An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Focus is key. This is how you get your creative ideas to flow easier. Formulate a continuous development plan because as your community grows, they’ll want to see consistency.
As a part of our series about cutting-edge technological breakthroughs, I had the pleasure of interviewing Tahem Verma.
Tahem Verma is the Co-Founder and CEO of mesha, an all-in-one smart money management tool for Web3 companies and DAOs. Mesha is a global platform that gives companies access to easy-to-use treasury and expense management tools to help Web3 teams scale their financial operations. Mesha enables startups to effectively manage their assets, access DeFi, and diversify tokens or earn yield. They provide startups with detailed insights into their finances and a corporate card program, allowing crypto-native teams to function seamlessly between the worlds of Web2 and Web3.
Tahem is a serial entrepreneur and previously founded the English-learning app Enguru. He received his BA at the University of Pennsylvania and MBA at Cornell Tech. He is also the host of the podcast Debug the Future, where he breaks down the fintech industry and helps audiences understand its potential and inner workings.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit about you. Can you tell us about the cutting-edge technological breakthroughs that you are working on? How do you think that will help people?
Mesha is the all-in-one smart money management tool for Web3 organizations such as DAOs, NFT projects, and Web3 startups. We provide a super easy-to-use treasury and expense management tool that helps teams scale their financial operations. Mesha helps Web3 startups with crypto assets, by actually managing those assets and securing them in a multi-signature wallet, which teams can access and use to make payments to vendors, DAO contributors, and employees. Users can also access DeFi solutions, so if they need to make token swaps because they’re earning in a non-stable currency, for example, mesha has streamlined this process for converting to a stablecoin. In addition, users get valuable insights into their finances. We also help bridge the gap between crypto assets and fiat payments with a corporate card program. You can think of mesha as a crypto-native bank and card program. Our goal is to let the best projects focus on building while we help them scale their financial operations, enabling the ecosystem to grow as a whole.
How do you think this might change the world?
A lot of Web3 teams overlook the traditional fiat rails that still exist. There are many bills that teams will need to pay in fiat, vendors that don’t accept crypto, and losses incurred while converting crypto to fiat. We’ve designed this global platform to expand the ecosystem and let innovators innovate. We have for too long seen Web3 teams and DAO contributors struggle with converting crypto to US dollars, making payments, and reconciling these transactions, so we make it a lot easier and a lot faster for them to do so. This means Web3 projects no longer need to hold their crypto in a centralized custodian. We underwrite users based on their decentralized wallet rather than their fiat bank account. What’s really exciting is that we enable Web3 projects to pay in fiat using their credit card while being able to pay back their balance in crypto, so we’ve designed the program to bridge the fiat requirements for crypto-native teams.
Was there a “tipping point” that led you to this breakthrough? Can you tell us that story?
As a Web3 company, I and my team suffered all the same problems. Converting fiat to crypto is a really complicated and tiresome process and to top it off it’s expensive. We realized the space is still growing and for the moment it’s quite broken. So, the tipping point was when we learned that we could make an impact and help teams focus on what they’re good at, which is building.
What do you need to lead this technology to widespread adoption?
It’s about executing and listening to our customer’s needs. That’s all that matters. With community-focused projects, it’s not enough to declare that you are all about the people. People want to see consistent growth because it’s an indication of how strong your team is and how dedicated they are the mission.
What have you been doing to publicize this idea? Have you been using any innovative marketing strategies?
We are community-focused, so we work with our communities, from Twitter Spaces to our Discord servers, to make sure they build with us, and because our community genuinely believes that our service is solving real-world problems, they spread the word about our project and the work that we do.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
It’s really important for us to give back and do our part because there are deep-rooted inequalities in the world. We donate one percent of whatever we earn to help female education around the world. Our community can vote to increase this percentage, but never decrease it. We hope that in the future mesha’s pledge will no longer be relevant- but until then, we will help empower girls in the world.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?
- Take your time with hiring the right people. Your team and company culture is key to a successful business, especially in Web3. You need people that believe in the vision and are willing to put in the work for the long haul.
- Spend time talking to users before building. You can’t settle for the ideas in your head. You need to be talking to users consistently in order to understand what they want to get out of an experience, and you need to be fully transparent. If you’re not committed to active engagement with your users as a founder, then you’re already missing one of the core reasons to create a business with Web3 principles.
- Focus is key. This is how you get your creative ideas to flow easier. Formulate a continuous development plan because as your community grows, they’ll want to see consistency.
- Stay healthy and find balance. Finding a balance between your work and private life is vital to avoiding burnout. I realized that being dedicated to your job doesn’t have to come at the expense of having boundaries and [it’s important] to let go of the idea that you have to be able to do it all on your own.
- Build relationships. Web3 is all about people coming together as a community and building relationships take a lot of time. Be clear with your intentions and foster an environment where people feel comfortable enough to self-signal their intentions.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
If more of us built for the world, and not for making money quickly, we could tap into the next wave of uplifting society and people around the world. We have the opportunity to change this narrative, and we should all start by uplifting those marginalized by society.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
Readers can follow me on my personal accounts: Twitter, LinkedIn, and my brand accounts: mesha, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Youtube.
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.
The Future Is Now: Tahem Verma On How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake Up The Tech Scene was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
