Fomo Co-Founder: The FOMO Bull Thesis For Trading Crypto (Be Early)

Transcript

All right, you guys. We are live here in the tokenization tower with Se Young Park. Se, welcome to the show. Good to have you, man. Congrats on the recent raise. >> Thanks, man. Thank you for having me. >> Yeah, man. It's a nice view. Not not not too bad, huh? >> I was telling you earlier, but I see my house from here, so great view. >> Yeah, man. Nice. Nice. Well, thanks for coming in. I know it's been a busy week for you. Um you guys announced that raise and just kind of uh the growth on the app side has been fantastic. It's your first time on the show, man. I know you have history in DeFi at at dYdX and just kind of building trading systems. Maybe you can just kind of give us a quick rundown on how you got into DeFi, what what your

kind of unique founder edge is. Yeah. >> Yeah, so I I started my career in traditional finance and investment banking. And I think this was right around 2021 when, you know, markets were hot, Bitcoin was at all-time highs, and a lot of my friends were starting to trade on chain. But, I just didn't really have the funds to start trading on Ethereum just like everyone else. So, I kind of waited and waited, and then there was an account that had leaked the bridge to this new chain, Avalanche. And that was an interesting moment because it was like, "Okay, you can actually, you know, pay cheap gas fees. You can trade on chain. You can do things easy." Or at least easy at the time. And then was able to just like start trading, really started using different protocols. And then my co-founder now, Paul, he actually had

left the same job that we were at to go join dYdX as their first BD hire. Six months later, he said, "Hey, we're trying to build out the team. I know you're into crypto. Why don't you come over here and we can run this together." So, we did that and ended up scaling the book of business from maybe five or so market makers at the time to about 150. A lot of guys in TradFi, a lot of the crypto market makers. And really just built an understanding of, you know, how um exchanges worked, how consumers worked, how institutions worked. And I think through all of that, my my my core kind of principle has always been, you know, be product driven. So, they actually moved me over to become the core trading product manager there my last year there. And was able to just really get into it, you know, what do

users like, what don't they like, what are the things that they're expressing that they don't like, which, you know, might cause these issues down the line or these like frustrations and so on and so forth. So, I always had this kind of consumer-first, product-first mindset. And I think that's carried us over a long way because our entire team is very product-focused and that's really important when you build a consumer app. >> Yeah, man. I mean, it feels like this entire industry is kind of like bifurcated into like this institutional RWA, stablecoin tokenization, like that's become the that's what all the L1s are like pivoting to, what all the kind of projects that are trying to figure out what their product market fit are. And then you've got like this still like a small sliver of consumer-oriented brands and chains like Magic Eden Base and Solana kind of still

just things, you know, true to the consumer side. You've got apps like FOMO, like Pump, etc. that are staying true to like the the consumer side, but it's really few and far between in the market now. Obviously, on-chain retail has been slowed down and it will come back, but, you know, there's just this really strong bifurcation. There's a lot less happening in the consumer side now and a lot more like pivoting or focus refocusing into kind of like fintech, web 2.5 kind of thing. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, I actually think that's contrary to what people think actually pretty positive for the space because you you just want crypto and the blockchain to be the technology that people use whether they know it or not. And I think more institutional adoption means, you know, there's bigger players that are

getting involved, there's institutions, there's more sophisticated players. And then it kind of trickles down over time to the point where, you know, people are going to be using crypto whether they know it or not. And I view that to be just in that positive for everyone even if you're not building uh in the consumer space at this moment. So, you know, for us that's exciting because you're expanding the industry, the technology, the things that are being built on top of it, and we want to be able to access that and offer it to all users on the platform. >> Yeah, exactly. And I mean, you So, with FOMO, you can still access this kind of growth of on-chain tokenized equities or, you know, like like the Space X launch, it was on Solana, right? You can still kind of uh trade all these like higher-quality

assets. Like Like people are asking for higher quality assets now. That's kind of like the main question. Um and so on FOMO, you you guys have built it in kind of like this modular flexible way such that any asset that is tradeable on chain is available on FOMO. May- Maybe you could just like walk us through what that what that like thesis is of kind of this social first trading. Uh why you why you believe that this is the future of kind of trading in general. >> Yeah, so I think one of the core beliefs that we have is people historically have never been able to be early enough.

