Tommy & Taylor Johnson - Co-Founders, PsyOptions Ep #51

<p>Anatoly (00:09):</p><p>Hey folks, this is Anatoly and you're listening to The Solana Podcast. And today I have with me Tommy and Taylor, co-founders of the PsyOptions protocol. Awesome to have you guys.</p><p>Tommy (00:18):</p><p>Thanks for having us.</p><p>Taylor (00:19):</p><p>Thanks for having us.</p><p>Anatoly (00:21):</p><p>Cool. So what's the origin story? How did you guys get into crypto and what made you build PsyOptions?</p><p>Tommy (00:27):</p><p>Crypto, it goes back to... I remember watching the Ethereum ICO, just being a broke college student, but felt we were too broke to actually throw anything into and that's a big regret, but that shaped up how we got into Solana later on. Really dove deep into everything back in 2017, right before the summer hype. And then in the summer hype, tried developing a little bit on Ethereum, doing some solidity development in the spare time, but I never jumped full time into it until PsyOptions. Taylor has a little bit of a different history with crypto.</p><p>Taylor (01:03):</p><p>Yeah. I've actually been full-time in crypto since late 2017, after Tommy and I shut down a previous business we started in school. We were looking for different things to do and I knew crypto had a lot of hype in 2017. I was like, "All right, this is definitely an industry I could see myself being a part of." I eventually took a job at Blockfolio and then as well as doing some freelance solidity development and then been full-time ever since.</p><p>Anatoly (01:27):</p><p>How did you guys meet? What was the genesis for you guys to go build PsyOptions?</p><p>Tommy (01:32):</p><p>Well, Taylor and I are twins, so we met a long, long time ago. We've always been hacking on ideas and stuff. And I guess, Taylor had his eye on Solana from 2018, right Taylor?</p><p>Taylor (01:47):</p><p>Yeah, pretty early on. I remember Multicoin writing about it. I was like, "Oh, this is actually a really sweet architecture, solves a lot of problems that we saw in Ethereum." And kept following before Mainnet beta