Fireside Chat with Furqan Rydhan and Kartik Talwar

Transcript

[Music] and for our next session we're going to have a  fireside chat with **Furqan** from **Thirdweb**. We're going to talk about all the things you  can learn from them going hard into building open-source tooling, getting more and more  developers in this space, and also why we should be excited about the Bay Area. So without further  ado, let's welcome **Furqan** from **Thirdweb**. All right, I'm excited to chat today  because there's a lot of things that are very complementary to what you’re doing and  have helped make a massive impact over the last couple of years in this space. But before we get  into the specifics of all the stuff that you’ve

put out in this ecosystem, I’m curious about what  actually made you start the company. What’s kind of the history behind it, why did you choose to  build it, and what got you excited originally? Yeah, well, thanks for having me here, and  it should be an exciting time. I'll give a little background because I’ve got kind of  a decent story in terms of entrepreneurship. I grew up here in the Bay Area, got  started in tech very young—I’m old, so you know, this was... I worked at id  (the creators of DOOM) when I was 15; that was 1999. So I got a chance to see the early  internet. I built an e-commerce company in 2001, which has a ton of parallels to crypto—like I’ve  been banned from banks and payment processors because selling online was too risky, and  it feels a lot like what we experience now.

I’ve built stuff in every era of the internet as  a founder or on founding teams (I won’t tell you about all the ones that didn’t work). I started  a company called **AppLovin**, which is publicly traded now in the mobile gaming space, so I got  a chance to see what “mobile” looked like up front—what it was like trying to sell mobile games  to big publishers who were selling console games, and they’d say “This doesn’t make sense,” and  then mobile gaming turned out to be gigantic. Then I built a lot of stuff in consumer social  at a company called **Bebo**. I was part of the second half of that—we bought it back from  AOL, built many social products, live-streaming, creator tools, and eventually ended up selling  to Amazon and Twitch. I spent some time there, and so I’d had a few exits, and I’m like,  “What am I going to do with my life?” I was

investing a lot, and investing is a little  boring—you meet great founders, get excited, then you’re basically a monthly update  away. And I was like, “This is not fun.” So I created a company called **Founders Inc**,  which is my family office I invest through. It has a studio where we get to build companies.  This is where **Thirdweb** was born. In 2019, we were building social-like products online,  on-chain, doing a lot of work. Every three months, we’d kick something off, ship it, get some people  to use it, pivot the idea, delete all the code, start again from the same framework. About  a year of doing that, it felt like, “Hey, why isn’t there a framework here that I can just  build apps with?” We believe apps are going to be the dominant thing on blockchains, right? The apps  we use on the internet—they look a certain way,

they’re in a browser, or a mobile app, or  a game, and the tools are very similar. If I build something else, I have these  great frameworks: Next.js, Django, Python, many different tools. Why is that missing in  this ecosystem? That was a light bulb moment for **Thirdweb**, and when that happened, we  literally spent two weeks just sprinting, hacking together this rough tool. I just  talked to everybody I could about it, and it turned out they needed it, and  that was the inception of **Thirdweb**. That’s awesome. The developer world in 2019  was even more nascent than what it is now, and the best you had was basically OpenZeppelin  libraries—but not much else about structure or best practices. I have a lot more stories from  that era, too. The question I’m curious about is:

it seems like you were your own customer,  and that’s why you built it, but was that the intent? Or was it like, “This is something  everybody else should have,” and that was the reason for doing it? Or did you just not  want to restart that whole loop every time? Yeah, it’s really nice when you’re your  own customer, because you feel the pain and understand it very well. You're not wondering if  somebody else has this problem—you know they do, because you had it. But we did see that we  were better suited not to build an app in the ecosystem, but rather to unlock this for everyone.  The starting point was: we want to see real apps using blockchains. We’d seen a few at that time,  but the majority were very simple products—click

a button, mint this thing—and the tooling  just wasn’t ready for real app-level builds. I’ve built a lot of stuff on the internet, and  cloud was probably one of the big transformative things that accelerated the internet. Why?  Because it let developers build simpler, faster, better products for their users and took  away a lot of the pain. We pay for compute on Amazon AWS, for example, to make servers closer  to you, to do caching and database work. That’s how developers built faster, bigger products.  This industry felt like we needed the same thing. For apps, there was a variety of things  you needed. The first starting point was: “Hey, this smart contract thing is weird, new, it’s a  new language, it’s kind of hard just to go from

