaction. But the script wasn’t flowing, the slides weren’t right, and things sounded perfectly fine in my head, and it didn’t sound well when I was actually standing on stage and trying to explain everything.

So I had a lot of refinement to do. And that’s another really interesting lesson. Writing a pitch and delivering the pitch are completely different things. You have to hear the words, you have to feel where the awkward transitions are, you have to find where you’re using too much technical language.

You realise that a slide you’ve spent three hours making actually makes no sense to anyone except for you. And then you start watching everyone else get up and explain their companies in 30 seconds, and you suddenly think, right, that’s as simple as how I need to get it. The rehearsal was rough, but that’s what rehearsals are for. It’s the uncomfortable part of the actual improvement process.

So we all went back, we reworked our scripts, changed slides, changed the order, simplified things, practiced again and again and again until the big pitch day itself. Now for me, I actually have to walk around, I can’t sit still practicing. So I went for long walks, I did I think 20, 17,000 steps one day, 20,000 steps another day, just walking up and down the streets of San Mateo, practicing the pitch over and over again. I’m sure there were plenty of people that thought I was absolutely crazy, but you know, when you put your earbuds in, they don’t really notice.

They just think, okay, he’s talking on the phone about the same thing over and over again and swearing and all that. So anyway, that was my experience in learning that pitch, and it’s stuck in my head. I can’t get rid of it. All right, so day 11, this is pitch day, and this was probably the most intense day of the entire program because now we’re pitching in front of Tim Draper and a room full of people who can pull your idea apart quickly.

Atmosphere that morning was interesting. Everyone was pretty nervous and people were practicing everywhere, going through slides, going through their lines, trying to remember everything. And I actually tried to stay away from a lot of it because I needed space to clear my head because I didn’t want to absorb everyone’s energy and nerves and then compounding that on top of my own nerves. So I had to leave the room and just let everyone be.

But eventually it was my turn. And weirdly, once you’re actually standing up there, you just got to do it. And the pitch went well. There was one little stuff up towards the end, but overall, I was pretty happy with it and even took a bit of a risk with a joke.

I was talking about some of the possibilities, the applications of escrows, including land transactions. I mentioned buying and selling an island, and Tim Draper just happened to be selling one of his islands, as you do. So eventually when he realised what I was referencing, he started to laugh. And I remember thinking, thank God that joke landed because no one else in the room got it because no one else knew that, or barely anyone else knew that he was selling an island.

He laughed. I got the reaction. He nudged Andy Tang next to him. They both got it.

They both understood. Then came the Q&A part of it. And that was a hard part because the pitch rehearsal, you got that down pat. You know what’s happening there, but the questions aren’t rehearsed.

And the questions from Tim Draper, he asked me about the infrastructure approach. Was building an escrow lair itself enough? I remember standing there while he was asking the question and having all of these other thoughts going through my head. I was thinking about what he’s asking.

I’m thinking about what I should answer. I was thinking about the pitch. Then he stopped talking. And there was a fraction of a second where my brain just went blank and said, what did he say?

And I had to come up with the answer quickly, but fortunately I answered it. And watching the recording back afterwards, I was actually happy with the answer. And because the answer was basically no, infrastructure itself probably isn’t enough. You need to start building applications on top of it.

You need to prove the infrastructure works. You need the distribution. You need the users, need revenue. You need something people can touch.

And that question has stayed with me. It’s a part why I’m not interested in spending years building a giant invisible blockchain infrastructure layer, and then hoping someone would actually turn up and use it. Build the infrastructure, but then also build applications that demonstrate why that infrastructure matters. That’s the thinking I have now, and much of a part of why Moshi Concepts is existing.

That’s the company that I’ve started and what we’re doing with Hoken. And Hoken is the escrow layer that I’m putting together. I also had questions around this infrastructure could potentially work with the grant system within Cardano, such as Project Catalyst and the Treasury. For example, Project Catalyst or the platforms where money is released based on milestones.

At the moment, someone submits a milestone, someone reviews it, gets approved, then eventually the payment process happens. There could be delays between those steps. And I’ve experienced myself being funded through Project Catalyst, being delayed for like up to a month before the money actually comes through. And when you’re being paid in a volatile asset, such as ADA.

