Why I Built an AI Wealth Advisor in 2016 (And What's Next) | Cyrus Fazel of SwissBorg

Shamil Malachiyev: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to this week's episode of The Founder's Code podcast. Joining me today from Zurich, Switzerland, is a founder who spent over eight years working as a hedge fund advisor and then decided to take his expertise and bring it to the world of crypto. Please welcome the founder and CEO of a unique crypto wealth-management ecosystem, SwissBorg: Cyrus Fazel.

Cyrus Fazel: Shamil, very nice to be here. Thanks for inviting me to the podcast.

Shamil Malachiyev: Thank you for coming. Can we start with you telling us a little about SwissBorg, the scope you're operating at and your current vision for the company?

Cyrus Fazel: SwissBorg was created almost ten years ago. The idea was to enable anyone to become financially free. We've been focused on building investment products and services for any kind of person who wants to get into crypto, because we always believed this was the most interesting asset class, the most beautiful technology, and it had this social cause that was really nice too: you could start small and grow with it.

Today we've built an amazing app and ecosystem around it. You can deposit your local currency, exchange at the best prices, get passive income, build baskets; there are mandates, so many different things on offer. But we make sure that anyone between 18 and a hundred years old can do it in the best and easiest way possible.

Shamil Malachiyev: Was it easy for you to choose this domain? Everybody knows this industry is always on fire: ups, downs, bulls, bears. It's difficult to stay in the saddle; it puts you through a lot of roller coasters. What was your thinking before starting in this direction?

Cyrus Fazel: From my background, I'm a nouveau pauvre. I came from a family that lost everything. I'm Iranian and Swiss, and in the Iranian Revolution my parents lost everything: their lands, their properties, their wealth, their identity. So I was always subjected to risk to some extent.

I was always trying to understand the investment game, because my family lost it all, so I thought, well, I should probably make it all. From starting my career in 2007 to today, I was always passionate about what the future would look like, and I always knew the future was going to look more futuristic. And the thing that captures the most of the future is technology. Since the early 2000s, the tech bubble even, I was very interested; I invested very early in Google, Apple and all these different companies, and I've always been tech-savvy. Working a long time in the financial world as well, I understood the coolest thing was definitely technology.

And crypto is the riskiest part of technology, the part that is proving itself every day but still has a lot to prove too. So I knew that taking the biggest risk is where you get the biggest returns. For me it was an obvious choice to be invested in that. And I think when you fulfill one of your own problems, which for me was financial freedom, then you really want to pass it on to everyone.

If you look at Stephen Covey's book, the seven habits of highly successful people: you work on yourself, and then you work on the others. That's what we should do. Take a big problem of your own and solve it. And when you've solved it for yourself, work out how to scale that product or service for a lot of people, making sure those people actually have the problem your solution solves.

Shamil Malachiyev: What was it like growing up in a family that was rebuilding from the start? What did you notice as a kid, and how did it affect the way you think about risk?

Cyrus Fazel: Well, if you'd had crypto back in the day, they could not have stolen everything, that's for sure, because my parents would have been holding it. Diversification was a big part. My grandmother was German, and she was the only one in the family who didn't tell anyone, but she had small apartments here and there, a bit in Lausanne and inside France. That's essentially where I lived, in a small, small apartment in France with my brother and mother, and it helped us a lot to get through a difficult life. So being able to have a plan B and a plan C was really good, alongside a strong plan A. Because back in the day, when everything is working so well, why would you refocus on something else?

Shamil Malachiyev: Did you ever feel like you had to prove yourself to others around you?

Cyrus Fazel: Yeah, of course. Growing up, I liked electricity and plumbing, because we didn't have cash for electricians and plumbers. So I just got into it: plumbing, electricity, TVs, trying to repair anything. When we had more money, people would ask what I wanted to be and I'd say, I'm an astronaut. A bit later they asked again and I said, I'll be an electrician and a plumber, because that's what people really need, and I like solving problems for people.

Then I remember one of my aunts said: but Cyrus, you're very good at math for your young age. You should be a banker. I said, what do you mean by banking? Well, you like counting money. And already as a young kid, any pocket money people gave me, I kept. I never spent it. I was trading baseball cards and American football cards and making a good amount of money. I was trying to set up businesses extremely early: washing cars, selling iced tea door to door, and bad cookies or whatever.