Right? So even in the stock market, you know, you have to wait till IPO. You can't buy pre-IPO. You can't buy early investments. You kind of get priced out, you know, before you really have a chance. I think it's actually a very similar experience for coins that get listed on centralized exchanges, right? By the time that coin launches, it's already raised, you know, 15 rounds and they're going to come out at 3 billion or, you know, it takes whatever 6 months for them to list the token like Hype. So our core belief is that if you want to do things earlier, you should be able to. So if that means the token is created, you should be able to buy that thing immediately. We should be able to put guardrails around this so you're not getting scammed, you know, it's coming from trusted sources for

launch partners and for parties. But we just want to be at the core of that and the thing we get asked a lot is like, "Okay, well, you're building a social layer. You let people buy things early. Why can't, you know, big companies? Why can't like Coinbase or Robinhood or Binance build the same thing and let people just access things on chain?" They can. But I like to think that the best traders on chain are not trading on those platforms today, right? They're trading on chain directly whether it's through FOMO or trading terminal or Phantom whatever it is. So by nature of that, you know, you can still build a social layer, but those users are always going to be late to our users. So the earliest thing is always going to happen on FOMO and I think if you think about, you know, how that evolves over time,

that just means it's in your best interest as a user to be on FOMO because that's the best traders, the best social network and it's incubating, you know, the best talent from day one as opposed to adding it at a later point. >> Yeah. Yeah. A- And so the community dynamic I feel like for markets has drastically increased since I would say I feel like GME kind of really kicked off this like Roaring Kitty leading these group of, you know, investors to, you know, take it to Citadel, take it to the hedge funds, and then now you have, I mean, just this continuous like era of financialization with, you know, streaming and trading and X adding cash tags. When you were starting FOMO, obviously this was kind

of still, you know, happening, but I feel like the the tides have just shifted more and more in your favor as far as like the way that prediction markets have evolved, the way that, you know, trading and streaming and this entire kind of like concept has grown. How do you like obviously things are path dependent when you're doing when you're building businesses, there's a lot of things outside of your control, but as far as like the external factors goes like we're in a raging AI stock market bull market, obviously crypto's down a bit, but like don't you feel that a lot of the factors externally to what your your internal vision is are working in your favor in terms of like the broad macro shift in the way people are investing and kind of trading and

gambling today? >> I think so. I think that's right. And a lot of this has been accelerated by AI, like you said. >> Yeah. >> So, one of the things we talk about a lot is, you know, if you go on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, whatever it is, there's a lot more content today, right? There's a lot more short form, it's very easy to put out essays, tweets, articles, whatever it is. So, once you get to this point where, you know, AI's getting so good that's probably replacing, you know, manual content entirely. Now you're left with just what I don't want to call it AI slop, but let's just say AI content, right? >> Yeah. >> And in that point it doesn't really take much to be, you know, the best threader or the best article guy or the best, you know, short form content guy. Like these

things are going to commoditize. >> Yeah. >> So, our view here is, okay, what can't be commoditized by AI? And it's dollars, it's risk, right? >> Dollars are real, you can't just get AI to produce you more dollars unless you, you know, do something very specific. So, we think that, you know, a network is going to actually be grounded on who is right most of the time and these are going to be the people who build themselves up to be the next celebrities, the next, you know, Mr. Beast of the world, the next, you know, whoever Elon's, whoever it is that have big presence in social media. It's going to be how much did you risk, how much were you right, and how often are you able to articulate these views via the form of thesis and long-form content.

