My journey into crypto has been a weird one. For some strange reason I’ve decided to spend my entire Tet (Lunar New Year) holidays to deep dive into this thing called “blockchain and crypto”. Before that, i have heard these terms thrown around often but never took it quite seriously enough to learn what it is about. And those two weeks went by quick, almost too quick. I was instantly hooked by the fascinating technology, the philosophy of decentralization, the complexity of the underlying technology, the myriads of different school of thoughts of what is the “correct” and right way in the dark and muddy world that is crypto.
Luckily though, I have some friends in the space that have been here longer than I have, reaching out to them was a blessing in disguise and little did I know, some of them would turn out to be my advisor, founding members and partners down the road.
As with anything, I believe if you start out with the pure desire to learn, and seek the right teachers, you will receive abundant knowledge. It is then up to you what you choose to do with those knowledge. So for me, i decided to devote my entire time after my day job to venture down this beautiful and alluring rabbit hole that is crypto.
80 hours work week
Just keeping up with this space requires a great deal of focus and dedication of time. There’s this whole new world that is crypto-twitter that I did not know about and was fascinated by it. On it, you’ll find all sorts of diamonds in the roughs, or just worthless rocks (or very expensive jpeg rocks) depending on your luck.
I started out with a great list of Twitter handles that a dear friend recommended to me, along with a list of podcasts and substacks from thought leaders in the space. Those were amazing, from these materials, and further research on my own, form the foundation of which I built my blockchain knowledge on. I would highly recommend anyone new to blockchain to do the same. You cannot hope to keep up with this space without doing this.
In order to do all of this and still manage the keep pace with my day job, I essentially started to change my work habits from what was previously a 48 hours work week to now an 80 hours work week for the past 5 months. Ho Chị Minh Covid quarantine allows me to be stuck at home working without the need to actively go out and socialize (a very valid reason to lock yourself up and immerse into something new). A big caveat is that a lot of family time was sacrificed due to this, I’m extremely lucky to have an understanding wife who allows me to spend as much time as I need glued to the desk in order to get this fledging idea of the ground. Could not have done it without her.
Finally, I believe not many thing in life is unlearnable, you just have got to devote an insane amount of time and willpower to it. There will always be teachers for the eager students. You just have to start and relentlessly keep going.
Put your ♥️ in the right place
With crypto and web3, there seems to be two big pillars of allure. One is definitely money, the promise of “making it” in a short amount of time. The ability to grow your net worth 100x with the right bets, and I use the word bets very intentionally here, as with most things in crypto are simply bets due to the asymmetry nature of information.
The other one, I would argue to be the philosophical allure of “decentralization” and how web3 will bring forth the next renaissance in humanity’s progress. Now web3 and its implication deserves another whole blog post with a more knowledgeable author. But from the little time that I’ve spend in this space, it is simply the transition from web2 where the big corps capture the most value from society through the centralization of assets, of distributions and of innovation to web3, where the value creation is now being decentralized and everybody who contributes to it, in whatever shape of form, will own a part of their contribution and benefit from it. It is precisely this incentive alignment across multiple stakeholders in the the chain of value creation that makes web3 so immensely more powerful and world changing in the right hands and dangerous in the wrong ones.
As for me, I’ll have to be honest and say I started out with both attraction in mind, however the longer i spent my time here, the more I’m a big believer in the power of web3 and what it means for society in general, and how it will be an unstoppable movement that we cannot afford to be outside of it.
Timing is everything
So by now, those who manage to read this long, have probably realized all the nonsense i wrote above has nothing to do with this funding round announcement and why I started Sipher, and you are not too wrong. However, I felt like all the above has to be said in order for me to share my next point, which is the fact that I’m simply one lucky son of a guy. Let me tell you why.
There has never been more capital available to fund technology companies than now.
There has never been a better time for crypto adoption than now.
There has never been a better time for founders to choose which dedicated investors they would like to partner with for the long haul than now.
There has never been a better time to attract amazing worldwide talents to work for ambitious, world changing startups than now.
There has never been a successful startup story like Axie Infinity until now.
There has never been such a better time to be a blockchain founder until now.
And that’s pretty much why we, Sipher, managed to successfully raised this Seed Round in the span of one month. Some would even argue that 1 month is too long in crypto! There’s simply no secret sauce, just pure luck by doing the right thing at the right time!
With that said, I’m so honored to welcome an all -star cast of Venture Funds who are extremely dedicated on backing ambitious founders in web3 and gaming. I’m really excited and very much looking forward to be working with them.
As for why I decided to start Sipher, you can read the previous blog post of mine here.
Team makes all the difference
Finally, all of these amazing progress that we have made thus far would not have happened if not for the amazing supporters and team members of Sipher. Again, I’ve been so lucky to meet all the right people, from all different disciplines to arrive at this point today. Started from a tiny idea with a tiny team, we have grown to be 60+ people company and growing. It has been an incredible growth journey and I could not have done it without the tireless contribution from every single members of the team.
All the late night oils that we burned, all the 10pm – 12am google meets and of course all the Saturday all hands meeting. I expect we will continue to have more of that for the foreseeable future as Sipher is very much a startup company in its infancy, but boy am i glad that I have this amazing group of people here alongside me.
So here’s to you, a massive thank you to the team, let’s take a holiday to celebrate this milestone when we can afford it (the time). For now, let’s keep building, for we have an entire Sipher-verse to build for.
If reading all this makes you feel like joining Sipher is a worthy consideration, we would love to hear from you. We are hiring all the best engineers, 3D and 2D artists, animators and content marketers all around the world. Please drop me a private message on Twitter (@AskTinNguyen) or join our amazing community on Discord and chat to our team. we would love to build amazing things with you.
Or you can always visit https://t.ly/sipherjoinus for the latest and greatest news about opportunities worldwide at Sipher.
Thank you, and I’ll see you all in Sipheria.