GRTiQ Podcast: 183 Garvit Goel

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Garvit Goel (00:19):

I think access to quick and cheap data about whatever product you’re building becomes very important. I think The Graph solution does a really good job around doing that. It saves us a ton of developer hassle.

Nick (01:02):

Welcome to the GRTiQ Podcast. Today, I’m speaking with Garvit Goel, Founder at Electron Labs, a web3 solution focused on solving the final bottleneck in Ethereum’s scaling roadmap using zero-knowledge proofs. Garvit has an interesting background having grown up in New Delhi, India and his early fascination with technology that led him to study chemical engineering before diving into the world of blockchain and web3. During this interview, Garvit shares his journey from New Delhi to becoming an entrepreneur in the tech space. We discuss his early interest in technology, his unique experiences working in traditional finance and the insights he gained that eventually led him into the web3 space.

Garvit also talks about his first entrepreneurial venture, Fraction 0x, and some of the important lessons he learned from it. We then explore the origins of Electron Labs, the challenges and pivots they faced, and how they are innovating in the Ethereum ecosystem. Additionally, Garvit shares his perspective on the importance of distribution. The role of zero-knowledge proofs in scaling Ethereum, his opinion on The Graph and web3 data and his vision for the future of blockchain. I started the conversation asking Garvit about where he’s from.

Garvit Goel (02:16):

So I grew up in India, New Delhi, and spent most of my life there. Been traveling a lot in the last one-year though.

Nick (02:26):

Tell us about your childhood and growing up in New Delhi. What was it like? What were some of the things you were interested in?

Garvit Goel (02:31):

So I had a pretty normal childhood. I wouldn’t say a lot of interesting things were happening. New Delhi is not a very tech hub kind of place. I got interested in the tech side of things pretty early on. India’s so different than US. I’m always talking to people here and I’m trying to explain them how things are over there, but yeah.

Nick (02:53):

When did you become interested in technology? It sounds like it was quite early. What drove that interest and when did it happen?

Garvit Goel (03:00):

As far as I can recall, probably when I was four and five. I remember watching a lot of Nat Geo and Discovery Channel and NASA space shuttle launches, and I’ve been into that stuff ever since then.

Nick (03:15):

So, Garvit, if we talk about New Delhi and Indian, I think there’s a lot of interesting stories that are emerging from that region of the world, and I know specific to The Graph community for example, there’s a ton of Graph Advocates in a very strong community in India, but what can you tell us from your perspective about the web3 crypto community in New Delhi?

Garvit Goel (03:35):

I would answer this question not just for Delhi, but I think the whole of India and Bangalore, particularly, the ecosystem, it pains me to say that it’s not as well-developed and it’s not developing as well as I would want. I think there are several reasons for that. Generally, I think the regulatory scene is a little bit screwed up over there, the government stance and all, and not just the regulatory side, but I think the very nature of crypto market, it’s so marketing and business-driven. India is great for finding builder kind of founders, but when it comes to marketing and BD, that is still I think very much focused on conferences and I would say New York and US and all of that. The ecosystem is not as strong and it’s not even developing that well at this point, unfortunately, we keep trying at Electron to spread the message in Bangalore. I wish we could do better.

Nick (04:29):

Well, I have a lot of follow-up questions about Electron and we’ll get there, but I do want to return to your personal story. So eventually you decide to go to university and you study chemical engineering. Talk to us why you chose to study chemical engineering and what was your vision for your career at that point in your life?

Garvit Goel (04:46):

In crypto, we have this, not just crypto in tech. I think we have a lot of computer science and electrical engineering graduates, and oftentimes tech is considered synonymous with software engineering. But I think if you expand the scope a bit, if you look at the whole human civilization, I think bigger impact happens when you do physical forms of engineering, which are mechanical or aeronautics or chemical engineering for that matter. That’s something that has always been very exciting to me. Getting into chemical engineering was like a natural evolution of that. That was the idea, and it still is to some extent. I think at some point of time, I want to be building companies that built physical products as opposed to just being software.

Nick (05:30):

And this brain, this engineering brain has come up on the podcast many times. I’ve had the opportunity to interview a lot of builders, a lot of entrepreneurs, contributors to web3, and it does seem like a lot of them have a background in some type of engineering, and in your case, it’s chemical engineering. But I want to ask you this question. I mean, do you think there is something to this engineer brain this way, an engineer approach problems and building that sort of primes them for entrepreneurship?

Garvit Goel (05:58):

It’s an interesting question. So definitely if you’re building a tech company, then I think having that engineering aptitude becomes very important. We live in a world where most of the entrepreneurship is tech-driven, so we see this accumulation of engineering talent in entrepreneurship. I think in future when AI becomes more prevalent and we see a lot of non-tech folks start companies as well, I think this might change actually.

