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Episode 87 · Deep tech · 27 min

Sell the use case, not the technology

BuildersTribe is a reputation-gated marketplace of help for Web3 founders — mentors, tool credits and roughly 400 investors — run by a man who says his own industry's besetting sin is selling complexity and then blaming you for not understanding it. Raghu Mohan's line is that not everything needs to be decentralised, and that the technology's best argument is a $40 million transfer that settled instantly for four cents.

Deep tech & hardware Hiring & talent Payments & fintech

Raghu Mohan

Founder, BuildersTribe · with Vishal Krishna

27:04

Said in this episode

▶ 3:06

$40M for 4¢

A Bitcoin transfer Mohan watched settle

Moved from one part of the world to another instantaneously at a cost of four cents — his standing example of what no bank can do today.

▶ 10:35

$1 bn

Raised for COVID relief in days

As described on air: a crypto relief effort raised roughly a billion dollars in a couple of days, traceable from source into vaccine research, at a speed traditional finance could not match.

▶ 6:56

1M TPS

Throughput Web2 buyers are asking for

The number Web2 companies are reportedly putting to Aptos — which Mohan calls unfathomable, and still short of the effectively infinite throughput infrastructure demands.

▶ 1:00

~400

Investors listed on BuildersTribe

Investors a founder on the platform can request a connection with, alongside mentors, tool credits and partner organisations.

▶ 17:10

$100,000

Given away at the event's demo day

Prize money handed out on stage — possible, Mohan argues, only because VCs, users and partners had already ascribed reputation to the startups pitching.

▶ 25:31

1,500

Startups on the BuildersTribe platform

Founder profiles Mohan reads through, with roughly 20 new ones landing every week; the caption audio is imprecise here, so treat the figure as approximate.

The brief

The argument in sixty seconds

Mohan's claim is that Web3's problem was never the technology — it is an industry that sells complexity and makes not understanding it your fault. He starts, as everyone does, a decentralisation maximalist, and arrives at pragmatism via Vitalik Buterin's spectrum: the lower the consequence of an action, the less it needs decentralising, so a like button does not, but a concentration of power does. The case for the technology is already on the record — a $40 million transfer settled instantly for four cents, a COVID relief fund that raised a billion dollars in days with every rupee traceable to its source, DeFi lending that reaches the unbanked without a hundred thousand licences and a jurisdiction. The case against is one he makes himself: throughput nowhere near the million transactions a second Web2 buyers are already asking for, a sign-every-transaction user experience that makes an ordinary app feel like luxury, and the smart contract that immutably immobilises your financed car on a highway with a pregnant wife in the passenger seat. BuildersTribe is his answer to the first problem — an Amazon-for-startups marketplace where founders are gated by seriousness and helpers by helpfulness. Under all of it sits a line from an Air Force officer, his father: if you really want to serve the country, give somebody a job.

Worth your time if you are

Web3 founders tired of being sold complexity

Engineers with a GitHub profile and no resume

Community and developer-relations builders

Investors sizing what blockchains can actually do today

Anyone who wrote off crypto during the Ponzi years

Episode map

Where the conversation travels

Every block is a chapter, coloured by what it's about. Click any of it to jump straight to that minute on YouTube.

Deep tech & hardwareHiring & talentPayments & fintechFounder journeyProduct strategyImpact & outcomes

