Thibaut Sahaghian from Multis on Building a Business on Crypto
What We Discuss With Thibaut Sahaghian
Embracing cryptocurrencies into your business can be a daunting undertaking.
While you should expect the transition to be gradual and perhaps even boring, starting small and experimenting today will provide your business with the 1st mover advantage.
3 of the biggest hurdles to going corporate with crypto today are the following;
(i) First payments and treasury managements
(ii) Secondly tracking your wallets and transactions
(iii) And finally exchanging crypto to fiat
To discuss how you can start building your business on crypto and embrace the open financial system, I spoke to Thibaut Sahaghian, the CEO and founder of Multis.
Multis allows organizations to manage their crypto treasury & cash flow, run crypto payroll, track spending across wallets, and have recently launched corporate cards to allow your business to off ramp and pay in USD within a few seconds.
In this episode today, we’ll discuss;
- The mindset change of what building a business on crypto entails
- What is Multis, its features and how to get started
- The good practices to have around tracking wallets, treasury management and offramping
- Approach to upskill your team for crypto finance & operations, and much more.
Shownotes
[00:00:00] Umar: Welcome to The Accountant Quits, brought to you by Request Finance, an all in one platform for crypto organizations and freelancers to easily manage and track their invoices, salaries, and expenses in a compliant way. On this podcast, we discuss how blockchain will impact the accounting profession and how accountants should prepare themselves for the future of work.
[00:00:23] Umar: My name’s Umar, your host, and even if some might prefer to me as the accountant gone rogue, my job is to provide you with the blockchain knowledge you need that will be relevant for the accounting industry as a whole.
[00:00:37] Umar: Welcome to Episode 38. Embracing cryptocurrency into your business can be a daunting undertaking. Even for the crypto savvy and builders in the space, there are many hurdles for them to make their organization be functioning entirely on crypto rails.
[00:00:53] Umar: While you should expect the transition to be gradual and perhaps even boring, starting small and experimenting today will provide your business with the 1st mover advantage.
[00:01:04] Umar: Three of the biggest hurdles to going corporate with crypto today are the following; first, payments and treasury management. Secondly, tracking your wallets and transactions. And finally exchanging crypto into fiat.
[00:01:18] Umar: To discuss how you can start building your business on crypto and embrace this open financial system, today I have the pleasure to be speaking to Thibaut, the CEO and founder of Multis. Multis allows organizations to manage their crypto, treasury, and cash flow, run crypto payroll, track spending across wallets and have recently launched corporate cards to allow your business to off ramp and pay USD within a few seconds.
[00:01:46] Umar: In this episode, today, we’ll discuss the mindset change of what building a business on crypto entails, what is Multis, its features and how to get started, the good practices to have around tracking wallets, treasury management, and off ramping, the approach to upskill your team for crypto finance and operations and much more.
[00:02:09] Umar: Thibaut, welcome to the show and thanks for making the time to be here. I’m super happy to be here.
[00:02:14] Umar: Can we start by sharing a bit of your personal journey into blockchain and the whole story of how Multis started?
[00:02:21] Thibaut: Sure. my crypto story started a few years back.
[00:02:24] Thibaut: So 2014, so I used to work as an investment banker in a really big, French investment bank and you know, I discovered crypto first as a speculative asset, right? So I’m talking about Bitcoin mostly, you know, Monero, Z Cash, those OG, you know, layer one OGs. That was the first discovery, I guess the first, contact point.
[00:02:45] When I really, really got into crypto, I really started to realize the potential of this brand new tech. You know, everything happened in 2000, late 2015, I quit my investment banking job. I joined a politician running for campaign for president, actually, and I was working closely with one of his chief advisor, especially on mobilization and coding.
[00:03:02] Thibaut: And that’s, you know, we were trying to find new ways to prevent fraud to, you know, track campaign funding, you know, to fight corruption. And that’s how we started to meet entrepreneurs in the civic tech space. And some of them, many of them actually were to build the systems, you know, this anti fraud, anti-corruption systems on the blockchain, right?
[00:03:23] Thibaut: So we were talking about color coins at that time, not necessarily years ERC20 or tokens. But all these people, you know, were using crypto as a tool for empowerment. So here we’re talking about empowerment for citizen, and this is, I guess the reason why I’m going this far back is that this idea of empowerment is core to what we do today at Multis, right?
