Sean Thielen-Esparza is co-founder & CEO of Genesis, a team of multidisciplinary individuals creating tools to empower the sovereign developers, creatives, and users of the new web.
I came across Genesis and was excited by your focus on “building category-defining technology to onboard the next billion people to Web3.” To start off, can you share a bit more about what you’re working on?
One component of it that is pretty core is the wallet. What I can share about the wallet thus far is that it’s going to be multi-chain. So, it will be able to support at first the EVM chain space and in the future it may move outside of that.
But beyond it being a wallet, the other things come downstream of the word “wallet.” You see a lot of existing products that look like mobile banking accounts that have pictures in them, which is reflective of how early wallets are. We are pretty constrained by the name “wallet.” One of the things that we’ve experimented with is what does it mean to expand the language system around wallets and what does a wallet actually do. And perhaps how do we change the signal word to define profile, identity, passport, and what have you into something a little more general that gives you more flexibility to use the wallet in the way that best suits your use case for crypto and being a person in Web3. So, we call Genesis “a system.” A previous iteration was “operating system” - that didn’t land with people. It was too confusing. People thought we were building Windows for Web3.
To sum up, we are building an interface for web3 and one of the features of that is a multi-chain wallet.
Prior to starting Genesis, you worked in product at enterprise data automation startup Hyperscience. How did that experience influence how you are approaching building Genesis?
A lot of people are like “what” when they see that. The story starts before then. While Hyperscience and being a PM was very instrumental generally entering tech, I think it was relatively inconsequential with starting Genesis, specifically this company and this space with this kind of product.
What I mean by that is I grew up as a musician and really interested in gardening and landscape architecture design. My mom’s a designer and I had this design orientation for a really long time. I went to school for genetics and studied interior design on the side. I’ve been doing that for a long time and I’d say that’s more directly impactful to Genesis. The way I see Genesis is if ultimately you think Web3 is inevitable, these products should be more like friendly consumer interfaces that use Web3 as an infrastructure. In other words, music NFTs, if we are right about this, don’t remain music NFTs. They’re just music. When I ask “Have you listened to the last Taylor Swift album?,” you don’t say “I bought that album on iTunes” or “I have the CD of it.” You assume I’m asking if you just steamed the new album. So, I think that Web3 is on a similar trajectory.
From a company building stance, I joined Hyperscience when they were a Series A company and they skyrocketed from an 80 person company when I joined to a 450 multi-national enterprise company. There, I was one of the first PMs that built general processes so I was a technical writer, a program manager, a PM, and a design researcher. So, I learned horizontal tech sensibility because previous to that I was in design, medicine, and furniture and it wasn’t really tech. Hyperscience was a crash course in that.
What was your first exposure to crypto or Web3? Led you to ultimately to double down on the space and start a company in the space?
I think it’s two big moments. The first one, I was in college in 2017 and started working at the Apple Store and was working on the floor in Santa Monica, California. That’s a pretty touristed, popular area of L.A. One day, a guy came up to me and wanted to buy six iPhones, which is kind of a red flag. I talked to this guy and he wanted to pay in cash. By protocol, I had to tell my manager that this person has a lot of cash on the floor. Long story short, he said he wanted to gift me something and that something ended up being half a Bitcoin. At this point, I’d heard theoretically about Bitcoin but I didn’t really know what it was. I thought it was a stock or something like that, at least functionally. What happened next was he said to download this app, go get a piece of paper and a pencil from the back, and make sure you cover the camera from seeing what you’re about to write down. And of course, he helped me sit up my first Bitcoin wallet. When he sent me half a Bitcoin, it didn’t register as half a Bitcoin. It registered as a few thousand dollars or I think at that time it was $850 or $1,000. Of course, from then I went home and Googled and learned about Bitcoin and became interested in Internet money.
But, I basically forgot about what happened there until 2019 when I started learning about NFTs through different organizations in tech that were speaking on primitives for new media. DeFi didn’t really catch my eye as much as NFTs did. NFTs as programmable media and simply a primitive of any kind of format clicked with a lot of the intuitions I had around how you use this as creative infrastructure that becomes extensible to an existing craft. For example, with musicians, this is very easy. You split off stems into NFTs. Those become trackable and you have programmable royalties. So, doubling down on crypto was a service towards understanding programmable media but also in thinking about that media as infrastructure for creativity in others. My mission is I want to catalyze creativity in other people. If you can create tooling or applications that make that more possible for people, I’ve done a good job. Genesis is a catalyst for creativity if we’re successful.
What do you believe are the biggest obstacles to onboarding the next billion users into Web3?
It’s two concepts that are wrapped up in the same bucket. I think education and design are both parts of UX. UX is sorely lacking in crypto. In particular, the initial, no put intended, genesis point - the wallet. So, if you want to start a wallet, it’s a fairly painful process where you have to use an old, cryptic mobile banking app except you have to write down these words and if you lose these words, you lose whatever’s in that portfolio. Or it’s just super expensive and you don’t really know why you’re paying to set up a Dharma or a Gnosis Safe. It’s not particularly clear why you’re paying a few hundred dollars if you’re a new person entering the space. Design and education are part of UX because good design has embedded educational components that make the process of being a new Web3 user more clear. Providing expectations of you as a new participant in this, imbuing principles of self-sovereignty, and making it clear what it means and implies to own your own keys are a big part of how UX could be better. That’s a huge impediment to a lot of adoption.
The other part of this is cost. If we’re assuming Ethereum mainnet, it’s still pretty expensive to transact on Ethereum. If you’re rebalancing your portfolio and buying, minting, and trading NFTs, it costs potentially hundreds of dollars to do pretty trivial actions. So, the lack of really strong adoption of Layer 2s is a pretty big impediment. Solana is an interesting blockchain that makes some of this more accessible to people. I have yet to develop a strong opinion on Solana’s value in the space beyond the blockchain that’s really, really cheap and fast. The fact that the blockchain goes down pretty frequently is a difficult thing to reconcile. But, the fact that it’s becoming modular, is cool.
The onboarding obstacles can be summarized in UX as well as the financial inaccessibility of Ethereum in particular.
You’re currently in beta. What’s next for Genesis?
The immediate is we want to publicly announce what it is that we’re building in very specific terms with the features that come next. I can’t share a date for that but it will be very soon. At which point, the beta will be available to a wider audience of people than it is now.
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