From Robinhood SWE to $1B+ Founder: Non-Linear Careers, Promotion Disillusionment, and Key Startup Lessons

This interview features Jayendra Jog, who transitioned from a Software Engineer at Robinhood to become the founder of Sei Labs, a crypto startup that raised $35 million. Jayendra shares his experiences of becoming disillusioned with traditional software engineering career ladders, how he managed to secure promotions while feeling disengaged, and his journey into entrepreneurship. He also discusses key lessons from founding a startup, fundraising, and what to expect as a founder.

Big Tech Internships

Ryan: You started your own crypto company with a market cap of coins worth over $10 billion. I want to delve into your career story, from your time at Facebook and Robinhood, and what ultimately motivated you to leave. Let's begin with your Facebook journey. How did you first get into big tech, and what's the story behind that?

Jay: Life, for anyone, is not linear; it has its ups and downs. When there are ups, they often manifest as step-function improvements rather than steady linear growth. In college, I was driven to secure one of the prestigious brand-name internships. I think it was partly a mimetic desire at the time, as Facebook and Google internships were widely considered the cream of the crop.

As a sophomore, I relentlessly prepared. I was fortunate to secure interviews with many of these companies and went into "hermit mode" to land one of these internships. Back then, I wasn't particularly adept at LeetCode-style problems. However, a friend, Vic, organized an event called "LeetCode and Chill" where a group of CS students gathered on a Friday night to solve problems together. We worked on "Number of Islands," a classic problem involving breadth-first or depth-first search to identify connected components. Coincidentally, that was the exact question I received during my onsite Facebook internship interview. Had I not attended that event, I wouldn't have secured the Facebook internship, and I believe none of my subsequent career events would have materialized. It was a completely random, lucky coincidence.

Ryan: You said Google and Facebook were top-tier. What about other companies like Palantir, which was also highly regarded then, or finance firms?

Jay: What you value is often a function of what your social circle values and discusses. My friends at UCLA weren't focusing on those other companies as much. Perhaps at a different college, high-frequency trading firms would have been seen as more prestigious. In my social circle at UCLA, Google and Facebook were paramount at that time. As I matured within that circle, I noticed other companies like Palantir and various pre-IPO companies gaining prestige.

Ryan: You landed the Facebook internship, which was your dream at the time. How was the actual experience?

Jay: To be honest, it wasn't particularly fun. It felt very impersonal. While it was an improvement over my previous summer internship, I wanted a smaller environment. This led me to Pinterest the following summer. That was part of the Kleiner Perkins Fellows program, and I expected full startup exposure. Pinterest was definitely a much better experience. Being based in San Francisco, it had a better culture, and as a smaller company, there was a much closer-knit intern class. This allowed me to form more meaningful friendships. I'm not in touch with many from my Facebook intern class, but I'm still super close with four or five guys from Pinterest. The atmosphere they created was just very different.

Joining Robinhood

Ryan: After your Pinterest internship and graduating, you chose Robinhood.

Jay: Exactly. It was September or October of my senior year, and I was nearing graduation. I had a few options: return to Pinterest, which I wasn't overly enthusiastic about because many of my friends weren't going back, diminishing the social appeal. A second option was a master's degree through UCLA's fifth-year program, which I seriously considered. I also interviewed at several other places.

I was seeking a smaller environment where I could be surrounded by people who would go on to do significant things. Robinhood was one of the companies I spoke with. I attended the Greylock Tech Fair, held at the Oracle Arena in SF. It's an invite-only event for interns, meaning most companies don't have long lines. However, at Robinhood in 2017, they had the longest line – a couple hundred people waiting to talk to them. I found it intriguing, especially since I didn't know much about trading or brokerage accounts then. After talking to their team, I was impressed by their caliber. In hindsight, it was absolutely the right decision. A master's degree wouldn't have mattered for my career, and Pinterest wouldn't have been as impactful as Robinhood. The quality of people joining Robinhood at that time was exceptionally high. Roughly a third of my new grad class went on to raise money and start venture-backed companies, a much higher percentage than you'd typically see. When you're at a rapidly scaling company, you encounter scaling problems and get exposed to a wider range of issues, leading to much faster learning and career growth. This was definitely more so than at a smaller startup where things don't change much year-to-year. I'm very grateful for my experience at Robinhood.

Ryan: What series funding was Robinhood at when you joined?

