# S01E13 · Transcript — Mark Kilaghbian Full transcript of [The Useful Podcast](https://useful.ventures/podcast) Episode 13, a founder-to-founder conversation between host Gokul Bala and Mark Kilaghbian, co-founder and CEO of [Dataing](https://dataing.io) and longtime host of the Cryptoconomy podcast. Back to the [episode page](https://useful.ventures/podcast/mark-kilaghbian-dataing). This transcript has been lightly edited for readability. Filler words and false starts have been removed and the meaning has been preserved. Any errors are mine, not Mark's. ## Tutoring, Austin's early Ethereum scene, and podcasting from day one **Gokul** Welcome to the show. I call this the useful podcast because it's useful for you, useful for me, and useful for the listener. Before we get started, I'd love to hear how you got into crypto, how you got into podcasting, and how you entered the space. **Mark** It was actually at the exact same time. It was a little after my first entrepreneurial journey — I got my first VC check in college building an on-demand tutoring platform connecting students and tutors. That was my first real chance to meet people and get integrated into the networks in Austin. At the time, Austin had a pretty strong crypto developer community — Ethereum was just getting off the ground, and there were people from companies like Augur doing early prediction markets. It was a really cool group of essentially just very cracked developers. You'd go to these meetups and these guys legitimately hadn't showered in weeks and you could understand maybe three words out of their mouths because they were so deep in it. There was no money to be made — these guys were there because they loved the cryptography and the technology. That was my first chance to meet some of those guys at the early Ethereum meetups. I met two guys who'd been doing a bunch of hackathons and had actually launched one of the earliest crypto exchanges — so early the SEC had thrown them in jail because the regulations weren't clear. These were real OGs, some of the smartest developers I've ever met. Pretty quickly I realized the smart people were being drawn to that industry like a moth to a flame, and it hooked me because I really loved the people I was meeting. ## The White House internship and a $20 million ultimatum **Gokul** Around that time you were also interning at the White House. How did that come about? **Mark** That was a wild time in my life — too much going on, and I was having to make big decisions. I had some family friends — one of our neighbors had been Ronald Reagan's secretary at the White House and later went on to run his presidential library. She mentioned offhand that they were trying to find interns and thought I might be a good fit. I applied without thinking much of it. By the time I got accepted, I'd already started a crypto company and we'd built out one of the first functional decentralized exchanges. We were on the edge of launching it, and I had to make a hard decision about whether to go. I went, figuring I'd check it out, make sure the guys kept working, maybe meet some good investors, maybe push on policy — because really the problem with that company was we were told that unless we raised twenty million dollars for money-transfer licenses, we'd be thrown in jail. This was right around when Ross Ulbricht and others were being prosecuted over Silk Road, and what we'd built was technology that would let anyone transact on anything without a government intermediary. You can do amazing things with that, but it's also not something governments typically like. So I had to make a difficult decision while I was at the White House, because a guy who'd founded the Toronto Stock Exchange was interested in investing — one of the few people who understood exchanges and could make the right introductions. I actually left the White House to go meet with him in LA, because he said it was now or never. It's not exactly what Trump would want to hear, but I figured — I'm going to go out there and build some cool tech, and I have a responsibility to all the people working with me. ## Losing everything at twelve **Gokul** Even before any of the companies — you come from a family of MDs, and you've described yourself as a kid who wanted to put every piece together, Lego sets, the Corvette engine. How did you end up in decentralization instead of medicine? **Mark** I didn't want to just do what my family had done — that path felt laid out for me. I wanted to take the foundation my dad built and take it a step further. My aunt was in finance and fed me books on technology moguls and people building new, innovative things. My family was always entrepreneurial — my dad, even as an orthopedic surgeon, was building robotics technology for Stryker, doing remote-controlled knee surgeries, spearheading a lot of the foundational work in robotic-assisted surgery. He was always tinkering in the garage, forcing me to go build things, make things, try things. I spent every summer at his practice, working the front desk, taking patients back — he'd have me taking out stitches when I was ten years old. Patients would ask if it was legal, and he'd just say "yep." I learned early that sometimes this stuff isn't that hard — you just go for it when you have the opportunity. The philosophy of decentralization, though, comes partly from distrust of centralized organizations. My father passed away in a tragic accident when I was twelve. Our family put all the money from his life insurance into the stock market — this was 2007 — and we lost everything when the market crashed. That was my first real-world experience of watching a man whose one job was to protect that money completely fail to see it coming. As a twelve-year-old, it was hard to understand how someone paid to know this didn't know it. So I had to unwind: how does the economy actually work, how does the stock market work, how are all these things connected? I read everything I could, and by the end I'd come across crypto and Bitcoin as ways technology