Builders & Founders

In this episode of When Shift Happens , I sit down with Bobby Ong, co-founder and CEO of CoinGecko, to discuss how he bootstrapped one of crypto’s most trusted data platforms with just $200 and no venture capital. Over the course of the conversation, Bobby reflects on discovering Bitcoin in 2013, building CoinGecko through multiple brutal market cycles, resisting the many shortcuts that exist in crypto, and why playing long-term games with long-term people may be the only way

In this episode of When Shift Happens , I sit down with Evan Cheng to discuss why he believes the architecture behind most major blockchains is fundamentally insufficient, what Sui was built to solve instead, and how the next wave of adoption may come. What makes the conversation especially interesting is that Evan is not simply arguing that Sui is faster or cheaper. He is making a deeper claim: that much of crypto is still built on a mental model of assets and ledgers that w

In this episode of When Shift Happens , I sit down with Anand Gomes, CEO of Paradex, to discuss what it really takes to survive crypto cycles, how most token launches misalign incentives, why Paradex locked 80% of its team tokens to public performance milestones, and why he believes perpetual exchanges are becoming the financial supercenters of the internet economy.  Health as a Founder’s First System The episode opens in an unexpected place, with Anand’s health. Over the pas

In this episode of When Shift Happens , I sit down with Avichal Garg to discuss why most people lose in crypto, what it really takes to survive long enough to win, and the investing frameworks behind backing more than 25 unicorns. As co-founder and general partner at Electric Capital, and an early backer of companies like Figma, Solana, Kraken, Notion, and Bitwise, Avichal brings a long-term Silicon Valley lens to a simple but uncomfortable question: Are you here because you

In this episode of When Shift Happens , I sit down with Anthony Pompliano to discuss what real conviction looks like: why he once put 95% of his net worth into Bitcoin, how deep research separates concentration from gambling, and why he would rather risk going to zero than win at what he calls “insider games” that create no real impact. “Relentless” as a way of operating Pompliano describes himself simply: investor, entrepreneur, someone who likes to have fun, but at the same

In this episode of When Shift Happens , I sit down with Andrej Majcen, co-founder and Group CEO of Bitcoin Suisse, to unpack one central idea: we are living through a narrow, five-year window that may define who preserves and compounds wealth, and who doesn’t. As pension systems strain, trust in institutions erodes, and inflation quietly eats away at savings, Andrej argues that Bitcoin is no longer a speculative trade but a structural response to a broken financial system. Th

In this episode of When Shift Happens , I sit down with Raagulan Pathy, founder of KAST and the “stablecoin guy”, to discuss what happens when a $100M company goes to zero, what eight years of debt repayment does to a founder’s mindset, and why he now believes stablecoins can power a global bank serving 150+ countries, and possibly a billion people. Raags is direct about the scale of what he’s trying to build. He says, on record, that KAST is a “trillion dollar plus” outcome

In this episode of When Shift Happens , I sit down with Sandeep Nailwal, founder of Polygon, to discuss what it takes to build through chaos, why he refused to “walk off” when crypto turned ugly in 2022, and what Polygon is really trying to become: not just another blockchain, but a global payments layer powered by stablecoins. Along the way, Sandeep reflects on his childhood, his obsession with individual sovereignty, and the philanthropic moment that turned crypto into a cu

In this episode of When Shift Happens , I sit down with Brian Armstrong to discuss what it really takes to build something that lasts. We talk about the myth of the “smartest founder in the room,” the unglamorous muscle of unreasonable determination, and the emotional cost of scaling Coinbase over more than a decade. Brian opens up about burnout, loneliness, ambition, and the mindset shifts that helped him keep going when things felt heavy. We also get into why he believes ca

In this episode of When Shift Happens , I sit down with Seung Yoon Lee to discuss the $80 trillion creative asset class, why creators are shut out of the value they generate, and how Story Protocol aims to tokenise and “programme” intellectual property so anyone can legally remix it while paying royalties automatically. Fixing Creator Economics Seung’s path to this problem began with a long apprenticeship in media economics. Fresh out of Oxford, he tried to fix journalism’s b

In this episode of When Shift Happens , I sit down with Emin Gün Sirer to discuss his journey from Turkish immigrant to Cornell professor...

In this episode of When Shift Happens , I sit down with Jordi Alexander, founder of Selini Capital, to unpack one of the most pressing...

In this episode of When Shift Happens , I sit down with Sergey Nazarov, co-founder and CEO of Chainlink, to discuss why crypto has...

In this episode of When Shift Happens, I sit down with Sam Blackshear, Co-founder and CTO of Mysten Labs, to discuss the creation of the...

In this episode of When Shift Happens , I sit down with Diogo Mónica, General Partner at Haun Ventures, the $1.5 billion firm known for...

In this episode of When Shift Happens , I sit down with Luca Netz to discuss the highs and lows of building Pudgy Penguins, how he...

In this episode of When Shift Happens , I sit down with Dan Tapiero to explore his journey from Wall Street to crypto. We talk about the...

In this episode of When Shift Happens , I sit down with Chris Larsen, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Ripple, to unpack how he and...

What if everything you’ve been taught about money, like buying a home, playing it safe, and climbing the ladder, is actually keeping you...

Evan Cheng sat down with me on the 125th episode of When Shift Happens  to unpack a bold ambition: fixing the broken foundation of the...