[00:03:43] Thibaut: So we’re not necessarily empowering citizens, but we believe we’re empowering entrepreneurs and operators to navigate the complicated waters of crypto today.
[00:03:51] Umar: Now the listeners of this podcast already have a good understanding of web3, but given the title of the episode, which is building a business on crypto, I thought it might be helpful to start with the ideological reminder of Web3. So for people who still need to be convinced or need a reminder about the philosophical underpinnings of Web3 and why it’s necessary to let go of this antiquated, siloed, and closed financial model, and now embrace a decentralized financial model, could you paint us a picture of the mindset change required to move one’s business on crypto?
[00:04:27] Thibaut: So you first have to acknowledge that it’s a change of paradigm, right? And you know, the first idea that you know that comes to mind here is self custody. This is one of the big change, right? Crypto is a world where you cannot yell at somebody because you lost access to your account.
[00:04:44] Thibaut: You’re in charge. It’s your keys, it’s your money. That’s what we always say. So I guess the first thing to come to realize when starting to run a business on crypto is that you’re gonna have to rely on good practices. You’re gonna have to rely on internal key management in order for you to really, really, you know, leverage the power of DeFi, the power of crypto.
[00:05:03] Thibaut: So I guess we can probably talk about Multi multisig wallets and you know, some of the other features that we provide among other companies, but this idea of self study is key. I guess the second thing that comes to mind is you need to, and that’s one of the main, main issues today, right? You need to, everything starts with a mindset.
[00:05:20] Thibaut: It’s not even, it’s not even about tooling. One of the big, big, big mistakes that a lot of companies do in that we did was, for example, to not track transactions, right? You just need a spreadsheet to start going. You just need a spreadsheet to just, you know, add a few transaction you’re doing rather than, you know, relying on all etherscan links, for example.
[00:05:39] Thibaut: So this is a first thing to do, and this is a good example, you know, that basic stuff like, you know, the name of the sender, the name of the receiver, you know the name of the wallet you used, with the, you know, the public associated to it. Those are the things that you should keep, that you should log in order for you to run your business a little bit smoothly.
[00:05:56] Thibaut: So that’s when you’re stuck, right? So again, everything is a mindset. It’s about key management. It’s about logging transactions. It’s about making sure that you give proper education to whoever’s working with you within the company. You do have internal risk. All people may not be familiar with crypto. So you know, as a business owner, you need to educate people on those good practices to avoid and to minimize risks.
[00:06:15] Thibaut: And I guess those are the two first thing that really comes to mind. First one is really like almost ideological, right? You choose crypto. You have to embrace self custody. It comes with benefits, but it comes to, you know, it comes with risk as well in terms of key management. Your money will be 24/7 available for your business, but you have to be careful about the way you manage keys.
[00:06:34] Thibaut: And the second thing is very more practical. It’s about mindset. You need to record transactions and you don’t necessarily need complicated to do so, but you have to start day 1.
[00:06:43] Umar: Now before we go into the nuts and bolts of the different elements, organizations have to get right to run their business on crypto, I wanted you to introduce us Multis, and provide an overview of the different features available on the Multis platform today.
[00:07:00] Thibaut: Let’s do this. So what do we provide today? the main thing we build today, we provide, you know, USD bank accounts and corporate cards for web3 companies. And we do so by merging the best of both the traditional finance world. We use the account and debit card and the DeFi world, right?
[00:07:19] Thibaut: Because you know all because the way we work with customers assets is like a hundred percent self custodial. We rely on multisignature wallets. So in a sense, we really give you the ability to move seamlessly from crypto to fiat to USD so that you can both, you know, leverage crypto payments, for example, run your crypto payroll.
[00:07:36] Thibaut: But at the same times, you know, we do have to acknowledge that most of our spending today still USD deominated right? You have to pay your rent in USD. You have to pay, you know, your, your, your team dinners in USD as well. And that’s where we help, that’s where we help. Those are the main features, right? Again, USD bank accounts, debit cards, exchange of course, to move from the multisignature wallet to the USD bank account to debit card.
[00:08:00] Thibaut: And on top of that, once you access the basics, which we believe are the basics of running your business with crypto, right? We give you some more advanced tools like, you know, tracking features. So the ability to link multiple external wallets so that you always have a very holistic of a view of what’s going on with the company’s funds.
