Raghu Yarlagadda, CEO & Co-Founder of FalconX — Delivering the Crypto Industry’s Best Point-in-Time Execution

Gabriela Ariana Campoverde sits down with Raghu Yarlagadda, CEO and Co-Founder of FalconX. The company is a digital assets brokerage that provides a single account connected to global crypto liquidity pools. Asset managers can execute trades at prices routed across liquidity sources, and settle with a single counterparty. Raghu and Prabhakar Reddy launched the company just four years ago, and today it is valued at $3.75 Billion dollars.

In this episode you will hear about:

• How FalconX works with institutional clients:

“The problem we’re trying to solve specifically for institutions is without the likes of Falcon X institutions to navigate digital assets, it’s very difficult in that they’re going to a credit shop, getting a long-term loan and it takes about a month to basically get a mid to long-term loan.

And then they go to the exchanges and deploy the capital against the strategy on an exchange, whether it’s a market maker strategy. Then very quickly, if that strategy doesn’t work on that exchange again, they need to move all the money to somewhere else and lose a lot of balance sheet efficiency.

That was the world before Falcon X. And what Falcon X does, is it collapses all this workflow into 120 seconds. By that what I mean is Falcon X is a one-stop shop for institutions and all an institution would need is to come to Falcon X and sign-on. They can get credit for creating really good, reliable liquidity that Falcon X has, but can potentially access other venues to Falcon X as well. So what we do for institutions is we collapsed the three key workflows that institutions care about. . . .”

• What it’s like to run a start-up which is live 24/7:

“Running a crypto company is unlike any other company that I’ve done before or unlike any other company that I’ve worked for before. It’s 24/7. The market is moving at an exponential pace, unlike an enterprise SAS company, which is going to take a break at 6:00 PM in the evening.

The markets cycle and evolution is just intense, and it’s 24/7. The beauty of it is you’re being extremely efficient with time. You are learning so much more. What it takes for novel startup learn in two, three years, as a crypto company, you will learn that in one year — and startups are all about learning and experimentation.

So the ability to experiment your hypothesis and get an insight out of it is 2, 3, 4 times faster than any other company that I’ve worked.”

• Innovation for cryptocurrency retail investors:

“The next billion users are coming into crypto. As the next billion users coming into the ecosystem, they’re not going to go just to like, you know, the, the crypto retail exchanges and try to onboard onto digital assets because these are not early adopters.

Oftentimes they don’t know those brands. So the next billion users, whether it’s retail or institutions are going to go to their favorite FinTech app or the broker of their choice and expect crypto to be there. And we’re seeing that massive front. So our goal as an industry and specifically as Falcon X over the next one or two years is to make sure that every institution that is seeing this last a demand from their customer base is equipped to basically process crypto digital assets in a reliable way.”

• Raghu’s career and his commitment to education:

“Until I finished engineering. I didn’t fully understand what engineering is and that shouldn’t be the case, right? For anyone irrespective of whatever vocation that you want to choose, that ability to give access to that well-rounded education, not just scoring amazingly well in a complicated exam, but that well-rounded education is what is going to define the next few decades of professional carriers for a lot of people.

I want to make sure that the well-rounded education is accessible in the very early rounds of education pretty much everywhere in the world. So to expand that mission, the two components effect, like in what’s the right technology that enables well-rounded education and actually experimenting, improving, and refining that technology.

So what started as a technology to build that well-rounded education. We wanted to experiment with our tools and techniques and processes to create that well-rounded education as an experiment with 500 students, but that experiment has gone so well now it’s about 4,000 students. So I’m deeply excited about where Sarada Educational Institutions is going!”

• And much more!

About Raghu Yarlagadda

Raghu Yarlagadda co-founded FalconX in 2018. Prior to FalconX, Raghu worked at Google and Motorola Mobility and in 2014 launched Sarada Educational Institution which leverages edtech to improve education for its students across India. He is also a graduate of Harvard Business School and the University of Texas at Dallas, where he studied Electrical Engineering.

About FalconX

FalconX is a blockchain, cryptocurrency, and fintech-focused cryptocurrency brokerage and digital asset trading platform. For additional information on FalconX, please visit FalconX.io.

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