GRTiQ Podcast: 180 Aki Balogh

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Aki Balogh (00:00:18):

I think web3 is, it’s like once you get into this stuff and learn how it works, you can’t go back. Anything, like sending, I don’t know, an ACH transaction feels like sending a telegram.

Nick (00:01:06):

Welcome to the GRTiQ Podcast. Today, I’m speaking with Aki Balogh, Co-founder and CEO at DLC.Link, a platform that facilitates trust-minimized Bitcoin smart contracts and DeFi applications using Discreet Log Contracts, or DLCs. Aki is a brilliant entrepreneur with a wealth of knowledge about web3, the Bitcoin community, and DeFi.

In our conversation, Aki shares his early exposure to technology, his remarkable achievements as a young student, which led to an exciting role at Microsoft where he had the opportunity to meet Bill Gates and visit his home. And Aki shares that story with us today. We also discuss Aki’s entrepreneurial journey, including the success of his first startup MarketMuse, how DLC.Link is transforming DeFi, and some important discussion on the topic of decentralization.

I started the conversation by asking Aki where he’s from, which led to a discussion about growing up the son of immigrants.

Aki Balogh (00:02:06):

Thanks for having me. I guess just to keep it short, I was born in Hungary in a smaller town called Debrecen, where my parents worked at the university, came out in 1991 to the US to the Boston area. So, I spent a lot of time there. And then, at one point, we moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan. So, I lived in Michigan too for about 10 years.

(00:02:26):

So, about 12 years in Boston, 10 years in Michigan, came to New York seven years ago. I also spent a little bit of time in Abu Dhabi and elsewhere, but those are the main highlights.

Nick (00:02:35):

I want to ask you this question about immigrating to the United States, and long-time listeners of the podcast know that I’ve had a lot of guests on whose parents were immigrants. And tell us about that story. What was that like for you growing up, the son of immigrants?

Aki Balogh (00:02:50):

Yeah, I think it did contribute to me becoming an entrepreneur. Actually, at one point years ago, I received some sort of immigrant founder award in Boston area for that. But hey, I’d honestly rather credit my parents for the bulk of it. I was five when we came out. But being an immigrant just… Having to go from one country to another, you learn the language. It’s not that big of a deal.

(00:03:13):

But seeing my parents especially go through that, it really made us a stronger family, I think. But when you come to another country and you’ve got to figure out the rules of engagement, everything’s unfamiliar, living in ambiguity for a couple of years, that definitely translates to doing startups. And now that I’ve done two startups, we’ll get into my background, but now that I’ve done two startups in completely different domains, I do draw on that scale.

Nick (00:03:39):

What do you make of this thing that occasionally comes up about the immigrant work ethic? And that sounds super positive, but I think for the children of immigrants, that’s a lot of pressure sometimes and it kind of shapes the types of things they’re interested in and the pressure they feel as they pursue. Is that something you’ve had to navigate?

Aki Balogh (00:03:54):

Yeah, I’d like to think so. I think there’s just a selection bias. Anyone who grows up in one place and chooses to move to another place, there’s a choice there. Maybe there’s research against this, but I would say a similar decision is moving to New York. Unless you grew up in the New York area, if you move to New York for work, you’ve made a choice to improve your life in some way, professionally and personally, et cetera.

(00:04:17):

So, any kind of migration from one place to another is going to correlate with something than just staying where you were and just spending your whole life in one place.

Nick (00:04:28):

And a final question on this immigration theme. The American dream is something I’m super interested in. You hear a lot of rhetoric, especially during election cycles, about the American dream. But you’ve lived it, your parents, first-generation immigrants. Did the American dream, was it realized for your parents and additionally, do you think the American dream is still alive?

Aki Balogh (00:04:48):

Yeah, I think so. But I think there are different types of dreams. And what I mean by that is my parents and we left because our situation in Hungary in the early ’90s was not good. It took a long time. Maybe it took seven to 10 years, but we definitely improved our conditions here. But then, 17 years ago, my brother moved to Singapore to improve on his quality of life over his options in the US.

(00:05:12):

And he’s been in Hong Kong for seven years, and he chooses to live in Asia. So, there’s also Singapore/Hong Kong dream. And I came to New York from Abu Dhabi in 2010. There’s different dreams, and it’s not specifically confined to America. In fact, now sometimes I go on podcasts saying, Well, I feel like the US is a little bit behind when it comes to crypto. I think we’d really need to catch up and take this stuff seriously.

(00:05:36):

And so, maybe the Chinese dream or the global dream of having free money flows and so on, maybe other countries are ahead of that right now.

Nick (00:05:46):

That’s a great point, and I appreciate you letting me double click a little bit on that backstory there. So, let’s dive back into your personal story a little bit here. As you said, you went on to university and you ended up studying and getting a degree in software development. What took you down that path?

Aki Balogh (00:06:01):

I started writing code when I was nine or 10, which was just as a hobby and so on. At 13, I learned Perl. I bought a book on Perl and learned that, and that was my first kind of more interesting language. Instead of going to high school, I went to a community college for computer programming. So, I did a computer science degree, which I received at 18 when I graduated from the community college.

(00:06:25):

Then, I went to Michigan for business school. So, I did undergrad BBA and went from there to management consulting. But I always had this kind of interest in… I interned at Microsoft. I always had this interest in business and technology. Basically, writing code and then what can we do to make that productive? So, that stuff came early and that has kind of persisted with me.

(00:06:47):

I guess I’ll get into the next set of career choices, but that has persisted with throughout. So, I’ve always been into software, business, entrepreneurship.

Nick (00:06:56):

Nine is a young age to get interested in something like tech, and yet so many entrepreneurs that joined the GRTiQ Podcast do start early, and I have to always ask, what was as a young person that sort of lit that fire? Was there a moment or a mentor or an experience where you just sort of turned your attention away from things that a lot of nine-year-olds are focusing on and started to go deep on coding and text?

Aki Balogh (00:07:22):

I’d love to say that I was brilliant, but I was probably just a big nerd, probably still am a big nerd. Got in computer games, especially strategy games like StarCraft. That definitely contributed. So, when I went to community college, I wanted to do game design. That was my first goal. Although then two years into the program, I realized, Wait a moment, that’s probably not where this is going.

(00:07:47):

But the thing about computers, and I would even more broadly say this about science and technology, I turned 39 last week, so I can say this. In almost 40 years of experience, I have seen technology, generally speaking, the scientific method, logical thinking, technology uplift our family. Technology is what took us from Hungary to the US. My dad’s a scientist.

(00:08:11):

He got a job at the University of Massachusetts Lowell doing research on nanomedicine, nanocomposites, stuff like that. That opportunity was given because of technology and innovation. And then, I’ve made a career out of tech and it has definitely improved both obviously my prospects professionally, but also our quality of life personally. So, I definitely am a technophile.

Nick (00:08:36):

When you think back to university and the things you were studying at that time, were there any seeds or ideas or concepts you came across related to web3, distributed systems, blockchain? Did you get any early exposure that would maybe explain how you found yourself in web3 at that time?

