Raagulan Pathy: Founder to Executive Transition, Blockchain Magic & Go For It - E226

Raagulan Pathy is the Vice President, Asia Pacific for Circle. Based in Singapore, his responsibilities include the go-to-market strategy, sales and representing Circle in the region. Raagulan was previously the Head of Enterprise for the Asia Pacific region at Zoom, and he brings over a decade of business and sales leadership experience within the Cloud and technology sectors. Prior to his role at Zoom, he held senior business roles at Workplace by Facebook, Amazon Web Services and as co-founder of a Cloud software company.

Jeremy Au: (00:29)
Hi, Raagulan, really excited to have you on the show. You've promised a clear and frank perspective on the crypto and blockchain industry. So I think people are really interested in this topic, but also how you yourself ended up in the web3 industry as well. So could you introduce yourself?
 
Raagulan Pathy: (00:45)
Sure. My name is Raagulan Pathy. I'm based here in Singapore for about 10 years now. I am originally Australian. Actually, I'm originally Sri Lankan. But I grew up in Australia, travelled and lived in lots of countries around the world over the last 20 years before I landed here in Singapore, lived in the UK, has spent some time in the US, even spent some time in Africa and a few other places. Personally, in terms of my career, it has taken a few different twists and turns, I was once a founder as well and started some companies. Early on in my career, I was doing a lot more like project management, program management with banking. Then I moved into tech, and currently I'm at Circle, which is most known for USDC. But prior to this, I've been at Zoom, as well as Facebook and Amazon here in Singapore.
 
Jeremy Au: (01:34)
Obviously, you started out early in your career as a founder. So talk to us about that early entrepreneurial journey.
 
Raagulan Pathy: (01:40)
My early entrepreneurial journey started when I was seven or eight years old, because my father was a businessman, and he was a businessman in Sri Lanka. And we moved from Sri Lanka during the Civil War to Australia, he had a business in Australia, a simple shop, working in that shop really was where I started my first elements of entrepreneurship. Now, I know that it sounds crazy, because you are seven or eight years old, but working in the shop and helping my dad do the books and keeping count money and things like that was really where I started. But realistically, that meant that I had business in my blood, really from a very young age. And I was always writing down business ideas, can I do this? Can I do that? Would this work? Would that not? I find that entrepreneurs are those that type of people. But it's not just about one idea that they suddenly came up with, they have this instinct to think about ideas and things that they can make a little bit of money from when they're a kid through to like much grander business ideas from an elder. When I was in my 20s, I tried building a Facebook for business effectively called on shop. That was one of the businesses I tried to build and try to develop, it didn't go to far, it was pre mobile age, it was a little bit too early. And then one of the more significant businesses I built was actually started off as a consulting company, and then later on became a private cloud that we built. And then it was an aggregation for cloud software. This was like in 2009, 2010, before AWS really took off, once again, was sort of a little bit too early to market. But that business did not grow to a substantial 15, $20 million Revenue Company. And ultimately, we didn't succeed and become the mega exit that we wanted, we did have to sell it to another company and exit. That's a couple of examples. But I've generally also always been invested in startups as well and worked very closely with founders as well, and really will pitch into most ideas. And I'm very interested in what's new, and what's coming as well.
 
Jeremy Au: (03:50)
What was it like transitioning from being a founder to being an executive at a larger tech company?
 
Raagulan Pathy: (03:57)
It was interesting, because you go from having all control to basically being part of like Amazon's very innovative company. And I would say it's probably one of the best places for an entrepreneur or founder to go because you have a lot of freedom to do a lot of your own things, but you're still part of a larger company, a larger corporation. So that always takes a little bit of adjustment. I often hire former founders, recently just hired one as well. And I can just see that adjustment from you can do whatever you want, as a founder to you're part of a broader company machinery in some way, shape, or form. So that takes a little bit of adjustment, just in the way you communicate and the way that you run things.
 
Jeremy Au: (04:41)
So there's a lot of founders, obviously, who are going to be transitioning off their jobs, because either they depart from the founding teams or because they are wrapping up the chapter of the lives because they are winding down the company. But the truth is, of course, is that finding a company is really hard. Over 90% of the founders are going to fail and they're going to transition to new roles and new startups. So what would you say are some of the challenges that you think that founders face in transitioning to, working at a tech company?
 
