[00:00:06] Viktoriia Miracle: Hello. Hello and welcome back to happy time happy money podcast and today we have Oleg. Oleg from Coinrule. He is a co founder of Coinrule YCombinator backed startup, which is all about catching the next market opportunity on your behalf by after meeting your investments. With Coinrulehobbyist investor can compete with professional traders and hedge funds by creating Afton ladies strategists for crypto as well as stocks.

[00:00:40] Hi. Oh, that's exciting. Welcome.

[00:00:43] Oleg GIberstein: Thank you so much. Great to be here, Viktoriia.

[00:00:46] Viktoriia Miracle: Well, good to meet you. And I am so eager to dive in right to the technology and the startup. But before that, I would love for you to share your story. How did you start it? What inspired you to start this company and what is inspiring you to keep going?

[00:01:04] Oleg GIberstein: Sure. Sure. Sure. Well, let me tell you a little bit about my background. So I'm originally, I was born in Eastern Europe, former Soviet union moved with my family first to Sweden was we were actually Britain living in a refugee camp there for a while. So it's a bit of a crazy story, not going to dive too much into that, but moved to Germany later.

[00:01:24] I came to the UK to study, went to study it in London and Oxford, and then worked in banking. So I was working in banking for about four years, between 2012, 2016, I was working in Citibank here in London, and vice banking. It's, you know, it's, it's nice. It's a good start to a career, but ultimately it wasn't really that exciting if you think about it.

[00:01:47] And I knew that I want to do something else. So I ended up quitting banking in 2016, started my first startup, which totally failed, didn't really work out with my co-founders. It was a career mentoring platform at the time called gate data. But what I did start to get into around that time in 2016, 2017, I really started to get into the whole blockchain, the crypto currency board.

[00:02:10] So it was always quite, quite the nerd for anything, digital private currency. So I was aware of Bitcoin, but you know, the opportunity cost of being in banking is you don't really have time for anything else. So was, I was aware of it. I didn't really do anything about it. So as I was doing my own startup, I started going to events, meeting people, and at some point it just went down the rabbit hole it blew my mind. And I couldn't like do anything else, but crypto since. So what happened was I had met my kind co-founders, Gabriele Musella and Zdenek Hofler. I met them during an accelerator program in London that I was doing with my first startup and I kind of kept like talking to them and talking to them.

[00:02:55] And the three of us were really getting into crypto at the time. And all of us had one specific issue, which is we were buying cryptos, realizing it's a 24/7 market, prices move. You can be sitting in front of your computer and just press buy and sell all the time. You want to be able to build some kind of strategies and like do more interesting things really rather than just buy and sell.

[00:03:20] And there really wasn't anything in the market that was easy to do for us like, yes you could call algorithmic trading strategies, but like that's really complex and takes a lot of time. And yeah, we got together. We started building Coinrule, started it really in like late 2018, raise some funding in 2019 and then things really started to grow last year, this year, since you mentioned, we went to Y Combinator race to see Toronto of 2.2 million, some really great investors on board. So founders of Fitbit, Twitch, kayak.com, eight sleeps all joined dollar round, which is super cool. And yeah, we've been, we've been really growing the team and just having a lot of growth ever since.

[00:04:07] Viktoriia Miracle: Wow, this is inspiring. I always love, you know, to hear when I learned about crypto, I couldn't do anything else, like, is that there's just so cool. So tell, tell us more about what, what is Coinrule and what does it do?.

[00:04:21] Oleg GIberstein: Sure. So coin rule helps normal people to build out, to make the trading strategies for cryptocurrencies.

[00:04:28] So let's say, you want to build a strategy that says if the price of Bitcoin goes up 5% in two hours and volume increases by 10 million US dollars. I want to buy a $1,000 of Bitcoin. You create the true within if this, then that logic you press launch and it goes into the market, like super nice, super simple.

[00:04:52] Of course you can build really also powerful strategies that you can create multiple steps. If this happens, then do this and then that, and basically run this type of logics. And what we also have is we have a demo exchange, so you can test your strategies, on basically a fake fake exchange where you would just re like modeled on Binance, which is one of the largest crypto exchanges.

