Thread
️24-year old Tieshun Roquerre is the best story in Web3.
He dropped out of MIT to build an NFT marketplace to challenge OpenSea — and it worked.
@blur_io now ranks #1 in NFT trading volume and is valued at over $250M.
Here's the wild story of @PacmanBlur👇🧵
He dropped out of MIT to build an NFT marketplace to challenge OpenSea — and it worked.
@blur_io now ranks #1 in NFT trading volume and is valued at over $250M.
Here's the wild story of @PacmanBlur👇🧵
When most kids were setting up lemonade stands, Pacman (real name: Tieshun Roquerre) discovered Y Combinator and Paul Graham's growth essays at the age of 13.
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At 16 Tieshun built a clone of the print-on-demand startup called Teespring in a spare time at school.
He then sent it to the CEO and landed an internship with them.
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He then sent it to the CEO and landed an internship with them.
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He left Boston for what was supposed to be a summer job in San Francisco. But the gig stuck, and he ended up staying with the Teespring for an entire year - which caused him to drop out of school.
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At 17, he co-founded StrongIntro - an engineer recruiting startup with a friend.
They made it into the YCombinator and went on to secure $120k in pre-seed funding from them.
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They made it into the YCombinator and went on to secure $120k in pre-seed funding from them.
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After a year of running the company, he knew it was time to level up.
That's when he decided to apply for Math and Computer Science at MIT.
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That's when he decided to apply for Math and Computer Science at MIT.
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Tieshun, like many others, started his crypto journey with BTC and ETH.
But in 2018, everything changed when a friend introduced him to HandShake - the revolutionary DNS protocol.
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But in 2018, everything changed when a friend introduced him to HandShake - the revolutionary DNS protocol.
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Tieshun and Anthony Liu (his classmate at the time) joined forces to create Namebase, the domain registrar that helped with Handshake adoption.
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Once again, he dropped out of school to build his company, but this time with a $100K grant from the Thiel Fellowship.
In 3 years company became a success👇
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In 3 years company became a success👇
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After selling Namebase in 2021 - he plunged into NFT trading.
His first mint was Blitmap. He diamond-handed it and sold at the peak for 30 ETH.
And just like that, he was hooked.
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His first mint was Blitmap. He diamond-handed it and sold at the peak for 30 ETH.
And just like that, he was hooked.
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He went all-in on NFTs, researched the space inside out, and even shared a thread about tools every investor should be using.
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To prove that he was no less than a real degen, here are a some of his GMs:
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On his journey, he dabbled in Solana NFTs and even snagged SMB #2794👇
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Frustrated with the sluggish infrastructure of retail-focused marketplaces, active trading just wasn't cutting it anymore.
It was time for a change.
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It was time for a change.
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Just two months after the launch (in January, 2022), Blur announced that they had secured $11M from top investors, including Paradigm.
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And just like that, in a little over a year, Tieshun's startup has become the leading NFT marketplace.
Last week it had almost triple the volume of OpenSea.
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Last week it had almost triple the volume of OpenSea.
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Congrats on reading the whole thread!
As a reward, here's some life alpha from Tieshun:
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As a reward, here's some life alpha from Tieshun:
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I hope you've enjoyed this thread! Follow me @PixSorcerer for more.
Liking and retweeting my first tweet below would mean the world to me.
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Liking and retweeting my first tweet below would mean the world to me.
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