# Building Series A Web3 Startup: Lessons Learned From 3+ Years Of RedStone - Marcin Kaźmierczak - Channel: [ETH Warsaw](https://streameth.org/eth-warsaw) - Date: 2025-10-07 - Duration: 29:24 - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-gK70LakGylc - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gK70LakGylc ## Description Building a Web3 startup is a hell of a ride... I'll present less obvious moments and findings from our journey that can be handy for both engineers and non-technical people. 🧜🏻‍♀️ ETHWarsaw is a series of educational and entertaining events for an active community of blockchain builders, developers and enthusiasts with focus on Ethereum-related tech. Once a year, we organize a large conference and hackathon for the community in the center of the Polish capital with speakers from the best web3 projects and participants from all over the world. Follow ETHWarsaw on social media for the latest updates! X (Twitter): https://twitter.com/ETHWarsaw LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ethwarsaw Telegram chat: https://t.me/joinethwarsaw See you all at our events in Warsaw 🙌🏻 ## Transcript um first if some of you haven't heard about Redstone oh about okay first I would tell you a few words about myself so what was my journey I graduated warso school of economics in waro quantitative methods in economics so I was always very interested in economics statistics and these kind of number games in economy got interested in ethereum in late 2017 wrote my bachelor thesis about blockchain uh use cases in in 2018 and in 2018 interestingly enough I somehow coordinated creation of a tool allowing to track ransomware Bitcoin transactions H one of the use cases was poce in Poland so in 2018 imagine someone is doing a ransomware attack on your laptop is you know blocking all your data and is sending you a Bitcoin address saying you send me 10 Bitcoins over there and I'm going to unlock your laptop you're doing so you go to the police and then the police says what can I do with this magic inter money I have no idea how to track this criminalist so we're trying to create the solution that nowadays there are plenty uh like elliptic chain analysis and so on where a policemen could track the uh each transaction from the address and usually it ended up on an exchange to go to a Fiat H which was like a very interesting uh stuff to do at the time then I worked as a PM in software devshop and joined Google cloud in 2020 to in 2021 join the uh technical found of redstone Jacob on a journey of building another Oracle on rwe so straight before my presentation there was a a video about rwe and AO uh We've started an incubation program of rwe which was uh very good to kick things off and get the initial uh fuel for uh you know the beginning recently we raised our seriesa uh $50 million led by Arington Capital that is uh founded by the founder of tech Crunch and crunch base some of reputable technological uh platforms uh altogether uh we rais to date over 22 million uh also have notable angels that not necessarily always Angel like Alex gloski or emmen from Avalanche uh which kind of also confirms that there are people in the space that believe in what we are doing we always love to do research and reports because when there is like a new narrative for example reaking or Oracle extractable value or what soever first thing we'll do is try to strip it down learn as much as possible and create a report or some educ educational piece because we learn on the way and we can also share our knowledge around and we are a team of 30 right now usually cool folks mainly in waro in Poland um and we constantly grow as the team itself last slide about Redstone right now we are the fastest growing Oracle in the market and top three on the on the charts we have over 100 clients supporting over 60 chains and secure $4 billion and Oracle is a service that delivers data feeds on chain the biggest one is chain link the second biggest is piff and by many metrics we are the number three uh for example by number of clients some of our notable clients Moro that recently raised like $50 million again H Venus protocol leverage protocols like gearbox Delta Prime uh staking protocols and reaking protocols for example examp Lombard is an interesting one like bit liquid Bitcoin staking that is coming into trenches right now yesterday they launched private beta and in one hour they collected $250 million of tvl like just like this because of Bitcoin Welles uh and yield protocols like Pendle uh which has been a pretty interesting one in the past months there's also VA and many many others and here a big shout out to all Redstone developers because oracles like the first thing that has to do is to be reliable and deliver accurate data that is not manipulated and our developers are working around the clock to make sure uh that we don't have any problem and knocking the wood we are the only biggest player that has never had a single manipulation or mispricing that affected any of the client so glad to also be able to say so all right let's go to the mid of the presentation right so Lessons Learned I try to divide them into three let's say categories because I don't know who exactly is at the on a so some of them will be for Founders majority of them actually because I'm one of the co-founders so it's the easiest for me GTM folks so go to market folks like people doing marketing BD community and so on and Engineers so I also try to Target the group that I pretend I understand right because I'm not an engineer myself but I believe me I do all my efforts to understand architecture and be as close to engineering and the product and the tech as possible the first lesson and it's mainly for the ones that are not really into trenches with defi yet is study defi