Jasmine & Ryan Farrell / Zestbloom
Start Here Podcast | Episode #73 | 2/7/2023
Today we sit down with Jasmine and Ryan Farrell, the Morrisville-based husband/wife team behind Zestbloom, one of Vermont’s most exciting Web3 startups.
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Transcription:
JASMINE FARRELL
You’re going to make mistakes. It’s not going to be perfect. Sometimes you’re going to think it’s going to be a complete mess. But you learn with every aspect of that, and you become so much stronger and so much better because of it.
RYAN FARRELL
Convincing yourself that you have a good idea is step one, and then being brave enough to go, write that idea down, go to people, and sell them on it, get them excited to invest in your company, get that first little bit of income. That’s really the hardest part.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
From the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies, it’s Start Here, a podcast sharing the stories of active, aspiring, and accidental entrepreneurs. Today we sit down with Jasmine and Ryan Farrell, the Morrisville-based husband-and-wife team behind Zestbloom, one of Vermont’s most exciting Web 3 startups. Welcome. This is Sam Roach Gerber.
DAVID BRADBURY
And David Bradbury.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Recording from the Consolidated Communications Technology Hub in downtown Burlington, VT.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Let’s try that again. I messed up recording the first time. Jasmine, Ryan, hello.
JASMINE FARRELL
Hello.
RYAN FARRELL
Good morning.
JASMINE FARRELL
Thank you for welcoming us.
DAVID BRADBURY
Good morning.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
See, your second hello is way better anyway, so I’m feeling really good about this.
RYAN FARRELL
I don’t know, that first one was going pretty well, I thought.
DAVID BRADBURY
I was uncomfortable with it, so let’s get into it here. It’s crypto, it’d D5, blockchain, Sam.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Yeah, I’m going to be the novice here that will ask all the painfully obvious questions, but I’m hoping some of our listeners are sort of at my level here too. What is Web 3? What does that mean? We’re seeing it everywhere. What does it mean?
RYAN FARRELL
Well, it is a new method of interacting with the Internet in a way that decentralizes authority, puts control back into the hands of consumers, creators, and different participants within the whole Web ecosystem.
JASMINE FARRELL
I’m going to do a little bit more simplistic description. It’s a public ledger. The information is public. You can see transactions clearly, and you know when those transactions are happening.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Sort of democratizing the Internet. If you will.
RYAN FARRELL
Yeah, I mean, it’s exactly what Jasmine said. But as it’s getting more advanced, we’re seeing things like smart contracts, code, and things being able to live within that public record. It’s growing, and it’s still in its infancy. We still exploring the power that it’s going to unlock.
DAVID BRADBURY
The blockchain is sort of the word we use to describe the enabling ledger, is that correct?
JASMINE FARRELL
Yes, it’s like a historical timestamp. So that’s what’s really beautiful about it, it is crystal clear how transactions are being done. You have a timestamp that everybody agrees upon, and so you know when a transaction has occurred in the past. That hasn’t really been seen on the Internet before, and so that’s what makes this quite unique. I don’t believe the blockchain will go anywhere – it’s here to stay – but how we utilize that is really undetermined still, and we’re just the pioneers that are going to help facilitate that.
DAVID BRADBURY
Heck, yeah. I mean, my God, look, they’re so thoughtful, calm, and intelligent. It is exciting. So, Sam, do you remember our first contact with Jasmine?
SAM ROACH-GERBER
I mean, I remember Jasmine reaching out, and I remember reading it and being like, I don’t know exactly what she is talking about, but she sounds cool, so I’m going to give her a call. It was like a creative studio for folks interested in Web design.
DAVID BRADBURY
An artist UX co-op in Morrisville.
JASMINE FARRELL
And engineers. I still want to facilitate that. It’s a total dream still.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
I love it.
JASMINE FARRELL
That there’s some value behind.
DAVID BRADBURY
Yeah. Truth, Sam, were you going to delete it or forward it to somebody else? Like how close was it?
SAM ROACH-GERBER
You 100% would have deleted it. I actually did not.
DAVID BRADBURY
Oh, no, Morrisville, go Lamoille County. That’s my area. So can you tell us about your backgrounds, and sort of how did you end up in Morrisville?
JASMINE FARRELL
Yeah, I’ll kind of start with my background. So I initially graduated from with a cell-molec-biochem degree, and then I went into finance. I was a JP Morgan financial advisor for the wealth department for six years. And then I transitioned into a startup called Lending Club. They actually went public, they went IPO when I was there. So I kind of saw the roots of it all, what it meant to be a startup and what that looks like, that journey. And I told Ryan I wanted to go back to school, so he actually helped facilitate that.
I went back to a community college. I got my background in Linux, C++, and I took courses also at Berkeley. And then I got an internship at Lawrence-Berkeley Lab as a site reliability engineer, so that was really cool. I worked with big data, the supercomputers. And then I got pregnant, and we moved to Vermont. We decided that a family lifestyle was for us, but we still wanted to stay in engineering, of course.