[00:08:18] Thibaut: And you know, we also help you manage more, I guess, have more granular user management system. So you can add, you can invite multiple people in the wallets. Can be, admins, they can be teammates with a very limited rights. And you can work, you can build workflows around this so that whether it’s a crypto or a USD payment, there are always limitations to them, controls and visibility over the company’s assets.
[00:08:42] Umar: Now I want to dive into all these elements a little bit more in detail. And I wanna start with Multisig wallet, which is I think one of the fundamental aspects for an organization to get right if they want to build their business on crypto. So for an organization like an LLC, a single key wallet is not secure to manage their crypto funds.
[00:09:04] Umar: As of course, it runs the risk of an employeeor if it’s a DAO of a DAO contributor, misappropriating the funds. So as its name implies, for listeners who are not very familiar, a multisignature wallet or multisig requires a minimum number of people to approve a transaction before it can occur. Now, Multis is built with Gnosis Safe, which is often referred to as the gold standard when it comes to multisig wallets.
[00:09:32] Umar: Could you tell the listeners why a multisig is the way to go for their treasury management and the difference between using Gnosis Safe’s native app or through Multis? What are some of the additional features that users will have using the Multis platform?
[00:09:48] Thibaut: So I guess there are 4 main reasons, which prompted us to build on top of Gnosis Safe wallet.
[00:09:54] Thibaut: The first thing is really easy. It’s an open source smart contract, which means anybody can actually build something on top of it, right? It’s open source, it’s battle tested. It’s super robust. It’s storing billions and billions and billions of funds. So we felt that this was the good choice of custody architecture for a solution. That’s reason number one.
[00:10:15] Thibaut: I guess reason number two and three are related to risk. When, and I already mentioned this. Managing crypto comes with risk, right? And you don’t have anybody to yell at when you lose access to your, to your accounts. So you have both social risk, what we call social risk and what we call third party risk.
[00:10:33] Thibaut: Social risk is essentially having somebody in the company, rage quitting for example, and sending funds to his own wallets. So it’s basically stealing the company’s money. Now, it’s really hard to prove today, and you may not be able to retrieve this money, So you need to have an onchain blockchain native system of approvals, right.
[00:10:54] Thibaut: You need to be able to control who’s making crypto transfers, and that’s what you refer to in your definition. You need multiple signature to unlock funds. So this is social risk, internal risk, right?
[00:11:04] Thibaut: And then you have third party risk and it’s a thing to leave your funds at Coinbase. Coinbase is really secure. It’s, you know, the biggest, it’s not a security company, but what about all the other kinds of wallets where you could, you know, other exchanges where you will leave funds.
[00:11:17] Thibaut: Every single week you have the owner of one of these exchanges just running away with the funds because everything is controlled millions and millions and millions.
[00:11:24] Thibaut: Everything is controlled with one single key that the exchange owners, executive team owns. They can also freeze your accounts like Binance did a few months back. Like so many of them do. So this third party risk means that for some reason you may not be able to use your funds or you know, to access them. So that’s another thing that, you know, self custody and multisignature wallet prevent.
[00:11:46] Thibaut: I guess the last thing that I always like to mention is that self custody and multisignature wallet especially is way more convenient and powerful than a ledger wallet or hardware key, for example, because you can always access it. You only need some bandwidth, you know, and a computer to access your phones, which is obviously not the case with the ledger key.
[00:12:07] Thibaut: So super convenient and you can, you know, natively integrate it with DeFi, which makes it super more usable. So those in a nutshell are the main reasons why we decided to build with multisignature wallets, especially Gnosis safe, given how you mentioned, this is one of the, gold standard in the space with multiple teams building on top of it.
[00:12:23] Umar: Moving on to the other aspect for organizations to get right is their accounts receivable and accounts payable process I would say. So for businesses looking to set up invoicing on crypto and they want to pay and be paid in cryptocurrency, I always say using legacy tools is not the way to go. And, for example, preparing PDF invoices for me, it’s a time ticking bomb for the accounting that ensues. It requires hours in manually reconciling data from different blockchain explorers, for example. So when it comes for, organizations to set up their accounts receivable and accounts payable workflow and approval process, how should that look like and how should they approach this?
