Parul Gujral - Snowball Money: Building The Universal Identity Layer for Web3’s Next Billion Users

Full transcript: Parul Gujral on London Real

3:55 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Parul Gujral, the blockchain expert, entrepreneur, investor, and adviser. You have been featured in Forbes magazine, spoken on stages from Silicon Valley to Davos, and advised projects that have raised over $200 million across the crypto, AI, venture, and tech ecosystems. You founded Snowball as a mobile app and wallet that’s now helped over 300,000 users access decentralized finance.

4:22 As a launchpad, you’ve incubated and invested in over 70 projects with an onchain ambassador program that has over 1 million users and over 350,000 transactions. You’re an expert at making products go viral. And your latest innovation, Snowball’s modular naming service, is creating the infrastructure for a future where digital identity is no longer fragmented, but unified, composable, and sovereign. Ultimately, you believe that web 3 is on the edge of mass adoption and that identity, reputation, and user experience are the missing links.

4:58 Parul, welcome to London Real.

5:00 Parul Gujral: Thank you for having me.

5:01 Brian Rose: Great to have you here. Look, I want to start by saying that Snowball Money is one of our portfolio companies here at London Real Ventures, the world’s first media-powered investment firm where our mission is to transform the world by investing in cutting edge web 3 and AI companies while giving our partners marketing exposure across the London Real media platforms andmies. We heighten awareness, create customers, and build communities by leveraging our global audience and extensive network.

5:26 Parul, we are beyond excited to be part of this journey with you. So, let’s jump in. What is Snowball Money?

5:32 Parul Gujral: Yeah, absolutely. Well, the feelings are mutual.

5:35 It’s such an honor to be able to collaborate with you and be aligned with your mission. Even going through the process of seeing the studio and what lights you up, what your purpose is, it’s so magical to be able to be aligned here energetically. And you know, Snowball’s purpose was to democratize access to information. Our mission is to positively touch the lives of a billion or more people. And so we’ve built a amalgamation of different technologies to be able to realize that whether by way of investing, by way of the products that we’ve launched in the market.

6:11 We came into market trying to be the bridge for the masses as we go through this financial revolution of physical assets turning into digital assets. And so we built a mobile wallet that allows people to very easily access decentralized finance. What is decentralized finance? It’s the ability to be your own bank and have bank type services by way of by way of self-sovereignty. And so Snowball is available on iOS and Android.

6:42 Through the years we’ve built a number of other technologies. We anonymously fair launched a liquid staking derivatives decentralized exchange. It’s a very sophisticated product. Didn’t raise any capital for it. Didn’t reveal who we were.

6:56 And we had over $130 million of TVL or deposits that happen. We built a launchpad which as you mentioned incubates, invests, advises, and launches a number of web 3 projects. And we’ve advised a number of projects. Some of them are unicorn and top winner market cap projects. And now we’re on this adventure to solve the identity and reputation problem.

7:18 And so, let me give you I guess a high level of what’s happening in the world right now. There’s 8 billion people in the world today. Three billion of them do not have access to the internet. They do not have access to smartphones. However, with the advent of technology and Moore’s law, companies like SpaceX have launched 60,000 plus satellites which are now orbiting Earth, creating Wi-Fi for Earth, and the cost for smartphones are going down exponentially.

7:50 Let me ask you a question. What is the biggest economy in the world?

7:54 Brian Rose: Interesting. I mean, I used to say it was, you know, some people say it’s actually culture is like the biggest economy as people buy the brands that they want and all the things that they want. Otherwise I’ve heard that, you know, it’s gaming and things like that.

8:11 You know that’s bigger than music and movies combined. I don’t know. You tell me.

8:16 Parul Gujral: Well, here I’ll ask you another question then I’ll answer. What is like where is the biggest population in the world?

8:24 Brian Rose: Well, I guess India is right up there, right? 1.3 billion or more. Probably that is for geography and then I guess we’re in China and then in Africa.

8:33 Parul Gujral: Yeah. So, like traditionally you’re right where you know India, China are the biggest populations, biggest economies seem to be United States.

8:41 But the way that you answered it is totally spot on. Our perspective is the biggest economy in the world is people who transact on the internet and the biggest population in the world is people who live on the internet. And we have three billion people who are coming online for the first time in their lives. And where are they going to participate in the global economy? It’s going to be on chain on the internet, right?

9:08 And so with these people coming online, what’s incredibly important is two things. One, your identity, right? Your identity should be self-sovereign. It should be something that cannot be taken away from you. Bitcoin’s thesis was it must be trustless because when governments collapse and the currencies collapse, you should be able to have a source of value that cannot be taken away from you that’s self-sovereign that doesn’t require you to reveal who you are.

9:33 The second is your reputation online such that you can see how valuable of a citizen you are on the internet and you can do things to become more and more valuable because that will create abundance for you in this future that we live in. And so with that in light we have built and are launching two major projects. One is a multi-chain naming service. What does that mean? You get one username for the internet and you can connect multiple blockchain addresses.

10:03 So today if you’re on Ethereum you have a unique wallet address. If you’re on Solana you have a unique wallet address. If you’re on Sui you have a unique wallet address. Aptos you have a unique wallet address. How do you manage all of this?

10:15 If I’m to do a transaction with you, Brian, say you know you paid 100 bucks for dinner, I owe you 50 bucks. So you say Pule you owe me 50 bucks. Say, ‘Great, Brian. I’m happy to send you 50 bucks. What currency do you want me to send it in?

10:30 USDT, USDC, Ethereum, Solana. You say, “I want it on USDT.” Okay, great. What blockchain do you want me to send it on? On Tron, Sui, and you say, “I want it on Tron.”

10:41 Great. Okay. What is your wallet address? Well, I don’t know what my wallet address is because it’s a 39 bit public key, which is encrypted. Or public key.

10:52 So, let me copy paste it and send it to you. Okay, let me send you a test transaction. Test transaction received. Great. Okay, let me send you the rest.

11:01 It’s like the whole process is broken. So we are building an onchain username that will be your identity for the internet self-sovereign. It could be anonymous. It could be at Brian or it could be at London Real or it could be at you know at Legend, whatever you want to be. And the second thing we’re building is onchain reputation score where you can see based on your onchain history across these multiple chains that you’ve connected with how valuable you are.

11:33 When blockchains launch or decentralized applications or DAOs launch generally what they do is they’re trying to identify who the most valuable folks are on chain. It’s almost like an oligarchy. If you have board apes in your wallet, if you have millions of dollars in your wallet, if you’ve done these transactions, these networks are trying to encourage you to come to their network such that they’re giving you an airdrop, which in some cases could be very, very valuable.

12:01 And so identifying how valuable you are and understanding where value accrual happens is such an important problem for data, especially as we live in this AI agent age. So, we’re allowing people to have an onchain reputation score to see how valuable they are on chain and we’re allowing them to do these different actions to be able to make their reputation greater such that they can get more value. And on the other side for protocols for decentralized applications, we’re allowing them to understand who these valuable people are and be able to incentivize them in a way that’s legal and compliant by way of giving them tasks such that their activities are aligned.

12:46 So what are these chains doing? They’re trying to find those who are doing onchain transactions. They’re trying to find those who are providing liquidity. They’re looking for those builders who have launched smart contracts and have millions of dollars that are going through these smart contracts. They’re trying to find those who are making votes and governance.

13:04 So, wherever value accrual happens, we’re able to identify that. And we’re also able to see who’s gotten airdrops in the past. Do they sell it or do they use those tokens for utility? And so, we’re building an intelligence and identity layer for the decentralized internet. This is the holy grail.

13:23 Brian Rose: Like, this is such a big deal. And there’s a bunch of people trying to pull it off in different ways. You know, you got Altman’s Worldcoin scanning people’s eyes. Yeah. You know, you got, I think it was Stanny from A created Lens and it was like this NFT that would follow you around.

13:38 Yat from Animoca has the Mochaverse. Yeah. What do you make of their attempts to try to assign identity? And why is this such a hard thing to figure out?

13:47 Parul Gujral: It’s a hard thing to figure out because the attempt has been by closing the by creating these closed loop networks.

13:54 So, I guess for the layman in muggle talk How are people transacting today? Let’s say you have Venmo, you have PayPal, you have Zelle. I cannot send you a payment from my Venmo to your PayPal or your PayPal to Zelle, right? Because these are closed networks and blockchains are the same. You have these incredible massive networks like the Solanas and Ethereums and the avalanches and polygons and Aptos and Sui and the cosmos of the world which aspire to be interoperable.

14:24 However, the user experience is horrendous and terrible. Even these identity naming services that have done a great job like ENS, we’re huge fans of them are closed off to the Ethereum network. And so, you know, these products could be very successful but we believe that the future should be interoperable and it and blockchain should be on the back end not on the front end. Your intent should be on the front end such that it could be realized in the most easiest way that’s grandmother tested.

14:54 Brian Rose: Yeah. This is such a powerful technology and you know we’ve got different investments in our portfolio that really take advantage of knowing someone’s identity and getting all sorts of benefits on the back because in the blockchain space I mean you it’s quite transparent on the activity of those wallets and so you could be an amazing candidate with an incredible history of you know receiving airdrops and holding them or someone who’s really creditworthy or someone who owns board apes and you might be able to reap all these benefits of being like a VIP customer and yet if you can’t be identified, you won’t get that. Whereas in the real world, you might have a good credit score and then you can make an investment.

