The Future of Onchain Capital Markets

Mason Nystrom sits down with Austin Adams (Doppler Protocol) to explore why token launches are broken, how traditional IPOs died, and what onchain capital markets can fix.

The problem: 20% of all token launches in 2025 traded below their issue price. Traditional IPOs now happen at terminal valuations—OpenAI and SpaceX go public where they used to peak. Amazon IPO'd under $1B and went up 1000x in public markets. Apple went public in their second year. That doesn't happen anymore.

Key Topics:

• Why token launches fail: extractive pricing, poor liquidity, delayed price discovery

• The death of the IPO: companies now go public at $1T+ instead of early-stage

• How Circle's IPO popped 40%+ due to 3-month-old pricing (Genius Act repriced everything)

• One size fits none: why custom capital markets beat cookie-cutter token launchers

• Bundling price discovery with liquidity: the only way to prevent chart disasters

• Why coding stops being the moat (AI can write Solidity/Rust, but can't generate novel ideas)

• Ethereum vs Solana: go where the users are, the chain doesn't matter

• The future: solo unicorns and micro-companies with tokenized equity

The views expressed in the podcast are those of the individual personnel quoted and are not the views of Pantera Capital Partners LP or its affiliates ("Pantera"). The podcast is provided for informational purposes only to provide market commentary and for general educational purposes, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. The podcast is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest. Please see additional important disclosures related to the content discussed in the podcast here.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The IPO is dead. People sort of seem that to be controversial, but it used to be sort of the most innovative companies in the world where IPOing.

SPEAKER_01 0:07

It doesn't matter if you vibe-coded a bad idea, it's still a bad idea.

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Coding is going to stop being the moat. Code the chain. The only thing that really matters is where the users are.

SPEAKER_01 0:18

Welcome to Staple of Pantera Podcast. My name is Mason Eistrom, and today we have a very special guest, Austin Adams, the founder and CEO of Whetstone Research, the creators of Doppler Protocol. We're really excited to announce that we just made a seed investment in Doppler. And here today to share more about Doppler and all things capital markets is Austin Adams. Austin, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00 0:39

Yeah, thanks for having me. Lovely to be here. Love yapping about all things capital markets. So excited to, you know, dive deep into the sort of full gambit of all of it.

SPEAKER_01 0:50

You've obviously been building in the ecosystem for a long time. Uh you were one of the architects of Uniswap before and have a very nuanced take on token launches, uh token issuance, and what goes right and what goes wrong with TGEs.

SPEAKER_00 1:04

Yeah. So I'm Austin. I run the Doppler protocol. Uh we do asset issuance, so we call it customized capital markets for all things uh on chains. We manage, we help manage like the economics, the contracts, everything for users. We sort of power like a bunch of different publisher exchanges that like want to build markets with things they're publishing. We also sort of do like uh sort of nascent markets that we're pretty excited about. And so like Zora and Banker, FX Hash, uh sort of like a bunch of like paragraph. Uh a lot of these things that we're sort of excited about is like bundling markets together with issuance or creation in general. And we think that that lets you have really high quality markets for very exciting things. And so yeah, we work on a lot of different tokens. Uh, I we've launched like seven or eight million tokens. Uh, and a lot of them are not super super valuable, but I do think like some of them are are you know very interesting and very valuable and push the space forward.

SPEAKER_01 1:58

I was recently looking at a stat from Richard Chen, who's one of another VC in the space, and he posted that 20% of all TGEs in 2025 are below their issuance price or their TGE price. So why do you think token launches have been broken uh today and and how do we fix it?

SPEAKER_00 2:16

The take that I have is I think the token launch not even the token launch, honestly, the entire initial offering has uh become problematic because I think that there's like a pretty safe and simple strategy to extract value out of it. We started seeing this originally in crypto with like sniping on token launches, but I think we've actually seen it progress to traditional tradfied markets that we've seen, you know, what is a a lot of these token launch, these IPOs are getting uh uh sandwiched essentially by people who are coming in buying the asset early, waiting for believers or something to come in and buy at a higher price and then selling on them. This is like uh everyone always feels like, oh, it's sniping. And I'm like, it's it's kind of like it's happened at like a much deeper level than that. And so the thing that's why a lot of these tokens are going down is because the uh initial sort of market that's being set up is very quite poor. It's very extractive to the believers who want to speculate or buy and take part in this ecosystem, and it's very extractive to them. There's been a lot of papers written about this with respect to equities markets, and so I'm sort of just taking those. I'm like, look, guys, this is like not uh we're kind of trying to reinvent the wheel a lot, but a lot of it there's a lot of research on it, and uh, we have to reinvent the wheel in some sense because they don't they don't have it solved either, and so it's sort of all working together. But yeah, I mean I think the overall the TGE is probably the most important thing a company does, not the most important thing, but one of the more important things a company does, and I think the process is just really bad. Uh, and it's very destructive to builders, it's very destructive to capital allocators, and sort of need to figure out how to simplify it end-to-end uh to make it better for everybody.

