Roham Gharegozlou, CEO of Dapper Labs, on how the online world will become tokenized!

So I was into tech way longer than I assumed it was going to be my path. I built my first website maybe when I was nine years old. Started making some money through kind of affiliate networks and early Amazon stuff, but I couldn't claim it because I was a teenager, Iranian citizen living in Dubai at the time. And so I got into tech early on, but I always assumed my career would be in medicine and biology. And that's when I went to college at Stanford, I majored in biology. I got my masters in biology, but I was doing tech off the side. I was, you know, building little tools and just having a lot of fun with it. And it took me until I graduated to realize, you know what, we should probably make a career out of this. So it was always my passion, but I didn't actually decide to jump in until, you know, I guess I was 19, 20 at the time. And you know, interned for a couple startups, joined a small venture capital firm, helped them raise their next round, and then within I guess it was two and a half, three years, started Axiom Zen to kind of have my own little playground to innovate and play around in.

Not really. I actually had kind of an existential crisis senior year in college and I sat down with my academic adviser who's actually an incredible person. He's got a great set of books out there. His name is Robert Sapolsky. He's a sort of human behavioral biologist. So he studies bonobo monkeys in particular to kind of get insights on human evolution. So anyway, he gave me the advice that hey look the thing you might feel right now because all your colleagues and your sort of classmates are finding their next jobs and you know talking about salaries and all that stuff is that you're running out of time. But the reality is the only thing you have is time. And so you should experiment and you should try a bunch of things before committing because the last thing you want to do is go down the 10-year track to becoming a doctor and then realize that's not what you want to do or you know spend 10 years at a biotech firm before deciding that's not your true passion whatever it is. So when I joined the group I actually didn't, I was kind of playing around and I was trying to learn, I was trying to figure out what to do next. But I soon realized it's just such a cool opportunity because you see hundreds and hundreds of entrepreneurs, some of which go on to build absolutely incredible companies and that you can be a part of, some of which you can't be a part of and you sort of still can watch their journeys and then you make so many mistakes, but in a sense you're never behind the wheel. So, it's not you making the mistakes, and it's a little bit of a, it's kind of a bittersweet sort of the successes are bittersweet and the failures are also, you know, you try to kind of empathize with the entrepreneur, but you're not really. So, you know, it was more of a just great group of people, great opportunity to learn. And so I stayed for a few years and then, you know, the call to kind of try to take more risks than I could within a sort of that venture capital box, I guess, led me to start Axiom Zen. And at Axiom Zen then we never really had a, our purpose was to sort of have a playground to innovate in and sort of play around in and explore and kind of be early to the next wave rather than a sort of crisp idea at that time of what that next wave would necessarily be or what product we wanted to build. And in fact, we built all kinds of different products.

Good question. I mean, credit goes to obviously my team and I think it was Mac Flavell, our head of creative at the time, who said the words, 'Let's put cats on the blockchain first.' But it was kind of a journey to look at, you know, and we had done so much experimentation in AR and VR. We had actually built a little bird catching game. It was kind of like Pokemon Go but with collectible birds that weren't at the time on blockchain. So we had drawn from a lot of experimentation we did in consumer on that side. But my CTO Dieter, you know, he mined his first Bitcoin in 2010. And so we've been thinking about this concept like open digital systems, digital sovereignty, you know, what does it mean to sort of have a customer control their own data. And of course eventually digital assets, data is sort of a more generic wrapper around it. So we've been playing around with it and we really wanted to find an application of smart contracts and on-chain logic that went beyond financialization but could be something people could play with but also didn't, you know, people were talking at the time. I'm sure you remember the ICO boom. Hey, let's put real estate on chain. Let's put, you know, let's get all land and title on chain. Of course, like eventually I still believe those things will happen, but they will take so much longer than many people anticipate. And so we wanted to pick something that was like almost like a toy. And I'm sure you've seen Chris Dixon, who became our co-lead investor with Fred Wilson. He had written an article, you know, the next big thing will start looking like a toy. And that kind of inspired us at Axiom Zen. We built a lot of serious stuff like ZenHub and Raptic. And you know I can talk about how those kind of had a blockchain sort of inspiration or rather like made us appreciate open systems better because of the difficulties faced there. But we always wanted to build kind of, you know, what are kind of next generation consumer products and we wanted to build something lightweight with blockchain that with crypto that was more than just currency.

Well, so I talked a little bit about ZenHub and Raptic. So we built some serious things at Axiom Zen when we started it because it was a self-funded kind of effort and so we wanted to make products that made revenue. And so the two products we built first were Raptic, it was a route optimization API. So other companies built it into their stack. So DoorDash, FedEx, some other companies used us. And then ZenHub was a project management solution that kind of plugged itself into GitHub. So, it kind of, it was features that, you know, sort of injected themselves into the GitHub UI. It was used by companies like Apple, Microsoft, it still is, has 30,000 plus enterprise customers. But both of them really struggled with being this like small components of wider systems. And so we saw the value of hey software that kind of works together, clicks together like Lego pieces. But then saw the limitation of like closed systems which we have today. You know right now you don't know how your data is being used. We don't know how this, like we have very limited visibility into what software is governing our daily lives. And kind of software developers have very limited control over and ability to serve their customers outside of, you know, the Google, Microsoft kind of big, and AI is sort of exacerbating that, making it way worse than it ever was. So, so we've always been like attuned to this issue of how can we have open digital systems with individual sovereignty over one's own data and digital assets and ability to sort of look at what a piece of software is doing with my data. And blockchain kind of the promise was hey look at least you can agree on who owns what. But then you sort of squint at it you say well wait a second it's basically like every smart contract is like an API that no one can alter. And so we were developers that were used to like building stuff on APIs that change all the time and it broke all our code all the time. And so this idea that hey we can build even on top of Bitcoin which we did in 2014 and nothing the Bitcoin developers can do can break our game was just insane crazy kind of innovative to think about and also empowering where you don't have to ask anyone for API keys. No one can kick you off for being from a given country or from not having, you know, not being of a certain age or whatever it is. And you just realize that that's kind of that's the future of software because every time we've made it easier for people to build software, you've gotten a new sort of kick up of productivity and just experimentation and things being built that no one would have assumed would be profitable previously. So anyway, that's what excited us is like just open digital systems is now possible.

Well, I mean, as a kid, the idea that I couldn't get my money because I was, you know, I was both, you know, a kid and also an Iranian citizen that lived in Dubai and didn't have the right, didn't have a social security number. I didn't know what that stood for. Like that was partially what attracted me initially to Bitcoin, but it was kind of the ZenHub and Raptic experiences of like you know we are at a severe disadvantage because we live in these wider systems and if we get too powerful we can get throttled over here. If these guys change their business model, which of course GitHub ended up introducing GitHub Projects and introducing a competitor into our product several years ago and so you know things have evolved since then but the point being that that kind of attuned us to wait a second we want to build a product for their customer and their customer wants to use our product but they're a digital middleman which can actually interrupt the customer experience and gatekeep that customer's own data the customer doesn't have the ability to provide us with their own information. It's kind of like crazy when you think about it. And you know why would that be in a world where there is an alternative which of course crypto systems have sort of in very early stage for the longest time and when we built CryptoKitties you know out the gate it was clear this thing is not going to like the blockchain can't handle more than 10,000 concurrent users and things have improved a little bit since then and you know layer twos etc sort of make things even better but the infrastructure has evolved a lot over the last 10 years.