Insight
Building outside tech hubs shields early founders from peer status games
“As you're starting a company, especially in the early phases, there is an immense desire to benchmark yourself versus everyone else. And there's always going to be someone who's growing faster. He's in a hotter space. Who's like more popular than you are or wh…”
Insight
Products sold exclusively to crypto companies are unlikely to succeed
“One of our realizations was that any crypto product that is, like, sold Two crypto companies is unlikely to be successful. That was, like, my biggest takeaway is, like, they definitely have problems, and there are things that you could build to solve problems …”
Opinion
Circle’s stablecoin APIs were 'really bad' in 2022
“There was like circle at the time kind of had some APIs, but they were really bad. And we realized there was no clean way for a developer Like a strike effectively a strike style API for a developer to come in and take a dollar and convert it into a stable.”
Insight
Founders building crypto in SF in 2023 were true believers
“If you show me a person who's building something in crypto, living in San Francisco, and was working on it in twenty-twenty-three, I will guarantee you that they are, like, a true believer and probably excellent.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
The post-FTX crypto fallout wiped out Bridge’s competitors for a year
“What happened was like over the course of a year, there were like, you know, a whole bunch of failures in the space and their company was impacted by it, indirectly impacted by FTX and so on. And that essentially just, like, nuked the competitive landscape for…”
Assertion Supported
Bridge launched the exact week SVB collapsed and USDC depegged
“The one thing that was, like, truly existential, Was when SVB went under, and USDC depegged, because, and that was the week that we launched.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bridge grew 20% to 50% month-over-month leading up to its acquisition
“I mean, we were probably pretty consistently growing somewhere between
20 and 50% a month.”
Disclosure
Abrams believed Bridge was unacquirable due to extreme internal stablecoin optimism
“We were, I actually thought that we were unacquirable as a company, because, mostly because we were working in a frontier space, and our belief of how big this space could be has, like, consistently been way more optimistic than everyone else's belief.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
The Stripe acquisition announcement actively accelerated Bridge's developer growth
“It's meaningfully accelerated the rate at which we've been, like, Acquiring developers and they've been launching and scaling and so on, which has been super exciting to see.”
Disclosure
Bridge originally launched as an NFT checkout product
“The segment that we originally launched into, which was like buying, buying like NFTs and stuff like that is what we kind of originally were like, you take your bank account, you convert the funds in your bank account and stable coins, you then use a stable co…”
Disclosure
Bridge pivoted its initial seed idea after just one month
“We raised in April, so we closed the route in April. And then we pivoted in May. So that's how long idea one lasted.”
Disclosure
Abrams told seed investors Bridge was pivoting without a backup plan
“I actually reached out maybe in, like, late May to one of our investors And I was like, hey, this idea that we raise money on. And I was like, not, I was so stressed. I was like, not sleeping because, you know, it was like these people invest all this money in…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
FTX had obscure APIs that easily converted between stablecoins
“When we were first building the product, FTX had a bunch of APIs that nobody really knew about, but we kind of discovered that made it easy to convert between stable coins.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Signing Bitso in mid-2023 became a major inflection point for Bridge
“And then we, like, maybe in, like, June or something, we ended up signing Bitso, which is the largest exchange in LATAM, and then Bitso became, like, kind of like a big enterprise customer for us, and we started You know, we launched with them in September and…”
Disclosure
Burnout from Square, Coinbase, and Brex prompted Abrams's departure
“Ultimately, I think there's, like, a lot of reason, a lot of, like, micro reasons why, why I left, but the, but sort of, like, now as I reflect on it, I just burnt out. Like, I had, we had basically, we started this company, Sean and I started a company in, li…”
Zach Abrams