Crypto Business Banking and Long-Term Blockchain Applications with Grace Guo of Domo and Mitchell Baldridge
Let’s talk business on the blockchain. (Yes, the future is still bright for crypto! Hold tight. We play the long game around here.)
Today, we are exploring Domo . Domo is a startup providing business banking to crypto teams. Their tools and dashboard make managing a business from a wallet even easier than a bank account.
Grace Guo , Domo’s CEO and cofounder, joins me to explore how businesses can operate on the blockchain now and in the future.
And perhaps you remember previous podcast guest Mitchell Baldridge . Our CFP + CPA + degen friend comes along for the ride, lending his accounting and crypto knowledge to help us better understand the intersection of business and blockchain.
Links to Platforms:
Here’s what I learned from the episode:
Before starting Domo, Grace was working for a venture studio. It was there that she realized a need for a serious crypto-friendly professional tools.
(This is a test way to start companies since they immediately funded Domo)
Domo offers business banking, financial operations, payroll, expenses, all the functions on the operation side of a business via the blockchain.
Domo is a sort of interface that resembles how you’d interact with a fiat bank account, but manages funds in wallets rather than bank accounts.
Productizing the experience of blockchain usage is a huge opportunity.
There are two main types of user personas: founders and cofounders of projects… and their accountants.
We are already starting to see “normal” businesses start to use the blockchain… Long way to go.
Sol, the other cofounder of Domo, is crazy in the best way possible. He is an entrepreneur, developer, AND lawyer. Clutch.
Grace predicts that in 50 years, 90% of payments will run on the blockchain without people even knowing. (Kind of like how most people hop on the web, but don’t know what’s going on with HTTP.)
Different chains have tradeoffs. There’s a trilemma between decentralization, security, and scalability.
Fun sidenote: Grace also is an Athena client. Athena (provides executive assistant services) is one of the sponsors of the podcast, and we had the CEO and COO on the pod previously. Grace’s EA was the company’s first hire.
This episode is sponsored by Athena.
Athena is a company completely dedicated to providing top-caliber executive assistants from the Philippines. I had a conversation with Athena’s CEO and CCO in episode 38 of this podcast.
If you’re interested in joining Athena:
Click here: AthenaGo.Com and complete the survey to sign up.
There’s often a waitlist to get matched with EAs, so plan ahead and sign up now, today – no commitment required.
Learn more about Grace Guo
Learn more about Mitchell Baldridge
Additional episodes if you enjoyed:
Growing Podcasts, Bookkeeping Biz, and Creator-Led Companies with David Senra and Mitchell Baldridge
Defeating Taxes, Crypto Taxes, and Financial Planning with Mitchell Baldridge
Jason Hitchcock: Your Guide to Web3 (DeFi, NFTs, and The Metaverse)
Episode Transcript:
Eric Jorgenson: Hello again and welcome. I am Eric Jorgenson, and I don't know much, I put my pants on one pair at a time, like anybody else, but I have some very smart friends. And if you listen to this podcast, then no matter who, where, or when you are, you do too. This show explores technology, investing, and entrepreneurship to help you and the rest of humanity build a brighter more abundant future. This podcast is one of a few of my projects. To read my book, blog, or newsletter, or invest alongside us in early-stage tech companies, please visit ejorgenson.com. Today my guest is Grace Guo. She is the CEO and cofounder of Domo which provides business banking for crypto teams. Previously she was the COO and cofounder of a few projects in crypto and before that an analyst at Goldman Sachs. And in this episode, we talk about how businesses can operate on the blockchain now and in the future. I actually pulled in my friend and previous podcast guest Mitchell Baldridge to join the conversation. He's the perfect person for this. He has run an NFT project. He currently runs an accounting firm. And we explore all kinds of stuff. We talk about the blockchain space over the long run. We talk about businesses and interactions and financial regulations that sort of govern the adoption of these things. And it's a very interesting broad look. If you are operating a business, if you operate in crypto especially, if you're in the finance sector, you work in accounting, I think there will be something interesting in here for you in thinking about how this industry is going to evolve and the capabilities that are going to happen and the tools that are getting built to help your job become easier. Before we get to our conversation, I want to highlight a sponsor we mention in our conversation. And that is Athena.
Athena makes this possible. They hire, train, and match you with a full-time executive assistant who is based in the Philippines. Then they provide guidance and accountability to be sure you and your EA have a successful relationship together. I love how the team at Athena obsesses over how to best create leverage for their clients. And they have a bunch of different pieces of their secret sauce. One is an incredibly high bar for hiring. They get thousands of applications every week for just a handful of spots, and they know how to pick great people, and they nurture, train the EAs in the tools and processes and playbooks, and they train you how to work with an EA well. You know I love a good form of leverage and this is one that I personally use, enjoy, and stand behind. Getting full-time dedicated help was easier than I ever thought it would be with Athena. So open your browser, type in athenago.com, and sign up. There is often a waitlist to get matched with EAs, so plan ahead and sign up now, today. There is no commitment required when you do that, and you will learn something just by going through the quick application. And if you just want to learn more about how to use an EA, some of the playbooks I mentioned that experts use, and how to start investing in the corporation of you, check out my episode with Athena’s CEO and COO. It is episode number 38. It is overflowing with valuable ideas. It has always been one of our most popular episodes and people love it. It is a very unique set of insights about the world. Once more, athenago.com. And please be sure to list me, Eric Jorgenson, as your refer.
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All right, welcome, Grace, to the podcast, welcome back, Mitchell. I had to bring Mitchell to this since he’s the friend with crypto and accounting experience, and I got a C barely in accounting. So if we have any hope of understanding this company and everything that Grace is going to teach us, I’m going to need your help.
Mitchell Baldridge: I am here to help the best I can.
Eric Jorgenson: Thank you. And Grace, we chatted a few times. I met you through the Athena network, so we can get into that if we want, but we clearly have a shared passion for leverage and delegation and excitement. And I know the first hire of your startup was from Athena but this is not about that. This is about you. My favorite opening question is who are your heroes?
Grace Guo: This is a good question. I actually spent a lot of time thinking about this one because I was like there's honestly so many people that I admire and in all different facets of life. I think if I were to narrow it down to let’s say like three people that I really, really look up to, one is my friend Kathy. She actually was one of the co-founders of the first crypto startup that I ever worked at a couple of years ago. And I kind of took this leap of faith to join her on this crazy adventure.
Eric Jorgenson: What was that?
Grace Guo: It was called Dunya Labs, and we were building tooling and infrastructure for EOS, if you guys remember that one. And it was really interesting because it was a super early industry, we were all really young, this was our first startup. And we did have an actual product and we did have actual customers and actual revenue, but we just mistimed the market way too early and maybe in hindsight bet on the wrong chain. So I went on this crazy adventure with her where we were building the company actually in Bangalore. And basically, I can think of my life as before that and after that. So that's one. I don't know if you guys are familiar with John Green or Hank Green, I'm obsessed with them as well. They do a lot of great content on YouTube. They have this thing called Crash Course History, Crash Course Philosophy, Crash Course Chemistry, tons of really, really fun videos to binge-watch there and also incredible writers. And then lastly Emma Watson. So those are my three heroes.