Nick (06:25):

And how would you describe the way you use your background in training in chemical engineering and what you’re doing now in web3? I mean, does it apply? Is it a dot-to-dot implementation?

Garvit Goel (06:35):

The content that we study in chemical engineering is super different. What I’ve always felt is that what’s more important is that engineering mindset and that aptitude to approach certain problems, and I think we’ve just applied that here in web3 and ZK as well. So it’s always good to have that specific knowledge of computer science and all of that, but I haven’t personally cared for that too much in my approach to building companies. There are some obviously subject overlaps like we used to do a lot of calculus, mathematics in chemical engineering, which obviously gets used a lot in ZK and all.

Nick (07:41):

So at what point in your life then did you become aware of crypto? You’re studying chemical engineering, you’ve got early aptitude in your life for technology growing up in New Delhi, at some point you become aware of web3, crypto, blockchain, whatever it was. When was that and do you remember what your first impressions were?

Garvit Goel (08:31):

So I was traveling to UK for a summer exchange kind of thing, and I started reading this magazine called The Economist. Okay. It’s like a super mainstream media, and it was super boomer kind of magazine. There was this article about Bitcoin and initial coin offerings. I think the Ethereum ICO hadn’t happened at that time, if I recall correctly, and I looked at it and I was like, “Okay, this is fucking crazy.” I started following a lot of finance back then, so it was quite revolutionary, but I was still new to finance, so I was still coming to terms with that. So I just looked at it then I forgot about it. It was in the back of my mind for a couple of years, but I didn’t really do anything in it. Then when I got closer to graduation in ’17, I was looking to start a company and I was just looking for ideas. Then I started to look at blockchain a little bit more seriously, and I tried to understand the technology on all of that, and it made a lot of sense to me at that point.

Nick (09:32):

What was the unlock? I mean, you’re revisiting it. So your first impression was what is this? And then the second impression was there might be something here. Help us understand how you sort of got to that.

Garvit Goel (09:43):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think the biggest difference why I understood it the second time was because in these two different situations, I had a chance to do a finance internship. So we all know a famous company called Lehman Brothers over here in the US. So when Lehman Brothers collapse, their Asia business was acquired by a bank called Nomura. It’s a pretty big Japan based bank. So I was in Nomura’s Mumbai office in the market trust division, and I had a chance to look at the finance industry very closely. All the data from all over the world that Nomura was trading on, that used to come into our division, to our team, and our job was to perform some sort of analytics and drive some information out of that. I had a lot of exposure to how this entire company was running, and when I saw that, I was very surprised that how the hell is this entire finance industry even able to operate?

(10:43):

You would expect that a large bank like Nomura would be very organized and all the information would be available in the right places, but that wasn’t the case. It was total utter chaos, and it wasn’t because the company was operating in a wrong way. It was just the size of the bank was so massive that just getting the information was a hard problem. So when I learned that, I realized that, okay, there are a lot of efficiencies in finance, and once I actually looked at the blockchain technology, I could see that anyone building using the blockchain technology would have a massive advantage over any existing financial institution. That’s how it came together for me.

Nick (11:23):

So after a few sort of internships and some work, as you mentioned there in pharmaceuticals and finance, in 2018, you launched Fraction 0x, is that your first entrepreneurial venture there? And talk to us a little bit about what the back story is.

Garvit Goel (11:38):

Yeah, it was pretty much my first one. I had a thing in college as well, but it wasn’t really a very serious startup, so I would call Fraction as my first one. I was just returning from that Nomura internship and I had just learned about crypto and blockchain and all of that. I was looking to start a company in blockchain in the financial sector. That was the motivation behind Fraction 0x. Talking a little bit about the problem statements we were working on at Fraction, our idea was very simple. We could see that with this advent of blockchain technology, we’re going to end up with this massive liquidity pool on chain. A lot of capital would exist on chain. It would be the most connected and the least fragmented form of capital out there. All other forms, whether it’s banking industry or whatever else we have, are super fragmented. So we could see that and we could see that over time, this liquidity pool is going to become a massive sort of limited partner or an LP for all other forms of investments out there. So that was our thesis.

(12:49):

So if you were a fund, you were like a TradFi fund, let’s say a private equity fund or anything, or a mutual fund. Rather than trying to raise capital from the TradFi markets, you would just try to sell it on chain because on chain would be the biggest form of liquidity pool level. So that was our thesis, and we started building this platform that would enable this on chain liquidity to get invested in the Asian and emerging market securities and bonds and all of that. So imagine a bank from Brazil getting tokenized, it’s getting its equity tokenized, and then that token is trading against other cryptocurrencies. So that was our thesis, what we were trying to build, super inspired by the work at Nomura, but yeah, we could never really get it to work because of the regulatory side and all of that.