Aki Balogh (00:08:54):

I’ll answer that question. I’ll tell you a quick funny story. When I was an intern at Microsoft, I had a chance to go to Bill Gates’s house. There was a reception, and I got to ask Bill Gates a question. And I knew ahead of time that I’m going to be able to ask Mr. Gates a question because other interns had done this before. And so, basically, when Bill Gates appeared, there was a big audience around it, but I asked him the first question.

(00:09:16):

I’m like, Hey, Mr. Gates, for somebody interested in business and technology, where should someone like that go to work other than Microsoft? Because I figured Microsoft would be the easy answer. And he did break it down for me. He said, I think technology and healthcare are some of the best industries. Within technology, software is better than hardware.

(00:09:34):

Maybe it’s easier in many ways, but there are a lot of startups and things fail. And so, you want to select what software company you work for. So, I was already filling software at that point, but Mr. Gates did verify that. But then, to really get more into your question, it was actually a couple years after, because from business school, I went into management consulting, tech strategy.

(00:09:54):

I did a private equity internship, and I ended up at a VC fund in Boston in 2011. And there, I was looking at big data. I was their first associate evangelizing big data and machine learning AI in 2011. So, basically, the database side of it, the distributed data, Hadoop, et cetera, at the time. And I actually left that VC fund to work for a big database company called Infinity B out of Texas.

(00:10:19):

So, data management was my first foray. At the time, it wasn’t… I had heard of Bitcoin around that time, but I don’t think web3 as a concept that maybe existed. So, I wasn’t like a super early practitioner of Bitcoin, but that did give me that background to see that this is something special.

Nick (00:10:38):

I recently, with another guest, had the opportunity to learn a little bit about what Andy Grove was like from Intel. They had worked at Intel and had the opportunity to meet Andy Grove, which is something I’d never experienced before. So, we had the opportunity to share some stories, which was a lot of fun. I got to ask you a follow-up about meeting Bill Gates.

(00:10:54):

He’d probably be up there with Andy Grove, with people who have really shaped technology and industry in the United States. What was it like going to his house and what was that experience like for a young person?

Aki Balogh (00:11:04):

By the way, Andy Grove’s Hungarian. That’s one of ours, I guess. Although to be fair, a lot of Hungarian people become famous after they’ve left Hungary. So, there’s two sides to that story. I was petrified, I was terrified. Well, first of all, the van pulls around to a church nearby. They take all of our cell phones and then kind of metal objects and so on.

(00:11:23):

They whisk us, us meaning all the interns in that class, whisk us to Mr. Gates’s actual house where you can see his fleet of cars and vans and all the room stuff. And then, you have all the C-levels from Microsoft there, too. There’s a big reception. I did have time to prep for this, and I did have time to kind of rehearse my question. And I was told that if you’re going to ask a question, be the first one because there’s this crowd.

(00:11:49):

And so, when Mr. Gates came out, I was the first one there and I was the first one to ask a question. And I would even say, honestly, just the confidence of being able to be the first one to ask a question, as a young person, I would even say it really doesn’t matter what the question is, but if you can go to a conference, stand up and ask a question and get an answer from someone who’s brilliant and famous, it just does build confidence.

(00:12:12):

So, I did have a lot of experiences. Not to make this all about just jumping around, but I also had an opportunity even before that, I delivered the commencement speech for the community college. So, when I was 18, I spoke to an audience, over 3,000 college students. These experiences, I do look back, it did build a lot of confidence.

(00:12:31):

And I think just the feeling that you can do something like that, that you matter, especially coming from kind of a tougher background, that helped. That did help.

Nick (00:12:41):

Well, I want to turn then to what you did following university. And as you said, you have a unique story. You got started young, you went to community college instead of high school, graduated, and you’ve done a lot of internships. But in 2013, you started MarketMuse, which was your first entrepreneurial venture. I want to talk about that. But the gap between university and 2013, what were some of the things you were working on at that time?

Aki Balogh (00:13:04):

Yeah, when I was graduating, I interviewed at 40 different jobs. I really wanted to find the career that would make sense for me, and I picked management consulting. I had this idea of like, Wouldn’t it be cool if I have to fly to places and companies want me to be there because of my skill, because of something that I uniquely bring? And that’s what I got in consulting. I did two years of that.

(00:13:25):

I had some early… I guess I would say I had a confidence building early win there too, because a few months in, my former boss from Microsoft, I was catching up with her and she’s like, By the way, does your company do strategy consulting? And yes, we do. And so, I ended up bringing in Microsoft as a client for my company, this company Diamond, which was later bought by PwC.

(00:13:47):

But it was their first engagement with Microsoft and three partners. And I ended up flying out to Redmond to pitch them, and we won a first deal. And then, the CEO of that consulting company congratulated me and so on. That was also another kind of, I would say an early sales win, but also very much confidence boosting. But basically, from there, I did two years in consulting. I did a bunch of projects.

(00:14:11):

At one point, I actually took a sabbatical. And this is maybe another confidence building moment, but I wanted to do a project abroad, but the company did not have any opportunities. So, I took an unpaid sabbatical and through a connection of mine, I sold a project to the government of Abu Dhabi. And I moved to Abu Dhabi in 2009, and I worked there with BCG, but as an independent consultant for a few months.

(00:14:37):

And then, when I came back from there, I did a consulting project back at my company on Islamic insurance for the board of AIG in 2009. So, these sales experiences, I would say now looking back, because I work in sales. I’ve been in sales for 10 years as a founder, CEO, it’s all sales and marketing. And just the ability to sell something, even if it’s a small win, that did stay with me.

Nick (00:15:02):

What does two years working as a management consultant teach you about the nature of business and management? Did you get any kind of core insights or fundamentals you take with you to today?

Aki Balogh (00:15:13):

Yeah, I thought it was a good start because they have a great training program. You get to work on a lot of different projects. Our company did not have a brand. It was called Diamond. Some people know it, a lot of people don’t. We competed against the McKinsey’s. At least the practice that I worked in, we competed against the McKinsey’s. I worked in, by the way, the data analytics and data management practice, so kind of precursor to big data.

(00:15:38):

But we competed in often one projects against McKinsey, BCG and others. And frankly, because of our intensity and grit, because we didn’t have a brand, we had to work twice as hard. I would argue, of course, my friends who were at McKinsey and BCG were working planning hard. Just the fact that we did win some projects suggests that we impressed them in some way.

(00:15:58):

Yeah, there’s a great training, lots of experiences, but then there’s also just a great side of it. For example, I was living in Michigan and flying to San Francisco every week for five months for a post-merger integration project. That was hard. I would leave home on Sunday or Monday morning at 4:00 AM, but usually Sunday afternoon, to fly to San Francisco.

(00:16:23):

And on Thursdays, I would take a red-eye back, of course, and coach and all that for five months, just showing up, being energetic, even though you’re in a different time zone, looking professional, even though you might feel like crap. That was something that consulting did teach me, which does then apply to entrepreneurship.

Nick (00:16:45):

Well, let’s fast forward, as I mentioned, to 2013. You co-founded MarketMuse, which became a very successful marketing content platform. Before we talk about your experience working on that and launching that, can you just take us back in time and talk about where the idea for MarketMuse came from and what you were thinking about at the time?