[00:13:08] Thibaut: I think it depends on the size of the company. I don’t think it makes sense to have multiple tools when your company with like five employees or when you’re not making more than say, 50 transaction a month. So I’d say that, for very simple invoicing process, I do think that some basic features like, tags, categories, notes, attachments, it’s fine. You know, most of companies don’t do it in web2 anyway, so this is not necessarily related to to web3.
[00:13:31] Thibaut: Now, when it comes to bigger companies running more complex workflows involving, more parties, departments, I do think that you need to a specialized tool just like you need in web2.
[00:13:41] Thibaut: And you know, one of the tool that comes to mind is Request Network, for example. That’s a tool that we’d like to integrate to Multis to give bigger teams the ability to streamline this part of the process as well.
[00:13:52] Umar: So invoicing is one. The other one that Multis offers is around payroll, which is called Multis Mass Pay. For companies wishing to pay the employees in crypto, could you explain how batched payments work right now in Multis and whether this is a full-fledged payroll solution? What can companies expect to have and maybe some of the features that are not there right now.
[00:14:17] Thibaut: So I’d like to think about payroll in two ways, right? I think there are two components.
[00:14:21] Thibaut: The first one is the payment flow percent. So do we actually make the payment? And this a good one, is more like the regulations, the compliance part around it, right? How do you, if you’re working with a contractor, you need a 1099 in the US for example, all this kind of papers, admin stuff that goes around the actual payment flow.
[00:14:38] Thibaut: Multis is only covering the payment flow today. So what we, you know, so a company, so we actually have like huge companies like, Axie Infinity, Audius, Connext, so many of them running the payroll with us. The way we do it is very simple. They import a list of contact as a csv, so we have a contact book on the platform. And from this contact book, can really easily add payments rather than making multiple payments, you know, individually and improving them manually and individually again, what you would do here is just simply choose the contact from your contact book. You can actually upload the CSV right there as well, so you don’t necessarily have to save them in your contact book.
[00:15:14] Thibaut: Everything will be populated in the cryptocurrency of your choosing. And you will validate, add notes, categories, etc for all these payments, and you will validate that with a standard multisignature approval workflow.
[00:15:25] Thibaut: So for example, if you are, if you’re the initiator of the transaction, I would have to approve it as well. So basically, batch payment is super powerful and so far as it enables team to do up to a hundred payments instead of in once, instead of like 100 individual payments, it saves a lot of time. So if you’re talking to big companies like, I mean, we’re talking hours here, right?
[00:15:48] Thibaut: Cause you know, running individual payment is fine when you do one or two payments. A month when you start doing, like I said, 100, 200, it’s a mess. You need to streamline this whole process, and that’s where we help.
[00:15:59] Thibaut: And I’d say that the last cool thing with this feature is that even though I’m not a hundred percent satisfied yet, by the way we’ve built it, we’re still enable teams to save on gas fees, right?
[00:16:09] Thibaut: Because again, you’re gonna have batch those payments, right? So again, pay less gas fees. So people should not expect to pay the equivalent gas fees relative to one transaction. It’s gonna be way more, but it’s like actually not proportional to the size of batch. So that’s another cool thing I’d like to mention as well.
[00:16:23] Thibaut: So you’re gonna save time and you’re gonna save money.
[00:16:26] Umar: And the third element I wanted to touch on today is off ramping. So Multis has recently unveiled its off ramping solution with corporate debit cards, which now allows organizations to spend in USD, from their crypto wallet in a matter of a few seconds.
[00:16:41] Umar: So essentially this is solving one of the biggest pain points with using crypto for payments, as now your company no longer needs to use a centralized exchange. Could you tell us a bit more about the off ramp solution offered by Multis and how it complements the whole experience of building a business using crypto?
[00:17:00] Thibaut: Well, as I mentioned, off ramping today, if you start generating fees, revenues in crypto, if you receive an investment in crypto, which is, you know, more and more often the case, you need an easy way to spend it on, you know, goods and services. And most of them today, whether they are travel bills or you know, said dinners, et cetera, most of them are still in fiat, in USD.
[00:17:20] Thibaut: So we built a tool, you know, which helps companies streamline the whole crypto treasury management processes. So we felt this was a natural, that was like a missing piece. Being able to do so in a more holistic way, being able to manage your treasury not only for crypto, but only for Fiat, for USD.