Raagulan Pathy: (05:10)
That sounds funny, but I would say actually, it's communication. If you're a founder, you can communicate how you want, because you can just tell people do this, do that, we're going to do this idea, and everyone's going to get behind it. And in a startup plan, you can do that and get away with it. When you come into a company, you've got to somewhat ask for permission to get things done, you've got to convince people to come on your journey. And that's the biggest adjustment that I see the founders have. They have to move from telling people, this is what we're going to do. And people accept it when you're a founder, because you're the one leading the vision going a certain way. So you have to communicate with people and convince lots of different stakeholders that this is what you want to do. And the stakeholders may be internal, or sometimes its customers as well. You also might not have full control over all the things it used to as a founder, you might be used to, like pricing things however you want, you might be able to like, write up whatever legal contracts and terms that you want. You may be able to spend money on marketing dollars, however you want all these things, you suddenly have to adjust the way that a company does it. And that adjustment can honestly be pretty brutal for a lot of founders at the beginning. And most of them figure it out, but it's definitely an adjustment.
 
Jeremy Au: (06:26)
So what advice would you give to founders who are transitioning to that role? You've been that founder going through the transition, and you've hired former founders to join a team. So what advice would you give them in that transition?
 
Raagulan Pathy: (06:38)
The advice that I would give is, find a role that is most like being a founder. And so what I mean by that is that, I actually think that sales and business development roles are probably the most natural fit for former founders, because you're driving at the front end in terms of revenue. And you get a little bit more leverage, you can do a little bit more of what you want, for the sake of bringing money into the company. So it's a bit of a softer adjustment. If you go from Founder into a lot more of a traditional role, whether it's like HR or communications or marketing operations or other things, sometimes it's not so easy. They're a little bit more fixed. If you're on a sales role in your business development role. It's creative, things aren't so fixed, there's still a bit of discovery in terms of like, how, what's the best way to do it? And that was certainly the process I went through, I went into a sales and business development role after I was a founder at Amazon.
 
Jeremy Au: (07:34)
Awesome. And when you see that, and you see that transition is not going well, what do you advise them to do? Because someone joined marketing or wasn't right, cultural fit? Or how do you think about coaching them.
 
Raagulan Pathy: (07:46)
Most of the founder conversations that I've seen, where if adjusted to like coming into a company, it's mostly the same conversation, which is like stop being a dick. Because, people don't have to listen to you as much in a Company. When you're a founder, you generally have a little bit of God personality to them. And they can be more brutal, and they can be a bit more of a dick, and people will forgive them for it because of the vision of where they're taking them to. So I go back to that bit about communication of like, you need to build friends again. Not everyone's going to be your friend, you need to understand that companies will have politics and companies will have structures, and companies will have people that have been there longer than you. And that's a lot of where the coaching is for founders trying to integrate back in. Like, don't be such a rough brush coming in. And just trying to brute force your way through everything. I see a lot of like, founders doing like the scorched earth method of like, I'm going to get shit done. Because I'm an ex founder, and I know how to get shit done. And I'm going to get shit done in the place, in the company I'm going to and that's probably why the company hired me because I'm an ex founder and I can get shit done. But the method that they take is like the scorched earth it like, doesn't matter what cost it comes, I'm going to get it done. And often that can end badly because they might get the result, but everyone might hate them in the process. And they might still find themselves getting thrown out of a company or so forth. Honestly, from what I've seen, most founders coming in, screw it up, coming back in and they probably will get right the second time around, maybe the company after the company they come in. It's the natural process. I rarely see them coming to a company in a perfectly works. They come in, they see the things, they do right and wrong. They learn a few lessons, they might go somewhere else after a few years, and then they get it right.
 
Jeremy Au: (09:44)
And I think part of it is that obviously you've really done a lot of these large companies, I would say you've been in Zoom, you've in Facebook, you've been at AWS. So what would you say are some things to watch out for? If you're joining relatively large companies
 
Raagulan Pathy: (10:03)
So when I've joined these companies, they've generally been quite small in Asia. Zoom, we have less than 10 people and very early stage, even at AWS in Singapore, maybe 15, or 20 people here in Singapore. Even a Facebook like, wasn’t this workplace, like new SAS startup within Facebook, so it had very few people. So I would say that coming into a big company that's got 1000s of people, is a little bit hard for a founder, I think most founders get frustrated, because they'll just be there going, I'm just like one piece of machinery, it's like very hard to have impact. It's a hard adjustment. The trick is trying to find a big company in the US, but it might be very new to Asia, that is a great fit for a former founder. Or a smaller company that may be in like, a Series C, D, that's already started in Asia. And that is a better fit. Honestly, I think if you're a former founder, and you go into a large established company, like Google or Microsoft, how big Facebook, any of the FAANG companies, I'm not picking on any company. Like if you go to any one of them, I think it's pretty hard. It's a pretty hard adjustment. Most founders would get super frustrated by the pace at which things happen. And the politics, and the complexity, is not a great fit for founders.
 
