How to survive crypto’s 24/7 grind 🧯 | Kevin de Patoul

Business is done by people, and that's what matters the most. Yes, you can make it very transactional, very rational, and you know, let's, we are just kind of economic actors, blah, blah, blah. But at the end, you're just people. And so everything that you do in business is a lot easier if you do it from a position of trust with another individual. So building that network continuously and making sure that you know the people behind the checks, what drives them, what motivates them, what might hold them back.

This week's Millennial Master is Kevin Depatoul, co-founder and CEO of Keyrock. Kevin left a fast-track career in consulting to build one of Europe's leading digital asset firms, raising over €80 million and scaling to nearly 200 people across the globe.

At Keyrock, he's helping to build a market infrastructure that could reshape how value moves in the 21st century.

In this episode, we talk about why crypto is more than a bubble and what's real innovation versus hype, the challenges and lessons of scaling from 30 to 160 employees in a year, and how to raise capital, keep your culture intact, and stay sane in a 24/7 market. Millennial Masters is brought to you by Jolt—fast, reliable web hosting built for founders. Whether you're launching a WordPress site or scaling an app, Jolt gives your project a rock-solid home starting from just £3.95 a month. You'll get 99.99% uptime, support in under 30 seconds, and flexible payment options including Bitcoin and Amex, so you can rack up those points while you build. Get your first 3 months free at jolt.co.uk. Smart hosting for people building what's next.

Kevin, welcome to Millennial Masters. How are you today?

Daniel, thank you very much. Thank you for having me.

Glad to have you on, and I'm excited to talk about crypto and infrastructure and the future of finance. So before you went into this, you were headed for a career in consulting, and I'm wondering what pulled you out of that world and into crypto, because it was a bit of a side hustle for you, if I'm right.

Yeah, indeed. I mean, you know, so I studied in Belgium, something that's called business engineering, which is kind of a mix between business and civil engineering. Belgium is very fond of compromises in general, and that's, that's one of them, I guess. But so I did that, and then, you know, after my studies, as anybody would, I was looking a bit at, you know, what am I going to do next? Where am I going to start my career? I did an internship as a quant in a bank, decided banking was not for me, and then headed for consulting. But to be honest, I was never, I never had in mind to make a career out of consulting. Like, the way I looked at it was, you know, I'm coming out of uni. Basically, when you come out of uni, you know nothing about anything. And so it's like, yeah, I What am I going to do? I don't know which industry do I actually like? What type of work do I actually like? No clue. What I liked with consulting was the fact that it was very, uh, it put a big emphasis on excellence, always working with, you know, kind of board of directors level on very strategic projects and doing so for short periods of time. So what I liked is that it basically allowed me to see something new every 3 to 6 months, right? So of course, a new industry, potentially a new country, but also within an industry, a different company, within a company, a different department, something, you know, another topic that we would focus on. So I always saw kind of consulting as a natural continuation of my, my studies as a way to, to learn and actually figure out what I wanted to do. And so while I was working at Roland Berger in management consulting, I realized that I was very keen to actually be more hands-on. So either launch my own company or potentially join a company like an early stage company that I would find exciting. And so quite, you know, quite fast, I think a couple of years, I started to look for opportunities and, and, and see what potentially I could be doing next. And I had, you know, since 2015, I've been very interested into Bitcoin and blockchain and digital assets. I think that it gives optionality, which I found very, very interesting. And we can, you know, get back to this a bit, a bit later. But so while during my last year at my consulting firm, I told the partners at my firm that no matter what, I think this was in January, and I told them that no matter what, I would quit in September. Like whether I had something else or not, I would quit in September. That was my deadline. And so I spent quite a bit of time from January to September just meeting a lot of people and figuring out the next step. And so I met my two co-founders at a small crypto event in the suburbs of Brussels that was in September, October 2017. I met them and I told them, yeah, I just quit my job. What are you guys up to? And they say, oh, we're very interested in digital assets. We're seeing some opportunities around liquidity. I say, yeah, I agree. That might be an interesting topic to work on. And so, you know, we started from there. And so I quit my job in September as planned. And we founded the company one a week later, basically. So, um, so yeah, I guess to come back to your question, how did I get from one to the other? For me, consulting, I always saw it as a stepping stone, basically, to really figure out what I really wanted to do. And since, you know, I had always been interested into blockchain and Bitcoin ever since I got into it in 2014, 2015, it was quite natural for the next step to be, you know, fully in that and then to launch my own company with my two co-founders.

So for anybody who is new to crypto and blockchain, how do you explain what Keyrock does and why does it matter?

I think I actually need to explain what Keyrock— like, so if you look at Keyrock on the— where it is today, like our purpose is to be kind of an investment bank for digital assets to some extent. So we're really a, we're a global investment firm for digital assets. Now, if you look at where we started, so we started with market making. And the activity of market making actually is not dependent from crypto. So it actually makes the explanation easier if you just take the crypto component completely out of it. And you look at market making, what is market making? It's an activity that exists on all types of markets. So if you consider equity market shares, you know, share trading, which is something that, you know, everybody is relatively familiar with. Basically, the purpose of a market maker is to bridge the gap between buyers and sellers. So if you have a, you're the owner of a share, you want to you want to sell it at a given price. It only rarely happens that you just meet a buyer that, you know, wants to do, that wants to buy it at that exact same price at that same moment. It's, you know, it's quite, you can have that pure kind of organic meeting of supply and demand, but that's, that's relatively rare. What you have in the middle usually are market makers. So as you, you own a share, you want to sell it, the market maker is going to be there willing to buy it immediately. And then they're going to hold to that share until they find somebody that they can themselves sell it to. And so they are there really bridging the gap so that when supply does not immediately and organically meet demand at a given price level, the market maker is there to bridge that gap and really make sure that the markets are as liquid and as efficient. So by, you know, making a market liquid means you allow the, the, the easy and cheap transformation of that asset into cash. You know, if you hold the share, you can sell it immediately and get cash. That's very liquid, basically, and that's what the role of a market maker is. Now that, that role, as I say, exists on all financial markets. Basically what Kirok did is, you know, we saw that this role was as important and actually even more important in digital assets because, and crypto, because those markets are very fragmented, right? So you don't have one price for Bitcoin. You have hundreds and thousands of price of Bitcoin because it can be traded anywhere because it's a decentralized technology. There's a lot of peer-to-peer trading. You have lots of price points, which means that the market is more fragmented. Which means that it is harder to change Bitcoin for cash than it would, you know, an Apple share, for example, where you only have one market. And so we saw that, you know, the liquidity was even more of a problem on digital asset market than it was on traditional markets. And that's, that's where we decided to start with T-Roc as a market maker. Now, as I said, for us, the purpose was never to just be a market maker. What we're building is a bit kind of a bigger vision and really being a a global investment firm. So we started with market making, we've added, you know, OTC trading, we've added options trading, we're adding asset management. So we're really kind of adding different pieces to, to build this global investment firm around digital assets.

