Aswin Mohan
Tell us about yourself?
After studying Information Technology at Delhi Technological University in India, I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in 2018.
I have always been passionate about new technologies, building products and the startup ecosystem. I had been closely following the Blockchain and the Cryptocurrency space from 2016 and decentralized technologies had always intrigued me.
After working in various software engineering positions with organizations like Fossasia (part of Google Summer of Code), Apollo Munich and Siftr Labs (Acq. for $2M), I got an offer from Samsung to join them as a software developer full-time.
Since I was fascinated by Blockchain technology, I always wanted to do a startup of my own in this space. And hence, left Samsung to found Cypherock in 2018 with my cofounder Vipul Saini.
What lessons has being an entrepreneur taught you?
1. Always be humble and kind to everyone. Even if you don’t get along. You always realise its true cost in the future. 2. Being brutally honest with someone actually helps the person in the long term even though it might be hurtful in the short term.
If you could go back in time to when you first started your business, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
If you are building in a VC backed industry, you cannot run a business like a bootstrapped company and become the market leader.
Hence, try to raise as much as you can by diluting as little as possible to grow faster. Use money as a leverage to hire great people and build the business. This is an advice I would give myself.
A lot of entrepreneurs find it difficult to balance their work and personal lives. How have you found that?
Being a founder, you know what you are signing up for. You as a founder probably will never have a true balance between work and personal lives if you are aiming for your startup to be successful.
This is even more apt if your startup is early stage. I believe having friends who are founders themselves does help though.
Give us a bit of an insight into the influences behind the company?
We started Cypherock to help bring mass adoption of web3. In web3 today most of the mindshare is in the hands of the Crypto exchanges. And if that continues, it will be traditional finance all over again since the exchanges will have similar set of regulations that the banking industry has today.
One of the key differences between traditional finance and finance enabled through Blockchain, is the decentralisation aspect of it through self custody.
Hence it is extremely important for self custody to scale up for the masses for web3 to have a chance of succeeding.
This is what pushed us to build a web3 wallet with security at its core and solve the fundamental problems in web3 today.
What do you think is your magic sauce? What sets you apart from the competitors?
I think focusing on what the customer wants through first principals thinking is what sets us apart. We are solving problems that no wallet has thought about solving before namely making wallets 10x more secure by decentralising the private keys, removing seed phrases from the equation and solving Crypto inheritance without compromising privacy and control of the assets.
Additionally we believe the future of web3 will be multi chain and multi wallet and hence it is important to build a wallet that gives you a way to manage all your assets through a single interface which only we can do at this point.
How have you found sales so far? Do you have any lessons you could pass on to other founders in the same market as you just starting out?
Sales have been great so far. The wallets already secures more than $1 Million in digital assets today 3 weeks since launch. And we have customers in more than 8 countries today.
I would say rather than building sometime cool and expecting customers to use the product automatically almost never happens. Start with the customer problem first and then focus on the technology to solve it. This is especially more true with web3.
What is the biggest challenge you have faced so far in your business, and how did you overcome it?
Building hardware is harder than I imagined. Even though I personally am from a software background and know how different technologies generally work. Iteration cycles in hardware are comparatively slower and more expensive than software which I found difficult to deal with initially.
We were fortunate enough to have a great team around us including my cofounder who has a hardware & a mechanical background for us to iterate relatively faster and release a consumer electronics product from India globally.
What do you consider are the main strengths of operating your business in India and the specific state you are in over other states in India?
1. Low burn rate of the business compared to USA. 2. High density of talent in Delhi NCR compared to other states in India. 3. Proximity to hardware markets for components in Delhi NCR.
What (if any) are some weaknesses of operating your business within India and your state?
Web3 will take some more time in India to scale up in comparison to other countries. So the early adopter community is a little lesser in India but since the World has adopted to work remotely and Internet first, all of the people globally are just a Zoom call away.
If you could operate your business in another state in India rather than the State you are in, which state would it be and why?
Probably Bengaluru due to the startup ecosystem there.
India has an incredibly diverse population. How has the affected your consumer base and business?
It does not really affect us that much since most of our customer base is outside India.
Infrastructure is really important to businesses. How have you seen India’s infrastructure improve recently? Do you see new opportunities opening up?
The startup ecosystem is actively supported by the Government of India and hence there has been huge improvements in terms of ease of doing business in India.
India is going to be a leader in technology over the coming decade and it is no surprise for me to see Indians who left India for better opportunities are coming back to build global companies from India.
What do you want to accomplish in the next 5 years with your business?
Personal data will be personal wealth. The current issues with key management pose massive barriers to the adoption of decentralised technologies.
We believe digital assets will have exponentially more value in the future and that will just not be limited to Cryptocurrency.
We want to enable people to be their own bank and become the default wallet that a user in web3 has for storing their majority of the digital assets in the next 5 years.
And finally, if people want to get involved and learn more about your business, how should they do that?
Not really since we export most of the products we build and India is a big supporter in terms of export of goods.
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