I grew up in New York, which is a place where you understand quickly what the value of money is, whatever your age. That gave me a sense of entrepreneurship very early. And then growing up with no money, well, you just have to figure the shit out, you really have to. A lot of entrepreneurs will realize this: if you want to be a successful entrepreneur, especially as a CEO, you need to know how to be extremely proactive, and you need to be able to sell a lot of shit until you build the right product and service. You have to be street-wise and just try and fail, try and fail, until you make things work. A lot of the things I've done made me much better and readier to be an entrepreneur, because as we know, it's never that easy to figure this out.

Shamil Malachiyev: Looking at the world today, a big part of me says plumbing and electricity are going to be some of the biggest industries within 20 or 30 years, probably some of the only ones for people to go into massively. Everybody's always going to need them, unless we have robots doing it. And all of those street smarts remind me of Gary Vaynerchuk's story: always selling baseball cards door to door.

Cyrus Fazel: Same neighborhood I grew up in, by the way, in New York, I just realized that. There were a lot of Middle Eastern people, a lot of Iranians, a lot of Jewish people. So it was very normal: you're four years old, you have to make money. In that phase of my life my family actually had more money; it got worse afterwards. But it's still a great way to start with obsession and sanity.

I think that's the double-edged sword every entrepreneur needs: you need to be obsessed. When I was a kid, I wanted all these G.I. Joes. I needed a hundred G.I. Joes, so I knew I needed $152, because they were $1.52 each. Thirty-five years later I still remember the price. And $3.45 for a Ninja Turtle. The math was too difficult for me, so my brother would help me, and I would count down and try to win quarters and squirrel them away. I never bought the hundred G.I. Joes, by the way, but I had the money to do it at the age of six, which was cool.

Shamil Malachiyev: I remember that feeling: you always want something, but once you have the money you think, I don't want to waste it on toys, I want to do something more adult with it. Has being street-smart played an important role in your development in investments and in the direction of your companies?

Cyrus Fazel: Not for crypto, for sure. For investments, I think it was exactly the opposite, because I started in private banking at the best private bank, Julius Baer, at a very interesting time when they were doing a lot of M&A, and I was very interested in M&A back then. I then went into quant trading hedge funds, which was about how you apply AI, or machine learning to some extent, to fund management. That was really cool; there was this tech side to it. But it was very scholarly. There wasn't street smartness there. There was definitely a lot of entrepreneurship in how you would grow and scale it, I agree, but this was more the Harvard league than the street-smart league. The street smarts came back when I had to do a 360 in my life and really say to everyone: it looks cool what you guys are doing, I did it for eight years, but now I need to change the world and change myself as well.

Shamil Malachiyev: You said the first part was achieving financial freedom, proving to yourself that you could give that freedom to yourself and your parents. Was that something you got close to achieving during your hedge fund days? I ask because back in school everybody said: you should be a banker, go into banking if you want money. Only around 2009 or 2010 did people start saying you could be a tech entrepreneur. Before that it was always banks, the most secure path.

Cyrus Fazel: Not really. When you're young you go for experience, but the financial world is extremely good at making sure you're not going to make too much money, while you're getting a lot of experience. It's very hard to make a huge amount of money before you become a partner at any firm. So definitely not. My standard of living was much better, but I still had my college loans to pay off. I never really had crazy money to do stupid things, and I never went through that phase anyway.

Financial freedom came to me, I would say, in 2021. I was at a supermarket. I was always very weird with numbers, not Rain Man weird, but still a little bit weird: I would get to the cashier at any supermarket after 30 minutes of shopping and know the price to within three or four francs. Even my co-founder Anthony, who is almost Rain Man in mathematics, was never as good as me at tallying the whole thing. He was like, dude, it's just awkward, you're literally doing additions while we shop. And I'd say no, I look at prices and the whole thing goes into my brain; I'm not memorizing all the prices, but at the end I can do it quite rapidly.

