Felix Feng
"I actually got involved with crypto originally from the financial side, and later transitioned to engineering. So I studied business at UC Berkely, and after I graduated I worked in finance. It was then [2015] that I met Paul from Pantera Capital. In my spare time, I helped Pantera look at companies such as exchanges and wallets. We also looked at companies such as Civic and Filecoin. [until 2016]
After helping Pantera part-time, I joined 21.co (now Earn) full-time. It was a Bitcoin mining company at the time, and I helped them make the transition from mining datacenters, to a Raspberry Pi Product, to Earn, which is a paid email service.
In 2016 I actually was so turned off of crypto by the scaling debates that I decided to take a break from it. At the time I was a Bitcoin maximalist. It was during this time that I took a coding bootcamp and actually started working at a startup as a software engineer. While I was at this coding job in 2017, Paul from Pantera told me “You should look at Ethereum.” And that led me down a rabbit hole that has now led to Set."
- From this interview (17-12-2018):
"I was actually working at a machine learning startup called Radius as an engineer. I worked at 21 prior. I was starting to kind of explore the space — after I left my previous startup I was reading white papers and trying to understand kind of what’s going on and trying to hash things out. I did Consensys academy which was this developer program where they teach you how to build decentralized applications and about how blockchains work.
Back in 2017 I was actually also doing a lot investing myself in pre-ICO projects and equity deals. I was helping to run this angel syndicate called Turing Capital. It had about 30 people working on it. We were doing a lot of deals back then and that gave me a lot of kind of general context on how fundraising in the space worked. The founder was Michael Karnjanaprakorn who was the the founder of Skillshare and had raised a lot of money from some of the best VC funds on earth for Skillshare. And he’s been a really invaluable advisor for us in terms of helping with the fundraise. Paul and I did a lot of investments together in 2017 and so we’ve built this really great relationship and he’s also an advisor for us. He’s seen so many deals and so has been really helpful for us when we went through process. Over the course of our fundraise, Steve Jang at Kindred Ventures has helped refine our business strategy, pitch, and connect us to the right folks. He took a pro-active role in helping us review and negotiate term sheets as well."
