1confirmation founder Nick Tomaino shared his personal experience in the cryptocurrency industry and gave some suggestions.
Written by Nick Tomaino, founder of 1confirmation Translation: Lu Jiangfei The Chinese version of this article was first published on ChainNews.com
I used to be an unknown person on the Internet, but after joining Coinbase and 1confirmation, it was really a very good time. Many people are curious about me. In fact, the whole journey is nothing special, but it is also full of busyness. Let me “unlock” all of this now.
Nick Tomaino, founder of 1confirmation
Coinbase is now a giant in the field of cryptocurrency exchanges, although sometimes annoying. But when Brian Armstrong created this cryptocurrency exchange in June 2012, he was actually a loser like other startups. I saw an article published by him on Hacker News, and I was very curious about what he did, so I became one of the first users of Coinbase.
In fact, a few months before Brian Armstrong’s post, Fred Wilson, founder of the venture capital firm USV, also wrote an article on Bitcoin. After reading it, I became very interested in Bitcoin. At that time, I took out the cash from the ATM and then transferred it to the Mt.Gox exchange through Moneygram to purchase Bitcoin.
But when I bought Bitcoin on Coinbase, I found that the user experience has been greatly improved.
Since the market’s demand for Bitcoin was not very high at that time, Brian Armstrong even misspelled the word “Bitcoin”. He wrote Bitcoin as “Bitcents” in his emails to users, and I, Falling into the rabbit hole by this coincidence.
In July 2013, I also sent an email specifically to Brian Armstrong and Fred Wilson, hoping to join Coinbase. The picture below is one of the many emails I sent:
In the fall of 2013, through my email with the .edu suffix, I established contact with many merchants and encouraged them to add and accept Bitcoin as a payment method. In fact, before I worked for Coinbase, I had proven that I could convince many people to use Coinbase’s merchant tools.
At the beginning of 2014, I missed a lot of courses because I spent most of my time on expanding the East Coast market for Coinbase. So I decided to leave Yale Business School and head straight to San Francisco.
During the period of 2014-2016, I experienced many ups and downs. At that time, I lost all my Bitcoin assets due to a phishing attack (because I can withdraw cash without setting up two-factor verification). In addition, we all know that startups have changed a lot, and cryptocurrency startups are even more so, but I always hope to build Coinbase into a trusted brand and help them launch more new products that will help Bitcoin’s adoption.
At that time, Bitcoin developers and merchants adopted a relatively strong momentum, but the overall number was not very large, and the market still lacked core buying/selling products. During that time, I published a lot of articles on the Coinbase blog and my own blog. Many people in the community like to share my work (such as @pmarca), which is very helpful for establishing Coinbase and my personal credibility, and more importantly , I do this very helpful to build confidence.
It can be said that we are the first batch of Bitcoin believers (maximalists). But at the same time, we also had an obvious mistake, which was to focus too much on the “yellow book” and distributed systems, instead of focusing on the talents of creators (such as Vitalik Buterin and Gavin Wood), but we quickly adjusted our strategy and began to focus on Talented developers.
@Zxocw is the first person in my memory who takes Ethereum seriously. At that time, as a judge of Coindesk’s hackathon, I was very impressed with @Zxocw and wrote a company memo.
In addition, the former Coinbase co-founder and Paradigm co-founder Fred Ehrsam once wrote an article “Ethereum is the Forefront of Digital Currency”, which is crucial to the construction of crypto culture .
In 2017, the Ethereum ecosystem began to rise and its creation accelerated, so I founded 1confirmation. The first batch of investors included Runa Capital partner Andre Bliznyuk, SmallDoorVet founder and former SoftBank employee Josh Guttman, and NBA Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Ku Ben, @pmarca, Chirs Dixon, and Peter Thiel, a well-known investor in Silicon Valley.
In May 2017, I attended the first cryptocurrency summit “Netscape Moment” hosted by Digital Currency.
From 2018, until now, the Ethereum ecosystem has been booming, innovation is increasing, and more institutions hope to gain exposure to cryptocurrencies. Coinbase’s choice to go public is an important milestone in the development of the entire cryptocurrency industry, but it is also our first step.
For now, cryptocurrency has made a small group of people wealthy. For most people who reject cryptocurrency and organizations that are content to maintain the status quo, the influence of cryptocurrency is becoming greater and greater.
This is not a cliché. The transformation has already begun and is expected to happen on a large scale within 10 years.
Here, I hope to give some suggestions:
- Ignore the short-sighted people around, their opinions are sometimes very ignorant;
- For most people, every time they hear some short-term views, they always feel great, but in fact, you should keep a low-key focus on long-term development and always maintain the right attitude. It is actually difficult to do this;
- In the real world, most people overestimate the opinions given by “institutional investors” and ignore many new ideas online;
- You don’t have to have special talents, and you don’t need to go to Silicon Valley to learn about various entrepreneurial ideas. You just need to stay in place, but you must have a strong curiosity and a spirit of hard work.
Source link: twitter.com
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