01Cold open: an Amazon for startups 0:00 Mohan defines BuildersTribe as an alternative to the traditional incubator — a digital marketplace for help where founders are gated by how serious they are and mentors, tool vendors and roughly 400 investors are gated by how helpful they have proven to be. 02The engineers' revolt, and Visa with zero employees 1:30 Crypto began as engineers revolting against traditional finance, and Mohan's proof that a network can beat an institution is a $40 million transfer he watched move across the world instantly for four cents — Bitcoin as a payments company with no employees. 03Vitalik's spectrum: not everything needs decentralising 3:37 After a Bengaluru round table with Vitalik Buterin, Mohan adopts the spectrum view — the lower the consequence of an action the less it needs decentralising, so like buttons stay centralised while concentrations of power are where the technology earns its keep. 04A million TPS is not enough 5:55 Web2 companies are already asking Aptos for a million transactions a second, and Mohan's answer is that even that misses the point: nobody asks AWS about throughput because it is effectively infinite, which is where blockchains have to get. 05The UX tax and the smart-contract car 7:55 Owning your assets means signing every transaction, which teaches you how easy ordinary products are — and the immutability everyone sells as efficiency becomes the smart contract that cuts your financed car's engine mid-drive with a pregnant wife inside. 06The use cases that earn the technology 10:20 The honest wins are large: a COVID relief fund that raised a billion dollars in days with the money traceable into vaccine research, and permissionless lending that hands financial products to the unbanked without a hundred thousand licences. 07Hype, Ponzis and the tulip precedent 12:15 Mohan concedes he is unpopular in his own industry for refusing the hype, and reads the Ponzi years as a free market doing what it did in tulips, 1929 and 2008 — a case for regulation, he argues, but not for centralisation. 08Zero employees, faceless developers, better jobs 13:30 A JediSwap-style network with zero employees pays faceless contributors — including a 17-year-old maintaining core infrastructure — which Mohan contrasts with Axie Infinity's Philippine grinders and endorses Buterin's line about destroying bad jobs to create cooler ones. 09What the conference crowd came for 16:02 Mohan's dipstick survey of the hall finds three motives — meeting heroes, hunting jobs in a serpentine queue outside eight hiring companies, and a $100,000 demo-day prize made safe by a community that has already diligenced the startups. 10The Air Force officer's answer 17:50 Asked what keeps him going after seven years, Mohan tells the story of wanting to join the Air Force and his serving father redirecting him — most of the defence establishment's problems trace to a demographic bulge of purposeless, unemployed youth, so give somebody a job instead. 11From scammy to networks that outlive you 19:55 The community that was once dismissed as scammy or too brainy now judges people only by what they have built, and Mohan's ambition for BuildersTribe is a marketplace that runs itself long after he is gone — because networks, unlike companies, have no CEO to arrest. 12BlackRock, Starbucks and legitimisation 21:05 The old financial order is more likely to absorb the new one than collide with it — BlackRock filing Bitcoin ETFs after its chief called the asset the future, and Starbucks taking crypto for coffee in Las Vegas back in 2017. 13Starting up is a privilege 22:35 Six years ago Mohan would have told everyone to start up; now he calls it a privilege and points instead to meaningful work — in an industry where a woman with no resume and a backend engineer with side projects get hired on evidence alone. 14The pitch deck that wasn't 25:00 Reading roughly 20 new founder profiles a week off a platform holding about 1,500 startups, the best pitch Mohan has ever seen had no deck at all: Huddle01 pitched its video product from inside the video product.

Takeaways

Ideas to carry out of this hour

Decentralisation is a spectrum, not a creed

Everyone starts as a decentralisation maximalist, Mohan says, and everyone who ships something discovers you cannot decentralise all of it. The rule he takes from a Bengaluru round table with Vitalik Buterin is an inverse curve: the lower the consequence of an action, the less it needs decentralising — a like, a share, a social post can stay on somebody's server. Where power concentrates is where the technology buys you efficiency, transparency and trustlessness, and that is the only place worth spending it.

▶ 4:38 ▶ 4:53 ▶ 5:24

The industry's real product defect is complexity

Mohan's sharpest criticism is aimed inward: Web3 is notorious for selling complexity and then making it your fault for not understanding it, which is precisely how a category fails to reach adoption. The panellists he admires at this event are the ones being pragmatic and open to criticism rather than mercenary. His prescription for the faithful is blunt — stop selling the technology, sell the use case, and stop asking whether the world needs another animal-picture PFP.

▶ 10:02 ▶ 10:20 ▶ 12:13

The wins are real, and they are already on the record

Against his own scepticism Mohan sets three concrete arguments. He has watched $40 million move across the world instantly for four cents, which no bank can match; a COVID relief effort raised a billion dollars in a couple of days with the money traceable from source into vaccine research at a speed traditional finance could not manage; and permissionless borrowing and lending reaches the unbanked without the hundred thousand licences, staff and jurisdictional limits a bank needs. That last one, he argues, is not a product — it is a case that the powers that be have been rationing access all along.

▶ 3:06 ▶ 10:35 ▶ 11:30

Throughput and user experience are the wall, not regulation

Web2 companies are already walking up to Aptos asking for a million transactions per second, and another founder tells him the honest answer is infinite TPS — because nobody has ever heard AWS discuss its throughput, which is the standard infrastructure has to meet. Mohan's view is that no amount of scaling reached so far is close to powering a decentralised internet. And even where use-case-specific throughput is solved, the experience of owning your keys and signing every transaction mostly teaches users how pleasant traditional products are.

▶ 6:41 ▶ 6:56 ▶ 7:57

Immutability cuts both ways

Pushed by Vishal on how decentralisation could have saved him from signing a document he did not understand, Mohan argues it would have compounded the problem: a chartered accountant can still find you a way out, an immutable signature cannot. His illustration is an autonomous car bought on EMI through a smart contract — a missed payment and the code does exactly what it was written to do, stopping the vehicle mid-drive with a pregnant wife in it. The technology is powerful; the conundrums have to be solved before the sales pitch.

▶ 8:58 ▶ 9:14 ▶ 9:29

Web3 hires on evidence, and that is its best recruiting pitch

The queue at the conference's hiring room ran from the room's door to the entrance of the hall, and the encounters Mohan describes are ones no resume-first industry would allow: a woman who asks whether anyone will talk to her without a CV, a backend engineer who answers 'what have you built' with hackathon and side projects. His answer to both is that this is the only industry that takes you for what you can do rather than where you have been. Set against the host's decades-old line about engineers being educated but unemployable, that is the sector's most defensible claim.

