Season 2 Episode 7: Zubin Koticha of Opyn

Come on into The Room. The Room is a series that lets you get a view into the room where it happened. If you're a founder facing questions about your first customer, first fundraise, or first hire, this is the show for you. I'm Claudia Laurie.

And I'm Madison McIlwain, your co-hosts.

This week on The Room, we sat down with Zubin Koticha, co-founder and CEO of Open. Open is a decentralized finance platform for Ethereum options, which recently raised their Series A led by Paradigm only months after their seed. What's incredibly exciting about this week's episode is that Zubin and I have been close friends since high school. and it's incredibly awesome to have seen his founding journey. Zubin graduated from Berkeley in 2018 after a many-year love and obsession with the crypto space. Post-graduation, Zubin worked at Thunder researching blockchain, but soon started Open with his two co-founders from college, Alexis and Aparna, in 2019. Zubin has worked in the crypto space through highs and lows, but given today's wildly hot crypto market, I think it's safe to say Zubin and the Open team are hitting product market fit. Today we will learn more about fundraising during difficult times, navigating a pivot, and a lot about crypto, DeFi, and of course, NFTs. Let's open the door.

Thank you so much, Zubin, for joining us today.

Thanks so much for having me, Claudia and Madison.

Before we dig into the founding of Open and all the exciting places that you're heading with Open, Let's rewind a little bit. So for our listeners, Zubin and I were actually incredibly close friends since high school. So this is an awesome episode for me and would love to hear a little bit more for our listeners, your journey to founding Open. You grew up in Scarsdale, graduated from Berkeley in computer science, and I recall in high school when crypto was really becoming a hot topic, you were quite passionate about it, but you were really planning for a career in finance. Tell us a little bit more about these early interests and how they started paving the way for where you are now.

Yeah, so I think I've been the finance nerd since I was small, and I'm not exactly sure why, but like in 5th grade, I wrote my end-of-year school report on the stock market. I started trading my own stocks in middle school, and in high school, like with Claudia, we were in the same science research club, and I was working on specifically financial research, NYU Stern at the time. And I was just like obsessed with finance. And it wasn't necessarily about like finance as a career path, like financial industry. It was like finance as like an academic field was just like really exciting to me. And so I didn't know if I was gonna go through like to a hedge fund or I was gonna go be a professor, but I knew what I loved. Interestingly, when I first heard about Bitcoin and crypto, I actually thought it was like a scam or like it wasn't going to work. Like a new global currency just sounds so ridiculous at the time. But at Berkeley, I started studying computer science in addition to economics, and I realized like there's fundamental ways in which the financial system is going to change. Early 2017, I rediscovered crypto, and this time from a completely different angle with different people. It was the perfect blend of traditional finance, what I was interested in, and this very new way of looking at things that I discovered in the Bay Area when I went to Berkeley. Really successful companies are putting a new front end onto the existing financial piping, the initial infrastructure that has existed for decades, but crypto is just ripping out that infrastructure and building a completely new piping that hackers would build from scratch if they were given the opportunity.

And did you ever think you were going to become a founder and CEO?

Yeah, it's a great question. So basically, I am a little bit of a, I would say, independent thinker, right? Like some of this crypto stuff in early 2017, it wasn't— it's like you would tell people you're interested in crypto, they're like, oh, Bitcoin, that's like scammy, that's like this, it's not going to work. Basically the same thoughts that I had about it much earlier. But I felt very strongly that this is like a new paradigm. Studying both computer science and economics at that time at Berkeley, that was— and being super passionate about finance was a great encouraging sign for me that there was founder-market fit to work on decentralized finance. And then also having great co-founders, finding great people to collaborate with. So So at Berkeley, I was really lucky to find Alexis and Aparna, who are my co-founders to this day. We started like hacking on things in early 2017, and we started working really closely to the point that we were working more on our crypto side projects than on school. And we just like went everywhere together. We did an internship together with this, with a Cornell professor who was working on blockchain stuff. On crypto stuff. We like traveled, I traveled with Aparna to Europe to give talks. Like we were just like inseparable spending all of our fun time, all of our side project time together. And so after roughly like 3 years, so like 2 years of, a year and a half of school left, I graduated, but Aparna and Alexis had this really difficult situation 'cause they were both younger. Alexis was going into her sophomore year and Aparna was going into her junior year. And so Aparna ended up applying for the Thiel Fellowship and she got it. So then it was like, Alexis, you know, you're going into your sophomore year. Are you going to join us or not? No pressure. And she was like, you know, it's very rare that you meet people who work together so well over such a long period of time. So she ended up dropping out and that's how we started Open. That was like late 2019 at this point.

