Noah Gaynor - Parcel

Noah Gaynor is the Co-Founder of Parcel. Parcel is a “Zillow for the metaverse”, a metaverse-native platform building key infrastructure for the needs of virtual real estate users, builders, property managers, investors, developers, and service providers. We talk about his journey from tradfi to crypto, Parcel, fundraising, the future of virtual real estate, Meta and more! The podcast is also available on your favourite podcast sources like Spotify, Apple and Youtube! NA: So great to have you on Noah. Been a while since we've been trying to set this up, so it's cool to finally be able to talk I'm keen to start with. Yeah. I'm keen to start with you and journey from Tradfi to crypto. I think it’s super interesting how you got to crypto. So I would love to hear that. NG: Yeah, sure. And again, thanks for having me on yeah, this did take a while to get set up finally, but I'm glad to make the connection and appreciate yeah, you featuring me and Parcel on the show. So, my journey. I became very interested in financial markets, really in college and started learning about stocks and derivatives. And I think I always had a very entrepreneurial spirit and sort of liked the idea of, you know, maybe being self-sufficient or being able to invest you know, for a living. Not be relying on maybe like a large institution, which I guess is kind of in the spirit of blockchain. So right after college, I became a proprietary trader, which is basically trading, you know, for our firm, you know, the ferns firms, own pool of capital. It's not like trading on behalf of a client at a large institution that job proved to be extremely difficult and stressful, and it was very entrepreneurial. Like, you definitely only, ate what you killed, but it wasn't sustainable for me at that time. So, I then transitioned into more of a corporate role. I was an internal consultant in the brokerage industry. But still, on the side, you know, I was like very interested in investing and trading, saw the markets closely and, you know, thought about all kinds of side hustles and other ideas which could ultimately make me kind of like independent and have some career freedom. So, my first exposure to Bitcoin was like 2013 when it started making the news, like TechCrunch and I dove in a little bit, I kind of understood that there's something interesting there it wasn't entirely clear what it was if it was a currency if it was a technology like I didn't fully wrap my head around what blockchain was at that time. And then I started to look into custody solutions. There weren't many at the time, there is one called Mt. Gox which seemed to be the popular one. And very luckily before I put any money there that hack happened. I mean, lucky for me, unfortunately for other Mt.Gox users. So, you know, I think that the natural thing at that point was just to step away and I kind of forgot about it until early 2017. I think it was rallying during Consensus week here in New York. And a co-worker came up to me, asked me if I had heard of something called XRP. And that completely sent me down the rabbit hole. Obviously, I learned what Ripple is all about, but that just sent me down the rabbit hole of blockchain altogether, learnt about Ethereum and everything else out there. So that was kind of like a really big turning point. Because obviously it was interesting as an investment, but I kind of saw the technology as being so much more pervasive, it had so many bigger applications and really disruptive to the whole financial system as we know it. So, at that point, you know, the switch flipped and I went all-in on crypto, like financially. And just in terms of where I wanted to go with my career, that was like my first foray into crypto. And then beyond that, yeah, I left the corporate world. I travelled a little bit. I ended up in Tel Aviv, Israel worked there in the crypto industry for about eight months. In more of an advisory capacity, like consulting, blockchain start-ups doing fundraising, ICOs, token design and things like that. I was sort of the bust part of, of the market after the boom. So, it wasn't the most exciting time to be there, but I was still very long-term bullish on the fundamentals. And then I came back to New York to get my MBA at Cornell Tech, where I actually ultimately met my current co-founder Ian in our MBA program. NA: Oh, very cool. It’s interesting how many people I've met that have fallen down the crypto rabbit hole starting with XRP. But that's great to hear. Following that journey which was super interesting how did you go down the path of deciding, you wanted to start at a company in the crypto/web 3 space? NG: Yeah, it's a good question. I mean obviously, you know, investing really interests me and even advisory is really interesting cause you get to sort of like work with founders and investors and have like a good purview. I think at the end of the day, I felt that web three enables everyone to do everything. So, you can be an investor and a trader and an advisor, and also a builder. And I just felt like, yeah, I can manage my personal portfolio, maybe not as actively as if I was doing it full-time but I could still do that. Plus, I can build and I can build great consumer products with great user interfaces. And it was just sort of like a burning desire. Just kind of like a screaming need that there's so much poor user interface in web three. I don't even want to say it's poor, it just like has even been addressed, to begin with, which I think happens, you know, at the beginning of most technologies. So, it just seemed like there was just enough need for more great products to be built. That's really what I wanted to do. And it also allows you to bring in some more of like the creative or artistic and like psychological side of things beyond you know, purely trading. NA: Yeah, right. No, I hear you. And so, let's talk about Parcel a little bit. How did you and Ian come up with the idea and what exactly is Parcel? NG: Yeah, so Ian and I actually both started different companies coming out of grad school at Cornell tech. There was like a startup incubator there. So he went in the direction of a web 2 gaming platform. It wasn't a crypto native and I went more of the DeFi payment space. I was working on a project that I'm just basically non-custodial on and off-ramps. So, a way to connect your metamask wallet to your bank account without having to go through a large, centralized exchange. And after we had both been working on these companies for about a year, and neither of them were really blowing up at that point. And Ian on his own started going down the rabbit hole of NFTs he's, you know, he's very creative. He's done a lot of graphic design and other kinds of arts. So, he started making his own NFTs and really fell down the hole. And then we just started having more and more frequent brainstorms and chats and mostly just as friends, but then we started brainstorming like other project ideas with another one of our classmates as well. And one day we had only been doing it for a few weeks and then one day, yeah. Ian was like, oh, I've been trying to buy land, in this game Ember sword, it's really difficult. There's not a lot of information out there. Everything's fragmented. Open Sea is not giving me everything that I need. You know, what if there was a need for like a land aggregator and, and to his credit, it was really his idea. He mocked it up, basically what it could look like in a very crude and MVP and threw it on Reddit on r/decentraland, and it was the top post of the day. And we're like, wow, we actually might have something here. So, we actually just started sprinting on it and we're like, okay, let's give this. We were both pretty exhausted from our last start-ups. So, like, all right, we're going to give this you know, two weeks, see if it really has legs. And then if it has legs we'll give it another two weeks, etc. And we ended up having enough momentum that we were able to sh… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theinquisitivevc.substack.com