understand key mechanism of defi well because the moment you start working in this space and you you know have thousands of tasks to do it's very hard to uh you know find a proper time to understand some Primitives and the 10 that I would very much recommend to study is seat phrase and wallets so how to manage your seat phrases what is the hot and cold wallet what kind of wallets out out there it's not only metamask way more and actually metamask I do use metamask daily I can I can tell you but definitely I don't don't keep my majority of my assets on metamask right like it's useful it's convenient but it's not the end game for wallets in my opinion um how ethereum works so you can argue hey there's Solana there's Avalanche there are many other chains but without any question ethereum is the most mature one with the most of developer tooling the most of people that are excited about stuff that is going on within the ecosystem so understand how smart contracts work manool blocks eum virtual machine compatibility and so on so forth layer ones and layer twos so what the sequencer is what's the difference between optimistic and ZK rollup what is rollup as a service which right now is a pretty hot topic as well stable coins so read about Teter also maybe a bit of a history like how it came into existence why Teter is mainly used on centralized exchanges whereas usdc from Circle is mainly used on decentralized exchanges in defi itself how dexes work which is like I would say probably the most important like primitive in defi so exchanging assets what slippage inment loss LP use Unis swap get burned with Unis swap H Pay 50% slippage on a shitcoin that you're trying to buy whatever like do those those mistakes you can do it on testet or you can do it with small amount of money right like 50% if you're doing a transaction of $5 is not that costy and then you're going to feel it and it's better to do it that way than when you're doing a swab of like $2,000 or something more meaningful lending which is another like backbone of defi so what's collateral liquidation Dynamics use AA Mor for create a position make sure that you're liquidated with the position so you understand how it works in practice when you're hitting the liquidation threshold like honestly for example this is a a rule I have no time myself to set up I I've never set up a landing POS like land position that was liquidated because I was always afraid and actually I would like to see how it works right to feel getting liquidated in a small position I control rather than you know onethird of my uh value CDP stable coins so play with maker Dow now it's called sky and die H liquid there's also a very interesting um cdp1 that you can use only if against to Mint stable coins what's taking is okay now super important thing for people who are familiar with staking and liquid staking my claim is that staking and liquid staking has be will become one of the most important Primitives in crypto the reason is in traditional Finance to my knowledge at least there is no popular product where you can buy a stock and then earn yield on that stock so you buy Tesla stock and as you hold that Tesla stock you get more of this Tesla stock and this is essentially what liquid staking is doing right so doing rwa so basically tokenizing bonds okay that's cool we should keep doing that but this is like bringing a primitive from traditional Finance on chain and here we have a primitive that is let's say new something that can be truly groundbreaking as the whole ecosystem grows Bridges and oracles so understand what the difference between bridge and Oracle is and in my words I would say bridge is just transferring assets between chains and Oracle responsible for delivering data to onchain environments or dabs directly use layer zero a Wormhole study chaining Redstone and other protocols and understand the difference between okay this one is not defi but I getting I'm getting asked so many times but let's say new people that are coming into the space hey what's this market cap and fully do evaluation like is actually uh I think worldcoin is one of these coins that has tremendous fdv but market cap relatively let's say still within a reasonable range uh there's a website I don't remember exactly but if you if you type into Google fully deleted valuation crypto ranking and then you just aox that with coin market cap you're going to see because coin Market capab what is doing is ordering all the coins with market capitalization which means how many coins are out there in circulation multiplied by price of one coin fully DED valuation is when for example I sell H I create a new coin let's call it Marsing coin that has a supply of 1 million and I sell one coin to my fiance for I don't know $1 million I can create crazy fdv even though the market cap is going to be fairly small so understand these Dynamics uh to know how to also value the projects themselves second lesson uh join a def session early so if you are not within the space again um understand that smart like developers of web free not necessarily code smart contracts and actually I can tell you in redstone we don't have that much smart contract work because we created our smart contracts and right now mainly it's like backend backend job or Integrations with the uh other DBS and environments so uh to materialize that you can come together come for example tomorrow at 4pm uh to a workshop by one of our Integrations engineer who has been in the crypto space for three or four years and it's also like a very cool dude charx so tomorrow at 4: if you'd like to uh get into beginning of the ecosystem join Over keep learning and I think this is very cliche but it's very many times omitted and find a system for that it's not it's not the learning that you