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Check out the 10-slide pitch deck that 4 ex-Facebook engineers used to secure $36 million in funding for their crypto start-up from backers like Andreessen Horowitz and Coinbase
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- Blockchain start-up Mysten Labs raised $36 million in a December 2021 funding round.
- Mysten chief executive Evan Cheng developed Facebook’s Novi digital wallet.
- Here’s an exclusive look at the slides Mysten used to pitch to investors including a16z and Coinbase Ventures.
Facebook suffered another crypto setback this week as its diem digital currency project started selling its assets to repay investors.
And it was the delayed launch of diem that encouraged four engineers to quit Facebook and found their own crypto start-up last year.
“Facebook’s technology was developed, but diem wasn’t able to launch for a number of reasons,” Evan Cheng, a former director for Facebook’s Novi digital wallet, told Insider in a recent interview. “Not being able to launch really weighed on the four of us, so we decided to start our own company.”
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Cheng is now chief executive of the blockchain infrastructure start-up Mysten Labs, which he founded alongside fellow ex-Facebook engineers Adeniyi Abiodun, Sam Blackshear and George Danezis. All four had previously worked together on the Novi project.
There’s a significant contrast between working in Big Tech and at a crypto start-up, according to Cheng, who previously spent ten years at Apple and six-and-a-half years at Facebook.
“In crypto, the speed of execution is completely different,” he said. “We can’t depend on anyone else to open doors for us anymore, so we have to move a lot faster than ever before.”
Moving fast helped Mysten secure $36 million of funding in December, with Cheng successfully pitching to investors from Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z crypto fund and Coinbase’s VC arm.
“It’s great to have investor partners that understand our vision,” Cheng told Insider. “A16z in particular has built lots of really impressive services, which was really attractive for us.”
Mysten is building underlying technology that will help firms that aren’t necessarily crypto-native to develop their blockchain capabilities, Cheng said. Andreessen Horowitz invests in many such companies across its 62 funds.
“We have some access to portfolio companies that operate outside of crypto, but might think about wanting to use blockchain technology down the road,” Cheng said. “That was what made a16z a perfect partner in our eyes.”
Here are the 10 pitch deck slides that Mysten’s founders used to secure the December funding round. Some elements have been redacted due to non-disclosure agreements.
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Check out: Personal Finance Insider’s review of Coinbase.