# S01E13 · Mark Kilaghbian — Co-Founder & CEO of Dataing <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClYjcmoMt0c" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><img class="uv-poster" src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ClYjcmoMt0c/maxresdefault.jpg" alt="Mark Kilaghbian on The Useful Podcast Episode 13" loading="lazy" /></a> Mark Kilaghbian is the co-founder and CEO of Dataing, an AI-powered matchmaking app built on Cupid, and the longtime host of the Cryptoconomy podcast. Before Dataing, he built a string of companies chasing the same idea from different angles: an on-demand tutoring marketplace funded by his first VC check in college, one of the earliest working decentralized exchanges — built while he was interning at the White House — UBDI (Universal Basic Data Income), which let people own and monetize their own data, and Open Transact, a payments platform for cannabis, adult, and gambling businesses that Stripe, Square, and Shopify wouldn't touch. The founder story here is the meeting he walked out of an internship to take. Regulators told his decentralized exchange team they needed twenty million dollars in money-transfer licenses or faced prosecution; when the founder of the Toronto Stock Exchange offered a one-time meeting in LA about investing, Mark left the White House mid-internship to take it. In this conversation, Gokul and Mark get into why no successful dating app has monetized before year three, why bear-market founders are the better bet and VCs almost never make it, how losing his family's savings in the 2008 crash at age twelve set him on this whole path, and how Dataing's API lets other developers build their own dating, recruiting, or matchmaking products on top of the same trust layer — including the connection to fellow guest [[eric-mchugh-dataing|Eric McHugh]], Dataing's President and Mark's co-founder. ## Listen <ul class="uv-linkrow"> <li><span class="uv-label">Watch</span><a class="uv-ico uv-yt" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClYjcmoMt0c" target="_blank" rel="noopener">YouTube</a></li> <li><span class="uv-label">Show</span><a class="uv-ico uv-sp" href="https://open.spotify.com/show/033DRed1adLXd1bg8honOl" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Useful Podcast on Spotify</a> · <a class="uv-ico uv-x" href="https://x.com/theusefulpod" target="_blank" rel="noopener">@theusefulpod on X</a></li> </ul> <a class="uv-btn" href="https://useful.ventures/podcast/mark-kilaghbian-dataing/transcript">Read the full transcript</a> ## Key facts <ul class="uv-facts"> <li><span class="uv-k">Episode</span>The Useful Podcast, Season 1, Episode 13</li> <li><span class="uv-k">Guest</span>Mark Kilaghbian, Co-Founder & CEO of Dataing, host of the Cryptoconomy podcast</li> <li><span class="uv-k">Host</span>Gokul Bala, co-founder of Useful Ventures</li> <li><span class="uv-k">Company</span><a href="https://dataing.io" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dataing</a>, an AI-powered matchmaking app built on Cupid AI</li> <li><span class="uv-k">Topics</span>Universal basic data income, payments for underserved industries, dating app monetization, bear-market vs. bull-market founders, building an API for developers</li> <li><span class="uv-k">Length</span>About 59 minutes · Published August 2026</li> </ul> ## Guest <ul class="uv-linkrow"> <li><span class="uv-label">Mark</span><a class="uv-ico uv-ig" href="https://www.instagram.com/markkilaghbian/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Instagram (@markkilaghbian)</a></li> <li><span class="uv-label">Dataing</span><a class="uv-ico uv-x" href="https://x.com/Dataing_io" target="_blank" rel="noopener">X (@Dataing_io)</a> · <a class="uv-ico uv-ig" href="https://www.instagram.com/dataing.io/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Instagram (@dataing.io)</a> · <a class="uv-ico uv-play" href="https://dataing.io" target="_blank" rel="noopener">dataing.io</a></li> <li><span class="uv-label">Host</span><a class="uv-ico uv-x" href="https://x.com/GokulsVision" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Gokul Bala on X (@GokulsVision)</a> · <a class="uv-ico uv-ig" href="https://www.instagram.com/gokuls.vision/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Instagram (@gokuls.vision)</a></li> </ul> ## Key insights **Twelve years old, and the family's life savings vanished in the 2008 crash.** Mark's father died in an accident when Mark was twelve. The family put the life-insurance payout into the stock market, and it was wiped out in the crash that followed. Trying to understand how the person trusted to protect that money didn't see it coming sent him down a years-long rabbit hole into how the economy actually works — and eventually toward Bitcoin as a way to build trust and transparency back into a system he'd watched fail his family. **He walked out of a White House internship to save a company from a $20 million ultimatum.** Mark interned at the White House while running one of the earliest working decentralized exchanges. Regulators told his team they needed twenty million dollars in money-transfer licenses to operate legally, or they'd face prosecution like Silk Road's Ross Ulbricht. When the founder of the Toronto Stock Exchange offered to meet in LA that same week about investing, Mark left the internship mid-term to take the meeting. **UBDI tried to pay people for their data honestly — and found out almost nobody wanted honesty.** Universal Basic Data Income let users monetize their own data and gave companies validated, unbiased research instead of the market-research industry's often-fabricated numbers. The problem: the companies that had been selling that same kind of data for a decade, for hundreds of millions of dollars, didn't want it validated. They wanted it left alone. **Open Transact built the payment rails Stripe and Square refuse to touch.** Cannabis, adult, and gambling businesses were paying up to ten percent in processing fees and getting debanked overnight on policy whims. Mark built the compliance and payments infrastructure those "too small, too risky" industries needed — including strip-club chains doing a hundred million dollars a month — largely by being one of the only people willing to answer the phone when their processor cut them off. **No successful dating app has monetized before year three — and a wave of VC-funded competitors ignored that.