might create trust and transparency and reduce the chance of that happening to someone else. The more I learned, the more passionate I got, because I kept finding that the people holding the strings were often not the people you'd want in that position. ## A pattern across four companies **Gokul** It seems like you've started a company every couple of years — Tutor, UBDI, Open Transact, and now Dataing — and they all revolve around a similar idea: decentralize, democratize, give people access to their own data. Am I reading that right? **Mark** Partially it's distrust of centralized organizations, and it traces back to what I just described. And it goes deeper than just maneuvering to get into positions of power — in a lot of these rooms, people are explicitly tested. You'll be in a room and get a clicker quiz: if we want to stop foreign countries from ditching the US dollar, how should we do that? And the options range from "stop weaponizing sanctions" to progressively more aggressive answers, and ninety-nine percent of the room picks the aggressive ones. Maybe one person picks the first option. You start to realize that half the room doesn't fully understand why those answers are bad, and the other half understands exactly what they're signing up for and are willing to make that deal. That's part of what drew me back to crypto over and over — I met a lot of people who'd been pushed out of legacy systems after reaching that same fork, who decided to go build something better in their garage instead of signing that deal. There's been a real divide between those people and the legacy incumbents who launch sketchy projects and try to taint what is actually a group of pretty honest, hardworking, intelligent people. Crypto and Bitcoin get a bad reputation more because of how they're used than because of the technology itself. It's meant to make sure anyone, anywhere, can always use money. ## UBDI: universal basic data income **Gokul** UBDI stands for Universal Basic Data Income — people owning and monetizing their own data. Talking to Eric, there's almost a similar vibe with Dataing. Was there inspiration there? **Mark** Certainly some. UBDI is one of the few companies I didn't start myself — it was someone I'd known a long time who'd started personal.com and sold it, and the acquirer wanted him to rebuild a system to help people monetize their data on top of the data-portability platform he'd built. We built a ton of connectors for different data sources and worked with researchers from Target, Best Buy, and Harvard Business School to make sense of it. What was interesting was realizing how few companies could actually take multi-source data and make sense of it — even massive companies like Target didn't really have someone doing that. The entire market-research industry was full of fabricated data, and we thought we could come in and say: we can validate your results, give you certainty about who's actually in your system, and simplify the survey process with unbiased data straight from the source. Most of them didn't want that — they ran for the hills. If you think about it, they'd been selling this data for ten years for a hundred million dollars, and the last thing they wanted was to be told it was mostly fabricated. We even did studies for nonprofits who wanted to understand why impoverished people were impoverished. We never took a cut of revenue — we gave every penny to the user — so we told them: here's a chance to take money you've raised and give it directly to these people for their insights. They wanted to package it as a two-hour survey paying twenty-five cents. You're paying someone twelve cents an hour and wondering why they don't have money. Users didn't trust us either, and I didn't blame them — most companies handling their data hadn't earned that trust. That's a big part of why, with Dataing, we're not making monetization the core of the product. You don't come to use it for that. You use it because the data makes your life better. Matching people with ads and research is fine, but matching people with each other is so much more powerful. We were helped get some of the laws passed that gave people rights to their own data — but even with those rights, the big companies had every incentive to make exercising them as difficult and scary as possible, while still coming back to us to validate their own numbers. ## Open Transact: payments for the industries everyone else ignores **Gokul** Open Transact is almost payments for the industries the world wants to ignore — cannabis, adult, gambling, crypto. **Mark** Basically anything Stripe, Square, or Shopify won't touch. It's a strange industry — too small a carve-out for the big, all-encompassing payment providers to want the compliance risk, largely because of how their banking partners think about one-size-fits-all systems. But these are still massive industries, and they'd frequently get debanked or pulled off platforms with no notice — especially cannabis, where policy could flip overnight. Some of these businesses, like strip club chains, do a hundred million dollars a month — real money — and they were paying exorbitant fees, sometimes up to ten percent, because of the risk profile. We built the technology they were missing from Square, Shopify, and Stripe and packaged it so they could use it. A lot of my day was dealing with people managing somewhat seedy industries — strip club owners, dispensary owners, a few genuinely scary characters. But it was one of the few companies where the business came to us easily, because the incumbents treated them so badly. It's a customer-service industry at the end of the day: if something's wrong with your account, can you call the CEO and get it fixed? With Stripe or Square, even running a hundred-million-dollar-a-month business, you don't get that. It was a lesson in how entire swaths of industry get disregarded. ## Hosting Cryptoconomy **Gokul** You've hosted hundreds of founders. What do you like about sitting down and hearing all those stories? **Mark** Probably