RYAN FARRELL
I’ve been a career engineer my whole professional life. I studied electrical engineering at UC Irvine. I went on to work on digital signaling devices and extension devices doing hardware QA, and then I kind of transitioned into automating the whole QA process. I went on to work for Dolby Laboratories doing audio analysis, validation of audio compression tools, and working on their Dolby Atmos surround sound systems. I’ve worked for Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu, on cloud reliability automated tools. And then as we transitioned here to Vermont, I spent some time working at Logic Supply, now known as OnLogic, a fantastic company.
DAVID BRADBURY
That’s right. We love that company.
RYAN FARRELL
And then a couple of years ago, I decided I wanted to be fully remote. And then we kind of wanted to start our own company, so we started coming down this path. I knew that together we could build something great, we just weren’t sure at the time what it was going to be.
DAVID BRADBURY
So you’re going to start your family, you found a house on the Internet that you wanted to go see, and you show up in Morrisville.
JASMINE FARRELL
I like that you gave up the fact that we bought our house online sight unseen.
RYAN FARRELL
Don’t do that, by the way.
JASMINE FARRELL
But we don’t regret it.
RYAN FARRELL
It worked out really great for us, but it could have been very different.
DAVID BRADBURY
It’s a gorgeous Victorian house. It’s got a non-traditional color. I stopped and took a picture of it. I didn’t tell you guys this, because I want the picture. They show that photo of, Google started in this garage. I feel like the Web 3 search engine started at this blue Victorian house in Morrisville. I can’t wait for you to show it to the world.
JASMINE FARRELL
We definitely picked a San Francisco color, and I believe Mary West, our neighbor, was a little dubious of it all.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
So why Vermont? Was it totally random? Did you have any connection here?
JASMINE FARRELL
We really love Bernie Sanders.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
We’re proud of him.
JASMINE FARRELL
And we did our research on all the different states that we wanted to live in. We did an East Coast trip, and we arrived to Vermont and absolutely loved it. Like, we fell in love with it.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Thank God for us. Am I right, Dave?
DAVID BRADBURY
So it’s just an important thing to – I don’t know, how many people have arrived in the last couple of years here, and everybody has a story. Some are looking for a climate that’s better, you know, the air is clearer or the water, the grass in your backyard, things like that that we used to take for granted, that you really can’t everywhere. Not everybody comes as well-credentialed as you both do.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Those resumes, are you kidding me?
DAVID BRADBURY
I know just nice, humble people doing it, I love it. I love it. So what is Zestbloom, please?
JASMINE FARRELL
So Zestbloom is a search engine actually on the blockchain. We look for different NFTs on the blockchain, and we confirm originality on those particular NFTs.
RYAN FARRELL
That’s right. I guess we’ve started building – we started focusing on the problem of originality detection a year to nine months ago, and as we started building out the technology, we had a third partner join us. Evan Maltz, he’s a PhD.
JASMINE FARRELL
Graduated from UCLA.
RYAN FARRELL
Graduated from UCLA. And he brought with him some really excellent expertise in that exact realm. And through his contribution and the ability to do reverse image search and originality detection, we actually also ended up building all the components needed for a fast and efficient search engine that uses natural language processing. It can do complex queries and find what’s in imagery just by the descriptions and the things that are in the picture, and there’s no need for any additional metadata to be indexed. It works amazingly well. We can do the reverse image search and we can do the text search.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Well, amazing. I have a couple of questions. One was first of all, I think just for listeners, what’s an NFT?
JASMINE FARRELL
An NFT is anything that’s minted on the blockchain. So it could be a picture, it could be text, it could be an audio file. Essentially, it detects when it was minted, the date and the time as we described earlier, and that’s what makes it an NFT. So it becomes public on the ledger, you know when it existed, and so it gives it kind of a defined date that most assets on the Internet, you have no idea when they were placed on there or how long they’ve been on there.
RYAN FARRELL
I hate the word NFT, personally. I wish we had a better way to describe it. The acronym, it really means that it’s a thing that you can trade that is not tradable, it’s not fungible, meaning that there’s nothing like it in any exact way. And we’re using it in the Web 3 sense as a record of something having been created by, and it’s a statement of that creation by the creator.
DAVID BRADBURY
And how it gets transacted or exchanged from buyer to seller, right? Because it’s not just a Bored Ape or a cool image, it could be a title to a piece of property, perhaps, or a song, or some other unique creation of text. Yeah, the NFT is sort of a misnomer. You know, there’s a lot more to it. Maybe you should rebrand it, come up with a name.
RYAN FARRELL
We’re trying, but I don’t think we have enough sway yet to dictate what people should be referring to these things as.
DAVID BRADBURY
Let’s call it a “Zest.”