That is quite wild. I always love hearing sort of like dropout stories. Always such a strong indicator of like true conviction and passion for, for what you're doing. Tell us about your first few roles right out of college and kind of how that informed your decision to start something on your own.

Yeah, so right out of college, this was like early 2018, I was working at a startup called Thunder in the South Bay. And basically, they were founded by a famous Cornell professor, Elaine Shi, who's well known in the crypto space. I think it had a lot of extremely smart people who are in the same room, but it didn't work out. It ended up imploding on itself. That was at the same time that the crypto markets were also imploding on themselves. 2017, People are on a high. Everyone's talking about putting blockchain in every corporate application. In 2018, especially late 2018, this market completely crashes. If you say you're working in crypto, it's impossible to get funding. So we were just like kind of a little bit confused as to what to do after that. I think like first, in terms of the role that I had, I was working on like specifically protocol-level research. So working on and designing protocols, crypto protocols that are incentive compatible and like have a few basically viable in the real world to handle like the scale that has started getting into the crypto space, which is something that blockchains and cryptocurrencies don't yet do well. So that was kind of what I was doing research-wise. And I think I learned a lot from being at a startup. I think you learn a lot whether the startup goes well or not, right? If you see— if you've worked at a place that's, that's done extremely well, you kind of see what seeds, what independent variables, what factors are helpful towards success. To a certain extent, getting the experience of seeing a startup that was really run by some of those brilliant people but didn't end up working out, it also taught me a lot. I said, you know, when I start my own company one day, if I ever do, here are ABC things that I would do differently. So I would suggest anyone that wants to go through the entrepreneurial path, maybe if you're not ready to take the full plunge and start your own thing, working at a very early stage company is really— and gives you a lot of insight.

We had another guest that had come on who said he learned the most he did he needed to about being a leader from someone who was a terrible leader. And I don't think that was the situation with Thunder, but the lessons that you learned that failed sound like they were invaluable in bringing into what became Open, which you started in 2019, shortly after that closure. Take a step back though for a second for listeners who maybe are less familiar with the crypto space. Could you explain in, you know, a couple sentences what Open does?

Yeah, so we build basically decentralized options. So financial options are a $300 trillion industry, and I don't know if you, uh, were following the GME saga, but retail investors are getting really excited and interested in, in options markets. They're now much larger than the stock market in terms of volume traded. And so the problem with the GME saga, I guess, was that a few centralized institutions could turn off trading and control the market. And with us, despite the fact that we've built this options protocol, we do not control it and cannot turn off the market. So it's a very different paradigm. It means like something like, you know, Robinhood turning off trading, that, that could never happen in the crypto space because of the way the infrastructure works. So it's a very different mental paradigm, but I think it's, it's extremely powerful one.

So we kind of call this like decentralized finance, so like DeFi, which we'll talk a little bit more about as we go. So that term will be used more and more. But walk us through this aha moment where you realized there was a huge opportunity for this margin trading cryptocurrency, like such as Ethereum, which is where I think Open focuses its efforts.