Jeremy Au: (11:19)
You went through that experience, and then you chose to work at Circle. So definitely, is it a big jump? So what led you to say, now I'm in these APAC leadership roles, obviously, for these very large companies. And I'm going to join a crypto, web3 and blockchain and stable coins, and specifically Circle. So walk us through that point of view.
 
Raagulan Pathy: (11:48)
Firstly, I've tried to go to an earlier and earliest stage with each company that I go to. Whenever I landed a company, the only thing I usually end up thinking is, I wish I was here earlier. So it doesn't matter how early you get there, even in Circle, I was like, I wish I was here a year earlier. But actually, the story of stablecoins is like a full circle one to me, and bear with me in the story for a few moments. So that was Facebook. And Facebook's obviously got like two and a half 3 billion people across all of their platforms. And the most simple set of concepts today is that I can send you an email, I can send you a WhatsApp, I can send you a photo, I can't send another person money. It's just impossibly difficult. And so I think Facebook had the right idea in terms of like trying to combine all of their platforms into one and coming up with a stable coin, where you can move money. And so anyone in the world could send money to anyone in the world. Of course, there is like really good until people realize that Facebook is the one trying to do that. And then it gets stuck and a whole bunch of government issues and regulatory and everything else. But I actually really wanted to go into that group. That was where I wanted to go. But it wasn't happening. Facebook was honestly a bit of a mess when i left as a company because of Cambridge Analytica and everything else. And I saw that Zoom was this company, I started speaking to Zoom, early 2019. So quite a bit before the pandemic made Zoom a household name, most people didn't know who's in was, but I was hearing a lot of customers talking very positive about Zoom and about Eric, about, there's the approach a company had towards developing things fast. And that worked out incredibly well in terms of being the right company to pick and then I couldn't have predicted a pandemic. But five years, which I had a five year plan at Zoom happened in like two years. And then I had this thing, I kept thinking about stable coins. And I saw that Circle was building a stable coin and was probably doing it the right way. So I still have this like very fundamental belief having lived in, a lot of developers, like I lived in Nigeria for two years. I love traveling. I've traveled over 100 countries, if you ask me, where do you want to go? Of course, I like Italy and Europe, like others, but for the holidays, I'm going to Rwanda and I like going to emerging market countries. I fundamentally believe that money is not a simple thing for most people. It's very hard for 80% of the world. It's very simple for us here sitting in Singapore, I can pay you now really simply. But it's not simple for the majority of the world. And this always stuck with me, travelling countries as to how hard money is, in so many different ways. Like it's hard to have the security of money, like having your money in a bank account is really hard. It's hard to know that your currency is going to be stable. Because a lot of countries are depreciating currencies. It's really hard to know that someone's not going to come and take your money or force you to pray a bribe or something else, for the security of your money if you making a lot of money. So a lot of things about money, which is not really easy. And at the very simplest. It's the analogy I always gave is like if you and I Jeremy are in a bar in Jakarta. And we have a bill for $200. And we are from different countries, I can't split that bill with you, I should be able to WhatsApp you that money or send it to you. As simple as sending your whatsapp. So this is just fundamentally a huge problem that needs to be solved for the world. And as you see the evolution of web one, to web two, to web three, initially, it was about speeding up like neutral mail into email, then it was about communicating much faster in a much more social media way. And now web three is really about transacting value, about moving value, whether it's money or goods, through NFTs, or many other things, like transacting value is really at the core of web three, in the way that I think about it. So I was thinking about this. And then I started speaking to some people Circle, all of my jobs that I've had the last four jobs, I've never applied for a job, I've approached someone to have a discussion. And that discussion has taken between two months to nine months for that company. And then we've decided it's the right place to be, because I really believe in what the company is doing. And then the role comes afterwards. And that was the same with Circle, with Zoom, with Facebook, even with Amazon, as well. Amazon, originally I went to because I built a cloud company, it didn't work. So I went to Amazon and said, Well, I'll come work for you guys instead. Because you guys know how to do it. But coming back to Circle, i fundamentally think that money is broken. It needs to be unbroken for the world economy, especially for the people in developing countries. And we have a huge opportunity as circle to do that. And we've got a very good chance of doing that for people. But even if we don't, we're lighting an industry under fire that whether it's us or somebody else, will provide the infrastructure so that people can have more short in terms of the weight of the money and transact value much easier as well.
 