15:32 But that’s, you know, the blockchain has so much more upside for this than the quote unquote real world or the traditional finance world. Yeah. So there’s a ton of upside here and I guess you see that as well, right?

15:45 Parul Gujral: Yeah, absolutely. And blockchain is solving the Byzantine generals problem.

15:49 Have you heard of this?

15:50 Brian Rose: I have. Yeah. Yeah. The old computer science problem.

15:52 Parul Gujral: Yeah. How do you have all of these people who don’t know each other or trust each other have the ability to work together in a way? It’s like how do you work together without having to trust each other?

16:02 Brian Rose: Yeah, that was that classic Byzantine general. I think it was like a bunch of generals were about to attack the castle and if they all worked together, they knew they could win, but if one had to go first, they got might get punished.

16:14 So if they had to trust each other, there was a problem. But if they could do it in a trustless manner, then they all won. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah.

16:22 Parul Gujral: Exactly. And if you think of like how governance has happened, it started with you know we have democracy which means one person one vote. You then you have an aristocracy where you have elites who make the decisions for society. Then you have a monarchy or dictatorship where you have a king who’s making decisions for society. And then you have corporations where it’s similar concept.

16:45 So this Byzantine general problem being solved allows people to create value in the network almost like a market. And if you’re creating value for the network, then you’re able to participate in a way and it’s allowing you to do this in a trustless way such that this network can flourish with people who are building value and receiving that value. And cryptocurrencies as a result of this, right? Because when that value is being distributed for the value that’s been created, it’s happening through this token.

17:16 And so this token represents that. And if the value is meaningful, solving a problem in the real world, then that token could have value.

17:24 Brian Rose: And with Snowball Money, you want to focus on the three billion people that still aren’t online, which means they’re most likely not banked at all, as opposed to the five billion that are already online.

17:36 Parul Gujral: I think our focus is for everybody but we understand that the biggest opportunity within the space is that we have all these people that are coming online and our purpose was to be able to democratize access to information such that everyone has an opportunity to participate and participate in a safe way in this new web 3 world where value is distributed by those who are giving value to the ecosystem.

17:59 And so yeah we’re working you know to start with those who are already online. We’re working with those who are already doing transactions. We’re working with those who are already giving value to these networks and then scaling and expanding from there.

18:13 Brian Rose: Okay. What makes you dangerous as one of the reasons we were really excited to partner and invest in you guys is that I mean you started Snowball in 2015.

18:22 Parul Gujral: I mean, 2018 20 end of 2017 is when we were working on it, but 2018 is when we started. Like you said, you’re on the iOS app store. I mean, just so people know, these are not things you hear about in blockchain. Use a blockchain, nobody has an app because the apps are all banned and nobody has web two tech experience and no one’s been around for seven, eight years. It just doesn’t exist.

18:43 Brian Rose: Yeah. And so you bring a lot of experience to the table. You’ve seen what works. You know, you understand product market fit. You understand app stores.

18:50 I mean, that’s really unique in this space, isn’t it?

18:53 Parul Gujral: is very unique in this space because the space is evolving and when we started Snowball, Bitcoin had gone from its peak of like 17 $18,000 all the way down to $3,000 and so there was a 70 80% draw down and imagine you’re building a company to solve a problem when everyone has lost majority of the capital that they invested.

19:13 Brian Rose: I watched a video of you speaking at a conference I think in 18 when the lows were in and you were talking about Snowball. Yeah.

19:21 And you’re at the stage and you’re like, “Look, I know, I know Bitcoin’s down, but you’re like, but this is all part of the process and like nobody wanted to hear you, but you were right.” You know, you knew this long vision, this northstar, it was coming back, but I’ve seen you at the lows.

19:37 Parul Gujral: Yeah. I think that, you know, as an entrepreneurship or part, as an entrepreneur, by definition, you’re a contrarian, right? It’s almost like religion.

19:46 Why? Because you can see around the corner before we get there.

20:19 Brian Rose: However, is you know you’ve generated value for the world but also it’s materially profitable. Yeah. Yeah.

21:13 And so you started back then you had this vision and you’ve built kind of in the web two world and in the web 3 world and that gives you an advantage over a lot of these companies that are some of them starting in the last 12 or 18 months with these kind of ID systems. And so you’ve kind of rolled all that back in. You’ve also gone from being an investor back into being an operator. And this is the other thing that makes you dangerous because you and I met years ago hanging out in Dubai and I always knew you as Parul the investor.

21:43 Yeah. And you were like, “Yeah, I’m doing investments here and here and here.” And then when I heard you were coming back in, I told my team, I’m like, “Guys like Parul don’t come back in unless they’re here to knock it out of the park, as we say in cricket, right?” And so these guys are here not just to build a massive company, but also to build something maybe for their legacy or something that means even more than the money. Yeah.

22:05 And so I always get worried when really savvy, plugged in, successful investors like you come back to operate because it says, “Uh-oh, this guy’s serious.” Because it’s clearly no longer about the money. It’s about impact. It’s about changing the world forever. And you’re dangerous.

22:22 Parul Gujral: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I think there’s a lot to unpack here. Number one is understanding where you are as a human going through this process of life.

22:34 Much like building a product, if you’ve ever built a product, it starts with inspiration, right? Something that is bigger than yourself. You see a problem that doesn’t exist that you can solve and prove to the world that it exists. Number two, then it goes to the brainstorm. And brainstorming this turns into planning, you know, the product launch.

22:56 Then you go into the sprint where you’re on the grind. Then you get to the quality assurance and you go back into the sprint and then you go back to, you know, then you become burnt out and then the process starts again. And so in my process, you know, I’ve had a lot of successes and a number of failures. But what I’ve learned is that all of the amalgamation of this experience that I’ve been so fortunate to have, like having the top, you know, category creating entrepreneurs in the world investing in us, like, you know, the co-founder of Twitch and the co-founder of Call of Duty and the co-founder of Salesforce and the co-founder of Ripple and the co-founder of Rotten Tomatoes and the co-founder of YouTube, etc., etc.

23:38 This is wisdom that they’ve created by creating these categories that I’ve been so fortunate to inherit and monetize. And so if I can help entrepreneurs do this by way of showing the example, not only by investing, that’s incredibly rewarding. But my whole career has come to this moment coming out of investing because I see this massive problem and opportunity. It is a very sophisticated problem, not an easy problem to solve. It’s a herculean endeavor to be able to deploy on eight blockchains with different programming languages and multiple wallets like MetaMask of the world and different blockchain explorers and then bringing up masses of community to actually see around the corner and in this like invisible thing before we get there is it’s actually such a joy.

24:27 My unfair advantage is like I see it. It’s very clear to me and having to have the opportunity cost of investing advising companies really means that I really believe in it with the deepest conviction. So here we are on this adventure. It’s so much fun and I get to have conversations with wonderful folks like you and have wonderful folks like you be part of our story to be able to, like, as an alchemist take this energy and spread it by way of this problem that we’re solving.

24:56 Giving people the ability to have their self-sovereign identity on chain. As well as giving the opportunity for people to know what their reputation is and increase that reputation because the internet is a place which is de facto of how we are living our lives. Right? The world has gone from having a physical resume to having an Instagram page which is your online resume. You know, we’ve gone from boardrooms to Zoom rooms, right?

25:29 Our identity is become so important because when you meet potentially a significant other at, you know, a bar or restaurant, you’re not asking for a phone number, you’re asking for this like online resume which shares, you know, who you are, who your friends are, what you’re into, you know, what inspires you, how you define yourself. And so we understand like we are continuing to move more and more and more into this online space, this box life living behind a digital screen by way of these digital avatars representing who we are. And that is what the metaverse is.

26:06 That is what the 3D internet is. And that is what our simulation of life that we’re experiencing is.

26:12 Brian Rose: You know, people are saying now that this online identity, which you’re going to champion, is going to become even more important as our AIs and our AI agents become more powerful. And we’re really going to need to know if someone is the person they say they are. And so, this was always an important issue.

26:30 And like you said, your online reputation is important. And a lot of times I’ll meet somebody and I’ll send them an article about me running for mayor on the BBC because it’s like, okay, I guess this guy’s legit cuz this is a legit service talking about something you did that looks pretty cool. And so you’re right, we really are digital identities. If I look at my stepdaughter, you know, she’s 21. Like her digital identity is more important in sometimes than her physical identity.

26:56 Yeah. And my boys even younger than that. You know who they are on Roblox playing with their friends is maybe more important than the clothes they’re wearing. Very different world than maybe we grew up. But now you got AI in there and all of these potential bots.

27:10 I mean, Elon posted something on X the other day, said or somebody said who here is actually real and not an AI bot. Yeah. And so tell me because you have a lot of experience in AI as well. Do you see what you’re doing as an important part of defining who is human in the future?

27:25 Parul Gujral: Yeah, absolutely.

