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The Nomics Update

The Nomics Update

By Clay Collins

This is the audio journal of Nomics.com CEO Clay Collins. The podcast tells stories from inside our cryptocurrency & bitcoin market data API company. Topics include Nomics’ product roadmap; new partnerships; company outlook; important new ideas shaping the future of Nomics.com and Nomics crypto market data API; as well as business strategy, philosophy, crypto investing & fundraising. Nomics.com launched in January of 2018 as an API-first company. The company was created in response to increasing demand for professional grade market data products & APIs for institutional investors.
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How Adderall, Meditation & Therapy Changed My Life - (Ep. 0011)

The Nomics UpdateDec 03, 2018

00:00
08:24
Sucking At "Theory Of Mind" (And Why That's Harming You) - (Ep. 0055)

Sucking At "Theory Of Mind" (And Why That's Harming You) - (Ep. 0055)

There's a concept in cognitive psychology called theory of mind, and theory of mind is the ability for someone to predict what someone else might be thinking in a given scenario. Young children have pretty horrific theory of mind. They're unable in most cases, you know, when kids are pretty young, to guess what a third party might be thinking [00:00:30] in a given scenario. They're unable to figure out or estimate what someone else might be thinking.


So an experiment that's done with very young children to figure out if they have developed theory of mind is a child who is being tested for theory of mind abilities might see a stuffed animal, and [00:01:00] the experiment or the person that's running this experiment would show the child that a stuffed animal sees a piece of candy. Then the researcher would cover up the eyes of the stuffed animal and put the candy in his or her pocket and then lift up the blindfold or whatever that's on the eyes of the stuffed [00:01:30] animal, and then ask the child who's seen all of this where the stuffed animal thinks the piece of candy is. And in most instances the child will tell the researcher that the stuffed animal thinks the piece of candy is in the researcher's pocket because the child ascribes to the stuffed animal what the child knows about where the candy is, even though during this experiment it was very evident [00:02:00] that the stuffed animal's eyes were covered when the piece of candy was placed in the experimenter's pocket.


And theory of mind is something that is commonly known to differentiate between people with and without autism. So people with autism are known for not doing especially well on theory of mind tests, but theory of mind [00:02:30] isn't just something that people with autism score poorly on. I've found through the years that most people who are looking to engage in business relationships don't have very good theory of mind at all. They don't spend much time trying to figure out what the person on the other end of a deal might be thinking, what a customer might be thinking, what problems [00:03:00] they'd be struggling with.


On a very, very small scale, it looks like salespeople who reach out to someone and try to set an appointment not using the time zone of the person that they're looking to set an appointment with. So let's say I'm in Chicago and I'm communicating with a salesperson in California, someone with highly [00:03:30] developed theory of mind, in my opinion, would give me times in my time zone, right, would relate to me on my own terms. They would also do some background and try and get a sense for what my pain points might be.


I encounter this lack of theory of mind or lack of consideration of theory of mind all the time when people pitch [00:04:00] me on coming onto the Flippening podcast, right, our popular podcast that often gets over 30,000 downloads an episode. People will pitch me on coming onto that podcast. They'll often asked to come on and talk about the same topic that someone else just spoke about. They won't say anything about how they'll promote the episode. They won't say anything about sponsoring [00:04:30]


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Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Feb 28, 201906:47
1-Week Into The Wim Hof Method (My Thoughts So Far) - (Ep. 0054)

1-Week Into The Wim Hof Method (My Thoughts So Far) - (Ep. 0054)

Something I've been really curious about for a long time are the methods of Wim Hof. Wim Hof is a Dutch extreme athlete and a really likable guy. I've seen him interviewed several times and he doesn't have the typical stunt devil persona. He really seems to be coming from a great place and he is really into [00:00:30] breath and breathing and how that lets you go deeper into yourself. He's set a bunch of really, really remarkable world records.


For example, he holds the record for swimming the longest under ice without any wetsuit or anything else on, just wearing a pair of shorts. He at one time held the record for the fastest half-marathon barefoot [00:01:00] on ice and snow. He frequently swims in frozen water. He holds the record for the longest time in direct full-body contact with ice, which is pretty nuts. He's climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro wearing only shorts. 


But his program, which I'm going through and enjoying, I'm only one week into this, [00:01:30] his program is called The Wim Hof Method and it's a couple hundred bucks. It's really about breathing. It's almost a meditation and yoga course. He claims that this comes with a bunch of health benefits. I remember seeing a documentary about him where folks at a hospital in a very controlled environment ejected him with, I believe, a virus and he was able to fight it off [00:02:00] by breathing in a certain way, keep his temperature down, and it was a virus that could have brought a lot of harm to him unmedicated, but he beat it without medication.


But I'm going through this because of the benefits that it claims, better sleep, better energy, better mood, and [00:02:30] overall better mindfulness. The practice really takes, I don't know, maybe 20 minutes a day of breathing and taking cold showers. I don't know, I'm only a week in, or I have one week down. It might escalate quite a bit, but it's a lot of fun. I'm enjoying it.


I have already noticed that I am sleeping better, that I do have more energy throughout the day, that my mood is [00:03:00] generally better. I'm just generally happier. Maybe it's all this forced hyperventilation or something. But yeah, it's a good thing. This entry is definitely more on the journal side of the kind of topics that are covered by this podcast, but yeah, this is my personal audio journal. I think that a startup can only grow at the rate that a founder [00:03:30] is growing, so I try and do things like this to expand myself. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. Maybe I'll report back after I'm done with the 10-week course.


But again, it's proving to be really enjoyable and it's amazing how good I feel after, you know, cold exposure, after taking a long cold shower. Alright, take care. Bye.


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Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Feb 27, 201903:58
Want Me To Publish You On the Nomics Update? - (Ep. 0053)

Want Me To Publish You On the Nomics Update? - (Ep. 0053)

Feb 26, 201901:32
Cryptocurrency Data Consulting & Services (for Funds and Enterprises) - (Ep. 0052)

Cryptocurrency Data Consulting & Services (for Funds and Enterprises) - (Ep. 0052)

At Nomics, one of the things we don't talk about very often but something that's been really popular among our enterprise customers are our consultative or concierge data services. It's something that's a lot of fun because it allows us to partner at a deeper level with institutional investors, family offices, hedge funds, private investment offices, prop [00:00:30] shops, et cetera. It allows us to get to know a lot more about how these organizations use data, how they think about data, and how data is integrated with their trading strategy. Whether it's active strategy, and maybe they're running a real time trading environment or it's more of a passive strategy and they're looking for analysis on historical data sets for the purpose of [00:01:00] back testing and things like that.


But our concierge data services are really for organizations that make heavy use of crypto asset data. They either don't have an in-house development staff that can build out arrays of machines or the infrastructure necessary to run [00:01:30] pretty complex trading operations. That's fine. There's a lot of really brilliant investors and big data people at these places that are really great at what they do but they don't necessarily have a background in software development or they're too busy making money for their fun to set up some of this infrastructure at least to take the first pass [00:02:00] at some of this infrastructure.


They either don't have the in-house engineering resources or the people that could do this in the organization are too busy executing against strategies that they know work, and that they know make money and they come to us because they have a hypothesis around some things that might work, and they want to test a strategy. In most cases [00:02:30] when these folks come to us to have custom work done, to have concierge data services done or created, we're able to charge them a lot less than it would cost them to build it themselves from scratch even paying existing employees, or to farm this out because we're working with data and cryptocurrency data all day long, really. So, we have a lot [00:03:00] of the building blocks in place already to do this. We're usually not starting from scratch, we're usually not testing different ways to store this data or to ingest new data sources that they might need. We have a lot of these ingestion pipelines already in place if they need a strategy that scales across multiple machines, we have that infrastructure in place already.


I should note that, [00:03:30] to get started, it's usually again, less money than hiring someone to do this from scratch. But these services do start at 30 grand, for anyone I think, who has a fund of the size that would need these services, this usually isn't a problem at all, especially if you're a $20 million plus fund and [00:04:00] you're winning, and you have a hypothesis of what might work. This is really a drop in the bucket and certainly below market, well below market.


In fact, often we're able to charge sometimes, less than other firms might charge for just out of the box products that are already created. A little bit about [00:04:30]


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Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Feb 19, 201915:01
The 9 Month Cycle of Founder Failure - (Ep. 0051)

The 9 Month Cycle of Founder Failure - (Ep. 0051)

I think founders for the most part seem to, at least speaking for myself here, I think founders go through roughly a nine month cycle of founder failure that starts up, gets going, and then, repeats itself over, and over, and over again. The cycle's pretty simple. I think most founders when they start a company, if they're experienced, and they know what they're doing, [00:00:30] they start off doing a pretty good job. They've thought a lot about a given problem, and what they're looking to do when they first start a business, and they spend about three months being pretty good at their job. They know what their responsibilities are, what their duties are.


They've thought a lot about what needs to be done, and what order it needs to be done in, and all of that. After this first initial three months of being pretty good at [00:01:00] their job, if they're having any kind of success, there's getting, traction is developing, then usually the job changes. In any kind of fast evolving situation, a situation with a lot of momentum behind it, I think after the first three months the job generally changes, and often a founder, and this applies to many people in startups. I think anyone who's at an early [00:01:30] stage company might, after the first three months of having a general sense of what needs to be done.


After those first three months they realize that the job has changed, and often they don't know how it's changed. They just know that the things that they were doing initially weren't working, so after the first three months of doing a pretty good job at their job, I think they spend another three months learning how their job has changed, [00:02:00] and usually they learn why, they learn that their job is changing, and how their job is changing, because old things aren't working anymore. They start failing. Maybe at first they were doing a lot of meetings, but then they realized they need to start implementing, and they can't be on all the meetings that they were being ... That they were on before, and execute like they need to execute now that they have a sense of what needs to be done.


The second three months of the cycle is around learning how [00:02:30] the job has changed, and the nature of the differences that have emerged, and then, I think the last three months of this nine month cycle of founder failure is learning the new job, and what it entails, and what needs to be done to be successful in the new job, so creating the circumstances to be successful again, and then, [00:03:00] once they've learned what their new job is, the cycle starts all over again. To summarize, I think the three months cycle of founder failure, or the three months cycle of founder success, I guess that's a little bit more optimistic is that there's three months at being okay at your job, three months learning that your job has changed, three months learning the new job, and then, of course starting all over, being okay at your job again once you've learned what the new job is.


[00:03:30] I'm certainly right now in the phase where I'm learning my new job. I think, I was really, I think, I was doing a really great job for a while, then hired more people, got more customers, got a lot more traction to the website, and realized that things have started to change. The things that worked when there wasn't as much traction in the business, [00:04:00]


[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Feb 18, 201909:00
Flippening Podcast Is Back (& Why I Almost Quit) - (Ep. 0050)

Flippening Podcast Is Back (& Why I Almost Quit) - (Ep. 0050)

Hey, folks. I am pleased to tell you that the Flippening Podcast is back. It's been over a month since we published the last episode, and frankly, I didn't know if we were going to continue doing them. The Flippening Podcast, if you've ever heard if you've ever heard an episode, for example, the Security Token Documentary, it's something that takes a lot of time to put together, to put [00:00:30] content together in simple content that's produced at that level. There's a lot of scripting, there's scripting of intros and outros. There's a lot of post production editorial work, and frankly, there's a lot that goes into it. And I don't know honestly about every day or so someone hits me up and wants to be on the podcast, and often it's these podcast PR firms that [00:01:00] are trying to get their CEO or the CEO of a company that's hired them to be on the podcast, and I don't think they have any idea how much time I've put onto this. Someone casually shows up because they're doing a 'podcast tour', and we record them for an hour. And then after that, it's like hours of work go into getting that episode live probably. Probably eight hours per episode. No joke. 


[00:01:30] And so just to actually clarify, so far no one who's ever reached out to me to be on the Flippening Podcast has been booked with one exception. It's all been people I reach out to and ask. 


So we're starting the Flippening Podcast back up again, and like I might have said before, I didn't know if we were going to bring it back. Honestly, [00:02:00] I look at the top crypto podcasts and I would count the Flippening a couple months ago, I would put the Flippening in that category when we were releasing episodes on a regular basis. But the top crypto podcasts generally aren't run by people that are also CEOs of product companies. At least product companies in the software space versus perhaps the media space. And [00:02:30] that's because it takes a lot of time. So in the time that's past since we posted the last episode, a bunch of people reached out asking what had happened, and basically making the case for bringing it back. And we had an internal debate about whether or not to proceed with the podcast, and after a lot of deliberation, I decided it was worth doing but I needed some help. 


So [00:03:00] we hired someone who's going to be essentially the producer for the podcast. So we have an editor but now we have an editor and a producer, and they're going to be able to help with everything from concepting the shows to helping with distribution to concepting things. And it's really exciting. And I believe if all this goes right that [00:03:30] it's going to require much less of my time than it did before because of the producers who's job is going to be to focus on this. It's not a full-time position. They do other things as well. 


So anyway, lots of great stuff is on the way, and I think you can expect starting maybe starting next week ... I think you can expect [00:04:00] that episodes will be released every week, every single week, maybe even more frequently than that if we can get our act together. And as of today, hopefully by the time you're listening to this, but if not, a few hours after we release this, the first new episode will be live, which is actually part two of the deep dive we were doing on decentralized exchanges. 


So [00:04:30]


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Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Feb 15, 201906:49
Blockchain Projects I'd Start (If I Wasn't Building Nomics) - (Ep. 0049)

Blockchain Projects I'd Start (If I Wasn't Building Nomics) - (Ep. 0049)

So Pravin, and I hope I'm pronouncing your name correctly Pravin, but Pravin from Block.Kitchen wrote in with a question, and I'm gonna address it. First off, Block.Kitchen, I didn't even know there was a dot Kitchen domain name. There's just so many now, it's crazy. It's hard to follow. I'm always looking at these domain names and be like, "Wait, is this a dot com? It's a ..." That's the extension, dot Kitchen. Anyway, he wrote in [00:00:30] with a couple of questions. The first question he asked is this, if ... So here's the question, if you are not pursuing Nomics, what other business opportunities or categories in the blockchain space would you be executing on? Good question. So I think first and foremost I wanna mention that I really don't know. This question stumped me, and it's not like I have a [00:01:00] list of things in the back of my head that I'm just waiting to do. I'm very focused on what we're doing and in another update I'll speak about why I'm so excited about what we're doing in the Pathron and the problem that we're really solving, versus the problem that a lot of people think we're solving.


But the answer is, I can't think of anything of the top of my head. I'm very interested in distributed datasets [00:01:30] and in data platforms, which is really at the core of what we're doing at Nomics, and core to the infrastructure that we're building. Much of which people can't see. And right now there's just nothing that excites me as much as data platforms. By the way, data platforms as an interest, like I've never been interested in anything that bored people to death as much as data platforms, but they're really [00:02:00] exciting if you ever wanna talk data platforms. Sometime maybe can have that conversation if we see each other at a conference or something. I think all of this said, if I have to think about it for a bit and stretch, I think I'd be interested in blockchain based lending, so on the Flippening Podcast, my other podcast, I did an interview with [00:02:30] Nadav Hollander from Dharma. I'm very impressed with what they're doing, I think that is potentially the killer use case, or one of many killer use cases.


And if you look at US bond markets, they're bigger than the stock market, and both the bond market and the stock market individually are much larger at the into money supply, which is just the amount of money people have in [00:03:00] back accounts and savings accounts and cash. And that doesn't even include ... The bond market doesn't even include personal loans and household debt and things like that. So, I think there's a ton of opportunity there, everyone borrows money and because of hurdles around user experience and knowledge, access to technology. I don't know that the average [00:03:30] person would use Bitcoin just to use it unless they live in a place like Argentina or Venezuela and there isn't another reliable form for storing value, there isn't another reliable means of doing that. Obviously if you live in a place where the banking system is terrible, then Bitcoin is potentially a great place to put your money, I don't know, I don't give [00:04:00]


[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Feb 12, 201905:37
Nomics' Origin Story - (Ep. 0048)

Nomics' Origin Story - (Ep. 0048)

I got an invite to be interviewed for actually a pretty cool thing. The problem is it's not a interview where we get on the phone and they interview me and then they take notes and publish that. It's an interview where they send me a list of questions, and I need to answer them, and I'm bad at getting to these things. Normally, [00:00:30] I don't do these kinds of interviews just because it's hard to make the time for them, to sit down and write out all my answers, but when there's upside for it and I can justify my use of time this way, I'll go ahead and do it from time to time.