So in 2021, crypto's pumping, of course, and I finished my grocery shopping and left, going back home with the shopping, and I realized I didn't know the bill. I hadn't counted what the bill would be. I didn't even know how much I'd spent on my credit card. I thought, well, that's weird. And then I thought about it. Growing up, when you don't have cash and you're with your mom and brother, your mom is buying everything she can for you, but sometimes you have to remove things at the till. It sucks. Everyone looks at you while they remove it: hurry up, hurry up. Especially in France, a lot of people are douchebags about it: why are you doing all that? And you feel a bit stupid. So probably, thinking about it now, I counted because I always knew my mom might overspend for us and then we'd have to remove things, and I didn't want to face that anymore in my life.

To get back to my point: I think every founder, every successful entrepreneur, really has to have a huge problem he needs to solve within himself, to take a sort of revenge on life. And if you have that, whatever that revenge is... it doesn't mean you have to be poor, by the way. Really not. You could be extremely rich. Look at Mark Zuckerberg with Harvard, how he was rejected and how he wanted to be so big, or people from wealthy families who still need a huge revenge on something. Elon Musk, all these guys had a fucking huge revenge on life. Whatever it is, it doesn't matter. But you need that huge frustration to create some genius out of yourself, for sure.

Shamil Malachiyev: What do you think helps founders think big? I talk to a lot of founders who are aiming for the level where they can stop looking at prices in supermarkets, and it's hard for them to imagine a $20 million company on the horizon. How do you build the internal confidence to say: I am capable, I deserve this, I can do it?

Cyrus Fazel: That's where it helps to be a second-class citizen, right? You don't give a shit, man. You didn't do Harvard. You probably have less to lose. If you're in Switzerland, why are there so few entrepreneurs in Switzerland? We have everything to lose here. And you're not really allowed to fail: until 40 years ago, if you went bankrupt in Switzerland, you were not allowed to vote anymore. Any person whose company went bankrupt would be a third-class citizen. And if you have a lot to lose, well, you're not going to take the risk.

My point was: I did those eight years in finance and I didn't really create value for the planet. I didn't create that much value for me either. It's crazy. I thought, well, I'm not killing it, and I'm not making a good change for this planet either. I was 33, I'd been fired from jobs or quit jobs, and I never really got the perfect combination where people helped me in my career or pushed me in a direction where I'd get the best version of myself. And that's when you look at yourself in the mirror and say: okay, the only best version of myself is if I create my own world. And for that, you need to find the right mission and, more importantly, the right co-founder or the right co-founders.

Shamil Malachiyev: That's actually another topic I want to get into, going solo or finding other founders. But I also wanted to touch on what was different about you going into the world of hedge funds. Going through M&As, you stop seeing companies as just things you're trying to grow; you start seeing them as business units that can be sold, another outcome that happens all the time. What other things did you learn there that changed the way you see business and building companies?

Cyrus Fazel: You're a sort of P&L maker, right? You understand quickly that some people lose money, some people make a lot of money, and some people are essentially costs to a company. It's a bit of a weird way of seeing things, the investment game. It's very interesting, of course, because you have all the betting parts: is it green, is it red, what are the beautiful horses going into the race? It has a lot of gambling addiction to it.

But the one thing I did understand, especially working for one hedge fund called FORT LP back in the day: they were scholars, extremely smart people, double PhDs and all that. And they had trend-following strategies that were purely quantitative. They would wait for the market, trade the market, automate the whole thing. I really liked their approach to life, which is: take one small problem, take one easy algorithm, look at what it has done in the past, try to anticipate the future with just one, two, three parameters. Make the algorithm simple and it will work.

And that was my debut in AI. Everyone thinks AI is so complicated. It's not. If you feed it the right data and you have simple parameters, it will spit out the right data that you want as well. OpenAI, for example, was a great change for this, but it's not like the technology was so much better. The models were just a bit more trained, the information a bit more trained, and the outcome was a game changer. And if you see things with OpenClaw today, it's the same thing. You don't have to build very complex things. You just have to make sure you have a few parameters, and that you're solving a big problem with outputs that are clear enough. And for that, you just have to work a bit on the problem itself for some time, and then solve it. That's where I thought: this is going to be a game changer, at least on my personal and professional level.