27:26 And if you think of artificial intelligence or AI agents or even AGI, it’s running off of data and we are creating this data such that they could utilize it to fulfill their tasks in a very efficient way. But we’re also allowing people to have proof of humanity and also these AI agents to have names and reputations themselves such that they can see how valuable they are compared to other AI agents. So really it comes down to creating a cryptographic proof of what you are and giving you credit for the things that you’ve done and giving you an incentive on and clarity of how you can improve.

28:09 And so, we’re, you know, having early talks with major AI protocols to be able to power 150,000 of their AI agents and the community that’s interacting with them to give them clarity as well as we’re questing platforms. And AI is not the future. It’s here today.

28:26 Brian Rose: Yeah. And the other thing about AI is it needs blockchain more than ever because AI and these agents are going to require microtransactions and even transactions and AIs can’t get bank accounts and so crypto is actually custom-built for AIs interacting with each other.

28:43 Is that right?

28:44 Parul Gujral: Yeah, absolutely. And you know authentication can happen by way of an AI agent. It can make the decisions and really what matters in this world is intent. It doesn’t matter what’s underneath.

28:58 It matters what you’re trying to accomplish. And AI is able to find ways and pathways to realize that intent. And over time, you know, we’re going to be living in absolute, I believe that we’re going to be living in absolute abundance because we have these humanoid robots that are not far away. We have these self-driving cars that will allow us to transfer, you know, our experience from one place to another. You know, we’ll be able to have these rocket ships that can in 30 minutes travel from Shanghai to San Francisco.

29:26 And so, you know, with Moore’s law, I’m so so excited about the future and the abundance that’s inevitable.

29:32 Brian Rose: Yeah, we just got to live long enough for it. We’ll talk about that shortly. One of your biggest issues is scaling. And I guess you got to get out to three billion and maybe 8 billion people.

29:42 How do you do that when everybody else is trying to do the same thing?

29:47 Parul Gujral: Inherently by how you’re architecting your business. The projects that go viral, it’s usually not by chance. It’s by architecting a series of S-curves. And so, by designing this positive feedback loops that are rewarding those who are participating, encouraging them to share with other people, it’s a very predictable way to grow.

30:08 So, we’ve created a number of programs, some traditional programs, some untraditional programs, but we have channel partnerships. Fortunately, I’ve been in the space long enough to have deep long-standing relationships with the major players. And actually in many cases advisor got to invest early and be part of their journey as well. So our unfair advantage is, you know, not only having those relationships but the resourcefulness and the architecture to be able to do this such that scaling is built by design not a factor of human capital or actually financial capital.

30:44 It’s based off technology.

30:45 Brian Rose: How important is it your past of advising companies and even the time you spent in Silicon Valley, because I mean they are the OGs of product development and product scaling and all of that stuff. You spent quite a bit of time out there, right? In being immersed in the mentality of that, even the way you describe it right now, I’ve never had a guest that’s described it the way you do. You know, everyone’s like, “Oh, we’re going to product market this.”

31:10 But you’re like, “No, no, no, no. It comes down to the design of the product itself.” Yeah. Yeah. Can you just speak on how that experience makes you like more qualified to build something like this?

31:21 Parul Gujral: Yeah, I think and I still spend a considerable amount of time in San Francisco. I think it’s absolutely mandatory because it is the mecca of technology innovation and AI innovation and in projects that have scaled. I think it’s an unfair advantage, not only because the serendipity of being around the smartest people in the world for the field of technology but because it’s, I believe in energy, right? So every city has a different energy. If you go to Miami the energy is going to be upbeat and to party and to socialize if you go to New York it’s going to be, you know, very fast-paced and, you know, energetically driven to be able to accomplish.

32:03 If you go to San Francisco, it’s to be able to create and to be able to co-create with people. And so I think San Francisco has an unfair advantage for that reason. You know, like we were sharing this example earlier. You know, you’ll go to a bar and you’ll meet, you know, a girl at the bar and what you’ll connect on is, you know, she’s a neuroscientist and she’s going to share the cutting edge research and you’re inquisitive enough to be able to ask the right questions and listen and understand and it’s coming from a place of shared growth versus an inquisitiveness, not off of ego.

32:35 So, I think that there’s real magic in San Francisco and we’ve been so fortunate to be able to collaborate with these category creators. John Dylan invented software as a service, the subscription model sharing at salesforce.com. Kevin Lynn, you know, from Twitch, they invented the ability to stream. And we’re going from these we’re going from this like web one, web two to web 3 world. And what’s really important about the web 3 world is anyone can participate and leverage.

33:06 In the past for you to be able to leverage, you needed capital, you needed, you know, resources. But now in this world, you can leverage your wisdom by getting on Twitter, by writing a blog. You know, where is money happening being created today and wealth? it’s happening by creating writing code. It’s happening by creating content such as yourself, which frankly costs almost nothing.

33:31 It just takes the ability to know something and share that the world wants. And so like understanding the constructs of these from these category creators and fundamentally injecting it into our business has been such an incredible experience with a number of losses and failures along the way. But you know, I believe that you know as an entrepreneur especially if you’re an early stage entrepreneur you have this idea and you bring this idea into a world full of apex predators.

34:02 Right, you go into the ocean and you get breached by the great white sharks that maybe the VC is saying, oh you don’t have product market fit or you don’t have enough users or you don’t have enough revenue you go into the jungle and you get mauled by the bears who are the regulators that haven’t created a legal jurisdiction as well as clear legal outline of how you could find legal path to success. You know, you go into the mountains and you get clawed by the mountain lions who are your customers who may not understand your product or the value proposition, but something very unique happens on this journey. Every apex predator you meet, when you meet them and you get clawed or mauled or breached, you don’t die, you evolve.

34:50 And so this is constant process of evolution to find that product market fit. And when you do find a product market fit and you’re doing something you know the world needs, then it becomes effortless. You’re actually in the flow of the river versus trying to change the direction of it. So each one of those challenges makes you better and better and better. Absolutely.

35:08 Brian Rose: And when you’re in Silicon Valley, you bump into more and more of those. Even your fellow VCs are just going to rip you apart over a coffee and say, “Bro, what are you doing? You don’t have the most obvious thing here. Fix that before you even talk about this again.” Right.

35:22 Advice you might never get in a London or somewhere else.

35:25 Parul Gujral: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

35:27 Especially because they’ve spoken to so many people and seen they’ve been in battle looking from so many different angles and have this like perspective. It’s their job to have these meetings and so you know, it’s our job to create product and solve a problem and so that wisdom that is inherited is incredible and if you can accept it openly but also decipher what’s noise and signal, it will increase the probability for success.

35:54 Brian Rose: Just tell me more about your journey in crypto because obviously Snowball Money is on the blockchain and it’s using the power of the blockchain in a big way.

36:04 But I’m curious like when you got into it and where you think it is now. I mean, Jesus, 2025, now we’ve got a sitting vice president of the United States at the Bitcoin conference. Yeah. You know, last year we had a former president, now the current president speaking at the Bitcoin conference. You just had the Winklevoss twins on stage with David Sacks, the AI and crypto czar, talking about how a year ago they were going to jail.

36:30 Everybody was going to jail, including Trump, and now they’re all being celebrated and empowered. What do you see? Because you’ve been here as long as those guys have.

36:41 Parul Gujral: Yeah, I think this is a golden age for crypto. Even Paulo’s CEO of Tether refused to come to the United States because of the lack of legal clarity and now he has come.

36:52 And so I think it all starts with a legal path to success. The previous administrations have been very critical on crypto and now they’re realizing that 10% of the population in the United States participates in this. People of the younger generation are more interested in crypto than they are of stocks. So inevitably it is going to be the future if we continue on this trajectory. The writing is on the wall.

37:20 You can see when President Trump went to the Middle East, he was able to get trillions of dollars of investment. Why is United States powerful? Why is the most powerful country in the world? Do you know?

37:33 Brian Rose: Well, some people say it’s the military.

37:35 Some people say it’s the innovation. Some people say it’s the capital markets. Some people say it’s the legal system that backs up those capital markets.

37:42 Parul Gujral: Yeah. So, so yes, you’re right in all of those, but also it’s because the power of the US dollar.

37:46 The US dollar is a global reserve currency. And it wasn’t always the global reserve currency.

37:51 Brian Rose: Before 1945, right, and Bretton Woods and all that, post World War II, it wasn’t. And before that, it was the pound, I think. Right.

37:59 Parul Gujral: Exactly. It was pound sterling. And so the history of money is money always will continue to evolve, right? We started in this, you know, here are my pebbles for you, you know, your rice, right? So we started with a bartering system and then we created this like, okay, here’s this scarce asset which is gold and silver and I have a pouch of it and we can now transfer this.

38:20 Then we created, you know, this paper money system where we put the gold in the bank and said this has more utility. Then we created, and I’m fast forwarding and overgeneralizing but then you created this paper check which could now represent more than the dollars that you could actually physically custody and hold. And we created this credit card which gives you additional utility. And so money was continuing to evolve since its inception to become more and more efficient.

38:45 And so the next iteration of this is digital assets. And with the legal jurisdiction giving the path to success we are going to we’re continuing to have more and more money being poured in. So just really really fortunate to now recently become an adviser for a major fund. It’s $10.6 billion fund. They’ve done over $200 billion of annual transactions and my involvement with them is to help them get into a stable coin because we’re having a stable coin gold rush.

