Most founders think finding a co-founder takes months of coffee meetings and grinding. For Brian, it was a 4-year journey through a VC introduction that taught him patience compounds better than speed. From 80 hour weeks on Wall Street, to crypto, to building Glider (backed by A16Z, 40K+ community), this MIT grad's path shows why the long game wins.

📌 KEY MOMENTS YOU CAN'T MISS:
🎯 01:16:16 - "It was four years in the making" - The real co-founder timeline
🔥 13:15 - Why MIT felt like
💼 21:00 - The truth about weeks in investment banking
🤝 01:18:49 - "Finding a co-founder is like a marriage" framework
⏰ 01:49:59 - "Product before token" philosophy (A16Z-backed approach)

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
🎬 CHAPTER 1: ORIGIN STORY
00:04:38 - The Overnight Success Myth vs. 10-Year Reality 00:08:38 - Growing Up Bilingual
00:09:15 - Competitive Soccer Through High School (Work Ethic Origins)

🎓 CHAPTER 2: THE MIT EXPERIENCE
00:11:50 - Why Brian Chose MIT Over Other Elite Schools 00:13:15 - 🔥 "MIT Was Like Drinking From a Fire Hose"
00:18:00 - When Trading & Markets Became the Obsession



💼 CHAPTER 3: WALL STREET PRESSURE COOKER
00:19:45 - Landing In Investment Banking
00:22:00 - 🎯 How Pressure Cooker Training Helps You as a Founder
00:24:45 - Skills That Transferred from Wall Street to Crypto ₿

CHAPTER 4: THE CRYPTO JOURNEY
00:26:30 - First Hearing About Bitcoin Around 2013-2014 00:35:00 - Joining Anchorage (2+ Year Chapter in Crypto) 🤝

CHAPTER 5: THE CO-FOUNDER STORY (MOST IMPORTANT) 01:14:41 - 🎬 THE REAL STORY BEGINS: "This Is a Very Long Story"
01:17:48 - 🎯 What to Look for in a Co-Founder: Complementary Skills
01:19:45 - 💡 ADVICE: Put Yourself Where You'll Find Complementary Skills

🚀 CHAPTER 6: BUILDING GLIDER
01:40:00 - What Glider Actually Does: Crypto Portfolio Management
01:49:28 - Glider Roadmap: What's Coming Next

🌍 CHAPTER 7: BUILDING GLOBAL COMMUNITY
01:51:21 - How to Follow & Get Involved with Glider 💭 CHAPTER 8: CLOSING INSIGHTS
01:52:17 - What Makes This Podcast Different From All Others

I'll condense this transcript to under 100K characters while preserving all key biographical facts, insights, and the conversation flow.

CONDENSED TRANSCRIPT - BRIAN (GLIDER) ON MIKEY G PODCAST

Mikey G: Brian, welcome to the Mikey G Podcast Experience. How you doing, brother?
Brian: I'm good, Mikey. Happy to be here.
Mikey G: Quick update for the audience - my focus has shifted from crypto Twitter to LinkedIn and Reddit forums. Millions of people in corporate America wanting to become entrepreneurs. That's my audience. Also excited to announce - first blockchain partnership after four years! Hard work over time pays off.

Brian: The moments you see on crypto Twitter had a lot of work behind them. Circle has been around for 15 years. Overnight successes are 10 years in the making.

Mikey G: Let's get into it. How did you get to where you're sitting today? Chapter 1: Childhood. Mantras, parents, memories, tinkering, sports. Chapter 2: Schooling, career, failures, lessons. Chapter 3: Your company, DeFi, crypto.

Brian: Born in Philadelphia, left at couple months old. Grew up in Maryland, just outside DC. Montgomery County. Fairly normal suburban upbringing, very multicultural. Had high expectations for doing well in school - not helicopter parents, but internal pressure to succeed.

Mikey G: Internal pressure is rare. Where did that come from?

Brian: Always a bit competitive. Figured out I was good at math - it felt like a game. I enjoyed taking homework home. Didn't come from sports, just enjoyed thinking about ideas and math.

Mikey G: So you had this innate competitive nature aligned with your passion - that creates greatness.

