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Krish Chelikavada
@thecskc
It took us 10 months and 3 iterations/pivots to even conceive of Passport Protocol. We started raising a pre-seed right when FTX happened. Went from building a full-stack AA SDK, to a wallet adapter and later finally landed on what today is Passport. Our story (+lessons) ...
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Krish Chelikavada
@thecskc
November 2022 We graduate from @alliance wanting to build a full-stack AA solution for dapps. One integrated solution with smart accounts, bundlers, and paymasters as a whole. Took this picture from our fundraising memo from then -
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Krish Chelikavada
@thecskc
A ton of other startups entered the space but began focusing on individual parts of this stack. We realized two things - - There's no way our small team could build all of this - If we wanted to win, we'd have to focus Lesson #1 - Do one thing, and do it really well
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Krish Chelikavada
@thecskc
Quick detour - we had to raise a round right after FTX's collapse. It felt like valuations halved overnight and nobody wanted to deploy capital anymore.
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Krish Chelikavada
@thecskc
Thanks to Alliance, the Stanford ecosystem, and mostly luck, we pulled through and raised a $1.8M preseed. Enough for us to iterate. I'll always be grateful to investors that backed us at that time. Lesson #2 - Sometimes you need luck and pure belief
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Krish Chelikavada
@thecskc
March/April '23 - July/August '23 After realizing we had to focus, we picked the auth part of the stack and decided we were going to build a new wallet adapter. Something better than RainbowKit. It would integrate with popular KMS solutions and also support AA/smart accounts.
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Krish Chelikavada
@thecskc
We launched it for free and saw some decent initial usage. Over 200+ projects signed up in the first 8 weeks or so. I would DM devs on TG for feedback. Always asked one simple question - "Why use 0xPass?"
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Krish Chelikavada
@thecskc
Surprisingly, most devs used us because we made it easy for them to integrate with KMS providers. Not because we built the best wallet adapter. All the value was being captured by KMS infra. Lesson #3: Focus where value/capital flows
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