Jay: When I signed the offer, it was Series C. By the time I joined, it was Series G. When I signed, the company had about a hundred people, occupying basically one building and two smaller buildings across the street, one of which was actually a house with bedrooms where engineers worked at standing desks. It was a much smaller environment than Pinterest.

Big Tech vs. Startups Discussion

Ryan: The common advice for new grads is to go into big tech for the "stamp" and experience a large environment. It sounds like you hold a contradictory opinion. What's your rationale for choosing smaller companies?

Jay: To be fair, I think I already had that "stamp" from my Facebook internship, so my decision might have been different otherwise. However, I believe you need to optimize for what truly matters in your career. If you're optimizing for Total Compensation (TC), you won't hit the ceiling at a big tech company. The maximum upside comes from joining a very early-stage company and seeing it succeed spectacularly. If you're optimizing for learning, you'll definitely find better opportunities at a smaller, rapidly growing company. You need to identify your optimization goal. For me, it became clear I valued growth—both learning and career growth—more than just money. That's why I chose Robinhood. I don't think my career growth there was as fast as I'd anticipated; it felt more like a normal company progression. However, it proved to be significantly better from a learning perspective.

Ryan: That's a common sentiment I hear: go to a small company for learning. I also feel that the small company path is high-variance. You could learn a lot more, but the company could also stop growing, reducing learning opportunities. In big tech, teams can also be constantly reorganized.

Jay: Yes, I think it broadly depends on how lucky you are with the specific position you land in. Perhaps the biggest controllable factor is the kind of people you'll be working with, as the career prospects of any startup are uncertain. You might work on something that seems brilliant at the time, but it might not gain enough traction to secure the next funding round. Optimizing for surrounding yourself with really smart people offers the best chance to learn significantly more than you would otherwise. That's a pretty good heuristic for people deciding where to go.

Getting Jaded About Robinhood Career Growth

Ryan: You mentioned starting at Robinhood expecting rapid growth, but it didn't meet your expectations.

Jay: I went in believing I'd experience pretty fast career growth. In context, I think I honestly joined a bit too late. By the time I started, it was Series D, and the people who joined during the Series A and B timeframe did achieve the kind of rapid growth I hoped for, moving up the ladder quickly to become engineering managers or even higher within two to three years. In my case, by the time I joined, it was already starting to feel like a big company progression. At my three-month mark, performance reviews were held, but I couldn't participate because I had joined a week or two too late. I had to wait for the next cycle, six months later. By my nine-month mark, I went through the entire performance review process, having worked diligently for those nine months.

There were several days I worked until 2:00 AM. Our on-call rotation was horrendous back then, mainly due to the "overnight batch" process. After the market closes each day, a lot of operations need to be completed before the market opens the next day. In our case, this required significant manual intervention. Hopefully, it's fixed now; I hope it's better for current Robinhood engineers. But back then, it was terrible. There were times it stretched to 5:00 AM, dangerously close to causing a major business issue for Robinhood. If the batch process isn't done by market opening, there's significant downside, as it involves critical tasks like trade settlement. You have to work with many external counterparties to ensure all systems are synchronized. It's essentially a series of batch jobs that run sequentially. If any fail, you have to diagnose and fix the issue. If there's a code-related problem, you get it out and then continue the process. Imagine three or four deployments happening on a given day, potentially introducing two issues that cause batch jobs to fail at, say, 11:00 PM. You'd page the person who wrote the code, they'd fix it, and then you'd restart the process.

I believe Robinhood's codebase wasn't architected for maximum stability, resulting in considerable technical debt. The core point was that despite working incredibly hard and receiving a five out of five performance rating – which is quite atypical and made me happy – there was no corresponding promotion or compensation change. I wondered, "Why did I do this?" When you're 22, there are many ways to invest your time. I felt that if I hadn't dedicated so much time to work, I would have been happier. I don't know if that's entirely true, but it certainly felt like the effort I was putting in wasn't commensurate with the reward. So, I decided to become a bit more "checked out" and just go through the motions of "playing the game." This made me incredibly jaded about the big tech environment, where it often feels like many people are just going through the motions. I felt there had to be something bigger to work towards.

Ryan: And that disillusionment set in nine months into your three-and-a-half-year tenure there?