[00:17:38] Thibaut: So now how do we do that? Super simple. Oh yeah, one thing I wanted to mention. You can actually spend up to 1000 coins not necessarily USD only. Because we do have an exchange, like decentralized exchange. So if you are, for example, a DAO, if you are, receiving protocol tokens, you know, as a contractor you can actually swap them against USD, DAI, ETH, and from then you can offramp, right?
[00:18:05] Thibaut: So of course V1 is not fully automated. V2 will be fully automated, which will give you literally the ability to say, spend your AAVE tokens, at your coffee shop. This is super exciting.
[00:18:15] Umar: And one of my follow up questions on this was, is it necessary to have a multisig with Multis to get a debit card? How is the application process like?
[00:18:25] Thibaut: So you don’t necessarily need to have an existing Multisignature wallet to open an account on Multis. You can, you know, just create a wallet on the fly. That’s fine. And if you don’t wanna use any multisignature features, meaning having several means you can just use it on your own, right. Again, you’re in charge, so that’s not necessarily a pre requisite to apply for those bank accounts.
[00:18:45] Thibaut: Two things, when you start with Multis, you get access for crypto features for free, right? Everything is based on transactions. So when you make a swaps, for example, using a decentralized exchange integrated. We’re using Paraswap integrated into a platform, we’re gonna get a fee. So it’s a very simple and transparent business model.
[00:19:00] Thibaut: Now, if you want to upgrade and access those corporate debit cards and USD bank account and exchange features, centralized exchange to effectively offramp your crypto, you need to apply, right. And for now, we only support US registered businesses. So now it’s restricted to the US and we’re working hard and hard to open it up to Europe and then other geographies.
[00:19:19] Thibaut: So the application process is actually super simple and that’s something I’m extremely, extremely proud about. The team has been doing a fantastic job streamlining this very, very clunky and frustrating process, for people in the space.
[00:19:32] Thibaut: So the whole process, you know, lasts less than 10 minutes. We actually have a founder yesterday who did it in three minutes. That’s the record time. You should expect 10 minutes to be honest. So once you’ve done that, we can actually approve you, provided you’ve got the right documentation, we can actually approve you within a day.
[00:19:48] Thibaut: We actually approved somebody two days ago in 47 minutes. That’s the record, 47 minutes compared to four, five months on Coinbase, compared to weeks on Circle and Kraken compared to, I don’t even know how much time you need to open a bank account now since banks, you know, still don’t want to work with crypto.
[00:20:05] Thibaut: So that’s a huge game changer. So, bottom line, it is super, super easy to open an account, access and use those debit cards for the simple reason that everything is built around web3 organizations. We are natively web3, which means we know your business, we know your business model. We know where your money come from, and we certainly won’t shut you down.
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[00:22:25] Umar: One of the other questions I had was, so prior to this podcast, I listened to one of your interviews on Runway Series that you did earlier this year, and you mentioned over there that you were somehow, Multis was like very early in the game in a way. So I was thinking like humans in general, and I succumb to this as well, that we tend to overestimate sometimes our predictive abilities. So ever since you started building Multis in 2019, you’ve iterated your business model and your product positioning.
[00:22:56] Umar: I want to ask. Over the upcoming month also, we’re in a bear market right now, what would need to happen for you to validate that you found your product market fit, and who would you say is your target audience in the upcoming 12 months, let’s say?
[00:23:12] Thibaut: We’ll be focusing only on the web3 organizations, essentially small web3 organizations in the next 12 months. So we’re talking about founders getting their initial, funding. We’re talking about companies starting to generate revenues with crypto through bootstrapping. Generally we’re talking about team less than 50 people, right? So this is the core target for us. This is a subset of a way bigger market that we don’t wanna address right now.
[00:23:38] So I guess now the PMA for us, product market fit for us, which will enable us to grow further and to raise another round of financing, is basically to confirm that those people, those founders, those entrepreneurs, those smaller companies, you know, have a need for solution.
[00:23:52] Thibaut: We’re super, you know, we believe in this, but we have to confirm it, right, market validation. We need to make sure that they enjoy the product, that they rave about the product, and that they stick to it, right. So this is retention, And I guess the last thing that we wanna validate is that we have a repeatable way of finding those customers.