Eric Jorgenson: I love Emma Watson. I like almost, almost went to Brown and found out later that's when Emma Watson would have been there. And I’m like fuck, I should have gone to Brown. I could have been best friends with Emma Watson and my whole life would be different. She's awesome. That's very, very exciting. Mitchell, have you answered that question? Also, I think it’s so funny, it is such a massive conscientiousness test, most people don't bother asking for questions before they come on the podcast. And Grace was like can you please send me the questions ahead of time? I'd like to contemplate and get organized and do two prep calls. I was like sure, whatever you want. Most people are just like I'll just show up and whatever happens happens. So very conscientious.
Mitchell Baldridge: That's where I would be.
Eric Jorgenson: That’s where you have been multiple times. I can call you in the morning and be like Mitchell, 20 minutes podcast, let’s go, and you’re like okay.
Mitchell Baldridge: It's a remarkably high variance, but it can be great, it can crash and burn.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, two sides of different coins. Where, Grace, did you first sort of see the need for Domo? Where did you encounter the problem that led to starting this company?
Grace Guo: Yeah, so my background is actually in finance and accounting. That is what I studied in school. In my career, I've been fortunate to be able to find different opportunities to manage different areas of a business, which is I think what led me to being pulled into joining a crypto venture studio in 2021. They kind of brought me on board as the founding COO, and it was right at the beginning of the company so I was being pulled in to set up the entities and help set up all the financial infrastructure and operations stack for the venture studio as well as for some of the portfolio companies that we were already working with at this time. And so it was kind of like everything that was business, quote unquote, was on my shoulders – legal, accounting, finance, operations, compliance, taxes, all those things. And I was really just living it day in and day out. This was 99% of what I did. And what I found was that for each of the companies that I was working with, they had a foot in the fiat world or the cash world, and they also had a foot in the crypto world in terms of how they were even running the companies. So it was pretty standard to set up the fiat stack. You get a bank account and then you get Justworks or Gusto and you get Expensify. It's all pretty straightforward. You get QuickBooks. On the crypto side, things were the complete opposite. It was not straightforward at all, and it was very difficult to find out what solutions people could even use to do that. So I struggled with just using the very rudimentary tools that were available at the time, Google Spreadsheets and just basic wallets. And I started asking around other people in the space who are also crypto operators just wondering was I missing something. I'm new to this, maybe I'm still getting up to speed, I'm just learning the ropes. And through those conversations that I had, I realized everyone was doing the same thing that I was doing which was basically building the same Google Sheet in different ways and using the same rudimentary tools. So I started to realize through that that if we wanted serious businesses to be built and we wanted serious companies to be built, we needed serious professional tools to be able to support that.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it's such an interesting- the co-evolution of tools and industry I think is really interesting and we'll see it in crypto. It will be interesting to see how much has to get rebuilt in crypto.
Mitchell Baldridge: And I think the interesting thing, and Grace and I had the chance to catch up a couple days ago and jam, and I was like let's just- we got to save it for the pod. We got too far along too quickly. But yeah, I ran into the exact same problem in working with a big NFT project on Solana that these five guys had started up this NFT project and they were making great revenue, and they had all the kind of pieces of a real business and really had no accounting stack because they just didn't know how to do it. And Grace, I was about to go do the same thing. Go hey, let's get someone to code some kind of script that will rip all the transactions into a Google Sheet and foreign exchange them to USD. The fact that everyone has to start from like level 0 principles of I am going to reinvent an accounting system is a lot of- rhymes a lot with a lot of the web 1.0 problems or like the Jeff Bezos does this make your beer taste better? No, we are reinventing accounting when we should be making a real product.
Grace Guo: Yeah totally. And I think the other difficult part about this is that in the early days of this industry, a lot of the founders and entrepreneurs that are working in the space don't necessarily come from a formal operating background. And so maybe they are a little bit familiar with accounting, maybe a little bit familiar with finances, but something we found very often when we were speaking to these teams is that there's always- they were trying to track the information but they weren't always sure what information exactly they needed to track. And so inevitably, at the end of the year or when they did start to work with accountants, they had to go all the way back to the beginning and figure out, wait, okay, I totally missed this column, where are the block explorer links for this, what was the US dollar value of this token at that time of the transaction, and there's all these different pieces that I think if you don't come from that type of background, you just don't know to think about, and it ends up really coming back to bite you later on.
Mitchell Baldridge: Like I was supposed to withhold taxes? Really? The whole time?
Eric Jorgenson: But all the crypto money is gone.
Mitchell Baldridge: But I’m poor.
Eric Jorgenson: So let me see if I can summarize Domo sufficiently for you. I'm looking at the homepage now, and it's basically business banking, financial operations, payroll, expenses, all of the functions that you need on sort of the operation side of a business with a blockchain background, like assuming a wallet is your bank account instead of a fiat bank account. Correct?
Grace Guo: Yeah, that’s right.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay, so it would replace- If we're doing an analogy between fiat stack, crypto stack, instead of a bank account, you have a wallet, instead of Gusto and QuickBooks, you have Domo.
Grace Guo: I would say it's probably more akin to the kind of first example that you gave where what we are I think enabling people to do is to have as many, quote, bank accounts as they want in the form of self custody wallets. So a lot of the teams we've spoken to, they often have on average about 5 wallets, and these wallets can be on multiple chains and these wallets could be in different formats. And what we are providing through Domo is this kind of interface that allows you to feel as if you are interacting with a bank account, and it feels like it's a banking experience. But you can actually take all of your different, quote, bank accounts, which in this case are actually wallets, and connect them and that is now your banking interface.
Eric Jorgenson: You still sort of have a normal-ish interface for understanding it the same way you would understand a business’s financials and inflows and outgoes, and then you can- you are set up well for taxes and financial statements and stuff.
Grace Guo: Right, exactly. Because you are basically very confident that we are pulling in all of the asset information about your crypto, all the transactional information about your crypto, and this interface that we've built out makes it so that it’s very easy for you to go in and contextualize those transactions. Some of the questions we hear very often are like, hey this thing from six months ago, I have no idea why I did this, I don’t remember what it was for, I don’t remember who it was to. Now what do we do? And so it's kind of a way to encourage people to make sure that they are keeping accurate and complete records of what they're doing along the way and not making it feel like homework, not making it feel like a chore. So I think that's really the biggest benefit for both business teams as well as accountants who maybe eventually are looking at this information because it's like oh it is already there, I don't need to ask a bazillion questions. And now that I have this very clean data set that I'm able to extract out of Domo, I can then take this and plug it into QuickBooks, plug it into my accounting software which is purpose built for accounting to then do the additional transformations that I need. If we go back to that business banking experience analogy, like you mentioned, some of the other things we help our teams do is make payments on chain, very similar to how in a bank account you would be able to send an ACH or a wire in a way that feels very easy because you're using the banking interface. It is very similar for us. You've connected your wallets, and we give you a safe way to kind of interact with crypto payments. So there is kind of error checks that make sure you're feeling in the address properly and it's on the correct chain and you're not missing any letters and this and that and a few other different kind of guard rails let's say. But we do also offer kind of the ability for people to make payments in crypto more confidently.