that I get them early — I should be a VC scout. A lot of the guys on my podcast, I was their first interview. They were green, and probably ten percent of them are running billion-dollar-plus companies now. Seeing that arc form, and catching up with them through crypto's up-and-down cycles, is really humbling compared to founders who mostly get upside. Watching friends go through the ins and outs, heads down, shipping, and then seeing it all pay off — and seeing them still make time for each other and remember who was there before they made it — that's my favorite part. The type of founder who starts a company in a bear market is entirely different from the type who starts in a bull market. The ones who show up when the money is good are the first ones gone when it dries up. The ones building as a passion project, with no money to be made, are the ones you bet on — which ironically, VCs almost never do. They wait for the bull market and then wade through fair-weather founders they typically pick wrong on. If you deploy in a bear market, you're usually fine. Most of the founders still around raised enough in the bull market to get through several years — I know guys who raised forty or fifty million and budgeted it to last six years, to the next cycle if they needed it. Budgeting for that and sticking through it, more than anything else, is what separated the founders who are still here. I run my podcast completely unscripted and unedited — if you say something that gets you in trouble, that's on you. Out of over a hundred episodes, maybe one guest ever tried to scam anyone, which is an insane track record for being in crypto that long. If you're willing to show your face and talk unscripted for an hour, that filters a lot. ## Bitcoin, headless products, and the case for dating as the last thing AI should touch **Gokul** Do you view Dataing as a Web3 product? **Mark** I wouldn't say it's wholly Web3 — I'm trying not to force that. I think it will be Web3 when everything becomes Web3, which I do think is coming, so we're positioning it for the world that's arriving without scaring off people who aren't ready for it yet. What I'd like it to be is the infrastructure for that coming world, the way Facebook was infrastructure for early app developers — they bootstrapped personalization and monetization and created a wave of indie developers, then pulled the plug and screwed everyone over. I'm hoping to bring that wave back without rugging the developers who build on top of us. For crypto generally, I think AI is going to be great, because crypto has been terrible at creating front ends and helping people understand incredibly complex software. Having AI read the white papers, understand the tokenomics, and just tell you what you need to know solves a lot of pain points. One reason we picked dating specifically is that I felt it would be the last thing people would trust a company like OpenAI with — it requires a level of trust the big incumbents haven't earned. Facebook actually copied our AI matchmaker one to one — same color codes, same fonts, even the same examples on the website — but they can't get their users to link more data, because people don't trust them with more than they've already handed over. We have far more context because people trust us with it. The most important moat you can build is trust with your users, and then delivering on what you said you'd do. Early on, everyone told me we were just a ChatGPT wrapper. I told them: give me a billion dollars to build a foundational model and I'll do it, and I'll probably make one better than theirs — but you're not going to do that, so get over yourself. Six months later, everyone was excited about wrappers and wanted to know why we hadn't monetized yet. But no dating app that's been successful in the last ten years has monetized before year three. They funded a wave of competitors anyway, who immediately tried to charge thirty dollars a match, built business models that couldn't scale, and burned ten million dollars finding out exactly what I'd told them would happen. We wanted the data private and local models driving a lot of the interaction, so people could actually trust the system instead of having their data fed back to big AI labs. That meant slow-rolling things because the technology didn't exist yet three years ago, before anyone knew we'd be here — but we prepared for this moment anyway, and it looks like we were right. ## The API, and building for a Web3 world that hasn't fully arrived **Gokul** What does your role look like versus Eric's as president? **Mark** A little bit of everything — I try to find people who can do a bunch of things. Eric is versatile: he handles a lot of the outbound work I hate, tells me who to meet and where to go, and he's also great on product — understanding how to architect things, where a user gets lost, and turning user feedback into actionable priorities, plus recruiting. Then you need really good developers. The hardest part right now with LLMs is figuring out what should go through an LLM and what will just frustrate the developer. It hasn't gotten harder to identify talented developers because of LLMs — it's gotten harder to figure out how to get people with different styles of using LLMs to work together. If someone's comfortable with LLMs and you pair them with someone who hates using them, they won't get along — one wants to rip everything up and start over. So we separate front end from back end, put the LLM-native people on the parts that are less likely to break something badly, and think carefully about how involved the PMs, and I, get. I did the design work and built the entire front end of our first app version myself, entirely with ChatGPT, partly to see how far the tooling could go and how messy it would get integrating with my CTO's back end. That was painful — I'd break everything randomly, push a hundred thousand lines of code at once, and he wouldn't know where to start. Growing pains, but the kind where you know in six months it won't be an