Awesome People - Ep 96
Engineering, UX, crypto payments, front-end and back-end
Hi founders and fellow VC Friends!
Each week we deliver one awesome person to your inbox. These are the people you need to know—the marketers, sales gurus, engineers, ops wizzes—who give your startup superpowers 🚀. The best part is, everyone is hireable!
In addition to this newsletter, we also run a Web3 Pallet job board.
Know someone who wants to work in web3? Tell them to join our Pallet board.
Want to hire top talent? Join our Pallet Collective to view 110+ pre-vetted candidates ready for interviews. We’ll drop another 20 candidates next week. Get 1 month 50% off with the code awesomecollective50, cancel anytime.
Please Meet Uneeb Agha, Your First Engineering Hire 🛠
We connected with Uneeb when he joined our Pallet board. Over the course of his career, he’s worked at Microsoft, Amazon, and Coinbase. He’s worked across infrastructure, back-end, and front-end teams. He recently took Coinbase Pay from zero to one. He led technical implementations for multiple fiat-to-crypto integrations. One little-known fact about Uneeb is that he hasn’t missed a Liverpool game since Klopp became the manager!
You can hire him to build the first iteration of your product. He’s most interested in working with crypto companies and has specific expertise in onramps and wallets.
Want an intro to Uneeb? Respond to this email and I’ll connect you!
Uneeb was Gracious Enough to Share 5 Tips from Working on Coinbase Payments ✨
Know your product tradeoffs ⏰
In crypto, startups often sacrifice user experience. In the past, users have been willing to trade poor design for better returns.
Throughout history, UX has always been important in payments. Customers prefer debit cards to cash because they are easier to carry. People prefer PayPal to wires because it’s simpler. They prefer online bank transfers to checks because they don’t have to drive to a bank.
In payments, the quality of your UX is largely dictated by your payment rails. Payments UX is impacted by fees, speed of settlement, fraud, and limit protections.
All products have tradeoffs.
At Coinbase, I built the support for instant withdrawals to your bank account through a debit card. Before this project, it would take 1-3 days to transfer your funds out of Coinbase. Users hated the wait. We took 24-to-72 hours down to 30 minutes. But, this required higher fees. Many users were more-than-willing to pay higher fees to access their money sooner. This increased both Coinbase’s revenue and users. It also helped Coinbase expand globally as there were regions where bank transfers were not yet supported.
Partner with complimentary players to improve UX 🤝
Users often don’t want to connect their bank accounts to new apps. It adds a ton of friction. How can you decrease friction? One option is to connect with strategic partners.
At Coinbase, integrating with PayPal was a popular request. We integrated Braintree to allow users to connect through PayPal and drive customer growth. Back to product tradeoffs — users increased, but so did fraud. We had to introduce restrictions and lower limits to mitigate fraud risk. But, overall, it was a product win.
You can always improve your UX 📈
Products need to prioritize UX to expand beyond crypto natives. At Coinbase, we kept looking for solutions to improve onramps. The final Coinbase integration I worked on was with Apple Pay. With Apple Pay, there are no fees or increase in settlement times. Now you can easily use your stored payment methods on your Apple device to buy crypto. This was a hit, especially with new users who didn’t have a payment method saved.
You can always ask yourself, how can we improve conversion? How can we improve the experience?
Leverage your product’s strengths 💪
Coinbase is in a unique position because it has integrations with US/EU debit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, ACH, SEPA, PayPal, and others. In addition, customers are already KYC’d so Coinbase can provide higher purchase limits than competitors. You can imagine a world where you can authenticate with Coinbase and have access to all your payment methods on file. The experience would be more seamless and powerful than logging in with PayPal.
This is exactly what we did. I proposed to Coinbase leadership that we should compete with Wyre and integrate with MetaMask, a popular wallet. Previously, this was a multi-step process and very error-prone. You can now login to MetaMask via Coinbase to directly deposit funds without leaving the app.
We need more user-friendly onramps🚀
We have to think of users first. Users don’t care how things work on the backend. They want fast, easy, and secure products. There will be custodial and non-custodial wallets. You’ll be able to hold crypto on websites, mobile applications, and browser extensions. If you’re building a product, you can use fiat onramps such as Wyre or Moonpay to embed into your dApp or wallet. For most products, the wallet will be invisible in the future.
It’s worth noting that crypto payments are still far from ideal. One big challenge is how do we make transfers on the blockchain reversible? This is a big problem right now and warrants a separate discussion on its own. We have so much still to build!
Want an intro to Uneeb? Respond to this email and I’ll connect you!
As always, please let me know if you have any questions and if you want an intro to Uneeb!
Stay awesome,
Julia Lipton + Will Johnson (our amazing fellow who edited this newsletter)
Founder of Awesome People Ventures & Talent
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Awesome People Continued 🤩
Recent Features 📝
James, Your Head of Content and Brand — Head of Communication and VP of Brand at two successful startups. He has experience leading messaging, working with Fortune 500 companies, and even interviewing Presidential candidates.
James, Your NFT-Native Ops Leader — most recently, led OpenSea’s internalization product including everything from research to go-to-market. Prior to OpenSea, James was an executive at Ula, the hypergrowth Indonesian e-commerce startup backed by Sequoia, Tencent, and Jeff Bezos.
Joe, Your Fractional Head of Ops — was the co-founder and COO of a YC-backed company, Tyltgo. They created a same-day delivery marketplace for SMBs. Before that, he led Uber Eats’ Canadian expansion. He managed marketplace ops across millions of monthly deliveries.
Feature Openings 💼
Syndicate: Sr. Solidity Engineer
Kairos Art: Founding Smart Contract Engineer
3Box Labs: Product Lead, Ceramic
XMTP: Sr. UX Researcher
Arkive: Smart Contract Engineer