So you've said Keyrock isn't a crypto company, it's a digital assets company. So what do then people get wrong about this space before they meet you or get acquainted with what Keyrock does? What are the the superstitions and the misconceptions people have about this space?

So I think that, you know, crypto and digital assets, quite frankly, are two words that you can use interchangeably. It's just that it depends what's hyped at a given time. You know, when crypto is going up, everybody talks about crypto. When all of a sudden there are issues, they start talking about digital assets to make it more respectable towards traditional finance. But frankly, like crypto is not a bad word. It's really the same thing. So we are a crypto investment firm. That's what Qiwoc does. No, I think the main, there are many misconceptions, of course, when you consider crypto. I think that the way I try and, you know, Ciaro tries to present it all the time is that the crypto market as it is today is not, is not one asset class. You have commodities on one side, you have fixed income, you have equity, and people say, oh no, we have a new asset class, which is crypto. And that's not really the case. Like crypto is just, it's a proof of concept of how you can digitally represent value. So it's really kind of a technological upgrade to how you represent value. Now, what type of value you put on that infrastructure, the whole point is that it can be anything. You know, you're going to have completely new types of value like Bitcoin, which is kind of a digital gold, and that is represented on the blockchain. But then you're going to have, eventually you're going to have equity on the blockchain as well. So what does that become? Crypto? Not really as we understand it today, it just becomes equity is equity, but it's a different, it's a different kind of technological back office, so to speak, to represent that ownership and maybe the same thing with fixed income. So the point being is that. Crypto is too often, you know, misunderstood as one separate asset class from traditional finance, where actually it's the tipping point of the iceberg, the emerged part of the iceberg of, you know, an upcoming complete technological upgrade of all financial markets. And today that technological upgrade has only been applied to what we call crypto, which is the assets that currently exist on blockchains. The whole point is that eventually this is going to eat the rest, you know. So the same way that I think it's Marc Andreessen that a few years ago said software is eating the world, we're going to see the same thing with blockchain. Blockchains are going to eat financial markets. And so you start here, you know, on one side with kind of the proof of concept of, you know, Bitcoin, Ethereum, utility tokens, NFT, meme coins, whatever, the proof of concept of fully digitally represented value. But then that is going to extend and, you know, we're starting to see it now, like tokenized equity, then you have the equity market that becomes part of crypto, eventually fixed income as well, private credit and so on and so on and so on. It's really the first example of a technological upgrade on how to represent value that will eventually be applied to all types of value and therefore to all financial markets.

So with everyone talking about real-world asset tokenization, what's the real innovation and what's just hype? How do you differentiate it?

Sure. The real innovation is that once you represent an asset on chain, that asset exists. Outside of any centralized third party, right? So the same way that, uh, you know, you take a physical asset, this iPhone exists no matter what, right? It doesn't depend on the bank, it doesn't depend on anybody, it exists, right? And that's kind of the physical existence. Now, when you take digital, if you take digital ownership today, you own a share, if you buy a share, you own it because only your name is linked to it in the database of a centralized, I don't know, a centralized depository that says, oh, you Daniel, Daniel, sorry, you own that one share. But, you know, if that goes away, the ownership is not as clear. What is amazing about the tokenization of an asset is that it takes an existence when it's tokenized, it exists outside of any third party. So if I take an example to make it a lot more concrete, you own a share, you want to sell it today, right? You want to sell it at the price of 100. I want to buy it. It's not possible. We cannot do that transaction. The reason for it, because your ownership of that share and your ability to transact on that share depends on the policy of the company that you're using as an intermediary to hold it. So if your broker does not, a broker would not allow you to sell to me directly, especially not if we're after hours, especially not if, if on the weekend, and most likely they will not allow me to buy half the share because your ownership is constrained. Your ownership of that share depends fully on the terms and conditions of the intermediate that you use to own it. Now, if you have that same share that's represented by a token, You want to sell it at 100. I want to buy it, but I only want to buy half of it. You can very easily just show me a QR code on the screen. I would scan it and we make a transaction the same way that if I want to sell you that iPhone and we were physically in the same room, I would give the iPhone, you give me the cash, it's over. Once an asset is tokenized, it's the same, it's the same thing. You can really have full ownership of it. And that's where the amazing innovation is when what I just explained now with shares, it applies to every other type of asset. If I take something that is very mainstream, stablecoins, what is the innovation there? Well, I don't know if you've tried sending dollars, for example, try sending dollars internationally over the weekend. It's a nightmare. It takes, you know, 3, 4 days. You're going to have dramatic costs.

I mean, the UK, even turning euros into pounds is just the same.

So I could have taken even a more local example. Now you have stablecoins. I can send them around the same way I send a WhatsApp. It's zero cost, 24/7, takes seconds everywhere in the world.. And this is the real innovation. You have a lot more control and a lot more efficiency on, on value once that value is tokenized. And that has nothing to do with hype. It's not, it even has nothing to do with, you know, philosophical conviction that everything should be decentralized. No, that doesn't matter. It's just that from an economic perspective, it is faster, it is more efficient, and you can do more with value once it's tokenized. And that has nothing to do with hype. It's 100% pure technological innovation that gives users and market participants a lot more control over their assets at a much cheaper cost.

