The Longest View with Dez Fleming

[Desmond Fleming]
Cool, so we are now on, you are the fifth guest on The Longest View. You are the first crypto-focused guest, so maybe let's start there. When did you first hear about Bitcoin?

That's always a fun question to ask people in crypto. Yeah. Well, first time I heard about it was probably back in like 2012, 2013.

I was an engineering student at UPenn at the time. I honestly paid it no attention when I first heard about it, but like, you know, Bitcoin was kind of buzzing around the engineering school at the time. And I immediately disregarded it as like, oh, it's like just video game money.

[Chuck Bradford]
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Desmond Fleming]
I didn't read the white paper or anything and still this kind of video.

[Chuck Bradford]
Yeah, yeah.

[Desmond Fleming]
No. And, you know, I think people say you get Bitcoin at the price you deserve, and I guess I just didn't deserve it at that price. So yeah, completely ignored it at first, but to my detriment only.

Yeah. So yeah, taking one step back, who are you, what are you doing? And then also maybe tell the story of how you got from growing up in Palo Alto to being an engineering student at UPenn.

That's always a good kind of set the foundation of who you are. Yeah. So I'm Chuck Bradford, founder and CEO of Dexare, which is a mobile crypto platform aimed to be sort of as user-friendly as the best fintechs and centralized exchange apps out there.

But differently than those being fully self-custodial and have the back end of a crypto wallet. So kind of adhering to the core ethos of crypto, but making sure that the user experience doesn't come at the cost of decentralization there. So, yeah, I grew up in Palo Alto area, you know, surrounded by tech and everything like that, obviously.

So it was an interest area of mine. I was very into math and science, you know, growing up. And so I was looking mostly at engineering schools for college, but still didn't really know what I want to do with my life like most people growing up.

But I felt like I should venture out a bit outside of California, because in the Silicon Valley and in a lot of places, people can decide to stay around because it's a nice place to grow up. It's a nice place to live. There's a lot going on, but I kind of wanted to build my own experiences out there.

So I really only looked at schools outside of California, so on the East Coast. And Penn struck me as a really interesting school because it was very different than where I grew up. It's in a city, a lot of really, really like driven people.

Not that there aren't that in the Silicon Valley, but it's that whole culture of like working hard and building your career from college on was a kind of culture that I really appreciated. And you started in 2011? 2010.

[Chuck Bradford]
2010.

[Desmond Fleming]
Yeah. So graduated 2014. I actually started out as a computer science major at Penn because I was really interested in that time.

But pretty quickly realized that coding was not for me as my career. I find it really interesting and an interesting thought process when you're when you're coding, but kind of transitioned into more of a hybrid business and engineering at Penn because they have the Wharton School there undergrad. And so were you in the M&T program?

I wasn't in the M&T program, but so I got my major in systems engineering and then I minored in actuarial math, which was at the Wharton School, and then a minor in entrepreneurship as well. So I kind of got a mix of a lot of different things at Penn. That's another thing that Penn does really well is there's a lot of different types of things you can do simultaneously.

[Chuck Bradford]
Yeah.

[Desmond Fleming]
And they make it relatively easy to do that.

[Chuck Bradford]
Yeah.

[Desmond Fleming]
Yeah. The M&T program is no joke out there. I've only heard positive things from the kids or students, whatever, coming out of it.

Yeah. I mean, everyone that does that is obviously very driven and smart. You kind of have to both get a degree in engineering and business at the same time.

And it's a very intense school. So it's I thought about it, but no, I decided to I got my minors, which was ambitious for me. So you Penn in 2010, graduate 2014.

What did you do immediately after? Yeah. So I decided to go into consulting.

I went into Boston Consulting Group, ECG. Very much so with the mindset, I don't exactly know what I want to do, but consulting is not a bad place to do that because you can experiment with a lot of different things. So I was working on projects as diverse as like insurance, pharma, private equity, cruise lines, if you can believe it, and just kind of trying to see what I liked doing.

And more so than anything, I really just found that I liked the analytical aspect of it. So doing like the heavy data science type projects were where I felt like I was adding the most value, but also found the most interesting. But I did that just for a couple of years before I went and got my my MBA.

So very short stint right after college, and actually didn't think I was going to go back to BCG. I did end up going back, but that wasn't my plan actually going into my MBA. So BCG, B school at the GSB, what was the GSB experience like?

It was a really great experience. I mean, one, I got to live close to home again for a bit. So it was nice to be back for a bit.