[00:05:17] So you test your strategy, you see how it would perform, and then you launch it live and that's, that's what, what, what makes Coinrule special.

[00:05:26] Viktoriia Miracle: Well, that sounds like a simple tool to use. If you're, if you, you know, you don't want to monitor our markets all the time. And I mean, I personally know how to detect a knowledge and trade and for, just to, for notes for women.

[00:05:40] It's, it's terrible. I don't want to do that. You know, that we are very emotional human beings and we have that time in the month where we like super emotional. And if you add that time sitting in the computer and watching, you know, your things goes down by 30%, it's like, you don't want to be there.

[00:06:01] Oleg GIberstein: Yeah. Well, in a way, that's why you need to know to make the trading strategy because it sticks out the emotions from it and you mentioned technical analysis. So you can use moving average, you can automate moving average, which is your strength index. And also you can integrate us with trading view and basically you can build any kind of indicator and then connect that to your corner of strategy and then that will trigger it.

[00:06:29] It's exactly, and what we're seeing is, I mean, obviously we have people use us who know their trading and like people like you who are kind of familiar really with technical analysis, but then we have a really supportive community and we're really focused on the educational side of things. So we get a lot of beginners who don't know much about these things, but they do want to get started and then it's, we make it quite easy for them to get started with trading.

[00:06:54] Viktoriia Miracle: So you have an educational portion of that as well. For those who are like zero. And I think my audience, most of it are doesn't know much about trading. What, where do they get to start? Where to start?

[00:07:09] Oleg GIberstein: Yeah. So there are two types of people here really to simplify it.

[00:07:14] There are those who are curious and interested to get a bit more into trading and then. And lot of people who, you know, might not actually be interested, they want to invest, but they don't want to actually engage with it now for those who don't really want to engage with it, the best thing to do, especially if you're getting into crypto would be to focus on, you know, something like Bitcoin, Ethereum, it's the two biggest cryptocurrencies, you know, forget about like all the other stuff. If you don't want to really engage with it and just dollar cost average, that's what I've been recommending. You know, like all those family members and friends to ask you about crypto investing, but never touched it before.

[00:07:52] So what I tell them, look what the site, a small amount of money that you're willing to put in per month. And then just set up a standing goal that send it to your exchange hundred dollars, whatever you're comfortable with. I actually personally even for that. So I sent the standing gold to Coinbase and then Coinrule automates the buy every month part of it.

[00:08:15] So every month buying Bitcoin and Ethereum and just like, you know, forget about it for five to 10 years and then you'll look at it and you'll be very happy now, for the number of people who actually you know, want to become more active in trading really want to get into it. Well, that's really, you know what welcome.

[00:08:35] That's exciting and I think there's more and more people like that, right. Thanks to Robin hood and like this rise of the millennial investor, millennial trader. Now, obviously put aside some money that again, you're comfortable to lose, to kind of really learn the ropes and then join a community, join a community like ours, because I, you know, obviously I'm biased here, but I've seen how people have, you know, over the last year, two years really like joined the community really learn really started to kind of become significantly better traders, which is super like motivating to see. So there's a free version of . You can start with that. Join the community, learn from people, read the articles, start building grooves, and then start to trade and you, you will see that you improve over time.

[00:09:22] Viktoriia Miracle: Yeah. Like everything, it's a skill and you get to start learning and little by little getting it. I like automation system. I think buy-in is just, just announced that they are created after mate advice as well. So, which is, I know you work with Binance that's, that's also, it's a great, great news and it's becomes easier and easier.

[00:09:40] The exchanges become so much more robust and just easier and for everybody's use. Yeah. Awesome. I would love, I wanted to talk more about like how you also build, you know, a business build a team. And I know that there are shortage of blockchains developers. There's, it's such a young industry that we just don't, there's no education on it.

[00:10:04] Like you go to the university and you become a blockchain specialist, but like, how do you find those people and where do you recruit them?

[00:10:13] Oleg GIberstein: Sure. So actually most of our platform, so we run on top of exchanges, like Binance and Coinbase, right? So we don't actually work directly that much with blockchain. We are building a proof of concept for around decentralized finance, which does need blockchain.