Nick (13:45):

Well, I want to ask you a question about entering into entrepreneurship. So clearly you went to work in blockchain and you were working on crypto type things, but at a grand view, you decided to become an entrepreneur. And while I was doing my research on you, it seems like it was reading the book by Peter Thiel, I believe Zero to One is the title. You had an experience there or an epiphany there that set you up for wanting to pursue entrepreneurship? Do I have that right?

Garvit Goel (14:11):

Yeah, absolutely. So, reading that book wasn’t the reason I left, it was more like the last straw. I was going through a phase where it was pretty clear to me that I wanted to start a company. The problem I consistently faced was I couldn’t find anyone to discuss my ideas with. No matter who I found, whether my relatives or my friends, they were all like, “Dude, you’re crazy. This stuff doesn’t make any sense to me.” So I started reading that book because since I couldn’t find anyone in my own personal life to talk about that, I was looking on the internet. So I found this book and I didn’t even know who Peter Thiel was back then.

I just read that book because Elon Musk had a testimony on the back of it and I thought, “Okay, this guy is obviously interesting, so if he’s recommending this book, maybe I should read it.” And I started reading that and I was like, after a couple of paragraphs, I was like, “Okay, this guy is clearly talking about the exact shit that’s going on in my head right now.” So maybe I’m not that crazy. Maybe all of my friends who think I’m crazy, they are the ones who are crazy. So I couldn’t wait anymore after that, I was like, “Okay, I need to start a company right now,” not wait even a single day anymore, and I resigned the very next day from my job.

Nick (15:21):

It’s an amazing story and I want to talk about entrepreneurship and again, a little bit more about that experience. You’ve also written about the darkest 14 days of your life and going through this, I believe it was either that transition period or close to it, but what can you tell us about that 14 days and where it sort of fits into this transition?

Garvit Goel (15:43):

So this was the last phase of that transition. So I had just graduated and I joined this analytics company in Mumbai. The moment I joined the company, I had already decided to start up back then. It was just a question of when, and my plan initially was to spend a couple of months, maybe probably six months to a year in that company and then start a company. But when I was there, we were going through that entire on-boarding journey, training and getting your I-cards made and all of that. It was a pretty corporate setting.

(16:19):

One day I was like, “Dude, I can’t go through this.” Again, as I told you that I had no one to talk to my ideas about, and there was absolutely no one willing to talk about blockchain or starting on general. I got into this really got backed into this corner kind of a situation where I just didn’t know what to do. So I was going through this period for these two weeks I was spending at this company. Eventually, it got so bad for me psychologically speaking that the only way I felt I would be able to stay sane is by actually leaving that company and starting on a company of my own. So yeah.

Nick (16:56):

That’s an amazing psychological experience.

Garvit Goel (16:59):

It wasn’t amazing for me. It was pretty crazy, man. I thought I was going crazy.

Nick (17:04):

I understand the depth of it. What I’m saying I think is that it’s remarkable that there was this push and pull internally about what you felt like you had to do and what you were sort of fighting up against, and that is really this pull of entrepreneurship. I mean, that was really you accepting your life mission. Is that a way to think about this?

Garvit Goel (17:26):

You could say that, yes. Yeah, I would exactly put it like that, in fact.

Nick (17:30):

What did you learn about entrepreneurship then if getting into entrepreneurship was such a challenge for you, as you’ve described it here, the actual activities and the energy required to be a successful entrepreneur is something entirely different, right?

Garvit Goel (17:47):

You could say that actually. So having a good enough reason to start a company is one thing, but when you actually try to execute things, that entrepreneurial energy is it just keeps you alive, but it doesn’t actually get you the business. It doesn’t actually run your company for you. It just gives you the energy for that. And in order to build a successful company, as it turns out, you need a lot of skills that you actually acquire by working in another company. So I didn’t have that. I didn’t have any job experience at all, and I learned that pretty quickly in the first month of me trying to start up and I’m like, “Dude, what the fuck did I just do?” Because I have no experience of how things actually work out there, and all I have right now is my desire and energy to do these things. So that realization hit me pretty quickly. I had no choice but to keep pushing through. Eventually, after making a lot of mistakes, things started to come on track a little bit, but it took a lot of time to get there.

Nick (18:46):

Do you mind sharing, and I always assume there’s entrepreneurs or potential entrepreneurs listening to this podcast and they learn from experiences and stories of people like you. Do you mind sharing what maybe two or three of the most important lessons you learned about entrepreneurship during that period in your life?