Brian: I went to a very interesting elementary school - half the day in Chinese, half in English. Math was taught in Chinese. I'm half Chinese, half Irish, so that cultural mix was interesting. A lot of math felt like puzzles to figure out. The objectivity of math was nice - either right or wrong, no subjectivity.

Mikey G: But entrepreneurship is incredibly subjective. When did creativity start playing a part?

Brian: Maybe not that early. I was always particular, enjoyed art and music, but wasn't particularly creative compared to other students. Looking back, I was probably a very big nerd. We didn't know it at the time.

Mikey G: Math and science, playing sports - what else?

Brian: Started swimming at age three, swam through high school. Never particularly liked it - getting up early, practice after school. But every child has to do something they don't enjoy. That's how life is. Understanding that not every day will be the best day is important.

Mikey G: Is grit the most critical trait for entrepreneurship?

Brian: That and knowing what you're not good at. Making sure we can fill those gaps is really important. A lot of kids get instant gratification from TikTok, Instagram, Twitter. Not doing something difficult or hard. Being a founder isn't easy - if it was, everyone would do it.

Mikey G: With AI, robots will do the hard work. How do we continue problem solving and creativity?

Brian: Our engineers use AI to write code - it's faster. But they all wrote code without AI before. Kids growing up with ChatGPT is different. Older generation uses it like a search engine; younger kids ask personal thoughts and opinions. Creativity and individuality will always come from humans. We hand-make all our marketing - not outsourcing to AI.

Mikey G: Back to swimming - the competition and team aspect?

Brian: Summer swimming was fun, lots of camaraderie. I was captain for two years in high school. That camaraderie translates to forming teams professionally. But I wasn't particularly competitive - it was time consuming.

Mikey G: Any mantras from parents?

Brian (26:44): My dad would say "be confident." I was a shy kid. Recognizing and caring about yourself, being confident, is important. A lot of entrepreneurship is raising money, giving presentations. That confidence is very important. I was definitely a shy earlier child. Still very introspective, think a lot, sometimes can't fall asleep because I'm thinking.

Mikey G: Being introspective, building confidence - how have you dealt with that?

Brian: A lot of it is just being the person you think you should be. Like what an actor plays a role. You're never going to be the person you want to be unless you try. It can feel like an alter ego, but as long as it's not too different from your true belief - these beliefs are strongly held in what we're building.

Mikey G: Moving to high school - what were you thinking about?

Brian: Very little had changed. Went to magnet middle school for math, science, computer science. Then magnet high school for same. Very competitive environment - small group trying to go to same colleges. Rigorous schoolwork. Long nights, early mornings. I look back and wonder how I did it all - schoolwork, swimming, golf team, clubs.

Mikey G: Would you put your kids through that pressure?

Brian: I personally liked the pressure. Putting kids through some stress is good. Getting people who are good at something together in the same environment is good. You don't want to be big fish in small pond - you want to be big fish in big pond with other big fish. You'll face reality eventually. When you get to college, every big fish was also a big fish in their small pond.

Mikey G: Why is Silicon Valley the entrepreneurship hub vs. MIT/Harvard?

Brian: Tech hub is definitely San Francisco - not sure why historically. But if you're in biotech, Cambridge is the hub. Pure tech has always been San Francisco.

Mikey G: Stanford alum told me it's because there's nothing to do there - just insular, like-minded people building.

Brian (48:47): San Francisco is a little dystopian. I spent three months there with A16Z accelerator. Self-driving cars, offices with five people, restaurants closed past 8pm, never interacting with many people. Very strange compared to New York where you're in someone's shoulder on the subway.

Mikey G: MIT - what were the big factors that impacted your career?

Brian (45:32): They really empower you to think big - you can do anything. All resources to build it. They'll fund it, get you top professors. You don't realize while there, but once out, it's way harder to get access. Unlimited compute, machine building resources. The smartest place on Earth with cutting-edge research.

One thing MIT doesn't do well: not very diverse set of thoughts. Everyone takes same freshman courses - math, bio, chem, physics. There's an archetype. Harvard has English majors, theater majors - more diversity of opinions. MIT is incredibly apolitical unless it's improving society and science. No political clubs. Politics is not a thing. I don't know if that's best, but that's the environment.

Mikey G: Why is MIT the prototypical entrepreneurship place?

