Building a blockchain startup in college with Avthar Sewrathan, Richard Adjei, and Felix Madutsa (BlockX)
This week, we’re excited to feature Avthar Sewrathan, Richard Adjei, and Felix Madusta — three recent Princeton graduates and co-founders of BlockX. BlockX is a blockchain company developing a decentralized social network, Afari, which will give users more control over their data and reward them for creating content.
Afari was the winner of the nationwide TigerLaunch entrepreneurship competition, beating out hundreds of other student startups, and recently placed second in the Princeton-HBS Startup Showcase. Avthar, Richard, and Felix are currently working out of Princeton’s eLab Summer Accelerator Program, and plan to continue working on Afari full-time. The trio had some great advice about getting smart about blockchain, building a manageable UI, and balancing founding a company with being a student!
How did the three of you meet, and what made you decide to start a company together?
Avthar: We all share a common background of being from the African continent, and gravitated towards each other during our freshman year at Princeton. We knew we were interested in entrepreneurship, and were always trying to figure out which technology we could leverage to make the biggest impact. We started looking at things like AI and aerospace engineering, but it felt like you needed to have a big company with lots of resources and a proprietary dataset to do something great in those spaces.
Crypto began to increase in popularity while we were at Princeton, and Richard and I started doing research on Bitcoin and blockchain with Arvid Narayanan. He introduced us to a more rigorous understanding of what blockchain technology is, and encouraged us to keep our ears open to opportunities in the space. For my senior thesis, I worked on building what would be a crude MVP of Afari.
What was the initial inspiration behind the company?
Avthar: We’ve always been interested in data privacy and control, and thought it would be interesting to create a decentralized social network that is resistant to censorship. In March, when the Cambridge Analytica scandal emerged, people started realizing that data privacy is weak on today’s social platforms. This was a big motivator for us to keep working on the company.
We also wanted to reward people for producing quality content. People spend hours a day producing content for websites like Twitter and Instagram, and we thought that we could leverage tokens to reward them for making things that other people enjoy. Finally, we wanted to make it easier for users to share content with the right demographic. When we interviewed social media users, they told us that it was tough to segment content for the right audience — for example, you only have one account that you use to both maintain a professional persona and share memes with friends.
How did you decide to build your company on Blockstack, and how to you think about creating an approachable user experience?
Avthar: We came across Blockstack through our Professor Michael J Freedman and were able to connect with the founders, who are also Princeton alums. We felt that Blockstack was more careful thought out and suited to consumer facing apps than other platforms we considered The experience has been great, though it’s difficult to build on infrastructure that is still developing. We have a great partnership with the Blockstack team, and have been working really closely with them on improvements.
The average person doesn’t care about whether a project uses blockchain. Our goal is to create a very joyful and simple user experience. We aim to abstract away things like creating a blockchain-based ID into a signup process that looks like what people are used to. It’s also about bringing people choice. In the long term, we think we’ll be compatible with a number of platforms, including Blockstack.
How did you balance schoolwork with building the company, and when did you decide to work on Afari full-time?
Richard: We worked in bursts. Over a two week period, we’d spend the first week doing all of our schoolwork, and then the next week we’d focus exclusively on building the platform. Toward the end of the semester, we started asking ourselves more serious questions about where we saw the product going and what we wanted to do after college. We had full-time jobs lined up, and thought we would work on this as a side project. But after doing a few pitch competitions and talking to people, we realized that we really cared about pursuing it full-time.
Avthar: There’s always pressure to go into consulting or finance, or work at one of the big tech companies. I had to think a lot about what I wanted out of life. First and foremost, I wanted to work with people who inspire me and bring me to a new level, which Felix and Richard do. We’ve been really fortunate to have a lot of mentors who have told us that this is the best time to start a company — we’re not married and don’t have kids. The worst case scenario is that this doesn’t work out, but in the process of building this company and making connections, we’ve exponentially increased the number of opportunities we have in the future.
You’ve entered a variety of programs and competitions — how did the company benefit from these experiences?
Avthar: Having milestones was super helpful for us — we used competitions and program applications as deadlines to get things done. We’ve also really enjoyed working with mentors through these programs and competitions. You can always cold email people and ask for advice, but you’ll have a better success rate if you’re paired with people who have already expressed a desire to help you! Especially for people who don’t have many roots in the U.S., these programs have been a great way to seed our networks.
What advice do you have for other students interested in learning more about blockchain?
Felix: It’s just like any other technology — you need to go in with an open mind and consult a wide variety of sources. Go and read papers on your own, and try to seek out independent experts who haven’t personally invested in a given platform. Some of the concepts can be really hard to understand at the beginning, but you have to persist and spend time on it before you start to learn.
Avthar: I’ve found it really helpful to go back to the original sources to understand why Bitcoin and Ethereum were created, and what drove the vision. You have to figure out what kind of problems you are interested in solving, and then make sure that blockchain is the right solution for what you want to tackle. There’s also a wonderful Coursera course, a great list of blockchain resources from Jameson Loppe, and a helpful podcast from Naval Ravikant, Tim Ferriss, and Nick Szabo.
What’s next for Afari?
Avthar: We have a web application built that’s currently in private testing — sign up at afari.io if you want to be an early user! The focus now is on shifting to mobile. We want to translate some of the lessons we’ve learned from Web into building a joyful mobile user experience.
We’re also thinking about how to build our brand. Users today care a lot about the personalities of the people building their products, and we want our users to understand our story and where we come from. We post daily updates on our Instagram about what it’s like for three guys from Africa to try to build a blockchain company. We’re really excited about creating a genuine and authentic brand in this space in addition to building a world class product.
Editor’s note: Check out the links below to follow the Afari team’s journey on social media! You can also sign up for Afari’s beta test on their website.
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