One of these things came in. It's a series of questions. What I'm probably going to do is record the answers and have them transcribed [00:01:00] and have a content person on my team turn it into an article and send that in. 


You guys, today, you folks ... I guess guys is not ... It's not cool to say "guys" anymore, and I'm not making fun of people who say, "It's not cool to say 'guys' anymore," but you can't say "guys" anymore, so I'm saying "folks" from now on. You folks get to hear my answers to these [00:01:30] questions for a few days here as I answer them because I don't even know that I would record the answers in audio format to get transcribed to send to a content person on my team if I couldn't publish it on the show, so thanks for listening as I do this. 


The question one that I need to answer for this is, what is your background, [00:02:00] and how did you get into crypto?


I don't know that I've told this story before. What's my background? Nomics is second software company, and before doing this, I co-founded a company called Leadpages, which now that corporate entity is called Drip, and they create a eCommerce CRM, [00:02:30] and we acquired Drip and it ended up being such a big thing, but the company pivoted around for lots of reasons, and I think it's a smart move. My previous company was Leadpages. I was the CEO of that company, grew that to over 150 people, raised 38 million in venture capital.


In [00:03:00] I think late 2013, arguably the second, but, really, the first year of that company, we hired someone on our devops team who came to us from Best Buy, and now they live in Palo Alto and work at Facebook, and are doing really cool things over there. I think they did cool things for us, as well, but that person got me into Bitcoin, [00:03:30] and he was a miner. I live in Minnesota. Minnesota winters are notoriously cold, so he had his mining equipment in his basement and claimed that, on some days, it produced enough heat to heat his house. It's kind of a cool dual use of that electricity, but he got me into Bitcoin. He started talking about it quite a bit, and I'm not sure [00:04:00] most people spent much time listening to him speak about it, but I was fascinated. It combined things that I was interested in, which was economics and money and computers and the Internet, so it's like this combination, this amalgamation of things that I'm intensely interested in, and it just made sense. It just clicked to me. 


There are so many [00:04:30] things that or so many businesses or projects or companies that were analog, and then another company came by and created a digital version of it, and then it could, that product or that idea, the function that was executed by that product, could hop on the back of Moore's law and go exponential, [00:05:00]


[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Feb 11, 201914:26
Crypto Companies and Individuals Who Inspire Me - (Ep. 0047)

Crypto Companies and Individuals Who Inspire Me - (Ep. 0047)

So back in the day I said I'd answer questions if you send them in. I believe also at the end of each episode I mentioned that I'll answer questions that folks submit as well. So I got a question from Casey. And they asked who inspires me in this space? What companies or individuals inspire me?


So I thought about this a little bit and the first person that came to mind was Andreas [00:00:30] Antonopoulos. I hope I'm pronouncing his last name correctly. I think there's a good chance that I'm not. But when I was first getting involved in this space, his content and his thoughts, and his wisdom influenced me more than anyone else. This is someone who spent his own money and lost money at first. And frankly had to cash in quite a bit of his Bitcoin to fiat to fund his travels where he'd go [00:01:00] to conferences and speak often for free before he could command a stipend.


He's created a lot of different videos and man, just really, really deepened my understanding of this space. And I'm so grateful to him. So he's first and foremost on this lesson. When I think of someone who speaks for Bitcoin, no one officially speaks for Bitcoin, [00:01:30] but I really think he is probably the most influential spokesperson on behalf of Bitcoin. And I've just learned so much from him, not just about bitcoin but about the lightening network, and a bunch of other things. Really great guy. I've bought, I believe, all of his books. I am a member of his Patreon community. I believe for awhile there I was donating $250 a month [00:02:00] to him just because I was so grateful for his contributions. I think the second company on this list is really the Dharma Protocol.


I think lending is way underrated as a use case. The bond market is much bigger than the stock market, and both the bond market and the stock market are bigger than circulating into [00:02:30] cash supply, at least in the United States. And everyone borrows money. Rich people borrow money, poor people borrow money. The middle class borrows money. It's just an important function of a well operating economy. And I believe that when lending, on the blockchain that when it's working and the incentives are correct, and it's functioning at scale, [00:03:00] I really believe that this has the potential to be the killer app that brings in millions of people. Because most people won't switch to Bitcoin just because it's neat, or it's cool, or even because it's censorship resistant, right? Unless they're in a place with a horrible banking system, and don't have access to USD accounts or other stable forms of wealth.


Most people aren't going to make that switch, especially when you consider [00:03:30] the amount of knowledge that's required to use Bitcoin. And also a lot of the UX hurdles. The user experience hurdles that exist. But I believe there are a lot of people that don't have access to loans that will find a way to make it work, right? Even if they've got to go into an internet cafe and navigate a pretty difficult process to get a loan. So I think loans, blockchain based loans [00:04:00]


[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Feb 10, 201914:41
Yet Another Morning Routine Post (Yawn) - (Ep. 0046)

Yet Another Morning Routine Post (Yawn) - (Ep. 0046)

So I got a second question from Pravin. Pravin, I hope I'm pronouncing your name correctly, from block.kitchen. Again, man I didn't even know there was a .kitchen domain extension. I'm perplexed by these, just this infinite number of domain names available now. And the prices all over the board. Sometimes you'll see like .blue domains [00:00:30] are like $100 a year and then there'll be some other kind that's like 15 cents. Anyway, I don't understand that business very well. 


But Pravin wrote in and asked a question that I was trying to dodge, but I told people I'd answer questions so I'm going to do it. He even wrote in and revised this question, but I'm going to answer the original question. Sorry. I'm going to answer the original question. 


So he asked what my, I don't know why I'm chuckling [00:01:00] here, but he asked what my morning ritual looks like or my morning routine. And the reason why I laugh is because back in the day, a long time ago, I used to be a personal development blogger right after college because I thought I knew something about personal development. And the truth is I think I probably know very little about personal development. 


But I learned a lot about marketing back then and about blogging and about growing an audience, [00:01:30] none those skills I'm using to actually grow this podcast, which I spent no time promoting at all. Other than I think I have this automated thing that tweets every time I put out a new post. 


So onto this question, but I want to preface this by saying that this used to be the obsession of like productivity bloggers. If you've followed productivity bloggers, basically the space that created [00:02:00] like Tim Ferriss or if you've been following the Getting Things Done Movement. There was this blog back in the day, it's still around, called Zen Habits. But everyone used to blog about their morning routine. There were all these blog posts about how to build a habit of getting up early in the morning. I think, really I think all that stuff is BS.


All right, I'm not going to digress here too much but there have been studies on [00:02:30] different chrono types. And that's just a fancy way of saying people that have certain proclivities around when they get up and when they go to bed. Most people have this flexible chrono type where if they work on it, they can get up early. And most, I mean it's like a majority, but I don't think it's significantly over 50%. 


But most people are in this kind of flexible chrono type category where, [00:03:00] like I said, they can train themselves to get up early or train themselves to get up late, they're flexible. But then there's this early riser, chrono type that tends to be much more organized and less creative, although there's certainly creative people that do get up early in the morning. This just about averages. And it is very hard for them to do anything other than get up early, like that's just how their body is wired. 


And then there's people with this sort of late [00:03:30] rising chrono type that can get up like I don't know, they get up later and they need to sleep in the morning. It's when their body produces certain hormones. They tend to be less structured and how they think and less organized and more creative. 


And if you're in either of those buckets, you really can't change this. And it's just, it's really absurd, kind of this cult around getting up early. There's that quote by, I believe Benjamin Franklin who said early [00:04:00]


[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter:

Feb 09, 201915:50
Recruiting Is A Multiyear Endeavor - (Ep. 0045)

Recruiting Is A Multiyear Endeavor - (Ep. 0045)

I think hiring is a multi-year ... a multi-year game. About half the people I ... we've hired at [Nomics 00:00:11] I've known ... oh, about a year. Some of them, two of them I knew for over a year before they were hired, and it's just so important, I think, as a CEO, to stay in contact [00:00:30] with people who are excellent at what they do. A lot of people try and stay in contact with thought leaders, or other CEOs, and ... you know, people with huge brand names. 


Those people are already bombarded. They have way too much to do. I think the highest ROI relationships to keep up are ones with just amazing operators in their space. I really believe that the biggest lessons I've learned as an entrepreneur [00:01:00] have been around what excellence looks like in different positions, and in different roles. 


And, until you've worked with an A-player ... any given role ... it's just hard to know what that looks like, specially in some of these roles that don't get a lot of attention, like finance leaders, sales leaders, design and product leaders, engineering leaders. 


Generally, the top people [00:01:30] on many of these roles don't have huge followings on Twitter. There's not a lot of social signaling around who they are, other than maybe companies that they've worked at in the past, maybe. And, the only way that they'll have ... for the most part, that they'll have really [fanty 00:01:47] past roles is if they've lived on the coast. Right? If they've lived in New York, or San Francisco; but other than that, those signals are often not there. 


But, [00:02:00] I think these are really important people to stay in touch with, so I just got off the phone with someone who we were looking at, at my last company, when we were looking to replace me as CEO. I went to the board, I said, “I think it's time to higher another CEO. This company ... you know. I feel really comfortable between 30 people to 80 people, or 100. Past that, I think I'm [00:02:30] a bit out of my league. We should hire someone,” and someone applied for that position, who I really think the world of. 


I think they're one of the best executives I've ever seen. Again, they don't have a huge following on Twitter. They don't have a huge personal brand, but holy crap, they're amazing operators, and I think they've been successful in every single role they've ever been in, ever. And so, [00:03:00] I stay in touch with them. 


I'd like them to be an advisor to the company, and so we're talking about that. I also, as a side note, stay in touch with the person that we hired for that role to replace me as CEO at my last company. He's an advisor to the company, we meet every month. I've learned so much from him, and have the utmost respect for him, as well. 


But, yeah, I [00:03:30] think staying in touch with the best operators in these often looked-over areas of a business. I think it's one of the highest ROI activities ever, as an entrepreneur, and I don't think it's done enough, because I just don't know a lot of people that do it; but those are the people that make the difference between really taking [00:04:00]


[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Feb 07, 201907:10
Nomics.com Is Now A Brave Verified Publisher (Plus My Experience With Brave) - (Ep. 0044)

Nomics.com Is Now A Brave Verified Publisher (Plus My Experience With Brave) - (Ep. 0044)

We just turned on Brave verified publisher status on nomics.com and I'm kind of excited about it. I don't think it's going to, at least in the short term, result in any kind of real and meaningful short term value. But I really like the direction that the Brave browser is going in. It's almost at the point that I can start using it on a daily basis, even though it's not quite there yet. 


[00:00:30] I thought it was going to be there. I thought I was going to completely switch over to Brave. They did a lot of things that I think make a lot of sense. I think they've basically forked Chrome, at least the open sourced parts of Chrome, so you can create different workspaces and personas that have saved cookies and bookmarks. There's a state behind [00:01:00] each of these environments that you can switch in and out of, and that's cool. 


For the most part, I believe all Chrome plugins now work in the Brave browser, which is nice, so I can use my password manager and a bunch of other plugins for Chrome that I've become dependent upon, like those working in Brave, which is really nice. And it seems to be faster than Chrome [00:01:30] and it has a real emphasis on privacy which I like, and blocking third party cookies and on, and on, and on. They've done a really good job there, and I'm happy that we are now verified in Brave, or as a Brave publisher. 


There's a few things that didn't work. One, when I use Google Hangouts in the Brave browser, I can't seem to hear the person [00:02:00] on the other side. They can hear me, they can see me, I can see them, but I can't hear them. I've done a lot of Google Hangouts. I'm pretty sure that I have it configured correctly, but I can't seem to hear the person on the other line. 


The other issue, and I'm sure there's more, is that I can't seem to print to anything but PDF in the Brave browser. It doesn't connect to printers on my system for some reason. I have no idea. [00:02:30] Maybe if I spent a couple of hours screwing around with the stuff, I could get it to work. But these things don't work. 


But I'm really glad that there is a team that's focused on some of the UX components of distributed finance or this ... I don't know, whatever we call this space; the crypto-sphere. I think Brave has come a long way. It does look like they took out the MetaMask wallet, or the native MetaMask wallet. [00:03:00] But it's really come a long way. I'm happy that we have it turned on. If you are a user of the Brave browser, and you want to donate to nomics.com, we would obviously, obviously welcome that. But we're not looking at it to be a huge source of revenue. Maybe we'll be pleasantly surprised. I don't know. 


But it's cool to see something come along that operates this well. Generally speaking, when I go [00:03:30] to a website and they tell me that I need to have MetaMask installed, I'm just like, "No. No, I'm just going to move on." Because the UI there is just so clunky and I wish it could get a lot better. I really do. Anyway, that's the update for today. Take care. Bye. 


[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Feb 05, 201904:13
No More "Meet and Greet" Phone Calls - (Ep. 0043)

No More "Meet and Greet" Phone Calls - (Ep. 0043)

At the end of last week, I decided that I am no longer doing meet and greet phone calls or I don't know even calls that feel like they're going to be meet and greet phone calls. When someone says they want to do a meet and greet, the answer is just no. But recently, I've been hit up with a bunch of different people reaching out who won't actually say they want to do a meet and greet [00:00:30] phone call. They'll disguise it as something else. I had someone reach out and say they wanted to sponsor the podcast. As soon as I got on they said that they'd be interested in sponsoring a few months out, but they just wanted to talk to me, and then they pitched me on being on the [inaudible 00:00:47] podcast and that was the podcast they were going to sponsor. But it really felt deceitful, frankly, and [00:01:00] they come in with hey I'd like to sponsor, but then it's three months out and we have to figure out what our budget is. Yadi, yadi, yada. That is not cool, people. That is not cool. Please do not do that. Not to me. Not to anyone else. You're just wasting time. 


I also had someone reach out. It was a journalist, and they said they wanted to talk, and when I got on the phone they said they were exploring different ideas for articles for something they're going to write [00:01:30] about three months out. It's always about three months. I don't know why, and they wanted to hear about Nomics. They're like just tell me more about Nomics. What are you doing? They were actually a journalist. They seemed legit. But that also was a complete waste of time. 


I think there's a lot of people with far too much time on their hands who when they don't feel like they're making progress or when they want to create for themselves the illusion that they're making progress on a given day. [00:02:00] They just want to talk to people, right? They like to hang out in telegram groups and talk on communities and debate various things and get on the phone with each other and talk about these things as well. They need a lot of social reinforcement around what they're doing. 


I'm getting better, for the most part, at filtering through these things. One of the key words I've found [00:02:30] around people who are likely going to waste my time is that they use the phrase "learn more". It might be a VC who reaches out and says something to the effect of, "I like what you're doing. It seems interesting. Let's get on the phone. I'd like to learn more." It's like what motivation do I have to educate you on our market and what we're doing just so that you can learn more? Are you really not going to offer anything of concrete value to me? 


The same on the sales front. Someone will reach out and try and sell me something, [00:03:00] and they'll say, "Hey. Here's what we do. I'd really like to get on the phone. Are you interested in learning more?" I don't what it is about the phrase "learn more" that is just this huge indicator that there's absolutely going to be no value transfer. 


I've started de-escalating these requests. If I don't know the person, I'll just ask for an email. On the bus dev [00:03:30]

 

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Feb 04, 201909:35
When I'm Transparent Here vs. Not - (Ep. 0042)

When I'm Transparent Here vs. Not - (Ep. 0042)

For the most part, I've been sharing general business advice on this podcast, and I really, really, really want that to change. For one, I don't know that I'm a general advice kind of person or an advice kind of persona at all. So what I've been sharing is not what I think is the right way to build a company. I think it's just how we're building a company, and a lot of this is influenced by my past experiences and [00:00:30] successes and also mistakes. I think general business advice starts veering into the category of thought leadership, and I'm also not a fan of thought leadership. One of my favorite things to say is that a leader is kind of like a thought leader except they actually get stuff done, and even when it comes to 'wrong' ways to build a business, [00:01:00] there are plenty of people who build a business the wrong way and still manage to have enormous success. 


