A few weeks ago, we made the challenging decision to pivot our energy away from Personae, the company I've been working on for the past couple of years.
We pioneered new ground, we failed to build retentive products, and ultimately we decided to return investor money and re-enter the startup idea maze from scratch.
Looking back, it's been a classic startup journey of ups and downs.
I'd like to take some time here to ramble out some closing thoughts. This may be the first in a multi-part series but it may also not.
Candidly, I'm mostly doing this for myself. Being publicly retrospective+vulnerable is therapeutic.
But I hope it also serves other founders struggling to bring cutting edge tech to market. It's a unique and lonely journey and the rough edges one picks up by grinding through it might have generalizable learnings.
Fwiw I'm not leaving crypto or startups and I only feel better armed and more excited going in for round 2!
Personae was founded to innovate on what it means to be pseudonymous online. We saw two trends:
'client-side' zero-knowledge proving becoming cheaper and faster
verifiable reputation (i.e. that could fit in a zkSNARK) becoming more relevant online via crypto (and key-based cryptography) adoption
We believed that the advancement of both of these trends would mean that soon 'porting' reputation seamlessly between public accounts would be possible and relevant to internet activity very soon.
Of course, as is the case with most startup failures, our timing wasn't quite right. Verifiable reputation just didn’t become important as fast as we thought.
While we still had conviction, we were taking a two pronged approach:
improve the ‘client-side’ zk-proving stack
build an explosive, retentive product using 1
In short, we succeeded massively at 1 and failed massively at 2. In startup terms, product/technology risk was never an issue; we had the capabilities to build anything. Distribution/market risk was huge though and we never made a product that stuck.
Rather than linking to all of our past work, I'll just link our github (LINK) for now and share a few bullet points on what I'm most proud of:
pioneering the idea of 'zk-identity'
creating and testing a reputation-bearing pseudonym scheme
pushing on the frontier of field-agnostic zk-proving
implementing and productizing some of the first zk-based consumer apps
As it turns out, the future is really really hard to predict.
A huge learning for me is that it's best to build momentum on things that are certain even if you're simultaneously making long-term bets that are speculative.
It's hard to keep a team motivated and excited when there isn't real growth and user retention but it's also hard to build something visionary and creative without imagining a future that's different from what exists today.
This inherent tension is something that I'm taking very seriously into the next venture. My ideal skeleton of a company needs to hit both criteria out of the park:
short-term growth+retention+momentum
long-term vision+creativity
Lots of the failed or slowly dying crypto companies I see around me satisfy only one of the two.
Those satisfying only 1 are doomed to rug their community as soon as the founders have made enough money. Those satisfying only 2 are doomed to build open-source 'art' forever.
Have you ever stopped to question why it is that we have so much open-source 'technology' that doesn't have any path to users in crypto? It's an odd thing. Technology, by definition, should be useful (i.e. with usage). When did we decide that something didn't have to be useful to be 'tech'?
I think it's worth taking a harder stance on calling all of this what it is: 'art'. This applies to crypto infra just as much as crypto application.
There's nothing wrong with making art! I consume a lot of art. This blog post is art.
But it's not technology to me unless it’s useful. There are many groups of people building this sort of art with technology market valuations driving expectations.
I think this is a huge miscalibration that's yet to cause a lot of heartbreak/disillusionment. In all honesty, Personae was in this bucket and our decision to pivot/change direction came from this realization. We made a lot of great art, but we hadn't signed up to be artists.
If you're a fellow founder who's finding him/herself building art, it may be worthwhile to do some soul-searching/introspection on that fact. Is this where you wanted to be?
Did you want to build a technology endeavor or an art studio?
Being 'separate' from Personae for a few weeks has given me time/space to re-examine my priors about the industry and the future.
Turns out, lots of beliefs I held as 'convictions' necessary to keep the vision strong were worth amending. Enumerating these could be a blog post of its own so I’ll save them for the time being, but I’d like to talk a bit about the conviction-flexibility tradeoff here.
I suspect that minding the conviction-flexibility tradeoff is one of the most challenging psychological tasks for founders.
It's absolutely necessary to be strong willed and put forth grand vision to create movement, but holding onto a belief when reality has shifted so as to nullify it is startup suicide.
Self-serving as it is to say, I think that proficiency in minding this tradeoff can't be taught. There just isn't a pithy synthesis that can be read, understood, and immediately implemented successfully.
This seems to be one of those things that you only learn the heuristics for by going through it and having rough times.
We're open sourcing all of our tech over the next couple months on github. Art as it may be, I hope the ideas become ones that others build on or at least that stoke other founders' imaginations.
I think 'portable reputation' is an incredibly powerful idea and although I don't think it's worth building a company around again, I think it's worth considering how to utilize it as a bootstrapping mechanism for new products.
I know I'll be looking for ways to bring these ideas into new things I build.
Onwards.