Two weeks makes quite a big difference to the actual value of the what you eventually receive and now with the markets you know in a bear market to you expecting. I don’t at x and then suddenly comes in at y and she is losing a lot of budget there. So that was one concept could smart contracts automate the final part of that workflow humans can still be there as a judgment part, you can even have AI help with the verification of the work that is done but once a milestone is approved could payment happen almost immediately. That’s the type of thing I start to think about not replacing humans not throwing AI at everything but looking at which parts of the workflow generally could benefit with a bit more automation.

Now one of the most important pieces of feedback came from Andy Tang and Andy is a partner draper associates and founding partner at draper dragon. Add his point was around credibility you can build a smart contract you can deploy it you can tell everyone it’s secure why should anyone trust it with their money and that’s a real problem. Traditional escrows has have overheads there’s paperwork there’s institutions and there’s insurance there are fees and for large transactions that will make sense but for smaller transactions. Traditional escrows become completely uneconomical if you’re going to deal with a few thousand dollars you may not want.

Hundreds or thousands of dollars of legal and escrow overhead attached to it smart contracts could potentially bring down those costs dramatically but you haven’t eliminated the trust you’ve just moved it so instead of trusting the escrow agent. People now need to trust the contract the platform the audit process and the dispute mechanism that means if Moshi Concepts is going to build this properly security trust can’t be a marketing line it has to be the product itself Moshi Concepts escrow platform has to be the most secure and trusted platform out there to make it actually work. After pitch day there was definitely a sense of relief we had spent so much time building towards that one moment.

Suddenly everyone could breathe but the focused moved into another phase how do we fund this how do we go to market. How do we build attention how do we turn attention into actual users how we work with investors how do we turn the start up into real company and we had some really good fireside chats that took us through the entire process afterwards so first off we had a chat with Joe. Vizani from Lunar Crush and he was speaking to us about fundraising and one thing I took away from Joe’s session was how much fundraising relies on momentum you need to stay organised you need to respond quickly you need to keep things moving when interest starts building don’t disappear for three weeks and come back with an email momentum itself create more momentum.

People see other people interested these VCs they all talk to each other they know what’s happening and they may say hey have you spoken to such and such about this deal that type of interest builds more momentum. They are they see these deals processing and suddenly the conversation changes it’s not necessarily comfortable but fundraising is its own rhythm and it seriously is a skill. Now with the go to market side of things we had Lorenzo from Nesso talking about the go to market strategies and specifically for Kidana as well and this is where another area that developers massively underestimate. Building the product is only half the problem I’d say even a third of the problem you need a thesis you need a story you need to be able to explain why it matters why what you’re building matters and then you have to test your story constantly against the market are people listening are people signing up are they coming back can you turn that attention into real repeatable users.

And this is especially interesting to me because I spent years building communities and product producing content I’m very comfortable getting a message out there but but turning content and attention into customer acquisition is a completely different discipline and that’s something I’m going to put more time and effort towards in what I’m building now. We also had conversations at the house with people including Rodrigo Cajero and Noel Becker from Edge and Node this place is absolutely sensational on theme that came from this conversation that really stood out to me was. Normal users do not care about decentralization in the same way as crypto people care about decentralization even argue a lot of crypto people.

Don’t even care about decentralization hence chains like Solana and Coinbase’s base chain exists they’re essentially centralized chains but people love it people want to use them they don’t care about the level of decentralization that people in the Kadana ecosystem care about now most people care about one thing first. Does it work is it reliable is it cheaper is it faster can I trust it if you’re selling someone a car they probably don’t want to have a forty minute explanation about it and that’s the same with blockchain they don’t want to understand the UTXO’s the validators what they want to know is where’s my money. When does the other person receive it what happens if something goes wrong and that’s probably it and I think this is something that the entire crypto industry needs to get better at the technology should disappear if someone can use a crypto powered escrow product without even realising that Kadana is underneath it that’s probably a win the blockchain shouldn’t be the product the outcome should be the product.