How do you turn a real-world asset into a digital token?

So basically what you have is you create, it's basically what we're seeing now, like for example with the X stocks, which is an offering put together by Kraken and Bakkt. What they have is that you, you, you. Imagine you have a company that buys 100 shares, right? Traditional markets, they buy 100 shares and then what they're going to do, they're going to create 100 tokens on the blockchain of their choosing and each of their tokens represents one share that they hold. And therefore, now the asset is wrapped in the token and by exchanging the token itself, the same way you would exchange, you know, ETH or whatever other crypto, crypto, you're exchanging, you know, the ownership of that share. Now, if you put it a step further, what is interesting is to actually create, in the example I just described, you have two shares, right? To some extent, you have the share that is the traditional one that is owned by the company, and then you have the token that represents ownership of it. What I think is even more interesting and where the market is going is to have those assets directly created on-chain. So when you create a company, if you create, I know I was to found Keyrock today, we're going to create a million shares. We're not creating traditional shares, you know, that we put in a paper ledger that we keep at the notary. We create immediately a million tokens and we decide that these tokens represent equity and give a right to the equity of Kiwok. So it becomes, you know, a share equity with the same, of course, regulatory framework as you would with traditional equity, but at least the assets exist on chain directly. And once you have that, you can really have all the benefits of the other crypto, but applied to your equity.

So you're really building market infrastructure. Exactly. And so then is crypto really then disrupting traditional finance or is it replicating the same old power structures but in a new format, which allows you to say trade in the evening and at weekends?

No, I do think it's a, it is definitely redefining the, the market structure. If I take the example of that share, if in, in the current market you own it, you're stuck. You cannot do anything with it. If you want to get a mortgage to buy a house and you want to pledge that share as collateral, if your bank does not allow you to do it, you're stuck. You need to potentially open a new account and it's very lengthy. You have lots of fees and so on and so forth. Now, if you have that same share that is a token, you can ask your bank, can I have a loan with that bank as collateral? No, sorry, we don't do that. No worries. You take your share elsewhere. You go on Aave, you put it in a pool, and all of a sudden you have a loan. And that's going through, you know, a fully a fully decentralized lending market. So, and what I'm describing here, you don't currently have pools on Aave that take tokenized equity as collateral, but it's just describing where the market is going. The fact that you have the ability to be decentralized for me does not mean that everything has to be fully decentralized all the time. It becomes, it becomes a decision. Right now in traditional markets, you don't have that decision. You don't have a choice. Everything is centralized. That's it. If you take crypto, you have a choice. Either you can go centralized because, you know, there has, there are some benefits. It is sometimes more convenient to go through a third party, right? So you can choose that. But if at some, at some point that stops being convenient for you at that given point in time, you have a choice and you can go towards another market structure that is decentralized. And so in, in that case, in, you know, I do think that tokenizing assets is profoundly redefining how markets work by adding more options, giving a lot more freedom to customers, which therefore will create more competition, which therefore would put, you know, put pressures on fees and on costs and make a market that is overall more accessible and more efficient.

And do you think then crypto is for everybody or will be for everybody? Or is it for now just something that people who have dealt with stock and shares and options as an alternative?

I think that eventually people will interact with crypto and with blockchains without knowing that they interact with crypto and with blockchain. We're currently speaking on the, you know, through the internet. We don't have an entire full understanding on how the internet protocol works and exactly what's happening in the background. It doesn't matter. What matters is the benefit that we have as users of being able to be in two different countries and speaking live with videos and sound. It's going to be the same thing with crypto. Like people are going to send value around. They're going to use value the same way they do. What, and they will not know, nor should they, nor will they care that in the back there's a blockchain. Who cares? I have, I have $1, I'm sending you $1 and just so happens that I can send it as easily as I send a WhatsApp. What is the technological, you know, the tech behind it that makes it possible? As a consumer, I shouldn't care. So I do think that eventually everybody will indeed be interacting with digital assets. Most of them will not know and there's no reason for them to know. And then which assets they decide to interact with is going to be the exact same thing as it is today on traditional finance. Like if you are more or less of a sophisticated investor, you have more or less interest in investment and markets, then you're going to you know, you're going to go towards more sophisticated products. But if you don't, you're just going to have a savings account, and that's fine. It's going to be exactly the same thing, but the tech would be better, and so everything would be faster and more efficient.

So is that why you believe that crypto isn't just a bubble? People would have read in the news over, especially in the last 5 to 7 years, about boom and bust in, in the crypto market. Bitcoin getting to super high prices, then dropping significantly, then back up. What convinced convinced you crypto was worth betting your entire career on?

I mean, I definitely don't think that the concept of crypto and blockchain is a bubble. Definitely not. I do think that if you look at 1,000 crypto assets today, a big chunk of them are a bubble and are way overvalued. But that's, that's just the nature of market. You have supply and demand, and so you, you have fluctuation the same way that you see in Bitcoin. The reason what, what convinced me is like, 7 and a half, 8 years ago and continues to convince me now is that it simply makes sense. Like the same way that the internet revolutionized how we exchange information, it's the same thing is happening for value. And it's not about like a big bet on, you know, some far-off individual asset. It's the concept of digitally representing value makes sense. It is faster, cheaper, safer. You have more transparency for everybody involved. And so of course, the market and kind of the innovation path, that's going to take detours, right? And yeah, you're going to have some assets created. That makes no sense. You're going to have booms, bursts, and so on. But at the end of the day, you're doing like this. But if you smooth it out and you look, you know, from a perspective that is distant enough, you just see adoption growing. And that, that is something that was clear for me 7 years ago, continues to be clear now, even more so because, you know, you see most of traditional finance talking about tokenization, about digitization of assets. And all of this is happening. You've seen stablecoins, like $250 billion. Like, it's not is not a detail anymore. You've seen companies like Circle going public and their IPO being one of the biggest successes of the year. All of this is happening, but nothing has changed compared to 7 years ago in terms of the conviction. It's just something that economically makes sense. It creates a better product for all the market participants. So of course it is going to happen. It's just that, you know, we're taking detours along the way as with any innovation, but the direction of travel has remained the same.