But also, again, being surrounded by such like incredible, ambitious people in an environment like Stanford, where there's just a lot going on, was really exciting. And I also happened to be there around the time like the ICO boom was happening in crypto. And that was really my first like real foray into learning about crypto because it was such a buzzing topic at Stanford at the time.

And this is like 2017?

[Chuck Bradford]
Yeah, 2017.

[Desmond Fleming]
I graduated in 2018 from Stanford. So I like to say I was very lucky that I was a student at the time because I didn't have a bunch of money to blow on crypto at the time because it was like the worst time to be investing in crypto.

[Chuck Bradford]
Yeah.

[Desmond Fleming]
Oh, I mean, looking back, I don't know. Bitcoin then back then is probably like 20k?

[Chuck Bradford]
I don't know.

[Desmond Fleming]
If you held.

[Chuck Bradford]
Yeah.

[Desmond Fleming]
But no, I bought like a little bit of Ethereum. I didn't really even touch Bitcoin at the time, but I bought it and then immediately felt like I was an idiot and got duped because of everything crashing.

[Chuck Bradford]
Yeah.

[Desmond Fleming]
Now, I didn't sell anything. So like, luckily, it was a good trade. But but no, I think that was that was my first time, like really understanding what crypto was.

Yeah. Did you read the white paper?

[Chuck Bradford]
Yeah.

[Desmond Fleming]
I started reading white papers. I mean, even from one of my classes, it was like an assignment. We had to learn about it.

It was more so in the context of ICOs and how they work. But I did start reading white papers, the Bitcoin white paper and others that were going around at the time. I didn't decide I wanted my career to be in crypto at the time, but it scratched an itch initially that I kind of like just continued learning about it.

But then you ultimately did decide you want to dip your toe, your career fully into crypto and going into Binance. So did you did you have a stint in between GSB and Binance or go straight from GSB to Binance? Yeah.

So I actually I did go back to BCG ultimately. So I worked in BCG in the digital practice area. So they have this digital rotation program where you can work in there's a data science arm at the time.

It was called Gamma. It might be called something else now. And then there's also this digital ventures arm, which is sort of like a venture incubator.

And so I worked there and it was there that I met some people that I really liked working with and really respected who were very, very into crypto. And that kind of like sent me down another rabbit hole of learning what could a career in crypto look like. And at that at that time, also, COVID was hitting New York and I was like starting to get like locked up in my apartment for months.

You know, as you know, New York was very locked down at first. And so with all that free time, I just kept on reading, kept on learning, kept on listening to podcasts. And around like 2021, I just decided, you know, I have this career in BCG and it's it's good, it's stable and everything.

But I wanted something different. And crypto to me seemed like the next technological wave that I wanted to be a part of because it excited me enough. Nothing at BCG that I worked on it excited me quite as much.

And so sort of when things settled down a bit more towards the end of 2021, I decided I wanted to leave BCG and pursue a career in crypto. And BCG has this perk where you you quit and you get three months paid to look for your next job. So I took that time and really explored and interviewed a ton of places.

And Binance US jumped out at me as the best opportunity of the ones I was looking at. And on top of that, the CEO of Binance US at the time was Brian Schroeder, who was a prior BCG guy. So I didn't know him before, but I got connected through.

Did they have a lot of BCG alumni in there, given the fact that the head of the company was ex-BCG? No, actually, there's only one other person that I worked with at Binance US that had any BCG background. He was at the Digital Ventures arm as well.

But no, it was it was really just I got connected through Brian Schroeder. He didn't come directly from BCG. So and BCG has enough turnover, you don't necessarily know a lot of people by the time you're five years out.

So no, I was the only BCG person there and I was kind of brought in as a consultant type role where he would just say like, you know, there's these high priority areas. Special projects.

[Chuck Bradford]
Yeah, exactly.

[Desmond Fleming]
I think my role was actually a strategy and improvement. It wasn't it was just like whatever is out there to fix, go fix it. Certainly not a lot of U.S. consumers recognize how large Binance is. Most U.S. consumers think about Coinbase and Coinbase is absolutely massive, 50 billion dollar public company, probably 100 million accounts created or wallets created and, you know, tens, hundreds of billions of transaction volume. But like to me, correct me if I'm wrong, Binance is the biggest broker or crypto focused broker in the world. Yeah, Binance is is the biggest or I mean, last I looked at the data, like kind of by far the biggest.

Just to be clear, though, like Binance U.S. where I worked was actually spun off entirely as a separate entity. By the time I worked there was like a year before I joined. So we did like have some interaction with Binance.com, but it was more so as like a vendor partner relationship kind of thing, because we essentially had an agreement to use some of their tech stack, but we were entirely separate. But but still wholly owned by Binance? No. Oh, it's fully separate.

