In December 2022, TechCrunch announced that a little-known tech start-up called Nillion had closed a $20m+ seed round with a valuation of $180 million, one of the highest seed round valuation of any tech or web3 company in 2022. Even more interesting was that Nillion completed their raise in the midst of a bear market, with crypto and broader market confidence at notable lows (crypto exchange FTX had imploded just weeks before) and without a deck. How did they do it? Nillion co-founder Andrew Masanto attributes it all to having a remarkable founding team.
In a recent TechCrunch piece, famed venture capitalist investor Eric Bahn argues that a diverse founding team is critical to building a successful start-up. He states that founders need to consider many factors when building a founding team, such as personality, communication styles, hard skills, cultural fit, technical competence and past experiences.
Web3 pioneer and multi-unicorn founder, Andrew Masanto, has put this into practice by assembling a quintessential founding team for his latest start-up, Nillion. Masanto is known for being a two-time web3 unicorn founder, having started two of the top 100 cryptocurrencies (Hedera and Reserve). Echoing the sentiments of Bahn, Masanto states, "Great tech with poor execution will ultimately fail. This is why people are critically important and why getting the right people involved was my entire focus in the early days of Nillion. Even though we had great tech, I knew we absolutely needed great people to deliver on its massive promise."
So who exactly is this all-star founding team and how was it put together?
"Most founders go straight to job boards and start sifting through resumes, but that's not ideal, especially at founding team level", Masanto says. "The best founding teams come from Founders who have fostered existing personal and professional relationships in anticipation of the founding moment." Masanto says that the wrong choice at Founding Team level can be "absolutely detrimental" to a business's chance of success.
In line with this strategy, Masanto initially invited his long-time friends and ex-Goldman Sachs and Rothschild bankers, Alex Page and Andrew Yeoh, to join him in shaping the nascent Nillion technology into a protocol. "I knew inviting Alex and Andrew to help shape the protocol from an early stage would be critical in getting their buy-in," Masanto states. Page and Yeoh would eventually become the CEO and CMO of Nillion, respectively.
Masanto next invited an old housemate whom he met at Burning Man who happened to also be the founding engineer and employee #2 of Uber, Conrad Whelan. "Conrad was a brilliant engineer looking for a new challenge and loved the technology but was skeptical about joining a web3 start-up. We agreed to a confidential two month test period. During this time we discovered that we loved working with each other and Conrad agreed to come on board full-time as CTO" Masanto recalls.
Masanto was then introduced to Lindsay Danas Cohen, the former Associate General Counsel of Coinbase, who joined as Nillion's General Counsel. To top things off, Masanto invited old friends Slava Rubin, the founder of Indiegogo, to join as Nillion's Chief Business Officer, and Mark McDermott, who led Partnership and Innovations at Nike, who joined as Head of Ecosystem.
"Despite market conditions, Venture Capitalists took notice", Masanto states. "Nillion's team is elite, not just in previous experience, but in actual execution. Working with them day-to-day, I can say that I have rarely had the privilege of working with such an elite and high functioning group of people. To deliver on Nillion's promise, we need a team capable of delivering and I genuinely believe this is the team to do just that."
Masanto also attributes being able to attract a team of this caliber to having focused on long-term relationships, keeping a win-win mentality throughout his career and also ensuring Nillion had a clear vision and big mission that would be enticing to be a part of. "At this level of hires, people can simply sense the mentality you have. People aren't dumb. You need to genuinely have a win-win mentality, a long-term reputation for being great to work with and a clear and compelling vision."
The story of Nillion began when Masanto met Dr. Miguel de Vega in 2018. The two innovators cultivated a relationship over the years and Dr. de Vega regularly shared thoughts on new innovative breakthroughs with Masanto. In 2022, Dr. de Vega presented Masanto with an innovation called Nil Message Compute (NMC), a new mathematical algorithm that used secure multi-party computation (MPC), rather than blockchain, to create a decentralized network. Unlike blockchain, this infrastructure would facilitate private and secure storage and computation of information, rather than facilitate transactions. Once Masanto realized the game-changing potential of Dr. de Vega's latest innovation, he felt the calling to turn it into a reality, at which point Nillion was born.
Masanto's interest seems justified. Over the past year, Nillion been invited to present it's technology at the University of Oxford, Cambridge University, New York University and MIT. "Nillion is an ambitious project based on a novel new technology. If it can be built the way the team intends and the white paper describes, it could have a big impact on both the web3 and web2 / traditional tech world", says David Gan, General Partner of OP Crypto, a venture capitalist and Nillion Investor.
Given his history in identifying and capitalizing on technological trends, it should come as no surprise that Masanto recognized this technology's potential and subsequently put together the ideal team to help Nillion grow. However, as Masanto states "the work is yet to be done". With a successful raise and the most impressive founding team in web3, we are excited to see where Nillion, and Masanto, take things from here.