Mitchell Baldridge: I logged in and was playing around with the product, and one cool thing was you can add your Mercury account, that they've integrated very well with Mercury. And so this would be almost hey, I'm running this company and I have this Mercury account that's like one of my chains, but it's almost secondary to I operate day to day in crypto and I have this kind of savings account off to the side that's in fiat. But then, Grace, you said at the beginning, well we know how to do this. We have Justworks or Gusto and we have Mercury and we have Expensify and we have- Mercury doesn't really do everything. They have crypto company- or they have companies out there who are the Justworks for crypto that you can then start to like build together with. Or how are you thinking about that?
Grace Guo: Yeah, for sure. I think this is an area where the problem space is so huge and there are many different areas where if you focus on just that subset of the problem, that's either like an industry or an entire business in and of itself with its own level of complexity. So I think for us, the way we are kind of thinking about it is we are really excited to focus on the collaborative aspects of being the business interface for people to kind of interact with their transactions. And where there are opportunities to partner with people who are specialized in certain areas, like for example, QuickBooks is specialized accounting software, we think that makes a lot of sense and allows people to be a little bit more perhaps defined about what tool is used for what thing. So yeah, I think there's a lot of opportunities to play around with integrations as we figure out how this industry of evolves.
Eric Jorgenson: The thing you said about sending payments is interesting. I was in a DAO, I guess I still am, I don't know how you leave a DAO. I am still in the Discord so I guess I am still in the DAO. The Index Coop that was like paying people, dozens of people every week based on a ton of different variables. And there’s spreadsheets and spreadsheets and copy pasting of addresses constantly. So I think there's a huge- for crypto to fulfill some of the visions people have around streaming payments or highly variable consistent compensation, incentive alignment, the sending of payments is huge and critical, and to your point, you need to account for all of that. You need to organize it. You need to know who it's going to and why. So when you show up at Mitchell’s doorstep with all of your block explorers and accounting statements at the end of the year that look like Swiss cheese, he doesn't kill you and send you to a different CPA. Or if you get audited, you don’t get audited into oblivion.
Grace Guo: Yeah, I know those can be nightmares as well.
Eric Jorgenson: I feel like we've only begun to hear the nightmares in that story or of that type.
Mitchell Baldridge: Yeah, there is so much- again, just going back to the accountant at the end of the year who is doing your taxes just is like give me your books and let’s get your tax return done. And then crypto going back to like before first principles, just like 0 with principles, you have this person who goes, I know at the beginning of the year, I had $50,000. I know today I have $250,000. And I have no idea how I got there. You know what I mean? Between wormholes and bridges and chains and blah blah blah blah blah. To institutionalize this experience is going to be a massive opportunity and a huge jump. Talking to people who are real accountants and kind of real institutional crypto, they have 250 wallets, and they have to keep everything straight. And they need better tools than the tools on the market today.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, Grace, who's kind of the first customer for this? Is this DAOs, is this individual businesses that are sort of run by people that are in the crypto space? What are you seeing so far?
Grace Guo: Yeah, I would say when we first started speaking to teams, this message resonated a lot with two main types of user personas, let’s say. Number one is the cofounder or the founder of a project where, again, they maybe don't come from a formal operations background, but they are trying to run a business, they are trying to run their startup in a way where they can kind of report back to investors and say yeah, we've got everything under control, we are managing our burn well, here’s maybe some high level financials. So that's one persona, the kind of cofounder or founder of a project. Maybe if the project is slightly larger, they have a dedicated operations manager or head of operations. And then on the other side, definitely accountants.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay, when you say a project, is that kind of like what Mitchell described as like an NFT project or a DAO or some crypto tool where people are earning in crypto? What falls under the umbrella of projects?
Grace Guo: So for us, I would say it is a team or group of people that is seeking to build or run a business in some way on crypto using digital assets. So yes, this could be a DAO, yes, this could be a VC funded crypto start up, yes, this could be an NFT project. I think it is really any group of people that happens to run all or some of their operations on chain. In terms of who we are kind of focusing on as a target customer at this time, I think it's really more narrowed down to project founders and operations leads as well as accountants.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay. Yeah, I imagine you get calls from accountants. I can't imagine how many accountants this year just got a call from somebody who started something new and is, like good news, bad news. I made some money. It's in a wallet. That's all the information I have. Can you please account for me? And I don’t even know. Mitchell, where do you even start with that?
Mitchell Baldridge: Well, yeah, you start by going, hey, let's get a Google Sheet. Let's list every public wallet you've ever had in the history of your whole life that you can remember. And then, to your point, Grace, you're filling in gaps. You are like where did $50,000 go? And they're like, oh, I don't know. So yeah, there are consumer tools out there that we've used, Coinly and Zenledger and Token Tax that kind of are designed to aggregate all of these transactions into one so that hopefully you can do your taxes. That's one problem that frankly a lot more people have than Grace’s problem. But Grace’s problem is a growing problem of we are a crypto first business that has a crypto element to our financial operations and we have no treasury management or our treasury management is some script that some dude on Upwork wrote that dumps into a Google Doc that breaks every few days. And that's supported by a bunch of [inaudible 26:00]. That's one way to run a business, but there are enough businesses out there now, and like Grace and I were talking, like tools are easy enough to make that somebody gets to come in and make a tool that solves what today is a pretty niche problem but is a growing problem.
Eric Jorgenson: And going to continue and continue to grow not just the scale of the number of businesses that are already sort of in the crypto space because they are selling something inherently crypto but the number of businesses that I think- I'm really curious to hear both of your takes about when we will see, when the tools basically get easy enough we will see, quote unquote, normal fiat businesses adopt a crypto path because it's easy enough and people want to pay their plumber through their wallet in ETH or stable or something like that rather than- Is that the future you envision with Domo, Grace, sort of enabling that to be another Channel?
Grace Guo: Yeah, 100%. And I would say that future is already here, and we see this already happening with, quote, normal businesses. So if you think about security auditing firms, they are working in the crypto industry but the service they are providing is really around code audits and going in and looking at code. So they're not necessarily creating a crypto token themselves, unless they decide to take that on as a separate project. But they are providing services and they are being paid in crypto, in tokens, in stable coins. And their whole business is taking money in in this way. And there's also some law firms out there now that accept crypto or stable coin as a form of payment. I think what's really fascinating to me about this is that you are already seeing, quote, traditional businesses today interacting with crypto in a very meaningful way because they're essentially earning their livelihood in crypto, in this new technology. And there have been a few other businesses that we have spoken to that might have international presence whether their vendors are in a different country or their customers are in a different country and they've kind of recognized the value of being able to very easily send and receive value via crypto compared to the systems they have to deal with today where it could take up, anecdotally, to 17 days for a company to get money from France to the US. And that's wild for a business that’s trying to manage their cash flow.