39:15 Yeah. And a stable coin bill was just passed in the United States showing how you can legally launch a stable coin and what the laws were around this. So there’s actual clarity and because there’s an appetite for this, you know, with this current administration, there’s a lot of deregulation that’s happening which is allowing free markets to find, you know, products that the world actually wants. And so it’s such an exciting time. There’s so much investment going in the United States.

39:42 I think if you look at the fundamentals of the markets, they’re absolutely strong. The technicals can be off every now and then when there’s major tariffs being threatened, but what I see that’s happening is these tariffs expectations without question. The trade deals with the United States and if tariffs are going to crush the market as they did the beginning of the year, what will removing the tariffs do, right? Probably make the market grow. And if we’ve been able to renegotiate these trade deals and we’re seeing that soft banks of the world and Middle East and all of these other countries are pouring in investment and the economics are more profitable for the United States, you know, with DOGE cutting what our spend is.

41:11 I think that United States was on a fast track to bankruptcy as Ray Dalio. But I strongly believe in here’s an example. COVID was a time that the whole world and all of humanity united for the first time against one common enemy. And what happened? The ozone healed.

41:33 You know, plants, animals were thriving. It was so good for the world. And what were we able to do within two years? We were able to come up with a number of vaccines. Now, right, these vaccines may or may not be serving humanity.

41:45 That’s debatable. I am someone who doesn’t personally believe in vaccines. But conceptually when there is a massive problem, the bigger the problem, the bigger the reward. And the problem that the United States and the opportunity United States have is because they have the dollar as a global reserve currency, it makes us a superpower. Major countries are backing their treasuries with the US dollars.

42:07 And the reason why the US dollar is a global reserve currency is because it’s, they call it the petrodollar. Because Saudi Arabia, they were settling oil trades in US dollars which means it has the most depth, has the most volume and that required countries to come into this. Now, the previous administration had a lot of very strong policies as well as perspectives that led for BRICS, which is Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and a number of the fastest developing nations to come together to potentially create this BRICS currency.

42:46 De-dollarization was one of the biggest threats to United States. The US has been behind over 100 regime changes in the world since World War II. It’s not been the best look. No, not been the best look. If you look at like I don’t know if you’ve ever watched any YouTube videos of Gaddafi.

43:04 Brian Rose: I think I’ve seen some of them recently.

43:07 Parul Gujral: Yeah. So much wisdom from him. Libya was absolutely flourishing. They had massive gold reserves.

43:13 Their currency was backed by their gold. They were allowing Europe to be able to buy oil in euros and they wanted to create an African united currency backed by gold and given that was a threat to the US dollar, you know, Gaddafi met his end. And so, protecting this power is so important and now with this new administration that has come in, it is very strongly signifying that all of these entities and sovereigns are now rebelieving and reinvesting in the dollar.

43:45 The de-dollarization concept is less and so what does that mean abundance is coming legal clarity is coming. If you look at what’s recently happened with Pakistan and India there was a terrorist attack that happened in India. India retaliated against these terrorists. Pakistan escalated by attacking India. India deescalated.

44:07 Why? Because their economy is booming and you know, Trump is a peacetime president. He even offered Iran to remove all sanctions if they get rid of their nuclear program because he wants to create global peace such that the global economy can thrive and by renegotiating these trade deals for the west this is going to create absolute abundance and what does this mean for blockchain and blockchain based currencies they’re very strongly correlated to macro markets And in addition to that, this means that you know when there is like uncertainty in the world people are looking for something that’s trustless and self-sovereign.

44:46 And so it’s inevitable that there will be continue to be skirmishes. It’s inevitable that there’s going to be challenges and steps backs before steps forward. But all in all, I believe that the direction that we’re going in is going to create this absolute golden age for us. And it has never been a more exciting time to be investing or to be building in blockchain, in AI, in robotics and technology. It’s a beautiful time

45:10 Brian Rose: and like you said that so we’ve been 80 80 years on the petrodollar.

45:14 I think everyone in Washington is starting to realize that the stable coin is the way to push that maybe another 80 years and I don’t think they got it before because it was being vilified and that’s the whole past. But I think they’re starting to see, wait a second. Because one of my students in my academy, they asked me the other day. They said, “Brian, where’s the Euro stable coin?” Where’s the Japanese yen stable coin?

45:36 And I said, “This is like a winner take all scenario.” It’s like it’s not like it’s distributed of where those currencies are by market cap. It’s like basically 99.9% dollar. And so this is the perfect opportunity for the dollar to extend that reach. And I’m so glad that the US is embracing that legislation and going forward with it.

45:53 And I hope we get this GENIUS Act passed and looks like we will. So yeah, it’s an exciting time and I, it’s nice to see the US waking up to the fact and that could ultimately provide some amazing stability across the world and so yeah, you must be excited because now blockchain is being legalized, the innovation’s there. AI is happening and like you said, the abundance is clear and there’s all sorts of amazing problems to solve. Yeah. In a playing field that looks more level than ever.

46:21 Yeah. You know, tell me what does Snowball Money look like over the next three months, six months, one year, two year, you know, what do you guys planning to roll out? What are you planning to accomplish? And how do you run this company? Is this team all over the world?

46:40 And I’m just kind of curious, what’s that like? Because I know you’re a super busy guy.

46:45 Parul Gujral: Yeah, our team is mostly decentralized. We have people from San Francisco to Kiev in Ukraine to Europe to Asia and I think it’s like very important to be aligned with the ethos of Satoshi white paper of decentralization and so we’ve found ways to allow our team to be most productive and collaborate with different perspectives and prerogatives from the different lights that they’re seeing from their everyday united on one common cause and that is you know democratize access to information by the technology that we build as well as positively affecting the lives of a billion or more people by, you know, acquiring users as well as investing in companies, advising companies, incubating companies, and launching them.

47:25 You know, our short-term focus is we’re launching our username products. So, you can get a username. Matter of fact, we just launched a public beta yesterday on eight blockchains. Amazing. Two years coming to get to this point.

47:39 So, super super exciting. We just launched our reputation score product as well. So, the next 3 to 6 months, we’re going to be acquiring as many users as possible, building on top of these different blockchain networks, doing these chain takeovers. I think the one-year vision is we’re exploring building our own chain for settlement. And then the two to five-year vision is this infrastructure has so much opportunity.

48:03 You mentioned it actually in the beginning of the conversation is you can build DeFi credit based on reputation based on onchain transactions and that’s like the high level focus but we want to be able to work with not only folks onchain but work with institutions and different communities to empower their communities by giving them an identity allowing them to receive tokens for the work that they’re doing allow them to create economics and schemas to be able to have value accrual for these entities. And we’re doing work from you know sovereign wealth funds to you know venture capital to even country level in some cases but really we’re hyperfocused on different phases. So this is the phase that we’re in right now is launch and acquire as many users as possible.

48:48 Brian Rose: Amazing. Now selfishly I want to get my name and I haven’t yet. So like how would I go do that right now and grab my name for your name service?

48:56 Parul Gujral: Yeah. So, right now we have only an allow list that’s allowing people, but you can go to www.snowball.money.

49:02 Okay. You can get on to the wait list for the allow list and when your time comes, you’ll be able to get your name. But we’ve already saved your name, by the way, because you’re our partner. And another thing we need to do is the other folks within London Real Ventures, it is our gift to give to them. Amazing.

49:19 Brian Rose: You know, it’s interesting because inside London Real Ventures, you know, all of our LPs have a say on whether we go forward with the project and like everybody was super impressed with you and I think it was your vibe and your energy and maybe I want to talk about that shortly, but they were just like this is the guy that’s going to build this project and we had heard other people pitch ideas like this, okay? And they were like, I don’t know if that guy can do it, but we feel like or if he’s fully aligned with it. So, it’s like they weren’t sure about both of those things, but they were sure about you.

49:53 And you just rattled off some of your investors, you know, like it’s nothing. But, like you said, co-founder of Twitch, co-founder of YouTube, co-founder of all these major pieces, you know, for those guys to trust you to execute on an idea they probably saw elsewhere. Why do they say, “Yeah, I’m in on Parul. I’m in on this guy. I want to do it with you.”

50:15 Parul Gujral: Because those are a huge list of investors. I think it’s for a number of reasons. Probably the number one reason is I’m unapologetically authentically myself and I take feedback but I make decisions for myself and I think that, you know, these emotions are contagious and transferable and people see that. I also, my approach has always been to give value before extracting value. And I think that’s super important because when you’re from coming from a place of giving, you can kind of understand how people are operating, what their actual intentions are.

50:50 And the third is this is such an exciting growing space and they want to go and get exposure from a place that is very trusted and so if you’re authentic in who you are I think you were able to get this value and actually as a matter of fact, it’s not that we have these incredible investors based on their name brand we have handpicked these investors because they’ve created categories for themselves and we ourselves are creating a category in this very innovative new, you know, frontier here. So, it’s super exciting to be able to collaborate with these people. I’m very grateful and it’s not just a factor of money, but it’s a factor of wisdom and energy exchange.