It's fully separate. Different board, different cap.

[Chuck Bradford]
OK, got it.

[Desmond Fleming]
Got it. Got it. They actually right before I joined, I think recently raised their seed round, if you can call it a seed round.

It was like a huge, massive hundred million bucks.

[Chuck Bradford]
Yeah.

[Desmond Fleming]
But no, it was at the time I joined. It was like fully separate. Obviously, we shared a brand name, which we like.

That was the biggest piece of me experiencing what it was like to work at Binance is anytime we had our brand in like a meeting with a potential partner, it's like that brand name itself was just such a big weight that you can bring into something like that. We also had a license to use their tech stack a bit. And that was also just a huge leverage point because they had built out a lot of the technology.

I can more so speak to like what a centralized exchange feels like working at.

[Chuck Bradford]
Yeah.

[Desmond Fleming]
Let's talk about it. Naively going into working at a centralized exchange, I had assumed that like the back end of these things operates using crypto technology a lot more than they actually do. Because, you know, when you deposit on a Coinbase or Binance, you're depositing onto a deposit address and you might or I thought at least then when I'm trading from that, I'm trading with another wallet that exists on the exchange.

And in reality, these deposit addresses just route the money to like a centralized custodial wallet, which when you're trading with someone, it's just like kind of changing the ledgers on the internal entry. So there's not like actually a lot of crypto tech that's happening in the background other than when you're depositing, you're depositing it on chain. And so what struck me pretty immediately was how like early in the crypto journey this industry is as a whole, because this whole industry is based on the idea of like ownership and decentralization.

But then these massive companies, and you quoted some statistics there about Coinbase and then Binance is even bigger, is enormously successful companies. And also at the time, FTX are successful, despite the fact that they're not really decentralized in any meaningful way. They're more like a bank that holds crypto than they are a, you know, decentralized exchange.

What were the three pillars? I remember because I was deeper in and by the way, I'm like crypto 101, maybe you want to, you know, between 101 and 201. But I remember, you know, there was always these three pillars of crypto.

It was decentralization, scalability, and then there was like a third one. Do you recall what that kind of phrase was? Speed?

Maybe. Yeah. I don't know.

There's always a lot of different frameworks where it's like the trilemma where it's like you can only have two of the three. Two out of the three. Yeah.

But I totally hear you. Right. Where it's like, hey, these these companies are touting and promoting and marketing the benefits of of crypto blockchains, of decentralized technologies, but not using it internally for themselves to build their business.

So there's a little bit of a of a dissonance there. But please continue. I would love to hear more about what that what the guts of these businesses look like.

Well, and yeah, I think so. The reason that they were built out this way is because until recently, like the tech in the blockchain space wasn't good enough where you could do the things that Coinbase and Binance are doing for users at a low enough cost way that makes sense, because it's so much more cost effective for Coinbase or Binance to just change numbers on their internal database than it is to actually send assets on chain because that involves gas fees.

And for the majority of cryptos existence and majority of smart contracts existence, all those need to be on chain transactions on Ethereum, which are very expensive if you're doing them as frequently as these platforms do it.

[Chuck Bradford]
Yeah.

[Desmond Fleming]
And so. As a result of all of this being centralized, there's just such a huge portion of these businesses that is back office operations that's meant to make sure that all of that is done safely, because if it's not done safely, you run into situations like the Bybit hack that happened a few months ago where there's this huge honeypot of user assets that is just if you can get into that one wallet, you have access to so many different users accounts. And that's one of the core risks of a centralized exchange. And so all of these exchanges, rightfully so, put so many resources into making sure that that is secure.

[Chuck Bradford]
Yeah.

[Desmond Fleming]
As a result, there's a ton of overhead at these centralized exchanges to make this work in a way that actually is, you know, the business model makes sense. Yep. And did you see that overhead and think that creates an opportunity for me to improve upon?

And that led to the idea of Dixari? This is like 100% part of the origin story, just seeing not only is it like against necessarily like the ethos of crypto, it's also just a much less efficient business model than if you can make everything happen on chain, you're effectively outsourcing your back office operations to decentralized apps and smart contracts. The hitch, though, is it hasn't really been possible, like I said, for the majority of crypto's existence because these gas fees have been so high.

And because things like account abstraction, where like, you know, you're abstracting away the complexity of the blockchain from users, technology hasn't been good enough for a majority of the existence. And so I think both seeing the way the back end works, and then starting to understand that the developments in the crypto tech was getting better, those two combined for me and my co-founders to say, right now it's actually possible to do this in a cost effective way. We can cut out, you know, I don't know what the exact number is, but like 80% of the cost structure at the centralized exchanges and just do this the right way, both from the ethos standpoint, but also just the business models way better, which allows us to offer lower fees, better for the user, just better in a lot of ways.