So then in say 5, 10 years, how will crypto show up in the average person's life? Like you said, even if they never buy a token.

I mean, I do think they will be buying tokens, but they will not know that there are tokens. Mm-hmm. When you have, you know, when you have 1 euro on your bank account, you don't know, you know, what is the link between that bank account and a custodian bank and the Central European Bank, blah, blah. You don't know that, you don't care, you just have 1 euro. It's going to be the same thing. You have tokens. Yes, value is represented as tokens, digital tokens that you can exchange. So they will, everybody will be buying tokens, but I don't think that it will be a thing. The fact that it's a token is just going to be completely in the background. I think that, you know, right now we still have, we used to have finance and crypto. Now it evolved a bit. We have TradFi and crypto. I think that eventually TradFi for traditional finance, I think eventually it's going to be the same thing as now. We're just going to have finance and it's just that the whole thing went through, an innovation cycle where, you know, value is not represented as, uh, lines in centralized databases anymore. They are represented by tokens on decentralized databases, which are blockchains. And that's just simply how value is exchanged amongst people.

And do you think then, then there will be a new generation of challenger digital native banks that will be dealing with this, or will TradFi adapt to it?

I think you're gonna have a mix, right? But like, um, I do believe that the digital natives and the crypto natives are going to take a very big chunk of the market.

And isn't in a way the old style regulation giving an advantage to the traditional banks? Because even today, if you want to, all these, say, neo banks, at least in the UK, but also around the world, like Revolut, which is a big success case study, they still had to have the backing of a traditional bank at the beginning until they can comply to all the regulations and become a fully fledged bank themselves.

No, I mean, I, I, I think that, you know, having clear rules and clear regulation is good. That's something that the market needs. And yes, of course it creates, you know, if you have too much of it too fast, it creates a lot of hurdles to innovation, but in general, we don't want to have, like we're talking about, you know, when you look at the internet, social networks and so on, like the, there's a big motto in startup, which is move fast and break things. You know, you can't do that when you talk about finance because this is people, people's livelihood, you know, people's entire savings. So you don't want to create kind of a Wild West of a market where anything goes and yeah, it's blockchain, go ahead, do whatever. And then you have people being scammed and, you know, there's different levels of education, of understanding of what's happening. And then, so if you have all of this, you have a mayhem and, it's a net negative for the entire market. And by market, I mean any people, any person, you know, the entire world that has value to be represented, that, you know, earns a salary, has savings, you know, it's a net negative for everyone. So you do firmly believe that you need, you need protection for consumers. You need, you need to have a clear regulatory framework that defines, you know, the rule on how different participants can engage into a given market to ensure that there's people are being taken advantage of or that you, you know, you don't have too big of an asymmetry of information. Could that to some extent benefit a bit the incumbents? Maybe a little bit, right? Because indeed it creates more hurdles, more frictions, it's more costly to launch something new. So it might, it slows innovation down a little bit, but I do think that the impact in the end becomes a net positive because while it makes things a bit slower and a bit more expensive. It does mean you can interact with a much bigger market because the rules are clear. And so you have many more participants that can, that can engage. For the last 7 and a half years, Kiwok, we've always, you know, advocated for very clear regulatory frameworks, you know, for digital assets, saying that eventually all assets will be like this. We should have the same types of frameworks and rules that we have on traditional markets. And this does create a net positive for all participants.

Let's talk a bit about Kevin, about Building and scaling Keyrock. You said you, you had two co-founders. Yes. But you also mentioned previously that scaling too fast nearly killed the company. So I'm wondering if you can walk us through what happened and how you pulled it all back and rescued the situation before it was too late. There's Basically, there's a danger in scaling too fast. Yeah.

So I think there is, and it's very hard. I do think that, you know, nearly killed the company is a bit overly dramatic. It never really kind of nearly killed the company. It's just that it was, it was challenging. So there were challenges with it. And, you know, there are some things that became harder, but Keyrock was never in any, you know, short-term danger at all as a firm. I'd like to say that. I think that's very important to know at all times over the last 7 and a half years, we've always had. A very strong stability and we're a very strong resilience as a firm. So nothing ever nearly killed the company. We do, we did see challenges in scaling for sure, because when you start, you just like 3, 4, 5 people around the table, then you have COVID and everybody's remote. And during that time, we went from 15 to 60 people and then we raised 70 million and we went from 60 to 160 in 12 months and all, and that's everywhere in the world. And then you go from one business to having 4 businesses. It's okay. So all of this, of course, creates a lot of challenges. There is, I think, um, you know, an idea of taking things slower to make sure that you can control them more. But I also think at the same time that if you don't experience that discomfort, you're not pushing hard enough. Like, this is just part of, you know, anytime there are companies that grow organically, you know, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30% a year. Uh, if you want to grow 100% a year or more. You are going to feel some discomfort. That's for sure. Because you are going too far. Like you are going too fast compared to what is nice and comfy. But that's what it takes to, that's what it takes to grow very fast, basically. So yes, it's, um, so basically, I guess, long story short, I think that there needs to be an understanding that scaling is hard, that it comes with a lot of discomfort. It takes a lot of work to do it right, because if you don't, it can get to a point where your company is at risk. If you keep on pushing, you know, headfirst and you never look, you know, what's happening behind, so to speak, in the company, how processes are being built, how the communication is being set up, what is the culture that you are creating. If, you know, as a founder, you just charge ahead and say, you know, fuck this, let's go. And, you know, let's grow, grow, grow. There is a point where things are gonna start imploding behind you. And so I do think that is something that—

and that's what I want to unpack. What are some of your secrets and lessons that you've had from this process of rapid scaling when, you know, you have to employ 150 people in a year. That's pretty much one every couple of days. How do you ensure they're a culture fit and that they would be able to be a positive contribution to the company and be aligned with the mission?