Shamil Malachiyev: Taking a complex problem, creating a simple solution. Now, I have a lot of friends doing solo startups who say that's the hardest thing, because you don't have that much support without co-founders. And there are people with teams of three or four who say solo founders are crazy people. What would you say are the main benefits of having a co-founder? The pros and cons, in your view?

Cyrus Fazel: I don't understand how it's possible to be by yourself. You're not good enough. You know you're not. And usually there are co-founders anyway: a founder, and then other people who are not called co-founders, who just got screwed on the title, or don't want the title but want the shares, whatever. The honest truth is you can't. Ninja Turtles are four guys. Even if Son Goku is amazing, there's still Vegeta. There's no action movie, no manga, no story of life where there's just one guy. We may talk about one guy, but there are always so many other people within it. So I think that's the honest truth.

And you really have to find the best people around you. The first two people are the game changer. SwissBorg started in 2015, but the real version only started in 2017. That's when Anthony joined, the co-founder. Before that I had many other people I never called co-founder, because I knew it was not that. And when he joined, very rapidly, within a few months, he said: I think I should be the co-founder.

Shamil Malachiyev: How did you know? What kind of feeling did you have inside?

Cyrus Fazel: It was very easy. I'd known him forever, so I knew exactly where he was much better than me in every way, and where I was much better than him. It's like a loving relationship, there's no difference. You have to find partners with good chemistry, who understand the end goal you want to reach together. But to get to that goal, on that journey, you really have to be extremely different in the ways you approach things. Where he wants to bring you and where you want to bring him have to meet eventually. You have to make sure he or she has very different points of view and makes you much better in every way.

There's a thing he told me once. I was doing a big presentation in Zurich, and funny enough, it was right after the founder of Revolut, which was already quite cool back in 2017; I was quite impressed I was right after him. And Anthony said: Cyrus, your presentation is tomorrow, I don't think you're ready. I said no, I'm good, I'm ready. He said: why are you preparing yourself to get 14 out of 20? Let's train you to be 20 out of 20, and you'll deliver 19 in the worst-case scenario. And that was my big change. He told me: you're extremely talented, but if you give 100%, you're not going to be only talented, you're going to be successful. That's when I thought, okay, I need to up my game. And he said: if we do this together, you'll up your game.

There was no bullshit. He was living at my place at that time. We'd known each other since college; he was an engineer and I was in business. We knew exactly which buttons worked and which didn't. There's never been any bullshit between us, which you find in a lot of companies. And that's what kills a lot of companies: politics.

And the funny story with him is that we lived together even after the ICO, which raised 52 million. We lived together an extra year, so two and a half, maybe three years in total. And we were not that young either: between 33 and 35. So it was sometimes a bit complicated, but overall it was amazing, because every two seconds, in the toilets, in the showers, in our rooms, we had whiteboards everywhere, and you would concentrate on only one thing: how to solve the problem of the current day, which was building SwissBorg.

Shamil Malachiyev: Did living so close together help you move faster? And your first employees, did you also invite them to the house for brainstorming sessions?

Cyrus Fazel: Yeah. The office was in our house. Which was weird, because sometimes I'd get out of the shower half naked and random people were coming in: hey guys. And I was never a very early-morning person, so they'd really wake me up: Cyrus, it's nine o'clock. Yeah, I had a long night. It was a lot of fun. And we had that office for quite a long time: living room, dining room. It was cool.

Shamil Malachiyev: How much did things change for you and Anthony once you'd secured funding? You start having a lot more pressure from investors to grow, to show results. You have to get up and start sprinting, as they say.

Cyrus Fazel: Our funding was very different, right? We were one of the biggest crowdfundings in the history of crowdfunding, so it was a bit of a weird one. It was not like we had pressure of: we need these results next quarter. We had no VCs whatsoever. We did a token sale, which was very different: 24,000 people, 149 countries. So we definitely had pressure.

The sad part is that the $52 million went from $52 million to about $10 million in six months. And I'm joking, but it's real, because we raised mostly crypto, and we were hoping crypto would not go and lose 90% in a few months. But the game definitely changed: from spending a lot of our own time, money and energy, to being able to hire and have real offices and all these things.