Gary Coover from SuperLayer also came in and spoke about tokenization and fundraising and I really liked how pragmatic that conversation was because we’re in crypto there’s a tendency to think we’ve built a project when token but why why does your company actually need a token what function does it perform could the same thing be achieved with equity could you just have a governance token do you need to have a governance token to be able to use the token. If you’re introducing a token purely because you think it will help raise money or get attention that’s probably not a good enough reason especially in how the crypto markets are right now that was another useful reality check really so technology choices token choices blockchain choices they all need to serve the business not the other way around.

Now one of the things Draper you made real clear to me was that I need to become much better at networking I’ve spent most of my career sitting behind a computer and behind a camera I can code I can build websites I can make videos I can research things I can happily spend 14 hours a day solving some technical problems without talking to another human being. And that’s just the way it is but founders do not get that luxury especially if you’re going to raise capital and towards the end of the program we had a dinner at anti tanks place there were founders their investors people from the ecosystem and I described at the time as almost feeling like speed dating you meet someone you have a few minutes with them what are you building what’s the markets where you at what are you raising.

Does it match their interest no great nice to meet you next conversation and it’s a very different from networking at a crypto conference where you can stand around talking about Kidano for 40 minutes to an hour and that’s another skill I’m developing how can you explain what you doing quickly. How do you listen to what the other person is looking for how do you know whether it’s a fit and how do you maintain those relationships afterwards. Now it wasn’t all about business and honestly the cohort was probably one of the biggest parts of the experience you’re effectively living with a group of founders who are going through the same thing everyone has their own company their own problems their own pictures their own pressures and we’re watching people improve every day.

We had days out in san francisco chinatown north beach fisherman’s worth food in which I absolutely love. My gira deli golden gate bridge breweries rooftops there are dinners out late night conversations and people helping each other with their decks and people. Practicing their pictures people questioning each other’s assumptions and eventually people started leaving and going back to their own countries and cities wherever they live and then that’s when you realise how quickly those four weeks went. At the beginning it felt like we had all the time in the world then suddenly the program was basically over.

So we organise a meet up with the barbecue pool party at the campus we had a hundred eight a reward for the first person to jump in the pool after certain time. That that one didn’t go ahead the pool was out of bounds it was being cleaned up and you know all this stuff was happening around there but we had another one for a hundred eight a price for the person who do the most tricep dips. And that nick from lava one that one i still got to send you the a to nick so i’m hit me up. But it’s just a part of the process it was a really good day just to have more of the community members around and just hanging about.

But those were the little community moments that were great the whole reason why the program exist was because of those connections between draper university and the katana ecosystem so having the actual community come through the campus made a lot of sense. Now the final week we had my favourite session we had george north up come in for a fireside chat and george’s career was ridiculous is is done so much is retired now. He went into a small systems integrator as CFO in the nineteen eighties and the company landed massive contracts and grew roughly three million dollars in revenue around a hundred fifty million in something. In eighteen months which understandably taught him complete the wrong lesson it made startups look easy but he later joined online resources the company that had burned three millions of dollars i had barely anything to show for it.

And he said they ran out of money sometimes like fifteen times eventually became IPO and across his career he had raised hundreds of millions of dollars but. The thing i took away from george wasn’t the numbers it was his attitude to ambiguity founders have to become uncomfortable with not knowing. You don’t know if the product is going to work you don’t know if the customers is going to buy you don’t know if the investors are going to invest you don’t the email that you sending is going to lead to absolutely nothing or completely change the business. His phrase was basically check under every rock because you don’t know where the next opportunity is coming from and i think that’s one of the best descriptions of startup life i’ve heard during the entire program.

I’m a final day programming it also included a session with lucheng zhang from arkham capital and again resilience was a major part of the conversation. People tend to see successful announcements they fundraise they launch the acquisition the company that suddenly appeared to be everywhere you don’t see the months. Of where nothing works you don’t see when the investors disappear the customers say no or the deal falls apart the product that they built had to be rebuilt and fundraising even from funds themselves can be brutal and hearing. People who actually gone through it talk candidly about it was useful.

