Fomo Co-Founders on Building the Social Network for Finance

**Jason Yanowitz** (0:00)
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All right, everyone, very excited about this one. Have been wanting to do this for a little bit. But time is right, coming off the back of a big raise, $550 million valuation. We've got the co-founders of Fomo, two of the three co-founders, right? Paul, Se, we're missing one, Prashan. Prashan, all right. Well, love goes out to Prashan. What does Prashan do? How do you guys split your roles?

**Paul Erlanger** (0:46)
So Prashan is our head of engineering, and he built the first version of the mobile app. Se and I used to handle everything else that's not engineering. Luckily, we were able to specialize a little bit more because we hired a head of finance recently and some other roles, but Se and I do product, we do BD, we do growth, we did some ops stuff, and we're handing a lot of that off now.
But I think the main differentiator comes in our perspective, not necessarily the work. So Se is a trader, and he's been a trader for a long time, and I'm more of this like normie user, and there's always this push-pull in every product decision we make, where Se is like, okay, the trader wants this, and I'm like, well, the normal person wouldn't understand this, so we build the product for both groups. And I think that's why it works really well.

**Jason Yanowitz** (1:28)
Have you guys had any huge debates?

**Paul Erlanger** (1:30)
Oh, every product decision?

**Se** (1:32)
Yeah, every single day. Yeah, I think that's like the beauty of it. It's like it's a push and pull. So I don't always try to bias towards the trader, but in a lot of ways, it's like, okay, this is what I've seen in the market. This is just what's easy, intuitive. But then it's something that the user might not understand if they'd never seen crypto before. So I wouldn't even just say to us too, it's pretty much everybody on our entire team has product sense. So we'll just get up and in the middle, they have like a 30-minute conversation about like a very small future or like a small polish item. And it might seem small in the moment, but these things really add up. So we really go deep into every single thing that we ship. Yeah, okay.

**Jason Yanowitz** (2:06)
So take us back because Paul, I think you messaged me, when was that? For when you guys raised this party round of like, it was like 100, 150 angels.

**Paul Erlanger** (2:14)
Probably February, January, February of maybe even January 2025

**Jason Yanowitz** (2:21)
2025, okay. You guys both worked at DYDX?

**Paul Erlanger** (2:23)
So yeah, we both worked at DYDX for about four years. Se joined like a couple months after me.
And yeah, then I was just taking some time off, started iterating some ideas. Se and I took like a birthday trip with some friends to Joshua Tree, and we were like thinking about some ideas, and then we decided to start building. We actually incorporated on January, I think December 30th, 2024, so like the last day of the year. And then we started raising the round early January, 2025

**Jason Yanowitz** (2:50)
Nice. Why did you guys structure it as that party round?

**Paul Erlanger** (2:53)
Yeah, I think it's really important for a consumer product to build distribution. So instead of having like one institutional anchor, we want both to have, be able to leverage all these different partners, whether they're builders, et cetera, but then also have some early traders that'll be testers and loyal users of the product to have ownership as well.
So that was the main reason.

**Jason Yanowitz** (3:13)
Did it work?

**Paul Erlanger** (3:14)
Yeah, I think it worked pretty well. It helped us bootstrap.
Because the hardest thing with consumer, especially a marketplace like a social trading app, is building a two-sided market. It's like a chicken egg problem because you need new traders to fund, but then you also need the top traders to provide information. So being able to do that both at once was the only way we could bootstrap.

**Jason Yanowitz** (3:33)
Makers and takers.

**Paul Erlanger** (3:34)
Exactly.

**Jason Yanowitz** (3:35)
All right, before we get into too deep into Fomo, let's talk. I mean, you guys have been in crypto for a while, so I'd love to just hear a little state of the union on a couple things. One is, one is just consumer crypto. Like, why do you, there have been many, many, many takes at consumer crypto. Why do you guys think you guys, I mean, I feel like you're the first really big breakout consumer crypto app, in trying to think of the last couple ones. I mean, we had like friend tech for a little bit, was like very hot and then very, you know, very dead.