It took us 10 months and 3 iterations/pivots to even conceive of Passport Protocol.

We started raising a pre-seed right when FTX happened. Went from building a full-stack AA SDK, to a wallet adapter and later finally landed on what today is Passport.

Our story (+lessons) ...

November 2022 

We graduate from @alliance wanting to build a full-stack AA solution for dapps. 

One integrated solution with smart accounts, bundlers, and paymasters as a whole. 

Took this picture from our fundraising memo from then -

Crypto's leading accelerator & founder network. Apply at alliance.xyz

Co-Founder of /0xpass -  https://passport.0xpass.io - programmable key management | Love all things product and design | Prev - Stanford, Microsoft

A ton of other startups entered the space but began focusing on individual parts of this stack. 

We realized two things - 
- There's no way our small team could build all of this
- If we wanted to win, we'd have to focus

Lesson #1 - Do one thing, and do it really well

Quick detour - we had to raise a round right after FTX's collapse. 

It felt like valuations halved overnight and nobody wanted to deploy capital anymore.

Thanks to Alliance, the Stanford ecosystem, and mostly luck, we pulled through and raised a $1.8M preseed. Enough for us to iterate. I'll always be grateful to investors that backed us at that time. 

Lesson #2 - Sometimes you need luck and pure belief

March/April '23 - July/August '23 

After realizing we had to focus, we picked the auth part of the stack and decided we were going to build a new wallet adapter. 

Something better than RainbowKit. It would integrate with popular KMS solutions and also support AA/smart accounts.

We launched it for free and saw some decent initial usage. Over 200+ projects signed up in the first 8 weeks or so. 

I would DM devs on TG for feedback. 

Always asked one simple question - "Why use 0xPass?"

Surprisingly, most devs used us because we made it easy for them to integrate with KMS providers. 

Not because we built the best wallet adapter. 

All the value was being captured by KMS infra. 

Lesson #3: Focus where value/capital flows

In September we announced Passport Protocol and have since been focused on validating our thesis, getting early customers, and getting to mainnet. 

So many challenges and learnings ... could warrant a part 2 to this story.