51:30 Like we have one adviser in our company, his name is Reese Jones. He invented the Ethernet cable. He’s advising another company which is Meta or Facebook. So, we’re able to like get this wisdom from folks that are seeing from different perspectives and we’re able to amalgamate that into actually actionable product and the world is receiving it. We’ve failed so many times and that’s okay, right?

51:59 Adversity actually is a strong signal for those who are successful. The most successful people have had the most adversity. It’s just what they’ve made from that adversity. So coming from the founder and builder side, the number of products to the investor side, coming to the dark side to see, you know, how founders are pitching, what their north star is, how they’re creating buy side, demand, you know, how they’re structuring like their approach. It really opened my eyes from all perspectives.

52:29 And that wholesome approach, I think, gives me a superpower. But it’s not just me. I’m so fortunate to be able to collaborate with some of the brightest minds in the world that I’ve built companies with in the past and who I’ve collaborated with for a numbers of years. I mean, shout out to Anna. Anna is I consider my business partner.

52:47 She started just as an analyst for the company and she was doing the work of what my co-founder was this fancy Wall Street guy was supposed to do. And you know, she comes from Ukraine and she wasn’t given the opportunity. There was glass ceilings and she was actually one of the lowest paid people in the company. But I saw her light and her wisdom and her execution and there will never be a successful parole story without there being Anna right next to me as my partner.

53:15 So now she’s our CFO, she’s partner and you know she’s executing with excellence, with passion and energy and that energy is transferable not only within the organization but to the external to our customers to our investors to our community and that’s like what we lead with.

53:31 Brian Rose: That’s amazing man. I love it. You mentioned your own blockchain in the future. Does this also include your own token and how would that work and timelines for that?

53:40 And how have you thought because I mean you must have seen so many token launches. You must have seen so many tokenomics. Yeah. You’ve seen a lot of failures. You’ve seen the evolution of the concept of what makes a good token or a utility token or a governance token.

53:55 So I’m curious how have you thought about that for Snowball?

53:59 Parul Gujral: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. We have a token on the horizon. There may or may not be an airdrop for those who have our identities.

54:08 Well said. No guarantees. But we do imagine there being a token sometime in the near future. I think our prerequisites is to make sure that we have major distribution channels closed. Fortunately, through investments, through deep relationships, we understand what the prerequisites are to get the best distribution channels.

54:30 We’ve got a number of projects listed on KuCoin and Bybit and Binance, Upbit, etc. And so, having these distribution channels are very important. We’ve created these amazing business partnerships like as I mentioned, Evan Luther, Kol Capital, I came up with the idea and the name for Kol Capital. We’ve got to be part of these early networks. Was number three in Morpheus which is the biggest decentralized AI community within blockchain with David Johnston who’s an absolute legend, you know, it’s early investor in SpaceX, early investor for Multicoin Capital, which is the best returning fund And so yeah, I think like amalgamating all of this incredible community that we have, having milestones that are accomplished will inevitably lead to a token.

55:13 We’re very ambitious, like Elon Musk, thinking that we’ll be able to do this by August And when we do it, it’s going to be on the top distribution channels. We certainly plan to do it by the end of this year. Hopefully in August, maybe it’s a bit unrealistic, but around this time frame.

55:30 Brian Rose: Amazing. What would you say is your single biggest challenge in the next 12 months, you know, as Snowball besides the TGE?

55:37 I know that’s a big one, but what would you say is the thing that’s kind of on your mind that you need to do?

55:44 Parul Gujral: You know, a lot of a lot of blockchain success has to do with timing. And like for example, in January, Trump launched the Trump coin. Yeah. And what happened?

55:55 Sucked the liquidity out of the market. We were in this memecoin super cycle and then memes went, you know, to zero. We went from a fear and greed index being at 87 to being at 17, which is the lowest it’s been since like the bottom of the bear market in I think 2022. And so, I think like the technicals with the approach of the current administration creates a lot of uncertainty for macro markets and markets like certainty. They like predictability.

56:28 You can have very high interest rates, but as long as they’re predictable, the markets will price that in and will have an ability to grow. So, I think that probably the biggest challenge is like the technicals being off. However, I’m so bullish on this current administration, you know, all of these investments that are happening and the United States uniting to solve this financial problem of the debt, this unsustainable debt to create abundance. And so I think that’s inevitable.

56:58 I think that when the market inevitably, like I have a strong thesis that once Bitcoin cross 110K, we’re shooting to 150K. Because that’s where the psychological barriers are. And we’ve crossed that 110K. And if it doesn’t happen by summer, it’ll happen soon thereafter. So, we’re timing the market to a line when the market has the most amount of people that are really interested for our launch.

57:23 And so between now and then, our goal and our obstacle and our opportunity is to spread the energy of this usernames to as many people as possible, a minimum of 300,000 people and with these onchain transactions and then we feel very confident that we could get any of the major distribution channels.

57:41 Brian Rose: Do you believe we’re going to follow that classic, you know, Bitcoin rally, that liquidity bleeds into Ethereum and layer 1’s and then bleeds down to where you get this quote unquote altcoin season that we’ve seen over the last four cycles or do you believe that that might be broken because now we’ve got, you know, 30 million tokens whereas back in 21 we had 30,000 tokens. Yeah.

58:03 Do you believe that that will trickle down as it has so many times in the past or do you think that it could be broken?

58:13 Parul Gujral: Okay. Okay. Well, let’s unpack this a little bit, right? So, I have a belief that the major product market fit within this space has been speculation.

58:25 And this is evidenced by where the volume and where the investment is going. It’s going to either these blockchain infrastructures or it’s going to memecoins. And during the memecoin super cycle, there was like 70% of the volume and attention was on these meme coins because it’s so easy to launch these meme coins. Now, if you have a utility token, generally you also have a vesting schedule which an inflation schedule where you’re introducing more and more tokens in the market and so many investors despite the success of the launches, got overinflated and the utility was never realized.

59:00 So the product market fit is like clearly a blockchain-based token. If you’re on the network, you need to use this token for gas. But if you look at Ethereum, right, how much of Ethereum is being bought to be used for these gas transactions, right? So, how Ethereum works is you have these builders, they need to pay gas to be able to launch their businesses and you have their customers who need to be able to pay gas to be able to utilize these businesses, whether it’s DeFi or GameFi, NFTs, etc.

59:26 How much do you think is actually being used for gas of all the Ethereum buys out there?

59:31 Brian Rose: Yeah, I don’t know. I feel like it’s small, way less than 5%, probably closer to 1 2%. The rest is speculative. The rest is people speculating that there’s going to be builders and buyers.

59:42 Parul Gujral: Right. Okay. Right. And then memecoins, memecoins are like Vladimir Putin.

59:47 Brian Rose: Pretty intense thing to say.

59:49 Parul Gujral: Why? Because all governments are mafias, right? As I mentioned before, the US has been behind over a hundred regime changes since World War II. with the, you know, advertising that we believe in democracy. How do you get out of a rat race?

1:00:06 How do you create wealth not only for yourself but also for

1:00:16 London Real promo: See you in the Investment Club.

1:00:22 Parul Gujral: But really, it’s to be able to control that we have the dollar as a global reserve currency and that’s our power and then we have the military to back that. And why are memecoins like Vladimir Putin? Because a lot of these utility tokens, they say that they have this purpose, but in reality, they’re doing all these Ponzomics with huge inflation and the investors are getting hurt.

1:01:26 The thing about memecoins is memecoins are 100% of the tokens are liquid on day one. They’re not vesting over a long period of time. They’re generally starting almost always on a decentralized exchange on chain. So you can see how decentralized it is versus how centralized the ownership of this token is. And they have no purpose besides it being a casino and gambling or for the culture for the lols.

1:01:53 And so Vladimir Putin is saying he’s a mafia and acting as a mafia and pretending not that he’s not a mafia, right? And that’s where the comparison is. And so like the advent of these pump funds have made it so easy to launch these speculative assets where there’s been strong product market fit. And so I do think despite this I think people are very very tired with speculating on these like gambling tokens because they have been the breeding grounds for this malicious rug pull type activities.

1:02:29 I think that they are speculating saying that altcoin season has started now and like if I was a betting man I would bet where money is going to inflow where there’s trust. I think a lot of people are doing extremely well on especially in institutions on Bitcoin but they’ve missed out on the exponential gains and so where is trust you know, Ethereum I think has great trust because it’s the innovation chain. It’s where NFTs were invented. It’s where DeFi was invented.

1:02:57 It’s where play to earn was invented. It’s where these different categories and concept. It’s where this layer twos were invented, modularity was invented. Solana has great product market fit because that’s the chain where these gambling tokens exist, right? Where all these meme coins and so everything is a leveraged bet.

1:03:19 So like Pepe is a leveraged bet on Ethereum. Pepe’s dog is a double leveraged bet on Ethereum. Memecoins are a leveraged bet on Solana being successful. And so yeah, I think that memecoins are a very strong signal to how much greed is in the market. So as greed comes back, meme coins will continue to rise.

1:03:39 But I think this next leg of the cycle, there’s going to be a concentration of liquidity going into things that are more trustworthy and safe based on real like mechanics and fundamentals. And that is going to be these altcoins. And so I’m super bullish on this altcoin cycle happening, but it’s not going to be like it was before.