issue, so you build the workflow now to be ready. We're now expanding to get more developers building on our API — I've built twelve apps on top of it in the last week alone, making profiles portable and finding what people can do with this data socially. There's a card people carry that's basically a link showing everything about them — right now specific to dating, but the underlying profile system can power other applications: a recruiting version that figures out who's compatible for a team the same way we figure out relationship compatibility, connecting people's GitHub to see how their working styles mesh, even a system that generates highly personalized music for a group based on everyone's taste. It's about finding the right partners to build cool things on top of the same core. That's the best part of Web3 to me — personalization and decentralization. In Web3, developer communities are genuinely willing to interoperate: send someone an API and within a week they've built something with real users giving real feedback, and over time those users become something closer to owners. I want everyone to build their own dating app — video-based, blind meetups, whatever — as long as they're interconnected, so we're learning across every experience built on top and can package the monetization so builders can just focus on building fun things. ## Bear markets, mentoring, and believing it's possible **Gokul** You're a mentor at an Oregon accelerator. How did you step into that? **Mark** That was really Eric — I moved to Portland and told him I didn't know enough people, and he lined up meetings for me all week. One connector like that can change your whole life when you move somewhere new. I'm not the type to cold-DM people and set up meetings myself, but he is. From there I just asked if I could help out, and there weren't enough mentors for the number of kids who needed help. I got them set up end-to-end with Codex and Figma's AI tools and told them to just build it. A lot of the time they just needed someone to show them what's possible — I'd sit down, get something thirty percent of the way there, hand it off, and they'd pick it up in half an hour. Sometimes that's all it takes: someone saying, yes, this is possible, go do it. I got lucky growing up around people who just went out and did it. Once you've seen it, it's easy to believe. A lot of people never meet an entrepreneur who's actually done it themselves, so they assume it can't be them. All I can tell them is: no, it can be you. If you don't believe it can happen, it never will — I've never met an entrepreneur who made it without believing it was possible first. That's not so different from workshops I run with guys in Nigeria using LLMs to build every kind of app, create content, and get their rap careers off the ground because they can now afford professional mixing they never could before. AI really can democratize this, which is also why I care about local models — the alternative future is one where only the people with unlimited compute budgets build better things, and that gap keeps widening for everyone else. ## Consumer versus B2B, and the trust moat **Gokul** What's next for you, beyond dating? **Mark** Always doing too many things. Right now it's expanding developers building on our API, making profiles portable and fun across dozens of use cases. Consumer is genuinely harder to build for than B2B — a business can make a logical decision, but a consumer needs something closer to an emotional one, and a lot of consumer decisions are nepotism- or network-based rather than pure marketing spend. I've watched competitors dump ten million dollars into marketing and get fewer users than we got spending a hundred dollars, because you can't force your way into a cultural moment — you have to understand the real pain point and package a solution people actually want, not the one they say they want. The B2B sales cycles for monetizing data were brutal too — I've spent a year working a deal with a massive company only to have the person driving it retire and the whole thing evaporate. And in payments, I'd do all the work to onboard a client and a competitor would undercut by a quarter of a percent after we'd done all the verification. It becomes a race to the bottom unless you've built real loyalty. That's where consumer can actually win — people don't trust anything they're using right now, and they want real people behind these products who'll honor what they agreed to. People back the story and the founder more than they back the product itself, and that's truer of everyday users than it ever was of VCs, who in my experience rarely use the product or give useful feedback themselves. Crypto investors, by contrast, are often willing to put money into something they believe makes the world better and actually become the earliest users and give real feedback in the trenches with you. ## Closing **Gokul** How do you see dating fitting into Web3 versus staying a mainstream consumer product? **Mark** It depends on the product. For most consumer products, I'd keep the Web3 framing quiet for now — realistically there are something like ten thousand serious crypto users in the US. They're wealthy, but there aren't many of them, and it's not the best way to take a product to market. But it's going mainstream a little more with every cycle. It was a death knell to even mention crypto a decade ago, and now people are comfortable with it as long as it doesn't add any extra friction — passkey-enabled wallets without seed phrases get us close to a one-to-one experience with what people already use for banking, which should take us the rest of the way. **Gokul** Thanks so much for coming on — this was a great one. **Mark** Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation, and you came with some great questions. Anything else I can help with, don't hesitate to reach out. --- Back to the [episode page](https://useful.ventures/podcast/mark-kilaghbian-dataing) · [Dataing](https://dataing.io) · [[podcast|All episodes]]