Portis is now part of the ShapeShift family
Every company has a story, and in the case of Portis, it follows the path of a classic startup. A hackathon-inspired idea turned MVP, capital seed investment that enabled building a team, to a product widely used in a rapidly growing industry, eventually leading to an acquisition by a leading player in the ecosystem.
However, like all stories, it’s the small details and significant insights that make it truly interesting, and I’d like to share those with you.
Humble Beginnings
My (former) co-founder and I both worked together on the same team for several years at an Israeli startup. On some weekends, we’d code pet projects, just because we wanted to tinker with some new technology or had some cool idea we wanted to see come to life (for example, we built this fun party game, perfect for these COVID-19 days of WFH: https://bullshit.wtf/)
In October 2017, we found ourselves spending a sleepless weekend building a decentralized Ethereum application at the Tel Aviv Facebook Hackathon and even won first place. The hackathon itself wasn’t about blockchain, but as someone who got into this space back in 2013, I saw this as the perfect opportunity to take the next step, to go from hodler to buidler.
As a wonderful and unexpected side-effect, our application revealed something that gets any entrepreneur extremely excited — a problem that needs solving. Not just any problem, a problem that doesn’t exist yet, but one we strongly believe will exist in the short to medium future.
The problem — an average person will never use DApps, as they are complicated and intimidating.
Think of the internet in the early nineties. Great potential, but only used by the die-hard nerds. That’s precisely where blockchain is right now.
Portis 1.0
For the first several months of 2018, we both worked out of my apartment in Tel Aviv, designing and building out an MVP of what we believed was crucial for DApps to reach mainstream adoption: we wanted to make them simple.
A more technical explanation of what we built is a private key management solution for using decentralized applications. It employs end-to-end encryption to offer users a secure non-custodial wallet with a familiar cloud experience of an email and password login, from any browser, on any device — no installation required!
The non-custodial aspect was critical in our eyes. Although holding people’s private keys solves a lot of UX, we believe it goes against an essential tenet of blockchain: “not your keys, not your coins.” It’s a UX shortcut in the wrong direction. Also, coming from a security background, we know that you must have the mindset of “you either got hacked, or you will get hacked.” Being non-custodial mitigates a lot of that risk. Finally, from a legal perspective, being non-custodial simplifies matters significantly, letting us focus our resources on what we do best — write awesome code.
Developers, Developers, DEVELOPERS!
A valuable insight we had early on, is that similar to the mobile revolution of the previous decade, if you win over the developers, that’s how you get the users.
Therefore, in addition to making our product user-friendly for end-users, we were first and firstmost focusing on the developers themselves who are integrating our solution by offering a robust product that’s simple to integrate and has comprehensive documentation. We listen to our developers! We make sure we’re super responsive to their requests and suggestions.
The developers are the ones with whom we are building our community.
Talking to developers reinforced our decision to be non-custodial. Many of them said they would not offer a web3 wallet solution to their users that holds their private keys. These developers are trying to build unstoppable apps, and custodianship introduces a single point of failure and a liability.
Less than a month after our first release, we had our first DApp (boy, that was an exciting day), and then another, and before we know it, we had over a dozen DApps using Portis!
They all realized the same thing we did back in that hackathon: MetaMask (the only option back then) was too hard for the average user. Also, users had to get their hands on actual cryptocurrency through a whole different platform like CoinBase, a huge friction point, even if all they wanted to do was just sign a transaction. DApps deserve a better experience, so we made sure users can buy crypto with their credit card right from inside the DApp.
It Takes Money to Make Money
As much as we enjoyed the romantic setup of working out of my apartment, we knew that for Portis to reach its full potential, we will need to raise capital. Helping us navigate those waters was Avishay Ovadia, our first advisor, who provided invaluable insights and experience in approaching this subject and with making more significant, strategical decisions later on.
And so, in September 2018, five months after officially founding Portis, we were delighted to close a seed investment of $1.5M with F2 Capital, an Israeli VC that focuses on early-stage startups like ours. F2 also runs The Junction, the leading pre-seed program for startups in Israel.
Someone once told me that signing with a VC is like getting married, only the divorce is more expensive. I’m thankful to say that we had a very happy marriage. I attribute a great deal of our marital bliss to Jonathan Saacks and Barak Rabinowitz, who taught us so much and were always patient, trusting, and supportive.
With money in the bank, we were ready and eager to turn Portis from an MVP to a full-fledged company.
Teamwork Makes the Dream Work
The first step for building a strong team is hiring the right people, and in that regard, I feel confident saying we pretty much nailed it. Every person that we hired is highly capable, excited about our vision, and an excellent social fit. The latter meaning we’ll be happy to have them join our table at lunch every day.
The second step, which is equally important but a lot more fun (seriously, hiring is an excruciating process), is to create a strong company culture.