And the idea of Dixari kind of came from that sort of like screaming at me as this is the opportunity. I'm not the kind of person that was like, I need to be a founder. Let me find an idea.

It was just, there was an idea looking me in the face. And it just makes sense. I actually don't hear that a lot.

I actually hear a lot of people, or my intuition with a lot of people is they want to be a founder first, and then they go looking for their nail. What's your perspective on a business like Uniswap, right? I was looking it up.

I think Uniswap has facilitated somewhere on the magnitude of two to three trillion transactions since inception, probably around three to four billion of fees generated. I didn't look up the exact figures, but that's a really, really efficient business and a really, really efficient company. And probably when you thought about the per fee generation per employee, right, Uniswap is probably an order of magnitude, at least higher than something like Coinbase.

So what do you think about their business model? Do you drive inspiration from it? And to a certain extent, it feels almost like you look at Uniswap and say, hey, their UX, their UI is not great for consumers.

It's very crypto native. Again, like my cousin who is around my age, a little older, he's probably like, ah, what? Uniswap?

[Chuck Bradford]
Never heard of it.

[Desmond Fleming]
But he probably has heard of Coinbase, right? And it seems like part of what Dexare is doing is taking the best of both worlds and combining them into one. Yeah.

No, and I think Uniswap is not alone in being efficient with their employees in the crypto space. Some people say like the tether is the most efficient per employee. I think if you were...

Well, people don't know if tether is fully, are they fully liquid or not? Who knows? I don't know anything about it, but I think you'll probably find as more and more crypto companies have success that they're going to be much more efficient per employee than any of their centralized counterparts.

And yeah, Uniswap is very impressive. They've been around for a long time. They're one of like the OG crypto DeFi protocols out there, and they obviously have done a lot of good things.

And I wouldn't say like their user experience is necessarily bad. They actually have a very good product that's embedded in most crypto wallets today. So MetaMask or Phantom, any of your favorite wallet apps out there, almost all of them have a swap button on the homepage.

That's powered by them. And it's powered by Uniswap and likely others too that are like aggregated into one button because Uniswap is one of many AMMs. It's the biggest one out there. And for the audience, what's an AMM?

Oh, an automated market maker. Actually, I don't know 100% whether Uniswap is the biggest, I just always assume that it's the biggest. But that swap button is actually a really good example of what we're trying to do at Dexare, which is, it's this button that just simplifies the user experience so much that people use it even though they could get a better price if they were to like go to the AMM or Uniswap directly.

Instead of having to go there and then go to Radium or go to any of these other ones that are out there and check for the best price, just clicking the button saying, I want to swap this crypto for this crypto and just you handle all the complexity for us. And that button is just so incredibly heavily used on all these wallets. And that was one of the other inspiration points for us.

Why is that the only feature that this really exists for in wallets? It's an embedded feature that abstracts away what's happening on chain. You don't even have to know that you're using Uniswap, you're just clicking a button.

And my thought was, can we just do this for other features and build a wallet that is all embedded features versus just being a general purpose wallet where you have to search for the app you want to use, you have to kind of know what you're doing, you have to make sure you're on the right blockchain, and just making that way easier such that all of it can just be clicks of a button. OK, so let's break that down. So when you think about the wallet swapping as one feature, what are the other additional top four features that matter to you?

Yeah. So how do you also tie that back to the consumer experience for Dexari? Yes, I'll start actually with that second one, because the customer experience is paramount in this space because it's the reason that Coinbase and Binance and these central exchanges have won so far is because their user experience is so much better than going to Metamask, which is the biggest of the wallets.

Yeah, they made it super easy for me to onboard into crypto, to buy Bitcoin, buy Ethereum, I can use my bank. I think I can pay by card too now as well. But they made it super easy.

Yeah. So you don't even really need to know what you're doing to get started there. And that's why so many people go to that as their entry point into crypto.

And it makes sense. It was my first time using crypto. I went to, I think it was Coinbase or one of the other exchanges at the time.

But it is easy. They do a really good job of it. Now it comes at the cost of the decentralization, but most users don't honestly really care about it.

They care about other things like prices and making sure it's easy to use and all that. The user experience is really critical. And so some of the elements that have become possible recently, I mentioned account abstraction earlier.