Garvit Goel (19:05):

I think the biggest takeaway was I used to think that the excitement I have about my company, everyone shares that. And it took me a lot of time to realize that in order to get people excited about either working for my company or working with me as a company, as a customer of my company or investing in my company, these people will need something else other than just excitement about that idea because I was running on that excitement and my desire to do this thing for a very long time, and I just assumed everyone would do that. So I think that realization took a lot of time to take root. I think that’s one of the biggest ones. There are quite a few small ones I would point out that every entrepreneur realizes over time, I would say just learning how to build teams, learning how to find ideas that are worth working on.

(20:00):

I think every entrepreneur goes through this journey where they can’t figure out what is the right idea to work on because what they might want to work on might not be the most relevant one for the market, and what is actually useful for the market may not be exciting for the entrepreneur. So finding that sweet spot, which is both exciting for you and the market, I think that itself is a very complicated journey for someone like me, especially who doesn’t have any job experience. So I had to go through that again for a very long time, trying to figure out what’s the right thing to build. It’s a pretty dark journey. It’s a pretty hard journey to go through that. If you make it through that, then obviously on the other side things are a lot better and a lot more fun.

Nick (20:43):

A question I routinely ask entrepreneurs on the podcast here is their relationship with fear, and it’s sort of personal because I’ve always had this thesis that one of the reasons people don’t pursue entrepreneurship, or once they begin, they might quit, is they have a fear of failure and it’s just a thesis. But I’m curious, what’s your relationship to fear? Were you ever afraid of failure or is that not something you worry about?

Garvit Goel (21:13):

Anyone who’s saying they’re not afraid of failure is lying. I think everyone is afraid of that. I think in my situation, again, the problem was not fear of failure. I had a bigger fear, which was fear of mediocrity. That was a bigger fear for me. So I was willing to be a total utter failure, but I was not willing to be mediocre. So that fear was actually a bigger driving factor for me. Look, ultimately for everyone, no matter what they do, fear tends to be the biggest driving factor. It’s just a question of what are they scared about? If you’re fearful of failure, then you end up doing things that are safer. But if you are like, you know how Jeff Bezos says that when he’s 80, he doesn’t want to regret not starting a company. So it’s like that, what’s a bigger failure that you have or what’s a bigger fear that you have that’s actually driving you?

Nick (22:00):

That’s a great way to put it. So as you mentioned earlier, Fraction 0x didn’t quite succeed because there were some issues on the regulatory side that were difficult to solve for. So then returning to your personal story, talk to us what you did after Fraction 0x.

Garvit Goel (22:16):

Yeah. So with Fraction, I think the biggest mistake we made was we didn’t know how to select the problem statement in the right way. We just picked up the most difficult problem statement we could think of and totally didn’t evaluate the feasibility of executing that. So I think this was the biggest realization, and going forward, whatever startup ideas I was experimenting with, I think I was trying to find out how hard or easy it could be to execute that and finding a sweet spot. So I, again, focused on hard tech ideas, did a lot of experimentation around eSIMs. eSIMs are obviously very popular now, but back a couple of years ago, they were still early. I actually set up a hydroponic farm. I don’t know if you know what hydroponics is, but…

Nick (23:02):

I don’t.

Garvit Goel (23:03):

It’s like a way to grow food without using soil. So you have, I could call it, a nutrient solution, and it has a substrate on it where you will actually plant the seed and then it grows out. So it’s like a lab grown kind of crop situation except that it doesn’t need your real world soil. So I was trying to experiment with that. Got into a bit of botany as well as a result of that, and did a lot of experiments like this in a lot of different domains, but none of them were actually reaching a stage where you could turn them into companies.

(23:38):

So there were a lot of experiments, but none of them could be turned into businesses. It was pretty clear. So I was, again, through a whole, I think two year period, I was just doing a ton of experiments. This is COVID period as well. So I was doing a lot of these experiments in my basement at my parents’ house, and I did that for two years. Eventually I started Electron when I could see that crypto is the best sweet spot of being a hard problem and an executable problem as well.

Nick (24:07):

Well, let’s double click then on the origins of Electron. As you said in 2021, you went to work and launched Electron. Before we talk about what it is and how it works, talk to us about where the idea came from. What were you sort of thinking about as a founder or the problem statement to use some terminology you’ve been using? What was it that you were working on or thinking about at that time?

Garvit Goel (24:32):

I was just working on a lot of ideas that I was just pulling out of my hat. They didn’t make a lot of sense, but I was still pursuing a lot of these ideas. The biggest issue in 2021 was there were so many chains out there and all of them seemed very promising. And the hardest problem that an entrepreneur, that a crypto founder had to make was which chain to build on? Which ecosystem do you associate yourself with? And we could see that this was a decision that should not be taken so early on in the journey of a company, while at the same time entrepreneurs were being forced to make that decision, because once you deploy on a particular chain, it’s really hard to change ecosystems very easily. So I was facing this problem myself.

