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

**Robbie** (0:00)
Alrighty, guys, we are live here in the Tokenization Tower with Se Yong Park. Se, welcome to the show. Good to have you, man. Congrats on the recent raise.

**Se Yong Park** (0:08)
Thanks, man. Thank you for having me.

**Robbie** (0:09)
Yeah, man, it's a nice view. Not too bad, huh?

**Se Yong Park** (0:13)
I was telling you earlier, but I see my house from here, so great view.

**Robbie** (0:15)
Yeah, man, nice, nice. Well, thanks for coming in. I know it's been a busy week for you. You guys announced that raise, and just kind of the growth on the app side has been fantastic. So your first time on the show, man, I know you have history in DeFi at DYDX, and you're just kind of building trading systems. Maybe you can just kind of give us a quick rundown on how you got into DeFi, what your kind of unique founder edge is, yeah.

**Se Yong Park** (0:39)
Yeah, so I started my career in traditional finance and investment banking. And I think this was right around 2021 when 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 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 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 of about 150, a lot of guys in TradFi, a lot of the crypto market makers and really just built an understanding of how exchanges worked, how consumers work, how institutions work. And I think through all of that, my core principle has always been 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 nitty gritty, what do users like, what don't they like? What are the things that they're expressing that they don't like which might cause these issues down the line or these 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.

**Robbie** (2:08)
Yeah, man. I mean, it feels like this entire industry is kind of like bifurcated into like this institutional RWA stable coin 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 the MegaEthan base and so on. It kind of still just thinks, you know, true to the consumer side. You've got apps like FOMO, like Pomp, et cetera, that are staying true to like 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 refocusing into kind of like Fintech Web 2.5 kind of thing.

**Se Yong Park** (3:03)
Yeah, I actually think that's contrary to what people think, actually pretty positive for the space because you just want crypto in the blockchain to be the technology that people use, whether they know it or not. And I think more institutional adoption means there's bigger players that get involved, there's institutions, there's more sophisticated players. And it kind of trickles down over time to the point where 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 in the consumer space at this moment. So 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 to all users on the platform.