Cuz it's it's harder and it's harder and harder it's like attach an AI thesis to like a coin that launched 3 days ago, right? There's not enough information or cultural event. It's kind of like taste making in modern day. >> Sure. >> And I think that all of these things are contributing to social just being so important when it comes to the financial graph. >> Yeah. Um Jake says FOMO helped me hold Jatshua, Gotshua, must be a new new on-chain runner on on Solana. Uh what FOMO is building for adapting crypto worldwide range. I'm not sure what that means. Um when it comes to like the vision that you were pitching to what I come to understand is more of like uh I would call them like web 2.5, web like traditional AI investors from Silicon Valley, USV, and a couple others. What

was the vision that you laid out cuz you you kind of explained where we are now, but let's fast forward, right? We're in the next crypto bull run, Bitcoin's, you know, breaking all-time highs probably next year or early in the following year. You know, on-chain is heated up again. There's this air of tokenized equity trading. Prediction markets have grown substantially in terms of market awareness, volume. Right? We're just in a different kind of state on-chain. Like like what is this vision that you told your investor base to really get them to commit? >> Yeah, so funny enough, I think the best investors you don't tell them, they tell you, right? You kind of are aligned in the same vision and it's very easy to understand, right? I think the hardest conversations we've had are with people who can't really seem to align on the

vision and understand where the world's going. But it's kind of similar to when you went from like paper trading to electronic trading. We think the next evolution is blockchain trading and I think the smartest people in the world are seeing that, right? They've seen thematically this thing happen over and over and over again. So, they're able to see and identify threads. Like, okay, this looks very similar to what looked, you know, very non-obvious 15 years ago or 40 years ago, whatever. So, a lot of these conversations are just like, okay, we agree on what this is going to look like. How are you going to get there? And that's really where all the details are kind of made, right? It's like, how do you get to the next, you know, 10 million, 100 million, billion users? How do you actually build this more and more

intuitively? How do you add all the products you need to? And our journey, you know, we started off in Spot on Solana. We've added a couple of other chains. We just added perps. We want to add a yield. >> on. So, you started off as far as like this trading terminal, right? It's kind of like this like interface to trade any any Solana asset on. >> Yes. >> But it also had the social aspect. Yes. >> Okay. And then we started to add more chains, right? Because you can't be an application that's one-dimensional, right? You need to be able to service users wherever they want to be. And our slogan is never miss out again. So, that means any chain, any asset class, any news event, anything that really goes on, you should be the first to know and the first to be able to trade it. And

you know, we all know if you look at any price chart or any asset, you know, the the price action precedes the news, right? So, you always see it start to move before thing actually happened. And because of the way FOMO was built, you get to actually see this in real time and then see how people are articulating their thoughts on top of these these actions that are happening. >> So, you So, you would then describe FOMO in its current state as a trading terminal that provides you with the ability to tail people in groups and have market uh news and like like could you just kind of explain what FOMO is? I would be We should have done this 10 minutes ago, but yeah.

>> Yeah. Yeah, I I think terminal is probably the wrong word here. Um I think terminal, you know, you typically associate it, let's say, with like a Bloomberg terminal, right? Very advanced tool. Only a select few people use it. It's just not the right interface for most people in the world. I think that's the same for trading terminals today, where you have all this data with bundles and transactions and wallet clusters and all these things and they're just not something that normal person will ever want to understand, to be honest. So, you need to be able to articulate this in very different ways, right? So, that's where plain text English comes in, right? You don't have to actually read alphanumeric public keys, you don't have to read, you know, what percentage supply is being moved around different wallets, and you can just see, okay, you know, Andy owns this

coin. This is the thesis, and this is why he holds it. So, it's very, very clear. So, ultimately, what FOMO is supposed to be is a trading app for, you know, everybody, right? We like to say a trading app for the rest of us. And it's an application where you can buy any asset very seamlessly. You're using crypto guardrails, we don't have to understand what blockchains are, gas fees are, or priority fees or anything in between. We take care of all that for you. And then you can just do that for every asset class that exists as everything comes on chain. We believe the world is going to be, you know, built on the blockchain itself. So, we want to be the ones that can steward that in some capacity, and obviously, we hope there's many others that can do this as well. But, ultimately, our

vision here is to expand the pie and to, you know, educate people through social and and allow them to really develop their own understanding of things. >> Yeah. Yeah. And then on the business side, what what's the business lines of FOMO, and what is the most successful, uh, you know, revenue generating aspect of the business? >> It's just fees today. It's just revenue on, um, transactions that happen on the platform. And it's, you know, we we tap into all the MM pools, we tap into hyper liquid perpetuals, and these are the people who are actually providing the actual execution. But, for us, we are adding an added benefit, which is ease, which is social, which is just understanding better and education.