Eric Jorgenson: Just get on the plane with a bag of cash. That's insane.
Grace Guo: Yeah, exactly. I do think we're already starting to see these businesses do this today and I do think this trend is going to continue where, as more and more people, as more and more businesses interact with crypto, I think there is a little bit maybe on both sides, a bit of education and also improving the user experience and the onboarding experience. But at some point, there's going to be kind of this wave that can't really be stopped because there's this natural gravity that people have towards solutions that are more convenient and that do the thing they're trying to do more conveniently. And I think crypto and blockchain or just digital assets, we can call them, present a solution that make it a lot more convenient for people to handle payments.
Mitchell Baldridge: I think two real world examples we've seen just play out over the past 15 years are Venmo that turned into CashApp that turned into Zelle of making peer to peer payments really, really easy and then spurring like these cottage industries of Facebook Marketplace and moms and boyfriends and girlfriends and all these people just sending money all over to themselves. Like go into your Venmo feed and just watch what's happening in the world. And then the other big one, which I've talked about before, I think Apple pay for crypto is going to be humongous of I can tap the side of my phone twice and pay at a register with crypto. That unlocks the universe of crypto and that’s, to Grace’s point, it is not a technical challenge today. It is a technical challenge that has been overcome. It's I think a regulatory issue of how are you going to- how is the government going to tag and manage all- because you can send money to France or anywhere in the world very, very quickly via crypto today. The question of whether you can send it legally quickly is another question or are you compliant by taking that action, and the bank is not there to save you and nobody is there to check, to Grace’s point. And tools like that will start to be built on top of platforms like Domo of just like hey, what do you think, where is this going?
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. The regulatory compliance is huge. The utility, like being able to see and understand which is exactly the problem that Domo is addressing from the business side, making it accessible. I talked to Zack- I did a whole episode with Zack Pettit on this, recapping the biggest fintech conference in the world and it is just incredibly insane how complicated fintech is, like the layers of dependencies and things that all need to feed into each other are so, so wild. And I think in part because of the regulation, in part because the banks already sort of own that relationship. One vision into the future is like we all have crypto wallets but it is basically inside of our bank’s app that we already have. And I think that is a vision Domo fits into incredibly well and enables. It’s like just help me wrap my head around what is an increasingly complex array of contraction types and frequencies and it has helped me understand the underlying the thing that is happening and help my account interact with it and help the government interact with it and whoever else needs to understand it. I don't know, it's like a block explorer for your individual little world, set of worlds that your accountant could also use.
Mitchell Baldridge: Domo can create an invoicing module that you can send somebody an invoice, and they can choose to pay either through Fiat or through ETH or Sol wallet or whatever and that can be sorted out in Domo. Or yeah, Stripe is going to go start to let you add an ETH wallet inside of Stripe or JP Morgan or Mercury is going to allow you to do that. They are both going to happen at the same time.
Eric Jorgenson: Is that one of the biggest features, Grace, the invoicing?
Grace Guo: That is something that I would say we are kind of experimenting with still right not. I think invoicing generally is a pretty critical and vital part of a business’s activities, so we do have some prototypes built out for that and we have some teams in our private alpha that are currently using that and giving us feedback. So yeah, I think for us, we are really focused on creating a really, really great user experience for all of the things that might be constituted as basic business activities, so invoicing definitely plays part in that.
Eric Jorgenson: Will you talk about sort of the starting conditions of the company? Like where'd you meet your co-founders, how did you raise initial capital? You came out of a venture studio. Did that make the whole process easier?
Grace Guo: Yeah, so we have I think an interesting story because Saul who is my co-founder, he's also my chief product officer and general counsel, he and I met before the venture studio. So we met at a company that he co-founded previously, and that company is called Concertiv. That company is a business that is built on managing spend and large corporate contracts for like boutique investment banks and private equity firms and law firms so you can think like giant corporate travel contracts or market data contracts, insurance policies that you're placing every year. And our customer point of contacts in this business were the CFOs, the COOs, the GCs, the ops managers of each of those professional services firms. So it was kind of a place where we were able to get really familiar with the guts of a company and were able to see all of the different things that go on behind the scenes of these various businesses. And so at company, he was co-founder and CTO and general counsel. And I joined as an employee, maybe number 15 or so, first in business development before becoming the company's first product manager. So we were able to overlap and work together quite a bit while I was there – small company, CTO product manager, there's a lot that we do together there. And so, we had a really great time working together there. I think we really started to understand each other's working styles, just had a lot of fun brainstorming, and I kind of realized that he was someone I really wanted to stay in touch with. I don't know if you guys know anyone, but I've never met anyone who is an entrepreneur and a developer and a lawyer. So I was like this guy is crazy in the best way possible. So I was like yeah, I have to stay in touch with this guy. Saul exited after a short time of us being together at this company, and then I ended up leaving Concertiv a little while later, in 2021, to join that venture studio. So Saul and I reconnected and we were like hey what's going on, let's catch up. At that time, I learned that Saul had just developed another really rare skill set which was being a crypto degen. And he had got really deep into the crypto rabbit hole, like he was contributing to Yearn, he was involved in Lex DAO, he was yield farming, he was staking. And I was like whoa, that's great, that's awesome, that's super cool. So I decided to introduce him to the co-founders of the venture studio because we were building in crypto and defi. And Saul kind of started exploring ideas there as an entrepreneur in residence, or EIR. And I was super happy because I was still full time with the venture studio, but we had an opportunity to jam again and brainstorm. So, we would each share what we were seeing day to day. Saul would pick my brain on what I was experiencing in my role, and we realized that I was dealing with a lot of problems while trying to run all these cryptic companies and that other people felt similarly. So basically after that, we were like, you know what, it feels really good to work together again, and in 2022, we decided we were going to go all in on this. So Saul and I became co-founders and I transitioned out of the venture studio, and they invested in us as kind of a first check as an incubator/YC style.
Eric Jorgenson: Very cool. Did you try to raise capital beyond that, or did you not need to for getting started?
Grace Guo: Yeah, I think we had considered the idea of raising a couple of times last year just because especially in the first half of the year, I think the market environment was good and there were a lot of teams that were going out there and pitching ideas. And so, we kind of consider going out there and doing the same thing. I think for us, one, the market changed quickly, and number two, I think we were still very early on in our interpretation of how we were going to tackle the problem in addition to kind of seeing how many other teams in the space were kind of coming in to tackle the problem. So one of the big trends last year, which actually had a revival in the fall, was around this concept of DAO tooling. And so there was kind of this- we were kind of trying to figure out how to tell the story around no, we are not DAO tooling but we know you're really excited about DAO tooling. And I think after a while we were like you know what, let's just focus on building the story that we're really compelled by, and then we can tell that story to people and see who it resonates with.
Eric Jorgenson: This seems like a super set of DAO tooling. Like the best business for managing a bunch of wallets for a group of people may just be the tool that all the DAOs adopt. They don't have to have- you don’t have to solve every one of DAOs’ problems all in one product.