Because one of the easiest things to do as a founder is to assume everyone else has figured it out they don’t know no one knows what they doing that was a big thing to their just further along that process. No one thing kept on popping up in every conversation and that was stable coins and payments that caught my attention because it’s directly relevant. To the direction i was moving in if we’re building escrow infrastructure stable coins make sense people don’t necessarily want to agree to a $10,000 transaction and then discover that asset. They’re using has moved 15% between when the deal started and when it actually settles you want a predictable value you want faster than you want programmability and you want that underlying blockchain to disappear as far into the background as possible.

And that’s where i started to see much more clearly as payment infrastructure rather than just a simple crypto application. So by day 18 1920 the program was essentially officially over and people were starting to leave we’re going out for drinks and there was a final night the local irish pub. I went to order some pizza which turned out to be gigantic but it’s bigger than australia pieces but you know america that’s that’s just how it is and it was a strange feeling because like for four weeks everyone had be. Been incredibly tense sessions all day meetings pitch preparations customer research events networking and suddenly it’s all stopped.

People were packing their bags, getting on their flights and everyone goes back to their own lives, except you’re not really going back to the same place you started. Looking back at the program now, I think there were three major changes for me. The first were going from a developer mindset to more of a founder mindset. I still love building, I still go out there and build things every day.

The first question isn’t, can I build this? The first question is now, should I build this? The second change was from moving from product first thinking to customer first thinking. Your idea doesn’t matter if nobody has the problem.

And someone saying, that’s cool, that’s not validation. Using it is validation, paying for it is validation, coming back is validation, recommending it to someone else, that’s validation. And the third change was realising how important relationships are. That’s with your customers, partners, mentors, investors, other founders, community.

You can’t build a meaningful company entirely by yourself behind a laptop. At some point, you got to get out there and you got to talk to people. Which brings us to where all of this is heading. Since DraperU, I’ve continued refining the concept through Moshi Concepts.

And the first major product we’re building is Hokan. Hokan is focused on programmable escrows. The idea is to use smart contracts and stable coins to make escrow easier to integrate, automate and use across digital commerce. But the bigger vision is the infrastructure underneath it, the APIs, the SDKs, payment rails, on and off ramps, different escrow models, dispute resolutions, eventually supporting both human transactions and agentic transactions.

But this time I’m approaching it differently. Not just disappearing for 12 months to build everything, the MVP comes first. Customer conversations continue, the market gets tested and we find where the strongest demand actually is, then start building from there. Because if Draper University has taught me anything, it’s that being busy building something isn’t the same as building the right thing.

Did Draper University give me all the answers? No. Probably the opposite. I came away with more questions than I started with.

Is escrow the right market? Which vertical should I target first? How should I build trust quickly enough? How do I handle disputes?

What parts need to remain human? What parts can I automate? How much of the blockchain should users ever see? How do you build something on Cardano that reaches customers far beyond the Cardano ecosystem?

I don’t know all of these answers yet, but I think I’m asking the questions much better. And that’s probably the biggest thing I took away from the Genesis program. A startup isn’t having an idea, building the thing, launching it, done. It’s much more like, have a hypothesis, talk to customers, test it, get told you’re wrong, change it, test it again, build something, put it in front of people, learn from that, change it, repeat, and keep going until something actually starts working.

The four weeks at Draper University were intense. There were uncomfortable moments. There were some very long days and were definitely moments where I wondered, what did I get myself into and how the hell am I here? But the people I met, the relationships that came out of it, and the way it changed my approach to building things made the whole experience incredibly worthwhile.

And now the interesting part starts, actually building this company. So you’ll be seeing a lot more about Moshi Concepts, about Hokan, over the next coming months as we work through that process. And I’ll start to share as much of it as possible. The good bits, the mistakes, what works, what doesn’t, because I’m pretty sure there’s still going to be a lot to learn.

So guys, if you’ve been following all the DraperU videos along the way, thank you so much. Make sure you hit that thumbs up, like, subscribe, notification bell on your way out. It’s been an interesting journey. And if you’re building something yourself, hopefully there’s a few lessons in here that can save you some time as well.

Whatever you’re building in the Codano ecosystem. Make sure you subscribe if you want to follow along for more to see what happens. And I’ll see you guys in the next video.