Funhaus Mirror

In honor of the playrs rollout, I wanted to write a heartfelt reflection on my life in the years since I founded playhaus.

Making hard choices looks easy and logical in hindsight. Conversely, lots of great decisions look terrible in the present moment. When I left my job at Google to become a full-time entrepreneur, it was a tough call, and to most outside observers likely seemed like a very bad idea.

To many, it may continue to seem so.

For nearly four years now, I’ve been on a journey to build a smart wallet for digital identity. It is essentially a decentralized warehouse for user data, used to store it and analyze it. But, unlike the majority of data warehouses, it is being built on the blockchain; Solana, specifically, to start. The ultimate intent is to enable users to opt-in to systems that want to feed their data into algorithms to make money; or, of course, opt-out.

This choice does not yet exist on the internet.

Nevertheless, that story has consistently fallen short as a compelling case for investors. It’s hard to not call it deflating at times. Web2 investors want me to flip the economic engine of my web3 project and sell out for quick cash on a 3-year timeline. Web3 investors are like, yeah, I totally get it, but what have you built today? Our focus on building a strong customer base and product interface that are fundamentally web2 in nature (bootstrapping) repels them, although we’re only doing so due to our lack of funding, and this is our de-risked path forward. I do have the trust of a few people with capital, but only after I have a fund willing to take the lead—a future comfort that doesn’t do much for me on a daily basis.

As a data and product analyst with a career focused in and around advertising technologies, but without the full technical chops to build an MVP on my own, the smartest choice for me has always been to build an agency business, and demonstrate I’m a capable operator who can acquire customers in his target demo. It’s something one of my mentors (and one of our advisors) Mike did to build his advertising technology business.

It’s double duty though. The operational revenue from an agency keeps the project funded for engineering and finding product market fit, operating as a de facto product department to gather insights from the core users of the product: marketing managers and business executives. Investors don’t love this approach for some confounding reason, arguing the operations of that business model aren’t scalable, which coincidentally is never an argument that I made. It is more of a necessary measure that happens to fit neatly with the data analytics business we’re building, than it is a core part of the plan for the long term.

The real irony lies in the fact that we’ve led with transparency all along. We’ve called ourselves a web2.5 company since March 2021. I may not be exaggerating when I say we coined the term. The balance of a lofty idea and a slow and steady approach to getting there is in large part what drew me to the project in the first place. I can’t speak for our team of more than a dozen technological wizards and creative visionaries. But I’m guessing they wouldn’t be working so hard for delayed gratification if it didn’t appeal to them too.

So, with the benefit of hindsight and results-oriented thinking, I can confidently say I made an easy, logical, great choice.

In four years, what do I have to show? Not the next Google, not a unicorn, not even a consistently profitable business. But we do have several deals at the finish line, new team members joining the mission in bulk, an upcoming NFT release, the revival of our content team, and growbot’s alpha client’s data onboarding underway. More importantly, I am four years closer to a solution that could quite literally benefit everyone on the internet. It may take another four years to get there. (And another forty to get investors to see it.) For now, the grind continues, and will until I find my lead.

—El Prof