Grace Guo: Yeah, I think that's right. I think the way we've always viewed this is that DAOs are- DAOs can use our product and DAOs would benefit from using a product like what we are building. But I think for us, the thing, we decided not to necessarily focus on DAOs as our primary audience or our primary target customer because we were still a little bit uncertain as to the stability of the DAO ecosystem. And I think we wanted to see how DAOs as organizations were going to evolve a bit more before we decided to just say this is our target audience, if that makes sense.
Eric Jorgenson: That makes a lot of sense. That was a bet that paid off for sure.
Mitchell Baldridge: You take a company out there, like Intuit is a $100 billion company and it touches a lot of different things and has a lot of verticals. But then you take crypto which is just very literally on chain and they talk about money Legos and all of these principles. And it's like, it's just such an exciting opportunity that you can kind of build horizontally or vertically, kind of any direction, and I just think y’all are smart to start at the center of just going, hey, here's the most like basic problem. You have all this money. You are trying to operate a business. How can you do anything, again to the points we were talking about earlier, if you don't know how much money you have? How are you going to manage a real business with fake tools or with no tools?
Grace Guo: Yeah, a hundred percent. And I think there's so much power in a business being able to ask themselves hey, how much did we spend on payroll last month, and then being able to answer that question in the next 5 seconds and just really being able to equip themselves with all this information so that they can make the best business decisions, so they do have a good sense of what their financial health looks like. I think there's so many aspects of being able to build a very strong and sustainable company that stem from having a really clean record of all this activity. So yeah, I think we're really excited about this, and I think the general group of people that we are impacting by building something like this, they're very, very talented entrepreneurs. They are people who really do want to build something impactful and build something that is cutting edge. And the more that we can do to just say hey, you focus on that and we'll make sure everything else is in order, I think that's our way, I suppose, of contributing to those innovations. But I mean, yeah, even for you, Eric, and you, Mitchell, what would you say is the most common behaviors that you notice when people are trying to keep track of things, or are they even keeping track of things? Is it Google Sheets? What have you seen as well when you talk to people about this?
Mitchell Baldridge: Eric, what is your kind of like process for having your own- like you made a lot of money and then lost a lot of money in crypto like a lot of us.
Eric Jorgenson: It's not lost until you sell. It is just a down. We have a long-term view, we are holding. Not everybody sold at the tippy-top like a fucking genius, Mitchell, so stop rubbing it in.
Mitchell Baldridge: I sold a little bit, I held a lot. But how do you think in terms- how do you organize this all in your head and in your world?
Eric Jorgenson: When you and I were kind of prepping for this, we talked through long-term and first principles which is kind of what I want to spend the rest of the sort of conversation on. I really want to think in decades here. I think what struck me about Domo when I first look at it and Grace when we first talked is the decades outlook. To me, I don't give a shit about the 18 month cycle of the price is up, price is down. To me, it is sufficiently clear that a blockchain is a better database technology and a better backbone for running a business, and it is going to take more than a few years for that to fully switch over and we are going to take a ton of tools and intermediate steps in the meantime to get there. But thinking about what becomes possible as that switch happens and as it becomes a meaningful percentage of business operations for not just crypto native companies and customers but plumbing companies and florists and, quote unquote, normal companies. So I think that's what's exciting to me and positioning- like Domo being positioned to be, as you said, Mitchell, the Intuit of the future or the one that I had in mind was the ADP of the future. Like both of those are a hundred billion dollar companies that most people don't know exist or barely think about because they perform these such critical functions that if you are not running a business or even a big enough business to really have problems with it because you can't just use cash accounting, then it's easy to overlook the value of the problem that gets solved and the value of the companies that get built here. And I think this is a big enough backbone, transplant that we may have new winners. There may be a new ADP. There may be a new Intuit. I'm excited to see companies like Domo sort of as they get born that can grow into that over the next couple of decades. That's a really fun thing to watch and game to play.
Mitchell Baldridge: Yeah, even to the idea of ADP being huge, Mercury Bank being huge, Intuit being huge, Xero as a competitor, there're all these- Stripe, there are a lot of public and private kind of finance tools that have not kind of flipped to crypto or really focused 1% of their energy on crypto. And an analogy would be like there's all these big tobacco companies, and they are like legalizing marijuana on the side and the whole system that's being grown from these. We know on Twitter Colin. These people who are making these entire companies, they have to use weird banking and they have to kind of develop all these tools to be able to work and they are all waiting for this day that their whole business becomes sort of effectively institutionalized and adopted because all of these big companies will just go acquire the smallest companies that are market leaders, or they will acquire, I'm sorry, not the smallest companies but the market leaders in crypto that are solving the problems already that they want to solve. It is also just weird to see we live in this world of no code and there's this bank out there Column that one of the Stripe founders went out and has started their own bank that's just like API bank. So really, crypto is pretty well all on API, and now we have banks on API. Gusto has rolled out an entire API. Again, back to my thesis of regulatory is probably the hurdle because once this hits this like point of no return or when people really find a use for this transfer of money beyond just oh number go up and we're going to get really rich, these systems are all going to be able to converge pretty well. And it is going to happen by the big boys and then it's going to happen by small companies who are leading the way in crypto. So watching it all come together, yeah, I don't know if we are one more cycle away or what does it take for- and again, to Grace’s point, companies are already working inside of crypto. There are a bunch of people who are like this is our main modus operanda today but what is it going to take for lots of companies to work in crypto out there?
Grace Guo: Yeah, no, I agree with you there. I think it's going to be a really exciting next to 5 to 10 years. I think for me, if I think about one of the questions that you had, Eric, was what does the world look like 50 years into the future, I won't claim to know what that will look like or what that's going to be like. So if you came to the podcast for that, sorry to disappoint.
Eric Jorgenson: That's why I show up. I'm hoping someone will tell me.
Mitchell Baldridge: You promised me, Eric, that I was going to find out the answer.
Eric Jorgenson: That was just the clickbait title. That’s we got you. We are 40 minutes in, you going to finish the podcast now. You are not going to quit.
Mitchell Baldridge: We were going to hang on to that alpha.
Eric Jorgenson: Sorry, 50 years, Grace, please.