>> Yeah. >> So, that's where the revenue comes from today. Um, if you ask me like, hey, would you sacrifice all of your revenue for the next 10 years to grow, let's say 100% every month? The answer would definitely be yes. Like, at the end of the day, our job is not really to maximize revenue. We have lower fees than most other terminals, you know, we try to, um, support costs like, you know, gas fees and priority fees and bridging fees and etc. where we can. And our goal is just to, you know, expand the pie and to get people to actually understand what FOMO is and to use it and to onboard new people into the space. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For for sure. What have been some of the, um, successful, um, like trading groups or stories from FOMO that can kind of give the listeners a

tangible understanding of like, you know, why you know, downloading this app, using it would be something that they'd be interested in. >> Yeah, so I mean there's a lot of success stories and you know, we try not to bias towards any, but I think one that everybody has kind of heard of at least on the crypto Twitter side of things is you know, this coin White Whale and Remus, he he was he's a good trader, you know, he's been around for a while. I think at the time he probably didn't have too much balance on his FOMO, but he put $500 into this token and at his peak it's worth $1.7 million, right? So he holds the token for a while, he's like you know, bringing the community up, he's kind of I think stewarding it in a right way. Everything is public so if he sells, you can see it. He'll kind

of update his thesis over time and I think you know, the the sticker number of 500 to 1.7 million is great, but I think the more impressive thing is if you look on his Twitter today, he probably went from 1,000 followers to 35,000 in a matter of months and that's something we want to continue to support, right? Like I I think that success stories are incredibly important and people should be able to build audiences based off the things that they do and I actually think over time, you know, we need to figure out a way for these creators on our platform to actually be able to monetize their following, whether that's subscriptions or friend tech style, you know, gated chat rooms or you know, warp style, like something that provides value to the audience and they would be willing to pay for. That's incredibly important

because every social platform in the world as you get bigger, your experience gets better, right? >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Somebody says just kind of a bit more nuanced on the fees. What are the fees and the user will pay the hyper liquid or AMM swap fees plus FOMO fees all for the social features question marks bit of a pointed question here. What value are they getting for the fees that they're paying and what are the fees? >> The fees are 0.5% and then you can get a 10% discount if you use a referral code for that spot. And then for major tokens, so Bitcoin, Solana, like you can think about anything that's listed on traditional centralized exchange, it's actually five basis points. So it's a lot cheaper than if you were to go to a Coinbase for the first time, you'd have to pay 1.5%. Robinhood, there's all

these, you know, associated fees. So, we want to be the cheapest place for you to trade, you know, entirely, right? And that's important to us, right? We can't really do anything about the underlying fees themselves. Maybe we can integrate with partners who charge you less or, you know, subsidize some of it like we do on some of the on-ramping stuff. And, you know, I think fees at the end of the day is not the right way we think about growth. It's just another metric that, you know, allows us to, you know, support the business itself, to do new things, to get back to users, and you know, all of the stuff in between. Um it's it's things like that that let us do, you know, the money air drop we did where we pretty much were able to give users, you know, close to a million

dollars based off their participation in the network. Um so, yeah, there's a lot of cool stuff that, you know, we're working on there. And hopefully this actually goes closer to zero over the course of time as more and more people are competing in the space. >> Yeah. Yeah. And so, when it comes to the kind of like the the on-chain pie growing here, um obviously we're in a a bit of a depressed market right now. On-chain uh is not nearly what it has been in the past. And then we've also seen like evolutions of on-chain activity. Ethereum in 2020 and 2021 was very hot. Then you had the the rise of Solana and L2s a little bit but in that era, Solana really dominated. Then kind of Base kind of got its feet under itself. Then we've moved into