(25:20):

That’s why this whole idea of building a cross chain solution came to me that what if we could just connect all these ecosystems together and connect all the liquidity? This idea of selecting a chain to build on would be irrelevant because you can be on any chain and access liquidity of any chain. So this was the motivation behind starting Electron. So we started as a cross chain company. As we started to build it, we realized there were a lot of infrastructure problems in crypto and you couldn’t actually build applications that easily. So that’s when we started to look into zero-knowledge proofs as a way to solve that problem. And we have been a ZK company ever since, and we’ve been doing a lot of experiments and products around that.

Nick (26:07):

And the name Electron, where did it come from?

Garvit Goel (26:10):

I just like electrons, man. I like chemistry in general, so yeah.

Nick (26:15):

Well, you just did a nice overview there when you were talking about Electron and the problem. And so not dissimilar to other entrepreneurial ventures and stories shared on this podcast. There was a little bit of a pivot there, there was a original vision and then a pivot towards ZK. Is that correct?

Garvit Goel (26:34):

There were multiple movements, yes. Yeah.

Nick (26:37):

Is that hard to do? I mean, you start with the vision, you’ve got a ton of interest and energy towards this one thing and you end up changing multiple times. Is that something hard to do or is that just part of the job of being an entrepreneur?

Garvit Goel (26:49):

I would say it’s part of the job. When you do it for the first couple of times, it’s very scary, but then you realize it’s part of the process. And in fact, every time you make a pivot, it’s a big relief because you’re like, “Oh, I don’t have to work on that crappy problem anymore, which wasn’t working out for me anyways.” So pre-pivot, it’s super hard. Post-pivot, it’s super relieving.

Nick (27:09):

And so as I’ve shared with you, a lot of my audience is non-technical. Of course, there’s a few that are, you’re saying things like ZK, I know that has some relation to scaling Ethereum. Can you take a swing at just sort of describing the value proposition of Electron in a way that non-technical listeners might be able to understand or comprehend?

Garvit Goel (27:31):

Yeah, let me try that. I actually try that often, but I haven’t done a very good job of that so far. So let me try again. So I like to think of Electron as the final bottleneck in the Ethereum scaling roadmap. So I think I can assume that everyone has some idea that roll-ups are being touted as the solution for scaling Ethereum. See, even roll-ups have their own scalability limits, and that limit comes from the fact that all roll-ups are required to submit a ZK proof on Ethereum. And submitting that ZK proof on Ethereum is still quite expensive. So I believe that’s the scalability limit to Ethereum at this point. We solved that problem. We make it cheaper to submit proofs on Ethereum by up to 95%. So that’s a high-level value problem.

Nick (28:31):

That’s super helpful. I appreciate you going through that. Why is Ethereum’s scaling problems still a going concern? And let me provide some context here, but clearly Ethereum right next to Bitcoin is a market leader, the most well-known, all of these things, everybody’s using and building all the L2s are coming up around it, and yet there’s continual concern and kind of regard for Ethereum scaling. I mean, is this a problem that we persist into the future that’s hard to ever address? Is this something we sort of address sooner than later or we must? Help us understand sort of the nature of these problems associated with scaling Ethereum.

Garvit Goel (29:12):

Yeah. So I would actually draw an analogy with internet error and how they were scaling issues even with the internet in the early days. So if you look at Google’s story in let’s say early 2000s, Google had this problem that they had a ton of traffic coming in, a lot of search traffic coming in, and they couldn’t actually build the backend infrastructure to serve those requests. So Google went through a couple of years of scaling journey where they figured out how to actually serve the internet at that scale. And while we have this view today that internet scales infinitely and that no matter what application you build, and no matter how many users you onboard in web2, you’ll always be able to solve them. This wasn’t true 20 years ago when Google was trying to scale. So internet actually has to go through this computer science R&D journey to solve those issues.

(30:07):

I think we’re going through a similar journey in crypto where we don’t know how to have enough block space going around that can serve all these use cases out there, but we’re improving. I think with the roll up, we’ve created a lot more block space. And I think in the short to medium term, we’re going to continue to see this problem, scalability as the limit to what we can build with chains. Although I think over a decade or let’s say a 10 to 15 year period, scaling would be a solved problem and we’ll have abundant block space going around and we’ll have other problems to deal with as opposed to just scaling.

Nick (30:44):

And so there’s different types of roll-ups, right? There’s the optimistic and the ZK. I’ve got that correct, right?

Garvit Goel (30:50):

Yeah. Yeah.

Nick (30:52):

So talk to us about why you’re focusing on ZK and is it too much of a stretch to say there’s a little bit of competition here between optimistic and ZK, or is it more a question of utility? Some types of roll-ups fit a use case better than others, and it’s not necessarily a competition for market share or adoptions per se?