SPEAKER_01 4:04

Right. And so Doppler provides this custom capital market infrastructure to improve the token issuance uh and let's say like capital formation process. Expand a bit more on like how we solve this problem, what are the you know, steps or things that like token project founders should be thinking of that they're not when they just go through like a vanilla TGE.

SPEAKER_00 4:28

Yeah, I think the it it they're these sort of like getting integrated in everything is like significantly more difficult than people think about it. Uh, I you know, cut founders ideally are doing one TGE, they are not thinking about these things as many times as they probably should. And so a lot of it just is working with people who've done a lot of them. Uh it's whenever we work with founders who are doing their TGE, it you know, it it's they're always like, This is the most stressful thing I've done. And I'm like, yeah, it it's you know, like, does it ever easier? I was like, no, it's it's always this uh stressful, and so it's nice to work with these teams and be a you know, an air of confidence, I would say. But I mean overall, I think like the one thing that we've thought a lot about is like everything, everyone wants something slightly differently. They all want something slightly more customized. You know, no one's cap table is the same, no one's economics is the same. Uh all these sort of like a lot of these economics of the token are downstream of how the protocol, like the underlying business or protocol works. And so it's pretty much impossible to have a one size fits all because you're trying to, you know, stuff a bunch of like insanely different things into your protocol. Like, you know, one day or you know, over the last like minute, there'll be like two or have been like a blog, there might have been an IPO, there might have been an AI agent launching a token. That sort of these things are all just like completely different. Uh, and so you have to build these custom capital markets in a way that you know enables sort of these deep markets without intermediaries. And uh, you know, we always say like one size fits none. It's like if you have a one size fits all solution, like it's good for some things, but once you try to expand it to other things, it sort of breaks down. And that's what we've seen, I would say, in most of these markets is that people build something, it gets figured out, uh, or they try to extend it to something else, and then it just completely breaks down. Uh, and that's sort of I think what we've seen a lot with these like one size fits all token launchers. We work with our customers to edit these things very rapidly. And I'm pretty uh, I think it's sort of the best way to go because no token launch is the same. They're all different, and so you got to treat them such that treat them that way.

SPEAKER_01 6:37

You're watching Stateful, a Pintera Capital podcast. Through our over decades-long investment track record, we bring on the best founders and investors to talk about everything that's happening in crypto. Please remember to like, subscribe, and follow us along to catch us on the next episode. Now back to the show. Uh, I think we've obviously gotten to a point in the market where we're seeing token issuance at a rapidly accelerating rate. Uh Doppler, as you mentioned, has has launched you know millions of tokens today that equate to billions uh of dollars in value. When uh you work with a you know new type of founder to issue a token, what does that process look like? And what are you kind of currently advising them to do in terms of both the issuance and kind of the the capital formation or uh set another way? Like what are the best practices that that Doppler is bringing to the market today?