1:04:00 Brian Rose: Okay. And do you think we are still on the four-year cycle, which would end I guess around Q4 this year or do you think this super cycle is happening or the cycle is going to be flattened out or increased to six years because of institutions or ETFs or all these other reasons?

1:04:17 What are your thoughts?

1:04:18 Parul Gujral: I think we’re going to have a super cycle. The fundamentals are strong and I think you know the technicals can be off here and there but the fundamentals are showing that there’s law that’s coming into place that makes it safe to be able to enter this space which now you know brings trillions of dollars on chain led by these institutions. These institutions have found product market fit with stable coins with Bitcoin with ETFs and with real world assets.

1:04:46 You know, all these real world assets when they come on chain is going to create, you know, mountainous affluvia of abundance. And it’s going to give us so much more utility like markets will continue to evolve to become more efficient. And blockchain makes it so easy for markets to become more and more efficient by way of these derivative products. And so I think that institutions especially with like a legal framework with major like pioneering institutions like the BlackRocks of the world entering this space, the Fidelities of this world entering this space with trillions of dollars of capital coming into stable coins and with incentives being aligned with not only the institutions but sovereigns, like do you know how stable coins work?

1:05:29 Brian Rose: I mean, as far as how they buy the assets, like how they make money assets.

1:05:33 Parul Gujral: Yeah. They keep the carry themselves, right? It’s the craziest business model ever invented. It’s the craziest business model.

1:05:39 Tether have more revenue per employee than any company in the world. 13 billion dollars last year, right, with 100 people. But the carry like the carry is by way of US treasury. So you have a dig a physical dollar, you collateralize it and create a digital dollar. They take the collateral.

1:05:55 They invest it in treasuries where they’re making 4 and a.5% yield. They keep 100% of that yield. Yeah. And the government loves it. Why?

1:06:03 Because now you have hundreds of millions of dollars like I think $180 billion dollars is what Tether’s like liquidity is coming in to buy these treasuries. Yeah. And so if you can create alignment and incentives and create free markets, yes there will be a lot of malicious activities. Yes, there will be a lot of failures and collapses. But if you can align it in a way with legal infrastructure, then you know you have found product market fit.

1:06:31 So that’s the time that we live in. And because of this, I think, you know, even the Michael Saylor model, this just happened with Galaxy Digital going public, and they’re doing like a leverage bet on Ethereum based on, you know, Michael Saylor’s model and it’s working. And now you’re seeing all these Fortune 100 or Fortune 500 companies adding Bitcoin to their treasury and their stock prices are pumping. It’s crazy. And so this is a very strong signal that there’s product market fit.

1:06:57 The total addressable market is growing exponentially. It’s it’s it breathes, right? So, it inhales and exhales and everything that goes up must correct and profits must be taken. But that’s very healthy.

1:07:12 Brian Rose: Is Galaxy basically a Bitcoin Saylor bet but for Ethereum?

1:07:16 I mean, are they amassing that in Galaxy?

1:07:19 Parul Gujral: Well, Galaxy is like taking major positions across multiple other chains outside of Ethereum. But in a way, it is. Yes. Okay.

1:07:26 Brian Rose: And I think there’s now 111 public companies that are now putting Bitcoin on their balance sheet. Do you think that will continue? And do you think at some point it has to top out to where you don’t see your stock go up 6x? Like I met Dylan at the Satoshi round table a year and a half ago. And I love Dylan.

1:07:46 He’s amazing visionary kid. And he didn’t took a job with MetaPlanet in Japan. And that stocks up like 7x. Yeah. 7x in Japan, which government bonds pay like a half a percent.

1:07:57 And I’m just wondering like Peter Schiff who was actually a guest on London Real back in like 13. He’s like this isn’t sustainable. You can’t take every public company in the world and they buy Bitcoin and it goes up. Yeah. What do you think happens there?

1:08:12 Parul Gujral: Do you know how bonding curves work?

1:08:14 Brian Rose: Yeah, I know a little bit about a bonding curve as in it’s based on the demand is based on the price that you get.

1:08:19 Parul Gujral: Yeah. So when you’re starting an incentive, the incentive is greatest for the earliest adopters. And also there’s legal reasons now where you might want to buy MetaPlanet because you couldn’t own physical Bitcoin in Japan.

1:08:30 Brian Rose: So yeah. So you’re saying the early adopters are getting the best prices and winning.

1:08:34 Parul Gujral: They’re getting the highest rewards, but they’re also, you know, how innovation happens is like if you’re an entrepreneur and you’re trying to understand who your customer is, who your customer is in the beginning is not who your customer is in the middle, right? In the beginning, your customers are the pioneers, the first two and a half%. It’s going to be, you know, the Brian Roses who is, you know, a builder himself and can empathize with a builder and see a vision.

1:08:57 It doesn’t have to be a finished built-out product. It can be a concept and you can get behind that concept. It could be then after the pioneers is the innovators, right? The innovators are those who follow Brian and have some initial validation and are looking for this problem to be solved. And because there’s initial validation, then they’re going to come in.

1:09:21 And then there’s the chasm that you must cross. And then you have the early majority, the late majority, and the laggards. So understanding where you are in the process is very, very important. And I think that we’re just crossing the chasm right now with all of these institutions coming in with early majority, late majority, and laggards. And there’s still massive opportunity for growth here.

1:09:40 Brian Rose: Yeah, I think you’re right. And there’s still so many restrictions for owning Bitcoin in places around the world. And if you can buy an equity that’s on the stock market that you know you have a you know QIP number for then of course it’s going to be profitable. It’s funny you mentioned those early customers cuz like those pioneers those are the people who will later tell you you sold out and you’re not the same as you used to be. And as an entrepreneur sometimes that hurts you personally.

1:10:04 But it’s like if you don’t have those people telling you that you’re not evolving your business. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Like, “Oh, I like the old days when you did this.”

1:10:12 And it’s like every entrepreneur wants to say, “Yeah, but if we were staying in the old days, then we wouldn’t be talking to you now.” So, like we have to evolve as a brand.

1:10:22 Parul Gujral: And yeah, well, those who are the happiest and the most successful lean into change and you know the only guarantee in life is they say like death in taxes, right? But is also change. Yeah.

1:10:33 Brian Rose: Well said. Tell me about you because you know we’ve heard you kind of wax philosophical a couple times in this conversation and there’s obviously a lot more behind you than just entrepreneurism and tech-savvy and blockchain experience and tech experience like you’ve obviously taken the time to get some life perspective. And I’m curious was Parul born that way or is this something that you’ve kind of developed over time by exploring? For me, it seems like it must be a little bit of both.

1:11:05 But I’m curious if you could tell me a little bit about that and then also how that affects the way you look at business and even conduct business as well on the back end.

1:11:17 Parul Gujral: I’m a big fan of physics. Why? Because physics is a quest for truth. And the only truth is that truth is not absolute.

1:11:26 Right? So for example, if you have a dot here and a dot here, how many lines could you draw from this dot? The answer used to be one. Yeah. Right.

1:11:34 But if you bend this, then you could do two, right? And so there’s this concept, quest for truth and for wisdom and knowledge is actually been something that really ignites me. I’m always studying. That’s what I love about San Francisco is you are having deep intellectual conversations that are multiple layers deep from a place of inquisitiveness. I was super fortunate to have incredible parents.

1:11:58 You know, entrepreneur father, my mother, she teaches meditation. Wow. Yeah. She’s vegetarian, teaches meditation every day. She’s up at 4:30 in the morning meditating.

1:12:08 It’s like been a really like strong construct of her life. And so I got to inherit that perspective as well.

1:12:14 Brian Rose: As a kid, were you doing that or did you resist it at first?

1:12:17 Parul Gujral: Oh, I for sure resisted it.

1:12:18 Brian Rose: But but you were aware of it.

1:12:20 Parul Gujral: Yeah. Because 35 36 years ago, nobody was talking about meditation. Yeah. You know, 20 years ago, there were no meditation videos on YouTube and there were no apps. Yeah.

1:12:30 Brian Rose: Like people need to understand that it was something that very few people did. Yeah. You know, so being exposed to it early is special.

1:12:38 Parul Gujral: Very lucky. Very very lucky.

1:12:40 And family grew up, I grew up in a Hindu family and Hinduism is really interesting and different from other religions because there’s three main gods in Hinduism. Hinduism has Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the destroyer and the concept is you know when there’s creation it must be preserved and things must end so there can be a new cycle versus hey follow these rules you go to heaven etc. Hinduism also believes that God exists in all religions.

1:13:09 And so, you know, I’m on this quest for truth and always asking questions and doing deep self-reflection. And as an entrepreneur, I got this great advice from like one of my best friends, big brothers. His name is Sam Zaid, founder of Getaround. He raised like $800 million, built this awesome company, and basically invented the category for the sharing economy. And recently he had a conversation with me and he said Brian, as an entrepreneur, as a man, it’s very very important for you to be as truthful and honest with yourself and ask yourself what are your beliefs that may be merited on hope or desire versus actual truth and so it was very profound and I remind myself every day what is the truth versus what is a desire.

1:14:02 So I’ve been really really lucky to just be on this quest. And I also study prehistory and in different categories because, you know, like we are these breath gasping, heartthrobing, decaying food for worms, right? We’re in this like temporary experience, you know, in this wetware. And you know, the Shakespeare like this cloud cap towers, you know, the great globe itself, all will dissolve in this unsubstantial pageant faded. Leave not a rack behind, right?

