Building a crypto startup? Here’s how two Indians are doing it.
What’s your one in a million story? — A topic that was trending on the internet earlier this week that got us thinking and led to us writing this article to document our journey as a young startup with two founders from Bangalore, India.
Being early adopters of bitcoin, we began tinkering with bitcoin at the age of 21, fell down the rabbit hole and never looked back. One common problem among bitcoin owners is the inability to actually use crypto as a currency. I (Prashanth, Founder), started to work on a solution to fix this problem whilst pursuing a masters in Computer Science at ETH Zurich. Having lived in over 6 countries and traveled to over 17 countries, I realized that even while I had bitcoin — what was meant to be a global, authority resistant, censorship resistant, decentralized currency — I still had to resort to moving money between several banks, to access my own money.
This leads to the tale of our unorthodox journey. Ashvin and I earned a Bachelors in Computer Science together and really got involved with bitcoin around the same time. Long story short, we both dropped everything we had going for us at the time to begin working on a really interesting solution to solve exactly the aforementioned problem. This literally is the next logical step in the bitcoin payments life-cycle and simply must come to exist at some point in the future and we want to be the first ones to get there.
I left one of the most prestigious masters programs in the world to work on lastbit full time and Ashvin quit his job to help me bring this to life. Now, as a bunch of 23-year-old young adults, we set out on our journey to build a complex product in a country where Bitcoin is banned currently. Nobody told us how hard it was going to be to build a hardware startup, but that could not stop us. We lacked real business and fund-raising experience, but what we do have is the absolute right mix of tech skills to bring this to life, a genuine love for all things complex and a ridiculous work ethic.
Agreed, admittedly, at this point it sounds like a bunch of inexperienced kids. Sure. We went on to build our first prototypes, enter Europe (our target market) and raise funding in Europe, Hong Kong and most recently Silicon Valley (UC Berkeley — more on this in a future article) in less than a year and learned lessons that no university in the world could have taught us.
Today, after almost a year of 12+ hour workdays and countless iterations of software and hardware, we’ve got the entire system working on top of lightning and are very close to completing an MVP with the help of our card issuing partner. It’s a surreal feeling holding in your hand, a product of your brain and we’re just getting started.
We may fail, we may be the next unicorn but neither will deter us. This journey has just begun and we’ve learned over the last year more than we’ve learned through any university or otherwise, and that is what we take away.
Head over to lastbit.io to follow us on our journey!
