Taylor Monahan talks the transition from MyEtherWallet to MyCrypto and her philosophy on key management (Part 1)

Taylor’s blockchain journey took off with the launch of Ethereum when there was a clear need for an easy-to-use interface to see, store, and manage your Ethereum. She began building, and eventually headed up the popular wallet interface, MyEtherWallet. In the beginning of 2018 she founded MyCrypto, where she strives to remove fear and confusion from the equation and help empower people to manage and control their own crypto assets.

How did you get into the blockchain space? What keeps you here?

Back in 2013 I started reading articles about Bitcoin, with headlines discussing how to “get rich quickly”, often with an aside about what blockchain technology actually is. I didn’t pay much attention originally, but after repeatedly seeing these headlines, I dug deeper. I found that people involved in the space came from really interesting backgrounds, and that’s when crypto started capturing my attention. When the market crashed and Mt. Gox happened, I was playing around with crypto, but I wasn’t super ingrained in the ecosystem; I hadn’t fully fallen down the rabbit hole.

When did you fall down the rabbit hole?

It wasn’t until 2014 or 2015, when Ethereum came on my radar. The whitepaper was really special, and you could tell that there was so much excitement and optimism in the space. When Ethereum first launched, they sent your private key with all your Ether in it to your email address. Even I knew that wasn’t a secure way to store your private key. I started wondering about how to move my Ether, and people told me that in order to do that you have to install a program via command line and type in commands. I pretty much laughed in their faces. I was thinking, “this is the stuff that’s supposed to make me fabulously rich, why should I have to use command line?” I was doing a lot of front-end development for clients, so I put together a simple interface and hooked it all together with my original co-founder of MyEtherWallet. Basically, it was a way that you could create a paper wallet, and send all your funds from your presale wallet to your new paper wallet. We shared it with Reddit and the rest is history.

Tell us a little bit about MyCrypto.

MyCrypto is a wallet– an interface that allows you to access your assets that are stored on the blockchain. We try to make the experience similar to an online or mobile banking application. Moving forward, we’re working on things that will allow people to use tokens instead of just speculating on them. We want to encourage people to go a level deeper and actually use the blockchain.

Why does MyCrypto have a distributed team?

Originally it was because I was working remotely– splitting my time between MyEtherWallet and freelance clients. I wanted to bring on more engineers and it didn’t make sense to limit the pool of people that could help grow our product to one location. I basically just went on Reddit and asked for help. As we grew I went back and forth on whether we should become a more social company with an office or just stay remote, but the reality is that I work most effectively in a remote environment and there are talented people all over the world.

What advantages does a distributed team bring to the MyCrypto platform?

The most helpful thing has been on the support and security side. Because we’re distributed, we have around the clock support. If a piece of our platform breaks at 3 a.m. it doesn’t matter that I’m asleep, because five of our team members are awake and can catch that issue and notify the rest of the team quickly in order to fix the issue.

The other thing is that it allows us to focus on the types of people we want to hire. We have different perspectives, and it’s kind of funny because some part of our team will be complaining about healthcare in the US, and the Canadians will be like “wait, back up, how does this work?” and explain how healthcare works for them. I learn so much from my team members– it’s a diverse set of perspectives.

Why is MyCrypto noncustodial? Could you tell us a little bit about your philosophy on key management?

I’m very dedicated to the concept of decentralization and empowering people. Going down the custodial route removes friction for the user, but it can easily lead to what we see with the current state of our financial institutions, where you have parties controlling pretty much everything.

Also, perhaps selfishly, the second that you turn a company into a custodial service a lot of your time, money, and resources go to compliance and regulation. I’m really focused on building things for people and I can’t imagine building a product where most of my time would be spent dealing with lawyers.

What was your day job while building MyEtherWallet?

I worked for this amazing company called Mangrove Labs building websites for clients. It gave me a lot of flexibility and it was easier in the early days for me to balance client work with MyEtherWallet. In 2017 as the ecosystem exploded our product exploded with popularity. It became harder and harder for me to balance these things, so I started moving my existing clients to other people and devoting my time to MyEtherWallet.

What was the reason for the transition from MyEtherWallet to MyCrypto?