Brian: It's merit-based, not relationship-based. MIT alumni community isn't as strong as Harvard's - it's more "show me what you've done, can you write code?" Not just "you went to same school." There are pros and cons. But in my fraternity: Keoni who founded Monad, founder of Dropbox, founders of Kaoshi. We'll always have that MIT connection, but it's not THE thing at MIT.

Mikey G: Take me through your career path.

Brian: Did internships - trading firm in Chicago (loved summer there), then Morgan Stanley in New York. That led to full-time offer. First job out of college was big bank in Times Square - stared directly at M&M sign every morning. Was there 10 months. Absolutely hated it.

Mikey G: Why?

Brian: Wasn't intellectually stimulated. Doing work that didn't get me anywhere or make me learn. Would get in 6:30 AM, stare at sign, ask "what am I doing here?" Trading bonds all day. Leave 6 PM exhausted - 11.5 hour day. Gym, dinner, hour of TV, bed, repeat. If you're not in love with it, I don't know how you put up with it. After 10 months, went back to high frequency trading firm.

I learned how massive companies operate - Morgan Stanley is 50,000 people. Understanding politics, what systems are good and bad. Wanted Python on my computer - how many approvals do I need? Absolutely crazy. But good learning experience, good stepping stone.

Spent 2.5 years at trading firm. Really enjoyed it. Traded everything - stocks, futures, commodities, FX, little bit of crypto. Writing code, using skills from college. Things got interesting.

Mikey G: Advice for someone wanting to do traditional finance?

Brian: Society is changing. If you're thinking traditional finance, recognize blockchain will overwrite all that. Larry Fink said two weeks ago everything's going to be tokenized. Don't go into industries on the way down. Go into up and coming - crypto, AI, robotics, new forms of arts. We're here very early. Catch something on the up and coming rather than something done for 100 years. You're not going to come up with anything new there.

Mikey G: Timing and luck are important.

Brian: Absolutely. I've been fortunate to have high-quality human relationships. Portfolio of relationships over past 2-3 years is insane. Pour back as much as I can, give as much as I can. Eventually something clicks. Being a kind human being - work hard and be kind. That's it.

Brian: At the bank, people would say "I hate I have to go to my daughter's birthday this weekend." That's something I'd look forward to. Clearly not my culture. Been fortunate to have agreeable culture at trading firm, at Anchorage, and now at our company - people we want to work with and hang out with. Not just a job.

Mikey G: Culture is huge. AI changes things - you'll have tribes of people building together. Be kind, be someone people want to hang out with.

Give me a mistake or lesson learned.

Brian: Maybe I shouldn't have worked at Morgan Stanley straight out of college. But I don't believe you make mistakes - you do something, learn from it, come out understanding why you shouldn't do that or do something different in future.

Mikey G: If you can get to mindset where mistakes aren't really vocabulary and it's all insights and learning lessons, you're doing something right.

Brian: That gets me to crypto. Saw what was wrong with traditional finance at bank. Tasted crypto at trading firm. Crypto as way of transferring value on blockchain is fundamentally better system. Momentum is really there now - traditional finance institutions participating. It's going to happen.

Mikey G: What was the big aha moment for you?

Brian: You see how extractive traditional finance is. So many fees and spread built in. Giant bank, only one you can trade with, they have liquidity. Pay lawyers, regulation. Simple example: sending money to France. Money in bank earns 0.5%, in treasuries 4%. Two days to send - neither you nor receiver gets that 3%. If you magnify across entire world, that extra money goes into somebody's hands. Every payment moved instantly means earning yield instantly. That's really cool. That's why this is exciting.

Mikey G: But Web3 might be more extractive - so much money at stake, few people know what's going on.

Brian: I agree 2017-2023 was a bit of a wash in terms of buildouts. But we have strong underlying protocols - Uniswap for swapping, Morpho for lending. Lots of mess with FTX, Terra Luna. What's interesting now: real stuff coming on chain. Not just trading Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, meme coins. People taken advantage of because market makers have more sophisticated setups than retail.

Things more level when you've got stocks on chain, bonds on chain - instruments to grow your wealth. That's what we're leaning into. Meme coins are gambling. Real stuff on chain is exciting. Stable coins are the start. On-chain stocks exist now - regulation needs to shape around market structure, but there's real stuff now. Protocols built, DEXs, lending, chains, improvements to EVM and SVM. We can build actual consumer experiences better than traditional finance rails.