So yeah. So I really I guess my journal entry today is just to note that I want to be sharing more about the specific things we're doing at Nomics, but there's a lot that I just can't share yet. I definitely had the experience in the past of [00:01:30] walking other through exactly what I've done in the market to have success and then seeing that copied. And I'm okay with that as long as enough of emote has been built up and as long as enough time has passed. And we're starting to see some real success at Nomics that I'm proud of, but enough time just hasn't passed yet. And I'm [00:02:00] kind of itching to share it. For one, I want to brag. For one, I want to brag. 


But I guess another piece of this is I just think there's a lot of things to learn about the space that we're in, cryptocurrency, market data, data companies, data platforms. And so I'm really looking forward to sharing some of our findings, some of our learnings, some of our [00:02:30] wins and also some of the things that I think are other people work that absolutely don't work. But, again, not enough time has passed for us to have a true mote there yet. So I'm just waiting for that to develop. 


So the message today is just that I am itching to share more. I'm itching to share more than just ideas and general thoughts on product and building an org. [00:03:00] But I also think that as I go about documenting what we're doing here and 'working' in public, whatever that means. There's a lot of people that talk about working in public or building a company in public, and I think that's just code for content marketing. And it can be really great content marketing, and it can help other people like join in the journey that you're having. I think a lot of the best marketing makes your listeners protagonists [00:03:30] or participants in the story about the development of your company, right? But it's just too early to share more details. Just know that they're coming, that I want to share them, that it's for the most part not in my nature to go so general on so many things. I hope you're enjoying this nonetheless. But stay tuned. Details are coming. They're forthcoming.


All right. Bye.

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Feb 03, 201904:23
Consistency (As Product Inspiration) Is Uninspired - (Ep. 0041)

Consistency (As Product Inspiration) Is Uninspired - (Ep. 0041)

I think it's dangerous for companies to become obsessed with consistency. I think there's a time and a place for consistency, and I'm not talking about consistency of execution, I'm talking about consistency of content. Of course, consistency of execution is important, being a consistent person, doing what you say you're going to do. All that stuff [00:00:30] is of upmost important. But when I talk about consistency in this podcast, I'm talking about consistency from a product and perhaps even a content perspective. 


I think one mistake that junior product managers make is they can be obsessed with consistency, and, in fact, in a lot of new product managers will come in and say, "I'm going [00:01:00] to make this new thing, and it's going to be consistent with that thing." And my primary job here once I started is to create consistency across our product or across our app, and there's nothing wrong inherently with consistency. But I think when that becomes the highest form of inspiration, problems can occur, right? When people stop [00:01:30] thinking about new ways to do things, when they stop asking questions like what does the user really want here, sometimes that can create situations where a new aspects of an app are in some ways highly inconsistent with past things. And maybe it's the older parts of the app that need to be made consistent with the new parts, or maybe it depends on your market [00:02:00] and your user group and who your customers are and why they bought your product. But maybe it's okay that there's inconsistency. Maybe as you build out the first version of your product, there are parts of what you're doing that are inconsistent with past parts. And that's okay. It's the first coat of paint, and when you go to put a second coat of paint on, maybe you can create consistency if that's the right thing to do.


But [00:02:30] I think there is sometimes within organizations this faith in what existed before they were around, and I think that's not only true of companies or products, I think it's true culturally. I think about a lot of religions where ... [00:03:00] So I'm not a religious person. But I've definitely seen ... But I grew up in a religious culture, and there's this tendency to not question the things that we're around before someone was born, right? So you can think about things like, I don't know, the birth of Jesus, right? If someone came around today saying the types of things that Jesus said or any other religious prophet or figure, most people would [00:03:30] discount them, right? But because these things, Jesus and others, existed before someone was born, it has a certain amount of weight. 


And I definitely see this in startups where a cohort of people will come into an organization, and they accept it almost faith value or at face value what was done prior to their arrival. But everything done since their arrival is subject to [00:04:00] a huge amount of scrutiny and there's this desire to create consistency with what's always been there. And I think a danger for companies is that a whole bunch of people get hired or enough people get hired that bring up consistency concerns at every meeting that you create this organization that it's like this consistency creating machine that everything that's done is pulled into this [00:04:30]

 

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Feb 01, 201908:35
Why My Tune Has Changed On Freelancers & Contractors - (Ep. 0040)

Why My Tune Has Changed On Freelancers & Contractors - (Ep. 0040)

My thinking, over the years, on hiring freelancers and other people with nonpermanent status has really changed a lot over time. I used to be of the opinion that I wanted to hire lifers, people who are in it for the long haul, people who could develop deep company knowledge and really kind [00:00:30] of be there forever. I still want to hire folks with some of those attributes. There's nothing wrong with that. I think was has changed is this staunch anti-freelancer or anti-contractor approach, and there's a few things that kind of changed my mind. 


I think the first is that hiring freelancers is a really great way to run experiments. They might [00:01:00] be more expensive per hour, but there are definitely people with highly-developed skillsets that have developed those skillsets over long periods of time that are staunchly committed to being contractors. They like it for a variety of lifestyle or other reasons, and they've developed deep expertise. You can hire them fairly quickly to [00:01:30] work on really important things in your business and test them out. 


When you test them out, you don't have to permanently commit to spending a certain amount of money per year. You don't have to invest in recruiting like you otherwise would. You don't have to invest in health insurance, but most importantly, you can pivot. If you run an experiment and it works, then perhaps you double down on that experiment or you decide to scale it, and that [00:02:00] might involve hiring someone full time, but if it doesn't work, you can just part ways when that makes sense and kind of within the terms of the contract you've established.


When it comes from everything to branding to SEO to writing to all kinds of different tasks, I think now I'm much more likely to hire a freelancer to test and [00:02:30] see if that works. Often, the freelancer won't be right, but the basic idea of what were attempting is right, and hiring that freelancer really allowed us to evolve our idea of what we need in a given position. It could be that our initial thoughts on the skillset or consolation of skills that would be required to create wins, that our initial idea of that was completely wrong, [00:03:00] and hiring a freelancer allows us to realize that. Then we can hire another freelancer and see if we nail it. 


Then, if that works, maybe we move to a full-time position or maybe, and this often happens, that the freelancer does bring a lot of success, but they bring success around something that only needed to be executed once over a period of three months, or with a lot of marketing things, someone [00:03:30] can bring success and then, over the course of six to eight months, that traffic opportunity or that advertising opportunity or that paid media opportunity kind of the ship has sailed on making that work because the economics of ad buying changed or competition in the space heated up, and there's no longer an opportunity there. 


Yeah, so my thoughts have really changed on this. I've also found that [00:04:00] there are some people that are so good at what they do that it's near impossible for a company of our size to hire them as full-time employees, but it's absolutely possible to hire them as freelancers, whether they're for-hire CFOs that have advanced skillsets in a given area or what have you. My tune has really changed here. I used to be [00:04:30]


[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Jan 31, 201905:50
What I'm Looking For In An Executive Assistant - (Ep. 0039)

What I'm Looking For In An Executive Assistant - (Ep. 0039)

So, I'm looking for an executive assistant, and I just want to put this out there. It's not a mad dash to hire someone. I'm not going to be hiring a recruiter. Yeah, I'm not going to be hiring a recruiter or running a strict process. I think it's the kind of thing where, when I find the right person, [00:00:30] it'll just happen. There are definitely hires that we make where we're running a process and we're shooting for a date. This hire is not like this. 


Yeah, so what's the predicament that I'm in, that's leading me to want to make this hire? I think the reality is that we've decided to build our company in a specific [00:01:00] way. There's five of us, and I'm the only one who's not a full-time maker. There's three engineers, one front end developer slash graphic designer, who's our creative director, and then there's me, and I really want the rest of the team focused on building and making our product. [00:01:30] That means banking, HR stuff, interfacing with lawyers, sales, customer support. I mean, we share customer support, communication with the outside world, doing webinars, content marketing, marketing in general. Everything that's not related to building the product is falling [00:02:00] on me, and I need help. 


The truth is that I don't really need help in quotes, and there's lots of people that will offer to help you. The truth is that I don't even have time for assistants, you know, for someone to assist me, because when someone's assisting you, it implies that you're doing it too, right? I've got two toddlers, and I'll say to them, " [00:02:30] Hey, I'm going to help you clean this room, or can you help me?" So I don't want someone to amplify what I'm doing. I want someone who truly is ... someone operates at a very high level, that can take entire functions of the business and just handle them with without [00:03:00] a ton of instructions. Right? I can just kind of describe the outcome I'm looking for, and they make it happen. They've got great judgment, and they can operate pretty independently, right? 


This is not a great position for someone who wants to mirror me or shadow me. If someone wants to learn from me directly, [00:03:30] this isn't a good position for that. What I do know is that there's a lot of writing that needs to be done. It doesn't make sense to hire a full-time writer just yet, who's just going to write. There's a lot of processes and organization that needs to be created, but we don't have to have enough to do to just hire a full time process person. 


Whoever we hire [00:04:00] needs to be a lover of new technology, new software. We have so much interesting technology that we use on so many fronts, security, organizational stuff, communication stuff. I think we do a lot of nonstandard things, and we're early adopters of communications technology. It can't be the thing where I'm like customer support for whoever's hired [00:04:30] on how this stuff works.


They also need to be passionate about business growth. I think the mistake that a lot of executive assistants make is that they think their job is to respond to everyone, and that's a real problem, right? Then you've just hired someone [00:05:00]

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Jan 31, 201907:16
Chief Communication Officer - (Ep. 0038)

Chief Communication Officer - (Ep. 0038)

One of my favorite blog posts is on the AVC.com blog. It came out in 2010. It's called What A CEO Does. This is on Fred Wilson's blog. In this blog post, it's pretty short, but it's incredibly powerful. In this blog post, Fred Wilson describes being on a board with another VC and [00:00:30] a search at that board was doing for a CEO of a portfolio company, right? They're looking to hire a new CEO. Fred, I think he was a junior VC at that time, certainly didn't have the experience that he has now, but Fred turned to the more experienced VC as described in this blog post and said, "What does a CEO do? We're looking to hire this position. [00:01:00] What are the foundational aspects of this person's job that we're hiring for?" 


As Fred tells the story, the senior VC on the board replied or answered without thinking. He said, "A CEO only does three things." Oh, it's my wife calling. I'll call her right back. Fred responded that a CEO does three things. One, [00:01:30] sets the overall vision and strategy for the company and communicates it to all stakeholders. Two, recruits, hires and retains the very best talent for the company. Three, make sure there's always enough cash in the bank. In the story, Fred said, "Is that really it?" The senior VC said that the CEO should be delegating everything else in the business. I think that's right. [00:02:00] I really agree with this. 


There's three jobs, make sure there's money in the bank, make sure the company is making good hires, and three, communicates the vision, right? Investors, employees, customers, the market, etcetera. I've been thinking about this a lot and I really think that of those three things, communicating the vision is the most important one. Because when you [00:02:30] communicate the vision frequently and perhaps in a one too many fashion, right, through blog posts, through podcasts, through all hands meetings of the company, when you tell lots of stories, you'll make good hires. You really will. 


At least it helps a lot when you're making good hires, especially if a lot of the communicating the vision is also to the press, if [00:03:00] you can get it. You'll make good hires and you'll tend to have money in the bank, right? Because customers will listen to this. Customers will listen to the communication of the vision. I think kind of at the top of the food chain, this three item food chain, is communicating the vision. Something I've been doing [00:03:30] five days a week, I try and do it every weekday, but sometimes in order to hit my number here, I got to do it on the weekends, but something I've been doing is sending a daily audio note to the company about different things that are going on. 


I call it the B Cast. I have a channel that it goes out on. I think that's been really helpful. I've gotten some good feedback on it, but I think it's always important [00:04:00] for CEOs to be communicating. That's part of why I do this podcast everyday. It's part of why I do the daily "podcast" of the company. It's not really a podcast, but it's important. I've seen this trend recently. It's not recent. I've seen this trend for a long time of CEOs [00:04:30]

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Jan 29, 201912:53
As a 2x Founder, This = The Best Advice I Can Give - (Ep. 0037)

As a 2x Founder, This = The Best Advice I Can Give - (Ep. 0037)

So, I was reading this article in the New York Times about Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi, and how Donald Trump has never had to really go up against someone like Nancy Pelosi in business negotiations before. And why he's being a bit, you know, he's been frustrated by that. And someone in the article, someone quoted in the article, "The art of war." So, there's this ancient [00:00:30] Chinese book by a man name Sun Tzu. So, I'm not a fan of war, but I am a fan of strategy and so this is a book about war strategy and a lot of people have used it to draw analogies to business strategy. In any kind of like zero sum adversarial strategy in general. There's a lot of takeaways that you can take from this book. 

                    So anyway, someone in this article was quoting Sun Tzu and the quote [00:01:00] that they read was this, here's the quote. "Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win." And this quote reminded me a lot about the things I'd like to do differently and the things that I think I am doing differently as a second time entrepreneur. So, I think a lot of [00:01:30] entrepreneurs are like, they start a business, and they raise funds, and they are basically executing with the hopes of winning, right? So, they'll raise money and the belief is that this money that they've raised is a lottery ticket and it basically allows them to enter the game to play the game. [00:02:00] And maybe they'll win, maybe they'll lose. And at best the money that they've raised they believe increases their likelihood of winning. And, I think that's a bad way to think about venture capital or any kind of investment, or business in general. 

                    I think the best entrepreneurs when they do raise money, or deploy capital, or invest in anything as a business, they are [00:02:30] deploying capital against a strategy that they've proven that they can execute against. And, they're deploying capital so that they can scale what is already winning, right? They're deploying capital to scale what is already working and how does this relate to business strategy, or entrepreneurship, or building a product company? I think for me [00:03:00] the biggest way that this comes into play is around product market fit and around engineering. So, a lot of companies spend a lot of money compensating for lack of product market fit, or compensating for not having a sticky product, not having a product that sells itself. Not having a product that goes viral, [00:03:30] et cetera. And so, they'll do a lot of things like, buy ads on AdWords, or hire a bunch of salespeople, or go to a bunch of conferences and buy booths, and they're doing all these things because they believe that they can deploy capital to increase the [00:04:00]

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Jan 27, 201907:45
Bitcoin Won't Recover Until 2021 - (Ep. 0036)

Bitcoin Won't Recover Until 2021 - (Ep. 0036)

Hey how's it going? I hope you're having a great day, a fantastic day wherever you are. So, I have been asked this a few times. I though I'd answer it here. What do I think of the current state of bear market and when are we going to recover? So, I went through this a little bit in 2013, 2014. During that time Bitcoin spiked to ... at the end of 2013 it spiked to around $1200 and then it crashed again to, [00:00:30] I don't know, $100, $200, $300 and fluctuated around there for a long time. Then it took all of 2014, all of 2015 all of 2016 and into the first quarter of 2017 to see 1200 again. So three whole years. Then it spiked, went to 20K. Then we crashed again [00:01:00] at the beginning of 2018. I really think it could be all of 2018, 2019 and all of 2020 and then at the beginning of 2021 it might spike again. So yeah, I think it's probably until beginning of 2021 until we see the kinds of prices that we saw at the end of 2017, but that doesn't mean there is not lots of opportunity. I think it's gonna go up during that time. 


In my opinion, this is all [00:01:30] for educational purposes only, I just don't think we'll see 20, 21K etc until then. Then I think once it hits 20, I think we could see another 2017 in 2021. So if you are a trader and you have experience and or like trading during markets that are going sideways, you benefit from the ups and downs and you know how to make that work for you, I think you're gonna see a pretty good time here [00:02:00] in the next few years. All right, so that is my hot take. Again, this is not financial advice. This is for entertainment purposes only. Please, please, please, do not make any decisions whatsoever based on my thoughts. All right take care. Bye. 

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Jan 26, 201902:40
Being An "API First" Company (And What This Means) - (Ep. 0035)

Being An "API First" Company (And What This Means) - (Ep. 0035)

So, a while ago on our homepage, and in our header, and basically everywhere on our website, we put a little tagline below our logo. That tagline says, an API company. So if you go to nomics.com it says Nomics an API company. And I think this is really important for us to kind of state what our focus is. I see a lot of companies that are distracted, especially during bear markets, especially in the crypto space during bear markets. [00:00:30] And they're just doing a lot of things simultaneously hoping that one of those things will work. It's like the lottery ticket strategy. Maybe if they just do everything all at once, one of those things will work. And for us, we're an API first company. So I wanted to describe it kind of to me what it means that we're an API first company. The first is, that [00:01:00] we must dog food our own API. So if you go to nomics.com everything there is built with our API, and it's built with public endpoints, or paid private endpoints. But we don't access our data in any way other way other than through that API. There is no backdoor.