Aki Balogh (00:17:03):

Yeah, yeah. So, when I was in BC, I was only there for nine months, but one of the reasons for that is my second week on the job, the founder of the fund, Scott Maxwell, basically pulled me aside and said, Hey, I like you, but you shouldn’t be here. Don’t be in venture right now. Go start a company or join somebody else’s and then come back to venture later. Some people find, it’s a good idea to go into venture young.

For you, it’s like you’re like a builder type. Go build some stuff and then do this as your last job kind of thing. And so, because of that, I left. I wasn’t ready to start my own, so I worked for the CEO of this database startup for two years, got to learn a lot about sales and marketing, that kind of stuff. But I did want to start an AI company. It seemed, back in 2011, there was a lot of Cloudera and MapR and stuff.

(00:17:51):

They were really pushing Hadoop or Hortonworks, and some of these names are ancient at this point in tech. But they were really pushing the concept of Hadoop. Get all your data in one place. But then, the big question everybody had, it was like, Cool, what do I do with the data? How can I… And it was clear that you would want to run large-scale machine learning algorithms to do something.

(00:18:11):

I wanted to figure out how to build an AI machine learning solution company. How do you use it to solve a business problem? And I basically… I actually worked a little bit on a healthcare idea, but then I realized, Wait, I actually don’t know anything about healthcare, so maybe that’s a tough one. So, instead, I switched to marketing.

(00:18:31):

And I switched to content marketing because HubSpot at the time in Boston was very new, but they were building this concept of inbound marketing and compete on just having great content, come up in search, that kind of thing. SEO was not new, but HubSpot was really pushing this concept to business leaders. So, that seemed to make sense. And then, the other part of it is content. I figured we could just download a bunch of it very cheaply.

(00:18:56):

It’s a very kind of low cost thing. And so, the idea basically, which took a while to figure out, but the idea was basically HubSpot tells you, You should write great content that will rank. But how do you actually write great content? They did not give any advice about that, really. And so, I thought, Hey, why don’t we… If you want to write great content, why don’t we use the machine to… let’s say you want to write about a topic.

Let’s have the machine download 10,000 articles, read them all quickly, and then tell you how to write a great topic given that corpus of data, that volume of data. And then, we could do that for any topic, anyone. It was sort of like reverse Google. I wanted the machine to tell me what do I not know so that I know what questions to ask versus Google where you have to know the question to get the answer.

(00:19:44):

It’s like, I want to know the question. And so, that eventually became MarketMuse.

Nick (00:19:51):

What’s it like for you now knowing how ubiquitous AI is? Everybody’s got ChatGPT and everybody’s talking about it, but here you are, as a founder in 2013, building a content machine based on AI. Are you a little bit in awe that people think AI is new and something incredible when you were working on something similar in 2013?

Aki Balogh (00:20:13):

I’m really happy that this exists. We raised $5 million in 2018, and we used a couple million of that to build an LLM in 2019-2020 timeframe. We built a research lab in Montreal next to or near Mila, the AI research lab. We were not associated with, but we worked with some advisors from Mila. And so, we had some natural language generation experts.

(00:20:36):

We moved from India and Egypt and elsewhere to Montreal to build this. And we launched… We actually had an LLM back then, but our training data was not sufficient. We threw a couple million at it, but it wasn’t enough to get, obviously, to where OpenAI is. And of course, we didn’t have the breadth of research knowledge that the OpenAI team has. So, we tried to build that product.

(00:21:01):

It actually did generate content. The content was okay, but it wasn’t way better than if humans would do it, and humans were cheap enough. So, it never became a commercial success. So, I’m really happy that that does exist because we all win. When we use technology to make our lives better, to improve productivity, everybody wins. And I’m just so happy.

(00:21:24):

And MarketMuse actually also now can use those things and still has differentiated value. It still does something that helps SEO experts and content writers. So, the AI just made MarketMuse more effective. Well, specifically, the challenge with MarketMuse was that it would give you these incredible outlines for how to write your content, but then someone still had to write the content, someone who had domain expertise, and we could not scale that.

(00:21:52):

And so, our board was pushing us to create a publishing house and have a bunch of humans running around. I’m like, I don’t really think that’s how we do anything. So then, we tried to work with content creation agencies. And there was always… Some of them were good, some of them were good, but expensive. Some of them were fine, but then it was all a challenge managing them.

(00:22:13):

So, that was then replaced by GPT because now you can create an AI-driven outline, which you can in MarketMuse today, and then have GPT write it, plus human editing. It just speeds up content creation. So, it was sort of like the last piece of the MarketMuse’s content creation flywheel.

Nick (00:22:32):

Well, as I’ve said a couple of times, that was in 2013, you co-founded MarketMuse and launched that. Here we are over a decade later. What was that experience like scaling a company from an idea to something viable out, competing in market with teams supporting it?

Aki Balogh (00:22:51):

Horrible. It was tough. Yeah. I’m going to be very candid, it was really tough because the learning curves were really steep. So, first of all, when I started the company, I decided, Hey, this would be a great opportunity to relearn how to code. I had not coded in a couple of years, so why don’t I sit down and learn all the languages that are used today?

(00:23:13):

So, I started with Python, got in Scala, Go then front-end stuff, Ruby, then Angular. Then, how do you run a web server? And I was just sitting in my apartment in the north end in Boston and just coding six days a week, three shifts a day, 14 hours a day. And oh, yeah, and I had no money because I had quit my job. So, I was basically just on savings. And so, it was really tough.

(00:23:42):

Entrepreneurship is tough, but it’s tough because of the learning curve. So, first, I created the software. I worked with the scientist, co-founder Richard, who was the expert in machine learning. So, he built the machine learning algo. I built everything around it. We have patents together, and that was one thing. So, that was the first two years also talking to customers.

(00:24:02):

Then, of course, I had to learn SEO and all the industry because I wasn’t from that industry. That’s another thing. My co-founder Jeff Coyle helped a lot. He brought in a lot of expertise and networks and that. Then, it was the other learning curve around building a sales team, building an organization, setting culture, setting vision, doing leadership off sites, all of that.

(00:24:22):

So, all of those learning curves in parallel, there’s like 12 things you have to do well, at least 12 things to run a company. And I was learning all 12, mostly in parallel or with great overlapping. So, it was super hard. It was a very new technology. In the first few years, SEOs, just thought it was interesting, but they didn’t believe that it worked, frankly. And then, we got some content.

(00:24:47):

We did some large-scale data studies with some influencers like Neil Patel who basically pointed out, This is actually the number one ranking factor on SEO. This is the number one thing you can do to your content to make it rank higher, which just galvanized the SEO industry. But that took a couple of years. That validation took a few years. And there was a couple of years of just building machine learning and stuff, which is already hard.

(00:25:12):

So, it was a lot. That was one type of challenge. And then, the other type of challenge was when we received $5 million in investment, and then we went on to raise something like $15 million over multiple rounds. But raising $5 million, and I’ve been arguably suffering toiling my whole life, a large part of my life. And then, we get all this money and now I have to hire a bunch of people really quickly.

(00:25:36):

We have a board with 12 VCs who have invested in, seven of them on the board and all of that. Yeah, it was definitely life on beast mode for a couple of years.