** Mark's read, informed by watching the category for years, is that dating apps which rush monetization build business models that can't scale. VCs funded a wave of competitors anyway, who charged users thirty dollars a match, burned through the money fast, and died. Meanwhile Facebook copied Cupid's matchmaker down to the color codes and fonts — and still can't get its own users to hand over the deeper data that real trust requires. **Bear-market founders are the better bet, and VCs almost never make it.** The founders worth funding, in Mark's experience, are the ones building when there's no money to be made — they're the ones still standing when the market turns. VCs typically wait for the bull market and then wade through fair-weather founders, and consistently pick wrong. He credits budgeting bull-market raises to survive the next bear market as one of the clearest signals of which founders last. ## About Dataing [Dataing](https://dataing.io) is an AI-powered matchmaking app built on Cupid, an in-app AI that auto-generates dating profiles from a user's digital footprint, matches people on personality correlation, and supports users before and after a match. It's co-founded by Mark Kilaghbian (CEO) and Eric McHugh (President) — Eric was the guest on [[eric-mchugh-dataing|Episode 1 of The Useful Podcast]], where he covers Cupid's product, the incentive problem with legacy dating apps, and Dataing's bootstrapped build philosophy in more depth. Mark's angle in this conversation is the founder path that led here: UBDI and Open Transact were both earlier attempts to hand people ownership over their own data and money, and Dataing extends that same thesis into a developer API — recruiting tools, in-game matchmaking, and other products all building on the same trust layer, so the data and context Dataing accumulates compounds across everything built on top of it. Learn more at [dataing.io](https://dataing.io). ## FAQ <div class="uv-faq"> ### Who is Mark Kilaghbian? Mark Kilaghbian is the co-founder and CEO of Dataing, an AI-powered matchmaking app, and the longtime host of the Cryptoconomy podcast, where he has interviewed more than a hundred founders over eight years. Before Dataing, he built an on-demand tutoring platform funded by his first VC check in college, one of the earliest working decentralized exchanges, UBDI (Universal Basic Data Income), and Open Transact, a payments platform for cannabis, adult, and gambling businesses. He comes from a family of doctors and interned at the White House before leaving mid-term to pursue a funding meeting for his crypto exchange. ### What is Dataing, and how does it connect to Eric McHugh's episode of The Useful Podcast? Dataing is an AI-powered matchmaking app built on Cupid, an AI that builds a profile from a user's digital footprint and supports users before and after a match. Mark Kilaghbian is Dataing's co-founder and CEO; his co-founder Eric McHugh is Dataing's President and was the guest on [[eric-mchugh-dataing|Episode 1 of The Useful Podcast]], where he discusses the product and business model in more depth. ### Why did Mark Kilaghbian leave his White House internship early? While interning at the White House, Mark was also running one of the earliest working decentralized exchanges, which regulators told him would require twenty million dollars in money-transfer licenses to operate legally, or risk prosecution similar to Silk Road's Ross Ulbricht. When the founder of the Toronto Stock Exchange offered a one-time meeting in Los Angeles about investing in the exchange, Mark left the internship mid-term to take it. ### What was UBDI (Universal Basic Data Income)? UBDI was a company Mark worked on, built on top of the personal.com founder's data-portability system, that let people own and monetize their own data — giving companies validated, unbiased survey and behavioral data directly from users instead of the fabricated data much of the market-research industry was selling. It struggled commercially in part because the incumbent data brokers it was trying to disrupt did not want their existing data validated. ### What is Open Transact? Open Transact was a payments company Mark built for industries that mainstream processors like Stripe, Square, and Shopify refuse to service, including cannabis, adult entertainment, and gambling businesses. These businesses were often paying up to ten percent in processing fees and could be debanked overnight when a processor changed policy; Open Transact built the compliance and payment infrastructure they were missing. ### Why does Mark Kilaghbian say no successful dating app has monetized before year three? Based on watching the dating app category for years, including through UBDI and now Dataing, Mark's view is that dating apps which rush monetization — for example, charging users per match — build business models that can't scale and burn out. He warned investors of this pattern before a wave of VC-funded dating startups did exactly that, charged early, and failed within a few years, having spent tens of millions of dollars in the process. ### What is The Useful Podcast? The Useful Podcast is a series of founder-to-founder conversations from Useful Ventures, hosted by Gokul Bala. Each episode digs past the highlight reel into the actual work of building a company. This is Season 1, Episode 13. </div> ## Related * [[podcast]] is the full Useful Podcast index. * [[manifesto]] is how we see the world and how we work. * [[notes]] is where we write about the world we see coming. * [[eric-mchugh-dataing|Eric McHugh's episode]] goes deeper on Dataing's product, incentive model, and build philosophy. * [Dataing](https://dataing.io) · [The Useful Podcast on Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/033DRed1adLXd1bg8honOl) · [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@TheUsefulPodcast) · [@theusefulpod on X](https://x.com/theusefulpod) Back to [[podcast]].