Otherwise, not much changed. We maybe got a little bit more serious. A CTO joined, Nicolas, and that was a big, big change in the approach. We were always very rapid builders: it doesn't matter, it's crypto, ship what works and just go. He was the exact opposite: let's think this whole thing through perfectly and build a rocket. And he had much more startup experience, a few of them that failed, and that really helped us a lot. Because when you have a lot of experience, especially when you fail, it's the best way to not fail again. But beyond that, not much. We were still living together.

Shamil Malachiyev: With any startup there are good days, maybe about 10%, and there are the normal shitty days where everything's on fire and you're trying to fix it all. How do you make sure your energy stays at a good level through all the ups and downs?

Cyrus Fazel: First, you need the obsession. And the obsession can come, again, from this frustration to prove something to the world, to prove something to yourself, to become financially free, to show your shareholders that you've delivered exactly what you said, or your users, your community members. For me it's always been about the community, because we were funded by the community.

It's not like we owe a VC. VCs don't invest in you: they take money from other people, put it in a rapid SPV, and take a lot of management fees from their clients to invest in your company. That's what they do, and hopefully they'll make successful investments so they can raise another fund. It's just a business; it's not real money they're giving you. When it's community members, that money is very different. Extremely different. I always remember, in the ICO, this guy from Tunisia put in five euros of Dash, the cheapest transaction we could accept. We received his Dash and it was cool. When you have 24,000 people backing you, you're not just another company that wants to be successful. You have to be successful, because they're trusting you.

So that's really what we've done: we remind ourselves that we don't have customers, we have community members. That's the reason I have this necklace that reminds me every day. Back in the day we had SwissBorg everywhere in the office and the house. I even have SwissBorg boxer shorts I'm wearing today. There you go.

Shamil Malachiyev: We'll put that on the thumbnail.

Cyrus Fazel: When you get obsessed about something, that's when you have bigger chances to win. And then you take it very seriously, and that's how you make sure you're able to dance in the rain. And that's very difficult. It sucks, because after so many years you have a lot of good times, but in entrepreneurship you probably have more difficult days than good days, for sure.

Shamil Malachiyev: And traders make life harder for somebody trying to build ecosystems and play the long game of actually building for the future. The traders are pumping, dumping, extracting as much as possible, creating all these cycles of ups and downs and hype that nobody really understands. In terms of supporting the real ecosystem, the people trying to build applications on top of blockchains, what are the main projects, supports or partnerships you pursue?

Cyrus Fazel: We've had multiple cycles, right? What is Bitcoin; then what are ICOs, in 2017, and we're going to change the world with every different application on blockchain; 2020 and 2021, which was all about DeFi and how you could exchange value through decentralized applications. We tried gaming; that failed for now, or has not met the expectations we wanted. And this last cycle, 2024 and 2025, was a lot of meme coins, some decentralized physical infrastructure networks with computing power or storage, which are trying but still not there, some SocialFi things, more DeFi, which is working better and better and better, and stablecoins.

And now we're definitely at a very interesting moment of the cycle where everyone says crypto will never work and everything will die and explode. And whenever that's the mood, that's the moment you just need to put in some cash and believe in your convictions. Look at the whole AI thing. It looks very difficult to give your credit card to OpenClaw to do micro-transactions; that would be a bit weird. However, being able to process this through your wallet, do a lot of different payments, and create tokens and incentives to use the best AI tools without a thousand accounts and a thousand different monthly memberships, which makes no sense: this is going to be the game changer. DeFi showed the world how.

More security tokens are going to come, no doubt, and more cool stuff in DeFi is going to happen. But now payments are going to be really cool: everyone has a stablecoin, everyone wants a piece of that stablecoin, and payments are massive. So that's going to be extremely interesting to watch.

And what we do at SwissBorg: we do a lot of early-stage projects as well, where the community can invest. These deals are very early stage, so they're extremely risky, but when it clicks, it clicks extremely well. There's going to be a new moment of a lot of early-stage projects that I think we're going to try to capture as well.