Nick (00:25:47):

And this is a pretty common question I asked someone like you, but what are the two or three characteristics that you think haven’t gone through that experience? And of course, you are working on something else now that we haven’t even introduced quite yet, but what are those two or three characteristics that every entrepreneur should have?

Aki Balogh (00:26:00):

For me, one was conviction. Early on when I started my company and I had no idea, no nothing, and my mom of course, being a mom worried, she’s like, Hey, so what happens if your company doesn’t succeed? You left your job. What are you going to do? And I’m like, Mom, I’m 27 at the time. I’m like, I got what, 40, 50 years ahead of me. I’m either going to make this company a success or I’m going to die trying.

(00:26:28):

And my mom was like, Oh. So, clearly, that was not the diplomatic answer. But what I meant by that is given enough years, I can do consulting, I can do whatever on the side. Worst case, I go back to another job and I do this on the side, whatever. There’s got to be a way, but I’m going to figure out how to make this company work through hell or high water, basically.

(00:26:50):

And so, that conviction, but it wasn’t because I’m maniacal. Maybe I am, I don’t know, but it was because I just knew, I thought that it could work. I knew that AI is a thing. I knew that SEO is a thing. I knew that there’s going to be some overlap over the two, and I was just going to bang away at that problem. And I knew that I could do it cheaply and experiment and kind of move quick.

(00:27:11):

I thought that learning how to code and Scala and all the crazy parallel asynchronous networking stuff that I was doing, just downloading large amounts of content very quickly. There’s a lot of stuff that I knew was hard, but I knew that people, more knowledgeable than me, could advise me on how to actually do it. I knew that I could thread this needle. And I just really liked the challenge.

(00:27:35):

And I knew that… I also wanted to do this before I had a family because I had worked for some entrepreneurs before the venture thing. I worked at a small PE fund, private equity fund, for a couple months, and those were two entrepreneurs who are kind of like, Yeah, if you want to start something, you might want to do it before you have kids because it’s just easier in many ways, or that’s a good time.

(00:27:54):

So, I knew that was the right time, and I just want to push myself and figure it out. And then, one thing that I learned from that, which I actually said in a quote in a magazine at the time, which my parents still remember, is like, Hey, you know what? When you start a company and you leave your job, you feel like you’re going to die because you don’t get a salary anymore. It is super scary, but as long as you have a dollar or whatever, you can buy rice.

As long as you have a place to live, which was with my parents for a bit, and then in a cheap apartment or low cost apartment, and then as long as you can buy a bag of rice and put some soy sauce on it, you’re not going to die. You’re not going to actually die. So, it is highly unpleasant, but it’s not that risky. It’s just it’s very likely going to be an unpleasant experience for a couple of years, but it’s not really that risky in the sense that the way that people think about it.

Nick (00:28:45):

Another thing you’ve said is that people don’t talk enough about the emotional toll it takes to be an entrepreneur. Why do you stress that point, and why is that important?

Aki Balogh (00:28:55):

Entrepreneurs are, by definition, leaders of their company, of their vision, of the industry, of the idea. And leaders don’t want to show weakness because someone might think they’re weak or not follow them, so on. So, there’s that side of that. You don’t want to just complain to people all the time. But the truth is that, there’s some tremendously steep learning curves no matter who you are, what you’re doing.

(00:29:19):

There’s some really tough learning curves. There’s not a huge safety net behind you unless you had a previous success and you have millions of dollars in the bank. But the only way to get that is sort of go through the struggle, the grind as they call it. So, if you become an entrepreneur, you’re destined to go through the grind. It’s inevitable. But the grind does have a significant mental health toll.

(00:29:41):

There’s a lot about this. There’s different aspects of it, but some people maybe never emerge from the grind. I would argue, Elon Musk has never emerged from the grind. He is still fighting the battle. He was fighting when he was a kid. By definition, that’s what motivates him, which is actually great from a productivity standpoint, but we also have to be kind to ourselves.

(00:30:02):

So, for example, my second startup, one of the rules I made for myself is I’m going to be kind to myself. I’m not going to just punish myself constantly about like, Oh, this is stuff I screwed up. Or if I’m tired, I take a nap or I sleep. I’m not going to just drink more coffee and push. Of course, there’s times when you sprint, you have to and all that. It’s not like I never do.

(00:30:22):

I would argue, I work just maybe as intensely as I did before, but if I’m getting signals or if I’m sad, I’ll tell someone. One thing I do is I talk to a lot of other entrepreneurs and founders, and we talk about challenges we have openly. So, emotional vulnerability is a really important tool for any leader and for venture-backed tech entrepreneurs, even more so.

Nick (00:31:51):

So, I do ask entrepreneurs like you this question frequently as well, which is for anybody that’s listening to your story and they have visions of becoming an entrepreneur themselves or they have an idea, and you’re talking about this emotional toll, there’s this question of like, well, how do I manage it then if this is something that might be down the road for me? What’s your system?

(00:32:13):

You mentioned a little bit of it there, but is there something more specific that you do or would advise people to do?

Aki Balogh (00:32:19):

There’s a lot. One of our investors actually assigned me a mental health coach who was himself a serial entrepreneur. His company, without getting into too much detail, his entire staff was killed when the plane crashed in the 9/11. I’m not laughing because it’s funny, I’m laughing because it’s unimaginable. Yeah, his entire company was in 9/11 and he sold to that market.

(00:32:43):

So, almost all of his colleagues lost their lives. And then, in addition to that, he went through multiple divorces and so on. And this is stuff he talks about openly. So, he’s a great coach because he’s lived it. But for anyone, of course, I hope no one has to go through that level of suffering. There’s a lot of things. There’s meditation. He actually pointed me to TM.org, Transcendental Meditation.

(00:33:05):

It’s like a free or very low-cost class. It’s a skill I’ve used since then. So, usually, that’s the one I say first is TM.org or any kind of meditation, but there’s also lifestyle movement. I woke up at 5:00 AM. I went to the gym this morning. Well, I tried to sleep till 6:00 AM, so I have sleeping issues. That’s not great. But then, at 6:30, I did go to the gym. So, getting to gym in, not drinking or not taking substances to an extreme degree.

(00:33:32):

Yeah, we’re all going to go to networking parties and have some drinks or something, but not to take it into extremes. And then, just really being open about emotions fit to family and friends. I think that’s it. I do not see that as weakness if someone’s able to articulate, Hey, I am feeling this. It was just a lot of opportunities to learn those lessons about being articulate emotionally.

Nick (00:33:58):

So, before we move on from MarketMuse, I want to ask you two follow-up questions. Number one is what’s the state of MarketMuse? You’re currently a board member and you’re currently working on something else. So, at some point, you kind of made the decision to move on, is that right?

Aki Balogh (00:34:13):

Yeah. My goal with MarketMuse was to go soup to nuts from the first lines of code written all the way through having a management team in place. And that’s what I did. In 2020, we got through the COVID era, or sorry, in 2021, which was very tough for the marketing industry and for some of our investors and so on, and our staff. So, we reimagined the company.

(00:34:38):

Well, we had a 14-person sales team, but then in COVID, most of that went away or almost all of that. So, we reimagined it as a product-led growth company, a PLG, so self-serve, and then sales behind it, supporting it. So, there was a lot that we did. But anyway, after that, after the PLG stuff was working, I felt comfortable to be able to step aside and give somebody else the leadership brains.