So on most crypto wallets, you have to manually change what chain you're on. So you can be on Ethereum, you can be on Arbitrum, you can be on Optimism. And you have to like actually know where your assets are and you have to bridge them from one chain to the next to use them.

But there's a lot of new technologies out there for account abstraction where if you go on Dexare's app, you have one USDC balance. It could be across like up to five chains right now and we're going to add more. But the user only sees that it's USDC and that is identical to how it works on a centralized exchange.

You actually don't have to care what assets your chain are on because they're held in like five different centralized wallets at the centralized exchange you're using. And they just keep track of how much of that is yours in aggregate. It doesn't really matter what chain they're on.

We're trying to simulate that on our exchange or on our app. And so that's one key element. The next piece is making sure that you don't have to like manually remember a private key when you're spinning up a wallet because no one's parents are going to go and do that.

It's impossible to expect that the average user wants to do that. And so there's new wallet tech out there that allows you to essentially create a wallet with your email address or your phone and all that stuff. Someone like Privy I think helps with that.

So those pieces of technology were like core infrastructure things that we built in immediately because those are the building blocks to anything else we're doing. Then to get back to your question, like what are the top four features that we want to integrate that are like use cases for users? So swap is certainly one that we'll have, but the one we've been focusing on so far is this advanced trading engine.

And the reason we're starting with that is because we view it as a big gap in the market. There's no wallet out there that makes it easy to say place advanced, you know, market limit, TWAP, I'm getting kind of into technical jargon here, but all these advanced type of orders stop losses and do so in a way that's really easy from mobile. And that was a huge glaring opportunity for us.

And so we set out to build that as our first feature in our app. And we identified HyperLiquid as the best decentralized exchange to do that. So essentially the equivalent of Uniswap and what we just talked about is HyperLiquid.

And so our user interface just replicates all the functionality that exists on HyperLiquid. We build a really clean user interface for it to use it from mobile. And users, when they place a trade on our platform, they're taking it from self custody, trading on HyperLiquid, and it's a direct interaction.

We just make it really easy to do. We don't actually touch the assets at any point. And so that's our version of the swap that exists in Metamask.

Yeah, you're like the oversimplification. You're the messaging layer. You're the UI plus the messaging layer to push trades from someone's self custodial wallet onto the HyperLiquid exchange.

Yeah, it's one way to describe it. We actually aren't even doing the messaging ourself because we don't transmit the information. It's from the user's device directly to the application.

So from a regulatory standpoint, we're trying to stay completely out of the flow of funds as much as we can. And so it's a direct interaction from the user's wallet. And so are you focused on traders?

Like if I thought about the spectrum of crypto users or consumers, and it could probably apply to traditional financial markets as well. There's like beginners, there's intermediate, and then there's expert. It sounds like the people that you're kind of wanting to appeal to sit somewhere in between that intermediate to expert spectrum if they care about, you know, stop loss and TWAP and whatever.

Certainly in the near term, that is our focus. And it's because I think this is just a very clear unmet segment of the market. The only place for them to do this right now is on, you know, desktop on HyperLiquid if they want to do self custody.

Or on mobile, it's really a better user experience to use Coinbase or Binance or wherever. But then Coinbase and Binance have the limitations of not having as rich feature functionality on the trading side. Exactly.

And the fees are a lot higher. Like our fees can be a lot lower because we're, you know, our back end is fully decentralized. But that's 100% not where we're trying to end our vision.

It's just like, you can't be everything to everyone from the start. You know, you have to start with a segment that you're going after. And so this is the segment that we thought was most ripe for this type of opportunity here.

But we're going to pretty quickly expand to other things. So we don't currently have the, you know, USD to USDC on ramp, but we're building that out right now so that you don't have to do everything fully on chain. So you can deposit with Apple Pay or your card if you want.

We're going to add earn features. So, you know, if you want to earn some sort of yield on your assets via a protocol like an Aave or other DeFi protocols out there, just deposit your USDC and have it earn whatever the market rate is. Staking is another way that people earn yield in crypto.

And so all of these features are sort of on the horizon for us. It's just a matter of sequencing them together because, you know, one of the things I've realized in starting this company is there's no shortage of opportunities out there. It's just a matter of figuring out which ones are most important right now and which ones are most important for our existing users and when to start expanding, you know, to the next set of users.

Yeah. Have you heard of this company Axiom? Yes.

Yeah. They're the desktop trading app, I believe. But for the Solano ecosystem or just in general?

I think it's, I honestly don't know enough about it. I thought it was more general purpose than Solano. It might have started on Solano, but I think they, their goal, as far as I understood it, and I might be confusing it with one of the other ones, but it's to aggregate these advanced trading protocols into a single UI.

