#33: Ivan Liljeqvist, Co-Founder @ Moralis | From 0 to 90+ employees in less than 2 years - how they've grown web3 infra business

Moralis joined a pretty crowded web3 infra market in 2020, and it's already become an important player serving projects such as MetaMask and Polygon. How did they do it? I talk with Ivan, Moralis Co-Founder, who shares the backstage perspective of their last 2 years.

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TIMESTAMPS:

0:38 Who is Ivan & Moralis, and what got him interested in blockchain

3:52 How their web2 experience inspired them to start Moralis

4:40 Why they entered a crowded infrastructure space with many already established players such as Alchemy, Infura & QuickNode

7:25 Why it’s hard to bootstrap infrastructure business and how they leveraged their online education platform to grow it

9:29 How not thinking too much helped them to start and grow

11:29 How their SDK & APIs help developers to better understand on-chain events

14:51 Why their onboarding process has quite a lot of friction

17:50 How they build strong relations with developers via free education, hackathons & Discord

20:27 How their YouTube channel & hackathon helped to acquire their first users

21:30 How they managed to grow the 100% remote company from 0 to 90+ people in 2 years

24:44 How being upfront about their way of working helped them to recruit the right people

27:08 Why cutting down features was hard and what they learned on the way

28:44 How do they decide what to include in their SDKs

29:48 What does he think about centralization risks by using centralized infrastructure

34:03 Why team building was the biggest lesson he learned from running Moralis

37:45 What would he fix about web3 with the magic wand

39:40 What has been the most interesting project he has seen

42:26 Why craziness of the crypto industry makes Ivan laugh

44:14 Where to learn more about Moralis

44:32 Guest ideas