So an analogy for a restaurant, if I owned a restaurant, I don't believe, unless there was a hugely important [00:01:30] reason that I can't think of, I don't think I would let people eat at that restaurant by just going into the kitchen if they worked there and grabbing some food. I think I would make them go through the front door, have that experience, wait to get seated with everyone else. Then they would have to sit at a table, and they'd have to see the menu. They'd have to get silverware delivered from the kitchen. And they'd have to experience that restaurant exactly [00:02:00] like everyone else experiences it. So they would have an understanding of what it's like to eat there. Right? If the service is slow, they would experience slow service. It's probably impossible to completely replicate the experience that someone would have if they weren't known by the kitchen staff and the wait staff and all that. But I think I would want them going through the front door, not through the kitchen to eat there. And that's the way I think about our API, right?


We're never going to consume [00:02:30] our data, or our systems in any way other than how the customers access it. And I think that's really important that we're a user of our API. So, what does it mean to be an API first company? Yeah, it means we dog food our own product. We go through the front door, not the back door. The second thing that it means is that our docs are really important. In a lot of ways, our docs are our most important marketing asset. It describes what the product is. It describes what the features are. Describes how they work. [00:03:00] And I think the API companies that treat their docs like the most important marketing materials that they have, I think those are the companies that succeed. So, that's another thing. It's another important part of being an API company. I think a third component of being an API first company is that it is our intent, I hope we do this, we plan on doing this, is open sourcing everything that's not our API. So our website, [00:03:30]

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Jan 25, 201907:39
Don't Make The Mistake of Forgetting What Phase of Growth You're In - (Ep. 0034)

Don't Make The Mistake of Forgetting What Phase of Growth You're In - (Ep. 0034)

Hey, it's me. Hope you're having a fantastic day, wherever you are. Or night, depending upon what part of the world you're in. So I wanted to share some thoughts about the product journey, buildings product, et cetera. I've had a lot of different kinds of experiences getting product feedback, it's really been all over the map. But the one consistent thing, the one consistent [00:00:30] experience I've had around product feedback, is that it is almost always the case that when there is a true market need, that when the market hungry for something, that the feedback you get is kind of hard to read.


I remember, back in the day, I was considering making a product, and I sent out a survey asking people [00:01:00] for what their needs were, what their hopes and fears were with regards to a specific market, and got back hundreds of responses to a survey where I was soliciting feedback, hoping we could build something that would get product market fit. And I really had to kind of get a beer and just kind of sit back on an easy chair and process everything that came in, because it was overwhelming. [00:01:30] There was so much need in this market that a lot of the asks included stores that were kind of sad, or they were from people that were just feeling completely overwhelmed. The responses were from people that just expressed so much need, and in a lot of cases were asking for things to be built that were just impossible to be built, and [00:02:00] it was a lot to process.


And I think in general, as product creators, we often think we want this feedback from the market, and then we get it, and it's kind of hard to deal with. The truth is that most people don't know what they want to see built, right? They only know their problems and they know what other people have built, so often [00:02:30] the feedback you get when you're asking for such feedback is people asking for something to be built that is just like, "Hey, can you build this thing that someone else has built, or something like this, but better?" Or they'll just speak to some outcome they're looking for, like they want to make more money, or they want six pack abs, or kind of the product ... The consumer product categories tend to be ... I put them into three buckets. Getting [00:03:00] paid, getting laid, and not dying, right?


So getting paid, that's around finance, personal finance, savings, career progression. The getting laid category ... I say that facetiously, but that's personal relationships, sex, love, fulfillment. Things like that. And then not dying ... Again, this is all mostly a joke, but ... [00:03:30] or these categories are jokes. But that's around health, fitness, longevity. Things like that. And people just ... they just know the outcomes that they want. They will hardly ever speak to specific features. They will hardly ever just give you something on a silver platter that you can just take in and then directly turn into features. [00:04:00] That's pretty rare.


And then in more enterprise or B2B niches, I think in order to get the kind of feedback you really need, you kind of — in my experience at least — you have to build something for the market to respond to, right? So I think about these three phases of growth, and they are, when it comes to the product, and it is build, iterate [00:04:30]

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Jan 23, 201910:16
Under Development - Open Source Apps for iOS, Android, WordPress etc. - (Ep. 0033)

Under Development - Open Source Apps for iOS, Android, WordPress etc. - (Ep. 0033)

Well, I'm having a pretty good day. My wife came over, and we watched [00:00:30] an episode of The Office which is something we've done. Not The Office, but we've had a show that we've tried to watch that gets our mind out of the day-to-day ever since our daughters were born. I have twin toddlers, two girls. They're amazing, and so's my wife actually. Anyway, she came over. We're on season two of The Office. Man, it's awkward. [00:01:00] Uh, uh, it's awkward and painful. There's no laugh tracks, so there's not a ton of comic relief. I hope it gets funnier. I think it's funny here and there, but it's also kind of sad.


All right. Anyway, that's a habit that my wife and I kind of started after our daughters were born. The first thing we watched was The Golden Girls. We saw every episode of The Golden Girls. What a great show. Man, I love [00:01:30] that show. Maybe my favorite sitcom to date. Yeah, so we'd make an appointment to watch this after the kids went to bed, and sometimes we'd watch it, sometimes we wouldn't, but it was good to have an appointment to get together even if sometimes we didn't want to talk at all and just wanted to veg out and watch the show, or sometimes it was fun to just talk and just reconnect. So, she did that. It's nice to have flexibility as an entrepreneur. [00:02:00] Especially when you're working hard but even if you're not. It's nice to take advantage of that, so we spent a little bit of time together in the middle of the day. 


Today's update is about some open source projects that we're kicking off. We have kicked off in various stages a WordPress plug-in, an IOS app, an Android app, [00:02:30] a Twitter Bot, and a Google Home skill thing. The WordPress plug-in is underway. That's going to be open sourced. Actually, all these are going to be open source because we want to provide really great example code around how to use our API. The WordPress plug-in is kicked off. For the IOS and Android app we've got a proposal from a team that we like, but if you know [00:03:00] anyone who's really fantastic at creating React Native apps that render to IOS and Android, please let us know. We'd love to look at a few different proposals, but we have one that we like, and then the Twitter Bot, the Alexa skill, and the Google Home, I don't even know what those are called, those are still in kind of product planning phases. 


If you have any requests for these, please let me know. We've actually [00:03:30] gotten some really interesting requests around the WordPress plug-in and gotten some great product feedback. But if you've used these kinds of apps before or if you've used apps that are put out by other platforms that do similar things and you have any feature requests, please let me know. I think that there's a lot of room for innovation, and everyone is basically doing different versions of the same thing. [00:04:00]

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Jan 22, 201905:30
Just Launched: Markets (Trading Pair) Analytics Page - (Ep. 0032)

Just Launched: Markets (Trading Pair) Analytics Page - (Ep. 0032)

Blog post link

Hey, everyone, welcome to today's Nomics update. It is Martin Luther King Jr. Day and this is one of, in my opinion, one of the most important holidays of the year. I am really glad that at Nomics we take the day off and we observe it. I hope you're having a good day, a restful day for those of you in the United States who have the day off and spending [00:00:30] time with those you care about and reflecting on, hopefully, the importance of the day or at least spending some time with your family. 


Today's update is around a new page that we've launched at nomics.com on the website. It is the Market's page which is currently in Beta, but the Market's page allows you to get data and intelligence [00:01:00] and metrics on specific trading pairs, which I think is important. Most of the time when people are looking at pricing data, at least when consumers are, they're considering the price of a specific asset. For example, they might look up the price of Bitcoin or the price of Ethereum or the price of Minero or Zcash or whatever they're interested in and [00:01:30] that's good to do. That's fine. I look at those prices as well. But it's important to realize that those prices are taken from the prices of trading pairs on given exchanges.


I think I'd say nine times out of 10, maybe 10 times out of 10 when people ask us to add a currency to the website, what they generally say is like when I get an email request, it'll say, "Hey, I'm wondering if you can add [00:02:00] this token to nomics.com or to your API?" The truth is that we don't have tokens to our API. We add exchanges and those exchanges have market data that allow us to price all the assets that are listed on that exchange whether they're the base currency or the quote currency on that exchange. So first off, we don't really list tokens. We might de-list a token [00:02:30] if we think there's some shady activity happening, but at the end, of the day we don't really list tokens. We list exchanges.


Once we add an exchange, we add all the trading pairs from that exchange. And I think most people know, at least in this space, if you're listening to this, you probably know what a trading pair is. An example of a trading pair is Ethereum to BTC. And [00:03:00] actually, I am going to get into this before I speak too much, before I say more about what's on our new markets page, so we had an exchange and then we add the trading pairs on that exchange. An example of a trading periods Ethereum to BTC. 


Generally, when these trading pairs are listed, the base currency comes first and the quote currency comes next. I think most people vaguely [00:03:30] know what a base currency and a quote currency are. I don't know that the average person that comes to our website actually or websites like ours, know what a base currency and a quote currency are. But if you've gone to a cryptocurrency exchange or a Forex exchange, you generally see these trading pairs. The first currency, which is the base currency, it is the item that is being priced, right. So [00:04:00] let's take Ethereum into BTC. In this scenario, Ethereum is the base currency and it is being priced in the quote currency. So for example, if you see Ethereum to BTC is priced at .033 it means that the price [00:04:30]

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Jan 21, 201909:57
[Minicourse + Podcast] (Almost) Everything I Know About Startup HR - (Ep. 0031, Formerly Episode 27)

[Minicourse + Podcast] (Almost) Everything I Know About Startup HR - (Ep. 0031, Formerly Episode 27)

Here's the full blog post with more details.

Links Mentioned In This Episode

All right, so this is going to be a mini course. The title of this is, almost everything I know about startup HR. I'd like to think though that I know a lot more than just what's in here, right? There's lots of nuance, but at the end of the day, the documents that I'm going to share really have the core of my belief system around this stuff. I'm going to spare you the philosophy upfront, [00:00:30] I think a lot of the philosophy is embedded or sort of the big concepts are driving ideas are embedded in these documents, and we can discuss them as we're reviewing the documents that I'm about to share in this mini course. It feels a little pretentious calling this a mini course, but I'm trying to speak to the value that I believe is being conveyed here. 

So, I guess the only bit of philosophy I'll share with you [00:01:00] is that in my experience, almost all success in business is really due to what you're working on and who you're working on it with. And then, in last place is how hard you're working. But because you can control all those three, you know, all three of those things, you should probably work hard. That's not an excuse to not work hard, although, you know, be considerate [00:01:30] of your family and your priorities, right? So, I've got five documents here that I'm going to review that speak to our standard operating procedure at Nomics and these documents have been created as a result of some good lessons, but also some really hard lessons. I guess those things aren't mutually exclusive, but let's start with [00:02:00] this first document. 

And again, I think I'll just say here, there's an additional side note that I think everyone thinks that startups or businesses is about having brilliant ideas, and working really hard against those ideas, but it's at the end of the day, it really just comes down to recruiting and that's what you're working on in your ability to recruit, and then after you've recruited the ability to be disciplined about [00:02:30] hiring and firing, and not having org chart debt, right? Everyone talks about tech debt, but I think org chart debt is also really important. And, yeah, there is an interview with a woman named Patty McCord who wrote a book called Powerful and she's an HR consultant, but she also used to run HR for [inaudible 00:02:56]

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Jan 20, 201939:30
In B2B Fintech, 30%+ of Product Value (Or More) Is In The Contract - (Ep. 0030)

In B2B Fintech, 30%+ of Product Value (Or More) Is In The Contract - (Ep. 0030)

I've had this new experience since being in this world, this financial world, dealing with hedge funds and exchanges and other folks who are customers, and it's really around product and the commercial contract and the role that the commercial contract plays in [00:00:30] the product. In the past, so much of the product or a huge part of the product, most of the product, the vast majority of a product that was sold, almost all of it, almost all of it was about the software and what you see on the screen, and I'd never worked with a commercial contracts attorney, going [00:01:00] back and forth with red lines on the particulars of an engagement that a customer might have with us.


I was in the MarTech space, vertical SaaS. People would come to the website, they'd find what they wanted to buy, they'd click the purchase button, and that was it. You'd have terms of service, and they'd either buy it and agree to the terms of service by buying, or they wouldn't. There wouldn't be all this back and forth with attorneys. 


[00:01:30] A new experience that I'm having in the financial world is just how much of the product and what you're charging for is the contract itself, the legal arrangement that you have with the person on the other end of the line. Often, a business might come to you, or I'll just describe an experience I had. 


A business came to me. They wanted [00:02:00] essentially a version of the product that we had posted on our website at nomics.com, but they wanted a bunch of stipulations in there around confidentiality, guarantees, SLAs, uptime, response time, indemnification, liability, etc., [00:02:30] and we had to charge a lot more for it, and one of the reasons why we had to charge a lot more for it is because we had to pay a damn attorney. Actually, I really like our commercial contracts attorney, but before this whole experience, I'd never even heard the term commercial contracts attorney. I didn't know that was ... I thought you just went to whoever your corporate attorney was, and they jimmied up a contract for you and things would mostly work, but now this is a thing that we do, [00:03:00] and you have to charge more because you have to pay an attorney, but also because you have to spend a whole bunch of your time going back and forth on the particulars of the agreement, and also because when you're doing B2B sales, especially in the financial world, it's just important to consider how much of the value of what you're providing comes through various guarantees and assumptions of liability, [00:03:30] etc. 


It's hard to calculate sometimes what's being given and what's being taken, especially if you're not very experienced. It's really hard to find research on what the price points are associated with pretty niche deals where there isn't a lot of market information or means for price discovery out there around the cost. 


When I think about an [00:04:00] offer in vertical SaaS where people just go to a website and buy something, I think about an offer consisting of price. How much does it cost? What are the guarantees? Do you have a 30-day money back guarantee or something like that? What is the timeframe? Is it a monthly plan? Is it a quarterly plan? Is it a yearly plan? Are there any bonuses that you're providing when someone purchases? Maybe [00:04:30]...

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Jan 17, 201907:25
Odd: Lots of Listens, Not Much Feedback - (Ep. 0029)

Odd: Lots of Listens, Not Much Feedback - (Ep. 0029)

Hey there. This is episode 29. Holy crap, this is a real thing. This podcast seems to be going pretty well. Every week or so, listens are roughly doubling so I know people are listening to this. But I haven't gotten a lot of feedback yet, really. Someone did send me a message the other day, let's see, let's [00:00:30] see what did they say here? "I'm trying to use fewer messaging apps, but your personal podcast is effing phenomenal. I listen to all of them and it's really helpful, helps me reflect on problems critically." 


Yeah, so it was a really nice message and my mom told me that she listened to this and a few other people have told me that they listen to this podcast. People seem a little, it's really odd, folks seem a little reluctant to tell me that they listen to this, almost as if they're listening to this to [00:01:00] kind of spy on my personal life but they don't want to tell me. It's cool to tell me, I do this so you can listen.


Anyway, I just wanted to ask for your feedback. It's kind of interesting, with the Flippening podcast, when it had roughly the same number of listeners, it actually wasn't growing as fast as this podcast but I got a ton of feedback. This podcast, not a ton of feedback but the listener base [00:01:30] is growing faster, so I don't know what that means. It's really interesting. I think sometimes you publish content and you just get different kinds of reactions. Some content you publish can get you a lot of sales, but then you don't get a lot of comments. Other times you publish a podcast or blog post or whatever, you release something in the world, and you get lots of comments or shares but no one buys. Sometimes you don't get [00:02:00] any interest at all and that's bad. Sometimes you'll get a lot of shares but not a lot of comments and it doesn't result in a lot of purchases or conversions against your funnel. It's really bizarre the way content works and the way people respond to different kinds of content.