Yeah, so that's, you know, that's a great question. So fundamentally, It— so we're not doing margin trading anymore. It actually— when we first started Open, we were doing just margin trading, but then we kind of pivoted into options. The aha moment was like when we were building this margin trading protocol, we realized that there were a lot of risks that people were experiencing that they wanted to hedge against. And in traditional finance, the hedging infrastructure is incredibly mature and complex. There's many different ways to protect yourselves from tail risks that might exist. In crypto at that point, that infrastructure was very immature. If I had a very aggressive long position on Ethereum or on Bitcoin, it was very hard to protect myself and the downside in a way that you can in traditional finance. There was this aha moment when we realized our users could lose a lot of money if they're unhedged and some crazy scenario happened. And then right in front of our eyes, that crazy scenario happened in March of 2020, like almost exactly one year ago to the day. There was coronavirus was becoming more and more a part of the public conscience and stock markets crashed, but crypto markets crashed even more severely than stock markets did in that, in that time. And those crashes were so severe that many of the protocols of that day just completely got wiped out or went into mass insolvency. And part of the reason was because there was a lot of people taking risk, but there was no way to really effectively offload risk yet. And so that really validated our hypothesis that building that infrastructure for protection, hedging, and insurance in crypto was so, uh, powerful. And so we launched roughly in March of last year, and And we were kind of very quickly, like, really excited about this as much as our users were, because we had in the first year more than $125 million volume traded on Open. And that continues to go up as the infrastructure becomes more and more mature. But that aha moment was just realizing, like, wow, there is a lot of risk. If there's a financial crisis, a lot of people are going to go under. And then that financial crisis happened. Right after we kind of started formulating that hypothesis.

I love that you found your people who were there to be there in the room when all of this was going down. And for years you've been talking about what is this future going to look like, and then you're empowered with the opportunity to build that future. And then coronavirus hits and you're like, oh crap, we're right and everyone else is wrong, and we get to now continue to build this. I just think that's so powerful. You have these 2 female founder co-founders with you, uh, in the room. And talk us through what your superpower is in that trio dynamic and how you guys work together to have gone through both really lifetime crisis, the global pandemic, but also navigating a massive product pivot through the lifetime of your company.

So I am really blessed to have my co-founders. They're just so awesome. I think it really helps to have a very technical team. So Alexis studied electrical engineering, computer science. Aparna studied computer science and is somewhat of a math whiz. I think the team has been working on crypto and blockchain for so long that technical depth is there. That really helps to have that DNA on the founding team. I think for me specifically, one thing that I'm uniquely good at is I'd say I come at things from a very deep finance or economics perspective of many years. And I think that especially like Aparna, because Alexis was definitely newer to school and to computer science at the time that she joined, but Aparna has many, many, many years of coming at things from the distributed systems and cryptography point of view. And so these are the hearts of crypto systems, especially DeFi. Is like finance and economics, because that's like what the vertical seems to have been that people are disrupting. Well, now art is coming into thing with NFTs and stuff, but at that point when we started, it was like finance, that's the killer use case. And then fundamentally we're doing that with, with this very specific type of software called a blockchain, and that's like distributed systems, and cryptography is the heart of that. And so I think like My superpower is definitely like understanding that like finance, economics point of view at a very deep level. And I would say apart from Alexis, like all of us have different superpowers and we all like complement each other very well. And I think like from a very early time when we were working together in 2017, we all had certain things we wanted to bring to a culture if we ever started a company together. For me, I was always like very, very much about like talking and feedback and making sure, like, if there's any problem, like, talk to me about it immediately. Overcommunicate. So that was one thing that I think, like, I uniquely brought to the point where Alexis Haparnaa and I can talk about pretty much any problem.

What I'm hearing is there's a lot of openness in your culture, which is very apt to your name, of course. And you all have a I think like people-first mindset to how you have built this company and valuing each other and respecting each other first and then lifting up each other's strengths, which is so powerful, but it's worked out well. And this February, I believe, announced your Series A raise led by Paradigm. So congratulations. That is no small feat, especially in the past year that we've had. I'm curious because you're a crypto startup, but you raised venture capital. Was venture capital always the obvious route for raising capital for Open?