There's been bad actors, on-chain gambling, VCs propping it up. We're entering era where that's not investible. You'll see real products. Institutions will come in and say price-to-earnings ratios don't make sense. You'll see collapse of no-product, no-revenue tokens without a doubt. Revenue is important - distributing it back to token holders or users. Being able to permissionlessly give back revenue or utility on chain is novel.

Mikey G: Quality of guests on my show has gone through the roof - people creating tangible things. Content creators think they can keep making money on vaporware - it's not going to last. Real people from branding and marketing won't care about 30K followers making $3M extracting. That's going to change very soon.

Brian: You can't sell vaporware anymore. Nobody cares about decentralized blah blah. Everyone's centering on user experiences, user value, making revenue. About time.

Mikey G: Take me to the moment where Glider became an idea.

Brian: Interesting story - more long story. At trading firm, recruiter reached out about new role. I wasn't looking. About a year into Anchorage, same recruiter reached out. Still not looking. After third time - now two years and a month at Anchorage, spanning 3-4 years knowing this recruiter - he said "I think you might be interested." Had John who came up with Glider name and concept. Looking for someone to do product, lead BD, non-technical side despite being technical.

John and I met, talked a few more times. I met people within VC firm (Anagram). Really nice marriage that coincidentally happened. But didn't happen overnight - four years in the making.

Mikey G: What do you look for in a co-founder?

Brian: Complementary skill sets. I can code, but could I build what we've built by myself? No. John showed me rough MVP - I said there's something here. He's the best engineer I've ever met. I have ability to make a business out of this - trading, marketing, consumer experience people will enjoy. Look for complementary skill sets.

Also culturally similar mindset. I didn't enjoy aggressive culture of banking. It's like a marriage - same ideals, same morals. John and I align. We disagree sometimes, but eventually one of us comes to terms. Neither has big ego. Company success is most important - that goes into every decision.

Put yourself in places where you'll find people with complementary skill sets.

Mikey G: My co-founder and I have different backgrounds - he's product/marketing, I'm branding/creative. I go to outer space big picture step 400, he brings me back to step 1. The ego thing is critical. Some productive meetings I've been in were scary - people shouting, but then having drinks after. Not my vibe, but it worked for them.

For us, we rarely disagree. We're so aligned spiritually, morals, mission-driven that when we do disagree, we find solutions quickly. If you can align higher level meaning, mission, vision, purpose, that's powerful.

Brian: John and I had very similar upbringing - suburban areas, fairly normal. We view life similarly. If you have that baseline, rest is minor quibbles.

Mikey G: My co-founder - born in Israel, Jewish, lives in Germany. Opposite upbringing. But we're insanely aligned on meaning of life, why we're doing what we're doing. Grounded principles. That's what matters.

Elevator pitch: What is Glider?

Brian (01:25:01): Glider makes on-chain investing easy. We don't want crypto investing to feel difficult. In crypto native circles: gas, bridging, signing, custody - vast majority of world doesn't need to know these terms. We abstract it away. You can create ETFs - basket of tokens you hold. What's unique: no middlemen between you and assets. You custody your assets, they rebalance automatically without leaving your custody. Traditional ETF charges 50 basis points a year. Glider has no middlemen to charge that. It's you and your assets.

Mikey G: Where does the extra money go since equation is simplified?

Brian: Lots of benefits doing things on chain. No expensive lawyers and regulation. On-chain stocks - if you're outside US, you get access. Accessibility angle. Our belief: every asset on chain should be permissionless and freely tradeable. We're not building meme coin casino. We're here for you to invest in big assets you want to hold long-term.

Right now 80-90% of holdings are stable coins (earning yield), Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana - long-term assets. We want people aligned to hold and invest over time in assets they believe in. It's about growing your wealth.

Mikey G: You can make your money and pass along savings from cutting middlemen.

Brian: The Robinhood model - Robinhood gets paid for every trade because they sell order flow, pockets all money. In on-chain world, if we sit in middle like Robinhood, we can pass that money directly back to users. There are rails to give back money directly to users based off trading they do. That's really important.