And then there are the layer-one blockchains. Solana is taking a huge, huge advantage now over Ethereum, but there might be new ones that exist or are maybe being fabricated right now; things to follow very carefully. Because three years ago Solana was nothing; everyone thought it was a piece of garbage. In 2023 it was already waking up, 2024 became the meme season, and it battle-tested itself to show the world it could create the biggest amount of hype, creating tokens and trading tokens. It didn't necessarily create a lot of value for the long run, but at least it battle-tested that this highway could take a lot of fast cars and work extremely well.

Shamil Malachiyev: For our users, viewers and listeners, not everybody is deeply into the world of crypto. Maybe we can talk about the difference between stablecoins and other kinds of crypto, and how flexibly they can be used: Bitcoin compared to Solana, for example.

Cyrus Fazel: Yeah, I'll do one better. If you look at religions, Bitcoin was the first, right? Bitcoin is the Abraham of religions. Whatever the religion, Abraham is Abraham, and Bitcoin remains Abraham, the number one. Why does Bitcoin create value? Because Bitcoin has the biggest decentralized network in the world to create value, and the underlying fundamental belief behind it is energy. You mine where you get energy at the best price in the world. So Bitcoin is energy. If you want to invest in energy, you invest in Bitcoin, that's pretty much it. Then there's digital gold; you get a lot of different narratives. But Bitcoin itself is the best form of decentralized technology, and the underlying fundamental is energy.

Then from that, you've had other blockchains, because this blockchain is good, but not that good for building applications on it. So you've had different layer ones, as we call them. These are blockchains: Solana is one, which is good, there's Sui, there are so many other different blockchains. Then you have applications, and these applications are built on these blockchains. They could be, for example, decentralized exchanges. And all these different applications, like SwissBorg, can have their own token, and their token could have membership rights, voting rights, discount rights, whatever you want on top of it.

Then if you go a step further, you have security tokens, which are fractional ownership of anything that is tangible, a physical asset. And this could be a stablecoin: every token of USDC or USDT is a fraction of a dollar. And last but not least, you have the same thing for digital goods. These are called NFTs. They're not fractional anymore, but they represent a certificate of ownership of anything digital. You could actually do physical as well, but usually it's more for digital. These could be paintings, or any hat in a video game, whatever you want.

And to finish: Ethereum is Judaism. It's very good, but it's quite complicated to be part of it. It's based on very smart brains, and you really have to think through and understand the big points of decentralization. And Christianity is more Solana: you build fast, you want the biggest amount of transaction volume and people adopting it, and it's much more solid. So these are a bit the religions that you have, and there are others, but we could keep it to that for the people interested.

Shamil Malachiyev: Thinking about the future of AI: AI will need a place to make transactions, and those transactions need to be effective, spending as little as possible on commissions and energy. In your view, which blockchains are best positioned for that?

Cyrus Fazel: Solana is definitely the one today, I would say, with the biggest amount of battle-testing. The slower things could definitely remain on Ethereum, and then you have some layer 2s on top of it, but I don't believe in layer 2s. I think it's just a weird concept; it doesn't make sense. So Solana has been battle-tested very much, and I think they are definitely winning there. And then there are a lot of new ones that should be battle-tested this cycle.

Shamil Malachiyev: Coming back to building and managing teams: how do you define the current culture at SwissBorg?

Cyrus Fazel: That's a good one; I was talking to our Human Resources director yesterday. Things have shifted, for sure. The culture was obviously always to try to get the best people into the company, like everyone. But I always have these two questions, the first and the last one, and I interview everyone who joins the company; I'm the last round, pretty much. I always start with: what's your purpose? To understand whether the purpose this person has is aligned with the purpose of SwissBorg. And then I always really try to understand how this person is going to become a better engineer, better marketer, better salesperson: if I talk to this person six months from now, are you better at what you're doing, and how?

Those have always been the key things. If you're aligned with the purpose and you feel that you are winning, even if the company's not winning, it makes a personal win, and eventually that personal build will manifest in a global win for the company. And with these crypto cycles, like where we are right now, it's very hard. You get stressed again, you lose a lot of money personally, the company has less revenue, and you have to look at profitability in another way: you're going to have negative months, maybe negative quarters, maybe negative years, right? So these are the moments where you really have to learn how to dance in the storms, and you have to be able to look out of the box too.