Jeremy Au: (16:55)
Understand, obviously, why you chose to work at a company. And obviously, the six months since then we've seen a lot of turbulence of crypto and will definitely turn into bearish sentiment, especially as of today's recording. SBF from FTX was arrested, right after claiming several hours ago, the things that you probably would not get arrested. So what do you think about, what the outlook is on the industry and why it means for any operators and builders?
 
Raagulan Pathy: (17:28)
The great thing about grey hairs is that you can think a little bit more long term. I'm not super old, but I'm lucky enough to have been through the.com boom and bust through the financial crisis, boom and bust. Now we have this very long run bull market, the way that I think about it is like SBF when the last financial crisis happened, he was like 15 or 16 years old. And since then, we've pretty much had a bull market. It started slowly at first and then it basically it kept going very fast. So to me, you've liked the evolution of technologies. And I think of this just no different to the bust after the 2000s, you had this like huge run up this bubble. And I call these like necessary bubbles. Because the bubble brings in lots of developers, lots of investment into like an unknown technology. In the 2000 Bubble. Every shop was go online, guess what malls are doing pretty well still. But that meant there was a lot of infrastructure built, like internet infrastructure was built. And that paved the way for a lot of the new businesses to be built afterwards. That meant Google was already born. But Google was a substantially bigger company today. But companies like Facebook weren't born, YouTube wasn't born, WhatsApp wasn't born. These were all born in the years after that bust. And I think of that exactly the same way. With what's happening with web three. I think a bust is never really fun. But what's going to happen is that exactly the same thing that happened in the.com, boom, that you had probably 90 or 95%, or maybe even 98% of companies go away with flaky business models, with speculative views on things. But it's going to leave all these people who've worked at companies and trade ideas and failed, and they come back and they're going to try new ideas. Because they've been sucked in into the bubble. I don't know anyone in crypto, who's quitting crypto, they may have lost their job. They may have been in a company that blew up, they may have been, but I don't hear about anyone go, you know what crypto is shit. And I'm quitting. And I'm going somewhere else. What I feel is they are going to try something else, because they've now understood the value of what can happen. And the real magic is going to happen in the next few years. So to answer your question, there's no better time to be building, it's going to be a little bit quiet, perhaps for a couple of years, because there's not going to be tons of VC money, there's not going to be so much noise around, like big valuations and big use cases. But what we'll find ourselves if I was a betting person based upon history, isn't in three or four years time, or maybe it's six to eight years time, you're going to see some really significant companies doing things that are of significant value to people, and suddenly, people are going to be like, overnight success.
 
Jeremy Au: (20:20)
You see real magic in the future. And it feels like the real magic for a while was the exchanges and investing and higher returns, those are the headlines. So what do you think is real magic? Even today for stable coins is still very much like, okay, we're paralleling real world utility, with that twin. So what do you see is the real magic?
 