SPEAKER_00 7:26

Yeah, so I think like we try to think a lot about sort of every part of the stack. So it's like vesting, what is your you know, IP, what is the sort of like initial pricing look like? I think that there's really not a lot of like, you know, I would say learnings that we can give to the market. Cause I as I said, like it really, it's honestly like every single thing is different. Uh there's that meme that's like the working at the token factor, it's like working at the factory, and they're like, ah, I guess we're doing circles now. And I'm like, that's how I feel like sometimes with us one day we wake up and we're like, oh, okay, I guess we're doing AI now. I guess we're doing you know art now. And so it's hard to have sort of like a one size fits all solution, but I would say that the thing that I think is really important is creating like a deep uh protocol owned liquidity pool. I think is like very, very underserved. We've seen a lot of teams do their ICOs and take a ton of the and use that to raise. I think it's actually quite bad. I think it's problematic for users to do that because uh the people you're raising from in the ICO are very different than the people that like you're you know that are on your cap table already. And so you want to create like a very, very deep, well-priced, actively trading liquidity pool. Otherwise, you're sort of gonna get this like economic death spiral that happens. That's where we see this a lot with tokens. You know, they pump really rapidly and then they die immediately, and then you're just like dead. Well, there's two ways to stop that actually. It is to have a high quality price discovery auction that immediately goes into the liquid market, uh, and that is real is deep end liquid. I think those are sort of the two ways you stop that. We've seen a lot of ICOs where people ICO and then they wait like months to open up trading, and I'm like, you're just like, why'd you do it? You know, like there's no point to do that because the price has changed in those four months. I mean, the price honestly changes every hour, it changes every second. And so by delaying your ICO a lot, I think it's actually very problematic. And that's one of the things that we think a lot about is like, you know, how do you enable all the orchestration necessary for these teams to go end to end in a way that's like clicking one button and your token is live? Like you don't have to, you know, the you don't have to like have uh uh your custodian send you your token from Anchorage or something to initialize the pool. Those small things can cause delays, and they generally do delay, and that breaks your price discovery and then it panics the market. And so, you know, bundling all of these things together is is really hard, but it actually is the like most simple way for founders to get things done. Like you just want to have you just want it to go well, you just want no delay, just kind of want like an 80% experience and like you're feeling pretty good. And so that's what we recommend to founders is like simplify everything, just go to market, have a liquid price and send it. And like if you have a good product, you have a good product and it will work.

SPEAKER_01 10:18

And talking about maybe this importance of pricing. So obviously, a lot of times I think when you look at whether it's a traditional IPO uh or even like a token generation event, like an IPO just says, okay, uh the bankers agree that we're gonna launch, you know, we're gonna do the IPO at this price. Tokens kind of operate similarly, like you maybe get some buy-round around market makers or what price they they're willing to make at some floor. How does Doppler improve price discovery and why is that important for better token launches?

SPEAKER_00 10:48

Yeah, I think like the most concrete example is the circle IPO. I think it's like something I've written a lot about is you know, the circle IPO happened uh, like you said, through market makers and book builders, and they came to a price. And then I think it was clarity that our genius had happened, and uh it just absolutely and just ripped the price completely because Circle was probably one of the better beneficiaries of stablecoin legislation, and that was just impossible to predict at the time because the IPO process takes months and months, and so what happened was they spent multiple months pricing this asset in a world where Genius wasn't passing, and then it passed this massively repriced circle. Uh, and the all of the sort of books they had spent three months building were just worthless. And so they just had a just essentially yOLO a price. And you know, we saw this one of the larger IPO pops that's ever happened or that's happened in the last like 10 years happened with Circle uh because of this repricing. And so what we always talk about is like you should have that book building pricing event in the market in the exact same time because you're gonna go live with that. If you if you want to have sort of the best possible seamless experience with your chart, you sort of need to have the uh price discovery auction tied together with liquid, the liquid generation of the market. And I I think like there's been a lot of people who don't do that, and it's like, why did you even try like why did you even find the price to begin with, right? Like it's gonna get repriced immediately when the market happens, and that will cause losses. And you know, IPO pops are actually very problematic for uh, especially for like employees of the company. There's actually a lot of tax issues with it. There are a lot of uh liabilities that happen on the company side, so it actually is not always good, it's actually quite bad sometimes. Uh and and so we think about like how and also that pop creates disruptive it it hurts the price of the token, it hurts the price of the asset. It it's in the market inefficiency happening, and to correct that market inefficiency, there needs to be uh some action that happens, and usually it loses money for the the people. And so we think like if you want to have the most uh you want to leak the least amount of money, you need to uh tie these two things together and run it.

SPEAKER_01 13:10

There's a framing of the IPO pop that it, like you said, it's a mispricing of the asset and it's relatively extractive and doesn't benefit the actual you know existing uh stakeholders of that asset. You've kind of previously you know written about this uh concept of like the the death of IPOs, uh, or how you know IPOs have have obviously lost uh a lot of their favor. We see companies obviously going public later and later. That is you know one kind of like quote unquote death of IPOs, but maybe expand a bit more on on what you mean when you say that.