Not sure what's happening with this. I think, you know I don't know, I wonder if it's just that investors are listening to this and families listening to this and competitors [00:02:30] are listening to this and no one wants to tell me that they're listening. Or customers are ... Anyway, I've enjoyed making this content. It's fun. There's a lot of tedious stuff I do. I would curse but I don't want to do post-production. So there's a lot of tedious stuff I do, and this is a cool place to just share with you our progress and I know our team company listen, or some people on the team listen to this. I don't know that Nick does. [00:03:00] I don't know that my co-founder does. 


If you do listen to this and some parts have been helpful and other parts haven't, I am desperate for feedback. Again, it's really this odd experience where the podcast just continues to grow and people are silent. So I guess I should just take that. Maybe I'll just look at the analytics. [00:03:30] Sometimes I'll post a post and there will be a ton of listens, and other ones there won't be a lot of listens and I can see when things get shared, so I'll just look at my metrics to get feedback from you. But that's not qualitative, come on.


Anyway, if you do have feedback let me know. If not, I guess given the growth of this show or whatever we want to call it ...

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Jan 15, 201905:07
Dear VCs - Please Don't Ask to "Learn More About Our Business" - (Ep. 0028)

Dear VCs - Please Don't Ask to "Learn More About Our Business" - (Ep. 0028)

So today's entry is a bit of a rant, and it's really around an email that I get pretty often. Especially when we do things that start getting a little bit of public attention. I often get an email from a VC, that essentially says, "Hey, I'm from such and such VC firm. I'd really like to hop on the phone [00:00:30] and learn a little bit more about your business." These emails really get me ... First off, yeah, it's great that they say something complimentary about the business, but they literally offer nothing in exchange for hopping on the phone and often, as I found the hard way, having to educate them on the industry, educate them on the business model.


Then they start asking questions where they're [00:01:00] critiquing our business model, asking who our big customers are and in these situations, when I've taken these calls, and I've only taken them a couple of times and not in this business, not at Nomics, they're essentially just trying to pump you for information about your business because they want to make sure that they don't miss out on the opportunity to invest in a great company. And almost [00:01:30] never, almost never on these calls ... and again, take it into consideration that I've only done a couple of these, do they provide any value in exchange, right. They just want to hear you and I think this works potentially on some entrepreneurs. I mean like, it must work on some level, which is why they do it.


But often it's ... on the other end of those phone calls, is just an analyst [00:02:00] who's filling out a spreadsheet about companies in your space. That's probably the most benign version. The most malicious version is that there's a VC that is considering investing in a company that's competitive with yours and they're trying to get as much information as they can about competitive companies before making the investment that they really want to make, which is in [00:02:30] your business enemy or whatever, at least a competitor. And so now, after they've invested in that competitor, they can tell the competitor all the information that they have about you. I can't tell you the number of times that someone has sent to me, a pitch deck from a competitive business that contains details about a business that's competing with mine.


And that man, that is not cool, [00:03:00] in my opinion, that people are just sharing pitch decks left and right, in that fashion. I guess my advice here to VCs if you're listening to this ... so to VCs or analysts that are doing these calls, my advice is, really get to know the business and offer some kind of exchange of value. [00:03:30] Don't just say, "Hey, I'd love to learn more." Like why? Why should I tell you more about the business? So offer and consider why an entrepreneur, who doesn't have much time at all, why should they spend an hour with you, telling you about ... educating you on this space and giving you the inside track? Can you offer something in exchange? To entrepreneurs, I guess I have a few pieces of advice. The first is, in general, [00:04:00] don't do these calls with analysts or associates.


Just never do these calls with analysts of associates, only do these with partners and you know when I've asked for that in the past. Someone will write in like, "Hey, we really love what you're doing, we'd love to learn more." Okay, I've asked to speak with a partner on the phone, I was like, "Okay, I'll do it with a partner."

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Jan 14, 201906:37
(Almost) Everything I Know About Working With Recruiters - (Ep. 0027)

(Almost) Everything I Know About Working With Recruiters - (Ep. 0027)

All right, this podcast episode is going to be called Almost Everything I Know About Working With Recruits.


So I think in the past definitely, definitely one of the biggest mistakes I've made is not paying the best recruiter I can as much as we can afford for the state of the company [00:00:30] to make key hire, to help us with with key hires. It's been my, it's kind of the mythology of the startup space that you can hire everyone on your own and that you should not hire recruiters. So there's a couple instances where this is actually a bad idea and where folks are making a mistake by not hiring recruiters. 


The first is when they just don't have a lot of time to do the quality of search that they need to do and the thoroughness [00:01:00] of the search that they need to do. When you have a startup, you have a lot of things on your plate and a good recruiting process can take just a ton of time over the course of sometimes six months or even longer for a very niche hire or for a very kind of critical hire that needs a multifaceted skillset. 


So like I said in the past, I've just kind of put out the job offer, [00:01:30] hit up people in my network, tweeted something and left things to chance and I think that resulted in a couple things. One, when you do that, it can sometimes take a lot longer to make the hire than it should take and there's the opportunity cost associated with everything that a hire would've done, an employee would have done during the the extra three or six months when [00:02:00] you would have had them on board if you had gone with a recruiter.


I think the second mistake is that when you don't go with a world class recruiter, at least a recruiter who's capable of hiring a world class person into your position, you can sometimes just not be dealing with the best possible candidate or candidate pool when you go to hire. And I've definitely done that in the past. 


I think the biggest learning, probably [00:02:30] the biggest learning, certainly tied for top three of in life in startups, the biggest lesson has been learning what real excellence looks like in a given position. When you first get started, if someone just knows more than you do about a given area, that's awesome. And because they know more [00:03:00] than you, you kind of give them the benefit of the doubt on everything. But until you've worked with someone who's world class in a given role and in a given position, you just don't know what that looks like and you don't know what you're missing out on by not having that truly. 


And especially for roles where people don't have huge personal brands. Accounting, engineering [00:03:30] and on and on and on. It's not obvious who the world class people are, right? It might be obvious who a world class CEO is or maybe a world class communications person, but when it comes to pretty obscure roles or highly technical roles where people in those positions generally don't want public profiles, it's just super hard to know what world class looks like.


[00:04:00] And when you don't know what world class looks like, you end up getting really attached to external signals, right?


[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Jan 13, 201918:11
Part 2 - ShapeShift Layoffs & Lessons Learned (About Focus & Discipline) - (Ep. 0026)

Part 2 - ShapeShift Layoffs & Lessons Learned (About Focus & Discipline) - (Ep. 0026)

So this is Part Two of my reflection on the Shape Shift layoffs. I think anytime we start observing rounds of layoffs from an industry, I think it's important for CEOs in the space, founders in the space, really anyone in the space whose key and vital to the success of a company to reflect on what's happening. What mistakes were made, what lessons [00:00:30] are in this for observers. It's great to learn from other people's mistakes, that's the best way to learn. 


So I guess going back to Erik Voorhees original post about the reason for the layoffs, he alludes to the fact that it really came down to a lack of focus, that they had built Shape Shift, had [00:01:00] a great deal of success, then went out and created Coin Cap and Keep Key and Prism, and a variety of other projects that require engineers and leaders and visionaries and evangelists and communications people. I think there's a few additional lessons in this, beyond what I was talking about in the previous episode. [00:01:30] I think the first on is to realize that in any given company, I think probably the most precious resource is management bandwidth. There are only so many people that ultimately can take entire parts of the business and just handle them for you. The bigger you get, the harder it is to get those people. When you're hiring [00:02:00] founders, there's just all kinds of incentives, and I think connection to the origin story, and connection to the founding circumstances. There's a lot that I think empowers and inspires and enables these sort of early people to give a damn, and to take ownership over what happens. 


Then each round of [00:02:30] hires after that inherits the culture that came right when they were hired. It's a different set of circumstances, it always is, even in extremely successful public companies where the founding CEO wasn't around anymore. It's just a very different set of circumstances, so people coming are... I think when you're at 100 plus people, they're there for a career. They [00:03:00] want to be paid well, and they are thinking about what's their next thing and what's their next thing. What will they really do if they had all the money in the world and didn't have to leave their house every day and go to work. So the first thing is that in any company there's a limited amount of management bandwidth and that is a very scare resource, I might just say ownership bandwidth.


The second thing that is [00:03:30] pretty limited in companies is, I would call it vision bandwidth. Vision and conviction bandwidth, basically there's only so many big ideas that exist in any given time that are actually commercially viable, that you can recruit people around, and there just isn't an infinite amount [00:04:00] of that. For creating multiple companies and brands and stuff. I guess I've been thinking about the difference between my first company, when we did have layoffs. I do think we did get distracted, I won't go over all the things we started up there, but kind of the things that Eric is talking about in regard to creating Coin cap and Keep Key and Prism. [00:04:30] They were creating a market data website, and they had a hardware wallet and they had a build your own index fund thing. Made those mistakes before, how we're trying to avoid them at Nomics. 


I think the first one is to realize the absolute huge amount of value that a good vendor or contractor can provide.

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Jan 12, 201917:18
Thought on Layoffs at ShapeShift (+ Thoughts on Focus & Discipline) - (Ep. 0025)

Thought on Layoffs at ShapeShift (+ Thoughts on Focus & Discipline) - (Ep. 0025)

I want to share a little bit about my thoughts on the ShapeShift layoffs. And a lot of empathy I'm having for Erik Voorhees right now. So first off, I think it's pretty cool that he was upfront about these layoffs. There are definitely things that companies can do to not let it leak out to the public that there have been layoffs. There's lot of techniques for doing that, [00:00:30] if you're into HR. And he didn't do it. He didn't do any of that, any obfuscation. He wrote a Medium post about it, and because he wrote a Medium post it was covered by almost all the crypto publications. CoinDesk. The Block, etcetera.

So the headline is that they let 37 employees go. So, if you haven't heard of ShapeShift, which is unlikely if you're in the crypto space. It's a non-custodial [00:01:00] exchange. So, kind of think about exchanges as existing on this continuum between centralized exchanges on one extreme, and decentralized exchanges on another examples of centralized exchanges would be like, Coinbase or Binance. And then on the decentralized extreme, you would have decentralized exchanges like Radar Relay, Paradex, [00:01:30] etcetera. And then there's kind of hybrid decentralized exchanges like IDEX. And if you're interested in decentralized exchanges and the spectrum in general, check out the latest [inaudible 00:01:43] podcast we've done about this. It's a two part series about decentralized exchanges. It's a really deep dive. It's much more professional than this podcast. 

So anyway, they let 37 employees go. And when I read his blog post about doing this, [00:02:00] the thing that stuck out to me was his statement that they made 1,000 mistakes. But the most thematic of them has been lack of focus. And I really can resonate with this. You know, I think this is something that, a mistake I made in the past, and at previous companies. I think if you're a product person, [00:02:30] and you love product, there's a certain joy that comes with launching a product. And, when you launch a product and it has immediate success, like ShapeShift did. I mean, they grew incredibly fast. I think they grew 3000% in 2017.

But when you have that kind of immediate success, you think it's, or you can think it's pretty repeatable, right? That you just got, you got the "It" factor and you can do it again. And again, [00:03:00] and again. So, ShapeShift not only did ShapeShift, which was their core business and brought in almost all of the revenue. They created CoinCap, which is a Nomics competitor, I guess. A CoinMarketCap competitor, etcetera. And so, that was at coincap.io. They purchased KeepKey, which is a hardware wallet. They created a smart contract, [00:03:30] like index fund thing called Prism, which I used. It was really great, I actually liked it quite a bit. 

But they did a bunch of things that weren't essential to their core business, probably 'cause they had a bunch of cashflow, and they could, right? It's fun to create products if you're a product person. And Eric Voorhees is. But I think [00:04:00] that's really hard to scale. I think the first thing that's hard to scale around creating multiple products is just the founding DNA. Like whatever confluence of circumstances and talents and people that led to your existing success, it's generally hard to reproduce. Like most startups fail. And whenever they work, it's a combination of skill and luck and timing and [00:04:30] a whole bunch of other factors, right? To try and do that over and over again with product after product, when you're still a startup, right? Like not when you're at Salesforce size, or Google size. 

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Jan 11, 201912:04
Why We're Leaving Telegram (And Why That Might Be A Mistake) - (Ep. 0024)

Why We're Leaving Telegram (And Why That Might Be A Mistake) - (Ep. 0024)

I want to share with you why we shifted away from telegram for our community and for our market data API support. So, the impetus [00:00:30] for this really came when I received an email from an API user who wanted free support via email and we don't offer free support for our API via email. We do it through forums because if we're going to spend some time helping someone who's not paying for the API, we really want it to be documented and searchable and available to everyone else who might be interested in that same problem. 

[00:01:00] Their complaint was that they had a bunch of chat apps and they just didn't want to install telegram. At first I was a little bit like, what do you want for free? The API is pretty dang good. I think the free version we're giving away more than CoinMarketCap is providing with their most expensive plan. I believe that to be true, and actually a lot more.

But then I started thinking about [00:01:30] the mainstreaming of the cryptocurrency movement, and yeah, I think a lot of niche things with early adopters happen on telegram, but most people don't have telegram installed. My parents don't have telegram installed. Everyone I know, doesn't use telegram. It's a fairly niche thing. And it's hard to search. There's not threaded comments. So, [00:02:00] as part of our effort to, I guess, go mainstream or make things more accessible, that's another thing about telegram. It's not very good from a accessibility perspective for users with disabilities and such. 

So anyway, we decided to move to forums. There at forums.nomics.com. It's kind of a ghost land right now. It took a while to get our telegram group going and I think folks in there are people [00:02:30] who are in a bunch of telegram groups and it's easy for them to just hop in a room and leave a comment or ask a question. So far, we've only announced these new forums in telegram, so there's not much happening on our forums. 

So, I wanted to walk you through our thinking a bit to the, what are the pros of telegram? So, telegram is great for folks who are on telegram. They don't have to [00:03:00] log in every time they want to leave a comment or ask a question, it's always running if you're participating in a bunch of groups, and it has the feel of real time. I think that's kind of interesting and something that we've seen a lot recently when it comes to business communications is, the presence of some kind of chat widget on websites and because of that interface, we have this [00:03:30] illusion that we're going to hear back. But most of the time when we leave a message in those little chat apps on websites if it's not support for a product you're paying for, usually, they then ask you to leave your email address, and you got to fill in additional emails or information, and then they tell you that they usually answer within like, five hours or something. So, it's basically the same as email. Perhaps it's a little bit more accessible. 

But anyway, telegram, I think, has the illusion of real time. People seem to think [00:04:00] that they're going to hear back sooner. I guess another pro is that, that we know that at least some people use it that it has a high adoption rate in the crypto community. So, those are the pros of going with telegram.

I think another pro for using telegram is, it's just where some people are. I think when it comes to communities, there's a lot of wisdom behind saying, go to where people naturally [00:04:30] are. There in the martech space, which I was in, the marketing technology space with my last company Leadpages and also Drip, everyone's in Facebook group.


[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]


Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Jan 10, 201909:30
Why Our Developers Aren't Launching Anything This Year - (Ep. 0023)

Why Our Developers Aren't Launching Anything This Year - (Ep. 0023)

Hey. So this one might be a little bit off topic. Maybe it's not. No, it definitely qualifies as how I define this podcast as my journal. So I want to talk about why in my humble opinion and after years of bad experiences why I think launching [00:00:30] should be a marketing event and not an engineering event. Like, of course, a launch is a marketing event. Everyone gets that. But I think the thing here that's most important is that launching should not be an engineering event.

So I think engineering teams are notoriously bad for no fault of their own. But I'll just say not engineering [00:01:00] teams, engineering projects are notoriously difficult to predict in terms of when something's going to be done. And often I've seen startups and I have done this more times than I can count unfortunately, but oftentimes I've seen companies do things like plan a launch for a given day and maybe the engineering team is 25% done or 50% done or at least they think they are. [00:01:30] And everyone will come up with some date that's perhaps a little bit of a stretch but mostly doable in terms of when they're going to launch something to the market. And a marketing leader will sit down with an engineering leader, and the engineering leader is trying to do a good job. Maybe they just got hired, maybe they've been there for a while and they want to come off as a team player, and they're like, "Okay. We're going to launch this thing on this date." [00:02:00] And they proceed to coordinate around that. 