It's a great question. And no, it's not always the obvious route for crypto companies. There's actually this big— I don't know if it's a culture war, but there's a big debate that's happening in the crypto space between venture-backed, more traditionally run companies and then organizations that are completely decentralized. There is no headquarters. Sometimes the founders are fundamentally anonymous. That's how Bitcoin was. They don't take any venture money. They just either have a coin or they do something else that will raise capital in a more non-traditional way. No, it's not always the answer, but I think fundamentally, there are certain people, especially, and I think Paradigm for crypto is absolutely amazing at this, that are just so important and so fundamental in building what you want to build and achieving your vision that bringing them on board is like a no-brainer. So Paradigm specifically, I think is worth talking about as well because they are just powerhouse. Basically founder of Coinbase, Fred Ehrsam, and Matt Huang, who was youngest partner at Sequoia at the time he joined, they both started, especially Matt, getting really invested mentally in, in crypto from a very, very early days. They amassed this like incredible superstar team and I think are very much visionaries in the space. And one thing that's a little bit different than crypto than in other fields, the iteration cycles are very, very quick. But in crypto, if you get a piece of code wrong, especially in DeFi, you could get hacked or there could be some kind of bug that literally loses you millions and millions of dollars of unrecoverable capital. So you need to build extremely production-ready code, and then you need to send it to audit. And every audit can be like 1 to 2 months and hundreds of thousands of dollars. And so you're basically waiting for your code, just hoping there's no big issues in it. and you have these very long cycles. So what you need to build needs to be incredibly novel and well thought out. And so this is where the idea of like mechanism design comes in. Paradigm specifically has partners, Dan Robinson, who's also from Scarsdale, weirdly, but, but Dan Robinson, he's like world famous for like his crypto mechanism design. And so they work very closely with you. The way that I would tell other founders to think about this is your co-founders, that's like going into a marriage, but to a certain extent, the same is true about the investors you work with, because if this works out, you guys are going to have a very close relationship for decades. You know, it could be 10, 20 years before your vision really starts to materialize in the good case, right? And so you wanna work with people you could really, really see supporting you through the hard times. Some people who you could really, really see like helping you. And like, I think Dan spends like 10 hours a week with us or something. Like it's incredible how hands-on they've been. So wouldn't do it any other way. I think we're really lucky.

Thank you for sharing that story. And it sounds like you found the exact right partners to help you through this next journey and Series A kind of growth milestones that are to come ahead for Open. I honestly really love what you said, and I think that's absolutely how my firm thinks about investing. And we just talked with another guest about kind of the frothiness of the market right now and how much capital is out there. And I think there is a little bit of naivete today in taking just capital for capital's sake, and it being a million dollars from one person is the same as a million dollars from another person. And what I heard you say is it's not, and that is a really important, very wise founder, uh, perspective I think to have at this stage, and I think will serve you well. For the years to come. It sounds like Paradigm was just the perfect partner. Did you find them immediately or was it kind of a journey to go from, okay, we wanna raise to meeting Paradigm?