Garvit Goel (31:15):

If you go back a year ago, optimistic roll-ups were like all the rage compared to ZK roll-ups, and people are more excited about the optimistic approach. But I think as the market is maturing, people are realizing that optimistic approach doesn’t work. ZK is the ultimate and the final solution for this. It’s the right way and pretty much the only way to do things. So you can do optimistic for a while. It can serve as a bridge while you get to the ZK future. But I think eventually, ZK has so many advantages around finality, that optimism, the optimistic approach is actually going away. Pretty much people have realized that by now. I think ZK is turning up, if you look at the scrolls growth and all, I think it’s settling the debate for us at this point. And obviously, there’s always some competition, but what actually I heard this some very recently that all these optimistic roll up companies are actually looking to launch their own ZK versions very soon. So I think that answers your question about competition.

Nick (32:21):

It does. And I was going to ask that follow-up of how one migrates to the other. So when you think about Electron and competition among other ZK roll-ups or service providers, what makes Electron unique?

Garvit Goel (32:38):

We are the only ones solving the problem that we’re solving. In fact, I was at the Google ZK Summit for these last two days here in SF, and I was talking to all the ZK companies and everyone is focused on one part of the ZK equation, which is the proof generation side. So how can we make proof generation faster? How can we make it cheaper? How can we make it easier to build these ZK submits? And everyone is working on that problem statement at all competing with each other. I think Electron is unique in the sense that we’re not solving for proof generation. We are actually solving for proof verification, which is, as I told you just a while back, is proof verification on Ethereum is super expensive. No one in the ZK space, no one in the Ethereum scaling roadmap is talking about this problem, the cost of verifying proofs on Ethereum, that’s what makes us unique, that we are pretty much the only company actually addressing this problem.

Nick (33:39):

Are there use cases beyond that? And again, a non-technical question, the answer could be very simply no. But are there use cases beyond that that have you excited about the future of Electron or ZK proofs?

Garvit Goel (33:56):

No, I disagree. So I think ZK proofs will eventually get abstracted away for the users. I think that’s already happening to some extent now. So I am not excited particularly about applications outside crypto or for that matter or anything like that.

Nick (34:13):

Makes sense, and I appreciate you answering that. So a couple of specific questions about the tech and the things that you’re building at Electron Labs. So for example, there’s this SDK. What can you tell us about the Electron Labs SDK and sort of how that fits into the story?

Garvit Goel (34:29):

Yeah. So I just give you an overview of our product. So I’ll give you an analogy. Okay. Think of the current situation. So if you want to submit a proof on Ethereum, it will cost you more than $50 million every year. If you want to submit a lot of proofs on Ethereum, that’s like owning a private jet. What Electron enables to happen is we are like a commercial airline service where you don’t actually own the entire jet, you just pay for your own slice of the seat and you get to the destination at a much cheaper price. So that’s what our product does. The way our SDK works is it accepts proofs from our customers, aggregates it with a bunch of other proofs from other customers, and creates this mother of all super proof, which is then sent to Ethereum. So rather than everyone sending their own proof on Ethereum, they aggregate it with us and we send it to Ethereum on their behalf, which allows us to amortize the cost amongst all these different protocols. So the Quantum SDK is like that integration tool for our customers to leverage this service.

Nick (35:35):

Amazing. And if listeners want to learn more and read the docs and things like that, what’s the best way for them to go a little deeper here?

Garvit Goel (35:42):

We actually operate pretty solid developer communities that people can find through our docs and code base. You can even join them. We have a lot of people hanging out over there already. You can chat around with our team, set up a call, read through our docs. We’ve recorded a ton of videos that you can check out and we’re regularly posting on Twitter as well. So these are all the places where you can learn about us.

Nick (36:04):

I think one of the things that listeners will be impressed with as they Google and look into the things you’re working on, Electron Labs is the list of partners that have come forward and are supporting your work. So people like Polygon, [inaudible 00:36:20], Gnosis, ChainSafe, and the list goes on and on. Talk to us about what it’s been like working with such a strong group of partners and what you’ve learned from that type of support.

Garvit Goel (36:33):

So I think the biggest takeaway has been, and I think we’ve proven to ourselves and the market that we have PMF, okay, every time we have a conversation with these folks, I think these guys very clearly realize, all these Polygons and Gnosis and ChainSafes of the world, they have been facing this problem themselves. So when we go to them, we can see that they’re super excited about integrating with our solution and working with us, which is exactly what we needed. I think we have a few companies in the Ethereum ecosystem right now that can claim to have PMF as a result.

Nick (37:08):

For listeners of this podcast who are enthusiastic about The Graph, I always like to ask a couple of questions to guess, especially someone like yourself about The Graph and web3 data. I mean, I presume you’re familiar with The Graph and would just be curious to know what your opinion is or if you’ve ever used it, the protocol.