So I don't think you can ensure it. You can maximize probability. So that's one thing that you need to do through your, you know, hiring process, making sure that, you know, you, you bake in questions and you, you as a founder remain very involved in the hiring decisions to make sure that you can feel the type of people you talk to. It's like, oh, is there a click or not? Is that something, somebody that yes, has the right skills, but also the right mindset, somebody that, you know, has the level of respect for others that I would expect to have in the company. And you can hiring for mindset and attitude is very important. I think so. That's a way for me to maximize the probability that it works out well, but you can never ensure it. And so I think the part of, part, if lesson number one is, you know, find ways to maximize and hire for mindset and attitude, because that is to some extent even more important than hard skills. The second is you need to accept that you cannot ensure it. You can do your best, you can maximize probability, but you're going to have mishires. You're going to have some people that come in that are not right for the company. And that's where the second learning comes in is that you need to always look for those mistakes and be able to recognize them fast. Because otherwise, you know, if you add more bad people than good ones, you end up with a problem. And so that's where you need to be able to constantly kind of, you know, iterate, make sure that you have a proper communication line between employees and their managers, making sure that the objectives of the company are very clear to the managers and that, you know, once or twice a year there are continuous reviews to make sure that the people are right and fit. And also to accept that if somebody doesn't have the right mindset, even if they have the right skills, it's better to let them go and find somebody else. Because I do think that eventually, and that's something that took us time to realize that if you're, you're a young company, you hire somebody with a set of skills that you've been looking for for 6 months. The person is super good. You finally have them. You can do stuff, but that person is an absolute asshole. It's very tempting to keep them because yeah, but if I let them go, you know, we're losing those skills. We're going to lose the business. Well, actually it's better to just stop it immediately. And yes, you, you, you're losing some hard skills and it's going to be potentially hard to find again in the market. But I think that the long-term damage of having kind of a rotten apple, so to speak, in your company culture, that long-term damage is much greater than the short-term one of losing some hard skills. And so I think that the second lesson we have is that you do need to iterate and recognize fast when something doesn't work and be able to end it and move forward rather than to keep somebody with the bad mindset for too long. So I think the—

so there are two key points there. One is Ensuring that there is a culture and/or mindset fit before hiring and then realizing later on that there isn't one. So I'm wondering first if you have, say, any particular questions that you asked in interview that give you a clear indication whether somebody is a fit for the mindset and the culture that you're looking to build. Or if there are any key triggers later on, if they pass the interview and they pass the vibe check initially, what gives you the signal later on that, you know, they're an asshole, like you said it earlier?

Yeah, sorry. Please excuse my French. I guess, you know, the interview process is a way, is a very short snippet of a person, right? You have what, 2, 3, 4, 5 interviews, even if you have like 16 interviews. It's an interview. It's a, it's a show, right? You're seeing the play. You're not seeing what's happening backstage, right? So you need to use that time to maximize the test and the understanding you can have with a person, but it can never be complete. And so I honestly, I don't have kind of one, I don't have one question because that I would ask every time, because the reality is that the, the mindset we try to hire for cannot be defined in one word, right? It's a collection of different things, but it's understanding asking questions about collaboration versus competition, asking questions about autonomy and drive, asking questions about how do you deal with, you know, defining your own to-do list, how do you deal with being remote, how do you, how do you deal with, uh, um, you know, conflicts with, with some of your co-workers, like, and, and when you start asking all of these questions about how a person interacts within the company, within the team, it can build somewhat of a picture of their mindset and ways of working and So you try to maximize that, but then the person joins after 6 months, you're hearing complaints all the time. Everybody in the team is complaining. And not that the person is not an expert, but like, you know, person is arrogant, person does not communicate enough, person doesn't, you know, is rude, lacks respect, like all of those things that can come up, you know, and at some point it's like, okay, one, if one person says something, maybe he's a problem. So it's not enough of a data point. Then you have 2 or 3 and then you go into it and then you actually Wait, I'm hearing that all the time. Let me go into the meetings where this is happening, see if I can see it myself. And at some point, you know, you realize that the problem is the person, you know, and then you just, you can decide either you, you keep it because that person is actually very good at their job. If they're bad at their job on top of it, it makes it very easy. But maybe the person is quite good at their job, really an expert. And then it becomes hard because like, I'm going to lose somebody that is good for my business, but that person is currently compromising my entire team in terms of, you know, culture and mindset and collaboration. And I do think in that case, you need to cut it. And I do think that the damage on the culture and the ability to work as a team is more important than their ability to individually contribute. But it's very easy to say it. It's a lot harder to do it because again, you want to double or triple every year. As an executive team, you you want to keep all the good people, right? And so it becomes a tough decision, but I personally believe that the cohesion of a team is more important than the individual contributor.

Speaking of tough decisions, and you also mentioned that a lot of the people working at Keyrock work remotely. When you scale so fast, you obviously must realize that also you can't manage in the old traditional way. So I'm wondering what are some of the systems systems, but also challenges you had in scaling Keyrock to such a large remote team, and how do you keep it all together?

I mean, yeah, it is a, it is, it is harder to manage a team remotely than it is to manage it in person. It has different benefits, right? But in terms of purely team management, I do believe it is harder. Now, as you mentioned tools, I do think that you cannot, I cannot imagine managing a remote team with email and phone. Like the fact that we have Slack, for example, as, you know, a central tool of communication, which is, can be both live, but also asynchronous. I think that really helps, you know, smoothen the communication. I think the key part is to recognize that if you are remote, communication will, should de facto take a much bigger part of your mindshare because it is going to be harder and you need to be a lot more proactive about communication because you don't have just this random encounter or, you know, people just meet and exchange ideas. So you need to, to replace that. And it doesn't just happen. You need to decide to take some time to think about how am I going to make the communication better? What are small initiatives that you can put together? In our case, that is very much driven by our HR team that is doing a great job. But how are we going to put those things together? So communication becomes front and center. It's not just a side topic. It is something that you need to actively manage, right? So that's the first thing and doing it with the proper tools. What we've seen as well is that, as you mentioned, keeping it all together, while you are fully remote, it is important to create opportunities for people to meet in person. And of course, that depends about, you know, that depends on the size of the company and, you know, how profitable the company is. And of course, that changes, but you need to find ways to make it happen. And so what we did initially, for example, we tried, I think for the last 4 or 5 years to have one offsite per year with everybody. And basically my logic is that being remote does not save you money. Because initially people thought, oh, I'm going to save a lot of money on office, for example. Yeah, you are going to save money on office, but you're going to spend that back on offsite and creating those opportunities to meet in person because it is necessary. And we've seen that actually quite recently at Kirok. So we did, we do these offsite once a year, right? And for whatever reason, the, between the last two, there was not one year, but a year and a half. Right. And we had the company offsite three weeks ago. So we're 100, not everybody was there, but out of 195, we're like 170 all together for one week.