[00:10:29] And most of those people, you kind of, you really find them through your network. You know, I'm, I'm quite involved in the community. I know a lot of people, you know, friends refer friends that, that kind of think, they're specialized, they're specialized job's list. There's something called crypto jobs list, which is a really good site, like we a big fence.

[00:10:48] So that's usually where people go and other people on this to just get recruited through like Twitter and discord. It's like, everything has gone really like underground in a way, you know? Which is cool. This is kind of the ethos of the community, you know, it's, it's so based on relationships and yeah, that's, that's, that's how it works.

[00:11:08] Viktoriia Miracle: So cryptojobs.com. If you want to build your own crypto company.

[00:11:12] Oleg GIberstein: I think its crypto jobs list. But I, I will double check that maybe you can put that into the show notes.

[00:11:18] Viktoriia Miracle: Sure. Oh yeah. Well, we'll take right after and add that to our show notes as well. And also, you know, there's not that many, many women in the world that are in crypto.

[00:11:30] It's like, how do we get more involved? Like I'm involved, but how did we get more women involved in it? And what would you, what do you think will help to like balance that out? This gender dividedness?

[00:11:43] Oleg GIberstein: Yeah. Yeah. This is a really, really big question. I mean, it's unjust fuel female, blockchain developers, it's few female developers full stop.

[00:11:51] So that's for us already a big challenge, right? We actually just, just last week I was talking, with, with the lady who runs an organization called it's called I think, the bigger pie. The bigger pie, exactly. Which is like a community of women in blockchain, which is really good. And like, they really give a lot of resources and help people on the recruitment side.

[00:12:15] And I was talking to Bridget, the founder in terms of like how to actually think about it. And it's fascinating, for example, how important it is to even when you write the job specs to use language that is more inclusive. For example, there are certain words which sound will sound still female developer that, Hey, this is a lats environment, where everyone is just competing, you know, for, for the highest salary and this will not be a friendly environment for, for a woman to work in. So like it really like thinking through kind of being deliberate about how to structure your hiring process. And there'll be a lot there, a few sites, which specifically are, networks to hire female developers. So we're going to start recruiting in those specifically as well, because you really want that diversity in your team.

[00:13:07] I mean, we don't want to be a team of, you know, we, we are very lucky to have a few ladies in the team who are amazing but ultimately.

[00:13:15] Viktoriia Miracle: What roles are they playing in the company?

[00:13:18] Oleg GIberstein: There's one is in the customer support team was in the marketing team. Yeah. Not, not, not yet on the, let's say blockchain development side, but we are working on it.

[00:13:28] Viktoriia Miracle: Well, the customer support, I think it's, you know, it's the best tip woman can do. It's just support, support people and yeah marketing and we might get right we market to woman woman's side, the drivers of decisions in the world.

[00:13:41] Oleg GIberstein: Exactly. It's actually, we're seeing more and more women starting to trade as well, which I think it's amazing. In my opinion, honestly, women are better traders than average because they're more prudent. They pay more attention to, you know, risk management.

[00:13:56] They don't you know, men gets overconfident and they think, Hey, I I've just made, you know, 50% profit, I'm a genius, but actually it's just the market going down, you know, you're know the genius, it's the market. And women tend to be much more realistic about this kind of things. And they tend to think more conservatively and maybe in the short-term.

[00:14:18] Their profits are not as, as huge, but it's significantly more sustainable over the long-term and, and everything that, that, that, that's a really big deal. And it's going to improve, you know, investment performance with having more female investors out there.

[00:14:33] Viktoriia Miracle: And then no boss that I don't know about that being emotionally, it's a kind of a bummer in the trading world, but you can definitely get this under, under control probably and just don't trade a couple of one week of the month, but otherwise it's fine. Cool. Well, let's talk about what are you excited about in crypto? Just this or the blockchain industry in general? Like what do you see it's coming soon, right. We were just having like three weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg about metaverse and all this like crazy ideas.

[00:15:10] But what do you see as being very, you know, heavily involved in having your own startup and company in that environment? Like what people are speaking about and specifically in London, it's like you are, are other side of the world.