Yeah, so we did our seed round with Dragonfly, also an incredible crypto firm. But in that round, we talked to a bunch of folks. I think like in crypto, there are a few venture capital firms that are really like crypto native and are distinguished in crypto. And so we talked to all of them and it was like rejection after rejection after rejection. And that's just how it is, especially at the seed round. So at that time we talked to Paradigm and they said, hey, come back to us later after you've made some progress and we can chat later, but it didn't work out immediately. And I think that's just part of being a founder, right? If you're used to very close, like short-term dopamine, like things work out immediately, That's not the reality of being a founder. It's like a lot of disappointment for a lot of time and a lot of stress. And so our seed round was actually like really long and dragged out and we talked to a couple of different folks. Our lead investor gave us a term sheet and then they ended up pulling our term sheet later down the line. And, you know, there's no ill will there, but like that's very atypical experience. That founders have. I think it's a weird thing where two things changed. The first is our traction really completely changed in 2020. The second thing was the funding market for crypto. When we first raised our seed round, Bitcoin was at $5,000 or something, crazy low. Now, it's at $60,000 or something like that. It was very hard. There was very little money in the space, and I think you just had an uphill journey trying to raise in a situation like that. But then in our A, which we actually ended up raising late 2020, it was a little bit— I think the market was a little bit easier, but now the market is incredible for raising. So I think that's one thing also to note that it's not even sometimes up to you if you get money or not. Like, I think you can really do a lot and you can just hustle and you should be able to get money from somewhere if you like really are persistent and work at it. But sometimes when it's just really easy to raise money, you shouldn't let that affect your ego because a lot of that is just like the market. And so that's something that, you know, we need to keep in mind as founders at all times and just focus on what matters, which is like building at the end of the day.

I think you've said quite a few things that resonated with me there, but I think one thing that is almost a blessing in disguise is, you know, let's say you go fundraise and you don't get that first term sheet, you know, the same day. It really forces you to think critically, like, are we building the right thing? Like, what is like structurally wrong with what we're doing? Are people not seeing the vision? Is it not clear? And having to go through those moments of, "Why is this not necessarily working?" actually, I think, causes you to be, one, a lot more critical about what you're doing, but then also, two, when you realize, "No, no, this is what we should be doing," you become so much more confident and convicted. And I think that comes through in the pitch. Whereas I know a few people who had easy times fundraising and then realized a year later that there were a bunch of structural issues. What they were doing had to completely pivot. So I think there's always a silver lining, even when maybe the fundraise is not going as planned. Let's dig a little bit more into your early aha moments in building the business. And you mentioned that you started building a platform to trade Ethereum on margin and then pivoted into building out an options trading platform. And as you mentioned, kind of building in the crypto space is quite difficult. Taking it up a level, what advice would you give founders in navigating a change in roadmap or a pivot? How do you identify that something is not working? And then what did it actually look like to say, okay, we need to make a change, here's how we're going to go about it?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think like, at that time, we were very lucky. So the first piece of advice I'll give founders is like, stay small as long as you can. Easiest mistake to make is like raise a bunch of money because the market is hot, hire way too many people, and then realize like, whoa, this is not working. Either have to fire people or have to just fundamentally like resell a large team on a completely new vision that they may not be as passionate about, right? So I would say for us, we just like, we're in the tinkering phase for a very long time from like early 2019 until like mid-2020. We were just kind of doing like different things here and there. In the moment, it didn't feel like a year and a half, but like, I guess looking back, it was like a year and a half of just like running around like a headless chicken, having no idea like what's actually gonna work and trying different stuff. And the fact that it was 3 of us and there was a lot of trust and we had a really long history of working together and we're very close friends, we were on the same page. Like, this margin trading thing is a way to understand how to build products. It's a way to understand like how to do user testing. It's a way to understand how to iterate. Fundamentally, we're just like getting better and better and better. And even though we were just like failing by any objective metric at finding product-market fit, we were getting so much better as founders. Our skills were so much better as engineers, as designers, like everything just got better. And we had like a really strong like growth mindset about us fundamentally becoming better through that journey. And so the first margin trading thing, I think we started realizing it wasn't working when— well, first, like, a competitor of ours got product-market fit and started, like, really exploding. And so at that time, we realized, like, what unique benefit do we give a user that this very well-funded and fast-moving competitor doesn't have? Like, we have no unique value proposition at that point. And so we were like, This is not working. And we sat in a room and we talked about it. We had a very calm discussion and then we kind of realized as a group, like, there are a few other different ways that we could go that are more, more interesting. And so we had no attachments, like our identity or the company, or like as individuals to exactly what we were building at that time, because we were very decidedly in a tinkering phase.

