Ben Gilbert: commitment

Transcript context

…Exactly. That was really awesome and a huge confidence boost in the design of what we're doing, what was right, because there was a huge amount of technical risk. I came up with this idea, proof of history, nobody else was working on it. There were a few academics defining verifiable delay functions, but it was really out there. Everybody else in the industry was going in a totally different direction. That made it hard for us to get a lot of commitments, too, from investors who were much more readily eager to invest in somebody with a huge pedigree out of MIT or whatever, like an Ivy League. Anatoly, I want to put a pin. As we dive deeper down the crypto rabbit hole here, we have a lot of non-crypto native audience, of startup native audience. I want to highlight. You just used the term proof of history. We're going to put a pin in that and come back to it later because it's one of the things that makes it very special. I'm going to do the work of highlighting a, hey, I'm going to force you to define that here at some point because a lot of us are very new to this. Totally. We got the team together. We had a decent runway, I think around two years, and we thought, oh, this is going to be done in a year. This is easy and we'll just ship it. It actually took a little longer, like 2½ years to do it and cost more. We had to hire more folks than we expected and we did a couple of raises after that, but we're always a little bit starving under 2 years, under 18 months of runway at any given time, bear market, trying to ship this thing as fast as we could, so we could get to the next stage, which is let's get users, let's build the use case we're always dreaming of, let's actually get to the adoption stage.…

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