Grace Guo: All good. 50 years in the future, I think my hypothesis is that 90% of all payments are going to be run on chain without people knowing that it's happening on chain, without knowing that they are interacting with the blockchain, without knowing that they are interacting with crypto assets. And the corollary that I think of is how today when you use the internet, you have no idea what HTTP is doing. I was never even taught about HTTP in school. I don't even really fully understand exactly what is going on, but I am able to open my browser, I am able to go to google.com, I am able to come to this podcast with you guys. And I don't really need to understand the protocol itself. I think the reason that I am like yeah, 90% is because I don't think it's going to require that much behavioral change from where we are at today to that vision for 50 years in the future because, Mitchell, like you were saying earlier, we are accustomed to interacting with Venmo and Stripe and Zelle and all of these online banking interfaces. What we see on our screen, that's what we think of as money now. When I look at my Venmo account or look at my bank account, the screen is telling me that I have $100 in my account or $1,000 in my account. I don't see the money, I don't interact with the money other than just through these numbers on a screen. So this is already digital money that we are using day in and day out, and there are tons of economies, well maybe not tons of economies, but there are large economies that are almost entirely cashless. If we think about China and how people in China pay for things, it is almost entirely via WeChat pay and/or Ali Pay. And this goes back to the example you gave, Mitchell, where its like yeah, people use tap to pay or Apple pay for everything. The human behavior, which is usually the hardest thing to change, is always in a place today where being able to adopt a maybe slightly different form of digital money or digital assets, I think it's well positioned to do that. And again, the main driver of all this in my opinion is that humans love convenience and more convenient solutions, and once we get used to the experience that this technology brings, it is going to be very hard to go back. Once I get used to being able to send $100 from my place in New York to Saul in Japan and for it to settle instantly and for him to be able to access it instantly, it's going to be very difficult for me to want to go back and experience anything less than that.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I think that’s- It's interesting, you brought up a few things there. I think one of the interesting things is we don't all have to decide to use wallets for that future to be true, for most of these transactions to move on to the blockchain. Imagine Visa, Mastercard just decided to switch their backbone. Like centralized quiet decision makers can make changes without us even knowing to move us to a blockchain future, and we can still use credit cards and bank accounts, and it can all still settle, bank accounts maybe less so. The other is like the sort of what changes when the blockchain is the backbone of everything. I think that is really interesting. So the early use cases is a cool thing to focus on for what changes with smart contracts. I think Balaji said the metabolism of business changes when everything settles instantly. All the money that is locked up in ACH transfers or two-week international transfers, all of that garbage is just gone. I think fraud prevention is a huge thing that banks spend a ton of money on. It slows everything down. The automation of payments, streaming of payments, auditing, hopefully it eventually makes accounting meaningfully easier thanks to things like Domo and just the reliability of the data, and if accounting is easier, hopefully taxes get easier. What else sort of goes on that list of reasons life gets better?
Mitchell Baldridge: Does this happen from a bottom-up or like a top down in the sense of does the backbone of JP Morgan change or does the backbone of the fed of a centralized digital currency change, or do we just get some app like Venmo where I can tap my iPhone onto your iPhone or I can tap my iPhone onto the register and now we have this free exchange again. And don't all these companies miss the float? But our win is somebody is using all this float, Eric.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, well, at Money20/20, Vinod Khosla went on stage and was like- which is just such a ballsy thing to do at a FinTech conference. He goes up and his closing remark on his talk was: I issue a challenge to entrepreneurs to reduce the profitability and size of the financial sector by 90%. Finance is too profitable. We do not have a healthy balanced economy because finance is this overgrown thing that is extracting too much value from basically every other industry. And I was like the one person in the back clapping and whistling, and there’s bunch of other people in the finance industry like fuck, fuck, fuck. But I think that is so cool. And I think this is the kind of thing that is going to change that or could change that.
Mitchell Baldridge: Are they going to give up their 3% and two weeks without kicking and screaming? No way.
Eric Jorgenson: No, of course, not willingly. But I think it'll be really interesting, like is Domo going to have to- are the Domos of the future going to have to directly compete with JP Morgan to unseat that? The way I explain crypto to people like my mom is transactions are going to get cheaper. Transactions are going to get software-ified and they’ll get cheaper. And so when they get cheaper, more of them happen. So instead of doing two transactions a day, you might do 200 transactions a day, so what are those transactions going to be and how are they going to work and who is going to execute them. Maybe it will be Visa and JP Morgan. Maybe it will be entirely new core providers. Maybe regulation doesn't let us change. I don't know, but it's all interesting chaos soup.
Mitchell Baldridge: It's the Black Mirror episode where you send out a tweet and you either have more money or less money depending on how good your Tweet was, and you're just typing away. But no, so yeah, a ton of- it happens bottom up, it happens top down, it happens with a ton of convenience and a ton of freedom and a ton of savings. And then new problems pop up of, your right, fraud prevention is a huge thing that Amex spends part of that 3% trying to deal with. And when someone steals your Amex and goes and buys something, they pay you back and somebody eventually pays that. And it has to all get sorted out. But crypto fixes that and crypto totally brakes that because you just never get your money back with crypto. You are done.
Eric Jorgenson: Grace, how much do different chains behave differently from your perspective? Because some chains are compliant with the core providers and the government and stuff like that. Is this kind of like bitcoin’s like cash because nobody can track it unless you report it and Ethereum is like accepting a credit card because it is automatically recorded. Are you totally agnostic as to which chain wins, you just need to figure out who to play with? You said your first startup was a very big bet on a chain, so how do you think about it now coming into your second?
Grace Guo: I think for us, we remain relatively agnostic to ecosystems. That said, individually we may have different opinions or perspectives on which philosophies resonate with us more. I would say each of the different chains and ecosystems we've looked at do feel very different culturally and are built very differently from kind of a code and development perspective. I think for all of the chains, at the very least, it's possible to track all transactions. Maybe you could argue pseudonymous, but if you put together an activity trail and you just spent a little bit of time doing that, you could arguably put together an identity or persona of who this person is and what they're trying to do. This is true for all chains. For us, I think there's a few different narratives that emerge when we look at different chains, and it also I think really depends on what that chain is trying to optimize for the most. There's kind of that trilemma, that triangle that we see referred to a lot where one angle is decentralization, one angle is security, and one angle is scalability. So there’s always some tradeoffs it looks like chains have to make. For us, when we are thinking about building out our company and building out our product, we are really focused on interviewing people and getting to know people and identifying where they today have most of their activity and what they might be active on very soon. And so just given that, I would say the vast majority of what we've seen is there is lots and lots of people on Ethereum, transacting on Ethereum, building on Ethereum. But with the advent of all these different L2s and optimistic rollups and ZK rollups, and this whole app chain narrative that's becoming stronger and stronger as well like in the Cosmos ecosystems and even in some of the L2 stories, I think there are things that will be coming out very soon, probably this year or next year, that may change the way that again everything works in this industry.
Eric Jorgenson: Just when you think you get your feet- well no, you never think you have your feet in crypto. You're just constantly tumbling and underwater. Yeah, hoping to stay in the black. That's been my experience anyway. I do find it way more stable I guess in the second half of this year. It is so much easier to go have a conversation with somebody with a decades long view who identified a problem in the tooling or infrastructure of the space and who's like nope, I'm going to spend 10 years building this tool and solving this problem and here is my customer and here is our progress, and I'll keep you updated quarterly, instead of the kind of like rise and fall of projects and people making tomato NFTs and stuff like that.