So you do it for a week long as well, not just a couple of days. Yeah.

Yeah. So we do it for a week long because, so if you're a company working in an office, you do an offsite for 2 or 3 days and you know, you, you go have some, some activities for 2 days and that's fine. As the logic is like, let's make it a week. It's going to be half work, half, you know, teaming and bonding. But what is good in when you are there for a week is that you, you know, you have all the meals, you know, you have breakfast, lunch, dinner, and And all of these are small opportunities to see another part of the team, spend time together and create that bond. So that's why we figured it's not going to be full holiday mode or full kind of offsite. It's going to be work as well. So we have sessions where it's just, you know, coworking time, but at least we're together. And our idea was to really, our purpose was to maximize the time together. And the impact of that, honestly, is dramatic. I mean, we did this offsite, um, 3 weeks ago and it does feel like people that are coming in are Everything is very transactional, you know, you are part of a company, but then, you know, you join calls, you are there doing a job and you're, you have a collection of individuals doing a job. And within this, you have some pockets that are really close teams, but, and then we spend one week altogether just talking about where are we going, the challenges that we have, addressing everything that is tough and really being honest about what doesn't work, being honest about what does work, playing sports together, talking, working together. And the 170 people that leave, they're one team. And of course, not everything is perfect, right? There are still some issues, loads of issues within the company, but you can feel that, that really, that, that, that you've created one entity again by having the time to be together. And so I do think that we are a remote-first company. We're going to continue to be a remote-first company. I love the fact that we trust people to manage where they work from. I think that, you know, we want to hire adults and we want them to be able to decide like, You know, telling an adult like you should be from 9 to 6 in that place I'm going to control. And I think that's an absolutely terrible way to manage people. I'd much rather tell them like you are trusted, you're an expert in what you do, you can work from wherever you want. So we're going to continue to be remote first, but for that to work, you need to also take the time to really have in-person interactions. And so at T-Roc, we, we have multiple things. So we do that with this, this week-long offsite once a year. We actually rent a house in Brussels. And so we let people from everywhere in the world come, I think, 2 times, 2 weeks per year in Brussels to be there with their team. Whenever we have 2 people from the company in the same city, I think, as long as you have 3 people, you can get a coworking together. If you go to a city where there's another person from Kiroc and you organize a dinner, the company pays for it. Small things like that, but to really kind of generate in-person interaction, because I do think those are absolutely critical. To really build team. So that's—

so not just the one once a year offsite, but you also encourage smaller interactions if people travel around the world and they could know, they could even tie in a little holiday, but also do some of the work before.

Exactly. If someone happens to be on holiday in a country when there's somebody else from Kiwok, they're still on holiday. But if they reach out to their colleague and say, oh, let's get a drink, or you can help me discover the city because you're from there. Well, the company is going to help and, you know, pay part of that dinner or drink or whatever, create those small interactions basically. So that is, that is something that we do, but then you have those big events offsite and then some small, more ad hoc kind of initiative throughout the year. And we, and then we really put a lot of emphasis on, on communication, even if it is remote. So, you know, we have a system that, for example, randomly pairs like 2 or 3 people, 15 minutes per week, just to catch up. Like there's no topic. Just the same way you would run into them at the water coolers. Like, you know, once a week you have 15 minutes, you click and you're with 2 random people from the company. It's like, hey guys, what you doing? Like, who are you? We haven't met. What do you do? What do you work on? Like, those are small things that you can put together to really create that cohesion and this logic that you're not just a collection of individuals doing a job, but that you're really one team trying to build something meaningful.

And speaking of building something meaningful, you had to present your vision and idea to a lot of people to raise up to $8 $30 million up to Series B for Keyrock. Now, I know that's no small feat, so I'm wondering what are your lessons and takeaway from the fundraising and pitching process that other founders and entrepreneurs can apply in their business and process as well? I think I have 3 main things.

The first one is that It's a lot easier to raise money from somebody that you know, which may sound very trivial, but that means that as a founder, as an entrepreneur, if you ever want to raise funds one day, you need to build that network ahead of time. And even if, you know, if you just start, you need to raise money now, you haven't built the network for enough, you just, you know, you raise money, you succeed, great. But then for the year and a half, 2 years, 3 years between raises, you should go to events to meet investors. You need to actively build your network of investors and even, even better if you can create that when you don't need them. But once you do, everything becomes a lot easier because you have built that personal relationship first. And at the end of the day, I think for me, you know, that's one of the big, sounds like a trivial, trivial learning about business, but business is done by people and that's what matters the most. Yes, you can make it very transactional. You can make it very, you know, uh, very concrete, very rational. And, you know, let's, we are just kind of economic actors, blah, blah, blah. But at the end, you're just people. And so everything that you do in business is a lot easier if you do it from a position of trust with another individual. And so building that network continuously and making sure that you know the people behind the checks, what drives them, what motivates them, what might, you know, hold them back. Once you have this and then you start discussing, you might still, you're still going to get a lot of nos, right? Because they're investors and they're not just doing this out of friendship, but still you will have taken a lot of friction away from the, from the process. And you will get a lot more honest feedback about what is and isn't interesting for them in your story. And that, of course, allows you to learn for the next people you're going to be talking to. So the next one is really to— the first one is really to build a network. The second is that the— you need a lot of resilience when you're—

you get a lot of nos. You get a lot of nos.