I think that's what crypto always was and is about: people who are not very scholarly. The best scholars are usually never very good at crypto. You have to think out of the box, because everything is new. You have to be rapid. And the recent shift through AI has been a great advancement for everyone. I've been trying to do this for two years, or since day one to be honest, but the last two years changed things massively. Everyone's on the cloud; we're on Gemini internally. A lot of the code is AI-driven. A lot of our decision frameworks are AI-driven. A lot of the marketing video campaigns are done today with AI agents and things like that. And I think that's really the future of the organization.

But it's the future of SwissBorg the product as well. In a 2017 video I put AI in, and I knew that we were not going to do anything hugely AI yet. We won trophies in AI, by the way, in 2020 and 2021. We never did something so great, to be honest, but I knew this was going to come. I did my first chatbot in 2016. That was with IBM. It sucked, but it was still really cool.

Shamil Malachiyev: Watson. IBM Watson, I think, was the main intelligence system.

Cyrus Fazel: Yes, exactly, that was it. I remember exactly. And it was not all wrong, to be honest. I think it was good. It's just that if you don't have enough users feeding it, eventually it's not going to be great. But IBM Watson had cool stuff, and I knew that this was going to happen. It just took more time than we wished, and now it's going in this direction. Next week there's a video of me on SwissBorg that I haven't even seen yet; I almost liked it in the comments, and then thought, I should not be liking videos of myself. It was great. I'm sure we could do this show even better with my avatar.

Shamil Malachiyev: Okay, we'll cut in some of the scenes with an AI avatar. Maybe in a couple of years it's just going to be two AI avatars doing a podcast; that will be quite interesting to see.

I was also thinking about the way you talked about crypto cycles. I've talked to founders in the hospitality industry, founders at Airbnb for example, during the COVID era, when COVID hit every company around travel and hospitality. They went through pretty much the same as crypto companies during a bear period: cutting costs, optimizing for profitability, making the business resilient. What qualities are essential for founders to play the long game and survive as business leaders through the hard periods almost every company faces at one point or another?

Cyrus Fazel: So we're facing difficult moments right now, since October 10. You realize it always a month and a half later, and then it's December, and in December you have to make cuts already, because you're going to be facing these things. And then you have to make the cuts. Those are the difficult moments. Family members were cut in this one. It sucks, but you have to do them. And this is the only way you can essentially become big again.

Those are also the moments where you have to realize that the small decisions you make now are the ones that are going to shape the company again. We've had some brutal meetings in the last few weeks, of course. And when you know the company or the market is very low, this is the moment you have to reunite all the energy, take the best people and say: okay, let's stop the bullshit. Let's focus on what is most important, and how we could go from a very quick MVP to rapidly rolling out a product or service that is going to be the game changer for the company.

Those are the pivotal moments: being able to say, okay, things are not going to be that easy, but I can reduce some costs, and I know that six months from now I'll have a new product or service that is going to bring stronger LTV, bring more love from our users, attract new users, or in some way change the business model so it brings much more revenue. Those are always the moments that are actually the most fun in the hard times. And you really need that. If you're in an extremely uncomfortable situation and you're smiling, you have what it takes to be in crypto. If you look at a drawdown of your portfolio and you're down 50% and you think, I'm never going to be able to make this back, then just don't do crypto. Invest a bit in crypto, but just don't work there. Because you'll do what everyone else does, which is spin up a new company every two years.

Shamil Malachiyev: What is the difference in internal thinking between those two types of people: the ones who see the same picture and decide to keep going, knowing they're capable, and the ones who give up?

Cyrus Fazel: That's a good one. If you are really on a mission, a strong mission, then you are going to make it. Look at crypto: the few founders who have now held a token for eight, nine years and been in this business so long, very often the mission of the company was something much bigger than a small personal gain, or "I have great market timing for my product," which makes no sense to me. Because regardless of the market timing, if you have the right mission, you're going to time it. It doesn't matter. It'll work out.