1:14:31 And if like death is inevitable, if this time is very short, what can we do that actually leaves our mark greater than ourselves? And so really fueled by purpose and this quest to continue to learn and also share this wisdom as well. Like I think that inevitably my journey in life after this song and dance of blockchain, entrepreneurship, growth, giving back is done, I think I’ll inevitably become a philosopher and just think about different concepts and share those concepts with the world.

1:15:05 And I guess I’m doing a bit of that through this journey as well because it really lights me up.

1:15:11 Brian Rose: That’s powerful. And so what will you leave behind, do you think?

1:15:15 Parul Gujral: Well, I think I’ll leave a legacy of allowing people to own their identity on the internet and understand what their value is on the internet with a clear incentive for them to be able to grow. One, I want to positively touch the lives of a billion or more people by way of the technology that I build, the investments that I do.

1:15:34 And that’s my clear path.

1:15:35 Brian Rose: Yeah, you’re kind of sketching out this whole concept of web three versus web two, which we didn’t specifically talk about, but it’s it is really, as Sandeep from Polygon said to me four years ago, it’s it’s a shift in human paradigm, you know, it’s this concept, it’s the internet of ownership. It’s the concept that we no longer need, you know, like a sovereign king or even a Google or someone to give us things is that we can claim it to be our own.

1:16:01 As someone who’s been censored by big tech where they’ve literally taken things away from me, you know, taken away my 2.4 million subscribers, taken away my social graph with tens of millions of people. Like, you really feel how that can affect humanity in a big way. So, this is not a small task. It’s one that really empowers people. It’s in a weird way, it’s it’s philosophy.

1:16:22 Parul Gujral: Yeah. What you’re doing right now and I think what we’re doing in blockchain because it’s it’s it’s not just investing. It’s kind of changing the world, I think, for the better. Yeah. And some of the consequences of changing the world and creating value is you know there’s monetary successes, there’s reputational successes, there’s you know energetic successes, there’s like wisdom that turns into data which fuels these artificial intelligence and the generations to come after us.

1:16:52 So, it’s it’s a very clear northstar and very very exciting to like to be clear in what my purpose is and to be able to act on that every single day. And also, you know what I’ve learned is inner peace is so important, absolutely critical because life will give you inevitable storms. If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re signing up for adversity. So, Harold, let me share a story with you. Once upon a time the founder of Celsius Network, Alex Mashinsky, wanted to buy Snowball and we said no.

1:17:26 And another entrepreneur wanted to buy Snowball and I brought our advisor Reese Jones to the conversation for acquisition. And thank God we said no, by the way, in retrospect.

1:17:37 Brian Rose: I knew Alex back in the day, interviewed him a couple times.

1:17:41 Parul Gujral: Yeah. Well, Celsius and Snowball, you know, there could have been like a harmony based on like, you know, us being weather.

1:17:49 But long story short, well, we went to this conversation and I asked Reese to join because this young entrepreneur who doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, who has a lot of traction, maybe feeling a bit like I’m in God mode because I’m hitting some home runs going against another entrepreneur who sold companies for billions of dollars and raised millions of dollars and understands this landscape and has been in this position, you know, tens of times or 20 or 100 times, ETA. So I asked him to come mediate and help me like ask the right questions. And so he did a wonderful job guiding me to help me ask the right questions and understand what would be the right path forward.

1:18:31 And after that meeting which was kind of like a a pardon my French, but a mind. I asked Reese what just happened and he said the most successful entrepreneurs can be clinically diagnosed as two things. One, manic, and number two, narcissists. And the reason why is the probability of being successful as an entrepreneur is like raising your seed round less than 5 10%. Raising your A round less than 5 10%.

1:19:06 Right? Existing in 10 years less than 1% even if you’ve hit those different milestones. And so you have to become one with the company and believe in yourself so much so irrationally. And if you have the skill set to be able to launch a successful company, you probably have the skill set to work at a Google where you have work life balance and every single piece of abundance possible and to work on something that’s meaningful. And so you have to also become a narcissist and believe in yourself and be manic to think that you can overcome like the odds being against you.

1:19:40 So if you’re signing up for this entrepreneurial journey of adversity, having inner peace is so important because when adversity inevitably happens, the market shifts and Bitcoin has a draw down to 70 80% and altcoins are down 95% and you’re going against the wind. You know, if someone who’s critical in as part of the organization does something like we had, you know, a co-founder who sexually harassed an employee, which was totally heart-wrenching, heartbreaking, and potentially a lawsuit towards me. This was back in 2018, 19.

1:20:18 You know, when you have someone who pretends to be a CTO who doesn’t know how to code come into the organization, these types of adversity, terrible mistakes on my part for judgment that I learned from, but the reality is you will inevitably have adversity. And if you have inner peace, then you know that when the storm comes, the peace cannot be taken away from you. If it is, then the peace is external. And if you could hold that inner peace, then you also are the north star and you are the foundation for the rest of your team, for your community.

1:20:49 And so practicing that is so fundamentally important because you know I know that there is no I’m a cockroach. There is no storm that can take my peace away. I will if I have to move in with parents house, I will happily move into my parents house. If I have to give up all the wealth that I have, no problem. Because wealth doesn’t really mean anything to me.

1:21:09 It’s just a construct for me to be able to deploy resources to be able to get greater purpose and outcomes. And if sometimes you need to take a step back before you take two steps forward, there no problem. And I’ve experienced that over the years multiple times. And that’s built my character. It’s created grit and has created so much opportunity and frankly speaking, it’s created abundance as well.

1:21:35 Brian Rose: How do you practice inner peace?

1:21:37 Parul Gujral: a number of different ways. Number one, starting with gratitude, right? When you’re expressing gratitude, there’s no angst, there’s no anger, there’s no jealousy, there’s no fear, like all these low vibrational feelings. And so practicing gratitude.

1:21:53 And number two, understanding is the seeds that you water are the seeds that grow. Now, when you have a garden and you’re watering the garden, the water cannot distinguish what’s a plant and what’s a weed, right? So, if you could be intentional, but also be hyper realistic and critical to understand, hey, I have weeds in the garden, identifying that allows you to pluck them. And if you’re on this constant quest to not compete with the world, but become just a little bit better every single day by by learning from the sages, by learning from the philosophers, by learning from the mathematicians and, you know, the entrepreneurs and the Brian Roses and those who are coming onto these types of podcasts, I think that, you know, there it’ll be so much easier to be successful.

1:22:43 And if you can do it from a place where you’re extremely humble and grateful, it becomes a habit, right? Like muscles aren’t built overnight. It comes from series of practice. But it’s also an art and a science, right? It’s a science because if you follow these steps, then the outcome is predictable.

1:23:05 It’s an art because it requires you to be creative. It requires you to be on the other side of fear and vulnerable and take these risks.

1:23:14 Brian Rose: It’s powerful. Super powerful. And it’s interesting, I think, during the lockdown and stuff in 2020, we got to see who had their inner peace and who didn’t.

1:23:25 And it was fascinating to watch because, you know, it’s the old adage that, you know, when the tide goes out, you can see who’s wearing the swimming suit. Yeah. And when things are good, a lot of people can look like they’ve got everything in control. But when you start throwing some crazy shots at people and introducing dialing up the fears, then what you would think would be a super successful, super rational, super balanced person was completely freaking out and would lost all of their stuff.

1:23:53 And so all that inner work that you do every single day, a lot of times people can’t tell. I mean people can when they’re spend time with you, but then when the time of crisis happens, yeah, those are the people that stay calm. Those are the people that lead us to the next level.

1:24:09 Parul Gujral: Yeah. And it’s so important and but it is a practice like you say, you have to put practice in every day to keep it and hold it to become better.

1:24:17 Yeah. At being that and it’s fascinating to see. You know, they say a measure of a man’s inner peace is put him in a quiet room for 30 minutes and see if he’s able to be happy through this. And it’s so important because you know the quest to greatness is you know ripe with obstacles right and the quest for happiness for short-term happiness could lead to long-term pain. So you know be open and challenge yourself and grow.

1:24:50 Do you know Miyamoto Musashi?

1:24:52 Brian Rose: Of course. Yeah. Five rings. Right.

1:24:54 Book of five rings.

1:24:55 Parul Gujral: Yeah. Ronin absolute legend right? mastering nature in itself and understanding human nature. Powerful stuff, right? Super powerful.

1:25:04 Brian Rose: I’m having flashbacks to 2020 because look, a lot of people in the world knew us from the conversations we had in this studio in 2020 putting out ideas that nobody could get anywhere else, you know, and people always like, “Ah, how did you do that?” And it was like I think it was like all the work I had done on myself up until that point meant that when lockdown happened, you know, I had stopped drinking 5 years earlier. I had a physical practice. You know, we had all these things to where when it happened, we were just like, “All right, let’s find out the truth and let’s just focus on that one thing.”

1:25:36 And it was for us, it was just a flow state. So when everybody else was in this storm, we knew exactly what we needed to do and we could execute on it. And that’s one of the reasons we were able to be a part of those messages. I don’t even feel like it was me doing it. It just kind of flowed through the vessel of me and London Real and Ike and all this stuff and went out to the world.