While MyEtherWallet started off as an open source tool, as it grew it became more and more obvious that we needed to hire more people and transition towards becoming a company. We needed to be able to provide salaries and be protected as individuals. Unfortunately, my co-founder and I couldn’t come to an agreement on the path forward, and eventually we decided that because everything was open source we could start a new company and MyEtherWallet could stay MyEtherWallet. This was one of the hardest decisions I ever made because MyEtherWallet was my baby. But, when I asked myself where I wanted to be in a few years I realized that I wanted stability. I didn’t want to be living off donations from kind users, and I wanted to be able to hire people that needed to be paid in USD and not ETH. Above all, I wanted to make sure that myself and my family were protected, in the sense that if you don’t have a company, as an individual you’re pretty exposed.

What was the process of transitioning like?

MyCrypto was originally a fork of MyEtherWallet, but we rewrote the entire code base so it’s 100% new. It’s all written in React and TypeScript. Because it was built by a team rather than one person (like MyEtherWallet), the code is incredibly different.

What did rewriting the codebase help with?

When we first launched MyEtherWallet it was actually a jQuery and Bootstrap website. In 2016 we quickly and minimally moved into Angular 1.5. For all of 2016 and 2017 it was a mess of adding and deleting features. My co-founder would do all of the logic and back-end and I would do the front-end. When you have that environment, you don’t ever think about other people needing to work on the code as well. When we started hiring engineers it just made sense to rewrite the code base with documentation and best practices. We were able to make decisions as a team and discuss how certain pieces of the code base work, how we add code, and how we view code. Ultimately, this means that when code gets pushed live we ensure that we’ve built a process that is super secure.

What things do you love as a CEO?

One of the things I love the most is watching my team work together. Since I work independently or with one other person most of the time, the process of how people work together to do code reviews is so fascinating to watch.

What has been the biggest challenge of growing a team?

Turning into a company coincided with the change in the market in 2017. When we were experiencing this massive growth we had so many people using our product in unexpected ways. We had to handle a huge number of support tickets and we had to adjust and iterate our UI really quickly to prevent people from doing things that they shouldn’t do. We got really good at reacting quickly.

In 2018 as the market started dying down, people weren’t pitching us ideas everyday. One of the hardest things was that we had to move backwards. We did things in reverse order; we had to learn how to make decisions proactively rather than reactively and build our culture. For so long it was just putting out fires and we were all in this adrenaline rush reacting to whatever the biggest fire was. When the market started dying down, we started thinking about what we should be doing, since we’re not getting thousands of support tickets yelling at us. We had to learn how to work together, communicate, and how to prioritize.

What did you prioritize building at MyCrypto when the market died down?

The most important thing was having people bond on a deeper level. Instead of having this shared war-zone experience, we had to work hard on getting our team to communicate clearly and give feedback effectively. Now we have an all-hands call every Friday morning where the entire team hops on a call. It’s pretty informal; we talk about what things in the ecosystem excite us and sometimes we gossip about ecosystem drama. The conversation flows naturally and we encourage everyone on the team to participate and speak their mind. In online environments if you don’t know your teammates personally it’s easy for someone to type something that you interpret as blunt or abrasive. The all-hands call helps with this since people understand each other’s personalities and tones better.

Tell us about the acquisition of Ambo.

In terms of product I’ve always struggled with balancing new users with hardcore power users. At the beginning everyone was a power user, but now we have people who are just getting to the ecosystem. Building a product that is split between these two very different groups is challenging at times.

Our lawyer somehow got Ambo on his radar and I was blown away by what they were building. I think our visions were completely aligned, although we took different approaches to getting there. One of the most exciting things about Ambo (besides it being mobile) is that they’re really focused on new users. For all these reasons we decided to acquire them in order to merge our efforts and I’m so excited to see how our projects will evolve on the desktop, but also the mobile side.

This is the first interview in a two part series. Check back tomorrow for the rest of our conversation with Taylor about the long term vision of MyCrypto, the challenges of onboarding new users in the blockchain space, and creating an optimistic and supportive blockchain community.

Connect with Taylor on her Twitter and LinkedIn!

Write to Roshni Rawal at roshnirawal@berkeley.edu. The she256: Fireside Chats are sponsored by Upscribe.