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In order to truly change things, in order to build something great, you must have conviction. A college dropout poker player. I didn't go to Harvard or MIT. I didn't go to amazing school. I didn't have any connections. We were nobodies. I always wanted to prove that we could do impossible things. You can't do this. Nobody can. When I hear that, that's all I want to work on. Reset everything. Think completely from first principles. How can I break it? How can I break it? And the why matters more than anything. Why are we here? Why do we get up in the morning? In the shower, when you're going to bed at night, when you wake up in the middle of the night, you have an idea. It's just a pure obsession. Can we have high performance and maximum decentralization? It's the holy grail. The impossible thing, an impossible problem. My favorite. What started as an idea now is a reality. We were the first company ever in history to have both Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia both co-lead a round. Vitalik said that trilemma was broken. He means theoretically it's broken, but we actually broke it. There were no more bottlenecks.
I'm Bryan Pellegrino, co-founder and CEO of LayerZero Labs. I'm Raz, co-founder and CTO of LayerZero. Zero is the last blockchain that'll ever be built.
I woke up one morning, April 15th, and I sat down at my computer and there's a big seal of the Department of Justice, the DOJ, on the website. Overnight they had banned all online poker within the United States. All of the websites are down. You can no longer play online poker in the United States. All of the payment processors are down. So, you can no longer move money between or do anything. Overnight the industry was just gone. That was the first time where you saw the reach of policy and government impacting you in your real life. When you're a kid you don't think about it much. When you're a young adult you don't think about it but there's the first time of I need to literally move where I live, my entire life and it's sort of career just got taken away from me. That really grounded me early on in the libertarian ethos of crypto and having something that was bigger than a single jurisdiction, was bigger than a current regulatory regime, had the ability to become something more.
For the first 24 hours, I just spent feeling sorry for myself. Natural reaction. You're just like, my career is over. All my money is gone. You don't really know what to do. But then immediately after that, the next day, I woke up and I saw that the world was changing very quickly. All of the main poker sites were now gone, but there's a bunch of smaller shady poker sites that still existed and that everybody was going to go and sign up on those because they needed to continue to make a living. I knew all of the highest stakes poker players in the world. So, I created an affiliate and I signed up all of my friends to all of these sites. I found them the best deals and I negotiated these things and it went from me making no money to me making $20-30,000 a month within a couple of weeks. Very quickly I saw that a changing reshuffle of a landscape created an opportunity and that really drew me to entrepreneurship in general. That was the first real catalyst.
I grew up in a town of 900 people. Very small village, not a lot of opportunity. I really valued for most of my life a meritocratic environment. I didn't go to Harvard or MIT. Didn't go to amazing school. Didn't have any connections. I was a poker player who dropped out of college. What I really valued was the ability to just do something where I could earn my own way or prove my own value over time. Poker is purely meritocratic. It doesn't matter anything about you. It's just you're smarter or better at the game or you're not. It's very linear. Those are just the systems and environments that I valued. That was one of the things I was very drawn to in crypto. I didn't need to know the banking executives. I didn't need to have an uncle who worked at Goldman Sachs. All I needed to do was be able to build something that was more useful to the world that actually had a higher degree of utility. Just build the best possible system that you can build and permissionless open access to anybody. Just build the best thing.
I've been building with Bryan since we're in school together. Nobody would give us money cuz we were nobodies and we didn't come from a great pedigree and we didn't have a great school. I always wanted to prove that we could do impossible things, great things. I'm always chasing when someone says something's not possible. This is not technically possible. You can't do this, nobody can. When I hear that, that's all I want to work on. Bryan was like our hero, like my hero, our like the older grade's heroes. He's a genius to everybody. I always looked at Bryan and I wanted to be like him. I didn't know we were going to be working together basically our whole lives.
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