[00:15:23] Oleg GIberstein: Yeah. I mean, there are so many things I'm so excited about, right. It's, it's incredible. Maybe the thing that I am like, kind of, let's say on the big picture, the most excited about this, how fast the space is moving because I mean, like in the current, let's say in the web tool world where everything is closed source, It's kind of innovation happens that piece by piece in closed environments.

[00:15:49] Like each company comes up with their own innovations, but in an environment where everything is permissionless, everything is open source. Teams just take code from other teams start building control, but like, it's not like you're stealing the code. You're actually contributing ultimately to it. You're contributing to the community.

[00:16:10] So you're getting a completely different just vibe. It feels like, Hey, we're all in this together. We have. And industry together. We're just different parts are building different bits. If I, if that makes sense. And it just, I see teams ship products and treat, you know, milestones, like, you know, a billion dollar in annual revenue type of gigantic milestones. It at the speed that is completely unprecedented in like the traditional, you know, for this financial world. And what I'm personally also excited about. Let's say the more kind of technological level. So I'm quite like there'll be a lot of layer, one blockchain competing with each other.

[00:16:53] I'm quite involved in the Ethereum ecosystem. Like, I'm a fan of a, of like projects out there. You know, I think salamis is a fantastic ecosystem, fantastic project, polkadot avalaunch. But for me theory, it's, it has the biggest community. That's like, I really enjoy the ethos and the theory has really been suffering from extremely high gusts prices.

[00:17:17] Priced out a lot of people. But in a way that's almost a good sign. It's been so expensive because so many people are using it right now. There's incredible amount of innovation happening in so-called layer, two scaling solutions for Ethereum. And one of them that I'm the most excited about are zero knowledge based roll-ups and then completely changed the game. I'm not going to like bore people with too much detail, but like just Google zero knowledge proofs and like, this will completely change how cryptography works in the next five to 10 years anything that's super exciting.

[00:17:54] Viktoriia Miracle: Awesome. Yeah. What do you think about metaverse? Like, what is your take on the metaverse.

[00:18:00] Oleg GIberstein: Well, I mean, it it's, obviously there'll be a lot of crazy things coming out of it, right. Unless, obviously I'm, let's say I'm more on the decentralized finance side. Like I, you know, I've got my fair share of, of, of pretty rubbish NFTs that I bought over the last, you know, six months.

[00:18:16] I think it's, it's, it's, it's exciting to see what kind of games will come out of it. Like, are we going to be like, let you working out of the metaverse that are people going through? You know, I have work meetings in it that we could not use like virtual reality with it.

[00:18:32] Viktoriia Miracle: What do you think? What are we going to or not?

[00:18:38] Oleg GIberstein: For sure for me, the question is I don't think that's going to happen in the next two years or three years.

[00:18:44] Viktoriia Miracle: Oh no, no, absolutely not. It's very interesting. If you think that we actually going to work and you know, virtual reality glasses, because what's on United States sites. What I see in a bloggers and like YouTube person, the community that people say, oh, damn, no. Like I'm not going to see the whole day in VR glasses and interesting then you broke people are like, yes, let's do.

[00:19:06] Oleg GIberstein: I tell you thing, think it's still such early days and years ago, someone would have said like, I will never spend my day on video calls and whatever we're doing now, we are spending the day on video calls. Right? It's, there's still a lot more to come from it, but early days.

[00:19:24] Viktoriia Miracle: Absolutely. I want to ask you, like, what do you think the successful entrepreneurial start up companies. It's all the same thing that you really working for yourself. What's the top three characteristics that you think you need to embody to be successful?

[00:19:42] Oleg GIberstein: As an entrepreneur?

[00:19:44] Viktoriia Miracle: Entrepreneur. I said.

[00:19:47] Oleg GIberstein: So the number one, really, the number one is persistence. Simply because. Startups don't die. They commit suicide. We had a lot of periods where we were basically debt. Like we had no money, as a company, you know, but we just refuse to go away, you know, at the end of the day, If the founders, we can cut our own salary, we can work for free.

