Josh Benaron, founder of Irys, recalls being ridiculed when he tried to raise funds for his crypto venture at 19. For years, he’s had to fight to be taken seriously.
“Before becoming a founder, I struggled to get access to opportunities within crypto. I was introduced to the [chief technology officer] of one of the largest European CEXs, and he practically laughed me out of the room because of my age,” Benaron tells Magazine.
“In general, when you raise money, being young doesn’t help, as they associate youth with inexperience and immaturity.”
Silicon Valley has glorified young founder success stories, but data shows tech founders generally aren’t that young. The average age of a founder in traditional tech is 42.
However, blockchain technology and its permissionless ethos have slowly changed this. Vitalik Buterin, the poster boy of crypto, was 21 when he co-founded Ethereum.
Young guns with a big chip on their shoulder
“It’s both a blessing and a curse,” said 23-year-old Chunda McCain, co-founder of Nucleus, a plug-and-play platform that allows rollups and appchains to offer yield on bridged assets to attract users.
McCain said a venture fund once told him they didn’t think he could compete in the hyper-competitive DeFi market.
“They just couldn’t get past my age. There was always an expectation that I was a child playing in an adult’s game.”
“That chip on our shoulder that we internalized from those types of comments was the thing that made sure we always checked ourselves, knowing people would underestimate us,” he says.
Benaron says he’s also had to fight to be respected.
However, he says that while the concerns aren’t necessarily unfounded, VCs aren’t doing a good enough job identifying young founders with potential.
Luckily, he eventually found some that allowed him to raise $200,000 in pre-seed at 19, and he’s since raised more than $15 million.
Running a crypto startup for dummies
Then there are the things that you don’t get taught in school, like how to run a company with living, breathing employees, or how to talk to politicians.
Benaron says young founders don’t yet have good mental models for how a team should run, forcing them to work from instinct and first principles thinking.
“It means that you become highly critical of ‘standard practices.’ I hired people in the past who were older than me, and they’d come in and try to change all the processes for process’s sake. It ruined our company for a period of time,” he recalls.
McCain says he struggled most at the start when he was required to step into a position of authority, with money, jobs and livelihoods on the line.
He overcame it by failing and learning quickly, maintaining integrity and ultimately removing the ego from the equation, he says.
“The pushbacks happen much less, if not at all now, and I do credit crypto people for being open-minded, as once you do have a track record and proven yourself in the market, they’re willing to look past age.”
Morpho founder took investor calls between classes
The story ran differently for Paul Frambot, who founded DeFi lending protocol Morpho in his dorm room during his second year of engineering school.
Frambot was just 19 at the time, recruiting fellow students as co-founders, and going up against the traditional path of an entrepreneur in France. Morpho allows anyone to earn yield and borrow assets.
“I still have impostor syndrome,” he admits to Magazine, but adds he never found age to be prohibitive.
“In fact, it helped when pitching American VCs. There’s a real appetite for backing young talent and new ideas. It helped that I was able to approach things from first principles, without being anchored by how things are usually done.”
“The magic was pure innocence. I was on investor calls in between my classes. No one ever told me how to fundraise,” Frambot says.
Frambot raised $1 million, followed by $20 million six months later. Crypto venture capital fund a16z hadn’t invested in France in seven years, prior to Morpho.
Morpho is now the third-largest DeFi lending platform, backed by $50 million and integrated into Coinbase.
Crypto founder starts just after the Terra ecosystem collapsed
Griffin Dunaif also started his crypto company in college, studying computer science at Stanford. He’d been hacking since fifth grade and was an avid gamer, contrasting with his interest in ancient history.
Dunaif cites an Ariana Grande concert in…
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