And everybody reads the story, you know, we've all read a TechCrunch article about some founder that raised, you know, $20 million in a day and a half with 25 term sheets. Great. That happens apparently. Never happened to me. Like no way. Never. I took way more nos than I took yeses in raising funds. Uh, and maybe that's me, right? Maybe I'm not good at it and maybe I'm not matching it, but I think I would dare to say that that's the case for the vast, vast majority of people that raise money is that you take a lot of nos. And so it takes a lot of, um, it takes a lot of resilience. You need to just continue. And that doesn't mean. Like you should ignore the bad signals, right? If systematically you talk to 20 people and 19 out of the 20 told you we're not investing because your valuation is too high, don't just keep pushing, right? Take a hint. Like, you know, you need to take that information in to change things. Don't stop. Like, it's normal to take a lot of nos and it takes a lot of resilience. That for me, the first learning is the network.

The second is the resilience. You said that people can tell you that your valuation is too high and if 19 out of 20 tell you that, then you perhaps need to take the hint. But sometimes people can get maybe swayed in their mission and pivot in a different direction because they don't get traction with investors. Was that the case with you, or did you remain on track and continued with your vision?

No, I mean, I, I think that again, like, um, it's a bit what I described for the adoption of digital assets, but you, you're doing like this, What matters is the direction of travel. And I think that in terms of the long-term direction of travel, I think that that remains relatively steady across, you know, throughout the years. But then the market changes, you know, between now and 7, 7 and a half years ago, the market has, you know, gone in every single direction. And then you have, you know, external constraints, regulatory constraints, and then you have Trump that puts tariffs or whatever. I don't know. There's many things that, you know, come at you and that you need to adapt for. So it isn't rational at all to say that you're going to take one decision at a given point, or I'm going to do this, and then you're never going to change no matter what the world throws at you. Like, there's no way. You do need to adapt. But I do think that while adapting and finding your ways, it's important to keep this, uh, uh, you know, this North Star or whatever, like a direction of travel that is further away that tells you like, yes, I might be taking detours and all the small kind of local optimums that I'm optimizing for. I keep in mind what my global optimum is and where I'm going. And that helps you making those small decisions and make sure that, you know, if I'm going like this, I don't end up going there. You know, I know that eventually I'm going to come back because I do have kind of this, this longer, this longer direction of travel that I keep in mind, but you should adapt. Like there's no way to, to be, or again, maybe it might be the same founder that raised in 2 days. You know, he's planned everything out and, you know, he knows exactly what's going to happen in the next 6 years. And so he can never change what he decided. But again, And I don't think that happens a lot in the real world.

So how do you keep this all aligned when there are 3 of you as co-founders? And how do you ensure that you're still all on the same page month after month, year after year, you know, raise after raise, product after product, as things evolve?

Talk a lot and you argue a lot and you accept that arguing and not being on the same page is part of the process and that you're going to make it work by always being transparent about things that you don't agree on, which creates a lot of tough discussions, but that's how you learn. I think there's nobody, many people in the world that I've learned more from than my co-founders because there's so many opportunities where I did not agree. You know, I started not agreeing with them at all. And then we have a tough conversation for an hour and a half. And then at the end, I'm like, you know what, actually you're right. And so it takes a lot of, uh, it takes a lot of confidence in your co-founders, a lot of respect as well, because, but also takes humility, but there are things that they know that you don't. There are things that you know that they don't, and you need to be ready to completely change your mind. So I think that for me, the key is yes, having a very open and continuous communication and transparency when you, and that's, that holds for founders, co-founders, but also investors and so on. And I think it takes a, it's important to be very humble and to realize that you might not know, you might be wrong. So I think, uh, there's one more, one saying that I love is to have, you know, very strong opinions, but very loosely held. And so that's the case. Like I have very strong opinions about things, but I'm completely happy to let them go and change them if I realize that I'm wrong. And I think that is something that is extremely important to make a co-founders. And I mean, not only co-founders, like an executive committee, a dynamic work is to realize that everybody has strong opinions and have the humility to know that you are going to learn a lot from others. And so you are going to change your mind. And that's not the change of— that's not the sign of weakness. And I think that's absolutely indispensable to make it work.

Has there been anything that you were wrong about and had to change your mind? An example that comes to mind. Loads.

There's loads of things that we were completely wrong about in terms of market timing, what we should start with, you know, oh, let's launch this now. And then you actually pull the plug a few weeks later because it makes no sense. It's not, it is not now. Oh, we need to get. This lights on now because the market is ready. Actually, no, the market is not going to be ready for another 5 years. So it makes no sense to put all those guys on this road. There's loads of them. Like, I think you need to be, uh, you need to be right here 51% of the time. And that's how you, you, you keep a proper direction, but we are wrong all the time. I think I'm a big tennis fan. You might not see like here, you just see the bike, but I'm a big, I'm a big tennis fan. And there was a one and For me, the most extraordinary tennis player of all time was Federer. I'm a big Federer fan. And he said in one college address, I don't know which college he spoke to, you know, in the US, whatever. And he mentioned the number of points that he played on his career. Basically end up like, I don't know, out of 50,000 points, he won 26,000 of them, but that means that he lost 24,000 points. And yet he's one of the best, you know, tennis player of all time, if not the best for some people. So I think that's a nice story. For being right and wrong in building a business like this. You have to start, you have no clue what you're doing. Even if you know the market very well and you know, you have a strong gut feeling, you don't know who you're going to be working with. You don't know what, how the market is going to evolve. You don't know how you yourself are going to deal with the ups and downs of building. You don't know. So you're going to be wrong loads of time, but as long as you keep that resilience and you manage to be right a bit more often, eventually it pays off.

Now, Kevin, you basically run a 24/7 business and I'm wondering how do you actually switch off or have you given up trying to switch off?