Mikey G: Majority of world is underbanked. You can solve that. Combine with AI agent - humans can do anything they want.

Brian: We're really excited about personalized financial advising. AI applications building personal finance advisors on traditional rails - connecting to Coinbase, Robinhood, brokers - not building right direction. Assets are moving on chain. It's better system. Agents managing assets on chain are much further ahead and will gain market share compared to agents in traditional finance. That space is dinosaur waiting to die off.

Mikey G: What excites you about agents, AI, and integration into decentralized world?

Brian: Don't think it'll happen overnight. Generally, agents are good at assisting. Not good at taking action. You're not asking ChatGPT to Venmo a friend. On top of that, simple actions like sending or trading - you can do in one click. You're not going to type into bot to do it for you. Need to get to point where you feel comfortable with agent taking sophisticated actions on your behalf that you wouldn't already do. Not there yet. Might take time. Might look like robo-advisors that assist you.

Mikey G: What's the timeframe?

Brian: On advertising/negotiation front, quite soon. World where every product is negotiable - agent negotiates for you. Every online purchase could sell at cheaper price. Some agentic negotiation. When does it become trading on your behalf and making money? I don't think that ever comes, actually. That's a hedge fund or trading firm. You see "I gave ChatGPT $10,000" - those will never take off. Trading firms exist because they do things with non-public data, incredible systems and models for short price movements. Very weary about anything saying they can make you trading money. No incentive to share that.

There will be one agent that gets lucky, somebody will say "this is the next big thing." Nobody talks about 99% of agents that never made money. Very difficult to differentiate luck from systematic profit making. Everyone's a winner in bull market. Systematically making money is very different. One agent will get lucky and make headlines, but long-term performance is difficult and there's no incentive to share that.

Mikey G: Where I do see it: personalized financial advising, education using LLM to interact with your platform, get insight you'd pay for but is now readily available.

Brian: 100% right. It can take in variables individual financial advisor never could. "I'm having children in two years, buying house in eight years, make this much, have this saved" - provides comprehensive plan for how you should invest and spend. That's really cool. Probably already happening. Being able to help plan financial future is important. That's different than "go make me money."

Mikey G: Is that baked into your platform or on roadmap?

Brian: We're not 100% confident in what LLMs can produce right now to say it's GA ready for everybody. Done things internally where it can produce diversified portfolios we think people should hold. Not at place where it's really 100% accurate. We've built our service with building blocks - you pick and choose what you want. Creates nice way to train natural language, LLM or MCP to create consistent, human-readable portfolios over time. It's tooling for agents.

Mikey G: Tell me more about building block infrastructure.

Brian: Before I met my co-founder, he was experimenting with agentic space - how can I use LLM to trade? LLMs can do simple things very well - swap, lend, find out about something. If you ask LLM to do TWAP, dollar cost average, rebalance portfolio - 99% of time it won't do it right. Absolute disaster. Not good at repetitive actions. Don't know any agent that will consistently do things accurately.

You need something between raw text input and neural network on LLM side - layer of APIs that LLM understands and can convert between natural language and what they're trained on. A lot of what we've built comes from that direction. We know existing LLMs won't run on just plain text. They'll need underlying APIs and tools. We've built that tooling.

Mikey G: Are blocks very specific parts of the process?

Brian: If you're familiar with Scratch, it's like a coding block system. Similar in Glider. Asset blocks - choose asset you want, it's a block. Put five assets in, suddenly holding ETF for those five assets. If statements - like limit orders. If price reaches $5,000, sell token. Automation and rebalancing is built in.

Mikey G: Other benefits to this block infrastructure?

Brian: It's fully composable. You can create your own blocks, build into system. They don't have to be part of our UI. Behind scenes, blocks are simple JSON code. You can take these portfolios and embed them in your own application. We have API. Don't have to be bound by our front end or blocks or data. Use this as framework to create whatever portfolio, whatever strategy you want. Think of it as a language for DeFi. React for DeFi - composable language where you can create components. That's the grander vision of what these blocks can become.

Mikey G: I can have Claude skill that understands your block infrastructure and create my own agentic system.

