Ep 90: Building the Bloomberg & Yahoo Finance of Crypto | TM Lee (co-founder & CEO, Coingecko)
TM Lee is the co-founder & CEO at Coingecko - one of the world’s largest crypto data aggregators with over 150 million users in 2021 alone! But before becoming a founder, TM was first influenced by his brother to become a coder. He learned about Reddit and Digg, and even ended up studying computer science at Purdue University, where he was exposed to the likes of Jason Fried (Basecamp) - a huge proponent of the bootstrap mentality. TM tried many things. He wrote an aggregator in college until things went south, and eventually worked at a Big 4 audit firm but at the back of his mind was the thought that he wanted to start a business. Then in April 2014, he co-founded Coingecko with Bobby Ong. It began as a side project with a starting capital of $100, launched soon after the collapse of Mt Gox. And as you’ll see from our interview, they went through lots of ups & downs to get to where they are today. Highlights: 3:52 How his brother exposed TM to coding 5:01 Influenced by Kevin Rose (Digg) 5:44 Jason Fried of Basecamp 9:17 Evaluating business partners 10:35 Returning to Malaysia 11:47 Side projects 14:56 Building Coingecko 17:05 Meeting his co-founder, Bobby Ong 18:30 The early days of Coingecko 20:00 The significance behind the crash of Mt Gox 21:30 Why launch Coingecko right after the Mt Gox crash? 22:40 Building trust 22:40 Bootstrapping with $100 25:31 Building collaborations with universities 26:40 Scaling via organic marketing 27:47 Getting Coingecko translated into 15 languages 30:19 Was TM worried about sharing his code to the public? 31:10 Getting investors on board 24:12 Why the banking/fintech industry is so different from the crypto industry 35:51 Why maintain Coingecko’s API for free forever? 37:05 How Coingecko ensures that they have accurate price data feeds 38:25 Deciding on the tokens to list 39:09 Sifting out the scams & rug pulls 40:53 Will Coingecko ever delist a token? 42:21 Main milestones behind Coingecko 43:31 How the crypto space is impacted by banks (e.g. DBS) launching their own crypto trading services 44:14 Impact of Binance’s purchase of Coinmarketcap on Coingecko 45:07 Is TM now more important to investors to remain competitive? 50:38 NFTs 52:00 The secret behind Coingecko’s rocket growth in 2021: From 50 million to 150 million in 11 months 53:03 Thoughts on the current bear market 55:34 Crash of the Luna token 56:54 Coinzilla’s malicious app script 1:02:52 What to expect from Coingecko moving forward 1:03:42 Things to expect if the metaverse takes off 1:05:37 How much of your success is due to hard work v luck? 📍Show notes: www.sothisismywhy.com/90 🙊 Like STIMY? Buy us a ☕️?: https://beacons.ai/sothisismywhy 💌 Get the latest STIMY alpha/exclusive updates: https://sothisismywhy.ck.page/ebf231f605