Mike Silagadze
Founder & CEO, ether.fi. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestor@MikeSilagadze ↗LinkedIn ↗ether.fi ↗
Mike Silagadze co-founded Top Hat, an edtech engagement platform he led as CEO for over a decade. He later transitioned into decentralized finance, running Gadze Finance and founding ether.fi, a liquid staking protocol.
2shows
2appearances
30statements
2resolved
0supported
0contradicted
0%fully supported
2said about them ↓ Everything Mike Silagadze said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Silagadze: Teaching quality is a very low priority for universities
“Teaching, as surprising as it may be, is really very low on the total pool of priorities in higher education. In fact, that's just, it's not how universities get funded. You know, universities are not known generally because of the quality of their teaching. I…”
Silagadze: Companies should measure IQ because it strongly correlates with performance
“Most companies don't measure IQ at all, and that's wrong. I mean, there's a zero-point-six correlation between IQ and job performance, and that is, in fact, if you could base your hiring decision on one factor, you could only base it on one factor. IQ is actua…”
Silagadze: Higher education is a luxury good, not a productivity investment
“I think many people believe that education is an investment that makes you more productive. In a sense. And I think beyond some of the very basic stuff that you learn in primary school, I don't actually think that's the case. I actually view education as a con…”
Silagadze in 2018: Crypto bubble could dislocate the global economy
“You know, it seems like certainly the crypto mania is concerning. I worry that it's going to get large enough to where I'll actually dislocate the global economy just like the real estate bubble did not too long ago.”
Silagadze: VC pushes founders to optimize for the next funding milestone
“Venture tends to push a kind of short term thinking. You know, oftentimes there's a conflict. In the business between doing what the right thing for the business would be if you were to run it for the next 20 years versus doing the thing that's going to allow …”
Silagadze: Only 10 to 15 EdTech startups have reached $10M+ revenue
“Out of the, you know, thousands and thousands of companies that have been funded over the last decade or so, only a handful, I would say probably 10 or 15, have really broken out past the, let's say, tens of millions in revenue milestone and, you know, are on …”
Silagadze: Most venture capital investors in EdTech have lost money
“Most people that have invested in EdTech have lost money in EdTech, and so, yeah, there's good reason to be skeptical.”
Silagadze: EdTech products fail because buyers and end users are mismatched
“Products in education technology are generally terrible because The decision makers aren't the users.”
Silagadze: Technical founders' early sales leadership hires fail almost 100% of the time
“There's one mistake that almost every young founder makes, engineering founders in particular, honestly, almost a hundred percent of the time is at some point they decide, you know what, we need to start figuring out sales. And then they correctly assess, well…”
Silagadze predicts global transaction value will eventually replatform onto DeFi
“Gave me a lot of conviction that over time, you know, a significant amount of value that's being transacted and the world was going to replatform onto crypto rails, onto, onto DeFi.”
Silagadze: Universities neglect teaching tech because funding comes from research
“The incentive structures within universities are set up such that the amount of resources they're willing to expend on actual, like, teaching technology and, like, investing in in student engagement, not super high. And it's just that most of their revenue, mo…”
Silagadze: 90% to 95% of all crypto activity is just gambling
“And even today, I would say, you know, pick a number, 90, 95% of the activity that happens in crypto is various forms of gambling.”
Silagadze: Traditional Chalkboard and Paper Lectures Fail to Effectively Teach Skills
“Chalkboards and paper books and all this stuff that hadn't changed for hundreds of years. And not only that it hadn't changed, but this is, it doesn't work. It's a really terrible way to teach people skills, actually.”
Silagadze: I wouldn't have invested in early-stage Top Hat today
“If I was evaluating Top Hat in the early days, I don't know if I would have invested knowing everything that I know now, just knowing how difficult the market is.”
Silagadze: Standard corporate hiring processes systematically favor charismatic extroverts
“Virtually all companies out there completely ignore this research and instead implement the same kind of hiring processes that have been shown repeatedly not to work, that have been shown to have tons of bias and be in favor of hiring basically extroverts that…”
Silagadze: Top experienced talent is harder to find because high performers are locked in
“And so as a result, people who are experienced paradoxically are, as far as the distribution, it's more challenging to find top performers because they said that the good ones are already locked in somewhere.”
Silagadze: Top sales individual contributors usually make poor managers
“When you've got somebody who's a top rep and, you know, is clamoring for a promotion to management, more often than not, that's a bad idea. You need to figure out how to level them up and give them the opportunity for growth within the, you know, as an individ…”
Silagadze: Measuring engineering velocity with metrics is nearly impossible
“Whereas in engineering, that's difficult, if not impossible. I mean, you basically, you almost don't have any metrics when it comes to measuring engineering velocity.”
Silagadze: Canada Lacks Executives Who Have Scaled Companies Beyond $100M
“And biggest challenge I would say is lack of executive talent. There are very, very few people in Canada that have scaled businesses past a hundred million dollars. And as a result of that, it's challenging to build a business that scales to that degree becaus…”
Silagadze: Founders err by launching in domains without firsthand experience
“One of the mistakes, frankly, that entrepreneurs tend to make is they'll, they'll start a company in a completely kind of random domain that they don't have a lot of experience or they don't have firsthand experience with the particular problem that they're so…”
Silagadze says finding the right customer is edtech's hardest challenge
“It's also about finding the right customer and the right channel to sell into. And I've seen a lot of companies sort of fall down on that aspect of it, especially in education. That's oftentimes the hardest thing to figure out in education technology.”
Top Hat investors bought a majority stake to provide Silagadze an exit
“We had an acquisition offer come in that was pretty, pretty compelling and that prompted kind of a conversation around you know, other options other than just selling the business to you know, public acquirer. I think you can talk about this. One of our, you k…”
Silagadze self-funds Gadzi's crypto infrastructure using its hedge fund revenue
“The idea of this sort of hedge fund that generates boring, predictable returns, And then using the income from that to finance technology development that's focused on building these crypto rails, that's the, you know, that's the That's the sort of premise of …”
Silagadze: Early Top Hat angels took 30% equity for $25,000 checks
“We raised money from kind of random people, from, like, random, like, consultants and executives and lawyers, just random people that could write a 25 or fifty-k check, you know, in exchange for 20 or 30% of the business. Like, that, that was the environment t…”
The other half of the tape: Mike Silagadze's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 2 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 2
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 2
2019 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Mike's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Founder & CEO, ether.fi | 1 | 19 | 0% 0/2 | full record on 20VC → |
 PRODUCT MARKET FITLEDGER | Founder & CEO, ether.fi | 1 | 11 | — | full record on A Product Market Fit Show → |