Mitchell Baldridge: I told you both this kind of anecdote that came from my friend Amon. I had worked with- I met a lot of crypto people last year. We were all kind of running around in crypto and it's a lot of fun. And my friend Amon was like, you know a lot of these people would have just been drop shippers 3 years ago. It's a great line. And there are drop shippers who are still doing great probably, God bless them. But it's just like the fad changes and the hot ball of money moves around and it's kind of run through crypto. And so, a lot of the people who, like I said Eric, I want to be working with you 25 years from now, I want to have the like Sam Hinke longest lens in the room, and a lot of people with very long lenses in crypto are still there. And the people who don't see it have come and gone.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. This is like when the real building happens I feel like, when the stripes get earned. Has it been easier to operate in this environment for you, Grace, or harder? Like on the recruiting or customer development side, has anything gotten measurably harder from the end of this year to the beginning?
Grace Guo: I would say given the product that we’re building, we've actually received quite a lot of interest because a few different factors around timing. I think number one, end of the year and tax season, and a lot of companies in 2022, it was their first year of operations. And so, a bunch of people are like, okay, what am I supposed to do? How do I even get started? Who do I talk to? So I think those conversations have been pretty fruitful. I think everyone is pretty willing to chat about those topics right now. I think the other aspect of the market being at the state that it's at now is that people are very concerned about their burn and they are very concerned about their financial activity. And so a lot of people are taking the time to look back and try to understand their spend behavior and understand how they might need to adjust it on a go-forward basis to be able to continue sustaining themselves throughout kind of these tough times. I think my experience in terms of talking to teams and talking to people sounds very similar to what you and Mitchell were just mentioning where it feels a little bit easier to get more directly to people who are excited about building in the space in the long term and are-
Eric Jorgenson: The real ones.
Grace Guo: Yeah, the real ones who are willing to stick it out and ready to stick it out and also excited about this period. Looking at my Twitter now, way less noise. I can actually hear thoughts and not just pumps and things like that. So I think from that perspective, it's giving us a little bit of breathing room to just think very deeply about where are we headed, what are we building, what is the value proposition here, who do we want to work with, and just approach these things with a bit more intention. Which I'm very excited by.
Eric Jorgenson: And on the distribution side, how have you- is all the accounting interest in particular- I'm interested in that because I think it's a good maybe representation of maybe a more mainstream view. Accountants, most accountants, Mitchell is an exception probably, are not going to leap at the opportunity to learn a whole new technology and thing and set of tools. Are you getting inbound interest from accountants who are like my clients are pushing me to figure this out, I have a bunch of questions, I’m being forced to figure this out and I'm coming to you? Or are they much more proactive than I'd imagine? Are you learning anything about the macro of adoption from that sort of seat that you have there?
Grace Guo: Yeah, it's a good question. I think for us, we are kind of thinking about Domo as the business interface that business teams can use to interact with their accountants or their accounting teams. And these accountants might be internal accountants, these accountants may be at external firms. But the idea of being able to give the business a tool that they understand and that they can use, I think there's a lot of value there because a lot of the feedback that we've heard from teams who do have accounting software like QuickBooks or maybe even are trying out some of the crypto accounting tools, a lot of the business people aren't really going into those tools very much because they're scared of the tools or they're scared they're going to mess something up, and it's not really a world or even it's not necessarily terminology they're very comfortable with. So a lot of times, they kind of say hey, person who is a technical accountant, please help me do the thing and ask me the questions and let's just talk via email or let's get on a call and you screen share and I'll verbalize all the answers, or we'll talk about it in Slack. So I think for us, we haven't done, I'd say, a ton of marketing last year. We haven't been super out there with what we are building, mostly just leveraging our own personal networks to make sure we're working with people who really understand what it is we are building and can give us good feedback. So for the most part, I would say most of the people in terms of distribution have been project founders, operators who kind of want this business interface that is a great upgrade from an Excel spreadsheet and any other records they’ve had in the past that they can fully contextualize. And then, for example, they can invite their accountant to Domo, and rather than the accountant needing to learn an entirely new tool or an entirely new system per se, it's very easy to identify okay, this is the transaction history, here's all the context, okay great, this is all the information I need to be able to do my job. It is kind of more from that perspective. One of the customers/partners that we did bring on this year is actually an accounting firm, and we have a great relationship with the head of crypto accounting at this firm. And she started using Domo and was like wow, this makes my life so much easier. I'm going to use this on all my web 3 clients. So, she started using Domo earlier in 2022 on their entire group of web3 clients, and it enabled them to grow their business massively and take on a lot more clients just because we're cutting out a lot of the manual work and we're cutting out a lot of the back and forth that's usually happening.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that’s awesome. I love to hear that. Those are all good words. What else do you have, Mitchell? I feel like we are sort of winding down. I have wildly off-topic questions for Grace. But if you’ve got anything else that fits this thread, hit us with it.
Mitchell Baldridge: Just like what is the- who's your person and kind of what is the next step to getting them the crypto bookkeeping of their dreams in Domo?
Grace Guo: So, when you say who is your person, as in who is like the target-?
Mitchell Baldridge: Who is the person that like if you're going to build your product avatar or user avatar, who's that person? Is it Grace from 2 years ago who's underwater of trying to operate a crypto incubator? Who is this person, and how do they get in touch or what is their next step? Should they go to their accountant, should they go to you? How are we going to get this- how are we going to get people right in 2023?
Grace Guo: Yeah, totally. I think for us, the target persona really is someone who's maybe like me at the venture studio in that role, someone who is a project founder who's like I need to get ahold of my finances, I need to make sure I have a good record here, and that way when I am ready to pass things off to an accountant, it's not me spending two months at the end of the year trying to compile everything together. It's a version of me which has been great about doing this throughout the year, so I can answer all the questions I have about my business, and I can pass it off really easily to the people who need to transform this data further. So I would say that's really kind of the person we'd like to speak more to this year. I think the other side of that is this person will inevitably be working with an accountant if they are serious about their business and they want to build a sustainable company. So also actively reaching out to accountants to really understand both sides of that relationship if that makes sense. We want to make sure we're building a tool that definitely helps the businessperson but also needs to make it easy for the next person to take the next step of the process.
Eric Jorgenson: It is interesting that the customers like come in pairs. You can go through either door and still end up with that- winning that business or that accountant, and either one sort of leads you to other customers. Like there is an inherent sort of virality in this if you are the best solution for the problem, it will lead you to others very naturally. It is such a good thing to do customer development through and meet people and just keep doing calls. You can just really grind your way to a very big company I feel like through these relationships.
Grace Guo: Totally. And basically, I know the year is only- we're only one week into the year, but for the last period of time, I've basically said Tuesdays are my call days, and all I do on Tuesdays is I talk to businesses and I talk to accountants and I just learn about what their current situation is, crypto specific, crypto nonspecific. I just want to learn about what they do day to day. I want to learn about what keeps them awake at night, what worries them, what they are anxious about. And that's been very fruitful. So I'm excited to kind of continue doing that exercise. I think for the product that were building, to your point Eric, there's some inherent network effects that are kind of just part of this product. I think there's a stickiness to it when you think about pulling in your transaction data and adding all of the context to it, and then because you are always needing to work with other people on this, you are always pulling other people into the app, or if you're making payments, for example, you always have a counterparty to whatever it is you're trying to do, so just through the actions that people want to be able to do and need to do that Domo could facilitate, for example, it has this very, very organic way of expanding its network.