Raagulan Pathy: (20:39)
Firstly, I think of the growth of exchanges, and it's kind of upside down. Because if the biggest thing is like trading and exchanges, you're basically trading value that hasn't been created yet. It's like, you're almost creating artificial value, trading it, as opposed to building great companies, getting them listed on exchanges, or their tokens, listed exchanges, and then that trading becomes interesting. Somehow that got brought to the very front. Firstly, crypto is quite broad. There's a lot of use cases, I just look at the team that I manage and think about all the different use cases, but there is a lot that is going to be very interesting in the gaming ecosystem. For gamers. I'm not a gamer, myself, but I think for the gaming ecosystem, there's going to be a lot in terms of like NFT's and in terms of value created for gamers. So there's that segment, then there is just genuinely building a new financial system. Being able to move money around is much easier. You have a very macro economic point of view, like the world. Fundamentally, if you look back 20 years ago, mostly traded goods, whether it's commodities, whether it's goods that were made, that's what was trading, the world is now largely a service economy. And the only thing that dictates and separates is, how much you can earn, is where you're born, or where you live. Staying in Singapore I can earn a lot more in a service role that I can just 30 kilometers across the border in Malaysia, even much less if I go one hour flight away to Chi Minh. But the world service economy is becoming global and service economy is the majority of the global economy in the future. And I think fundamentally, if the world economy is a service economy, and it can be run from nearly anywhere in the world, because the internet, then you're going to have to have a whole new financial system that will support this economy. And that hasn't been built. Realistically what we've been doing with payment companies, and one of the fintechs is what I call lipstick on a pig. We've taken current systems, we've made it simpler for a developer to code and so forth, but we haven't fundamentally tried to change, how value is transacted, whether it's like money is actually moved, whether it's like value captured in NFT or others. And that growth of the service economy becoming a major part of the economy, the fact that the service economy is completely global and economy completely remote. And the fact that the economy needs to trade with each other and need means to trade with each other that is where a lot of the magic in web three is going to actually happen. Whether it's moving money or other things.
 
Jeremy Au: (23:19)
So it sounds like replacing the financial system is the approach. But does the value accrue to the incumbent players who already have a regulatory approval, and the relationship the US, finance system, does the value accrue to up coming, folks, or it hasn't occurred to nobody, because, it feels like everybody in crypto is very much effectively moving to zero fees. It feels like a race to the bottom, it feels like low cost airlines, competing with each other and duking it out. So how do you see the value moving around industry?
 
Raagulan Pathy: (23:54)
It's a good question, because the cost of crypto, which is one of its great promises, is very low, comparatively. And I think the question around like, how do you create a business model to extract that value is a very good question. Because fundamentally, crypto promises like reducing the tax that's currently paid. If you move money between countries, between .5 to 3%, tax you're paying. If you're using a credit card, you're paying a tax, every time you move money, most of the time, you're paying some sort of tax. So the presumption is that tax was going to go to nearly zero through web3 technologies, how do you actually make money from it. I guess it is interesting. But if you look a bit deeper, within crypto and web three, the opportunity for players to make money, it may be on a much smaller fractional percentage, but the volumes are also significantly much bigger, as well, I still think there is going to be an opportunity to capture value. But I don't know that we know exactly where that is going to be. I don't think we know that. Who is going to be Google? Who is going to apply the Google tax, like whatever online business you create, you're going to pay the Google and Facebook tax of the advertising that you've got to pay to them to get off the ground. I think their combined revenues are well north of $100 billion. And that's a very well known tax within the internet economy that you got to pay. I don't know if we know what that is, for web three, or a crazy idea maybe won't accrue to just one person, maybe accrue much more evenly to a lot more people. It will be like as web three promises are more decentralised than centralised, there'll be more people getting it in smaller chunks, rather than a few companies getting a very large proportion of it today.
 
Jeremy Au: (25:49)
Awesome. Could you share with us about a time that you personally have been brave?
 
