Sui Roundtable: Ep. 39 - Kevin, CEO of Mysten Labs Joins

on chain in Baltimore, Maryland. And we had a few different Chinese fast food restaurants there. And the reason that you do that type of thing, which is you leave Chinatown, which is probably the greatest density and cultural density, especially for Chinese folks, and go to a city where there's virtually none, is exactly because you're trying to start a business, you're trying to start a life for your family, and you don't want competition. So when you're selling Chinese fast food, you really don't want as many other Chinese people around. It's one people that will buy your, your cooking. And so that is the hallmark of my memory. I was in mall rat, I was in restaurants day in day out working the cashier's running the hallways. I don't know if you guys are familiar with the corridors behind malls, but every single store in malls is connected by a hallway out the back. And that hallway out the back is where goods are delivered, and it's basically like a big elaborate. The hallmark of my child, though, is basically being a mall rat running through those labrins. My parents, however, were not very tiger in that when they raised me, I was not destined to become just like a straight-day student, that only excelled in academics, and just focused on a lot of the immigrant tropes that are out there. I was really encouraged to just do whatever I could be good at. The only things I was really good at, my friends, was art, tinkering our computers, and playing lots and lots of video games. And so ultimately, I went to Carnegie Mellon University for five years. So my background is not even in law. The origins of my background are in art, and specifically drawing and painting, and an electronic time-based media, which is a fancy way of talking about video editing and action scripting. I didn't know how to code. Everyone in Carnegie Mellon basically runs out of code. And I learned how to code through action script. So the first jobs that I had to kind of feed myself out of college, because back then, when the graduated was a recession, was building websites, action script websites, like figuring out what is a cool load screen, and then trying to get people to pay me money for those types of things, while also working as a photographer on the side, doing portraits, like a hundred books of headshot kind of thing. Those types of businesses still exist all over the place in New York City. After doing that for a while, I came to realization man, trying to be an artist and eating out of living as an artist. That is a very, very difficult thing to do, but I managed to do it. I ended up spending a few years in the celebrity entertainment industry working at a production company that was eventually acquired and is now a part of Getty Images for anyone that remembers that company. I still have very fond memories of going to back then places like the MTV Music Awards and like having runners run memory cards out from photographers to like trucks where images would just get processed and then you would put those things on the internet as fast as you can, and then I would do them up and edit them so that places like AOL and Yahoo, could buy them were new stories that were put on the internet. Fast forward a little bit to that. I ended up going back to school, this time law school over for them in New York City. And I did that because I knew that the only two things I ever really loved or was good at in life was artwork and potentially law, the law mostly because I had some experience and debate and I just really enjoyed arguing and all the audience like eating out of living as a star of an artist, even out of production company is pretty hard compared to if you could make it in the law, it's a lot more compensation, it's a lot more of a stable livelihood. But when I was a lawyer, I always knew that I wanted to get into tech and so I spent most of my quote unquote big law career and white shoe law firm in New York City always thinking about how to go in a house and how to get closer to tech. So after spending a few years at a large law firm, I went to Amazon, that was my first in-house gig as a product lawyer. I supported businesses like shop-off, soft lines. Soft lines are things that close luggage, retail essentially, I supported the retail business. And then after that, I went to a square where I think I had some of the most formative years of my legal career growing and leading product teams, commercial teams, international teams. And then I went to Pixar, not to be confused with Pixar. Is another creator economy startup. And to me, going to Pixar really represented trying to find a way to bring fine art and creativity back into my career. And then Evan, our CTO, the XCEO of Mr. Labs, he stole me away from Pixar. And it was really the call of crypto and specifically the genius talent that I knew he had within himself and that he had exposed me to at Mr. Labs that really want me over. I had started retail investing and buying crypto. I mean, I had a lot of ES. I had started that professionally at square because we were one of the first companies to sell Bitcoin and cashier. And back then, people did not know if Bitcoin was a security nut. So it was actually a big scary deal. But it is really, you know, if you ask how you should figure out what you should do next in life, you should definitely be looking for the opportunities that make you very uncomfortable and the people that make you uncomfortable. And when I interviewed with the five founders and I interviewed with Evan, I could tell I was intimidated. I felt a pressure when you speak to these guys that they are trying to reach for something greater, that they are trying to do something meaningful, that they're trying to build something the world has never seen. That sense of intimidation and that sense of adventure is why, you know, little more four years ago, I joined Mr. Lambs. I am lucky, I am blessed in that when I joined the company, we have five technical founders and no founders that had really had a deep go at, you know, the traditional executive model of working at a large company as a C suite executive managing lots of different functions. And so because I had done that before, I was very well suited to be a catch-all. To be a person who were just, I'm always focused on problems and solving problems. You solve enough problems, people ask you or the business asks you to solve a different problem until you start solving non-level problems and then you just look for more and more problems to solve. And I think that is the best way to explain how I ended up at CEO today. The last thing to say, I'll cap it up on it, I said I was gonna bring it all back together, is the one thread that has driven my entire career. And I think I'm in media elsewhere saying this even years ago, is this idea of community. The reason I told you about my immigrant story and my parents from way back when, is because they gave up community to case the American dream to make money, to