SPEAKER_00 13:42

Bill Gurley was actually on TPBN talking about this, and I think it's like people don't think about like what the IPO used to be. Like in the 70s and the 80s, these you know, extremely novel technology firms uh that were like doing computing were IPO ing all of the time, and they were IPOing at like very small evaluations that were not crazy.

SPEAKER_01 14:06

Like Amazon Basically, what are the equivalent of like token market cap?

SPEAKER_00 14:09

Yes, exactly. And so, like, you know, what the example that Bill Gurley gave was that like the like Amazon went public under a billion dollars. It's up a thousand X in the public markets, like that's unreal. That's crazy. And that had that used to happen like a lot, you know. Uh I looked at Apple, so Apple went public uh their second year in existence. They, you know, they weren't, they did not have the Mac, you know, the OG Mac yet. Like it was a completely different experience. Like if Apple went public today, you know, they're going public at a trillion dollars. Like we're seeing OpenAI go, you know, public at a trillion dollars. Like that that's that's that's kind of ludicrous, right? Like, what's the point of, you know, you're just having private market price discovery at that point. And I I I guess I talk about the death of the IPO, like the IPO is dead. I people sort of seem that to be controversial, but it it's just like it's true that the amount of the IPO market is actually is just a it's a shell of itself. It used to be sort of the most innovative companies in the world were IPOing early in their life cycle, giving upside to retail, giving upside to institutions, giving upside to everyone, and then having these public pricing events that drove a lot of capital and interest to these things, and it's just not true anymore. It's just not what happens. Like, if you wanted to tell a banker in the 70s that open AI would go out at like what is probably like a top 20, 30 company in the world, I don't know the exact number, but like they would be like, that's insane. Like, who had that happen? And I think they're right. Like, I think the uh the the the IPO market is the best way for the public and essentially just everyone who's not a a pub a private investor to get upside in these assets, and they just fundamentally can't anymore. And there really hasn't been like a one reason why, it's just been a huge collection of a lot of small things that have added up, and that has actually made it much harder to solve than it would be otherwise, because it's not just one thing that you can click a button and fix, it's like 50-60 things and like these crazy changes in how the economy has broadly worked. And so, yeah, I mean the IPO market, it just is dead. It's uh if anything, uh open eyed SpaceX are showing this. They're they're going public at what is likely their terminal evaluation. Um, maybe it goes up from there. I'm not saying it doesn't, but like it will not go up as much as it did previously, uh, unless something crazy happens. And then uh I guess we'll just be wrong at that point.

SPEAKER_01 16:36

And IPO is becoming the uh the vehicle of last resort rather than uh an early option uh as it previously has been in the capital markets. Let's talk about the future of on-chain capital formation as it relates to the death of IPOs and how IPOs potentially move on-chain. Uh Pintera, one of our portfolio companies figure markets, went public you know, last year. They recently just did kind of an on-chain capital formation event as well, starting to show the pairing of at least you know existing companies. But there's also a world in which you know we see companies just forego your traditional you know, IPO and launch directly on-chain. How do you think about this evolution and the future of on-chain IPOs and on-chain capital formation?

SPEAKER_00 17:25

I think the problem with like one a bunch of the big problem there's a bunch of small problems with the IPO market just as it exists today. Uh, like one of those is IPO bookrunners don't want to do small assets because it's just not valuable for them. And like this is not a pro this is not something you can solve. Uh, like Morgan Stanley or whatever is gonna make more money on the I the open AI uh round than they would doing a thousand small companies. And and so I I think just fundamentally the reason why I'm so bullish on I on on-chain capital issuance is that it bucks the trend of it, but it, you know, we can't just do I as I sort of said, there's not just one small thing we can do to fix this market, we have to do like a million things to fix this IPO market. And the only way we're really gonna be able to do that is through reimagining almost every single part of the asset lifecycle uh that's necessary. And I think like that's why, and I think that's what tokenization allows. It allows you to uh spin up these really complex markets in a very efficient way that is just fundamentally impossible to have on private markets. So, like if you want to do an IPO, you got to get a market maker, you got to get an underwriter, you got to get, you know, all the regulatory approvals, you need to get all of the infrastructure in place for your the exchange. Uh, and like these things are just really hard, and every single little small piece makes it harder and harder. And I think if we just sort of spin it on its head and we have these issuances that happen in these decentralized exchanges in a permissionless way, it's uh actually very simple to do on-chain. It's actually the all uh the other parts of the harder part is getting enough capital interest, getting enough uh regulatory interest to solve these problem to allow companies to do these. Uh, but it yeah, it's gonna take a huge change and it's uh unclear. I every time I read a paper about like how do we solve IPOs, the answer is always like we have no idea. And like they just I'm just like we gotta, oh my god, it's great. That's a that's that's a great answer that the best people in the world have no idea how to fix these things, and it's gonna take just will to solve it. And I do think like that's the I like markets on chain are much better at this and much better experimenting than markets off-chain because it was never really built for that. Uh, but markets on-chain really are built for this.

