WiB Spotlight is a new Q&A series by Women in Blockchain where we highlight women and non-binary leaders building in the crypto space.

Introducing Nitya, founder of Capsule. Capsule is a toolkit for transacting on blockchains. Capsule’s SDKs make it easy to build safe and intuitive crypto experiences. In this month’s WiB Spotlight, we talk to Nitya about being a solo founder and curating a company work culture, why she built Capsule, and how she keeps herself motivated on a daily basis.

WiB: How did you get into crypto? Was there a specific moment that made you question our current financial systems?

Nitya: I had one such moment. I was working in lending and ironically enough, I applied for a credit card and got rejected. It was a very confusing moment of reflection, like how am I this very well-set up, financially stable person who literally works in lending, and didn’t get my application for this credit card accepted. That got me down this rabbithole of understanding the ways our financial system is not set up to serve consumers’ incentives, but rather the incentives of corporations and lenders entrenched in power. I realized that if you were able to make certain types of systems more open, that would increase people’s understanding of how these systems work and likely increase their access as well. I’d first learned about Bitcoin in 2014, but understanding what open, programmable systems and smart contracts could accomplish on a societal level got me to join the crypto space full time in 2017

**WiB: **Can you tell me a little bit about Capsule and the process of creating it? What is the big problem you’re trying to solve?

Nitya: I had spent the 2017 through 2022 crypto cycle building the Celo Protocol and saw the ways in which this cyclic nature of crypto brings about new innovation in waves. But I’ve also seen that the whole space tends to be very focused on building abstracted compute platforms like building new types of L1s, new mechanisms for scaling, etc. But I wasn’t seeing as many of the ways that people were going to actually be able to take advantage of all of this new compute that has finally become abundant. At every juncture, the focus has always been on “how do we create more space for transactions on chain” versus “how we actually find more ways that more people can put more transactions onto blockchains”. I realized we have a massive demand problem in crypto.

From my experiences actually building a mobile wallet (Valora) and doing GTM on the ground in emerging markets, I knew viscerally that nobody is able to do useful things onchain without key management. Crypto can only really be a toy until the places to store value are more intuitive, and the ways to actually write data to blockchains are easier. These were the foundational insights that led to Capsule.

WiB: What was the process like of putting together your team? What were some of the challenges you faced?

Nitya: I’m a solo founder. When I left my job, I took a little bit of time off and really wanted to validate a lot of my assumptions about the space by talking to other people. I spent quite a bit of time with other folks working on a lot of the main crypto projects, trying to understand how they viewed the space. I kept hearing the same things over and over again: that users aren’t coming to our products, that we’re seeing high dropoff. People will sign up for something if they think its speculative, but they won’t be retained.

Along the way, I’d thought a lot about co-founders and what that journey could look like, but realized I wanted to put together a really strong founding team instead. I tapped one of the engineers that I’d had a really amazing experience working with in the past, and also had an insanely talented friend from the crypto space express excitement about what we were building and come on board. Since then, it’s been a great journey building together.

WiB: You mentioned you’re a solo founder. What’s that like?

Nitya: For me, the decision of whether to start a company alone versus having a co-founder had a few factors. The first factor is, when you’re a solo founder, you take on ultimate accountability for everything at the company. In a lot of co-founding pairs where you might have a CEO and a CTO for example, you can divide and conquer some of these things, whereas as a CEO and solo founder, you do need to hire someone and delegate everything or do it yourself. You have to get comfortable receiving and tackling problems day-to-day. You also have to be much more intrinsically motivated, and balanced in optimism and realism because there isn’t a natural counterbalance.

WiB: How did you keep yourself motivated?

Nitya: All of us have many aspects to our lives. Every element will rarely be going well all the time. A company is no different. Building a company is very intensely personal and it’s expected that you will care a lot about it. Small things will go wrong, probably every day, definitely every week- same is true in the opposite direction. Life is kind of the same way, occasionally small things go wrong, sometimes big things go wrong. For me, cultivating resilience to that and focusing on why I’m doing everything I’m doing is really important. For me, the excitement behind Capsule and what it has the potential of becoming is what gets me out of bed every morning. When you do have that North Star that really, really matters, it’s a lot easier to justify bumps in the road towards it.

WiB: That’s very beautifully put, and a great segue into my next question, which is what it’s like to work in a small team and what work culture is like at Capsule.

Nitya: Before starting Capsule, I’d always gravitated towards smaller teams because the kind of difference in impact you can have being good versus being great versus outstanding- in startups is massive. There’s unlimited ability for having a differentiated path if you’re doing really well, both as a company and an individual. This can be quite compelling if you’re high-achieving and somewhat early in your career. There are no real ceilings, this is something I really appreciated about small company environments as an employee in the past. Of course, there are downsides that come with working at a startup too. For instance, sometimes your schedule is not always your own. There can be external deadlines that you don’t have as much control over and have to hit. When you join an early stage startup you need to be consciously opting into these tradeoffs.

For everyone who chooses to be here and commit, I want their experience at Capsule to be career-defining. Capsule offers a unique opportunity to be a part of something that will define the crypto space, and ideally define how we interact on the internet. That’s what has attracted our early team and something I look for when identifying fit- the desire to be part of (and do the work to build) something of significance.

We intentionally structured our early team as in-person around two major crypto talent hubs, SF and NYC. I wanted everyone to have an in-office experience and foster that culture, even if we’re not all in the same office. It’s important to me that the team feels a sense of high trust and mutual respect. This is easiest when everyone is fairly senior and there is high agency and a strong bottoms-up accountability culture.

WiB: From your perspective, what aspect of blockchain tech do you think is really misunderstood or underappreciated by people, whether they work in crypto or the world beyond?

Nitya: I would have to say the wallet, of course. In crypto, we started out with having wallets because on Bitcoin, you needed an interface to transfer assets. Now, it’s this vestigial remnant of an evolutionary process, where we have separate applications for seeing what we can do on the blockchain (read) and then another category of product to actually go and do it (write). People get very used to the experiences they have and then forget that there are ways in which they’re not intuitive.

This is controversial, but I think there are too many builders in crypto that say they are building the new thing and everyone has to learn to do things their way to be in the space, sort of like a “crypto-native cool kids club.” Then there’s this other camp which says self-custody and portability don’t matter, we need to build things in centralized, custodial ways, and we’ll call it an NFT because that will make people more excited. Almost nobody is thinking about the large middle ground, which is that you need to make experiences and the roles of different product categories as analogous as possible to people that have experience on the internet. This is the opportunity I see with Capsule.

If you think about it from web1 to web2 there wasn’t actually a shift in how people used things at all. It was a difference in functionality. Web3 is a similar capability shift, but we’ve gone and made these entirely different categories of products and these paradigms of user experience that have made it feel like a weird thing. If we let go of that notion, we’ll see a lot more innovation in the space, and a lot more people using web3 products.