(00:35:02):

And also I was just, honestly, a little bit wiped out mentally and emotionally. So, basically, we promoted our Chief Revenue Officer Chuck to lead the company. And he’s been the CEO ever since. I automated something. So, as my last six months there, I just automated a lot of dashboards, a lot of reports so that they could see, they could get client success metrics, look at who’s going to renew.

(00:35:24):

I did a lot of data science to see what behaviors to show, whether someone’s activated or going to renew or going to churn, that kind of stuff. And then, I left. And then, there is a next chapter for MarketMuse. I cannot speak about it publicly, but in about a month or two, I think there will be some news around it. And that’s all I can say. So, it will be a soup to nuts experience one day this year, hopefully.

Nick (00:35:50):

And then, the second follow up is the state of SEO then. That’s kind of like this treasure that every marketing team is searching for, everyone’s trying to hack. There’s sort of this mystique or magic around it, but sometimes it seems like it’s much to do about nothing. You have people that are like, Just create great content and people will find you.

(00:36:08):

And then, of course, you have the other extreme, which is everything should be produced with this SEO in mind. So, what’s your view on it as that evolved and the present state of it?

Aki Balogh (00:36:17):

There’s a technical SEO side, especially for large websites and publishers, undeniably a technical SEO side. For most companies, it’s really about who you are, what you do, what’s the value you provide, what’s the differentiated value. What can you do that others can’t? Or what do you know better? What’s the knowledge inside the walls of your company, the virtual walls? How do you write that down?

(00:36:41):

And we do this at dlcBTC at DLC.Link, my new company, which we’ll get into of course. But we do this. We have a lot of content. When we hear a question from the community or a sales question or sales objection, we not only answer the question, but we write content about it. Ideally long form blog content because that way we learn the answer ourselves very well, and it makes great sales collateral.

(00:37:04):

So, we write blog posts and then we put the sales collateral. Of course, everything’s out there. There’s no paywall. Not that there would be, but for publishers there are. But I believe, let’s just get all the content out there. Create as much content as possible. As long as the content has, and even with AI, obviously the AI can help write some of it or help our writers, but of course we have human writers, myself included. I write some of it.

(00:37:29):

And it just forces us to articulate both in a short way. So, we get the 10-second, 30-second explanation for question, and then the long way, the long article way. And then, we can take that content and slice and dice, put it into our tweets, and basically build other types of content and marketing from that knowledge base.

Nick (00:37:51):

So then, let’s go to where you are presently today. And I know there were some stops along the way and other projects that you worked on, but as you mentioned there, you went on then to launch DLC.Link. And 2021 was an interesting year for you, right? You’re doing some consulting, some important stuff on blockchain with a group that you’re working with and advising, but you’re also an entrepreneur again, launching a project.

(00:38:13):

So, talk to us about this period in your life and some of the things you’re working on and thinking about.

Aki Balogh (00:38:18):

I guess I mentioned earlier, I heard a Bitcoin in 2011, sad story. Well, everyone’s got a sad story. I had $3,000 and I’m like, Should I put it into Bitcoin or should I put it into myself? And I’m like, No, I should put it into myself. I should have put 500 bucks into Bitcoin. And then, I heard about ETH early on to whatever, 2016 or whenever, but I just didn’t have the mental capacity to look at either of these to really read in.

(00:38:45):

I heard of it, I saw it’s used, but I just didn’t focus on it. And obviously, I missed the big run-up, the whatever, 50k or whatever, when I entered the scene. But next best time is now. Yeah, there’s making money and there’s making an impact, and there’s wealth and career. And even if I would’ve made a bunch of money, I still would want a career, whatever. Next best time is now.

(00:39:09):

Let’s create something. And I actually got into Bitcoin. I came to crypto for a lot of reasons. My friend Vadim is a brilliant entrepreneur, and he had built a crypto company. He didn’t orange pill me or anything, but through his example, I saw that there’s a lot of really cool stuff going on in this space. And I had also been into stocks and really Motley Fool. I was in the GameStop stuff with all the emotions around that.

(00:39:36):

And so, it just seemed like a good time to get into actual trading and trading ops and this kind of stuff. But crypto is also really interesting, and it also linked to data management. So, it just hit on a lot of the things that I was looking for. But I didn’t know anything. I really didn’t know anything about web3 when I came to it. So, I started watching the Bitcoin class, the MIT OpenCourseWare class on Bitcoin, and just learning the technical stuff.

(00:40:03):

So, I kind of did a deep dive, looked into Ethereum and Solana and all of that. And the way that I got to building our Bitcoin was actually, it was kind of an accident. I met a brilliant engineer in Hungary who has a development shop, Laszlo from Dakai. And I’m like, Look, I don’t know anything about crypto, but you do. So, let me at least… I’m in New York. Let me do some BD for you. I’ll try to get you some deals.

(00:40:26):

And I got him an opportunity and he ended up, or they ended up winning the project to build the Chivo Wallet for El Salvador. And they built the wallet, and then it was being used by like 250,000 people daily in the small country of El Salvador. And for me, that was a light bulb moment. I’m like, Okay, I don’t know about where crypto will go, but Bitcoin has clearly crossed the chasm. Everyone can understand Bitcoin.

They might not be doing L2, L3 roll up stuff or whatever, account abstraction. That might be a very technical thing, but everybody can understand Bitcoin and the value prop. Humanity has gotten there. So, I should build on Bitcoin because if you have some Bitcoin, what are you going to want to do with it? You might want to take a loan or invest it or something. You might want to do something with it.

(00:41:11):

And so, I started looking at that problem, and then a friend of mine, Pablo, told me about DLCs, and then we got into DLCs. So, anyway, that’s kind of how I got into building on Bitcoin.

Nick (00:41:23):

Let’s talk about DLC.Link. So, a lot of listeners may not be familiar with this work. Of course, there’s been a lot of renewed interest in the Bitcoin community and things that are going on there. So, help us get the proper context and framing of what you launched and what you’re working on.

Aki Balogh (00:41:38):

Yeah. And this idea went through some iterations, but basically my co-founder and I, and we had an advisor, Dan, early on. We really got excited about this DLC idea. And so, what is a DLC? Well, it was actually a white paper published six years ago by one of the leading Bitcoin researchers at MIT. When I was watching the MIT OpenCourseWare class, this guy Tadge is actually the guy teaching the class.

(00:42:04):

So, that same guy, Tadge Dryja, he also was maybe more well-known for his work, co-creating the Lightning Network. So, he co-invented the Lightning Network. But before he did that, he wrote this white paper on Discreet Log Contracts. The paper’s entitled something like Smart Contracts on Bitcoin. He wanted to have smart contract-like functionality on Bitcoin.

(00:42:25):

And so, he proposed this way where… the example he used is you have Alice and Bob and they want to make a sports bet. And then, how would you set that up on Bitcoin? And you would have an off-chain entity called an Oracle, Olivia the Oracle. And Olivia does not know who Alice and Bob are, but does know the outcome.