[00:24:09] Thibaut: It’s all about acquisition, so once we’ve confirmed our assumptions, things are going super well, have been going super well over the past months, so we’re pretty confident about this. we will believe that we, we’ve reached the product market fit.
[00:24:21] Umar: Can I ask you right now, what are some of the biggest challenges faced by Multis for adoption? This could range from anything about regulation, education, communication.
[00:24:30] Thibaut: I guess one of the biggest challenges we had was on a, on a product side, on a technical side, you know, building a hybrid fiat crypto infrastructure is insanely hard. And I do believe that we’ve cracked it. This is the first obstacle we’ve overcome.
[00:24:45] Thibaut: This is still a gray area around crypto, right. And we see that still unclear whether self custodial providers, for example, will be regulated or not as MSB in the States as money service businesses. So I’d say that all those different shades of gray around crypto can act as some kind of a blocker for a lot of entrepreneurs and business owners, right? So this is one of the main, you know, I’d say critical factor to adoption.
[00:25:08] Thibaut: Indeed, I do believe that the space has been making, you know, if you did ask me two years ago, I would probably tell you that UX in a space, is miserable, was miserable, and that we needed to change. We have been making a lot of headways there, so I’m actually even more confident on our ability to onboard businesses.
[00:25:23] Thibaut: I do think that as a business owner, like we mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, you need to embrace that crypto is a different paradigm as well, right. Which probably neglected two years ago, and that was actually one of the fear of Multis. We wanted to abstract crypto complexity to hide it completely without realizing that, you know, a lot of the people are willing to use crypto to run the business with crypto.
[00:25:43] Thibaut: Just didn’t want to abstract it at all, right. They wanted to see it. They wanted to use native tokens, it, they didn’t want to hide it, you know, behind USDC for example. So I guess yeah, very briefly that that would be my answer to this.
[00:25:55] Umar: Earlier when we started the podcast, you said, amongst the mindset change that we need is to educate the staff of the organization. Now, I wanna ask you, what should companies know today about upskilling, their accountants, CFOs, controllers,when it comes to building a business on crypto?
[00:26:13] Umar: Let’s say if I’m the CFO of a company, and I’m listening to you right now on this podcast, and I want to slowly establish different processes, around the different areas we spoke of Multisig, AR AP, off ramping, how to educate my team and build like a project plan, maybe about this transition.
[00:26:32] Thibaut: Well, you should start with listening to your podcast, for example, . It’s a tough one actually. I’d say that, once you covered the basics that we mentioned, right, which is how do you store your assets? How do you have controls and how do you easily, you know, move from crypto to fiat? I’d say that you need to do your own research, to do your own research, you need as a CFO to start using those tools, feel the pain a little bit so that you can really find the right tools for your organization.
[00:26:58] Thibaut: It is a pretty vague answer, but it’s hard to, We’re still in this phase where there’s no clear market leader, there’s no, standards yet, there’s no reference in how you should manage your crypto. So my general rule of thumb will be to start with, you know, use cases that you have in web2, apply to web3.
[00:27:15] Thibaut: So for example, running a payroll or you know, logging a transaction is something you should do with web2 anyway, so that you can use this, you can basically use those tools and try to find the equivalent with web3. And that’s where, you know, optimizing for UX without compromising security with tools like of course we’re talking about Multis because we’re building this for CFOs, entrepreneurs, but you know, tools like Request Network, tools like Bitwave for example, like accounting tool. Those are tools that are built around the very web2 UX that should enable your team to get started pretty quick. I do think that might be a little bit too soon to do crazy complex yield stuff as a CFO or as a treasury and delegate this to this team. I wouldn’t venture this far.
[00:27:59] Umar: Yeah, I completely agree with you. There’s no blueprint I would say to build a business right now. You learn by doing and with for the crypto curious among us, those are the ones who I guess, who will be probably the most rewarded in the end.
[00:28:13] Umar: The episode is coming to an end, so I want to ask you for your closing thoughts around building a business on crypto.
[00:28:19] Umar: So, for all folks listening right now, especially business founders, CFOs, controllers who have started, who understand the merits of crypto, and now they want to switch their business on operations on crypto, what would be your closing thoughts about maybe the easiest step they can take today and the one thing that they need to get right for them to shift their business on crypto?