[Chuck Bradford]
Yeah. Yeah. OK.

[Desmond Fleming]
And there's a lot of these types of desktop trading apps out there. And I think the reason so many of them exist is, you know, intuitively, you'd think that someone that's trading, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars a volume a month, that they do most of it on desktop because, you know, it's a lot of money.

[Chuck Bradford]
Yeah.

[Desmond Fleming]
It feels like a business.

[Chuck Bradford]
Yeah.

[Desmond Fleming]
And so, rightfully so, there's a lot of app companies going after this opportunity. Also, you don't have to deal with the App Store and Play Store and all that complexity there. And it's easier to build a desktop app versus kind of condensing everything into a mobile app.

So there's a lot of reasons they exist and a lot of them do. But that's not to say that these advanced traders don't like trading on mobile as well. And so I think companies like Axiom and others that exist out there will continue to exist.

And we can kind of be like the mobile companion to that in a way. Yeah. I mean, if I think about, again, traditional financial services, I do almost all of my checking of my, you know, general equity retirement assets entirely on my phone.

Yeah. On Vanguard. Yeah.

No, it's becoming more and more common that our generation and younger do more and more of their stuff on mobile versus desktop. And that's not any less true in crypto. Even some of these people that are trading crazy volumes, they're doing it from mobile, which is, you know, surprising intuitively.

What's the craziest single trade you've seen within crypto from like a dollar amount? There was a, I mean, actually recently there was someone that was like, had a billion dollar size trade, a leverage trade, so a billion dollars notional on Hyperliquid that was circulating on Twitter recently. And some of the people that trade in Hyperliquid just do insane things like that.

And it's because a lot of them have gotten really wealthy from like the airdrop that happened. And also just like are just degens. And so it's incredible what some of these traders do.

And a lot of times they get it right and they like and making a lot of money. But that's not the kind of a crypto user I am, but I enjoy watching it from the. But it'd be great if that person came on to DexAri, right?

I mean, I don't know what you're what you're thinking about from a transactional transaction fee perspective. But even if it's basis points, right, like that's huge, huge volume. Yeah, we are.

We're charging and we have a tiered fee structure right now. But the lowest tier is one basis point. If you're trading over.

I forget what we said, it's like a million dollars monthly down to one basis point. And there are several traders that are already in that category. So it's but like that's that's enough for us to sustain our business.

We, you know, because we have such a low overhead and back back office cost structure. Your company can be very scalable. Our company is incredibly scalable.

And it's like once we have it built and these products built, they don't require a lot of maintenance because, you know, all the back end is built out by these companies building things on chain. And all of them, they do the maintenance for the most part for us. We just have to make sure that the user experience doesn't have any hitches.

Yeah, you're the app player, right? Like you are what Venmo was to Platt. Yeah, no, that's a very good example of a similar business model.

Yeah. What have you learned about building so far? It's your first company, correct me if I'm wrong, but what have you learned about starting a business, especially coming from someone who I think viewed the opportunity.

And I don't mean this the wrong way as practical, you were just like, hey, here's an obvious problem. Like, I'm going to go solve this problem. I think there's a there's a lot I've learned along the way, but I wouldn't say any of it was like, oh, I've learned that it's hard to build a company because that's like I think a lot of people say like how.

But like I've I've heard my entire life how hard it is to build a company. I've grown up around entrepreneurs. I went to business school with a bunch of people that built companies.

Everyone talks about how hard it is. And so I didn't go into this naively saying, oh, this is going to be a walk in the park. So it's it's it's validated that it's hard, but it's like I think I've learned for the most part that like you have to learn to like manage your stress in different ways.

Then then like I was in a high stress job in consulting, but it was an entirely different type of stress. It was, you know, making sure I was like going to hit my deadlines, making sure I was going to do the next presentation really well. All of these things that frankly, I got pretty good at compartmentalizing in my life and I was able to like have my life and then my work and like keep them relatively separate.

[Chuck Bradford]
Right.

[Desmond Fleming]
So the thing that surprised me is just like as a founder, it's it's it's harder to compartmentalize. It's like I'm always thinking about my company and like, yeah, you know, what's next? And like, what can I be doing differently?

What could I be doing better? And that, I think, is the only piece from like, oh, like I know it was going to be hard, but it's like the mindset is a little bit different, where it's like I'm always thinking about it, whereas, you know, in my prior career, I didn't always think about work. Yeah, you could shut off.

And it's all what you're doing today is all consuming. Obviously, I mean, we recently closed our funding round, which is a huge congrats. Yeah, thank you.