Hyperliquid now where it's like perps and perps and perps and trade anything. Now we're now we're about to get tokenized equities on chain on spot markets. So, we're, you know, we saw Backpack and Wormhole and Sunrise launch SpaceX and crush that. Hyperliquid has perps for SpaceX, they crushed that. So, like I'm curious, what do you believe because as an entrepreneur, right, you you're always thinking about what's next. How do you position your product to be uh ready for the next thing? And obviously we're kind of in the I think we're at close to the end of this bear market, couple more months probably, uh fall hopefully. And so, when you think about like product-wise, road map-wise, focus-wise, what is your kind of like bigger prediction or thesis for like what's next? Obviously, it's more

people coming on chain, but like give us a bit more nuance on like why or how or what are they trading? And then how are you building the product stack or your road map or your kind of way of of articulating what you're doing in accordance with what you believe like kind of broadly speaking wise is coming next for on chain? >> Yeah, I think we think about it in two ways. One is like what does the market look like because that informs, you know, how much time we have to do things versus fixing issues or improving, you know, whatever is to come. So, I think, you know, we probably feel very similarly that, you know, this feels like it's getting close to the end of the the bear market. We've actually never operated in a bull market, so, you know, this is all just like, let's say,

theoretical. But in our minds, you know, the busiest times are times where you're just putting out fires, you're improving the experience for users, you're fixing issues, you're you're really just always on the ground trying to like improve the thing that's in front of you. Bear markets, which we are now, are a time for us to take a step back and build new features, right? So, we added a web app, we added Ethereum mainnet, we added perps on the last 2 months. We have the luxury to do this in this market and it's something that we know that the user wants. There's a few things there that, you know, we hope to improve on on the product front entirely. But yeah, it's just going to be market contingent on, you know, what we're able to do and how fast we're able to do things. I think thinking about it

from another lens, which is like, okay, what do you want to actually build, you know, let's say all things constant. We want to be able to offer you anything, you know, you want to speculate on, right? So, yield I think is an incredibly underserved opportunity for most of the world, right? I bank with Chase and I tried to make a savings account. They said, "Hey, you can earn, you know, 0.2% on all of your money here." And you know, Chase Bank is probably one of the banks that actually gives you actual tier, right? Like most other banks don't even offer that. They say, "Hey, you get 0%. This is not for you." Versus everybody in the world should be able to tap into an app like FOMO, deposit money, earn 4% or whatever the treasury bill is. And then, you know, greater amounts if they want to

tap into different forms of risk. So, I think that that is something that's just like an equitable need that the world needs to be able to tap into. And then, another thing is prediction markets, right? I think we're [clears throat] still very early on in what prediction markets can look like. Right now, they're used for very mainstream events, but think about like if you get to this point where you can do localized markets, you can, you know, bet on long-tail. You can just like permissionlessly spin up markets and provide liquidity to them. I think that end state is actually one of the most incredible, um, exciting things that finance can offer. If you can get to this point where, you know, you can place your opinion on anything in the world. I don't know how we'll get there. I'm sure there's a lot more smarter people than I

am that are working on that issue. That's something we're excited about and we're keeping an eye on what this looks like and how we can actually support stewarding that into the, uh, broader world. >> Yeah, man. How many people are on the, um, team right now? >> We have 13 in New York today, and then we have three people who are remote. Um, we we have a few more people that, you know, we we we hope to have us join, uh, join us in the next few months, but we're relatively lean. I think, um, a lot of companies think, "Okay, raise a round, go hire, you know, five x the amount of people you have and just scale." We think that the lean team advantage is something that suits us best where we can work very strongly, very closely together. Everybody has a product sense and it's a very flat