Company culture is required both to motivate, but also to guide.
Your team needs to know what is our definition of organizational success, so they will know what’s expected of them. For example, we decided we will operate in full transparency in our organization. Besides employee compensations, everything was accessible to anyone on the team: numbers, roadmaps, plans, challenges, and concerns.
“When you hide information from your team, you limit their intelligence to that of your own, crippling the smart people you hired.”
— Avishai Abrahami, Wix CEO
This transparency also empowered everyone at Portis to take complete ownership of their areas of responsibility. We tell people to be bold, take risks, and learn from mistakes.
We have fun too, of course! Game nights, going out for drinks, escape rooms, you name it. We enjoy each other’s company, so for instance, when we stayed up all night at the office to make sure we’re ready for ETH Denver, everyone had a blast!
“Have you heard the good word?”
All startups need to make sure they have their sights on the right goals, and that means deciding what your KPI is. For us, that Key Performance Indicator was the number of live DApps using Portis. We believe in the power of network effects, so the more DApps integrate us, the more likely other DApps are to do the same. Both due to word-of-mouth and brand effect, but also for the simple reason that they would be able to offer their users a better experience, as the one Portis account they create will work on most Apps. There are additional benefits, like more feedback data, which improves our product.
We were always delighted to hear from developers using us that they love our SDK. Naturally, we wanted to spread the love. So, just before 2018 was over, we brought on another key player to the company — Scott Gralnick. Scott joined the company as VP of Business Development, operating out of his home in NYC, and eventually became CBO and co-founder.
Scott and I spent the better part of 2019 traveling around the world, going to all the different conferences and hackathons.
Throughout these events, we talked with developers and listened carefully to their suggestions. We believe that Portis should be easy to use, but also easy to build on. That’s why we simply live for these conversations. Engaging with our community is the best way to grow our product in the right direction.
The Crypto Winter
Towards the end of 2019, our product has grown from a scrappy MVP to a robust, feature-rich product, used by top DApps like OpenSea, Augur, AirSwap, Cryptodozer, Gods Unchained, and most recently — ShapeShift.
However, in the backdrop of crypto winter, it appeared like additional fundraising was going to be an almost impossible challenge. We were forced to make the hardest decision in the history of our company and had to let go of half of our team to extend our runway. When the dust settled, my original co-founder decided to resign, and from 8 people, we were down to 4. Extremely painful, but necessary. We were holding out for either better days or for the right opportunity to present itself. And present itself it did.
The ShapeShift Spring
Back in November 2019, ShapeShift integrated Portis into its new ShapeShift.com crypto platform. It was the first time users could connect a non-hardware wallet to get access to ShapeShift’s zero-commission trading. The ShapeShift team loved our functionality, and we’ve been in close contact ever since.
ShapeShift understands the importance of a borderless financial system that is built in an open and decentralized manner — and specifically, the need to make self-custody easy for people. Like us, ShapeShift is also a firm believer in the “not your keys, not your coins” mantra.
At its core, Portis aims to empower developers to delight their user base with a seamless user experience to drive the mass adoption of web3.
As we got to know Erik Voorhees (ShapeShift CEO) and his team better, we started having conversations about the overall ecosystem and how both our companies believe that balancing security with usability is of the utmost importance for building the next wave of DApps.
As our relationship grew stronger, ShapeShift told us that they love our solution so much that they want to acquire us.
We were thrilled at the opportunity, both because we’re huge fans of ShapeShift’s product and company culture, but also because we understood the immense potential of joining forces, especially with a company that understands and shares our vision so well.
With this acquisition, every ShapeShift user will be able to log in to leading web3 applications already supporting Portis. Moreover, every Portis user will be able to get access to commission-free coin conversions on all major chains (not just Ethereum and ERC-20 tokens), and super fast fiat-to-crypto via debit card. Instead of only offering Portis users basic fiat-to-crypto, we now enjoy the full force of one of the leading crypto exchanges in the space.
Where do we go from here?
For the time being, the Portis SDK will remain the same. But in the coming months, we’ll transition into a unified login under the ShapeShift brand, and thanks to the immense capabilities of ShapeShift’s talented team, we will continue promoting the Portis vision of making all DApps easy to use without compromising security or self-custody.
We’re excited to join the fox family and become a part of an awesome company like ShapeShift. The more we get to know the people, the clearer it becomes it’s the perfect fit for Portis. They have the same professional yet friendly attitude, the uncompromising attention to details and security, the silly chat rooms, the over-the-top swag, and the unrelenting esprit de corps.
This is not the end of our journey, but rather a bridge into a new land filled with like-minded individuals that are eager to pioneer this space together with us.
If you have any questions about this transition, please contact support@portis.io.
As always, we remain true to our vision: empower our devs, and make #BUIDL #SIMPL.
Sincerely,
Tom Teman, Portis CEO