No, I have not given up. It's hard. Like I do, I mean, I think the key is to have a strong team that you trust so that, you know, you can let go and know that the ship is in good hands, right? With the rest of the management team of the company. I do think that, you know, I mean, personally, I don't know if it's as a CEO or as a founder, but you don't it's very hard to completely switch off. Like, you know, there are nights where I don't work, but still, you know, the last thing I do is checking Slack. The first thing I do is checking Slack. So you're always a bit turned on, you know, somewhere. But I do think it's very important to find, you know, periods of time where you can try to completely switch off and take, you know, 1 or 2 weeks off to really clear your mind. Because yeah, I'm not a big fan of the full hustle culture and always on work 24/7 and can you, kill yourself to work. I think that's very counterproductive actually. So I do try during my holidays to really be completely off. And how I do it is just that, you know, Slack is off my phone. I don't check my emails. And I tell the guys, if you have a very big emergency, you call me. And otherwise I don't check. And that, you know, I think it's something that helps a lot. But clearly when it's your company, you cannot be as switched off as you would as an employee and say, you know, 9 to 6 and then I just don't think about it at all. Like that's impossible, frankly, or I, I've, or at least now I'm not able to do it, but I do think it's very important to keep some moments where you force yourself to stop thinking about it because it's meant to be a marathon, not a sprint, right? And I don't think you can just be all the time on.

So besides taking a 2-week holiday once a year or 2 1-week holidays spread about, how do you then manage to stay productive and grounded on a day-to-day basis? What are some of your habits and routines?

Personally, I'm so first I have my family, which I think is the most important thing in my life, a lot more than my business, to be very honest. So that's something that helps a lot and gives me perspective to what is actually important when, when there's moments of stress at work, I can always just take a step back and say, oh wait, my kids are fine. So actually everything is fine. So that's one thing. The second, I guess, in terms of productivity, I do a lot of sports and that, that is something that That helps me a lot. It gives me like a, you know, I do an hour of sport. It's like a 1-hour holiday, basically. If you, if you do a, you know, a lot of cycling, go to the gym, run, walk, whatever, but any physical activity, it just brings you back to the here and now. It allows you to stop thinking about, at least me, hundreds of different things that could happen and just focus on here and now. And that makes kind of a nice small, yeah, small holiday that, you know, brings me back. And that's a very, uh, a very key part of my productivity, but actually more importantly, my mental health, basically to have those, those moments. Yeah. I think that family and sports are two very big things.

And, but you didn't have your family when you started Keyrock. So I'm wondering how— I was married already. You were married already, but not the children. So I'm wondering then how has the arrival of your children changed your perspective on life and business?

I think the main change is what I mentioned, it gave me perspective. Like there's nothing else that is important, that is really important. Everything takes second stage compared to, to my children and my wife and my family. So it just gave me a lot of perspective, which I think is very positive because it allows you to stay a lot more calm and collected in every situation because something goes wrong with business again, like in the grand scheme of life, how important is that versus the rest? Oh, all of a sudden it's not that important anymore. So you can be a lot more clear of mind when finding a solution rather than panicking or stressing out and so on. So it's, it's really that perspective that changed that I think was actually very beneficial, of course, for me personally, but I think also for how I deal with problems at work.

Now, Kevin, as we taper off our conversation, this is something that I tend to ask most of my, uh, millennial masters. And on your journey building Keyrock and getting to the success so far, there had to be some sacrifices. So I'm wondering, what are the biggest sacrifices you had to make to be where you are today?

Well, I think that work takes a much bigger part of my life than it does for most people. And that can be a sacrifice if you— actually, no, what I was going to say is kind of bullshit actually, because some people say it's a sacrifice if you don't like it, it isn't if you like it. I think that's bullshit because even if you like it a lot, but it's still hard. And so I think that's somewhat of an overall sacrifice. Like, you know, it's nice outside, uh, the weather is nice, it's 5 PM, I'm not going to be on the terrace having a beer with friends. Doesn't happen. I know that basically my, currently my life is very much centered about my family, my work, and then anything else I can fit to stay kind of mentally healthy and balanced. But there is definitely a sacrifice in terms of, you know, the amount of time I spend working and thinking about work. And so I think the, one part of it is time and the second is the fact it's the, is the mental load. Like when you, again, it depends how you build your company and what your objectives are. But if you start a, if you start on a VC path, so to speak, where you take, you know, external financing and you know that the purpose is going to do 10x over the next, you know, 5, 6, 7 years, you're going to need to push every single month. And that is something that is super exciting. And, you know, a lot of people kind of realize themselves as individuals in that, but it can also take a toll. To realize like you're, you're starting on the race that doesn't have an end. It doesn't like, it's a, you know, perpetual growth. You want to grow, to grow, to grow, to grow, to grow all the time. So every single month for the last almost 8 years, I'm checking the numbers end of the month. Are we bigger than the month before? And it never stops. And if my target is to double on a year, that year we're going to double. I'm going to be happy for 10 minutes and I'm going to say, how do we triple next year? And that is something that takes that can be mentally tiring and that you need to be ready for. If you, if you take external financing and you want to grow as fast as possible, as much as possible, this is what it entails. So I think that, that, um, that constant pressure and the fact that I spend a lot more time at work than most people, I think those are two, the two biggest ones.

Even if you work remotely and you are in close proximity of your family, it doesn't mean you can still dedicate as much time as you want.

No, definitely not. You're still working, right? I mean, yes, it's nice because I can do the commute in the morning and, you know, I can sometimes, if they're not at school, I can go out and, you know, spend 10 minutes with them, but still, you know, I'm going back and I'm working, like the full day I'm working. So that's, yeah, that's just how it is. Whether you're remote or not, it doesn't change.

So one final question then, Kevin. I'm wondering what What would you say to 2017 Kevin when you started on the Keyrock journey? If you could go back in time or send a Slack message back in history 7, 8 years ago.

Definitely to go for it. Uh, kind of reassurance, like go for it. The level of uncertainty that you have is not going to go away. Like, um, you continuously have uncertainty and you're continuously outside of your comfort zone. That's normal, but just, you know, go for it, trust yourself. And, uh, and yeah, eventually it pays off and you, you know, if you do a lot of very small steps, you end up covering a very big distance. And I think that's kind of the journey of building a company. So I would, I would just say that to myself just to have that kind of reassurance starting up.

I love that little insight that you'd never stop doubting and you always have to keep pushing on. I totally feel that one as well a lot of the time. So Thank you so much, Kevin, for sharing your journey and your story so far with Keyrock, and I can't wait to see what you're gonna do next.

Thank you very much, Daniel. It was a great chat. I appreciate the time. Have a very nice day.

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