Which is a huge weight off. It's it's it's good to know you have a certain amount of runway no matter what happens. And like you have time to build the right product versus like rushing or anything.

But that's not that just means that there's the next stressor that's coming on. And it's like, you know, there's always something that you could be improving on. And it's just finding a way to maintain the balance in your life, even though my life is encompassed with work for the most part.

Yeah. How do you find balance? What is your way to decompress?

For me personally, and I live in a totally different world, not nearly as stressful, obviously. But, you know, for me, it's snowboarding. Like, that is my disconnect.

That's why I'm like, hey, I'm off the laptop, off the computer, off the phone. It's just I'm out in nature trying to survive. Like, what is it for you?

I love snowboarding and skiing, by the way. Yeah, I haven't actually done a lot of it since I've moved out to the East Coast.

[Chuck Bradford]
Yeah, I grew up. It's terrible out there.

[Desmond Fleming]
I grew up going to Tahoe like all the time. So that was that was great. But no, for me, for the most part, running has become that that thing for me.

I never ran any sort of distance growing up. I was more of a football, basketball, baseball kind of guy. But as soon as I got in New York, I needed something to take my stress away.

And this was when I was still just working consulting. And so my sister is a marathon runner. And so she convinced me to run a marathon 10 years ago at this point.

And so I did it. I trained up for it. Found I actually really loved it.

It was like a way to disconnect entirely from everything else. And, you know, turn my phone on airplane mode, just like listen to music or podcasts or audio books or whatever, and just run for a long time. And since then, I've run, I think it's seven marathons.

Oh, wow. I was in New York. Actually, I didn't do the like the real New York marathon.

I did it during COVID when it was the virtual marathon. And so it was just like, you, uh, you just run 26.2 miles at whatever.

[Chuck Bradford]
Yeah. By yourself.

[Desmond Fleming]
Go for it. Um, that's wild.

[Chuck Bradford]
Yeah.

[Desmond Fleming]
Uh, but yeah, no, it's, it's like, it's been a really good, like, I think, uh, way to decompress, de-stress my mind on something else, obviously work stuff now creeps into my mind as I'm running, but I try to try to tone it down. It's, I really like it. I've grown to love it.

I'm kind of surprised. I, I never did it growing up, but now it's something that I do. And what is most immediate for Dexare?

Is it building out the functionality of the app? Is it acquiring users? I mean, those two things feel like the most, they feel like the most important things and that would be a persistent, uh, trend for the business, but like, where are you, uh, in the journey of building the company?

Yeah. So we, we took an approach that is oddly enough, I think very unique in the crypto space where we were very product centric from the beginning, whereas a lot of crypto projects start with what is the marketing, what is the messaging and then building a product sort of like as that's going on. So for the first, you know, six, seven months, we've been doing this, we've spent $0 on marketing.

We've just been kind of like trying to grow our presence a little bit organically on X and wherever else we've been very product centric to get our product to market and iterating very rapidly with users to a point where we're very close to wanting to launch fully on app stores. Uh, right now it's in a closed beta with an invite code, so it's, it still is a very controlled release, but, uh, you know, we're really excited about where it's, it's gotten to, and we're getting pretty close to that. And then the next stage is we're going to ramp up that marketing and growth engine because there's only so far we can get with our word of mouth and our direct outreach to, you know, power traders, which is what we've been doing so far.

You know, with this seed round closing, we've finally hired someone to focus full time on, on growth. So we've hired a head of growth. Uh, we're going to start getting our referral program going and affiliate programs, all of the traditional things you do in crypto.

Are you guys going to do like an airdrop type reward or no? Uh, I feel like that's what I see. Well, that's what, that's what I see a lot in, uh, uh, in crypto as like one of the more unique crypto focus mechanisms to bring users onto your platform.

And it can certainly be very effective. I think when you do it though, you have to be very careful because if you do it at the wrong time or in the wrong way, you can draw a lot of like mercenary type capital in, and then you don't end up getting a sustained user base. And this is one of the things I think hyper liquid did particularly well is they essentially built the product for over two years and got it to be really, really good before considering this, this airdrop that ended up being a huge success.

And they built something that is worth using regardless of whether there is an airdrop or not. And we're trying to do the same thing because our business model doesn't require there to be any token or airdrop or anything. We just want it to be a really good product.

So we're starting when we launch, we're going to have a points system in place. Um, a lot of times point systems turn into, to tokens, but we don't actually necessarily think it needs to. It's something that we'll contemplate at a later date, but it is certainly a unique mechanism in the crypto space that you can have these like airdrops that attract users for the right reasons and the wrong reasons, whatever you call it.