(00:42:46):

And so, she publishes the outcome of the game, and then Alice or Bob can take that outcome called an attestation, and the winning party can grab the Bitcoin. I guess to keep it simple, that was the example used. And we thought that was really cool because now you have something that is on Bitcoin. And DLCs use Schnorr signatures, which were added into Bitcoin in November 2021.

(00:43:10):

So, you don’t get a lot of things added into Bitcoin. Bitcoin is very slow to… There’s not a lot of BIPs, Bitcoin Improvement Proposals, that are accepted by the community by a majority of miners. But that Schnorr was added, and Schnorr made DLCs possible. Right at the time that we were looking at DLCs, we’re like, Oh, my God, DLCs are actually now possible. So, what can you do with the DLC?

(00:43:33):

And we met the DLC teams who are working on it. There was tremendous work done by a group called Suredbits, Chris and Nadav, and then some other teams that were doing some really cool stuff. And so, anyway, we got into this building on DLCs idea, and it went from there. The idea went through several twists and turns. So, what we have now is definitely quite different than where we started.

Nick (00:43:56):

So, I love this founder’s story here. Got interested through a free course through MIT, sharpening the saw on blockchain and what it all means, and identify and make a connection on DLC and what it could mean. So, you said the idea and vision has evolved. What are you working on presently? And what’s the differentiated value, to borrow a term from you, that you’re working on?

Aki Balogh (00:44:19):

So, the goal was always, let’s make it safer, better, to take a loan on Bitcoin or to invest Bitcoin. The logic just being, if you have some Bitcoin, you probably want to take a loan on it at some point. If it’s just sitting there and it has value, you probably want take a loan. Or if you can invest it somehow and earn a yield, then that yield is going to compound.

(00:44:39):

And over the many years and decades or generations that you hold a Bitcoin, you’re going to make a lot more money if you invest it versus if you don’t. That has not changed. But the mechanism of that has, because we originally were thinking, Well, this is stuff that gets built on Bitcoin. But the building on Bitcoin for various technical reasons is extremely hard because by definition, by design, it’s extremely limited.

(00:45:03):

But there’s a lot of what’s called DeFi, decentralized finance, on Ethereum and other chains like Solana and Cosmos and so on. And so, you have these DeFi chains, but you can’t get Bitcoin into them very easily, or there’s always a trade-off when you do. We use DLCs in kind of a non-standard way. We don’t use it in the way that I described where Alice and Bob make a bet. We don’t do that.

(00:45:27):

All we do is we created something we call self-wrapping. So, Alice, the depositor, let’s say you have Bitcoin. You use the DLC mechanism to lock a Bitcoin with yourself. So, you take the Bitcoin in self-custody, which is safer than sending it elsewhere, and you put it into a locked state using this DLC concept. And it’s in a state where basically you cannot spend it, but you lock it with yourself.

(00:45:54):

And then, when you do, that means another token on Ethereum called the sBTC, that’s a synthetic Bitcoin representation basically, but that is liquid. And you can use that to take the loan and do whatever, invest it. And then, when you burn that, you get your Bitcoin back. So, we’ve basically implemented the simplest, simplest form of maybe logic you can on Bitcoin.

(00:46:16):

But because it’s so simple, it works really well because we don’t have any of the typical, the machinery that’s so hard to build on Bitcoin, we don’t have to build it. You just lock it and do all that on ETH, where it’s actually very easy. And you can also, in this way, self-wrap Bitcoin to any other chain. So, whatever new chains emerge, boom, you can have your Bitcoin there, and it’s safer.

(00:46:38):

And by safer, I should say safer to the tune of over $100 billion have been lost because of hacks. And custodial failure is safer. So, it’s actually addressing what I think the biggest problem is with crypto is you don’t want to lose your money in a crypto thing, but this is the safest implementation that I have seen that gets Bitcoin to another chain where it can be used.

Nick (00:47:03):

And what are you seeing in terms of user adoption and the way people use this solution? Is it, as you described there, borrowing it, lending it, or staking it in places? What are you seeing?

Aki Balogh (00:47:15):

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I guess the first thing we noticed, I mean, we’re kind of coming into this Yahoo’s. We were not crypto experts or OGs, or we have absolutely no following. We were really new to this stuff. We’re even new today, but we were completely green three years ago. The first response we got from the Greybeards was, these VCs and stuff had been looking at this stuff for years.

(00:47:41):

They’re like, What? They’re like, Wait, wait, how come no one has built this already? Wait, there are smart contract, simple smart contracts on Bitcoin? I’m like, Yeah, and it’s been there the whole time. And they’re like, What? So, usually, it’s shock slash disbelief slash What am I trying to, so there’s that.

(00:48:04):

But when they look at the mechanism, and now we’ve got some pretty good content, some pretty good product marketing that explains it in a simple way, people are like, Oh, that makes sense. Cool. Well, yeah, how can we use this? And the problem of bringing Bitcoin to other chains is such a significant problem. A year ago, this whole building on Bitcoin thing started, and now there’s over 100 startups trying to do this in various ways.

(00:48:29):

There’s over a trillion dollars of Bitcoin. How do you bring it to Ethereum and take loans on it safely? This is a big problem space. So, in this way, because we’re taking the biggest asset to the biggest chains and the biggest DeFi protocols, we basically get to work with a lot of the blue chips, which is great. We get to work, I don’t know if this audience, I guess they’re more into crypto, but for example, like Aave.

(00:48:51):

Aave is the number one lending platform in DeFi, has been for many years. We’re doing our Aave listing. We started it a few weeks ago. We just passed a first round of voting. The president of the Aave Chan Initiative, Marc Zeller, supports it publicly. We’re going to do some Twitter spaces. These are some of the greatest minds in DeFi. And so, Aave, Curve. The founder of Curve built us a price feed Oracle over the weekend for fun.

(00:49:19):

He wants to support what we’re doing. So, we just get a lot of really smart people helping. And these people are all, many of them smarter than me, definitely almost all of them, much more knowledgeable. And we’re able to just kind of build on the shoulders of giants, which has helped. Because one thing I think that happens maybe too often in crypto is people try to build their own thing for themselves in a dark corner.

(00:49:41):

This is the opposite. This is very collaborative. It’s very fast moving. And so, we get a lot of help.

Nick (00:49:48):

And it’s early days, of course, but early traction, lots of support from industry partners and people that want to see succeed. What’s your long-term vision for DLC.Link?

Aki Balogh (00:49:57):

Yeah, I guess just a traction. For anyone in crypto, or maybe not in crypto, just to give the sense of the scale of it. So, we work with liquidity providers that have Bitcoin that are seeking yield. Our first liquidity provider, Amber Group, which itself is a multibillion-dollar company, they put in a million dollars. They had some Bitcoin on hand. Cool, let’s put in a million dollars of Bitcoin. Use this.

(00:50:20):

Our second liquidity provider has $4 billion of Bitcoin in their corporate treasury, according to public filings, IMC. And so, the customers has 65,000 Bitcoin. It’s unimaginable. That’s just some small percent of Bitcoin, total Bitcoin. So, the scale is unimaginable. But sorry, I kind of lost track. Could you repeat the rest of the question?

Nick (00:50:45):

Of course. I’d be happy to. And yeah, that’s a huge market opportunity, and I’m sure that’s very exciting to the team. My question was about the long-term vision. So, how do you see or what do you project DLC.Link doing into the future and evolving even further?