organization at FMO where, you know, everybody has a say and can contribute to whatever ownership area they think is the most important. >> Yeah. Yeah. And are you are you using, uh, AI a lot to scale different operations internally? What is like like obviously the on the engineering side, I'm, you know, the whole game of engineering has changed quite a bit. How how are you leveraging AI internally to kind of help yourself scale? >> A lot of ways. I mean, I think AI is able to write a lot of code these days and I would say like, you know, a vast majority of our code is now written by AI, but with very specific harnesses and guardrails and checks and, you know, reviews. I think it's incredibly important that like you can actually still write high quality code. So, for

that reason, you know, we still are able to check all these things very manually, make sure that it's up to par. And then, I actually think the biggest level up has been on the non-engineering side where you can now have your growth lead push a PR directly to the app because it's a visual bug on the front end or it's a campaign they want to run or they can you know use whatever AI services to ingest all the data and create better telemetry. Like I actually think that this is the most exciting thing for us because now you can actually take a bunch of roles that you would have had to do one-off things and then condense them into things in the hands of people who are very high agency. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then on the app side of things, people say like oh you

know I'm I I want to trade with an LLM like a interface like a company called Liquid launch this kind of like LLM AI first uh trading um platform I guess. And you know like the thesis is that you can go into LLM, write what you want to do, talk to it about your trade ideas, and then execute trades directly from that kind of interface. Do you see that as something that FOMO wants to or is thinking about kind of their users interacting with an LLM to make trades on the platform? Or how do you think about that kind of uh side of things?

>> Yeah, I think we have a view on agentic trading to be that it's going to be a very good resource, right? So it's going to be able to research things that you're interested in, give you commentary on what's going on, and just advance your thought processes through different domains. Yeah. I don't think we believe we're ever going to get to this point where it's just performing actions on your behalf, right? Because you think of a world where like everybody's doing that then nobody's doing it, right? Because you're just competing at the same level of infra, you're kind of getting your lunch eaten by people who have more sophisticated knowledge, and it just doesn't really feel like the uh the path that that we're going to go on as humans. Uh but we do think it's an incredible resource and you know if you want to place a

trade by saying, "Okay, I know exactly what I want to buy. Like let's say go dollar cost Ethereum for the next 12 hours if it's under this price." You should be able to type that in and get it done. So I think that that is a model that's pretty compelling, but yeah, I think that we're very far away if you know if we even ever get there to be at the point of like full-on agentic trading. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Um you You thinking about this what what you said at the top here about being early. Right, I think that's something that, you know, we we come on the show every day and talk about our thesis. We talk about, you know, the things that we're buying, the things that we're selling, where we think we're at in the market, etc. etc. And we're always

trying to kind of like you know, our biggest strength I think in my investing career and through the show has just been like kind of like longer swing trades, getting into spot positions with decent size, riding thesis for several weeks to months, and then exiting. Usually not short-term leverage, it's usually not short-term trading, it's usually not shorting, it's usually long only spot market buys for, you know, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, even a year, and kind of like that's been the that's been the the way that I've done the best on chain and just in general in crypto.

Um, when it comes to being early on FOMO, you know, what like unique advantages or what is the process for me to actually you know, reap the rewards of being early through FOMO. How how does that work and and what can I do to help my listeners who come in, tune in day in and day out to kind of like help them grow, help us grow? >> Yeah, I think trading in crypto is inherently very social, right? Like if you think about even, you know, from as early as 2017, like coins used to move when you had a big account talk about it and express a view because I think that a lot of people converge to, you know, you know, converge and find confluence in the people they think are smart. So, I think you can use FOMO in a very

similar way, right? Where, you know, on Twitter, you don't follow people that you think are nefarious or going to scam you or pump and dump on you. So, you should do the same on FOMO. You should find the people that you think are credible actors who align with your time horizon, your investment thesis, strategy, and you know, the way you do things, and really understand, right? Cuz I think the best things that or the best trades that I've had in my life have been through confluence, right? So, it's like, "Hey, you know, I'm looking at this spot. I think that's a really good coin. They have a lot of good tailwinds. Nobody's really talking about it. So, like I respect your opinion, what do you think? And typically, it's been, you know, some back and forth, but then you'll have the one guy that, you