SAM ROACH-GERBER
So can I ask, just from a business perspective, obviously you’re at the cusp of this. You call it the frontier, right? It’s all new, it’s all changing daily. How did you focus on the problem of originality as what you wanted to focus on? And did it take a while to kind of narrow that vision and get to that as sort of where you wanted to focus?
JASMINE FARRELL
Yeah, I think that although we have this public ledger that brilliant – you can tell when assets are being minted, and you know exactly the date and time when that’s happening – the problem we didn’t understand or realize was going to happen was, that now you can mint assets on different blockchains. So each blockchain has their own public ledger, and there can be conflicting information when you have different blockchains that have public ledgers.
So if I was to admit, let’s say a Van Gogh on Ethereum, and that’s where it got minted first, I as a user could copy that image, go on to a different blockchain like Solana, and mint it again, and now it’ll have a different time and date that didn’t occur before. So, yeah, so now you have a conflict of interest, right? Which one’s the original? Obviously the Ethereum one, because it was minted first there.
What our search engine does is it crawls across all the blockchains, and it looks for that original asset, where it was minted, and what time it was minted at, so it can pull that original asset and confirm the originality.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
So, can you just give me a case of how this has solved a problem for someone?
RYAN FARRELL
I think that it’s still too early to say, but we have seen many instances of fraud exactly in the way Jasmine has described it, resulting in people spending hundreds if not thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars on something that would end up being a fake or put out there by somebody who was a bad actor. That’s the exact kind of problem that we’re hoping to curb.
As the Web 3 industry is still pretty nascent, I think things like that hurt its ability to be adopted in a widespread way. Our tool will actually help bring some of what makes Web 2 work really well back into the Web 3 aspect of it.
DAVID BRADBURY
Got that, Sam? It’s all clear.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
No, I do. I’ve got it.
DAVID BRADBURY
All clear now, right? Imagine someone copying the title to your house and selling it on Solana.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Scary as hell.
DAVID BRADBURY
But you’re like, no, I did it on Ethereum, or something. That’s terrifying. And some of these NFT art pieces are of high dollar value today still.
JASMINE FARRELL
Exactly.
DAVID BRADBURY
Can we talk about the technology, and just how brilliant is Evan, your third partner? Because we watched him over this last year, finish his PhD at UCLA, get these patents ready and filed, and the tech. Maybe humble brag a bit about your tech and your third co-founder.
RYAN FARRELL
Well, yeah, of course. I mean, our technology is the best that we’ve seen. There are some companies that I think are tackling a similar problem. We’ve actually built a product that works, and it’s amazing how well it works. We’ve yet to see anything that works better than that, even compared to Google’s reverse image search. We’re able to pinpoint things on the blockchain which they’re not capable of doing, at least not at this time. Maybe an acquisition is in order here.
JASMINE FARRELL
Also, our search results are quick. If you look at different companies that try to emulate what we’ve done, their results, first off, delay quite a bit. There’s probably a 30-second delay for the results. And then second, they generally don’t actually pick up on what we’re asking of the search engine. Our system is very sophisticated. It’s quick. You could be very descriptive. It could populate those results very quickly. It’s like 99.9% accurate.
There’s a chance where it may get it wrong, but for the most part you can crop an image, you can reverse an image, you can add a collage of images, and it will still find the original asset on the blockchain.
DAVID BRADBURY
And if I recall, your algorithms are learning with each search.
JASMINE FARRELL
That’s right.
DAVID BRADBURY
Can you dumb that down enough so that Sam and I understand?
JASMINE FARRELL
We’re using different models to create our search results. Some of them are from other companies that have spent millions of dollars on AI research, that we’re applying to the search. Then there’s also our IP, that kind of does a mathematic equation on the back end that helps validate the originality of that particular piece. So you’ve got different layers that are being applied to get the results that we’re receiving, but each one is critical to what that will look like as an output on our search engine.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
I even understood that, Dave.
JASMINE FARRELL
I hope so.
DAVID BRADBURY
I mean, I love the fact that you’re a search engine, right? I always try that when we look at businesses, to say, who benefits? What happens? It’s a faster search. It’s assured or authenticated as being a true representation of frauds and copies. It’s a more precise refined search, so my results that I see as a consumer, I’m more satisfied. It’s not the worldwide waste of time kind of days.
And from a host of images and NFTs, they use less computing power, right? I’s faster, cheaper, better, more precise, so everybody benefits. The exchange where you’re doing the search, the cloud companies on the back end, and the consumers, and then I guess the public, just because it’s so trusted and validated.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Was there any question on who your biggest fan in the world is?
DAVID BRADBURY
I’m like desperate to get a T-shirt or something. I don’t have anything branded.
JASMINE FARRELL
We need to work on our swag for sure.
DAVID BRADBURY
Your sticker was nice.
JASMINE FARRELL
We need more swag, you’re right.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
It’s really great. You did the logo and the name, right?
