EP #207 - Julian Liniger: Bitcoin Made Simple

Julian Liniger is the co-founder and CEO at Relai, the world's easiest Bitcoin investing app. His educational background is in Business Administration and Psychology an he has previously worked for Gsponer Consulting Group International and synfluence.

He was originally introduced to bitcoin by a nerdy friend of his, through whom Julian bought his first bitcoin. Despite having had little talent for "techy" things all his life, he eventually grew to understand cryptocurrency.

The idea for Relai came from Julian's own experience. Before, if you wanted to start buying or trading bitcoin, you had to:

- Find an exchange and create an account, which required uploading all of your personal info and having it checked, which took a couple of days;

- Wiring money from the bank to the exchange and waiting for that process to be completed, so that you could then exchange the money into bitcoin;

- Creating a wallet, then withdrawing the bitcoin from the exchange to the wallet (since exchanges — and the bitcoin that is stored within them — are at the mercy of hackers).

The whole process took about 1-2 weeks and required 2-3 different service providers.

The fact that the process needed to be simplified was a no brainer. Together with his co-founder Adem Bilican, Julian started the pre-seed fundraising process. It took them 5 months to raise a meager 20k. In hindsight, Julian blames his lack of track record and the typical Swiss hesitancy, but also the fact that they were approaching the wrong investors: people who didn't understand crypto and sometimes weren't even that interested in fintech.

Once they got the money, Adem and Julian built the MVP in 3 months and went live — from this point onwards, investors were the ones approaching them. And it's no wonder: Relai allows you start buying, trading and saving bitcoin within just 1 minute, and they don't even need to know your name.

Memorable Quotes:

"More than half of Gen Zs and Millennials say they'll be investing in bitcoin. These are the people who are gonna control more than half of all money in the future."

If you would like to listen to our previous episode with Julian Liniger, click here.

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