SPEAKER_01 19:51

And I think there's a bit of um a hesitancy because like obviously you know, IPOs have a lot of infrastructure uh that is that is tied to them. You know, when you think about issuance and like the quality of assets, that is one thing that like the IPO pathway presents because like you can you know go issue on Nicy or Nasdaq, and that comes with like a an element of quality. As we look towards asset issuance on-chain, there's a variety of ways that this could evolve. You know, you might have NASDAQ or you know, those types of organizations roll their own chains that are permissioned or permissionless. Uh, you can also issue on you know Ethereum or Base or Solana. How do you think about the maybe landscape of issuance today and and where does Doppler look to prioritize issuance based on the the types of assets that are going through the protocol?

SPEAKER_00 20:42

Yeah, I think like as you said, the current, I mean, there's a lot of motes of why people IPL, obviously, uh, but I'd say the biggest moat is the sort of like lemon market problem that exists in alternatives to the IPO market. Uh, like the IPO market's good because it's been making public companies for 50, 60 years, or even longer than that, uh, and it's been working. And so I think like that's the biggest challenge for competitors to the IPO is the like nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM problem. It's like, I just don't want to have to think about this. I'm gonna pick the first thing. And so how we think about it is the thing that Doppler wants to focus most on is these net new classes that can't exist. Outside of crypto, I think crypto generally, when it hits an amount of it hits PMF or it finds something that's unique, it does it by doing something completely different that's not just like the existing system, but better. And I think that that's like why we focus so heavily on these net new asset classes, uh, and then you know, working with them to hopefully become an existing asset class. And I think that those are the first movers in this area, this on chain capital formation. Is these net new internet native things that can't exist anywhere else. And then I think we'll see a lot of the learnings from that roll over into uh the like traditional IPO process that happens on the chain. So I guess kind of hard to know because I think it's unclear what will win in the current sort of net news step. But I I think I guess like in my hopeful world, like it's people just doing these on permission permissionless. I I I it'll probably be sort of like a Nasdaq app chain that settles to some ledger like Ether Solana. I think that that's probably just the most likely way to go is starters that have like a Nasdaq app chain. But I think uh I was wrong about app chains like two years ago, so I don't want to put my I don't want to be like ah, app chains are coming.

SPEAKER_01 22:52

I guess a more broader question to that than today, like how do you view Ethereum versus Solana?

SPEAKER_00 22:57

Yeah, I mean I think like for us or for everyone, I think that the Solana like obviously is very Lindy, and so is Ethereum. And I think they've bootstrapped net different users. Uh, and there's some a lot of overlap for sure, but I think that there's just like a set of users who does not want to leave Solana. There's a set of users that people don't want to leave Ethereum, and you know, these things, these these assets, these chains, they're very different. Uh, they're they're they're surprisingly different in sort of like a lot of the minutia that happens, uh like specifically in block building on Solana is very impactfully different than the block building on Ethereum, and that has downstream impacts for all the applications and users using them. And so I think like any company just got to go where users are. It's there's users on Solana, they clearly do not want to leave, and you're not gonna convince them to leave, so why even try? Just go to where they're at. Um, I think they'll like uh the desire to like have one big chain that does everything is like probably not possible. I think it's gonna be like these ecosystems, these sort of like then these little different tribes that exist uh across everywhere, and it's sort of necessary to build pieces for all of them. And I think it's what we're gonna see a lot more of is the net new uh the hard part about building a lot of these on-chain things is just having the unique context necessary to build these assets and then putting it in your clot or whatever to code it up. And so to me, it's like I think the coding is gonna stop being the moat, and the moat is going to turn into being able to have this unique context that allows you to generate things on these new markets. And I think it's what we'll see broadly, just sort of across everything, is that it's just gonna like the code, the chain, it's not gonna matter. It's just like go to where the it's the only thing that really matters is where the users are and like the applications are.