JASMINE FARRELL
I did, yeah.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
It’s one of my favorites. Such a good name, it’s an amazing name.
JASMINE FARRELL
It was fun. We tried to keep it simple and easy to recall.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
It’s so easy to recall and sticks in your mind. It doesn’t remind me of anything else, which is rare, I feel like.
DAVID BRADBURY
So what’s the business model then at Zestbloom? So you have this tech. Do consumers to buy it, or how do you get it out to the world?
JASMINE FARRELL
So the idea behind that is that we help refine search for other aggregators, other marketplaces, and probably gaming, you can imagine. Here’s an example. We had a CEO for a gaming company approach us, and he talked about how there are about 1,500 gaming platforms that are joining blockchain technology. And with each one of those gaming platforms, there are about 150 to 500 assets that they’re selling, and then times that by a thousand because they’re replicating those assets. So how do you search through all those assets? Like, how do you find the gun that you need and the armor that you need to go fight your war, right? What do you do?
And so he came to us with this problem, and he saw that our search engine is so sophisticated. You can be very descriptive. You could say, “I want a shield that’s red with flowers on it,” and it will populate the results for that, and then you can make your purchase and buy those assets. And that’s kind of unique. We bring the consumer to the user right off the bat. There is no need for you to go around, search, and look for those different properties that you normally have to do. So that’s kind of a strong value for business-to-business usage.
RYAN FARRELL
As Jasmine said, the sheer volume of content that’s being tokenized, it’s going to be in the millions, tens of millions –
JASMINE FARRELL
Billions, right? You know, billions of assets.
RYAN FARRELL
And what our search is going to be able to do is, it’s going to be able to find you that handful of grains of sand on the beach. We’re not just talking about art. I think we’ve already touched upon it a couple of times. We’re talking about tokenized assets of value. That could be the deed to a property, or a license agreement for something.
And then add to that, the original question was how do we monetize this? Well, we are selling APIs to marketplaces and aggregators for that search capability, but we’re also working on our own set of smart contracts and technology that can facilitate new mechanisms of transactions for those different kinds of assets.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
So cool. When did you start the business?
JASMINE FARRELL
We started March of 2021.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
That’s crazy.
JASMINE FARRELL
I can give the exact date, March 21, 2021.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
All right!
RYAN FARRELL
Date of incorporation, baby.
DAVID BRADBURY
I love it –
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Sorry, that was leading into a second question going to, you’re going to have to wait.
DAVID BRADBURY
I will wait. I’m going to be patient.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
So starting from the beginning, how have you financed your company? Just sort of tell us the highs and lows of that process.
JASMINE FARRELL
Well, we came to you guys, that was one way. I think you guys were the first investors we approached. I started doing my research and I said, “Where can I go that will matter and is meaningful?” And of course, VCET, right? Because VCET supports small businesses that are trying to make a difference here in Vermont, and I felt like we fit right in that, and we’re also kind of unique to the industry, right? So I approached our ideas with you, in hopes that you would invest in us.
The second route I went was the community. I thought, “What better route to go than to ask people who themselves see the potential in us? Because if they believe in us, then we believe in ourselves.” So we went through WeFunder as a second avenue, and we were able to raise $371K. Of course, VCET went through WeFunder, and we had other VCs that went through that, and that was very meaningful. I think that was a testament to what we’re building has some potential, people saw the value in it, and it’s very validating as an entrepreneur to have that.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
How was working with WeFunder? It’s obviously becoming more and more popular. How did that go for you?
JASMINE FARRELL
It was a little bit of a mess initially. I won’t blame them completely, but I do think that they’re better now.
DAVID BRADBURY
Way better, yeah. They had some growing pains too, for sure.
JASMINE FARRELL
So they were a startup as well. I couldn’t be so critical. I think they went really far, and their idea was meaningful. They’re better prepared now for other people who want to join that space, but initially it was a little challenging. I leaned to Dave for a lot of suggestions, let me tell you.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
For a company who’s thinking about using WeFunder, or do you have any recommendations of what you need to bring to the table to make it successful?
JASMINE FARRELL
Yeah, I would suggest understanding what your valuation is. Know how much you’re willing to give up of your company, because that is the first step to you continuing working on your company, how much are you willing to give up? And really understanding the marketing. Get your voice out there, tell people. I told my entire family. Everybody invested in my family. Let everybody know that you’re trying to accomplish something that’s kind of bigger than yourself and you need assistance to do that.
DAVID BRADBURY
That’s so great. And then you were able to get some foundation backing as well. Can you talk about that?
JASMINE FARRELL
Yes.
RYAN FARRELL
Yeah, we’ve submitted some grant proposals. We started our work on a blockchain called Algorand, which is a small blockchain, but it’s extremely powerful. And in terms of its technological offering, it’s probably one of the most efficient and fastest technologies that I’ve seen, as we initially did our research as to where to start building.
