Founder Fridays: Venture Builder to Laser-Focused Building

Tascha Punyaneramitdee shares about her entry into DeFi and the journey leading up to Stella.

Can you introduce Stella for people that aren’t familiar with it?

We started out as Alpha Finance Labs in 2020 and we later became Alpha Venture DAO as we started to incubate external DeFi projects, in addition to building in-house DeFi products. Recently, Alpha Venture DAO was rebranded to Stella to reflect the next chapter and mission for the project.

Stella is a leveraged strategies protocol where borrowers borrow at 0% interest rate at all times and in all scenarios to execute leveraged DeFi strategies and lenders lend supported crypto assets for lending APY. Stella’s 0% cost to borrow and Pay-As-You-Earn (PAYE) model, for the first time, align incentives between borrowers and lenders, as yields generated from the leveraged strategies performed by borrowers are cut and shared to lenders. Borrowers only pay if they generate yields, and lenders earn a share of yields generated by borrowers. The more borrowers earn, the more lenders earn.

I understand your background is largely in finance (IB, VC, PE). What made you take the leap to more Product-related roles, starting as a Product Manager with Tencent and now Project Lead at Stella?

I find both finance and tech industries exciting, but I wanted to understand better where I can add the most value in a tech company as a person without an engineering background. So instead of starting my career in a tech company right away, I decided to go for tech investment banking, meaning providing financial services such as IPO, mergers & acquisitions (M&A), debt financing to tech companies in the US and Europe, to get as much exposure to all key functions in tech companies.

Working with many tech companies definitely helped to broaden and deepen my view of the industry and where I see myself. Then, I got placed on a potential M&A deal that I had to work hand-in-hand with the client’s product management team and advise on new product growth angles to build up towards M&A timeline. That deal became my favorite, and that was the beginning of my career shift journey towards a product role.

Getting momentum in the beginning for a venture studio is never easy. What was the journey like in building your first product, Alpha Homora?

Prior to Alpha Homora, we were actually building and planning to launch another product. However, the craze of yield farming and the rise of many DeFi protocols with various incentives created big shifts in DeFi. Instead of sticking through the planned product, we decided to fold that and build a whole new product, Alpha Homora, in 2 weeks to capture the opportunity in time.

And the journey was fruitful. The important lesson here is that you can only plan as much. At the end of the day, your product will go live in the market, and it is key to listen, understand, and react according to the market demand. Of course, you cannot react to every opportunity, and it is fine to miss some, as there will always be the next one.

Tell us more about your recent rebrand from Alpha Venture DAO to Stella and the motivations behind it.

Previously as Alpha Finance Lab/Alpha Venture DAO, we started out before DeFi got a lot of adoption in late 2020. Because the industry was early in its days and unclear what kind of products will see adoption for a sustainable period of time, our mission then was to experiment, build, and incubate a number of interesting DeFi ideas and products.

Fast forward to today in which it is clear what works and doesn’t work in DeFi, we believe that a good leverage system is needed for DeFi to be sustained and to grow with strong fundamentals.

The goal for Stella is to redesign ‘leveraged DeFi’ in a way that incentives are all aligned among borrowers and lenders and unlock the next potential of DeFi.

What is one piece of advice you’d give your younger self if you could go back in time?

The 80/20 rule goes a long way. You should frequently evaluate where your time and energy are spent on and reflect whether these areas should be where you focus on the most. This will require you to think what’s the bottom line and what are the key things that drive to that bottom line, and you should focus a lot on those.

It is easy to lose sight as you scale and things change internally and externally.

Interested to try out Stella’s beta? Check out their official announcement for more details!