Aki Balogh (00:50:59):

Yeah, I sincerely believe that there’s only so many ways to bring Bitcoin to other chains. One is a custodial system. BitGo pioneered with some other luminaries, WBTC, which is still a rapid coin, which is still a top 15 token in crypto. It’s around 10 billion last I checked. But it relies on a single custodian. And crypto was literally built against that system, against single custody ship. That’s not going to scale.

(00:51:26):

And then, the other method are bridges. So, you send the Bitcoin to a series of nodes, but if the nodes are hacked, all the Bitcoin is gone. And there’ve been some really, really great projects around this vision, but I don’t think it’s going to scale. So, I honestly believe that there’s going to be a future. Unless we come out with some new tech, which is always possible and could hopefully happen, but unless something new comes out, this is the way to bring a trillion dollars of Bitcoin to other chains.

(00:51:54):

And I’m not even saying that to pump my bags. Someone can disagree with me, and I’d love to learn the reasons and I’d love to hear some well-articulated arguments against this. But I actually think this is a self-wrapping concept, is the thing that’s going to bring a trillion dollars plus into DeFi and make it productive. And so, you can imagine, I don’t know, 5% annual return on investing maybe.

(00:52:19):

Right now in crypto, it’s riskier. So, 15% to 25%, but let’s just say it’s even 5%, 10%. Let’s say 10% of a trillion dollars of value being generated every year through that Bitcoin becoming available in DeFi. It’s just a huge amount of wealth creation for our customers and our ecosystem, and that’s what we want to be a part of.

Nick (00:52:42):

And let’s then talk to listeners who you’ve spiked their interest. They want to learn more about what you’re working on and they want to potentially use this product. What’s the best way to get started?

Aki Balogh (00:52:51):

Right now, we’re still rolling out the product in that we’re not listed on Aave, and we barely are listed on Curve. So, there’s definitely some early stuff we need to set up. But even in a few weeks, I think if everything goes well, we should be in some of these protocols. So, we just launched a few weeks ago to Arbitrum and soon to Ethereum at some other chains.

(00:53:13):

But for the first time, retail can actually use dlcBTC. You can go to your Coinbase Wallet or your MetaMask wallet on Arbitrum and swap to get dlcBTC. And I usually tell people, Take your WBTC and swap it out and get dlcBTC if for no other reason, I mean it’s safer and better and all that, but for no other reason. But you get some points if you do. WBTC does not pay points, dlcBTC does.

(00:53:38):

We just rolled out the points thing a few days ago. What are the points worth? I don’t know. I can’t say, but it’s definitely not zero. There’s going to be some things, mileage points or whatever, loyalty points. So, if you swap your WBTC for dlcBTC and you get some points and then later in a few weeks, you can take a loan in Aave or do your regular DeFi stuff, and then we’re going to implement into some staking protocols so you can actually get a yield once all that’s set up.

(00:54:03):

Yeah, this is stuff that’s going to happen over the next few weeks. In the meantime, yeah, you can just go to DLC.Link, which is our website, and go to the earn tab and see what you can do with dlcBTC and just keep following that. We also have a Twitter and stuff, so you can follow the regular news on us. But yeah, it’s pretty magical that you can just go into your Coinbase or MetaMask wallet and just do a swap right in there on Arbitrum and soon on ETH.

(00:54:26):

So, it’s the miracle of DeFi composability that this stuff all just kind of gels.

Nick (00:54:32):

Well, I only have a few more questions for you and then I’m going to ask you the GRTiQ 10. And as I said, long time listeners know this is coming, the 10 questions I ask each guest of the podcast every week. The first question I want to ask you is about this surge in interest in the programmability of Bitcoin, the emergence of things like Ordinals and L2′s. How does someone like yourself make sense of that? Where did this come from and what are the implications?

Aki Balogh (00:54:58):

I think basically one day people kind of woke up, because Bitcoin was, especially when we started, there were not a lot of building on Bitcoin for a lot of ideological and technology reasons. And then, one day people just started realizing, Wait a moment, we have this huge asset, this liquidity just sitting there. And if we can make it productive somehow, that would be huge.

It would have a lot more staying power than a lot of other things that crypto communities come out with. I was thinking of like CryptoDickbutts, but I don’t want to rip on CryptoDickbutts. But yeah, let’s rip on crypto. Yeah, this has a lot more staying power than some of the meme coins and the Dogecoins and stuff, which we love, but also cringe at, at the same time. So, people are like, Wait a moment, this could actually form a basis for the future.

And isn’t it better to work collaboratively than to be at odds with each other for these communities? Yeah, the Ordinals thing did kick it off, which is great. You need that emotional catalyst moment. But then, it was very quickly followed on by a bunch of people, developers jumping in and taking this stuff seriously and actually spending a lot of time researching or re-researching Bitcoin and VCs investing into it, which always helps drive innovation.

(00:56:20):

So, that started last July. It started about a year ago, and it’s just been this huge wave and now you have all kinds of stuff. Some are more on the casino side and some are more on the building meaningful financial infrastructure side. But hey, it’s all good because the attention and development, the influx of engineering talent is really what makes stuff happen.

Nick (00:56:45):

And the next question I want to ask you is about web3 itself. How do you place the emergence of something like web3? Is it just sort of a natural evolution that one would expect in a species use, in interest in technology, or is this a little bit of an experiment we’re watching and the future’s a little uncertain here?

Aki Balogh (00:57:04):

Well, I think it makes all the sense in the world. If AI is going to optimize all of our supply chain and stuff, they’re not going to want to use cash or Visa card. They’re going to want to do micro-optimizations on assets tracked in a blockchain type system. So, no, I think it really gels with the future. But even outside of AI, which is sort of AI on blockchain is a new thing that even has yet to emerge, I would argue.

(00:57:32):

But yeah, just blockchain stuff. One of the things that really appealed to me that you don’t have to be an engineer to understand is banks. So, you have these huge banks, whatever, Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan, whatever these are, and they build all this stuff in-house. And everyone’s building a loan thing and a trading thing and whatever, and they’re all completely siloed, but they’re all building the same thing.

(00:57:55):

It’s literally the same thing as far as I know. Maybe different in some features, but whatever. Versus web3, you build in the open, everyone’s collaborative. You build one thing, I build another thing. We hook it together because of composability. I think composability is the main killer app of DeFi. We can all just have open source and then fork it and adapt to it and add to it.

(00:58:20):

And it makes a very chaotic system, which is kind of get back to that emotional point. I’m glad I went through those tough emotional times, my last one because this one’s even faster, harder, more intense with the travel and crazy ups and downs. There’s more of that. So, I use those skills. I think web3 is, it’s like once you get into this stuff and learn how it works, you can’t go back.

(00:58:46):

Anything, like sending, I don’t know, an ACH transaction feels like sending a telegram. You can’t unsee it once you’ve seen it.

Nick (00:58:57):

And then, the final question before I ask you the GRTiQ 10 is this, and it’s the role of decentralization in all of this. And it’s a little odd that the ethos and so much of what’s happening in web3 is grounded on that decentralization ideology, but you still have SaaS-looking emerging organizations that show up on the scene that are centralized service providers.