And they granted us, I think in total around $200K in grant funding, combined between those few grants, and that was very meaningful. Of course, we’ve started by building out an indexer and running all of the NFTs from their systems through our pipeline. Obviously, the core technology that we built is completely chain-agnostic, and we are looking to expand into multiple ecosystems because that will only make the technology more valuable.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
But how validating right from the start, having them buy into what you’re doing. I can’t imagine a better partner to begin.
JASMINE FARRELL
Yeah, I completely agree. Having the Algorand Foundation just validates that our work is meaningful and essential for the infrastructure and for the ecosystem. In addition to that, we also leased out our search engine to Dell, and they were able to compensate us for a million dollars. So we continued with that kind of funding as well, to grow out our search engine and make it robust. But there’s still room for growth, right?
DAVID BRADBURY
For sure, for sure. And I will say, when we were looking at a $45,000 investment early on in the campaign to try to – I won’t say kickstart, but to WeFunder, get that going – Sam reached out to Jamie Goldstein and Jody Goldstein, two longtime entrepreneurs and investors, very familiar with Algorand to come have a little sit down. I remember, I think we had nachos and beer at Ranch Camp.. I just love that our community of Vermont, willing to come, share their perspectives, and help us sort of figure what we’re getting into a little bit.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
I remember when Jasmine and I had that first call about Zestbloom – I don’t even know if it was named at the time – but I remember you telling me what you’re doing. And I was like, okay, I’m not smart enough to understand this, but I can find people who are, and I know that you have something. Like, I could hear it in your voice, I could hear the way you’re talking about it. I would cringe to look at my notes now from that call, but I remember calling Dave and being like, “Okay, remember Morrisville, blah, blah?” And he’s like, “No.”
DAVID BRADBURY
The designers co-op?
JASMINE FARRELL
The engineering co-op? It would be brilliant.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
You’ll get there. We’ll do another episode on that one.
JASMINE FARRELL
It’s what we need to do. Oh my God, I would love that, just encourage people. I love it, I love it.
DAVID BRADBURY
Any unique challenges? Like, this forefront of technology thing, where do you get inspiration, or where do you find help or guidance? How do you do that? I mean, I’m a really good follower, but how do you lead at this cutting edge stuff that seems to change every 90 days?
RYAN FARRELL
Oh, man, it changes on the week. It is incredibly hard to keep up with. Yeah, I mean, that’s just the nature of being in this particular space. How do you keep up with it? You know, you just have to – we have lots of people that we’ve met through conferences and people interested in building out technologies adjacent to ours, and we pretty much just have, you know, a million Telegram chats open about different things with different partners. And even then we still get blindsided by something, some news announcements on a weekly basis.
DAVID BRADBURY
Are you seeing innovations coming out of Asia, Europe, or the US? I mean, you have touchpoints and relationships globally, so any geographic sort of lead in this? Or maybe it’s a regulatory environment, or a mindset, or something?
JASMINE FARRELL
I think it’s a little of everything. We did just come back from Singapore, which was really amazing. We saw a lot of talent there. It’s fascinating to see what people are focused on. The different realms, a lot of defi obviously, loans and lending. We’re more on the originality and kind of insurance policy. We’re confirming this is a real asset, you can invest in this asset. But in Europe, I know there are a lot of NFT marketplaces. That’s really the trend there, there’s a lot of high-end art. And then you’ve got West Africa, which is probably the leading country in the world that is going into crypto, and they’re actually regulating it, which makes a big difference.
Now I do believe that when the United States starts regulating crypto here, it’s going to be much more meaningful. It’s necessary, because you need safeguards. If you’re going to go invest in a stock and your stock fails, you get to write that off. Like, it’s not a complete loss, right? Like, you get to write that off at the end of the year. You invest in crypto, you don’t get to write that off. That’s just your loss, that is it. That’s what you take for your – and so that is a problem that needs to be addressed.
DAVID BRADBURY
Nobody told me that.
JASMINE FARRELL
So you have to remind yourself that if you’re going to jump into the crypto world, know that it’s not regulated, that it’s like the Wild, Wild West, and we need companies like us to make sure that assets are legitimate.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Ryan, you said things are literally changing week to week. Like, how far ahead can you plan? Like, do you guys definitely don’t have a three-to-five-year product plan? Because it’s just changing so quickly. I’m just curious, how far ahead do you look?
RYAN FARRELL
You really just have to do the best you can in paying particular attention to the regulatory side of things and the legal side of things, which Jasmine excels at. She made sure that everything about our company is structured properly and that we have all the I’s dotted and all the T’s crossed. And yeah, that’s really the best you can do. And we have lots of conversations with our lawyers and our accountants.
