EP14: Bringing crypto loans to the real world, with Blake West, co-founder/CTO of Goldfinch, $500M DAO and $25M from a16z

Paradigm Shift

In this wide-ranging conversation, we chat with Blake about his experiences starting out his professional career as a musician, and all the key experiences and trends that led him to founding the Goldfinch decentralized lending protocol (recent $25m Series A from a16z, and $500M DAO).

This is an incredibly rich conversation where we explore so many interesting topics. Some select highlights: the similarities between being a musician and an engineer, and between being in a band and a startup. How the Goldfinch protocol works and Blake’s most ambitious vision for it. Advantages of setting up Goldfinch as a DAO. Predictions on NFTs. The areas where crypto really shines and the trends that are moving more and more economic activity on chain.

Blake is a brilliant and clear thinker, and we learned so much from this conversation. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.
Episode Highlights

1. Being a full-time musician after college
2. Putting small things together to make big things as a musician, and engineer
3. Joy of working on a small group, and being in a band vs startup
4. Learning to code after college and transitioning over to software engineering
5. Early inflection points at Hint Health (Employee #1) and Coinbase
6. Approach to hiring engineers at Goldfinch
7. How Blake got into crypto and what got him interested
8. Magic of decentralization and many interfaces sitting on top of the same data
9. Recent LooksRare token launch
10. What Goldfinch does and how it’s different from other crypto lending protocols
11. Under-collateralized lending for real-world scenarios in a decentralized way
12. Approach to finding the right market and getting early PMF traction
13. How the lending protocol works — across borrowers, backers and LPs
14. More liquidity as one of the places where crypto really shines
15. Most ambitious vision for the protocol
16. Trends moving more economic activity on chain
17. Goldfinch is setup as a DAO — how that works
18. Tradeoffs between DAOs and Centralized Organizations
19. Thoughts on the current bear market cycle
20. Blake’s secret to making rapid progress with Goldfinch
21. What mission-driven means to Blake
22. DeFi advantages: natively global and interoperable by default
23. Prediction on profile NFT pics coming true
24. Crypto wallets as bottomless digital backpacks
25. Predictions on NFTs— “can’t lose” way for brands and creators to engage super fans
26. Building great co-founder relationships and handling high pressure situations
27. Recruiting his initial boss at Coinbase to Goldfinch
28. Superpowers and book recommendations
29. Structure of Scientific Revolutions— the book that coined the term “Paradigm Shift”!

Links

• Goldfinch: the protocol bringing crypto loans to the real world
• Hummingbird Notation (early side project)
• Blake’s Op-Ed on NFTs from April 2021
• Follow Blake on Twitter

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