So heading into kind of the time of thing is about to launch, marketing and engineering gets together, and they're like, "All right. We need to create marketing collateral around this launch. We need screenshots." Well, the screenshots are ... Engineering will come back with like the screenshots are mostly done, but we have some mock ups. So we can create a demo based on this beta version that's on [00:02:30] a developers computer or I don't know, a mock up of the UI in something like envision or whatever they're using. And they'll invest a whole bunch of time in creating a video or marketing collateral around this launch that's scheduled for this date, but the thing isn't quite ready. But you need to create the collateral ahead of time. 

There's all this coordination cost that's incurred, right? Like weekly meetings. All right, is engineering on track? Is marketing on track? [00:03:00] Let's coordinate, and that eats up a bunch of time. All right. What features are we going to say exist in this when it launches? Here all are the features. Next thing you know a week before launch or two weeks before launch, it turns out that some of those features aren't there. Okay. We have to remove them from the video. We have to remove them from the copy or we need to rename this feature because it doesn't do exactly what we thought and it's going [00:03:30] to be out later or some aspect of the new thing is in beta but another aspect isn't that needs to be added to the graphic. There's just all this coordination stuff.

And if you've ever been involved in this, I'm sure you can attest to the fact that it just slows down engineering teams because they have to spend so much time coordinating and educating and providing status updates to marketing around the launch. And if they just use that time [00:04:00] focused on building the thing, it probably would get done a lot faster. 

So at Nomics, for the most part, we try not to use the word launch, right? So I like to say that we're not ...

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Jan 08, 201908:12
Why We're Building a "Boring" Business - (Ep. 0022)

Why We're Building a "Boring" Business - (Ep. 0022)

Man, I really love a boring business. I think boring businesses are really beautiful in a lot of ways for so many reasons. I first started thinking about boring businesses when this person I knew made an absolute killing back in the day. I don't even know if their company is around anymore, but they started what was essentially [00:00:30] Uber for construction type dumpsters in Europe. It was one of those things where it was an old industry. They didn't really use technology. There were no apps. Companies in the space didn't really have a website, and this guy came into the industry, made viral videos, had an app, [00:01:00] had a phone number you could call 24/7, had a website, and really made it easy for anyone to get ... You know those dumpsters you see in the street when they're doing demolish on a house or construction work and they just put everything in these huge dumpsters? That's what they did, right? Not sexy at all. It's not like blockchain. They weren't launching their own token or anything like that. But I [00:01:30] really enjoyed the way he put like this kind of cool wrapper around the space. Came in with really fun branding and brought innovation to this industry that hadn't seen it for a while. That's kind of what got me thinking about this.

And then recently I was contemplating one of the products that I really like a lot, which is Rev, which does the transcribes for the [00:02:00] Flippening Podcast, my other podcast, and they do transcripts for this podcast too. And there's a lot of people that do transcription. If you go to UpWork or Craigslist or anywhere like it's like of a commodity, right? But Rev just kind of took it to the next level. They have over 100,000 paying customers. They've done ... Let's see. [00:02:30] I'm on their website right now. I forgot how many millions upon millions of minutes they've transcribed. But they took this thing that was arguably kind of boring and they just took it to the next level. They have an iOS app that you can just ... Or they have apps on Android. They have a bunch of apps that you can just talk into it and then they send you a transcript back. You can pay more for time stamping. They'll transcribe [00:03:00] it for you in a pretty automated fashion and get you ... Like if you want, you can get a transcript back immediately because they'll have their machine do it, then they'll have their AI do it, and then they'll come in and have a human go over it and make it perfect. They get so many little things right. 

One of the reasons why this podcast is so fast for me to produce is because I record it and then I immediately [00:03:30] drop the audio file into a folder on my computer, like just on my desktop, not on Google Drive or anything. And I have a little automation that runs using their API that just sends the file to Rev and generates an order and has all these settings preselected and the folder just gets populated later with the transcription of the file. I don't even need to log into their website. I just drop it into a folder. [00:04:00] They'll do ... What is it called? They'll do the closed captioning on videos. They'll take any file format. You can just send them the URL of a video, and they'll transcribe it. It's pretty incredible. 

When you're going to checkout, you can enter names of people. It's just incredibly well done. They've got an app that you can just install on your phone, and you can [00:04:30] place calls out of it and then it'll record and transcribe those phone calls for you. Like they just really thought of everything, and the accuracies amazing. One day I got a transcript back from them, and it was fine.

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Jan 07, 201908:28
Why You Probably Should *Not* Partner With Us - (Ep. 0021)

Why You Probably Should *Not* Partner With Us - (Ep. 0021)

I get a lot of emails almost I'd say one every 2-3 days from someone that basically says something like, "Hey, I love what you're doing. We should partner. Let's get on the phone to explore." Right? I [00:01:00] never ... it's hard to respond to those, right?

At the very beginning when we were new and just wanted to talk to anyone to get feedback and learn about how other people saw us in the space. I would get on some of these calls and be like, "Okay, what ... how do you want to partner?" They'd say like, "I'm open to anything." Really? You're open to anything? So I [00:02:00] have to come up with the partnership idea. So you want to partner with me and now like I need to pitch you on the ... on what a partnership might look like? So now I just say to folks like, "Okay, cool. I'm open to it. Send me a one-page proposal with as many concretes as possible outlining what you would get, what we would get. Concretely what the exchange of value would be. Is it money? Is it traffic? Is [00:02:30] it visibility? If it is traffic or something like that, what would the form of that take?" 

And almost nobody writes back with a one-page proposal. Even a one paragraph concrete proposal. I don't get this whole like, "Hey, we should do something. Let's hop on the phone." Like who has that much phone time? Who has [00:03:00] that much bandwidth for connections in real time? Probably people who aren't ... who don't have customers. I don't know. I used to have this theory that the Biz Dev career or industry, like basically the main role of folks in Biz Dev, was to tie up time with other people who are in Biz Dev. Like, "Hey, Biz Dev person A at company A is going to Biz Dev person [00:03:30] B at company B and they're just gonna eat up a bunch of each other's time so they can justify their roles."

When you're exchanging money, something fungible or bitcoin or equity or something, when you're trading these things it's very clear how value is exchanged. But when there's a partnership it's like, "All right, what are the specifics? [00:05:00] How long is it gonna last? Is there confidentiality? Is there exclusivity?" Usually you need to get ... you have to have some kind of contract involved, right? So you need to pay, if you're gonna do it right, you have to pay a pretty good commercial contracts attorney and that takes time. 

Usually [00:05:30] it takes hours of meetings, tens of hours and meetings in some cases. And then once it's done, you have to execute it, which means you need to get other people on your team involved and they have to be in alignment. There's so much involved in a really solid partnership. I think even Fortune 500 companies can count on two hands the number of really [00:06:00] important partners that exist for them. So yeah, I think it's just something that most people can consider ... I sent out a Tweet about this the other day and it got a lot of likes. 

Thank you for everyone who liked it. And someone responded to the Tweet, who I used to work with, Kevin Raheja, who runs partnerships or ... [00:06:30] I don't know what his official title ... I think it's maybe director of partnerships at HubSpot. And he responded with a really clear directive, which was 1. Know the partner's business. 2. Have a plan. 3. Be short and clear. 4. Exchange value. And 5. Don't waste time.

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Jan 06, 201907:25
This Keeps Me Going When I'm Frustrated At Work - (Ep. 0020)

This Keeps Me Going When I'm Frustrated At Work - (Ep. 0020)

I had some time off during Christmas, and the holidays, and the New Year, and stuff. My family went to California, spent some time in remote desert places, and some dive bars. My parents took the kids for a few days, and my wife and I went and [00:00:30] drove back roads around some of the areas where I grew up in rural Southern California. The deserts and the back roads of that area. I had a lot of fun. 

When I got back, I had a couple days in the office where it was just me working. I think some other people were working as well, but we didn't have any meetings scheduled. [00:01:00] Man, I spent like a half a day ... I even spent a whole day on one of those "days off" just playing with software. Going through my computer, creating shortcuts, optimizing my environment, and I really enjoyed it. It really reminded me of when I was [00:01:30] younger, before the internet was a thing really in a big way, dialing into bulletin board services. I even created a bulletin board service with a friend. Downloading shareware. Playing with different types of utility apps for the computer. 

I started downloading apps from the Mac App Store, and some of them are really good. [00:02:00] There's a program called Be Focused Pro which I was messing with. There's an app for ... I never thought I'd use this kind of thing, but I'm using it. There's an app for tracking your water consumption, and it syncs across all your devices. 

I just had fun playing with software. And I realized, at the end of the day, I'm no longer a kid, but I think in my heart, or whatever, [00:02:30] spiritual, I'm just a kid that likes playing with computers and software. I think that's why I got into product in the first place. That's why I learned to develop, to write code, in the first place. It's not because I'm really in love with the hardcore aspects of software engineering, and infrastructure, and architecture, and all that, although, I'm intellectually [00:03:00] interested in that stuff. But, at the end of the day, I really, really, really love product. It delights me to no end. I love outdoors, and I love hiking and camping, but the part of me that's indoors, just loves just crewing around with software and seeing how different designers and developers solve different UX problems. 

I remember [00:03:30] at my last company, which is still going strong, but I'm no longer there, lead pages. I remember hiring, or interviewing, people for product rolls, and one of my favorite questions to ask them was, "What are some of your favorite apps? What's some software that you just really love playing with?" These were career product people in software, and I was dumbfounded, I was absolutely dumbfounded, [00:04:00] by the number of people that couldn't answer that question. I would often hear that they liked the Mac OS, or super obvious stuff. They liked Google Docs. 

It's just whatever they used at work. It was nothing beyond that. Slack. But often it would be hard for them to even come up with those. The question was, "What's software that really delights you? That you're really getting into these days?" [00:04:30] And almost no one interviewing for that role, could say anything other than they think their phone is well designed, or they like Google Docs, they like Slack. 

Really? You like Slack? Okay. 

I wasn't looking for a replica of me, but I was looking for someone who had this intellectual curiosity around [00:05:00] programs, and software, and how products should be done. They'd make reference to Product Time, sometimes. They'd be like, "Oh, I really like browsing Product Time." I'd be like, "Oh, reallY? What's something that really sticks out on Product Time that you enjoyed playing with?" And they'd be like, "I can't remember. I have a list somewhere." Okay. 

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]


Website: https://nomics.com

Jan 05, 201915:06
2019 Goals & Nikhil Kalghatgi's 9 Categories of Moonshots - (Ep. 0019)

2019 Goals & Nikhil Kalghatgi's 9 Categories of Moonshots - (Ep. 0019)

I started thinking about moonshots after speaking with one of our investors Nikhil at CoVenture Crypto. He's a partner there. And I guess the back story on this is Nikhil Kalghatgi met with me and also Ateet from [00:02:30] CoVenture Crypto who runs their quant fund. We met for breakfast when I was in New York, and one of the questions that I like to ask investors is what's the best way to engage you. So Ateet had been helping us out with a bunch of pod related things. He's deep in data all day long. But this was the first time Nikhil and I had met in person, and I posed this question to him. And [00:03:00] he was pretty thoughtful and he responded that he likes to help out portfolio companies with moonshots, right?

And so I was reflecting on that and I emailed Nikhil a little bit later, and said, "Hey, I'd really like to take you up on this offer of helping us define moonshots [00:04:00] as a company." And he sent me back this really thoughtful email to help me prepare for this meeting that we were setting up, and in that email, he outlined nine types of moonshots. So these are ... This is his IP. Thanks, Nikhil. So the first type of moonshot that he describes, the first category are [00:04:30] moonshots that are obviously impossible, right? He put obviously in quotes. These are things that you would like to do but are just obviously something that you can't do. And I think that kind of framing pushes you to think bigger. So that's category number one or type one. 

Type two, moonshot type two are imaginary dream partners. So when you're going [00:05:00] through this exercise and you get to number two, the objective here is to think about a dream partner that doesn't exist and just sort of define what the partnership would be, right? And the objective there is after you've defined them, you actually start looking for real world examples of these imaginary dream partners. 

The third type of moonshot is the brand elevation. So [00:05:30] think huge media partnerships. For us, for Nomics, this might be a partnership with the largest financial publication in the world, right? Providing data to them. Other companies might envision a Super Bowl ad, although that's almost never a good use of ad dollars. But what are some things that you can do that would immediately catapult your brand to the forefront of the space? 

[00:06:00] The fourth type of moonshot is distribution channels or partners, right? So if you're a consumer package good company, this might be getting Walmart or Target or whoever the biggest retailer is in your space to get your product in front of a lot of shoppers.

The fifth category or type is [00:06:30] unique individuals in other sectors who might come and work for you. And I think often there's very fruitful like cross pollination that can be very beneficial to a company when they hire someone who's a leader in a tangential space that comes in and then runs their playbook in your company. That can be really great. I think there's some of the, actually arguably the biggest, [00:07:00] some of the biggest crypto companies are operating not solely in this sort of crypto-native capacity, right? They have connections in banking and Wall Street and stuff like that. 

The sixth type of moonshot is geographical growth. So do you want to expand to Europe or South America, China, whatever. What that might look like hypothetically. 

[00:07:30] The seventh category are partnerships that we talked about. Distributions channels and imaginary dream partners. This would be sort of like actual concrete partnerships. 

The eight category are what might it look...

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Jan 04, 201911:11
Bear Market Update: Equity is Sexy Again - (Ep. 0018)

Bear Market Update: Equity is Sexy Again - (Ep. 0018)

It's me reporting you live from the depths of the bear market in the space, and I've been talking to a bunch of investors recently, I mean, I guess that's what I do all day for the most part. But, I am reflecting on the kinds of companies that are getting funded here recently, like companies that are getting funded [00:00:30] not token projects. Although, I haven't seen a lot of token projects getting funded recently, and it seems like the pendulum has swung so in 2017 investing in crypto assets like folks were doing that Andreessen Horowitz was doing it, Union Square Ventures was doing it, other folks were doing it that are not as notable to the media but might be so interesting investors and funds and stuff.


[00:01:00] But what I'm seeing getting funded as of late are companies again, and I'm even seeing examples where funds that were created to invest in crypto assets are now in some cases preferring investing in equity and I think there's a few pieces to this. The first is that equity is sexy again, [00:01:30] equity comes with control or at least voting rights in some cases, it comes with you know if you're a lead investor and you can negotiate the deal, it comes with board seats, and all kinds of things. 


So I think the first thing that I'm seeing is that equity is back, if the company ever sells you can get a piece of that. I think the second thing I'm seeing is that investing in companies with [00:02:00] or projects with live products is back. We've seen a lot of companies raise a lot of money and ship nothing, and we've seen examples of, like basis returning funds back to their customers, I think we're gonna see a lot more, a lot more of that, token projects or at least projects with tokens returning funds back to investors because of [00:02:30] regulatory friction and they can't launch what they thought they were going to launch in a whole bunch of stuff along those lines. I saw a report yesterday, I won't get into that. 


So anyway I think investing in companies with live products that people can use and see, I think that's back. I think the third thing is that investing in companies with revenue, with actual revenue holy crap. [00:03:00] That's back in revenue from delivering a products, not from holding a token in a treasury that's investors have bought because around the promise of the future delivery of something of value, but investing companies with their products is back. 


Finally, investing in teams with real experience is back. I [00:03:30] can't tell you the number of crypto projects I see where the list of team members and it looks really fancy on the surface. So you might see that a bunch of the team members or ex-Coinbase, ex-Google, ex-Airbnb, something similar to that and then you dig into it a little bit more and find out that the Coinbase thing was an internship, and the Google thing maybe they were a project manager [00:04:00] on some experimental team for nine months, and the Airbnb they were I don't know, they were in product. And maybe that was one and half years but certainly never shipped a production line of code, never was responsible for generating bottom line sales.


So there's a whole bunch of people that looked like that, that were on teams of maybe you know founding teams of five or six that were getting [00:04:30] funded. From my vantage point those folks aren't getting funded anymore, which is not surprising and probably how it should be. But there's lots of things . . .