JASMINE FARRELL
Several lawyers, several accountants. Yeah, I think our goal is to make it more concrete to bring crypto into the world that makes sense, that benefits everybody, and everybody can take advantage of that. We’re creating tech that will help facilitate that. Our tech is here to stay, like, it’s permanent. And even though the world around it changes weekly, our tech will always be the best, and it will always be here, and it will always be needed. And that’s what’s unique about what we built.
DAVID BRADBURY
Oh, I told you she was bad-ass, and Ryan and Evan too. We’re just going to focus on Jasmine for a second.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
So one thing I wanted to ask you all is, man, what is it like building a company and raising young children? And has the childcare crisis impacted you all?
RYAN FARRELL
Yeah, definitely, yes.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Don’t cry, don’t cry!
JASMINE FARRELL
That’s easy, yes. It’s so challenging, I think, on a daily basis, how do single parents survive? Like, how do they do it by themselves? Because I cannot imagine being alone. And I came from a background where I was my mom was a single mom. She just took care of me. She worked 60 hours a week, and I stayed at school until she got off work. I got dropped off at 5:00 in the morning and I got picked up at 6:00 PM, because there was no daycare for me. I lived at school, and that’s where I spent my entire time. I don’t know what the solution is to it, but it needs to be addressed, it’s clear, because innovation is being slowed down because there isn’t that support at home. People can’t be creative, they can’t be innovative, they can’t find better solutions to bigger problems. We’re relying on just a certain group of people to create all of the innovation, and it’s very elitist. So, it’s a huge problem.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
And as co-founders and co-parents, we both need to be in this meeting. But guess what?
JASMINE FARRELL
Only one of us will be, yeah.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
I’ve had meetings with you guys where your kids are running around, and the sort of bright side of things, I think it is a little bit more normalized. Sometimes I have to bring my kids, and they’re going to color in the other room while we have a meeting, and that’s sort of the reality. And that’s really hard, and that sucks, but also I do think there’s a lot of really positive change with that too. Because people are starting to understand, you know what? No, I got to go. I need to pick up my kid, and that’s the most important thing.
DAVID BRADBURY
They mess with me sometimes, because we’ll be on a Zoom and I see the server on the floor behind them, and, they’ll send their daughter over with, like, a juice cup – an empty one, I hope – and just sort of pretend that it’s going to fry it. It’s kind of freaky. Don’t do that with anybody else! Just keep that there. Any mentors along the way that you rely upon or that you’ve found really valuable?
JASMINE FARRELL
That’s such a given, Dave. You know that you’re one of our mentors.
DAVID BRADBURY
No, no. Well, thank you. Not for hat. You have so many others around the table.
JASMINE FARRELL
Of course, of course.
DAVID BRADBURY
Chris Warner and others, yeah.
JASMINE FARRELL
Dave, you’re one. You’ve been essential to us understanding the vocabulary in the startup world. Let me tell you, nobody knows when people give you random vocabulary, am I supposed to know what that means?
RYAN FARRELL
Especially in the VC realm and how to raise money and value yourself.
DAVID BRADBURY
It doesn’t need to be that complicated.
JASMINE FARRELL
That’s always really challenging. And yes, Chris Warner, who we meet with weekly, and he gives us advice on how we should handle our team, what the team should look like, and what direction we should go in. We also have Jay McArthur –
RYAN FARRELL
McCarthy.
JASMINE FARRELL
Oh, McCarthy, got his name wrong.
RYAN FARRELL
Yeah, Chris and Jay are the founders of a company called Reach, and what they’re doing is amazing. They’re building a blockchain-agnostic smart contract language that compiles down into the native language for different chains. And currently support is for Ethereum, Algorand, and Conflex, but they’re working to bring on other mainstream blockchains as well.
JASMINE FARRELL
And we use their smart contracts to build out our stuff. Very, very awesome. They help audit some of our stuff. Well, they won’t say they “audit,” they just review. And we have a lot of – you know, we met Jason Lee. He was like one of the founding members of Algorand, a phenomenal guy, really welcoming. We’ve got Shamir from the Algorand Foundation and Ryan Tabellini, who are considering investing in us.
DAVID BRADBURY
Borderless Capital, right, which is a name in the space.
JASMINE FARRELL
Yeah, big, Borderless that David –
DAVID BRADBURY
This might be similar to the question, how do you keep up with stuff? Just talk to the folks in it. And if we were going to follow one or two people on Twitter, who talks about this stuff regularly that a layperson like me could follow?
JASMINE FARRELL
You can follow us.
DAVID BRADBURY
Well, besides you. We’ll do that, follow that, but anybody else out there you think is important?
JASMINE FARRELL
You can follow me, Jasmine Iris!
DAVID BRADBURY
That you think is a real positive steward and really offer some insights?
JASMINE FARRELL
I do think Chris Warner is actually a good –
RYAN FARRELL
He’s probably one of the better ones that I can name off the top of my head. There are more. I’d have to get my phone out, which I lovingly turned off and put aside for this podcast.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
That means a lot to us. Any big screw ups? Any big mistakes that if you could go back and redo that, that maybe you can help another entrepreneur prevent.