Raagulan Pathy: (25:52)
I like to think I'm always quite brave. But, the biggest philosophy that I have in life is that you need to disrupt yourself before you get disrupted. It doesn't sit very well with people because people don't like change fundamentally. So for me, I was born in Sri Lanka, I moved to Adelaide with my parents, which is like the fifth or sixth biggest city in Australia, has really no tech industry, no finance industry, or anything else. I was in university and I was super bored. And it was like 2000, in the middle of the.com Boom. So my dad had a cousin who had like a tech training business, I was studying accounting, and I just made the decision to leave uni and fly over there to learn Unix programming, which most of my friends when I was 20 years old, thought it was completely crazy. Because, like now people leave Australia and go to America. This is like 20 years ago, people don't just get off and go to New York, like no money in their pocket. So for me, everyone thought I was crazy. And everything was stupid. And then I moved. I was there for a little while. Then I went to the UK. And then I remember I was snowboarding in France, just on a holiday and I was living in the UK. So I was 22 at the time. And my phone rings. I'm on top of this hill. And then this like, recruitment agency says, we've got this like job in Nigeria, would you like to go and work in Nigeria? And I was like, sure, what's the job and I was basically building data centers for a new telco called MTN, which is now one of the largest emerging market telcos in Nigeria, I was just like, I'm going to go. And I went down. And once again, people thought I was crazy. And I've just consistently done that a lot, especially a lot through my 20s. Where, I don't really think about it too much. And I just kind of like to go for it. Of course, when you get a bit older, you assess your risk a little bit more and you think it through a bit more, but I'm always of the opinion that especially when you're below 35. You should be super brave. You should just go for it. Because the worst thing is going to happen. You're going to like, lose money and you're going to be a bit further behind in your career. But you are going to learn so much in terms of lessons, So I think I've been super brave in terms of like moving countries, very often especially in my 20s, I move countries maybe five or six times, and each time on a whim. But on the question of bravery, I'm 42. Now. So I do sometimes look at myself and think, I wish I was a bit more brave. Because with age, what happens is you become slightly less brave, you become slightly more considered in your approach, maybe that's a good thing. Maybe it's not a good thing. But that's why if you're a founder and you're in your 20s, even if it doesn't work out, and the majority of your business not going to work out, just fucking go for it. Because just be brave, what you're going to lose is so little, in terms of like in the long run, but when you're going to gain in terms of experience, in terms of the harsh realities of life, or building a business, it's just so powerful. And I could just couldn't recommend it more, don't get caught into this cycle of what your friends are doing, how they're building their s&p 500 portfolio, because it doesn't matter. You can make all that money back if it doesn't work. But be brave and give it a crack and fail and be willing to fail over and over again, because eventually it ends up in the right place.
 
Jeremy Au: (29:17)
You didn't do that. You did go for it by being a founder several times in your 20s and 30. So do you feel like you learn from it? Do you feel like you went hard enough for it? Do you feel like you learn from your experience?
 
Raagulan Pathy: (29:28)
I did.Look, everyone has different life circumstances. Like, I was also having this debate with somebody on LinkedIn today. If I was born into a perfect family, I have lovingly great parents, but I made all my money myself and came from nothing, basically. So, if I had a complete safety net of parents, I could fall back onto, in Asia, we have this obligation of like looking after our parents and helping them out. And we have different obligations when we're trying to be brave, compared to people who don't have those family obligations. But to answer your question, have I been brave enough? I don't think I'm done being brave. I think there's still time. And I don't discount becoming a founder in the future. I've gone a long time at Circle. But maybe after this, or maybe after the next roll, maybe it was time to go at it again. And, I will go back at it with all the lessons that I've learned from my early bravery, I guess, versus if I hadn't been brave, if I hadn't given those things, even though it didn't make me into worth hundreds of millions of dollars, or a billionaire or anything like that. I don't think I would have the scars or those lessons to be even thinking about it. If I had just worked in a job my whole life. Firstly, I don't think I would have got to the position I have, if I just worked in a job my whole life, I think going and being a founder actually gave me the opportunity to get to where I am. But secondly, people, if they don't give it a crack when they're young, I don't think many people wake up when they're like 40 years old and think for the first time in my life, I'm going to go and start a business. I just don't see that very often. People give it a crack early, if it doesn't work, they'll come back in and give it a crack later.
 
Jeremy Au: (31:08)
Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I'd love to paraphrase the three big themes I got from the show. And the first of course, is thank you so much for sharing about your personal transition. But also your observations of how founders transition to becoming an executive at a large tech company or medium sized tech company. I thought you had some good advice on how you advise folks to not be scorched earth, but be thoughtful about how they approach friendships and relationships and alliances to get stuff done in the companies. The second of course, is thank you for sharing your point of view on the blockchain industry and you have a longer view that this has happened before. It's happened now and it will happen again. And you're looking to build over the long term, then you still believe that there is some fundamental magic that will continue to be built, though the jury's still out. Where the value accretes within the industry across incumbents to single players or to multiple players. Lastly, thank you so much for sharing about your advice to go for it, about your thoughts and regrets and point of view on being more aggressive while you're young. And then being realistic that you're probably not going to be that aggressive again in the future. So go for a while you can. So thank you so much for coming on the show.
 
Raagulan Pathy: (32:27)
No problems. And just one thing I would say and this may come back to haunt me but people are going to say that like what's going to happen with crypto, is it dead. And I'm just telling you that to me crypto, and the web3 industries are an absolute no brainer. Today, people may be getting distracted with generative AI and a whole bunch of other things. But if you're going to be a builder, go and build now because to me, from my experience, this is going to be an absolute no brainer of where to be. So I'll leave you with that.