realize hey I don't understand something that's going to help you very much it's more like if you build a system during busy days to keep educating yourself and being in front of all the news that is out there it is very very helpful um for example find a dude that is a researcher or like that is very interested in crypto and from time to time go on a coffee with him or like basically come over on the party that you know people want to just hang out and ask him about what's new in defi what's happening with reaking uh what's difference between carak igen layer and symbiotic and so on so like crypto research dude is always uh nice um a specific tool I've started to using recently is called Kito Ai and though the platform itself is paid there is like a public group on telegram that is called overheard over Twitter where they summarize with AI all the major metas that are happening on Twitter on crypto once every 24 hours and to me it's fantastic I'm just using that for to understand what's majority people talking on on Twitter and helps a t and find a podcast or like some of a form of a news that you're following regularly uh for me because I started like way earlier uh I found one day defy that and I really enjoy like the way he's approaching episodes and stuff it can be Bank it can be um some other uh producer producer but just find something and consistently look at that and the reason I put it as top free lesson is I remember the first moment and here shout out to Matt head of BD At Redstone when there was a call like approximately two years ago one and a half years ago when I was so occupied with day-to-day work that when we were hooping on a calls with clients he was more educated than me like he's telling words that I don't understand I was like what the I cannot allow that I just need to find a system in my everyday amount of work to keep being on top of things because once you get obsolete you know this this industry you know doesn't allow you to do so um this is for Founders early on build a super strong fundament for the team not like a team that team like this has to be like your truly stronghold as you progress with within the company rock solid team that enjoys working uh together to give you some examples uh one of our fellows like uh philli when he went to Dubai he's so dedicated to wearing Redstone merch when it was 40 degrees outside he was still wearing a vest that is designed to wear probably like when it's Zer degrees not like 40 so he was truly like within the trenches uh in our brand um ourselves we have an office in waro which we found found extremely valuable because people can grab coffee interact in person which is amazing and basically even something as simple as Gathering people once a year for Christmas party it is very cool and it helps a lot to mingle with people and create something more meaningful over a longer term especially that crypto is known for turnover and here I can tell you an interesting statistics there was never a person in Redstone team that willingly left the team like said hey I exit to a competition or ever like we did tear apart like with some team members but not because they wanted to go somewhere else um and with redstone we are recruiting right now H mainly backend Engineers so this is our bread and butter we need good backend Engineers to make sure that the system holds as I said in the beginning but we also recruit people that are very hungry in terms of marketing and BD areas especially young ones that are willing to make their hands dirty and want to work hard and go on a journey together together with us so if you're looking for a a maybe New Journey you can reach out to our team come over to our booth that is outside and chat with the team Poland rules and I already you can you can experience that and the reason I'm telling it it's mainly for polls because when I go to International conferences over these three years I felt more and more interest in Poland the reason is we are growing as a country there's more and more de talent but also BD marketing and whatever other talent and basically as a country we are expanding we are not shrinking uh so if warso is a very good example so we are also maturing as the conference itself um and Pauls are hungry for Success so even yesterday I was talking with a random french guy and he said dude like in Poland everyone's working so hard in France everyone's just looking for taking days off or like fighting for additional free hours and here people strive for Success these are not my words but I would say in general here is like a very good environment to create a team and this is also one of the reasons with redstone right now almost 90% probably of the team are PS and mainly located here in Poland itself um these are words of Sam Alman I think from last year I don't know what Poland does as a culture and a system to create such engineering and research Talent samman founder of CEO of open Ai and co-founder of vcoin so it shows internationally we are also more and more recognized and we should be proud of that there's a really cool video for foreigners and also Polish people in YouTube if you type rise of Poland that shows some economic um justification for what I'm saying right now work hard and this is mainly probably for Founders but I also add a GTM Engineers over here and if you're willing to go the founder Road be ready to dedicate yourself to the company and probably you're familiar with work life balance uh so this is basically me playing Uno in 20 21 when I decided to join Redstone I drew the 25 cards of recruitment legal taxes BD marketing doing whatever right so it's like founder journey is very very hard and there is no work life balance there is 24- hour a day and this is your decision how you're going to dedicate that and