019: Buying $69.3M in NFT Artwork & Y Combinator's Stupidest Smartest Guy = Vignesh Sundaresan

Background on NFT Investor – Vignesh Sundaresan:

Vignesh Sundaresan is a blockchain entrepreneur, an open protocol architect, and Y Combinator Alumni. He designed and leads the project that implements the open protocol – Lendroid. A professional programmer with expertise in blockchain technologies, back-end programming, software product management, marketing performance mechanisms, knowledge organization, and data-mining. With over 10 years of experience in product development, he's now excited about open protocols and believes we are in the middle of a paradigm shift.

Time-Stamped Show Notes:

[0:50] Vignesh consider himself a protocol architect and he’s currently doing Lendroid, a decentralized digital asset lending protocol and platform.
[2:05] Blockchain is a public ledger of all cryptocurrency transactions.
[4:17] He was born in India and he wanted to be an entrepreneur.
[5:48] Vignesh discovered Bitcoin in 2012.
[6:37] He studied Mechanical Engineering in Dubai.
[7:23] Moved to Canada to gain more networks and support system.
[8:30] He worked in a project called Exchange where you can deposit your Bitcoin and allows you to buy other coins with Bitcoin and vice versa.
[9:30] Canada has an Anti Money Laundering Policy that forced him to give up Exchange.
[10:40] He found a team in Canada and co-founded Bitaccess, a Y Combinator backed Bitcoin ATM.
[11:42] Bitaccess have 4 cofounders and he worked as a coder of the team.
[14:48] Y Combinator invests $120,000 in a large number of startups.
[17:25] He discovered Ethereum, another currency that has its own Blockchain and similar but is little advance than Bitcoin.
[18:10] Left the company last December and started working on Lendroid.
[19:50] “If it’s a bad company, you can shut it down. If it’s a great company, you want to do it. But if it’s an okay company, you are stuck.”
[22:47] Lendroid is not a traditional company but it’s on the Blockchain.
[23:07] He was working with Aragon, a company that provide tools to run a company on Ethereum.
[24:35] Lendroid is a lending company that put lien to your Ethereum, Bitcoin or digital assets and give you funds so that you can get liquidity.
[30:27] “It is hard if you don’t see your product working and it is harder if you see your product working and you are not making any money out of it.”
[33:57] The company doesn’t have any existing competition yet.
[41:40] “I would ask the entrepreneurs to think not just their country but the whole world as one place and go from there.”

Fabulous 4 Questions:

📖 📚 Favorite Book(s)? Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Harari, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz, & Ignited Minds by A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
🙌😎 Favorite Amazon.com purchase? JBL Pulse 2 Speaker
🌱💸 Favorite Tool that's GROWN your Business? Front
💭💡 BIGGEST Challenge keeping your Business from GROWING? Scaling the team.