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]


Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Dec 31, 201806:15
Some (Difficult) Lessons Learned During Long Sales Cycles - (Ep. 0017)

Some (Difficult) Lessons Learned During Long Sales Cycles - (Ep. 0017)

Recently, I've been contemplating the gift of learning patience from longer sales cycles. In a previous life, I come from kind of prosumer, B2B, SaaS world, where a lot of sales were driven by scarcity marketing or incentivizing customers to purchase because [00:00:30] there was perhaps a discount available with a promotion that's going away. Or some bonuses that came if people buy the product by a certain time, and that went away. It has many of the sales characteristics as Groupon, right? There's an offer and then it goes away and if you don't buy it before a deadline, then you don't get the thing. And when you do that, you can predictably drive sales in [00:01:00] markets that have consumer-like properties. 

But in more B2B sales cycles, I've found that a lot of the buying behavior is driven by the customer. And that's how it should be, right? And I've had a few experiences recently that I'm actually kind of grateful for that have taught me that longer sales cycles can indeed end up fairly [00:01:30] fruitful. So I guess the first example that I want to run through is around us raising VC money. One of the VCs we approached told us up front that they were in the process of raising their fund and it would be a while until we heard back from them. And I at first thought this was code for, "We just want to hear your pitch. Maybe get intelligence from the space. But there's [00:02:00] no way on earth that we're going to invest in you." 

So I a little bit begrudgingly gave the pitch, even though I trusted these folks. And after walking them through our business and what we were doing, I didn't hear back from them for a long time. And frankly, I didn't expect to hear back from them. I thought it was a done deal and that it would never happen. And then low and behold, maybe a month and a half [00:02:30] later, I heard back from them and they said, "We're in." I was taken aback. I thought they were going to get on the phone to just provide a rejection but that wasn't the case. And then a little bit later, they actually told me that they wanted to up their investment which I was happy about, because I really liked them. And there wasn't exactly room around but we wanted [00:03:00] to make some for them because we really, really liked them. 

And it was just a really positive experience that proved me wrong about my skepticism. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs tend to be impatient and skeptical. We're used to hearing a lot of rejection, right? I think if you have ambitious goals, you tend to hear more rejections than acceptances I guess. So that's the first example I wanted [00:03:30] to lay out. 

The second example is around our biggest customer to date and they had approached us really before we even officially had our API out of beta and they'd approached us about purchasing our product. And that deal didn't go through. But then a few months later, conversations resumed and [00:04:00] again, things seemed to be really kind of dragging along. And I was patient. I waited and we tried to respond to them as quickly as we could. And three to four months later, that deal closed even though again they initially said they couldn't. That they had gone in another direction. They came back and then something happened. And that was another really positive experience for me. [00:04:30] Again, I'm an impatient person. I'm used to rejection and I think sometimes I can be a little bit skeptical. But again, that resulted in our largest sale to date. 

The third example is around a company that I led the acquisition of at my prior business, Leadpages. We acquired a company called Drip...


[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]


Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Dec 21, 201808:16
Why We're Not Celebrating Our Series A - (Ep. 0016)

Why We're Not Celebrating Our Series A - (Ep. 0016)

Man oh, man am I'm nervous. Man, am I'm nervous. Had trouble sleeping last night and all of that. So tomorrow, I'm recording this ahead of time. So tomorrow, but you probably have already heard of it by now or at least we've told other people, you might not have heard yourself. Tomorrow we are announcing our Series A fundraise. It's a pretty cool event, you can read [00:00:30] about it. Arthur Ventures led the round with Coinbase Ventures, and Digital Currency Group, and Davenport, and Polymath, and CoVenture Crypto, and CityBlock Capital and others participating.

We're announcing that tomorrow, but I'm going to publish this the day after we announce so hopefully heard about it yesterday. Yeah, I'm just nervous about announcing this and it's [00:01:00] really due to, I think, past lessons learned, past experiences. But, all this announcement makes me nervous. In a past life at my last company raised $38 million in venture capital. I think when you raise money, especially when you raise a lot of money, which we didn't here. But I think the public perception of what is happening can become [00:01:30] very much out of sync with what's really happening, and incentives can get really misaligned.

If you look at the crypto currency space, there's a lot of large figures attached to projects with really huge brand names; that haven't shipped much of anything and are providing much value to the space. We've seen recently Consensus lay off a bunch of people. We've seen Basis return money, [00:02:00] funds, where they raise close to $100 million, if not more, to investors or at least they're going to. I think there's going to be a lot more of these projects coming.

These projects, like Basis for example, has a gorgeous website. They did have, a PR machine hired a bunch of people. It's really easy to believe the marketing hype [00:02:30] about a company, or a team or a project; it's really easy for people at those institutions to start believing the public hype about what they're doing. Instead of listing the market, and actually having, head to the ground, around the pulse of the value that's being created.

I [00:03:00] think there was a part of me that considered not even announcing that we had done a fundraiser. We didn't need to file paperwork with the SEC, we didn't need to publicly disclose how much we had raised or who we had raised funds from. We just didn't need to do that. So, why are we doing this? Why are we doing this? [00:03:30] I think for a few reasons.

One, we want our customers to know that we're here to stay, that there are luminaries in the space or people with influence who believe in us and what we're doing. I think that lends credibility to our project. I think it's important for people to know that we're here, that we exist, that we're serious and all of that. That's [00:04:00] part of the reason why we're doing it.

I'm also glad that, this is just kind of a good excuse to develop relationships with journalists, and the media, and the press and to kind of come out for the very first time to the space in a way. I don't know if it's in a big way, but to come out to the space. That's part of the reason why we're doing it. I think there are definitely upsides to this.

The downsides of course are that [00:04:30] it's possible to build a huge brand in the cryptocurrency space, without delivering much value at all. To have a team that's speaking at conferences, that's putting out podcasts, that is coming across as being hugely influential, and just not having any profit [00:05:00] or any sustainable value that comes with that.

All of this said, I think the reason why we did get funded in a bear market is that, we have . . .

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website:
nomics.com
Crypto Market Data API: nomicsapi.com
Personal Twitter: twitter.com/ClayCollins
Company Twitter: twitter.com/NomicsFinance
Dec 19, 201808:24
Announcing Nomics' Series A VC Financing - (Ep. 0015)

Announcing Nomics' Series A VC Financing - (Ep. 0015)

Hey, this is Clay and I am pleased to announce that Nomics has raised a Series A round venture capital financing. Leading the round is Arthur Ventures, and also participating are Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group, TokenSoft, Ben Davenport, who is the co-founder and former CTO of BitGo, CoVenture Crypto, CityBlock Capital, [00:00:30] King Capital, and some other friends and family, who participated in the round. We're excited to partner with all of them.

I can tell you a little bit about how this came together. A few months ago, I started looking at companies that I really, really respected, in terms of the products that they had created, but also [00:01:00] how lean the companies ran. A few companies in that category include Zapier, Clearbit, SendGrid, folks like that. I looked at the size of their series A funding. Zapier and Clearbit, I believe, had only done one round of VC financing and or seed rounds, and never had to raise [00:01:30] money again. I believe that's true of Clearbit. I know that's true of Zapier. SendGrid, of course, went on to become public. I think they're being sold to [Tulio 00:01:40] right now, but I looked at the average series A size. I saw a lot of constraint, and pragmaticism around the raise. I think we were aiming for that as well. At my last company, we raised 38 million in ventures capital. [00:02:00] So I've done the thing where we raise a lot. Over time, I'm becoming a bigger and bigger fan of constraints, and just really being reasonable about these things, especially after the euphoria of the 2017 bull market and crypto.

We're excited about this. I think I was saying this earlier. [00:02:30] How this got started was I approached Patrick Meenan at Arthur Ventures. Again, they're our lead investor. I told him we were going to raise, and that I wanted to pitch him first before we went to anyone else, really. I went to Patrick and pitched him. Basically said, essentially, "Here's what we're thinking, in terms of valuation. I'd like to have you specifically [00:03:00] on the board. I'd like Arthur Ventures specifically to be the lead investor, if you guys are down for this. If you're not, no problem. We'll go to the coast or maybe we'll look here internally, but we really, really want this to be you."

The backstory there is I served on the board of Leadpages, and I'm still on board of Leadpages with Patrick for around five years. I knew that we were aligned. [00:03:30] The philosophy here is that I've seen a lot of VCs claim to do value-added things. I think in some cases it's possible, and it can happen, but that narrative has really been blown up around VCs doing intros, and helping you hire, and doing marketing stuff for you or in some cases, building software. I just, I think it's really [00:04:00] hard to actually realize that value in a lot of cases.

I heard it was a famous Israeli VC talking about how when he first got started in crypto, he tried to do everything to help his portfolio companies. What he realized over time was that the companies that were going to make it, and that did make it, and that offered the biggest return or provided the biggest return didn't really need his help at all. [00:04:30] It was the companies that probably where the investment would go to zero or something similar, that ate up all his time. He got to the point where when he made an investment, he would just give the founder or whoever was leading the raise his card, and say, "Here's my number. You can call it. I probably won't answer, but just think of this as a money-only arrangement." [00:05:00] I actually think there's a lot of value in that.

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website:
nomics.com
Crypto Market Data API: nomicsapi.com
Personal Twitter: twitter.com/ClayCollins
Company Twitter: twitter.com/NomicsFinance
Dec 18, 201811:39
No, We (Unfortunately) Can't Tell You Who Our Customers Are - (Ep. 0014)

No, We (Unfortunately) Can't Tell You Who Our Customers Are - (Ep. 0014)

When I first got started [00:01:00] in the cryptocurrency space, I started looking at websites like CoinMarketCap, and there was no about page. There was really no phone number. People wouldn't tell you who they are. People were using pseudonyms. Everyone was like cryptopeeweeherman on Twitter. For the most part, that trend has continued. We do have a few competitors here and there [00:01:30] that will say who they are at least on the consumer side, but for the most part, nobody tell you who they are. It's kind of sketchy. It's kind of fishy is the new, you have this new kind of little website that's popped up recently that I think is actually using our data, using our API, and they won't say who they are. All the domains are hidden. It's not, I'm not creeping on these people, but it's just, my mind is [00:02:00] just absolutely just blown by all of this.

I guess what's surprising is how far this mindset has seeped into so many, so many aspects of the space, even on the enterprise side. I've been doing a lot of talking to reporters recently around something we're going to announce that I'm [00:02:30] excited to announce, and one question they ask is, "Who are some of your customers?" The big ones, I'm not able to say, because they're all, we're all wrapped up under NDAs. I guess that's something I've kind of been surprised about, especially [00:03:00] coming from the marketing technology space, from vertical SaaS, where people are giving each other testimonials, where you can use logos on people's homepage, where people list their customers sometimes without even permission. That's not cool, like I wouldn't do that at my past company, but it's really incredible.

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website:
nomics.com
Crypto Market Data API: nomicsapi.com
Personal Twitter: twitter.com/ClayCollins
Company Twitter: twitter.com/NomicsFinance
Dec 17, 201806:44
Winter is Coming For Crypto Startups (& Why Org Chart Debt Sucks) - (Ep. 0013)

Winter is Coming For Crypto Startups (& Why Org Chart Debt Sucks) - (Ep. 0013)

So I'm pretty tired today. We decided when we first started Nomics that we just weren't going to build a marketing time and we weren't going to hire admins or directors of operations and it's for a bunch of reasons, but I see a lot of really bloated organizations, especially in the block chain space. I see organizations that have a COO and a finance person [00:00:30] and this person and that person and they'll have like a bunch of analysts, a marketing person, a PR firm. It will be like a 15 or 20 person organization and there will be like three or four developers or engineers. Man, I just think that's a lot of bloat especially considering that winter is coming or arguably it is here.

For all the talk that I hear [00:01:00] in product organizations about tech debt, I think something that's often not discussed enough is org chart debt. Org chart debt is when you start prematurely building our your org prior to having real revenue or product market fit and you end up with this org and that has its own momentum and starts holding you back and makes it really hard to pivot. So at Nomics, [00:01:30] there's me, there's ... and I'm only non-technical person, I'm somewhat technical, I was a developer in a past life, but there's myself, our CTO and my co-founder, there's a designer/developer, essentially designer who operates at the design layer of our app and can re-theme the app essentially without having to touch other parts of the code, so definitely deploys to get hub and stuff like that. [00:02:00] We have a friend and engineer, we have someone who works in the middle end, essentially on our API and our API gateway, and we're hiring ... plug for that, we're hiring, a distributed data systems engineer who works with [Kofka 00:02:19] and Cassandra and stuff like that. So, if you know anyone whose interested in that position, please let them know.

But, man, I've just seen so many orgs where [00:02:30] the org chart is more mature than the business and they end up creating all this momentum around the people they've hired and the projects that the people they've hired have developed and they end up in a place that they just can't crawl back from. Particularly, I think in our space given how active crypto Twitter is and the lure that that has, [00:03:00] and I think the lure that content marketing has in our space, I think a lot of maybe competitive organizations end up hiring marketers, blog writers, analysts, and they end up in a place where it's like, what are they, are they immediate company, are they a software company? All those people really ... [00:03:30] it's hard to measure. I think this is the biggest thing, it's hard to measure the effectiveness of what those people are doing if you don't have a product to sell, right?

When you have a product to sell, then you can measure the efficacy of all your marketing efforts, all those medium posts, all those tweets, all those talks that are given, all those podcast appearances, all those podcasts that are created. You can measure those against whether or not they're moving the needle [00:04:00] the paid product. When you don't you end up in a situation where you end up having to spend a lot of time managing people and empowering, often incredibly talented people who kind of lack in a north star, in a sense that they have no idea how the contributions that they provide affect the bottom line.

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website:
nomics.com
Crypto Market Data API: nomicsapi.com
Personal Twitter: twitter.com/ClayCollins
Company Twitter: twitter.com/NomicsFinance
Dec 06, 201817:06
Ask Me Anything - (Ep. 0012)

Ask Me Anything - (Ep. 0012)

Quick update today. If you go to: asknomics.com, it'll send you a page where you can record audio question. If it's a good question and relevant to what we do and all that, we will answer it live on this podcast, which is the Nomics update.

Anyway, I look forward to hearing your questions. I'm happy to talk about future product roadmap, points of differentiation verus competitive products, our API, [00:00:30] the future of the API, how our company is set up, funding, any of that stuff.

So, again, if you have any questions, go to:
asknomics.com and if you can use a good headset or whatever because it's going to produce audio that I can then play on this podcast for everyone to hear and then I can respond with my answers and thoughts. So post a question if you want to. It should [00:01:00] be fun. I'll be sure to link to you in the show notes, link to your Twitter handle and LinkedIn profile and even company website if you want to. So it's a good way to get a little bit of exposure around your project, whatever you're doing, especially if you have a good intelligent question.

Alright. Take care. Bye.

Website: nomics.com
Crypto Market Data API: nomicsapi.com
Personal Twitter: twitter.com/ClayCollins
Company Twitter: twitter.com/NomicsFinance
Dec 04, 201801:26
How Adderall, Meditation & Therapy Changed My Life - (Ep. 0011)

How Adderall, Meditation & Therapy Changed My Life - (Ep. 0011)

I want to talk for a bit about how Adderall, the drug, meditation, and therapy have changed my life. I realize this is a diversion from what we normally cover, and I think it's questionable whether or not I should even be talking about these issues in this podcast, right. It's called the Nomics Update, it's about the company, but I think in a lot of other ways this is kind of inside our journey building this start up.

So, [00:00:30] there might be a chance that i never do this kind of update ever again. Please let me know if it's helpful to you. Certainly, let's start off with the first one. So, the first one, Adderall. Certainly, the plight of people with attention deficit disorder is nowhere near on the same level of the plights of people dealing with other kinds of things. So, if you have a mental illness or depression, this is not in that same kind [00:01:00] of category. This isn't in the same category as people who have dealt with being repressed or people who have experienced racism or other kinds of isms because they're members of marginalized groups, but I think it's worth speaking to.

The reason I'm bringing this up is because back in the day I saw a social media post from someone who I really respected saying that he was taking some kind of medication for [00:01:30] ADD and he was better for it. He was more present for his family, he was more present to his coworkers. He was a nicer person. He was no longer depressed because he wasn't struggling with a lot of the things that come with ADD. So I think it's worth noting. If just to normalize some of this.