[00:28:44] Thibaut: You need a very convenient tool to get started. And I’m gonna be like a hundred percent unbiased here, but you should start with Multis. The reason is , you need to store securely your assets, and you need to perform a few payments. Those are the basic of the basics to, you know, get you up to speed. And, you know, the mere fact, the very fact of just, you know, making a payment will convince you of how powerful crypto is.
[00:29:06] Thibaut: So, you know, start working with a contractor in, you know, a country abroad, for example. Start running a few payments with a basic solution. Of course I’m talking about Multis because I do think that we’re building something easy, you know, very convenient to onboard the next million of businesses on crypto, but that could be other tool we mentioned.
[00:29:22] Thibaut: Gnosis does have an application. Try to run a few payments on this. That’s really how to get started and, and you can scale with, with more complex tools later on. I realize, am I answering your question here, ? Yes. Right. .
[00:29:40] Umar: It doesn’t have to be a direct answer.
[00:29:43] yeah. No. I mean, you know, as soon as you start, I mean, you know, transparently, as soon as you, as soon as you start running some payment, and your payment just, you know, goes to the other side of the world in literally 10 seconds.
[00:29:56] Thibaut: And when you incur like 10 cents, you know, 100 K, worth of crypto transfers, it’s this feeling, I mean, it’s magic really. That’s how you should start. You know, don’t start with complex stuff like DeFi, NFTs, yield farming, all this stuff for degen people. Just run, make a simple payment with USDC or DAI. It is a tremendous experience and that’s really how I got into, when I really started to be convinced by how powerful, those new payment reels could be.
[00:30:27] Umar: Thibaut, there’s a last question that I like to ask to my guests before they leave is, do you have a quote or maximum that you live by?
[00:30:35] Think we’re gonna have to, we’re gonna have to stick to somebody very crypto. Yeah, I could tell you WAGMI, right. We’re gonna make it because we’re still in the process of building this whole industry.
[00:30:45] Thibaut: You know, I’d like to think that Multis, we’re builders, you know, building for builders. But I’d like to finish on something which is really related to the bear market we’re in, which is a quote from Robert. So Robert is the, the CEO of of Compound. One of our investors, early investors. And he always say is you need to focus, execute, and win.
[00:31:04] Thibaut: And this is all we should do in a bear market, especially in the bear markets. And in the end, this is something very simple but extremely powerful for an entrepreneur like me.
[00:31:13] Umar: The ability to focus is a superpower I think, it is very hard these days where .
[00:31:19] Thibaut: There’s so many new things popping up. You know, there’s noise everywhere.
[00:31:23] Thibaut: There’s so many new integration, shiny, new protocols. You have to, you really have to remain laser focus on your vision. You know, our vision is very simple. we want to build a financial backbone of the web3 economy, and that’s all you know, that matters. We need to execute, right? We need to be consistent in a way we improve the product, talk to our users, iterate, make mistakes, and that’s how we win the day very simply.
[00:31:47] Umar: Thibaut, thanks a lot for coming in today. Really enjoyed speaking to you about different elements that goes into building a business on crypto.
[00:31:55] Umar: Before we go, if people want to reach out to you and they want to learn more about Multis, how should they do so? Where can they reach out to you on social media, for example?
[00:32:04] Thibaut: So we do have Twitter, of course, Twitter and LinkedIn channels. So you know, Twitter is pretty easy. It’s multishq. Same thing on LinkedIn. They can actually send us an email, you know, we have links at multis.com. We are extremely responsive.
[00:32:17] Thibaut: We’re still a very small team, so we take a lot of joy to respond directly to any inquiry that they are from, you know, users, curious people, or potential partners. So this is a very easy way to join us as well.
[00:32:30] Umar: Thibaut, thanks a lot for coming today. We did exceed a little bit of the time that we had allocated for this episode, and thank you so much for making the time for it.
[00:32:39] Thibaut: Thanks so much for having me.
[00:32:40] Umar: I would like to thank everyone for listening to this episode. You will find all the links of the episode, shownotes and transcripts on the website of The Accountant Quits at theaccountantquits.com. Please note that this content is for general information purposes only and is not a substitute for consultation with professional advisors.
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