Ep 90: Building the Bloomberg&Yahoo Finance of Crypto | TM Lee (co-founder&CEO, Coingecko) - a podcast by Ling Yah
from 2023-12-13T20:10:48.743143
TM Lee is the co-founder & CEO at Coingecko - one of the world’s largest crypto data aggregators with over 150 million users in 2021 alone!
But before becoming a founder, TM was first influenced by his brother to become a coder. He learned about Reddit and Digg, and even ended up studying computer science at Purdue University, where he was exposed to the likes of Jason Fried (Basecamp) - a huge proponent of the bootstrap mentality.
TM tried many things. He wrote an aggregator in college until things went south, and eventually worked at a Big 4 audit firm but at the back of his mind was the thought that he wanted to start a business.
Then in April 2014, he co-founded Coingecko with Bobby Ong. It began as a side project with a starting capital of $100, launched soon after the collapse of Mt Gox. And as you’ll see from our interview, they went through lots of ups & downs to get to where they are today.
Highlights:
- 3:52 How his brother exposed TM to coding
- 5:01 Influenced by Kevin Rose (Digg)
- 5:44 Jason Fried of Basecamp
- 9:17 Evaluating business partners
- 10:35 Returning to Malaysia
- 11:47 Side projects
- 14:56 Building Coingecko
- 17:05 Meeting his co-founder, Bobby Ong
- 18:30 The early days of Coingecko
- 20:00 The significance behind the crash of Mt Gox
- 21:30 Why launch Coingecko right after the Mt Gox crash?
- 22:40 Building trust
- 22:40 Bootstrapping with $100
- 25:31 Building collaborations with universities
- 26:40 Scaling via organic marketing
- 27:47 Getting Coingecko translated into 15 languages
- 30:19 Was TM worried about sharing his code to the public?
- 31:10 Getting investors on board
- 24:12 Why the banking/fintech industry is so different from the crypto industry
- 35:51 Why maintain Coingecko’s API for free forever?
- 37:05 How Coingecko ensures that they have accurate price data feeds
- 38:25 Deciding on the tokens to list
- 39:09 Sifting out the scams & rug pulls
- 40:53 Will Coingecko ever delist a token?
- 42:21 Main milestones behind Coingecko
- 43:31 How the crypto space is impacted by banks (e.g. DBS) launching their own crypto trading services
- 44:14 Impact of Binance’s purchase of Coinmarketcap on Coingecko
- 45:07 Is TM now more important to investors to remain competitive?
- 50:38 NFTs
- 52:00 The secret behind Coingecko’s rocket growth in 2021: From 50 million to 150 million in 11 months
- 53:03 Thoughts on the current bear market
- 55:34 Crash of the Luna token
- 56:54 Coinzilla’s malicious app script
- 1:02:52 What to expect from Coingecko moving forward
- 1:03:42 Things to expect if the metaverse takes off
- 1:05:37 How much of your success is due to hard work v luck?
📍Show notes: www.sothisismywhy.com/90
🙊 Like STIMY? Buy us a ☕️?: https://beacons.ai/sothisismywhy
💌 Get the latest STIMY alpha/exclusive updates: https://sothisismywhy.ck.page/ebf231f605
Further episodes of So This Is My Why
Further podcasts by Ling Yah
Website of Ling Yah