And so, it becomes interesting of how important decentralization is presently and how it’ll be into the future. How do you think through some of that?

Aki Balogh (00:59:27):

There’s sort of two reasons why people might be centralized. One is because the UX of DeFi is challenging, the user experience can be challenging. So, hey, let’s make it easy and abstract the way the hard stuff for non-experts. And that kind of leads to centralization, which is fine. That happens. And then, parts of that will get chipped away through improvement in DeFi usability and all that.

(00:59:51):

But totally okay when that happens. And others, I think just people in finance and people in general, maybe they just sort of tend to sometimes default to centralized thinking. I’m a founder, surely I know better than everybody else because I know more about this problem than anyone. That would be an example of centralization. Decentralization is like, I actually don’t know better, so let me find all the experts and listen to them.

And then a consortium with smart people will make a decision, which may go contrary to mine. And it’s funny because we see this sometimes in our customers as we work with large financial institutions. It’s like every month or every week, maybe every month, someone pitches us the idea of, Hey, let’s take your product and do a centralized flavor of it.

(01:00:39):

And we’re like, Yeah, but what if you fail? I realize you’re big and fancy and you don’t think you would fail. But every company that is big and fancy, most of them do actually fail. What if you blow up and you lose tens of billions and user deposits? I am not to be trusted with so much money. That’s like the whole point. And it’s just funny to see people who have been in crypto for a long time even struggle with that.

(01:01:05):

And from a decision-making standpoint, I will admit, I struggle with it too. I’m like, Am I centralizing this decision? If I enact this, what’s the best way to enact this policy or this way of thinking? So, it’s an odd feeling to have anonymous people from the internet tell you what to do and how to do it. But when it works, it is actually kind of magical, but it’s a new frontier for me too.

Nick (01:01:29):

So, Aki, now we’ve reached a point where I’m going to ask you the GRTiQ 10. As I said a moment ago, I ask these questions every week to each guest that joins the podcast. I do it because it lets us learn a little bit more about you on the personal side. And as I always say, my hope is that guests will learn something new, try something different, or achieve more based on some of the things you share with us. So, are you ready for the GRTiQ 10?

Aki Balogh (01:01:49):

Yes, sir.

Nick (01:02:00):

What book or article has had the most impact on your life?

Aki Balogh (01:02:04):

So, I will say Antifragile. Charlie from Bitlayer also said that, but it is true. And I actually have a company named after it. I have a company, Antifragile Partners LLC. And I picked that company name because people will hear it and they’ll be like, Oh, what’s that? And then, I get to explain antifragile, and then they learn about the book. So, definitely Antifragile.

Nick (01:02:24):

Yeah. And for listeners who didn’t know what you’re referencing there, I’ve had Charlie Hu on from Bitlayer that joined us, and he also mentioned that book. A great reference, a great Episode for anybody who wants to learn more about what’s going on in the Bitcoin community. How about this one? Is there a movie or a TV show that you would recommend everybody should watch?

Aki Balogh (01:02:39):

Yeah. I almost hesitated to say this, but my favorite movie, maybe weirdly, is Jesus Christ Superstar. It’s like movie musical from the ’70s, but it shows Jesus as having the challenges of being a leader. He’s kind of mean in the movie. I don’t know if the real Jesus was like that, but it definitely shows different aspects of being a leader. Sometimes people ignore you, sometimes they think you’re amazing.

(01:03:07):

I should say I’m not a religious person, but for religious people, there must be other sides to it, too, that I don’t detect. Yeah, to me, it’s a movie on leadership.

Nick (01:03:16):

And the third question, if you could listen to only one music album for the rest of your life, which one would you choose?

Aki Balogh (01:03:21):

I really like Mark Farina’s, Mushroom Jazz. He’s got a whole bunch of them, but 7 is a good one. So, I really could just listen to that over and over.

Nick (01:03:31):

And what’s the best advice someone’s ever given to you?

Aki Balogh (01:03:34):

I have gotten a lot of good advice. One that my parents told me early on is you got to give time for people to get to know you. So, just kind of being patient. I’m obviously very excitable, kind of ADHD. So, just be patient with people and give them time to get to know you and your company, if they didn’t say, but that would be the follow-on.

Nick (01:03:58):

And Aki, what’s one thing you’ve learned in your life that you don’t think most other people have learned or know quite yet?

Aki Balogh (01:04:05):

I’m always amazed by how much human potential there is. I think we, even I, consistently underestimate what people are capable of because we only see examples in ourselves and people immediately around us. But people in all geographies, of all backgrounds, in all professions are actually capable of so much more than we think we are.

(01:04:28):

I have seen it play out in startups time and again where you think someone who’s never done something and next thing you know, maybe someone starts as an intern and in a few years they’re leading the whole division. I think people have untapped potential.

Nick (01:04:42):

What’s the best life hack you’ve discovered for yourself?

Aki Balogh (01:04:46):

I guess I already said it, but TM.org, Transcendental Meditation. Take the class. You will not regret it.

Nick (01:04:52):

Aki, based on your own experiences and life observations, what’s the one habit or characteristic that you think best explains how people find success in life?

Aki Balogh (01:05:02):

I think it’s thinking of what the goals are. We tend to rush to things like, Oh, I want to make money, or, Oh, I want to be famous or something. But for me, I’m always fascinated by what technology has done to uplift myself and my family and my friends and family, relatives and so on. So, I think for me, it’s all about that. It’s using technology to uplift us and to empower us.

(01:05:30):

And so, whether I make money or not, of course we want dlcBTC to be successful and so on, but whatever happens, if I’ve achieved that, then I’ve achieved my goal.

Nick (01:05:41):

And then, Aki, the final three questions are complete the sentence type questions. So, the first one is, the thing that most excites me about web3 is-

Aki Balogh (01:05:49):

I think that everyone in the US is going to be using it on a daily basis. And that’s the future that I want to build toward.

Nick (01:06:01):

And how about this one? If you’re on X, formerly Twitter, I still always call it Twitter, then you should be following-

Aki Balogh (01:06:08):

I really like QW from Alliance DAO. His handle is Q-W-Q-I-A-O. Not going to mispronounce that, but QwQiao. I don’t know. He’s great.

Nick (01:06:22):

And I’ll put a link in the show notes for anybody who wants to see that.

Aki Balogh (01:06:24):

Thank you.

Nick (01:06:24):

And then, the final question, Aki, I’m happiest when-

Aki Balogh (01:06:29):

When I’m building something that makes a difference, personally and professionally, and that’s what I love about entrepreneurship. It makes you a better human and a better professional. Stick a fork in me. I’m done. I’m so happy doing this.

Nick (01:06:51):

Amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining the GRTiQ Podcast. It was fun to get to know your background and to be able to leverage some of your experiences so far in your life to better understand and learn about business management and this emerging industry and all the cool things you’re doing at DLC.Link. If listeners want to stay in touch with you and follow the things you are working on, how should they stay in touch?

Aki Balogh (01:07:11):

Sure, yeah. Follow me on Twitter, Aki Balogh. Yeah, I think that’s it. I’m on other things too. But my Twitter… I put all my fun personal sides in Twitter.