But, uh, it's something we're, we're not too focused on in the immediate term. Yeah. What is your ambition?

Is your longterm goal to replace someone like Coinbase? Because what you're describing kind of, it's not where you're starting today, but over time there's an argument to say, Hey, Hey, we're, we're a better experience or on par experience, but also quite frankly, what I think moves a lot of customers shopping for financial services is we're cheaper. Yeah.

Straight up. Yeah. So I think in the longterm, I don't think that the centralized exchange model is the dominant model in crypto and whether they adapt and do something more similar to us or whether we replace them is sort of like what the open question is for us, but we're certainly going after the same vision in the longterm that the centralized exchanges are going for.

We want to be the first app that people come to when they think of crypto, it's like Dexare is in the option set and it's for many of the first choice. Yeah. We, there's also going to be this convergence between traditional FinTech apps, in my opinion, and crypto apps.

And Robinhood is certainly an example of an app that has really embraced it. So it's not really just a centralized exchange apps. It's all of financial tech, retail facing financial tech, at least, and kind of competing with all of these companies on different fronts, because I do think the self-custodial model is the best model for this going forward.

But there will be alternatives that come, come up. And I think there probably is some segment of users that still prefers the custodial model because there are some benefits to it, to be clear, really. You know, if you do something on Dexare, send assets to the wrong person, it's gone.

It's gone. And that's a trade-off. It's like, and that's honestly one of the scarier elements of crypto for a lot of people is like the finality of it.

Yeah. It's, it's one of the benefits, but it's also one of the drawbacks of it. And so I think there will be multiple models out there.

There won't be one winner in crypto and there won't be one winner in financial, you know, apps for, for retail users. And so we are going after that centralized exchange type user right now, but that's going to evolve over time. And I think crypto is going to become a bigger and bigger part of really all financial services.

Love it. Chuck, maybe last question, or maybe last two questions. What do you need help with?

So for the people who watch this and they say, wow, I really love what Chuck's doing. Like I want to help them out. Like, what do you need help with?

And then the very last question, I always love asking this because part of why I even started doing interviews like this in the first place is I do really care about, um, spreading the knowledge within the ecosystem, especially people who are going through the process of actively building. It's one thing if you've, you've reached the mountaintop and you're Brian Armstrong and everything works, but like, that's not always relevant for people starting out. So if you were starting the company today, knowing what you know over the past year ish, what would you want to know if you were starting the company today?

I think the biggest thing is just user feedback. It's so valuable. Like we get outreach from, you know, the users that we've given the invite codes to, they reach out to us directly on telegram or X or whatever, and just tell us what they like and don't like about the product.

You have no idea how useful that is because like we, we test the app out so much internally, but we have blind spots. And if we don't have someone coming in from the outside and seeing like what is and isn't working about the product, there's sometimes we won't actually know it. And we want to make sure this product is perfect for the users.

And so feedback is really the biggest thing. Um, and I, but I think even maybe before that is I I'd ask people to experiment with crypto and it's not even just with Dexare, it's, I think any crypto app that's doing something interesting out there, it's worth trying out because we need more people that are actually using crypto in the space to grow it. And Coinbase and Binance and all these centralized exchanges, they've done a really good job of onboarding the masses into crypto, but I don't want that to be where most people's journey ends.

I want people to try things out. Cause I think this is a space that deserves, um, to grow. Um, and it's, it's worth trying out because the more and more you use it, I think the more and more you'll like what you see.

Um, as long as we on the builder side can make it easy to use. So that's, that's sort of like, we're trying to give you the user experience and we're asking in turn that you try it out. So you're open to feedback.

Yeah, always, you know, there was a certain way I expected things to play out and I think, you know, nothing ever happens as you'd expect it when you're starting a company. And like I said earlier, I knew, I knew it was going to be hard, but just being able to have the mindset of like, expect the unexpected things are going to come up. Don't stress about every little thing as much as maybe you, you will.

Um, because at the end of the day, all you can do is your best and put your best foot forward. And there are things that will work. There are things that won't work.

And as long as you are building with people that are sort of on the same page as you, which I very much feel I'm doing with my co-founders, you know, relying on each other to get you through the hard times, um, is a big piece of it. I don't think I could have done this company without at least one co-founder. I have luckily two that I really like.

And I think, you know, more power to people that are able to build companies on their own. Um, but I do think it helps to have people that are aligned with your vision and that can, you know, pick up each other's slack along the way. Yeah.

Love it. Chuck, thanks for coming on the longest view episode five. Love it.

Thanks for having me. Absolutely.