Garvit Goel (37:24):

Our engineering team was actually experimenting with The Graph a while back, and I think we are looking forward to integrating it in one of our products going forward. Having said that, one of the interesting things I want to mention here is that I was just looking at The Graph solution and how it’s an indexing service and all of that, aggregation layers need their own indexing service actually, and it could be an interesting business segment for The Graph Foundation.

Nick (37:48):

Amazing insight there. Yeah, that’s a great idea. And that’s one of the first times that’s come up on the podcast. For my non-technical audience listening to a builder out there with a strong vision and a lot of persistence in building and bringing their vision to life, do you mind just sort of describing how important that indexing and querying a blockchain data is for builders like yourself in the space?

Garvit Goel (38:13):

Absolutely. So as you go about building these products, whether it’s a bridge or a DeFi application, I think access to quick and cheap data about whatever product you’re building becomes very important. I think The Graph solution does a really good job around doing that. It saves us a ton of developer hassle and it just makes our entire go-to-market charting a lot more seamless.

Nick (38:37):

So returning to Electron, you mentioned a couple ways for listeners to learn more. You gave us an overview of the product and the services, and you presently have that unique position of being the only one working on a really important problem in the Ethereum space. And I’m thinking about Zero to One again and Peter Thiel’s argument in that book about you want to avoid competition. It’s far better to be a monopoly in that sense. What have you learned about entrepreneurship this time, new lessons, new insights by virtue of your work at Electron?

Garvit Goel (39:10):

Yeah, quite a few, actually. And I want to say I disagree with Peter Thiel over there. I mean, obviously as a business, you don’t want to have competition, but I think this doesn’t apply to the modern style of building companies anymore, because the moment a problem statement, a good product is identified, everyone wants a piece of that. So even if you enter a market that doesn’t have a lot of competition, the moment you announce your product, 10 different companies will pop up. And you’re already seeing that with Electron as well. We see a lot of copycats and other companies that are trying to copy us, come up all the time. I don’t think that as a business you have the liberty of not being in competition anymore these days.

(39:52):

You can try a new space, but it won’t stay greenfield space for very long. So just wanted to add that. And I think there are ton of learnings otherwise, which I believe are not out there in any of the books like Zero to One or all sorts of amazing books that we have out there. I would just say that I think one of the biggest learnings I had as an entrepreneur, one of the best advice I received was don’t focus on just the product, but distribution as well. And sometimes distribution can actually be a much bigger advantage or more than actually having a great tech and product.

Nick (40:27):

I’ve seen some chatter on Twitter recently about that very idea, and so I appreciate you highlighting that. And I think just a couple searches for any listener that wants to explore product versus distribution and some of the online discussion about that. We’ll find some interesting things on Twitter on that topic. I only have a few more questions for you before I ask you the GRTiQ 10, Garvit, and very interested to hearing your answers to those questions. The first question I want to ask you is in addition to your work on Electron, you’re also working in some angel investing. You’ve referred to it as the first check-in. Talk to us about the range of things you’re exploring. I mean, I looked up some of the things. You’ve got particle accelerators and quantum computing. It’s quite a range and it’s certainly outside of crypto and web3. What are you working on and what has you excited about that?

Garvit Goel (41:19):

Look, I have this very strong belief that science needs to ultimately become part of… Okay, let me step back. So if you look at the last 200 years, and if you look at the modern lifestyle, the television sets, the aircrafts and everything, all these things became possible because somebody was conducting our research in a lab somewhere 200 years ago, they discovered something, somebody decided to pick up that discovery, engineer that into a product and release it for the masses. And every single modern day device that we have is an example of that. The reason I’m excited about these two quantum computing and particle accelerators as an area is.

(41:59):

Because lately if you look at the last 50 years, you will not see that a lot of science has actually converted into real world products. I mean, some of it, but not too much. So I think that needs to change. Somehow we need to go back to that era where scientific discoveries were making it to real world products pretty quickly. So I think these two areas will enable that to happen, and that’s one of the reasons I’ve been looking out for entrepreneurs building in these domains and would love to help however I can for those folks.

Nick (42:36):

Well, I encourage listeners to visit your LinkedIn page and I’ll put links in the show notes to see some of the things you’re interested in and some of the partnerships and angel investing that you’re doing. It’s super interesting. The next question I want to ask you is about web3 and just get your opinion on what needs to be the next big thing. What’s the next big unlock for the industry to reach wider adoption? And I asked this question in the context of so much of the discussion in the industry presently being that we have the infrastructure, we need something else if we’re going to get to the next level to cross that chasm, if you will. What’s your opinion on that?