So, starting this year I began taking Adderall. I got a prescription and I don't know what to say here [00:02:00] other than my entire life i never really felt like I had complete access to my brain. And I never felt like my brain really worked. I went in, I saw a doctor, there were some tests, and I got a prescription. And from day one of taking this, my life has changed. I'm able to execute on things that my family needs me to execute on. That my business needs me to execute on, that our customers need us to execute on, [00:02:30] and I've never felt that all of me was available to me until now, right. Cognitively.

So, it's really, it's really really really made a difference. And so I want to normalize this and I don't know, do my small part to destigmatize attention deficit disorder and ADD. I will say that I'm glad I didn't take any of these medications as a child. Adderall is an amphetamine and [00:03:00] it's real. I do think that this was something, a decision I needed to make as an adult and I'm glad my parents were against this when I was a child. So that's really all I have to say about that. If you are an entrepreneur or involved in finance, there's a decent chance that you have something like this. A very high percentage of entrepreneurs I found have attention deficit disorder.

[00:03:30] I think it used to be called ADHD. It either used to be called ADHD and now it's called ADD, or it's ADD and now it's called ADHD. But there used to be two types of ADD, one was a kind that came with hyperactivity, and then there was a kind that did not. And I have the kind that does not come with hyperactivity, I'm a huge ... Although, you know, I like podcasting and speaking from the stage, I'm a huge introvert. Although, someone I know [00:04:00] has pointed out that speaking on stage and doing a podcast for the most part is not an extroverted activity when you're on stage, it's really just you. And yes, you're interacting with the audience and reading them, but it's very different than being in a group with five people.

So, anyway, moving on to the next thing. Meditation.

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website:
nomics.com
Crypto Market Data API: nomicsapi.com
Personal Twitter: twitter.com/ClayCollins
Company Twitter: twitter.com/NomicsFinance
Dec 03, 201808:24
Why I Turn Down 95% Flippening Guest Pitches - (Ep. 0010)

Why I Turn Down 95% Flippening Guest Pitches - (Ep. 0010)

Each day, almost every day, I get pitched by a company or a person that would like to be on the Nomics ... on the Flippening podcast, our most popular podcast, the one that is reliably getting over 25,000 downloads per episode. Often it's over 50,000 downloads per episode. Sometimes it's a PR firm that reaches out and I never really entertain those requests. I [00:00:30] only talk to folks who are looking to book themselves on the podcast, but actually, there's only been one attempt so far from someone who's approached me about being on the podcast that ... where that has converted into an actual interview. I wanted to share my thinking on this.

Rule number one, or guideline number one that I take into consideration is the person [00:01:00] who would be interviewed, are they the ones reaching out? If so, that's good and we can proceed. It's not someone on their PR team. It's not someone in marketing who's looking to book their CEO who may or may not have any desire to be on the podcast or who may or may not have ever heard of it. I think another thing that we take into consideration is have we done an episode recently on the topic that they would want [00:01:30] to talk about? This often can trip up the process because very frequently people reach out right after we interviewed a competitor. We'll interview a competitor. We'll get them on the show, and then a bunch of other people in the same industry will wanna reach out. It's like I don't wanna do a bunch of podcasts on this one topic. Our audience doesn't wanna hear it. There's not gonna be a lot of net new information.

The next thing that we take into consideration is [00:02:00] does this project, or company, or whoever's reaching out, do they have a product that's live and usable by the public? There's so much speculative activity in this space. There's a lot of people building new things, who have been building new things for a long time and we're not looking to have conversations with projects that don't have something tangible that's available for the product to consume. [00:02:30] If they're a crypto hedge fund, they have to be a hedge fund that's live and taking limited partners. If it's a product, a fintech product, it has to be a product that is available to the public, even if it's just public data. It has to be at least at that stage in order to move forward.

The next thing is that we are unwilling to be part of people's launch plans. [00:03:00] If you're gearing up for a big launch ... Usually if you're gearing up for a big launch, the thing that you're launching doesn't exist yet. It isn't available to the public at large. In those cases, we just don't wanna be part of someone's launch event campaign or planning, unless they wanna be a sponsor. In which case, we're ... that's something we're open to talk to you, but in terms of content on the podcast itself, [00:03:30] it has ... you have ... the dust has to have settled on the launch of whatever you're doing because again, we're not here to be part of people's marketing agendas. We're here to educate the space. If you wanna do marketing with us, that's what our paid sponsorships are for.

Once we've gotten past that, all of these hurdles, I'm hearing from the person themselves, they ... it's not about a topic [00:04:00] that we recently covered, the dust has settled on a product launch and the product is publicly available and consumable by the general public or at least some subsection of the general public, maybe it's just accredited investors, but once we're past that, the questions I ask myself are, "Does having this person on the podcast ...

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website:
nomics.com
Crypto Market Data API: nomicsapi.com
Personal Twitter: twitter.com/ClayCollins
Company Twitter: twitter.com/NomicsFinance
Nov 28, 201809:17
"I Found A Bug - Nomics.com (or Your API) is Reporting Different Values Than CoinMarketCap"

"I Found A Bug - Nomics.com (or Your API) is Reporting Different Values Than CoinMarketCap"

Hey, this is Clay. Welcome to The Nomics Update for today, and today I want to talk about something that's come up a few times here in the last month. We actually get a few bug logs, bug alerts from our community that essentially come in and say the following, "CoinMarketCap is showing this number, and you're showing a different number. You have a bug," and so this might be related to the all-time high [00:00:30] of a crypto asset. They might be telling us that the volume numbers that we're reporting for a given exchange are different than what CoinMarketCap is reporting, or even in some cases different from what the website itself is reporting, and usually they're slight variations.

But I just find it so interesting that CoinMarketCap has gotten to a position in the industry where literally [00:01:00] if there's a discrepancy between our numbers or someone else's numbers and their numbers, that it's considered to be a bug, and I want to stay open-minded about this. Sometimes when this kind of thing is brought to our attention, there is something notable to explore there. Maybe we should reconsider our pricing methodologies, but for the most part we've been extremely open about our pricing methodologies, [00:01:30] and other sites, including CoinMarketCap, has not.

For example, we have an entire article on our blog written about how we price crypto assets, and it's not just a line or two explaining the methodology. It's an entire article with math and tables. I think it's about 750 words on we explore different use cases and how we might calculate the price of a crypto asset in those cases. The same with all-time high. We have an article, [00:02:00] a long form article written about we calculate all-time high.

When this kind of request comes in from one of our API customers, one of my paying API customers, I essentially tell them here's how we calculate the methodology. Here's the data behind it. Do you agree with the data? If the answer's yes, do you think this is good data? If you agree with our methodology, then [00:02:30] this number should serve you well, and also let those customers know, or anyone else who's using our data, know that if they want to use alternative methodologies for calculating these things, they absolutely can because we give everyone all the raw data that they need to calculate these things themselves. We have for the most part every single trade, on every single trading pair, on every exchange going back to the very beginning [00:03:00] of those trading pairs on those exchanges.

Yeah, so I just think it's really interesting. I think it's worth noting though there's a lot different ways to calculate all-time high. There's a lot of different ways to calculate candles. I'll give you an example with Binance. One of our customers, really astute person, came to us, and they weren't reporting this as a bug, but they essentially said, "Hey, CoinMarketCap is showing this volume [00:03:30] number for Binance, and you're showing a different number. Why is that?"

It essentially came down to the fact that we price Tether, TUSD is the ticker symbol, we price Tether differently than CoinmarketCap prices Tether. There's slight variations in the price of Tether to the U.S. dollar. Because Binance is the largest exchange and because all of Binance's [00:04:00] largest markets, at least as of the recording today, are priced in Tether, if there's a slight variation in the price of Tether between us and Binance ... and Binance is doing hundreds of millions of dollars per day, sometimes billions, then we're absolutely going to be showing different volume numbers.

But I think it's really time for us as a community to [00:04:30] just stop accepting calculations in this space.

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website:
nomics.com
Crypto Market Data API: nomicsapi.com
Personal Twitter: twitter.com/ClayCollins
Company Twitter: twitter.com/NomicsFinance
Nov 27, 201808:41
Our Two Cyber Monday Deals ... Or Make Us Your Best Offer - (Ep. 0008)

Our Two Cyber Monday Deals ... Or Make Us Your Best Offer - (Ep. 0008)

Hey, it's me, your trusty market-data API, CEO here at Nomics. This is usually my audio journal, but today I'm going use this opportunity to shill. First off, how was your Thanksgiving? I hope it was good. I hope you avoided fights with the in-laws or whatever, having to explain why everyone invested in Bitcoin and lost money.

[00:00:30] I had a good time. I did see a little bit of fighting. I did not participate in any family infighting but the stress is over and we're back to business. I got inspired by all the Black Friday pitches I saw in my inbox today and man, my inner marketer just couldn't resist. It's too late to do a Black Friday deal, so we're going to do a Cyber Monday offering.

[00:01:00] It's pretty simple. There's basically two things. The first thing is if you sign up for the paid version of our API and do an onboarding call with us, we will waive the $100 setup fee. Usually, when you sign up for the commercial-grade version of our API that doesn't require attribution and comes with redistribution rights and stuff like that, [00:01:30] there's a $100 setup fee. If you do an onboarding call with us, we'll waive that.

By the way, the reason why we added the $100 setup fee for the commercial version of our API is because we had people signing up for the seven-day trial, which everyone gets a seven-day trial, so if you sign up, we waive the $100 setup fee. Then, you're essentially just into a free seven-day trial, no strings attached. We had people signing up for [00:02:00] that using it for seven days, not talking to us in any way, shape, or form, making a billion calls, and then quitting and they wouldn't respond to any of our emails.

As a product organization, we need to talk to new customers. It seemed like a bunch of these folks that were signing up for the seven-day trial of our commercial API, all the signs pointed to [00:02:30] the fact that they had every intent to just sign up, hit as much as they could, 'cause we don't have rate limits, but hit it as hard as they could and then quit. Yeah, they wouldn't even respond to an email like I said. Simply by adding this $100 setup fee, we filtered out those folks.

Again, that's thing number one. Sign up for the commercial version of our API. We will refund [00:03:00] the $100 setup fee. Of course, like I said before, you have to meet with us. Thing number two is pitch us, give us your best offer for a week-long takeover of the website in terms of advertising. So, you'll get full coverage on every page of the website. You'll be on the homepage. You'll be on every cryptocurrency page for an individual currency. You'll be on the pages for every exchange and [00:03:30] exchange index page. You'll be on every page on our website and, in addition to that, you'll get a reading at the beginning and the end of the podcast of the Flippening Podcast for the week.

Generally speaking, episodes of the Flippening Podcast get over 30,000 downloads per episode, so, not only do you get to be everywhere on the website for a week, but you get a reading at [00:04:00] the beginning and end of the podcast. You'd be the only advertiser during the week for the podcast. So, give us your best offer on that and if we're good with your offer, then we'll get you all set up.

In general, though, I think the spirit of this is, this is a special time and we're open to making deals. If you have something you want to pitch us, make a specific proposal with a [00:04:30] dollar amount attached to it and we will absolutely entertain it. All right, again, if you're interested, email me at
contact@nomics.com and we promise to respond to everyone by the end of the day on Wednesday but possibly much, much sooner than that.

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: nomics.com
Crypto Market Data API: nomicsapi.com
Personal Twitter: twitter.com/ClayCollins
Company Twitter: twitter.com/NomicsFinance
Nov 26, 201805:42
Now Providing Crypto Order Book Data At 100ms Intervals (Nobody Else Can Do This) - (Ep. 0007)

Now Providing Crypto Order Book Data At 100ms Intervals (Nobody Else Can Do This) - (Ep. 0007)

Hey, welcome to my journal, for whatever day it is.

Okay, so, have some exciting news. I'm pleased to announce that we can now provide order book data at 100 millisecond intervals. So you might notice that, at the middle tier of our API plan, we're able to provide order book data, roughly at 15-minute snapshots. There's a lot of quantum physics and stuff going into [00:00:30] exactly how that plays out across great limits on a whole bunch of different exchanges.

But if you are a enterprise customer, and/or, like your quant fund, then you need super high frequency order book data, we can now get it to you at 100 milliseconds. There's a bunch of crazy stuff we had to do in the background, to make this work, but we can make this happen, and we can make this happen across a whole bunch of different exchanges, not just the exchanges that we officially [00:01:00] support.

This is not for everyone. This is probably not something that the vast majority of users of our API are interested in, but there's a few quant funds with specific strategies here and there, that could benefit from this, and yeah, I'm excited that we can accomplish this, thanks to my CTO, Nick, who put this solution together, for one of our customers.

It works really well, works really, really well. So, [00:01:30] blatant pitch here. If you're interested in this kind of thing, please let us know this would come in a custom offering plan, thing, but if you'd like to talk about this more, let me know. You can find us at
nomics.com. There's a contact form there, to talk to us, or if you go to our API landing page, there is a Chat widget, where you can shoot us a message.

So let me know if you're interested in this. Regardless, I'm proud of the accomplishments. No one else that I know of [00:02:00] provides data at this fidelity. All right. Take care. Bye.

Website: nomics.com
Crypto Market Data API: nomicsapi.com
Personal Twitter: twitter.com/ClayCollins
Company Twitter: twitter.com/NomicsFinance
Nov 23, 201802:07
Nomics.com Is Now Much Faster, And Why Site Speed Matters (Thank You Google) - (Ep. 0006)

Nomics.com Is Now Much Faster, And Why Site Speed Matters (Thank You Google) - (Ep. 0006)

Hey, welcome to my audio journal for today. Today I want to talk a little bit about site speed. Back in the day, Google did everyone a huge favor by saying that, all things being equal, faster sites will outrank slower sites. Right? They essentially said that site speed would be a ranking factor. Along with this, they provided a number of tools for evaluating how fast one's website is. [00:00:30] This really made the web a lot faster because everyone wants to rank. Companies that produce websites or host websites and a bunch of other things made moves to help their customers make faster websites. It became a point of differentiation for hosting companies in this space and a whole bunch of stuff. So Google cares tremendously about site speed, especially as they start optimizing [00:01:00] more and more for mobile devices.

This brings us to
nomics.com. The nomics.com website, although it isn't large in terms of file size, is ... It's been a little bit slower than we've liked. Actually, I'll just be honest. It's been a lot slower than we'd like. It's pretty fast, actually, if you've loaded the website in the past few days and have a version of the website cached. But if you're [00:01:30] doing a fresh load of the website it's just definitely not as fast as we wanted it to be. I think there were a few ways that this was affecting us. One, Google wasn't crawling our title tags and our meta tags so when you searched for ... Actually, today, because Googlebot hasn't updated our listing yet, if you searched for Nomics you don't see our full title tag. You don't see our description tags.

I was perplexed by this for a bit [00:02:00] because, again, the actual file size of the page isn't ... It isn't large. It's not large from a file size perspective. But the amount of text that a browser has to read in order to render the page is ... It's a lot of text. We were putting SVG images in there. We were putting all kinds of data points on the page itself that the front-end would render. [00:02:30] It was just taking a lot longer than we'd like. Google has a website evaluation tool called web.dev. We put Nomics in there and one day we saw a 6 out of 100. It wasn't great. This is a problem we can easily solve. We have the tech team to get this done. We had just been prioritizing other things around our API and around generating new pages. [00:03:00] We believe here in the next few months we're actually going to have millions of pages on nomics.com.

We had prioritized other things until Google started dropping our title tags. I'm pleased to report that sort of the first iteration of this effort to make the website faster has been completed. The home page is now one-tenth of the size it used to be. It loads almost 10 times faster, [00:03:30] which is great. We're going to be making updates to the exchanges pages, pages for individual currency pages and a whole bunch of other pages. So, happy that this has happening. I do think that this is work that needed to become ... That this is work that needed to come before other feature requests. So shout out to Tyler on our front-end team who's making everything faster. I've worked with Tyler in [00:04:00] the past. He's just incredible. Before coming to Nomics, he was on the front-end e-commerce team at Target, which had just done a ton of optimization work. You're going to see things get faster and faster and faster over time.

Yeah. The updates keep on coming. By the way, just as a product person, [00:04:30] and if you're listening to this or if you think much about product, I think whenever you can't think of the next feature to make, you just can't go wrong making something faster.

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: nomics.com
Crypto Market Data API: nomicsapi.com
Personal Twitter: twitter.com/ClayCollins
Company Twitter: twitter.com/NomicsFinance
Nov 21, 201805:21