zero to one and get something to production.”  In almost every other industry, you can hack something together in a night and ship. In this  industry, it’s “I need audits, I need security, I need to know a new language,” all that. So  we said, “What if we just make this part easy, and then let people connect their apps  to it?” That was the starting point, and we saw so much demand. It was basically nine  months straight of sprinting—covering the ground of what people needed, different frameworks,  capabilities, better caching. Then we discovered, “Well, I also need an RPC, I need a wallet,”  etc. So it turned out the blockchain part was just one of five, six, seven boxes. For most  app developers, that was too big a slice,

so we ended up a full-stack platform: front-end  tools, back-end tools, on-chain tools. That’s what we believe full stack is now—you have  to include on-chain. We just talked to users, heard the pain points, debugged with them, and  60% of the problems were “I didn’t get a paid RPC.” So we gave them an RPC, and those  problems went away. That was literally 250 support tickets a week, so figuring that out  and building it really fast became the mission. It’s also an interesting framing, because  we’re in the business of telling people, “Hey,

this is possible—build stuff in Web3.” Every time  you have that conversation, the reaction is, “Oh, this is a new thing I have to learn,” but  they don’t think of it as complementary or just one additional slice of what they’re already  doing. Even if we’re working on a smart contract, I might still be interfacing with it on Vercel  or something. It's not an either/or scenario. One part of our ecosystem that can be both good  and bad is how quickly it changes. You have all these thematic spikes—DeFi, stablecoins, L2s,  NFTs, DAOs, rollups. If you started in 2019, you saw it all. How do you prioritize what’s worth  spending time on, and how do you decide what’s

good feedback or a sticky layer you want to be  under, versus supporting everything that pops up? Yeah, really good question. The first thing for me  is: I saw Ethereum when the white paper first came out. I followed along, invested, wrote stuff—I  was a hobbyist in it. There's a long story being written, and you have to remember you’re part of  it. We might be in chapter one, two, or three, but you don’t want to be a maximalist about  chapter three. There's a bigger vision building. For instance, I saw Bitcoin before that; when  I saw Ethereum, I thought, “Man, this is cool, we’re going to program on these networks.” I’m not  super into the purely financial use cases—like,

I don’t think about trading on Wall Street.  But I got excited about the idea of public infrastructure, because blockchains are basically  highways and bridges for the internet. It's all public. If you think about Apple or other  big companies, they have private databases with a billion phones, and that's a weird feeling.  We live mostly on private infrastructure, which is kind of strange. I saw this world  that was going to form. We wanted to build apps that people love on the internet, so how do  we do that here? That was our centering point.

When we launched Thirdweb, the NFT cycle  was peaking, and everyone was like, “10k PFPs are everything; we found the magic  number: 10,000.” And that wasn’t it. But from seeing other eras—e-commerce in ‘01, mobile  later—you try not to get too caught up in the moment. There’s a promised land to reach. For us,  it's apps and games like we use on the internet, but on public infrastructure—trustless,  permissionless, ideally decentralized.

So we just keep that bigger vision in mind  and inch it forward. Sure, we can’t jump from the 2019 tools to everyone on the planet  using it, but if we keep pushing, we’re at a point now where you can spin up a rollup in  30 seconds, or do social logins, sponsor gas, etc. Now we see apps with hundreds of thousands  of DAUs that got built three months ago. That wasn’t possible two years ago. We just did our  job of inching it forward, and it’ll keep going.

Does that mean, for example,  if the 10k PFP NFT mania was going on, did you decide not to  specifically optimize for that, or was it more like, “We’ll build a solid  NFT minting infrastructure, here's an API, use it however you want,” because we’re  not going to be opinionated about that? As an early-stage startup, you always think: “I  need to know if people love and need my thing.” I need that hair-on-fire problem. If people building  NFT products don’t find us useful, then nobody needs us. So while we might not personally agree  with everything they do with the tools, they still

need to use them. Then we asked ourselves,  “Are we building an NFT minting company, or a general-purpose Web3 dev tool that helps  folks get on-chain?” We chose the second. Yes, these were specific use cases, so that’s where  your guides, docs, content come in. That’s where your solutions team understands DeFi, stablecoins,  how to handle NFTs. Because we see so many of these use cases, we can help teams: “Hey, do  it this way—it’s better for these reasons, and we have modules that do that.” So in the end,  we think of ourselves as software infrastructure,

general-purpose. We embed in apps and games.  You don’t try to squeeze into just one vertical. That’s awesome. Hopefully, you can all translate  that as you build your own companies. One other interesting piece—somewhat unique to  Thirdweb—is that most everything you’re doing is open source. How do you think  about building something entirely open source and usable by everybody, but also having  a sustainable business? How do those intersect?