Garvit Goel (43:17):

It’s a very difficult question. I wish I could give you those three things that we could do as an industry that would get us into that mass adoption phase. I think no one in the industry, including myself, has any clue what those three things are. And I think we are all searching for it. And unfortunately, we happen to be in that situation right now. And it’s probably the reason for all the doom and gloom in the industry right now. I wish I could give you a more exciting and a hopeful answer, but I just don’t have it right now. Maybe in future when I do, I’ll tell you.

Nick (43:55):

Amazing. Yeah, please do. And I totally understand. I don’t think a lot of guests do have clarity on that, and I think in a lot of ways the industry as a whole is sort of searching for the answer. Then, if that’s true and then the final question here before the GRTiQ 10, what makes you optimistic then about the future of the industry? I mean, certainly we’re still working on and trying to figure out many things, including how to scale Ethereum efficiently, how to reach mass adoption, but yet builders like you persist and continue showing up each day. Where’s that optimism come from?

Garvit Goel (44:28):

I think our fundamental belief is still there, that we can solve very important problems using this approach. Some of the problems I have faced myself, and again, going back to my first internship at Nomura where I could see that, yes, there are a lot of inefficiencies in the system. So as they say, the world is built on hope, and that’s what we are living on these days. So hopefully we’ll get there eventually. Yeah.

Nick (44:56):

Well, Garvit, now we’ve reached a point where I’m going to ask you the GRTiQ 10, longtime listeners of the podcast know I ask these questions to each guest every week. And as I always say, I do this because first of all, it lets us get to know you a little bit more on the personal side, but also I think listeners who are paying attention and sort of keeping track of all these great answers every week will probably learn something new, try something different, or achieve more in their own life. So, Garvit, are you ready for the GRTiQ 10?

Garvit Goel (45:23):

Absolutely. Please shoot away.

Nick (45:36):

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

Garvit Goel (45:41):

I don’t read a lot of books, but as I said, I just went through the first page of Zero to One, and that was it. Yeah.

Nick (45:49):

Is there a movie or a TV show that you would recommend everybody should watch?

Garvit Goel (45:53):

There’s a TV series by Nat Geo called American Genius about how all these interesting companies like Henry Ford and all these people, they were building companies a 100 years ago. I would recommend everyone to watch that.

Nick (46:08):

And how about this one, Garvit, if you could only listen to one music album for the rest of your life, which one would you choose?

Garvit Goel (46:14):

Any ambient music, man, I’m not a big music listener, but I just listen to random shit on YouTube.

Nick (46:22):

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

Garvit Goel (46:26):

I think it’s part of my crypto and startup journey. A lot of people told me that focus on distribution more than tech and product, and I think I’ve realized that with time.

Nick (46:37):

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

Garvit Goel (46:42):

I say this often, especially in crypto, people have this extremely short-sightedness to everything, and I strongly believe that being actually good and doing the right thing pays fruits in the long run. Not many people agree with this. People think that just getting what you want somehow gets you through life. I don’t agree with that.

Nick (47:03):

And Garvit, what’s the best life hack you’ve discovered for yourself?

Garvit Goel (47:08):

I’ve been trying meditation a little bit, but it hasn’t worked that much for focus and all. So yeah, I would say I’m still experimenting. I haven’t found a silver bullet.

Nick (47:18):

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

Garvit Goel (47:29):

It comes down to how much you want something and for what reasons you want it. If you want it for the right reasons, and if you’re really willing to put in the effort, go through that extremely harsh journey, I think you’ll get there.

Nick (47:40):

And then lastly, Garvit, the final three questions are complete the sentence type questions. So the first one is, the thing that most excites me about the future of web3 is?

Garvit Goel (47:50):

Hopefully, we’ll eventually see mass adoption.

Nick (47:53):

And how about this? If you’re on X, I still refer to it as Twitter. I mean, I do it verbally. I do it written. So if you’re on Twitter, then you should be following?

Garvit Goel (48:02):

Well, you should definitely follow Electron’s Twitter account. But other than that, I follow this guy called Andrew Cote, who’s a good deep tech thinker, and he posts quite interesting content around that.

Nick (48:13):

And then the final question, Garvit, is I’m happiest when?

Garvit Goel (48:19):

After putting in a hard day off work and getting good results from that by the end of the day.

Nick (48:26):

Garvit, thank you so much for joining the GRTiQ Podcast. What an exciting thing to hear about your approach and your entry into entrepreneurship, and then the amazing problems that you’re working on at Electron, and as you described it here today, I’m very excited about the future, and I’m sure a lot of listeners, I’ll be watching and cheering for your success on this important problem. If listeners want to stay in touch with you, follow things you are working on, how can they stay in touch?

Garvit Goel (49:00):

We have a solid online presence. I think Twitter account is the best way to do that. Other than that, we have multiple developer and business centric telegram chats that we operate. Feel free to join them.