[00:20:13] Is it fun? No, is it because we had like a lot of money on the bank account? No. At various points, like it was a pretty precarious situation. We had just, when COVID was starting last March, we had basically a funding from pretty much ready. We had the term sheet on the table and within days.

[00:20:34] It was around the 10th of March, completely collapsed. The fund pulled out. We had no money in the bank account and it was soaking like the world is ascending, right. which was very scary, but we just, you know, we cut our salaries and we just kept going. Okay. You know, here we are. So it's the end of the day.

[00:20:53] It's kind of like, you have to have that persistence. So that's number one. Number two. I don't know how to summarize it in one word, but the number one, the most important thing will be your relationship with your co-founders. You need to be able to cOVID diplomacy. COVID, you know, empathy. You need to be able to find like, like, there'll be times you want to kill your co-founders.

[00:21:16] And, but like, it's just normal, right? It's like a super-intense relationship basically for years and years. So you really need to find the ways to work with them and deal with them. And three, you'll need to have luck as well. And like luck according to the, the, the, the Greek or Roman philosopher Seneca is when preparation meets opportunity, right.

[00:21:41] And that it can take years for an opportunity to come up. But you need to be prepared and in that situation, you'll find yourself lucky. It's like, you know, when Twitter was starting and no one or was it no, sorry, not Twitter. And let's say Dropbox was starting and no one really needed a Dropbox. And then iPhone came up and suddenly you had not one device that computer, but you have two devices and you wanted to sync data between them.

[00:22:05] And suddenly Dropbox was like the hardest thing ever. But it's something that was, it was the luck in a way that, that the iPhone came up. Right. So you need that luck as well, but you need to be prepared, to, to have it.

[00:22:20] Viktoriia Miracle: So what I'm hearing, it's, very important to just, you know, stay human when the times had stuff and keep going and be committed to whatever you're doing and they will pay off.

[00:22:33] Oleg GIberstein: Take advantage when you're lucky break comes,

[00:22:37] I'll be open to possibilities. Right? Take the possibilities when they come in, because there's so many times they're coming and we're like, Ooh, that's not real. Maybe that's not a good idea, but it's like, you just got to go for it.

[00:22:49] Yeah. It's something that you learned from to kind of the best entrepreneurs who have a decision-making framework, how to evaluate these kind of opportunities. Are you going to be wrong so many times, but if you can look back and you can say, Hey, these were my assumptions. This is what went wrong, but my assumptions made sense at the time and then you keep improving your decision-making framework.

[00:23:12] You're going to improve a center of the nerve the next opportunity you say yes, but again, your decision will be better than the last time. So you kind of need to be willing to learn from the decisions you make as well.

[00:23:24] Viktoriia Miracle: Okay. So creating your decision, making. Shit, whatever she'd sheet. Decision making cheat sheet.

[00:23:32] Oleg GIberstein: I do that actually.

[00:23:33] I've got like a, I call it my little book of big decisions where I write down decisions I make and then kind of go through the Weiss and assign probabilities and things like that.

[00:23:44] Viktoriia Miracle: Oh, cool. I would ask you to share, but I know that's kind of, first of all, the thing that is, that is a good thing. Awesome, so good to chatting with you Oleg and, what do you have for our audience today where they can find you or like to share anything?

[00:23:58] I know.

[00:24:00] Oleg GIberstein: Yeah. Sure. So first of all, visit us on coinrule.com. That's our landing page. You can sign up and you can sample a free account. If you have any, you know, you, you can ask, we don't have the community open. You can just message our support and they'll invite you in. You can find me on Twitter at ogilberstein.

[00:24:18] It's ogilberstein, like my first letter my first name and my last name. You can message me on Twitter.

[00:24:23] Viktoriia Miracle: Awesome. So good. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing. And if you're listening or watching to this podcast, and I know some people said, I did not know that you are on YouTube just yet.

[00:24:35] You actually can see the video version of this interview. So definitely go and subscribe and put some comments and likes on our YouTube that you can find everything in the show notes. Everything that we've mentioned today will be down below either there in the caption or, um, be down on a podcast page.

[00:24:56] Thank you so much. And I will see you next week,

[00:25:00] Oleg GIberstein: Thank you so much, Viktoriia.