jaggle let's say personal life and and the founder responsibilities it is hard but it's also very very rewarding and um you can I can tell you this is a real picture from my apartment that my fian took when I hopped off after 10 calls in a row going for a lunch so and she she asked everything is okay I was like yeah of course like it's an easy day right so you have to be ready for that H but the big plus is at least myself maybe it's just my kind of character but I'm very at peace with myself even if we fail as Redstone that I I'm doing all I can do to make sure we are achieving the success we are in a good position to get but if we fail I will be like okay I've done all the measures I could have done to get over there and I also hear from our team that they respect that I mean they respect that they see that I'm working hard it's not like I'm just going on conferences and of course I do as well and it's it's nice but when I'm on a conference it's not like I'm just giving a speech I'm giving a speech I'm finding a quiet place of to work and then respond all the messages and try to push things forward right so this is part of the founders journey and this is a classic uh crypto in general like if you're entering crypto as whatever like GTM or engineer Forks be ready that people will be like oh you look very good you don't look stressed at all right here a very related topic H partner app find a partner that supports you and here I'm talking about your co-founder so someone that you're spending many time every day with struggling with you know uh any obstacle that you see on the road but I'm also talking about the partner for your life so a person that will understand it's not 9 to5 job that you sometimes have to manage the stuff that is happening crypto doesn't sleep um and here is like a recent tweet that sparked quite a lot of attention about a girl that found her boyfriend on Friday night preparing for y combinator uh presentation and she made sure he's fat do his laundry cut his hair and basically kind of like babysit him and I'm not this is like too crazy to me already but um this is a standard one this is a picture again with my fiance when we go on a vacation whenever I say no work emails at holidays and then I take out my phone and start working on telegram Discord Twitter H or whatever other tool that is available out there just to be plugged and know what's happening right because crypto never sleeps so a partner that is supporting you on the way both in terms of let's say the co-founder but also the partner for your life is tremendously important if you would like to go the founder Journey if you're a founder and you go the race or whatever manage your burn I mean throughout three years crypto is crazy with some of the raises like ourselves like 15 mil I'm pretty happy it's quite a substantial amount of money but I've seen bigger like I'm not going to name startups but there were like $80 million seed rounds or like even bigger ones and I saw these Founders throwing parties for millions of dollars in like I don't know Dubai or Singapore other expensive cities and they started to burn as hell 90% of startups fail it's not my statistics it's something that why combinator published as well and in my opinion in crypto especially is because they don't understand a very simple equation business model equals Revenue Minus cost like you need to make revenue and you need to make sure that your costs do not like explode when you start scaling right and keep thinking about that if you're a Founder because as I go to conferences I realize that many people talk about the coin like launch a coin you're going to get infinite Runway whatsoever fine it can work for like shorter period of time but then eventually like everyone should have a business model maybe not everyone but majority of the companies should have a business model out there so don't bur cash like crazy before you find product Market feed or generate already Revenue so once you've hit the product Market fit then you can start burning money to make sure that the revenue start growing right but before you do so spending like crazy on marketing or other stuff is not necessarily the way go at least in my opinion conferences are really good for testing interest like cost of sending a person to a conference like e foro is fairly affordable and over there it's like a perfect ground for testing the goto Market the product just getting feedback from people hey it doesn't make sense for example with redstone I remember what our first conference my first conference like internationally was if Lisbon 2021 after covid because before you remember there was this crazy illness Co that ke everyone at house like people uh I believe some forgot already and over there when I tested like the first version of redstone no one no one cared like like why why are you building this so we did a lot of iterations based on feedback that we got from clients in the very very very early days be creative to leverage your network and out Fair advantage and I think to a Founder uh that raised or is already having a sort of a product it's one of the advises I would very much emphasize because if you're building a bridge or you're building a deck or building whatever first thing you do you look at competition and you think okay they're doing this very well they're doing this very well you're not thinking turn the table around like think okay what kind of unfair Advantage I have what kind of people I know I can use for my distribution I can use for my promotion maybe I met two years ago a guy that right now is like I don't know a high person in binance maybe I can message that person so kind of like be creative find a cal moment and find think about the leverages you as a person or you as a team have to use in