JASMINE FARRELL
Oh, yeah. My favorite phrase, right? What was the phrase that you used when we first built our first marketplace?
RYAN FARRELL
Well, we did end up – first hired a team that probably wasn’t as skilled as it needed to be to build our first product, which was initially looking like it was just going to be a simple marketplace. It was before we really got deep into the originality side. And so the phrase Jasmine is referring to is to give it a “Viking funeral,” after we’d spent all that time and effort on something that wasn’t going to be paying our bills. The code was bad, so we ended up taking only the best parts of it and porting it over into our whole new application.
JASMINE FARRELL
He pretty much just burned the rest. I mean, yeah, it’s something that he regrets tremendously.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
So what would you have done differently? Would you have hired a different team? Would you have waited and raised more capital to build it? What would the move be?
RYAN FARRELL
No, I think hiring the right people makes a big difference.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Well, you had such a sense of urgency too, right? Like, I remember talking to you and saying, like, if we don’t do this someone else will.
RYAN FARRELL
Yeah, that’s true. I think there’s a sunken cost fallacy too, you know. I think when you start a company, there are going to be some inefficiencies on how you spend money, but the point is to take from that and learn from it. And what we learned was to spend more time vetting people that we hire. And we have a solid team right now, our total headcount is six, and we’ve been able to build this amazing product with such a small number of people. I think that’s a testament to how much better we’ve gotten at choosing our talent.
JASMINE FARRELL
Also, just mention, you were still working. So you actually did not give up working. Once Ryan decided to dedicate himself to the project, he was actually able to come on full time as an engineer and he had the project. That made the difference. We pivoted really quickly.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
But terrifyingly, right? That’s a scary thing to do.
JASMINE FARRELL
Yeah.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Jasmine, can you talk a little bit about being a woman in crypto? Because there’s probably not a lot of you. You’re talking about going all these conferences and things like that. Do you feel like a leader in the space? Do you feel like you have other women that you can connect with?
JASMINE FARRELL
Yeah, I do feel like I have other women that I can connect with. We’ve made a few friends with a few other CEOs that happen to be females as well. Natalie is fantastic, she’s doing Prismatic, which is another project on Dell Tools. But it is seldom that you find someone who is in the same kind of category that you are in. I’m a minority, not just because I’m a female, but because I’m also Hispanic. It’s rare that you find anybody that has those two categories in them. Just recently, when we went to Singapore, we got invited to a group through the Algorand Foundation with the 50 most promising projects, and we were at a round table with, I don’t know, would you say like 60 people?
RYAN FARRELL
I wasn’t there.
JASMINE FARRELL
Oh, I’m sorry. That’s right.
RYAN FARRELL
I was watching the kids! We have to take the kids with us when we go on these conferences around the world.
JASMINE FARRELL
So we take turns. There are three females besides me. The other two females were just assisting with the project, they weren’t actually co-founders or CEOs.
DAVID BRADBURY
1 out of 60?
JASMINE FARRELL
That’s right. I was the only female that was representing a company, that owned a company and was a co-founder of a company and the CEO of the company. Imagine how I must have felt, talk about isolating. Like, nobody can relate to what I’m doing. I feel like I have a lot more hurdles, a lot more barriers are placed upon me, and all eyes are on me.
And the question gets asked often, how do we bring more women? And it’s like, support them. Give them money. Maybe their idea is not the best, but if you support them, they can make it the best. Give them the opportunity that they haven’t been given in the past, and that is tremendous. Like, don’t just say you’re going to put them on a panel, give them money. It’s not enough to be placing them on a panel and pretending that you’re diverse. You need to support them in the sense that makes sense, because they’re not making the same income as a male is.
First off, Hispanics are like 2% of the income earners, so they make hardly anything. You can’t expect a project to succeed and not back them with income. I think VCs need to realize that. Maybe I’ve heard this idea 10 times, but let’s support this female to accomplish that idea.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Put your money where your mouth is.
JASMINE FARRELL
Yeah, exactly. I think that that’s really lacking. Yeah, I really feel like VCs need to adjust – if they’re about diversity, make it so. I want you to look at your portfolio, and I want you to review how many CEOs are females, how many of them are minorities, and how many of them are this. Let’s make it as diverse as possible. As diverse as your portfolio is, so will be the people.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Hell yes.
RYAN FARRELL
Here, here.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
She’s good.
DAVID BRADBURY
My face hurts from smiling, grinning, and nodding so much. This is fantastic. We’re going to start wrapping up here, unfortunately, Sam.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Yeah, we got kids to pick up, right.
DAVID BRADBURY
Any little snippet of advice for the next entrepreneur that’s out there with a big dream, like you are, uncertain? How do I take the risk and chance?