Jay: My situation was complex for a couple of reasons. There was a death in the family, which made it harder for me to consider leaving. Additionally, they gave us stock options that were expensive to exercise. It would have cost me $400,000 to exercise them, which I didn't have readily available. I would have needed a loan. My plan was to stay until there was a way to navigate that, either by staying long enough (they offer seven years post-departure to exercise) or by waiting for the IPO. The IPO happened in July 2021, which effectively removed my "handcuffs," giving me the freedom to pursue whatever I wanted. That's when I started delving deeper into crypto and exploring what we could build there.

Ryan: Looking back, you mentioned compensation at a pre-IPO startup versus big tech. Did it ultimately result in higher pay?

Jay: Yes, it was an order of magnitude higher than if I had spent three and a half years at a Google or Facebook. Financially, it was a fantastic decision in hindsight. At the time, I felt locked in without much flexibility, which also detracted from my happiness. We certainly got lucky. While some of my friends who joined pre-IPO companies also saw their companies IPO, many others haven't, and their stock options haven't materialized into significant value. My graduating class in 2018 was quite fortunate with the timing of the tech IPO boom in 2021. The IPO market has since cooled down, with fewer opportunities. Someone who graduated in 2020, for example, might not have had the same liquidation opportunities.

Coasting and Getting Promoted

Ryan: Regarding your career growth, it sounds like you were a bit disengaged. Were you still aiming for promotions or just getting them while coasting?

Jay: I was. I still got promoted in the second performance cycle, and then before leaving, I was technically up for another promotion. At that point, I was still "playing the game" but wasn't investing much mental energy or time into it. It's a strange thing: I was putting in the bare minimum to stay close to average, then spending my time elsewhere.

Ryan: How did you manage to play the game, do the minimum, yet still get promoted?

Jay: At Robinhood, it was probably easier than it would have been at a bigger company. I joined, and the company grew tenfold afterward. I quickly became a domain expert because we were hiring many people and building numerous new services. I was often the only person who knew how to do ten different things. Once you're given that much responsibility, it's easy to be seen as an expert and someone reliable for solving problems. I was a competent engineer who knew a lot, which made it very easy to get promoted the second time. I was already functioning as an engineering lead, handling multiple systems, so that responsibility was essentially given to me.

Ryan: I see. So it sounds like in a high-growth environment, if you're competent, you naturally become a load-bearing member.

Jay: Yes, absolutely, if it's a high-growth environment where both the team and the workload are expanding. Because of that, I also got many opportunities I likely wouldn't have at a bigger company. I mentored three different people, starting my first mentorship about a year and a half into my job there. In many larger companies, you might not get your first mentee or intern until you're much more senior.

Ryan: Right. So it sounds like many career trajectories depend on opportunity and luck, factors outside our control. But two consistent themes here are that you sought out talented people and gravitated towards a high-growth environment. Those elements, working together, led to promotions even when you weren't actively striving for them.

GameStop Stories from the Inside

Ryan: I understand you worked at Robinhood during the GameStop saga. What was that like from the inside?

Jay: For anyone unfamiliar, during the GameStop saga, about a dozen stocks—GameStop, AMC, and ten others I don't recall—were skyrocketing. This was during COVID, when people had received stimulus checks and were engaging in a lot of speculative trading. These stocks surged, leading hedge funds and institutional traders to believe, based on fundamental analysis, that the valuations were unsustainable. They decided to short these stocks, expecting them to return to normal. The problem with shorting is that you borrow a stock, sell it, and then buy it back later to return it. When you buy it back, it drives the price up. So, as prices rose, people had to close their short positions, creating a "short squeeze" with increased buying pressure.

These toxic short squeezes were happening. In a way, it felt like the "little guy" was beating the "big guy" institutions. Robinhood was the primary platform for this trading. Then, on January 28, 2021, Robinhood abruptly disabled buys on all these "meme stocks." I found out when I woke up and thought, "This is crazy." That day, so many people reached out to me, asking, "What the hell is going on?" Many were financially invested. When Robinhood turned off buys, and GameStop's price began to drop, they were understandably upset. As an insider, it makes you feel incredibly powerless in such a situation. One thing I realized is how archaic our current financial system truly is.

In Robinhood's case, this occurred because of T+2 settlement. Back then, trades took two days to settle, and during this period, Robinhood needed to hold collateral for the positions people were opening. They would have needed to provide billions of dollars to counterparties on January 28th if they were to allow continued trading of these assets. Normal people don't know about any of that. It's a ramification of a traditional financial system built 40 years ago. It made it clear to me that we will need much better financial infrastructure in the future, which became one of the inspirations for Sei Labs.