better realize with money. But the problem with that is that, if you want to define wealth, wealth is much, much greater than just money. Wealth is the horizontal ties that find, is the people that you have on that shared journey with you, is the people that you are trying to build something with. And so I've always been lately being interested in companies that have communities and trench communities that actually are a part of the business model. The folks that are here today on this round table, like sweet self, it is a giant community. And it is actually more important now that it ever has been because you can reproduce everything else in a business so easily. You cannot yet reproduce a community. So if there's one thing I want to emphasize from that earlier story, the immigrant story, it's that I learned from the mistakes that my family has made that you can't give up community, even if it is for money, because all of that together is worth. All right, back to you. Sorry, that was a heck of a monologue. That was great. That was definitely a lot of information there. And around the ball because, how do I get off the sound of the car? So I was going to say Kevin, really a really helpful background story. Guys, there's about a hundred people in here now. We're going to jump into some good questions. If you can like and repost and comment, I think this is going to be a great space. Kevin just gave truly an inspirational, a bit of an inspirational. I don't want to say I had a tear coming down the cheek but pulled up my heartstrings a little bit. And as a community builder on Sweet, definitely got me fired up there. So that's one thing. The other thing is you talked a lot about how, I don't know your age, but I can kind of decimate here and it sounds like we're, we're within a couple of years of one another. And back when I was growing up, tech wasn't as prevalent as it is today now and as you mentioned, now we work it. Now you work at Sweet, I build on Sweet everyone in here is collectively in crypto. So I think we've jumped ahead light years and Basecamp was awesome. It was like this tech immersion. I feel like for a lot of people and there were a lot of awesome updates from Sweet Basecamp, some of which would love to get your take on. But the one that really stood out to me and you were just talking about chasing money or chasing the American dream and selling Bitcoin and cash app and all these different things. It really like crypto is an industry that I think sometimes people forget revolves around money like just moving money, decentralized finance. I think that sometimes in the pursuit of innovation, maybe we're trying to do too many crazy things but crypto really again comes back to money and the big announcement that I saw at Sweet Basecamp that I was like, wow, this is huge. It was the Samsung wallet integrating sweet network. So people can basically send money anywhere in the world for zero fee with USDC on Sweet. And was just wondering, obviously, this is a bit of a huge announcement. But where do you see this? Like what does SixX look like in the future? Where do you see this kind of partnership with Samsung and Sweet going in the future? And is this kind of the first step in something greater? And how would you like to see that kind of evolve the frontier of finance so to speak? Yeah, our integration of USDC into Samsung wallets, 83 million in the States very much is the first step. And I can lay out what I hope to be the graduating growth of where it goes with Samsung. But I want to also take a step back to point out how it's important that we recognize it's all connected on Sweet. On Sweet today, we are very much focused on on chain finance finance. And yes, Samsung with USDC is a stable coin is different than is DeFi. But ultimately, it's all linked to TBL. It's all linked to depth, breadth, liquidity. And more importantly, it's linked to what we know people want. Like I wrote on X a couple days ago about how, you know, and that context was writing about Hoody. But it is everywhere around us. The world is changing. And every single person wants a leg up. And you see that manifesting in copy trading. People want something faster. People want their work to do the money to do more for them. And that's where USDC comes in. And so the idea of how our job at Sweet and the focus of Sweet today is to help people do more with their money and make more money is a theme that permeates whether or not you're talking about stable coins, copy trading, like hash and hoody institutional wallets. It doesn't matter. It all comes back to that same starting point. And so for Samsung wallet specifically, if we can deliver on Samsung wallet users, being able to do more with USDC in app in the wallet, then we are meeting their objective of, of course, making Samsung wallet as sticky as possible. But also by helping their customers do more and make more with their money. So another way to say that is, is if we stop today, and all you can do is just send a bunch of dollars, digital dollars from one Samsung wall to another, that thing is dead in the water. Like that will go nowhere because you can do that everywhere in a million different modes. Fine, it's great distribution and you will see just more adoption of stable coins for it. And in that way, it is like the big test thesis. It is a big test thesis of consumer adoption of stable coins. But Samsung also knows you can't stop there. It is not competitive enough to just have a digital dollar. You have to have perks. And if you just go into Samsung wallet and you look at what they do around their card and what they do with everything else, it's just perk after perk after perk. They are constantly looking at ways to give an edge, to give a person a reason to do more inside the wallet. And so we have to stack all those things. What are the things that we can do as suites to help them? Well, the obvious one is if you are holding a balance, if you are looking for ways to get greater yield, if you are looking for ways to get discount coupons or codes or other things, like that can all be surfaced to you in that one wallet space, very, very easily, very organically. And you can see Samsung do this with other things in that wallet all day long. And then next after that, I think the golden goose for suedef is, and you get these things connected into DeFi. Now that is a whole nother layer because now you are directly contributing to suedef, you're creating depth, you're adding TV out to it. And now you are bringing in a ton of people that know nothing about crypto and ideally never have to learn about crypto, but are getting things that feel and look like DeFi advantages. So obviously I can't say what's promised. And the roadmap is just at the earliest days, but if you have an opportunity to work with an entity like Samsung, and we know that we are focused so much on launching finance on the dream today, we need to bring launching finance into Samsung and vice versa, but in ways that do not alienate consumers.