Thank you for sharing that. Let's talk a little bit more about the broader landscape or the potential ways in which Open could have pivoted. Tell us a bit more about the emerging decentralized finance space and its potential value.

Yeah. Oh, God. This is a very difficult— I would say it's a very, very different landscape than like traditional finance. But the idea is, and it takes a while to wrap your head around, but The idea is basically DeFi is a financial system that is fully programmatic, that is composable, so applications can be built on top of each other very easily, and permissionless. And what does that mean? Well, and how is that different from traditional finance? Like, well, Open, when we built our first version of our product, we were basically an aggregation layer between lending market Compound, which is at that time we were building on it before, like it had been launched. And now it's like a multi, multi-billion dollar company or project or protocol, I should say. And Uniswap, which is also the same. We were just like an aggregation layer that an API that allowed people to compose these two fundamental applications on top of each other. And that allowed people to build a new use case out of two building blocks that previously people had not been envisioning. And that's kind of how computer science in general works, right? It's through layers of abstraction that allow you to build completely novel use cases. But in traditional finance, that's not possible because all these APIs are strongly permissioned, right? And so for us to build margin protocol, a margin trading protocol on top of any bank infrastructure and any exchange infrastructure in traditional finance, that would have been like a multi-year business development or sales cycle to even allow for that to happen, because banks are very close to the chest with allowing integration and stuff like that. But this cycle in traditional— in DeFi, it's just like 3 kids right out of school, slash dropouts, working in this one little room were able to hack together something using these very powerful primitives just through the strength of code, not through like any sales or business development cycle. And so fundamentally, it's as big as the internet was for knowledge, like DeFi is for the exchange of value through these permissionless because of these permissionless, composable, and programmatic qualities that it has that's very similar to the internet. An example of this is what are some innovations that have come out of DeFi? One example is Uniswap itself, which is this crazy thing that trades a billion— it's an exchange that trades $1 billion of value a day. It is absolutely huge, also backed by Paradigm and Andreessen Horowitz and a bunch of other well-respected folks in the industry. But it's like, fundamentally, this exchange is just one equation written into code, x times y equals k. It's like one equation that Vitalik Buterin had casually posted on Reddit one time, and someone decided to build, has become one of the world's biggest markets for, for like trading tokenized value. This is what, what Uniswap has become. And I can't stress enough that it's created this idea called an AMM, an automated market maker, or a piece of code that lives, that is autonomous and not controlled by any individual and allows for the exchange of value. And it's like really broken a lot of the traditional models people had for academic finance about what kind of, what an exchange can look like. One person can create social media app that touches billions of people, but one person could never create like a new exchange or a new bank or like a new fintech that touched like billions of people. Like it was such a longer and more difficult process until DeFi came along.

I can hear your passion coming through, and what I'm hearing is we're just scratching the surface of what crypto is going to look like and there's so much more to come, I think, in this space. And usually when spaces are emerging, they're on the fringe, you know, they're not as mainstream. Maybe even governments and policymakers haven't even looked up from what they're doing every day to recognize what's going on here. And I think you mentioned the Robinhood scandal. I think that that was a really probably watershed moment in terms of macro forces getting involved in what is happening at kind of and changing underneath the feet of traditional finance. I'm curious, as you and Open are really paving that way and on the forefront of the future of DeFi, how do you think policymakers are going to start introducing regulation? Do you think that there's going to be regulatory impact that changes the volatility of crypto markets or changes what you are able to do with Open?