JASMINE FARRELL
I think first, if you’re already in the space, you’ve already done something monumental. You took that first step, is the hardest thing to do, to be honest. To say I can do this and I believe in myself, that is monumental. If you can get there and you can say I can do this, then you can do it all the way. Always believe in yourself. Recognize that you’re going to make mistakes, it’s not going to be perfect, and sometimes you’re going to think it’s going to be a complete mess, but you learn with every aspect of that and you become so much stronger and so much better because of it.
RYAN FARRELL
Exactly. Really just taking that first step and telling yourself that you do – convincing yourself that you have a good idea is step one. And then being brave enough to go and write that idea down and go to people and sell them on it, get them excited to invest in your company. Get that first little bit of income that you can start working on and generating revenue as a company, to kind of prove your idea. That’s really the hardest part, and I think putting time and effort into those first steps really pays dividends.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
So great, really good advice. Even if you hire the wrong developers, you’ll get over it.
DAVID BRADBURY
The Viking funeral!
JASMINE FARRELL
It’s essentially, Ryan’s like, all right, I guess I have to quit my job and start working for our own company!
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Sometimes you need that kick in the ass, right! All right, the magic wand question. I’m going to give each of you an opportunity to answer, because there’s two of you.
DAVID BRADBURY
A double wand.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
If you could change one thing in Vermont today, the magic wand, what would you change? It can be ridiculous, or it can be really meaningful.
JASMINE FARRELL
Sounds like he’s got an idea already.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Yeah, Ryan’s ready to go.
RYAN FARRELL
Well, we can’t make the snow go away, so –
SAM ROACH-GERBER
You can, there’s a magic wand. I mean, Dave would be sad.
DAVID BRADBURY
Hey! You can tell Californians are in the house, right?
RYAN FARRELL
That was a joke.
JASMINE FARRELL
Yes, maybe not go away, just make it shorter. No, I think we need more kids’ spaces. I don’t think we have enough for –
DAVID BRADBURY
Like, to play and learn and gather?
JASMINE FARRELL
Yeah, because we can’t always go down the mountain. We take them down the mountain for 15 minutes and they’re done, and they’re like, okay, get me off this mountain. So, like, what else do we do with them?
SAM ROACH-GERBER
I know. Every mountain should have an indoor jungle gym situation. I guess Jay does.
DAVID BRADBURY
Climbing gyms have been great for our boys, and those programs, and the swimming hole is kind of fun.
JASMINE FARRELL
Yeah, more outdoor stuff, more indoor stuff for the snow. The season is long, so the kids get stir crazy.
DAVID BRADBURY
Do you want to become a snowboarder this winter?
JASMINE FARRELL
Oh, I am a snowboarder!
DAVID BRADBURY
You are? I didn’t know that. It’s not on your resume.
JASMINE FARRELL
I’ve been snowboarding since I was 16.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Oh my God, I thought Dave couldn’t love you anymore.
DAVID BRADBURY
I am thrilled.
JASMINE FARRELL
Mountain High] is where I would go. That’s where I snowboarded. But yeah, now we’re here. I haven’t had the opportunity because of our kids. We snowboard with them going down the little hillside, like I said.
DAVID BRADBURY
Yeah, it’s still painful.
JASMINE FARRELL
But yeah, I think more stuff indoors for the, kids and throughout the area, not just in the main cities like Burlington.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
I’m willing to drive, man. I’m willing to drive.
JASMINE FARRELL
I would love to go jumping from town to town because my kids are like, “I want to go to Monkey Do in Hyde Park. I want to go to something in Johnson.” I think that’d be cool.
RYAN FARRELL
I think my answer is I just want some real authentic Mexican food.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
That’s my answer too, 100%.
RYAN FARRELL
He’s feeling hurt left and right over there.
DAVID BRADBURY
Yeah.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
No, 100%.
JASMINE FARRELL
Can you name a good Mexican restaurant for us? I’d love to hear it. Where they make homemade flour tortilla.
DAVID BRADBURY
Well, you told me about some of your skills. I don’t want to out any restaurant pro/con.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
I just said there isn’t a good one, so I’m probably going to get some hate mail.
JASMINE FARRELL
I was like, do you have anything? I just want to hear one.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Not authentic, that’s for sure.
DAVID BRADBURY
I think when you established this designer’s co-op, let’s put a little kitchen nearby too.
JASMINE FARRELL
Let’s do it. Engineering homemade flour.
DAVID BRADBURY
All right, well, let’s get the search engine out there to the world and have some fun. Jasmine and Ryan, thank you so much for sharing your story.
JASMINE FARRELL
Thanks, guys. Thank you for having us.
DAVID BRADBURY
Evan, we’ll talk to you another time as well. This has been Start Here with Sam and Dave, a podcast sharing of stories of active, aspiring, and accidental entrepreneurs. This series is made possible by the Vermont Technology Council and Consolidated Communications. Follow us on Twitter at @vcet, and let’s get back on chain.