▶ 23:46 ▶ 24:03 ▶ 24:32

The whole enterprise is a job-creation argument

Mohan wanted to join the Air Force in his second year of engineering; his father, a serving senior officer, told him that if he really wanted to serve the country he should give somebody a job, and he would have served it more than his father had. The reasoning was operational — most of the problems the defence establishment faces trace back to a demographic bulge of young people without purpose, who get drafted into activities against the nation. Wealth creation and job creation, in his telling, are not the by-product of building a Web3 ecosystem; they are the reason for it.

▶ 18:19 ▶ 18:37 ▶ 19:06

Reputation gating is the product

BuildersTribe is not an incubator taking equity for a cohort; it is a two-sided marketplace where startups earn better help by demonstrating seriousness and helpers earn better startups by being genuinely useful. The same logic runs the event: by the time a startup pitches for the $100,000 on offer, big VCs have already spoken to it, users have vouched for the product and partners have vouched for the working relationship, so the investor's diligence is mostly done. Community validation, not a deck, is what makes writing the cheque on stage rational.

▶ 0:30 ▶ 1:15 ▶ 17:20

The numbers, drawn

What the episode measures

Every figure below was said on air — timestamps included, caveats kept.

Conversation share

portion of the hour spent on each theme

Deep tech & hardware24%

Hiring & talent18%

Payments & fintech16%

Founder journey14%

Product strategy10%

Impact & outcomes9%

Computed from the chapter map of this episode.

Both sides of the BuildersTribe marketplace

participants listed

Both figures as stated on air — about 400 investors available to request a connection with, and roughly 1,500 startups on the platform generating some 20 new profiles a week. The startup figure comes from a garbled stretch of captions and should be read as approximate.▶ 25:31

Worth keeping

Lines that stay

If you look at Bitcoin, it's a payments company. It's Visa with zero employees.

— Raghu Mohan ▶ 2:48

They're not selling you complexity, which our industry is notorious for. They will sell you complexity — and then it's your fault for not knowing.

— Raghu Mohan ▶ 10:02

If you really want to serve the country, give somebody a job — and you would have served it more than I have.

— Raghu Mohan, quoting his father ▶ 18:37

Networks are immortal. You can't shut down Bitcoin because you arrested their CEO or confiscated their thing or shut down their internet.

— Raghu Mohan ▶ 20:44

This is the only industry that will take you for what you can do versus where you've been.

— Raghu Mohan ▶ 24:03

Clips that travel

Short on time? Start here

Anyone who wrote off crypto during the Ponzi years

Visa with zero employees

Crypto framed as an engineers' revolt against finance, and the $40 million transfer that settled instantly for four cents.

1:30 → 3:37 · 2 min ▶ Watch clip

Web3 founders tired of being sold complexity

Not everything needs to be decentralised

The spectrum Mohan takes from a round table with Vitalik Buterin, and why maximalism dies the moment you have to ship.

4:21 → 6:41 · 2 min ▶ Watch clip

Investors sizing what blockchains can actually do today

The smart contract that stops your car

The most honest stretch in the episode: immutability as a hazard, followed immediately by the use cases that still justify the technology.

8:58 → 12:15 · 3 min ▶ Watch clip

Community and developer-relations builders

If you want to serve the country, give somebody a job

Seven years of community building traced back to an Air Force officer's argument about a demographic bulge and purposeless youth.

17:50 → 19:55 · 2 min ▶ Watch clip

Engineers with a GitHub profile and no resume

Hired without a resume

Why starting up is a privilege but meaningful work isn't — and the two hallway conversations that make the case for evidence-based hiring.

23:29 → 25:00 · 2 min ▶ Watch clip

Glossary

The jargon, unpacked

Web3

Shorthand for applications built on public blockchains, where users hold their own assets and sign their own transactions instead of trusting a company's servers.

TPS

Transactions per second — the throughput measure at the centre of the scaling argument, where Web2 buyers ask for a million and Mohan's answer is that infrastructure has to feel infinite, the way AWS does.

DeFi

Decentralised finance: borrowing, lending and earning yield through code rather than a licensed bank, which is what makes the products permissionless and borderless.

Smart contract

Code that executes an agreement automatically once its conditions are met — efficient when it works, unforgiving when it cuts the engine of a car whose EMI was paid late.

PFP

A profile-picture NFT collection, usually cartoon animals — Mohan's shorthand for the hype products the industry keeps making instead of use cases.

Developer relations

The craft of building and supporting a developer community around a technology; Mohan's background before Lumos and BuildersTribe.

Reputation gating

BuildersTribe's core mechanic: founders qualify for better help by showing seriousness, and mentors, partners and investors qualify for better startups by being demonstrably helpful.

Demo day

The staged pitch session that closes an accelerator or conference programme — here carrying $100,000 in prize money awarded after community, not just investor, diligence.

Connections

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EP 143 · Deep tech

Full transcript

The whole conversation, searchable

Auto-generated captions, lightly cleaned. Click a timestamp to open that moment on YouTube.