Ryan: That's interesting. I remember when they turned off buys; the public narrative was that they were intentionally manipulating the price. But you're saying it was purely logistical—they couldn't support the trades.

Jay: Yes, Robinhood did not turn off buys to manipulate the price. They did it because they needed to put up more collateral. I think they miscommunicated this, potentially on purpose. They were saying they didn't turn off buys for X, Y, Z reasons, even though the collateral issue was the actual case. I believe this was because they were actively fundraising at the same time, needing to raise billions of dollars. It was a difficult situation for them. I don't know what the right way to handle it would have been. They were fighting for their company's existence, especially since regulators didn't particularly favor them to begin with. Things could have gone very wrong. All things considered, they navigated it acceptably, but their communication to the public could have been much better.

Leaving Robinhood

Ryan: So, it sounds like you were getting promoted but were disengaged and looking to leave. What's the story behind you eventually leaving to start a startup?

Jay: Growing up in Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs are the most respected figures, not sports or Hollywood stars. Everyone talks about Steve Jobs, not Madonna. I think anyone growing up in Silicon Valley considers starting something at some point. My Kleiner Perkins Fellowship felt much more accessible; many participants had started or were considering starting their own companies. Being surrounded by that group at 21 made me believe starting something was doable.

In 2019, my co-founder and I decided to start building things together after my promotion didn't work out, leaving me wondering what to do with my life. We spent nights and weekends trying to get an AWS cost management startup off the ground. It's a rather dull space, as your job is to help companies cut cloud costs. High-growth companies aren't interested because they can easily raise more money. The only companies you can work with are those that are atrophying. Being a small startup, we'd only target Series A or Series B companies that had stalled their growth and needed to cut costs—a horrible customer base. We didn't find much traction, and honestly, thank God for that, because I don't think I would have enjoyed spending several years on it. That was our first attempt in 2019.

In 2021, we decided to focus more on crypto. We explored various ideas, but ultimately, we wanted to build something like Robinhood in a decentralized way. The idea was that a decentralized approach could solve the issues that arose during the Robinhood saga. This initially led us to build a central limit order book-based exchange on-chain. Without going too deep into the technical details, we initially aimed to build an application (an exchange). We then realized it was more strategic to build the underlying infrastructure for such an application, which led to Sei Labs. That's around the time I quit my job, and we went all-in.

What did I need to see before going all-in? We had a team of people willing to work part-time with us, which helped. We had a good relationship, and we started seeing initial excitement around what we were building—that's when I pulled the trigger. My bar for taking that leap was lower than it might be for others because the IPO had just happened. Financially, there wasn't much downside for me, as I was hitting the end of my four-year grant anyway. I thought, "This is the time," and in hindsight, it was a fantastic moment to make that move.

Ryan: Imagine Robinhood's compensation was just average, similar to working at Google or another big tech company. Do you think you still would have left to start your own company with the same conviction, or was the financial upside a major factor?

Jay: It would've been even easier to make that decision, honestly. The six months of equity I left on the table still represented a significant dollar value to me. If it had been a normal level of compensation I was foregoing, I don't think it would have been a hard decision at all. In general, I think people are way too scared of leaving their jobs. Most of the time, if you're competent, things will work out. I don't know many people who are good at their jobs at Company A and then can't find work again. In fact, I don't know anyone like that. Typically, if someone is good at Company A, they have no trouble finding a job elsewhere. So, yes, I think people tend to over-index on the risk they perceive when leaving to start something new.

Ryan: I see. So you're saying it's not that big of a deal, and you can just go back or find another opportunity if it fails?

Jay: Exactly. If you're a software engineer in tech, there's very little downside, mostly just opportunity cost. If you spend a year trying to get something off the ground and it doesn't work out, you're actually more valuable to a startup or any company. If you've gone through the experience of trying to start something, you gain valuable skills. Many people worry that if they're not working as a software engineer for a year, it will be hard to get a job. But if you're actively trying to build a product, you learn a lot that makes you more valuable to any business.

Ryan: What are those things you learn?

Jay: For instance, getting product validation, developing a product idea, assessing if people care about it, then navigating the entire product lifecycle: designing, engineering, going to market, marketing, and business development. These are many things a "normal" engineer doesn't have to do. In this case, you learn all of that. When you later join a company as an engineer, if you can also play the roles of a marketer, product manager, and business development person, you'll build a much better product and play a much bigger role in its eventual go-to-market strategy.