Brian: Yeah. That's where things are going. ChatGPT has bunch of underlying tools. This is underlying tool for people who want to build agents on top of it. We already have agents using it. None publicly released yet. The tool had to be built first. Simple example: if you ask ChatGPT to find houses in San Diego, it needs Zillow. Same thing - if you ask it to TWAP into token and lend it, it needs something to do that. That's similar to Zillow.

Mikey G: Last questions about Glider. Even looking at comments, you've built something people are excited about. Finance is kind of dull. How'd you do it?

Brian: We do have quite an audience - surprising. When we raised first fundraise, question was "how will you get people to use this?" We had ideas about user flywheels, referrals. But it's taken more life of its own than expected. So globally distributed - no single country has more than 10% of users. US, China, Nigeria, South Korea, Philippines, France - crazy how global crypto is.

Couple things: building trust and real products. Now tens of thousands of users using Glider. They enjoy it. There's utility. We're here for people to invest, not trade casino of meme coins. That's a mission everyone wants. Better vision for investing on chain. Comes from trust.

Lucky to have good VCs supporting us early, but also the brand. All branding/marketing done in-house. Spend a lot of time making sure people we hire and way we portray brand is unique, safe, trusted, calm. My head of marketing has really built nice narrative around how we think and feel about this brand. Underestimated what crypto companies are putting out there. Focus on brands. In world where you can make anything with AI - to be clear, Glider couldn't be made with AI, there's a lot of work behind it - but in world where lots of things can be made with AI, that individuality, creativity, brand will differentiate you.

Mikey G: Next 3-6 months, what can people expect?

Brian: Very exciting announcement coming next Tuesday. Progressive rollout of more chains. Our belief: users shouldn't care what chain they're on. New chains mean new assets to invest in. Solana will have on-chain stocks. More B2B2C integration - agents, applications taking portfolios and embedding them. Improvements to API, working with partners. If you want to put your own portfolio on your website, you can - very simple.

We aren't launching token anytime soon to be clear. This is product before token. That's the way it should be. We have plans, thought about cool mechanics around how token could work. Spent time thinking with A16Z who's one of our investors and has done ton of tokenomics. Yes, there are ideas. Not in rush, but when time is right, time will be right.

Mikey G: Best way to get involved?

Brian: Just crossed 40,000 on Discord. Very active, no matter what language - Russian, Chinese, Hindi. Million different communities speaking different languages every day. Best way to follow without getting into Discord is X - glider_fi. Website is glider.fi. Should do better job on LinkedIn - we'll do more over time. X is the place for announcements. Discord is the place to get deeply involved.

Mikey G: Last question I ask every guest: If someone asked you to describe being on Mikey G Podcast Experience, what would you say?

Brian: Probably the only podcast or live where we've gone so deep into my personal upbringing and growth and life as a person, a human. That's interesting because we talk about this at Glider - how can we humanize a brand, humanize tech? We don't spend enough time talking about it. This has been unique experience compared to other podcasts that just want to hear about crypto and what you're doing.

Mikey G: I saw you comment about being pissed about InfoFi, said I could link you with Ponds, but also had podcast. If I see founder like yourself being active, creating meaningful content, just comments - I need to talk to that person. Immediately saw you went to MIT, seems like you know what you're doing, but you were engaged. From intro call, when we realized we grew up similar backgrounds, knew this would be great conversation.

Thing that stood out: you're genuinely a genuine human being that cares. That's why what we did is critical. This is the real alpha people. You want true alpha? Sit with us for hour and half, figure out if you vibe with Brian as human being. If you do, spend your money on what he's doing because you believe in him. The only thing you're searching for: someone you think can pull off what they're trying to pull off, and do you like them as human being?

You did that today by sharing your story. Beautiful insights about pressure cooker, MIT, finding a founder. So many tidbits. I'll make 60 shorts out of this. All of this, even though not specifically talking about Glider, we actually are - because it's you as good human being sharing your story. Last recommendation: keep on being human. You're doing your brand justice.

Brian: I appreciate this. Everything we do at Glider is to build wealth for our users. This is about investing. Not a service we sell for millions. We're here because we want people to feel this is real tech that normal people, outside crypto Twitter and in crypto Twitter, can use. Now is the right time for that.

Mikey G: Almost got to 500 people on platforms, but we did pretty good. Thank you for hundreds who tuned in. Beautiful conversation. We love you all. Happy Friday. Mikey G and Brian are out.