Mitchell Baldridge: Hey, I just got- congratulations, you just got paid, check your wallet, OX, blah blah blah blah, coming from Domo. Yeah, really linking the person to the wallet and creating an organized world. I love it. So go to Domo.so. Click get started. Talk to Grace next Tuesday. Let's go.
Eric Jorgenson: Clear your Tuesdays, DM Grace, get on her calendar. My off-topic question is so, Grace, we met through Athena who sponsors this podcast and who I am a fan of, but I have not heard before someone do what you did which is basically like an EA through Athena was your first hire for your startup from your co founding team. I'm curious what you did and how that went and what they're doing for you and just kind of like talk about that as an early stage company what the day to day looks like amongst the team.
Grace Guo: Yeah, totally. So my EA’s name is Anj, and bringing her onto our team last year was if not the best business decision, one of the best business decisions we made as a team because bringing her on board gave us so much leverage. One of the biggest areas where she's contributed and is continuing to contribute and actually own is this process that we call UAT or user acceptance testing. So because we're building software and we have a certain level of quality that we want to make sure we're putting out to anyone that may be interacting with our product. We always put new features through a very rigorous testing process, and my guidance is basically try as hard as you can to break the app every time. Do all of the functions, do all of these crazy combinations of things, try to break the app. And if you can't, great, let's approve it and put into production. But always, I would say, whether it's big or small, there's always something that comes up as a little bit off or maybe we want to take a look at it and then we will make a judgment call for whether or not we want to push that through or continue working on it. But that process has made our software I think just again able to meet the quality of standard we want it to be at, and it has also given us so much time to be able to do all of the high-leverage things that we need to do as a team as well while having comfort that it's being taken care of. So that is probably one of the biggest areas we have her working on and where she’s provided a ton of help for us. There's some other areas as well around helping us build and keep a CRM for all of the people we've been connecting with that are really important for us to be able to reach out to and get feedback from them on our product and things like that. But I would say UAT is probably my favorite example.
Eric Jorgenson: That’s awesome. I love collecting the stories of everybody who's got an Athena EA or VA, especially as like early when it's just your founding team, there's so much to do, and a lot of it is that stuff that's like it has to be done, it's not super hard, but it's draining or tiring or just takes a huge volume of hours and takes you away from some of the other high-value stuff that you can do. So I think it's a really sort of wise approach to get somebody right away who can help you with the high-volume tasks that just have to be done and help you organize the information, manage the outreach, and keep the pace of the organization high. So thank you for that. And this is actually my third person I've talked to today that I’ve met through Athena or is also an Athena person. So it is turning out to be an amazing group of humans as well. I know Mitchell has his own flavor of this ice cream, but I don’t care.
Mitchell Baldridge: Your podcast, Eric, is mostly turned to change my life and be about convincing me to take the next steps in my life, so I've been asking you both about Athena. The biggest thing that you all have told me about this is the difference between me just trying to go on Craigslist and go hey, Filipino VA and try to do everything myself is like have someone who is vetted and trained and have a support network beyond just okay, good luck, here's your VA, you are best friends now.
Eric Jorgenson: I did a lot of attempts at that through Upwork and stuff over the years. And it is just like I always failed and blamed myself, and it wasn't until I over-invested- it wasn't until I went to the highest quality of version of this that I could that I was like oh, there's a real skillset here that you can make up for with patience and money and effort. But I'd rather just hire Athena who nails it from the beginning and makes it so I can't fail it this. It took that level of desire in finding- It didn’t used to exist. But yeah, this podcast exists to market Baldridge Financial Services and the ecosystem of products around it. I don't know what you're talking about Mitchell. That’s my main focus, not improving your life, it's introducing people to your products and services, and now Domo. Manifesting a beautiful crypto future, that's what we're doing here.
Mitchell Baldridge: I remember when I first heard about Gusto and told everyone- or just totally flipped over, and like Domo is that. You are just like you are now- finding people who care about their product and who want to grow their product and who are in it for the long term, it's an easy choice. And as an accountant, when you can get good help, it's great.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, this is going to be an interesting company to see grow I think because Gusto was such an immediate problem for so many people right at the same time and this is so intertwined with- you have to already have taken the crypto pill or already be working in the industry to appreciate the value of the solution I think. But as that grows and as this tool gets better, it's going to make that solution and ecosystem and lifestyle of a business more attractive and make it more accessible. And I don't know, I think it'll be really cool to sort of see how this grows. And thank you, Grace, for solving such a big problem that everybody needs solved whether they realize it or not. And it will be very appreciative to you in 20 years when 90% of transactions are going through blockchains and you're helping all of us run quality businesses and not get audited and accountants just have easier lives and there’s less people in jail.
Grace Guo: That would be a great future. If we can manifest that, when we are successful, if we can make that happen, that would be amazing. I think the other aspect of this is I feel like I've seen more and more people going down this path of entrepreneurship and starting micro-businesses. I think what you were saying earlier as well Mitchell, no code, a lot of people are really experimenting with building these new companies, these new projects, and yeah, maybe they have talent that's coming from Asia, maybe they have talent coming from Europe or South America or anywhere in the world. And so we have a lot of these new types of organizations that are going to be built as well, and I think that's something we're really excited to kind of keep a pulse on and to identify the needs for and build for too. So lots of things, lots of things to look forward to.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, you are facilitating whole new types of organizations sort of globally. That is super exciting. Cool. Domo.so. Is there anything else that people need to know about you or how to find your or how to use Domo, or anything else?
Grace Guo: Yeah, our website is domo.so. We have a Twitter which is Domodotso, dot spelled out. Feel free to DM there if you have any questions or if you want to DM me on Twitter, I’m @Guocamole, so it is guacamole but instead of an A it's an O. Feel free to DM me there as well.
Eric Jorgenson: Grace’s last name is Guo, so that explains- it's not a typo. She knows exactly what she's doing. It's very clever. I will also say that Grace will whoop your ass at Settlers of Catan if you want to challenge her.
Grace Guo: I am always down for a game.
Eric Jorgenson: Thank you both so much for taking the time. Mitchell, thank you for making up for my accounting inadequacy and bringing your degen expertise. Grace, I appreciate you coming on, sharing your story, solving your problems, building your company. I can't wait to see what the future holds.
Grace Guo: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. This was great. I had a ton of fun.
Mitchell Baldridge: Yeah, thanks, Eric.
Eric Jorgenson: I appreciate you hanging out with us today. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, similar episodes you will also love are my two previous episodes with Mitchell Baldridge, and if you are into the crypto stuff, we had some great crypto episodes from about six months ago with Jason Hitchcock, Sean O'Connor. It’s really an endless source of things to learn. And I love having conversations and finding people who can teach me more about it. Thank you for supporting the sponsors of this episode, Athena Go and GiveWell, athenago.com and givewell.org. Links to both are in the show notes. For a free way to support the show, please leave a quick review for the show or text this episode to a friend or coworker you think would enjoy it. I appreciate you very much.