1:25:57 But it was only because we had maybe done all that work over the years and that allowed us to just allow it to happen and not freak out, right?

1:26:06 Parul Gujral: Yeah. So, it’s such powerful practice. Well, I mean, hats off to you because you’ve been able to navigate through so much adversity, creating so much value, but having these centralized parties take that value away despite having an audience who’s resonating with, you know, the wisdom and these contrarian ideas that you’re giving.

1:26:27 And these contrarian ideas is what pushes the world forward. And this is so important for Elon to buy Twitter because we need a place where people can openly speak about their ideas and the community can validate or invalidate them. And so, you know, the fact that you’ve come into this space of blockchain where there’s decentralization and self-sovereignty to be able to share your energy through by way of your wisdom is so amazing and a great example of like product market fit of this.

1:26:56 And so I’m excited to be able to collaborate with you and share ideas and if I could help your endeavors, it’d be so exciting to be able to know that the energy that I’m pouring in is multiplying to realize that mission of positively touching the lives of a billion or more people.

1:27:11 Brian Rose: Yeah, I think we’re kind of starting that right now. Yeah, this space has been such a natural fit. It shocked me because look, I mean, I had been aware of blockchain and Bitcoin for many years, but it wasn’t until 21 when we actually lost the race to be mayor of London.

1:27:26 And again, another positive coming out of a perceived negative that made me think now we got to turn this in a new intentional direction. And we went all into DeFi and crypto and blockchain. And I got to start talking to the Michael Saylors of the world, the Yatsus of the world live and amazing. And then I soon realized that it was everything that we stood for. Yeah.

1:27:49 You know, it was this concept of freedom. I remember Dan Held the old school Bitcoiner. Yeah. He said to me, Brian, he said, “Freedom of speech is a luxury if you don’t have financial freedom.” And that was powerful because we had been banging on about freedom of speech for a year.

1:28:02 And he was right. He’s like, “If you don’t have internet on your phone, if you don’t have a roof over your head, if you don’t have food in your belly, then the speech, that’s a luxury.” Yeah. And it made me realize that financial freedom was such an important part. And then the whole concept of ownership and it was just perfect.

1:28:20 And then the thing on top of that perule was that we used to promote these contrarian ideas by giving them media and that was the attention that people could consume on independent platforms for the first time ever. And that was a way of focusing energy and saying, “Okay, here’s this guy named Portal. He moves in a new way. Here’s a guy named Bruce Lipton who thinks in a different way. You know, here’s a guy over here or okay, that’s how we would put our resources and our energy.

1:28:51 Now, we can say here’s this amazing guy, Parul, and he’s got a great idea that’s going to change a billion people’s lives. Let’s give him okay media attention. Let’s give him capital, too. Yeah. And so it’s just the same thing we’ve been doing for 14 years, except now there’s a capital component.

1:29:08 Yeah. And then when I started thinking about it this way, I was just like, man, it’s just all energy. Energy. And you, I’m sure you know that. So, it’s attention and media and money.

1:29:16 It’s all just kind of energy and we’re trying to focus it in the right places based on what our community thinks and what we think. And so, yeah, man, it’s been an amazing energy. And the people in blockchain like they welcomed us wholeheartedly and I was surprised. I thought they might have been like, “Took you long enough to get here. Like, what are you doing?

1:29:34 You just coming in to mess up our party?” and they were like, “Thank you for coming. We love what you do. We’ve been watching your shows. Please get involved.” And I would say to anybody out there, the blockchain community in crypto is really like that.

1:29:48 They’re welcoming. There’s so much love in this community. It sounds weird to say. And I took a bunch of my members to consensus in Toronto and they’d never been to a blockchain conference before. Wow.

1:29:57 And I think they were expecting, you know, like I think they were expecting something like the mutual fund conference or maybe, you know, the rubber gasket conference. I haven’t been to those conferences before, but I think they’re maybe a little boring. I don’t know. But they got there and they’re like, “Wow, this is amazing.” And everyone’s excited and everyone’s passionate.

1:30:18 And I was like, “Oh, yeah. That’s blockchain. That’s blockchain.”

1:30:23 Parul Gujral: Yeah. Well, we’re an amalgamation of mathematicians, of finance years, of engineers, and dreamers all coming together doing these rapid experiments trying to reinvent the systems that exist.

1:30:38 Not upgrade them, but reinvent. And often times we’ll find product market fit. Often times right away, but we’ll lose product market fit. Often times it’ll take a while to find product market fit. But we’re all experimenting and this has attracted the smartest engineers in the world and some of the smartest minds.

1:30:56 So, it’s so fun to be able to share ideas with folks such as yourself. And you know, Nikola Tesla, we spoke this briefly, but Nikola Tesla said, “The secret of the universe comes in the form of energy, vibrations, and frequency, right? All things have energy. All energy vibrates, and all vibrations are happening at a certain frequency. And if you’re aligned with someone’s frequency, then things become automatic and effortless.

1:31:22 So if you think of like a flock of birds that are flying in V formation, they’re flying effortlessly, carving through these tornadoes of wind, but you have the one that’s outside that has to make a lot of effort to come in. And you’re almost like an alchemist that’s channeling all of these ideas and all of this wisdom sometimes that you don’t believe in, but in free form content to people to receive it. And you’re doing it without ego in this incredible space.

1:31:49 So, we’re all lucky to have you come into this space because we obviously know you could spend your time with the legends of the world, as the previous interviews that you’ve done that are working on very major things, but you’ve come to really become a mastadon of impact. And so, what you’re doing were totally aligned with. It’s amazing. Congratulations to your success. Like it’s awesome that you were able to show your LPs what crypto conferences look like because I think everyone is harnessed on that same energy as pioneers.

1:32:20 It’s, you know, in some ways it’s the wild wild west, but in other ways, you know, there is some legs to a lot of these things that are happening and like right now we’re building the foundation for the skyscraper and maybe we get it wrong two three times or maybe we get it right and the skyscraper falls down because greed etc from the FTXs of the world but we are progressing we are moving forward and it is a movement that is inevitable. You know, Andre, who I had a conversation with, general, the gentleman who is the owner of this $10.6 billion fund. We sat over dinner at Evan’s house, our friend Evan Luther.

1:33:01 Shout out to him. In Tulum, and his children, 17 and 15, they only care about crypto. And so, this is the younger generation has found product market fit. This is what’s inevitable. So, we’re now pioneers, you know, on a frontier creating the foundation and it’s so exciting.

1:33:22 Brian Rose: It is. And it’s just an honor to be a part of this. And I am talking to the legends, the future legends, guys like you. Yeah, that’s true. Last question.

1:33:30 Five years from now, 2030, what do you think Snowball looks like? What do you think what you’ve built kind of looks like?

1:33:39 Parul Gujral: Yeah, I think we’ll have a billion users. I think we will be the de facto way that people are transacting onchain. From username to username, I think that the economy will have shifted to an automation robotic AI economy which is based off of data and our reputation layer will be powering this for automation and I think that it will be fully decentralized such that these billion people will be owners of the network.

1:34:10 Brian Rose: Powerful man. Powerful. Yeah, I can all see that happening right now. So, look, man, I’m so excited we did this. It’s been great knowing you over the last few years, but it’s even better being in business together and this was fantastic conversation.

1:34:23 So, thank you. I think people are very interested in doing this. What’s the best way for them to engage? You mentioned website X. What’s the best way to follow you guys and maybe to jump on or apply for your test net so they can get their name?

1:34:39 Parul Gujral: Yeah. Yeah. So, you can go to snowball.money. You could go to snowstorm.com. You can find us on X snowball_money or parulgujral.

1:34:51 P A R U L G U J R A L. Please DM us. We’d love to see you. We have a strong presence in a lot of the conferences. We also host events, private events, bigger events across the cities of the world.

1:35:04 We want to hear your story. We’d love for you to be part of this. We actually have a number of programs as well. We have an ambassador program where you can be rewarded for sharing these usernames, acquiring these usernames and sharing it with your friends through a custom link. We have a channel partnership program where if you want to sell this to your community, you will get the biggest discount versus buying it from us as well as have an opportunity to make 15 to 50% of the net proceeds of all sales.

1:35:32 We also have a grant program where we’re giving away $2.5 million for projects that are opting to build use utilizing our APIs for the reputation score as well as the naming service. So you know our goal is to give as much value away because the best way that we can help the world is by creating and distributing this value and you know solving the problem of democratizing access to information and allowing people to see what their value is as a citizen on chain and how to increase that value. So please find us online www.snowball.money.

1:36:07 It has all of the links there as well. And I’m super excited. And if you’re a founder, an entrepreneur inspired by anything that we said and you need help, you know, we have a division that is incubating and investing in projects still. It’s not a huge personal focus of mine, but we have a small team doing this and an incredible network of folks such as yourself that we could be in concert with. So, thank you.

1:36:28 I really enjoyed speaking with you as well, and I’m so excited about what we’ll be able to create together. So, cheers to you and thanks for having me.

1:36:51 Brian Rose: Yeah, man. My pleasure. Thanks so much, man.