your goto Market which for example in our case is being in Poland like I mean we could have like we had really good Engineers or other people that wanted to work for us from all over the world but we strategically took decision hey Poland is amazing and this is a hub where we want to create a very solid team that has culture that has values and you know like works together strongly another one for engineers uh built solid web to engineering fundamentals so this is something empiric that we see when people apply to Redstone sometimes they just believe they're going to become good web free engineer without knowing good web to stack or like having some experience web free I would say maybe it's yeah I would say it's probably a bit another um level of complexity because you are using all the tooling usually from web 2 and then you're adding some sort of communication with the web free uh products functions or uh whatsoever and in web free actually you're not doing that much solidity as I as I told you it's more about understanding communication and edge cases that can happen when creating this kind of application and for that it's very good to have a first job in an environment that helps you do these first steps so if you're an ambitious de or an ambitious engineer and you join a team uh with whom you can meet also go for a lunch ask like non stard questions that you wouldn't ask on public meetings uh it is very helpful for and on boarding process because if you join a remote startup and you are just lost alone one person in one city then it's very hard to just DM someone on Discord hop on a call it's a bit of a different um interaction and with redstone again as I said we are recruiting so uh if you would like to embrace the web free ecosystem industry we so far okay At Redstone at least my idea and Jacob who's the technical founder is that we are kind of like a um football teaching Club so we take a lot of younger very hungry and ex and uh ambitious developers and people who would like to uh do their career and then we try to grow alongside with them like the company grows together with the people rather than just scheming the best the most experienced folks uh out there it's pretty hot in here right isn't it wow I still feeling like a bit dizzy but anyway last but not least because it's like a decalog right like so there has to be 10 get to know people and I think this is a single one thing I I really don't like to brag but I nailed in 2020 and 2021 when I started I was like when I didn't have that much uh stuff to do ongoingly I created a vast network of people I was approached by people at conferences I was approaching people at conferences getting their contacts and right now it's paying off like just to give you some tangible examples last week we had a call with guy from gito like one of the biggest staking provider on Solana and he's like hey I remember I met you like two years ago it was still very early with redstone but you seem very passionate about yeah like and that's the reason I remember about you right you never know what the person you're are going to randomly meet at e foro is going to do in two years maybe he's going to do a unicorn and it's going to be your perfect client or whatsoever the web free space has a very interesting Dynamic it's small it is small and it's still very very early so probably there is like I don't know 500 maybe a thousand people working we free in Poland right now like full-time being dedicated and working web free I'm rather talking about let's say the DBS and Technology rather than mcoin trading or whatsoever because um here I focus more on that front um so make sure you nurture your network in that space both in Poland globally because the word is very small and the moment people start recognizing you these people talk and you create like a graph of your network that then starts to spread knowledge about you or your company within this network so people start passing and doing intros and whatsoever H and it's definitely not too late for that like if I were to enter the AI space or I don't know SAS space that's probably a bit too late because it's so big and there are so many new popping out but web free in my opinion is still small enough to uh do that kind of strategy um yeah and then these were like the lessons uh for people who are not willing to jump into let's say web free uh as Redstone we are running right now Redstone Expedition that will be uh gearing us toward like a big launch that's going to happen somewhere at some point um you can become a minor so Redstone what's the origin story of the the name of redstone so Redstone is one of the resources in Minecraft that you need to create like cool stuff and Jacob was playing with his son Minecraft and he was like Hey you need Redstone to build cool stuff in Minecraft so you need Redstone in web fre to also build cool def5 protocols and whatsoever so we have miners as our ambassadors and we have a lot of interactions with top defi protocols such as pandal Venus uh globally uh all the time I'm not sure if I will be able to okay never mind I just wanted to show the website as well but it it's not like so so crucial yeah and these were like the major lessons um if you would like to ask me anything more private as well throughout the journey that we've done uh feel free to grab me later after the talk we also have a booth as Redstone you can uh we have also a photo booth that you can take a picture uh over there and yeah I think we have still a moment for questions do we minutes I I see 1 minute 20 minutes 20 seconds here okay uh let's W it wrap it okay okay so I'm wrapping it up so if you would like to ask any questions you can catch me after the talk thank you very much and I hope you found at least something over here useful thanks