I’ve used a lot of open source in my life—my  entire career is basically built on open source, though I haven’t really had a chance  to build an open-source company until now. The industry is by default open, right? When you  go to the blockchain, you can see everything. It felt odd to talk about auditing or being able to  see code, and then close all of our stuff. So that was a starting point. I think 90–95% of what we  do is open source under a very permissive license, and people should use it. However, open  source cannot be your marketing tactic—if

that’s why you’re doing it, that’s a huge  mistake, especially in this ecosystem. So for us, there were two main  reasons. One, we wanted to get the maximum possible feedback from users  in any capacity—people can poke around, inspect our stuff, send PRs. Our users  are developers. They want to see code, find bugs, request features. That was essential  for building the best product, because you can’t sit on a whiteboard and magically invent it. You  need to see the pain point in real time. Two,

it raises our engineering bar. If you hide  code behind a wall, it’s a lot easier to have lower-quality engineering. Going from private  to public repos requires best practices from day one: no keys in repos, environment  variables set up correctly, and so on. Then, how do you build a business on  this? That was a big challenge for us, too. We spent the first two years of Thirdweb open  source and free, because we needed to figure out what to build, how to do it. Then we looked  at some open core models—like in big data,

or the typical internet approach of hosting. We  have a back-end server called Engine, which is an HTTP API paired with a back-end wallet, so you  can sign in with Ethereum or do mints/transactions from your side. You could self-host it—it’s a  Docker container—but it’s annoying to manage or scale. We offer a managed service for it,  plus solutions and support. So at the top end of the ecosystem, big teams that have raised a  lot or generate revenue become our customers, while the long tail remains free. Similar to  how GitHub worked: I used GitHub for 10 years

without paying a cent, then when I was at bigger  companies, we paid them. Totally sustainable. I don’t think open source limits you; you just  have to be intentional. The biggest mistake is founders using open source as a marketing ploy. It  has to be core. Otherwise, the business team comes later and says, “Hey, we need to close everything  because customers are using it for free.” Then you run into problems. For us, it’s a core value.  Our engineering team is better because the code is visible. It’s tougher—we open ourselves to  more criticism—but that helps. I’m not worried if someone says our code is bad, because we’ll just  fix it tomorrow. That’s exactly what we want.

That’s a great way to frame it. You’re based  in SF, a place that’s not necessarily the main crypto hub—though there isn’t a single hub,  it’s all over the world. How’s that impacted your product development? Net positive,  neutral, negative? What’s your take? I think the world changed overall. Ten years ago,  building a company meant everybody was around you in SF. Now you’re by default digital-first,  probably on Slack or other remote platforms.

That’s also us. We do have a good concentration  here; it’s powerful to sit next to someone physically. But there’s also great talent  everywhere. I’d also argue there are a lot of crypto builders in SF and the Bay Area—it’s just  fragmented. That’s actually why we’re doing this event, to corral the community. Similarly,  we do the same: events, working sessions, trying to connect people. In-person time is  special. Our team does a lot of offsites; we’ll fly people here, show them our spaces,  get them interacting. Next week, we have 25 people from Thirdweb coming to SF. It’s  going to be awesome—you’ll feel the energy.

There’s so much technical innovation  here. You see self-driving cars on the streets, for example, and  it inspires you to think bigger, try new things. Web3 is the next evolution  of internet infrastructure. In my mind, every app is going to be crypto-enabled  eventually—public infrastructure for user data, etc. I want to be in a place that motivates  that. I’m born and raised here, so I don’t know other places as well, but SF is definitely a  massive tech hub. There are many others, but you should still come see the innovation here. You’ll  be surprised how many products use blockchains in

the future. I consider myself someone in San  Francisco you can go to if you want to learn about blockchains or why it’s awesome. I’m not  talking about meme coins or degenerate trading, but what you can actually build. Just last week I  showed a developer our Thirdweb Connect product, and they said, “Wait, this is a whole user login  system?” And I said, “Yeah, public infrastructure means you already have an account system built  in—just use it!” That “click” moment is huge. Anyway, we’ll wrap it up here. It’s been  amazing to hear your story and how you think about this space. Hopefully you got some good  advice. Please give a big round of applause.

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