SPEAKER_01 24:50

Yeah, it all comes down to distribution and meeting users where they are. Uh, and I think a lot of uh companies have have you know realized that that's why obviously why you see so many companies trying to build these like vertical chains, whether it's Robin Hood or Stripe, you know, or or whoever else that I'm I'm sure is uh coming down the pipeline. When you say that the moat is context, can you tease that out a bit more?

SPEAKER_00 25:12

How I think about it is the code is kind of an implementation detail of like the underlying idea. And the underlying idea is the context. It's sort of this, you know, what is the sort of like thing that AI can't do? And the thing, uh AIs today, you know, they have like one, they're all sort of like they're trained on the same code or it's the same sort of like context. And so they're really good at like doing everything 80%. It's that last 20% that's like very novel. Like it's not gonna come up with it's not very good at coming up with novel new ideas if it hasn't seen it yet. Um, and that's what I sort of talk about as like context. It's like in your head, uh, you know, like in our in our head, we have some vision or some idea of like where this stuff's gonna go and what we need to build. The AI is not gonna be able to do that, but if we tell the AI like, hey, like can you do, can you look at this or can you make this tweak to that's like something novel, it's actually like really good at implementing those things. And so for us, like I think the delta, the build building an AMM or building an issuance protocol is like very unique, difficult context to generate. The code about how Solana, the code like writing it in Rust or writing it in Solidity is kind of an implementation detail now. It used to not be. I think it used to be like, you know, there were companies made on their ability to write this code, and there still will be, you know, like there's like a gonna be security and all that stuff that still exists. But to me, this is going to increasingly not become important. It's like, you know, if you have some unique idea, you're gonna put it everywhere because that's where the customers are, and you're gonna have AI and uh you know, really smart people dealing with all of sort of like the implementation details instead. Uh like what used to be an implementation. It's now coding is an implementation detail, which is not how it used to be for sure.

SPEAKER_01 27:06

The mode of the technology becomes much less and it becomes more about speed and execution.

SPEAKER_00 27:10

And new ideas, I think. I think people like that's always to me the thing about AI is like if you don't have good ideas, it ain't gonna help you. You know, you're like uh you can't be like make a novel protocol, please. It has no idea what novel means. It doesn't really know that. But if you say like, hey, I have this like 12 ideas, are they good or not? It's actually pretty good at that. Uh that's where I think it's like execution and ideas. It's just like sort of like where is it gonna go? And more of a predictive thing on a longer term period rather than like actual code execution.

SPEAKER_01 27:44

Yeah, it doesn't matter if you uh vibe coded a bad idea, it's still a bad idea. Yeah, it's true.

SPEAKER_00 27:49

Slop in, slop out, you know.

SPEAKER_01 27:51

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Awesome. I want to uh before we end, I want to do a quick quick fire uh where I ask a series of fast questions and you give me your you know first takeout response. Uh the first is uh what asset do you wish was tokenized today but hasn't been?

SPEAKER_00 28:07

Uh that's a good one. I think the thing that I'm most excited about, I think we're starting to see this emergence of this, but it really just is like single solo man companies are you know, or like small companies that like would previously be a pre-seed or a series A or sorry, a pre-seed or a seed series company, and then having those sort of take off. I think that you know, people always talk about the solo, the one-man unicorn. I'm so bullish on that. I don't know, I don't think it's gonna come up in the next year or so, but I think it eventually is going to probably happen. And that is just in it's insane to think about that. Like you just never could do that in IPO that way. Like, you would need at least a legal team to have that. And so I think like the thing I'm most excited about, or I want to see the growth of is more small experimental companies that you just try some shit, and if it fails, yeah, you just kill it and you move on to the next thing. And it it we sort of have these capital markets for experimentation. We don't really have that today. We have capital markets for the end piece, but we don't have capital markets for experimentation. So to me, that's what I'm most excited about is uh like micro companies uh that I think are pretty pretty novel pushing these things forward. We see a lot of these are just not really they haven't hit a critical mass yet.