know, you really respect saying, "You know, I I could see what you're saying. I think that like I'm going to I'm going to take this trade, too. Let's do it." And then you end up, you know, executing well. At least historically, I've done the best when I've found confluence with people that I think are smart. >> Yeah. >> So, use this as a tool, right? People are going to write their theses, which you don't always get access to the thoughts of people in, you know, in very, I would say, large, um, influential settings, right? >> Right. >> These people are talking in group chats. They're talking in private communities. They're not always giving you their their thoughts on private in in public. >> Yeah. >> So, we want to expose what's in private into the public by giving you this, you know, benefit of you can actually become

the biggest creator on FOMO if you are expressing these thoughts early, giving your audience, you know, the right things and the right theses using guiding them in the right ways. So, I would just say find the right people that align to your investment strategy, understand why they're buying things. Hopefully, we find more ways for you to interact with these people and ask them questions. >> Yeah. >> It's a two-way street. And then just, you know, follow your guts, right? Like you're going to have your own view, find confluence where you can, find, you know, invalidations where you can, and then try to make the best decisions over whatever time horizon is best for you. >> Yeah. Dude, how much of your time is spent like trading and using FOMO versus like building it? >> Yeah, I would say early days, I probably traded on it every day, you know,

multiple hours a day, like just, you know, really battle testing the product. I I, uh, I did a challenge that I ran 5K to 250K, you know, the first month of FOMO just to show like, "Okay, here, you can do it. And I'm going to do it in public, and I'm going to use the same resources that you and I have and get this thing done." Today, I would say that as you start to grow the organization, add new product features, and we don't have a product team. So, everybody, you know, the co-founders, all the engineers, all the growth people have to be incredibly product focused. >> Um, so my job actually, I'd say most of my day is talking to users. Like I really, really love, you know, waking up to uh, hundreds of DMs, group chat messages on what we, you know, are doing

terribly, what we can do better, what new features to add. And I think that breaks a lot of people, but for us, that's like keep telling us all of that. Like we want to know all of it. We want to improve, and I don't take it personally. None of us do. It's, you know, just like your user, and you have frustrations. We want to hear them, and we'll fix it. >> Yeah. Fomo, man. What an incredible name for a trading app, as well, huh? Uh last thing from my side, what are you What are you going to use primarily the funds on? You're going to be, you know, you raised $75 million. Obviously, you've said that you're, you know, trying to keep the team lean. How do you How do you plan to best utilize the new capital? Obviously, you also have a high valuation on on your head now, as well.

>> Yeah. >> It's more pressure. There's going to be, uh you know, there's there's there's upsides to that, and there's drawbacks to that. You know, just give us your well-rounded take on using the capital, why kind of that valuation made sense, and just kind of like where you're at on the financials, and kind of like scaling side. >> Yeah, so, um one of the things that was really important to us was like, you know, we didn't need to raise the money, right? We actually haven't touched a single venture dollar that we've raised to this point. And for that reason, it's not, you know, you need a financial constraint, go raise the money, figure out what to do with it. I think for us it was really about bringing in good partners, right? We get to bring in some of the people who have scaled a lot of

organizations we respect, Robinhood, Coinbase, Revolut, Twitter. These are all just organizations that we highly respect and think have done a really good job just in the world of either finance or social. Uh and then you have Benchmark who led our A, who's pretty much done every other social app in the world. So, I think it's just having the right people in the right room to advise on, you know, what they've seen, where they think things are going, how we can, you know, align on the best direction for strategy, and the things that are highest leverage, and you know, I I think I would love to be here saying, you know, we're going to spend this much money on this, we're going to do this and scale this. But I think our general philosophy is like we're going to do the thing that's working, you know, really

double down, go 5x, 10x on, you know, whatever the thing is really working, not spread ourselves thin across a number of different mediums or acquisition channels, and just kind of feel where the market is going, and just do the thing we think will put us in the best place to succeed over time. >> Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, that is Say Young Park from Fomo, the co-founder following their $75 million raise. Thanks for your time. Great conversation.