The Crypto Bros Your Mom Would Approve Of

Phil Kwok was in primary school when he made a discovery that would turn him into that most dangerous word for parents who just want their kids to go to a good college, find a job, and get married: entrepreneur.

“I actually found a special method of making paper airplanes, and nobody else could do it,” Phil told The Index. “I was selling paper airplanes in the school playground for five pounds a pop.”

He transitioned from paper to pixels, building a social network called Campus Banter, for his high school peers. The inspiration was founder-coded: “One of the movies that I keep coming back to as having been very inspiring was The Social Network,” Phil said. At 16, he discovered the Bitcoin whitepaper and became obsessed, abandoning Campus Banter. “It’s probably still out there somewhere.”

His parents watched as he turned the basement into a makeshift mining operation. “They were like, ‘No, you got to stop doing this,’” Phil recalled. “I was like, ‘No, no, no! It’s the future.’”

They were relieved when he got into Cambridge. His older brother, Dom, had left two years before to attend Penn, which he would later parlay into jobs at Goldman Sachs and Blackstone before becoming one of the first hires at Travis Kalanick’s AI and robotics company. Phil, meanwhile, eventually joined Sullivan & Cromwell in New York.

For a while, things seemed to have settled down.

But restless and wanting to work together, they used their strong alma mater networks to launch two startups in their spare time: one was a bartering platform, the other was a borrowing platform. In doing so, the brothers saw a need for a neutral blockchain resource and became educators themselves.

They left their prestigious jobs to pursue their idea—then told their family. “Better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission,” Phil said.

What the brothers left to build was EasyA, a fitting name for two people who had always seemed to sail through their studies. Would-be startup founders download the EasyA app, learn all about this thing called the blockchain (and now AI), build their products on it, demo their MVP at an EasyA hackathon, and get in front of top-tier blue-chip investors. Users launch fully fledged companies right from their smartphone.

Their parents didn’t share their conviction, but Phil and Dom knew they had an unfair advantage as co-founding brothers. “We spend pretty much every day and every night together. Well, I mean, not every night, but every day together, essentially,” Dom said. “We’ll have all the meals together, work out together, finish work together, and do pretty much everything together.”

Strangers occasionally struggle to tell the brothers apart, and even they have found themselves morphing into one due to all the time they spend together: “You get that mind meld," said Dom. "You start to know what they're thinking. You know what their next step is going to be. You know [how] they would react to a certain message or email or different events, and ultimately, it just saves a lot of time.”

“We’ll have all the meals together, work out together, finish work together, and do pretty much everything together.”

That kinship came in handy, especially at the start. Phil told The Index he thought the idea would hit on the first try. “When we launched the EasyA app, we were sitting around the kitchen table worried if our servers could handle it or if we could handle all the press inquiries or customer support.”

That didn’t turn out to be a problem.

“We worked for months and months, we left our jobs, and then boom, you release it, and literally nobody cares,” he said. “You reach out to people. Even your own friends don’t really want to use the app that you’ve built, because in all fairness, you probably built something that people don’t really want.”

This is the stage where most founders give up, and the Kwoks certainly had the connections to move on. They could have gone back to their high-paying jobs and called it a fever dream. Instead, they iterated until they hit product-market fit. 

“The startup world ends up doing this to you. It will break you down, and then maybe it doesn’t reconstitute you, but you need to reconstitute yourself,” Phil said. Dom put it another way: “You need to almost in a way be a little bit delusional about why you can do it and why no one else was able to do it.”

Four years after the Kwoks sat around that lonely kitchen table waiting for someone, anyone, to care, the EasyA app has grown to an impressive 1.3 million+ users. And the brothers say people start lining up at 5 a.m. for EasyA events that don’t start until 10:30 a.m.  “A lot of people can get engagement online, but they can’t always get people actually showing up for them in person,” Dom said.

They are gearing up to go public after filing confidentially with the SEC.

Now, what keeps them up at night isn’t if they’ll be able to keep the app running, but rather how fast they’ll be able to get to 1 billion users. This requires spotting the next innovations, getting in front of them, and putting them in EasyA users' hands before the mainstream gets behind them. “It’s about trying to see around the corners,” Dom said.

EasyA is already a cool flywheel for the brothers, bringing frontier technologies to the EasyA community, seeing projects get built, and investing in the ones that catch their imagination. But they also see some room for improvement—and it’s not always the product. 

“I think one of the big issues we see with a lot of companies is they start the company [and] don't really know the co-founder," Dom said. "They have their own lives, and they aren't as connected as they ultimately should be.”

Not everyone has a lifetime to get to know their co-founder.