How to Survive the Crypto Boom & Bust Cycle | Main Function

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Chandan Lodha is the co-founder of CoinTracker, the gold standard for crypto, portfolio management and taxes. And he knows, as well as just about anyone, what it takes to survive the crazy boom bust cycle of crypto. The price of Bitcoin surging again.

**Chandan Lodha** (0:14)
Showing no signs of flowing. Another warning signal is flashing for Bitcoin.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:19)
The crypto market is crashing.

**Chandan Lodha** (0:20)
Bitcoin briefly bouncing back above $67,000 this morning. When there's excitement, how do we capture that excitement and push, use it to propel ourselves forward? And when we're in a bear cycle, how do we hunker down and use our resources effectively to just continue building so that when that next wave of crypto adoption comes, we can ride that wave.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:39)
So today, we're sitting down with Chandan to discuss the origins of CoinTracker, how they survived several crypto downturns and the state of crypto today. Let's get started. For a lot of people, jumping into the crypto market can be intimidating. It can be hard to track your portfolio across exchanges or figure out how to file taxes. CoinTracker is solving these problems, and what they're building is making crypto more accessible and easier to use.

**Chandan Lodha** (1:19)
Our mission at CoinTracker is to enable everyone in the world to use crypto with peace of mind by building the leading cryptocurrency portfolio tracking and tax compliance software.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:29)
Like many of the best products, CoinTracker was built to solve a problem the founders faced themselves.

**Chandan Lodha** (1:36)
My co-founder, John and I, we had both worked together in our previous job and we were interested in fintech. We were actually building something that had nothing to do with crypto at all. We got really frustrated with building on the traditional financial rails because they're super slow, they're super inefficient, and so that was kind of the kick that made us look deeper into the crypto space. This is in 2017 One of the first pain points there was, how the heck am I going to keep track of all these assets? And that was kind of the kernel of a problem that led us to building the first version of CoinTracker to enable users to track their portfolio and then eventually do their crypto taxes as well.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:11)
But making sure users are tax compliant is just one of many challenges Chandan and his team are facing.
Crypto has gone through bull and bear cycles since Bitcoin's inception. In fact, Bitcoin has been declared dead over 475 times in the past 12 years. Running a company in the space is particularly difficult because you're forced to evolve as the cycles come and go.

**Chandan Lodha** (2:40)
Our journey and crypto's journey definitely are intertwined for a variety of reasons. And one of those reasons are these ebbs and flows of the crypto market, which is sort of unique compared to other technological spaces that I've worked in in the past.
Because you have these really big bull cycles, you have a huge amount of growth and demand that comes in all at one specific time. And then you have these bear cycles, where there can be again a year or multiple years where the space is declared dead and there's not a lot of activity happening, at least on the speculative trading sort of side.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:14)
Building startups is hard in the first place, but dramatic ups and downs in the crypto cycle can take a toll on founders and teams in the space.

**Chandan Lodha** (3:24)
Going through crypto winter is brutal. It's probably the lowest point that I've had as a founder or like in my professional work history. Not only is it a struggle from a company morale and growth perspective, but on top of that, the entire world is telling us that the entire space that we're working in is irrelevant and dead and doesn't make sense. There was a point in 2020 where we were six months away from having to shutter our doors because we were going to run out of money. It's just a feeling of desperation, of just like, oh my God, like nothing is working and there's nothing we can do about it. So that was a really tough and very low point. And the way we got through it was, A, I have an amazing co-founder. I cannot imagine having gone through this without him. But B, I think it's again, taking a very long-term view on what we're doing. And does it actually make sense from first principles, regardless of the kind of local climate that we're currently in at a specific point of time? Like, is the mission that we're fighting for, a mission that we want to see the world like adopt and to make it, you know, does it improve users' lives in some kind of meaningful way? And so it was kind of sticking to those first principles. And also like the really amazing team that CoinTracker is, like really bringing people in from the team and saying, hey, look, we're not going to like lie to you. Here is the reality of the situation. Here's what it means for us. And here's what we need to accomplish in order to get back on a gross trajectory. So we had to just basically have some really open, honest, vulnerable conversations with people. And I'm really glad we did that because it got us through those some of those tough times. And it's basically the companies that do survive those tough times in crypto, they get to reap the benefits of the really good times like what we're in now.