Ryan: What about the worst-case scenario? Say you quit your job, work on something where you don't achieve Product-Market Fit (PMF), and don't have a marketable milestone from that venture, even if you gained skills. Who would give you credibility if you just explored ideas?

Jay: I don't think big companies would give you much credibility. However, many early-stage startups would. If you interview at a seed or pre-seed startup, they would be very happy to work with a former founder-engineer, much more so than a normal engineer. This is because a founder can be far more impactful in the "zero to one" process of getting something off the ground.

Ryan: Right. So it's like if you choose that career path, it doesn't necessarily pigeonhole you, but your career might bias more towards smaller companies.

Jay: I think smaller companies are where you'll excel more. But there's also the aspect that people who try to start a company are often already biased towards smaller companies, so they're more likely to only interview for those types of companies if their startup doesn't work out. That's also where they'll find more interesting problems to work on anyway. You probably see more examples of people leaving to start a company, failing, and then going to another small company. I don't think that's solely because big companies reject them; it's also because that's the environment those founders want to be in.

Ryan: Yeah, there are definitely some confounding factors for sure. I've seen examples of people leaving big tech, starting something, failing, and coming right back to big tech, so that's true. You can definitely do that as well. I want to talk about fundraising because your startup, thankfully, was successful, and you raised a lot of money. I don't know the total.

Jay: We raised $35 million in total: a $5 million seed round, followed by strategic rounds amounting to $30 million.

Learnings from Raising $35M

Ryan: Okay, so you raised $35 million. You must have learned something significant in that process. What was that like?

Jay: Our seed round fundraising began right after Terra, one of the biggest blockchains, collapsed. We started raising three weeks after that, which was one of the worst times in crypto history to raise money. We learned a lot about rejection, as most investors said no. We also learned about the end-to-end lifecycle of fundraising, having never done it before: intro calls, meeting partners, discussing the team, product, vision, and so on. It's actually not that scary. There's a lot of group dynamics. Initially, everyone is skeptical, but once one fund gets excited, it becomes much easier to convince others to join. Many investors are on the sidelines, trying to maintain optionality, often giving excuses like, "Oh yeah, we're still doing diligence. We'll get back to you in a week or something," just to see how the deal plays out. There's definitely that aspect of trying to generate more excitement for the investment.

Ryan: I see. So it sounds like the most impactful thing is to get a good lead investor, and then others will follow.

Jay: If you secure a Tier 1 lead investor, everything else becomes super easy.

Ryan: So how did you get your lead investor, and what does that process look like if you're just an engineer with a product?

Jay: In our case, we simply got introduced to a lot of top-tier crypto investors. One of the funds we spoke with was Multicoin. They were the biggest investor in Solana and made billions from that investment. They're widely regarded as one of the top five to ten investors in crypto. We had really good conversations with them, and they ultimately decided to invest in us. After that investment, everything became much easier. Initially, when you're starting something without a track record, everyone is skeptical. But once you get that "stamp" from a reputable investor, it becomes much easier to open doors for business development opportunities, future fundraising, or anything required for the actual launch. It simplifies things significantly.

Another thing I'll note is that crypto fundraising is very different from traditional venture. In traditional venture, it's probably even harder. In crypto, most projects have a seed round, a Series A, and then typically a token launch event. They don't usually raise institutional venture capital rounds much after that. In AI companies or most Web2 companies, there are several fundraising rounds, and people scrutinize revenue and financials. In crypto, software metrics are looked at, but if you're building a blockchain, there isn't really the same concept of revenue. In Web2, it's "Okay, what's your ARR?"—a fundamental metric and how fast it's growing. In crypto, it's much more about the excitement around the project and how many teams are building with it. It reminds me of internet investing from 1995-1997, where alternative metrics like "number of eyeballs looking at a website" were used. I think it's a much more subjective space for crypto investors.

What Value Does Crypto Provide?

Ryan: Let's say I'm a skeptical software engineer who sees a lot of "grift" in crypto. What's the clear case for the value crypto provides the world?