SPEAKER_01 29:27

And I hear you, it's definitely easier to do that, easier as the the solo entrepreneur, solo unicorn. It is easier to do that on-chain than it is to go through like a traditional IPO process. Second question, uh, what's one piece of advice that you would give to uh other founders who are just starting their founder journey?

SPEAKER_00 29:44

Everything always seems more obvious to you than it is to everybody else. I had to like teach myself that one a lot. Is like, yeah, you have it in your head, but like they're and like you think it's obvious that like what you should do to everybody else, it's really not. And so like you need to like tell these people what to do. I think the other thing is making sure that like you have a team around you that is like really high quality and is really mission-driven. I think is something that I really looked for. Was like every single person I hired, I was like, Do you like like what we're doing? Because to me, like those are the people who go, you know, they have this novel idea and they push these things forward. I always joke that like my job as a founder, this is not true, obviously, but like it's like having one good thought a month. Like, if I have one really bang and thought a month, like I will be probably fine. Uh, that's not entirely true, but I think like you all you want to have like that day, you want to have a lot of this ownership down through your stack where like everyone is one bang and thought a month away. Uh, and you always want to be like rolling those things up because like you, you're fan, you're you know, like I can't think about all the stuff that the company's doing, it's just too much. And it's just easier to have to like delegate these things and trusting these people who you're delegating to is actually extremely important. And keeping those people around is also very important. There's a lot of context they have, and like you know, people are people, companies are a collection of people. I think like we get on like this like money ball, like I can replace anyone. It's like, you know, you can't really, like, you it's that's kind of fake. Like, that's uh morale and things like that are much more important than they seem.

SPEAKER_01 31:14

Talent is always an edge. And then the final question: what's something that you've changed your mind on in the past year?

SPEAKER_00 31:20

Man, I've been crazy the past year. I've been cooking, so I don't I think I was the L2 experience. I'm trying to think about like things I've definitely changed. I don't know if it's the number one thing. I I changed my mind on L2s a lot. Uh, I was really bullish on them. I'm kind of like bearish on them again. I would say I don't necessarily know the most impactful thing that I've changed my mind on. I thought this was gonna I thought like this IPO stuff was gonna happen a lot quicker than I did. Like that was just so obvious it was gonna like this is back to my original point for what it's worth. Like I was like, oh, we're gonna do IPOs in like six months or something. And like that was crazy. It was ever gonna happen. But I think like to me, that I think is pretty impactful. I think we've also sort of seen a push back on like we've sort of seen like revenue hit the idea maze wall. So like we've seen like these two competing, you know, people in crypto where like one is like moonshot only crazy ideas and these rev sort of people, they sort of like hit each other really difficultly. And it's been, you know, these two people, these two camps are trying to hash it out live. And I think uh the I don't know, I've changed my mind a little bit. Like, like I I gotta service the revenue people too. Like, I think they're probably right in some sense that like that is a necessary thing to real companies, but I think that we've also abandoned a lot of like you know, crypto is a moonshot protocol, it's a moonshot thing, like AI is too. It's like new technology always is a moonshot, and like to intentionally harden yourself to like revenue, I think is kind of silly. But I I I I I think I understand what they're talking about, but I would also encourage people like uh you're building a moonshot, you know, as a startup. You're not like I'm gonna make 10% a year or something, uh, and I'm gonna give them all this money.

SPEAKER_01 33:07

It's like yeah, big I big ideas only.

SPEAKER_00 33:09

Yeah, get cooking, man. Get get back in the the idea minds and bring some good ones up, please.

SPEAKER_01 33:15

Uh Austin, thank you so much for joining. Where can people uh find you or more about Doppler?

SPEAKER_00 33:19

Yeah, I'm A Adams on Twitter. I insistently rant on there, uh less so these days than I used to. And then uh Doppler is Doppler.lol. Oh, we love talking to founders building new types of markets or trying to sort of go or to go public with the mar the assets they already have. Um, we have like extreme customization sort of on every single step, and we think that like you can build the market that you want pretty easily uh and be pretty novel. So if you're trying to issue tokens or you're trying to make a new market, like you know, hit me up, hit up the contact form, hit up Doppler in general, and uh yeah, go use our app. That's always gotta shield my own app, gotta do it.

SPEAKER_01 34:02

Thank you, Austin, so much for joining. Uh for all the listeners, uh, thank you for listening to Stayful Pantar Podcasts. Please like, subscribe, and share, and catch us on the next episode.