Yeah, this is a great question. There has already been a lot of regulatory action. The first thing was a number of different countries and jurisdictions already tried to regulate Bitcoin. I mean, it's never really worked because it's so fundamentally new. It's kind of like trying to regulate the internet. In order to do it, to regulate the internet successfully, you need to have a huge state apparatus, and some countries try to do that. You can't just say, oh, Bitcoin bad, no Bitcoin. That doesn't work. Fundamentally, it's such a difficult thing to grasp mentally, Bitcoin and DeFi in general, and I think regulators are a little bit behind, but they are catching up, it seems. After the last bull market, it's interesting, crypto seems to go through bull markets every 4 years, just like on clockwork. It was like 2011, then 2014, then every 3 years. 2011, 2014, 2017, now 2020, 2021 seems to be the next one. But, um, it's like clockwork that this happens. And every time there was some like major excess in like the, in the bull market. And last time in 2017, it was ICOs. So like unregistered securities offerings that people were doing. And it's like a fundamentally new way to raise venture capital. Was the way that it was being sold at the time. But really, it was a way to— for many of the projects that did it were honest, but many of them were not honest and was a way to just like raise millions of dollars and then not deliver any product and take advantage of kind of like market sentiment at the time. And so regulators obviously aren't happy about that, right? And I think in this bull market, it's completely different where like DeFi and not ICOs is really hot. NFTs is really hot right now. And so there are a few projects that are kind of doing things in excess. I think those particularly aggressive projects will have regulators come in and take action in the future. But I actually will say that I, I respect regulators, especially in the United States, for not— for being very selective in what they go after, and to a certain extent being so far very kind of clued into what is like honest behavior and what is dishonest behavior? Because I would say most behavior in crypto to a certain extent is very hard to fit under an existing regulatory paradigm.

So one thing that I've been seeing on Twitter and hearing about a lot these days and actually have minted my own are NFTs. Just for context, I'm super into art. Me and my significant other, we've been painting for a long time. And so this weekend we were like, let's mint mint some of our paintings. So sort of got a taste of that world, which was wild. What is your take on the world of NFTs?

Oh, NFTs are so awesome. I think like there are people who seem to like really love them and people who seem to really hate them. It's so clear that, you know, when we were kids, for example, Yu-Gi-Oh was like a thing. Pokémon cards were a thing. Baseball cards. Art modern art, there's these collector's items that people love because they're fun, because they're rare, because they're part of like a community and not because of their intrinsic value, right? And I think that people who are really clued into like the collector's world, like art or shoes or fashion, they understand that scarcity and that cultural element is what makes something special. And desirable, right? To a large extent, but at the same time, it's been kind of hard for this collector's market to be very digital. It's always been like real world goods and items and experiences, but in crypto, especially like NFTs, which I remember when they first came out like 3 or 4 years ago, they were like a really a nerd thing. And people are like, oh my God, ERC-20. 721. This is like the new standard for non-fungible tokens. It was like a very nerdy thing, and I think now it's still nerdy, but it's nerdy in a different population, which I'm so happy to see. It's in this population that really understands like cultural scarcity and, and collectorship and, and that kind of thing. And I think NFT is like 0 to 1 innovation on what the landscape for collectors items is going to look like for quite a long time. I think it was just a matter of time before, like, these kinds of experiences become digitized. I'm pretty bullish on NFTs, but it is very hot right now. I will say, I will say that.

Who is a woman in your life in the professional context that has had a profound impact on you?

So there's the cliché answer, like, couldn't do it without my mom. My mom has been, like, super supportive of me and, like, always challenged me to do better and never be satisfied and just do better and work harder towards what my dreams are. But I'd say in addition to that, I'm in a unique position that Alexis and Aparna are my two co-founders and they're such close friends, but also way more than that. And I think that I couldn't really imagine myself being here without them. And I think I'm such a better person for having met them. Goes out to Alexis and Aparna.

Well, thank you so much, Zubin, for spending this time with us. We had a lot of fun.

All right. Thanks so much, Madison and Claudia. I really appreciate meeting you, Madison, and great as always, Claudia.

Thank you for listening to this episode of The Room. If you enjoyed our conversation, please like, follow, subscribe, talk to us in Clubhouse, and share with friends. We'll be back next week, airing Tuesday at 10:00 AM Eastern, 7:00 PM Pacific. 7 AM Pacific. See you in the room.

All opinions expressed by Claudia and Madison and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Defy VC. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.