Jay: There are two main lines of thought here. First, any early-stage industry tends to have a ton of "grift" and things that don't make sense. When the internet was starting in the mid-nineties, arguably its biggest use case was porn, right? Yet, the internet has completely transformed society. It takes time, and new industries inevitably attract a lot of questionable activity. We're seeing similar semblances with AI now, where many people are raising money without building anything truly meaningful, likely misusing funds. Crypto has certainly had many such events. However, we're seeing these events become less common due to a couple of factors. First, there's increasing regulatory clarity. Once governments get involved and set clear guidelines, the "grift" naturally diminishes. There's also social policing: if people observe patterns where certain actions lead to bad outcomes, they become less supportive of founders who might engage in those actions. This negative behavior is becoming much less common.

In terms of crypto's future, I believe it will play a very significant role in changing the financial system. Currently, crypto excels at two things: payments and trading. The reason is that a distributed ledger adds considerable cost because you're essentially performing the same operation multiple times across different machines. The benefit, however, is verifiability—you can trust the computation because you're doing it yourself. The only use case where this really makes sense is finance. When actual money is at stake, that's where crypto can be truly impactful. It's already playing a significant role in international remittances through stablecoins. As stablecoin adoption grows, more financial infrastructure will be built around them. We're going to see a version of a completely decentralized Wall Street that is globally accessible, allowing anyone to trade and utilize it.

Consider someone in a country with an unstable currency. What do they hold their money in? Unless they're investing in a stock market, they don't want to hold a currency inflating 30% in a few days. In such cases, they'd want to hold US dollars. But if their country restricts easy access to US dollars, what's the solution? Crypto is becoming a clear option, with people buying USDC or USDT for transactions. This is another use case where crypto is gaining traction. In Southeast Asia and Latin America, it's being increasingly used for actual payments, leading to wider adoption. Long-term, I firmly believe the verifiability crypto offers will be incredibly useful for enabling computation between untrusting parties, thereby creating numerous financial use cases for people worldwide.

Learnings and When to Leave

Ryan: As we conclude, looking back on your career, which period do you feel you experienced the most growth, and why?

Jay: Undoubtedly, 2022 was the year of my most significant growth. That was when you started the company? Yes, when we started. When you're in a job, there are many support structures. When you start your own company, you're on your own and have to figure everything out. As a result, I learned an immense amount. I think practically every year since then, I've learned more than I did during any of the jobs I worked for other people.

Ryan: I see. And these learnings are more about non-engineering aspects?

Jay: The engineering side of things is generally pretty straightforward. Definitely, once you're moving up the ladder at a company like Meta, you're solving really difficult problems. I don't think most businesses face those kinds of problems or need such high-level support to solve them. Most businesses are solving fairly mundane problems. From the perspective of building a product people use, you typically don't encounter those extreme scaling challenges. If you're a competent L4 engineer, I think you can do perfectly fine as a founder from an engineering standpoint.

Ryan: So, if I were a new grad wanting to start my own company, would you recommend waiting until I hit a minimum bar of technical competency?

Jay: If you know what you want to build, I think you should just go for it. You'll either build that technical competency or, more likely, hire for it. If you have a good idea, it'll be pretty easy to raise money. If you raise money, then it's going to be pretty straightforward to grow a team from there as well.

Ryan: Looking back with 20/20 hindsight, your startup has been successful. How has your team grown over the last few years compared to big tech levels, and what do those promotions look like?

Jay: When we started in 2022, there were about five to seven of us. Now, across multiple entities, if we combine them all, it's around 60 full-time people. We've been pretty lean in our growth compared to what I saw at places like Robinhood. I believe that was absolutely the right decision. Growing slowly allows you to maintain culture and prevents the scaling issues you often see with bureaucracy and people feeling directionless. That also allows you to move more quickly.

Advice for His Younger Self

Ryan: The last thing I want to ask is, if you could go back to yourself right after graduating from UCLA and offer some advice, knowing everything you know now, what would you say?

Jay: The main thing that comes to mind is not to be so scared. I'm naturally a more risk-averse person, and as a result, I've been hesitant to take big leaps of faith. I know other people for whom that's very easy. I think there's a middle ground: you should thoroughly think through any decision you make, but then pull the trigger quickly. I shouldn't have been scared at all about leaving my job at Robinhood, even potentially earlier.

Ryan: I see. So in a perfect world, you would have left earlier.

Jay: In a perfect world, I would have left earlier. But I don't know if things would have played out the same way, because I might not have started a crypto company in that case. It might have been that AWS cost management company, and I don't think that would have had the same outcome.

Ryan: Cool. Well, thank you for your time, Jay.