And I think that's what happens: if you're not really passionate about the mission, not passionate about your community members and all that, then in the hard times it's so easy to quit. It's so easy. And I don't want to point fingers; it's so difficult not to quit, right? You just have to enjoy it. You have to enjoy all the moments of pain, knowing they will eventually bring higher highs. And if you have trustful employees around you, partners, community members, they will back you, and they will work harder if they have to, to make shit happen.

Shamil Malachiyev: That reminds me of a piece from a Steve Jobs interview. He said that in order to persevere, you really need to have a passion for what you do, because it always gets tough, and any sane, logical person would quit, because it doesn't make sense to be going through so much pain. If you don't have passion, you'll never make it through.

Cyrus Fazel: And what is for sure is that if you knew how difficult it would be, you would never do it. That's why you always have to start with, not optimism only: you have to be extremely naive. If you could read the book of your life in advance, you'd say, dude, just stay at whatever great company, chill there and have it easy. But if you break it into small chapters, it's really cool. Especially if you do it with the right people. I think it's really, really fun.

Shamil Malachiyev: You almost make me think I should have built my podcast around "building a business is easy: the easiest thing you can do, just start, everything's going to work."

Cyrus Fazel: Yeah, I have a plan, a program: go on my website, and after my five chapters of how cool you are, bro, you're going to make it, click like that. You're going to do a Series A, raise a hundred million, have the best product-market fit, and all that for a cost of $99.99. Follow me on X.

Shamil Malachiyev: Exactly. That seems to be the most logical. Thank you for buying this course; as a result, I'm now $200 richer, and I'm going to teach you how to do the same thing.

Cyrus Fazel: Exactly. But look: today we had this meeting about how we really want to deploy AI agents. What we really want, and it's always been about this at SwissBorg, is the Cyborg advisor. The "Swiss" is about democracy, it's about trust, it's about long-term thinking. And the "Borg" has always been the cyborg. How do you bring that to any person? Today AI is this amazing assistant, and investing has always been lonely. The idea with this new service is: how do you empower it with the community, with their thinking? How do you feed this Cyborg advisor, swarm all this intelligence, and then serve it to different people based on their profiles and what they really need to climb this financial-freedom ladder?

And that's where I think it's beautiful, because finance was always a zero-sum game, but it doesn't have to be. It really doesn't have to. That's what crypto was always about: how we as a community make it together. It's not that traditional finance never had it: you had it in Tesla stock, you had it back in the day with Apple in the early generation. But most traditional investing has lost it.

When I see people's stock portfolios: everyone talks about Palantir all the time. Why would I fucking want to invest in people who want to kill their people? That doesn't seem... "Oh, it's great, security, defense." Everyone's investing money. I could be investing in Putin, or in the Iranian regime right now, and make a lot of money, but would I do it? It's crazy to think about that.

So I think your identity and your financial knowledge, and how you create the best mandates, the best coaching system that could accompany you: that's how you become the best version of yourself and invest in the future that you want. That has been really the bigger mission at SwissBorg. It's been very hard to implement, but now we're so close to it. This year is the most pivotal year for AI, the most pivotal year for crypto as well, and therefore for SwissBorg. That's why I'm so bullish here.

Shamil Malachiyev: If there was one message you could give right now to people in the US and Europe, a lot of them senior people in technology currently being made redundant across various industries, being replaced by AI, thinking about the next trajectory of their professional lives, whether to work on a startup: what can they do with SwissBorg, and how can they interact with your ecosystem to build that future together?

Cyrus Fazel: That's a great question. Well, we have monthly governance where we vote on so many different subjects. And I think the passion we always have behind any crypto project is for it to be decentralized. I don't call it an autonomous organization, but a decentralized organization, where we collectively make the choice of what we should be building and how we build it. I think that has always been the thing that is great.

What I would say for anyone in the world is: always try to take the time to understand who you are, and based on who you are and where you want the planet to go, invest in those things. I had Tesla shares; I've sold them, actually, but I'll buy them back whenever they get to a certain price, because I drive a Tesla. I have a lot of Solana because we build on Solana. I have Ethereum because we build on Ethereum. And I have Zara stock. Zara! My point is: if you really like gold, well, definitely buy gold. Just have a lot of gold.

Focus on who you are, and then on how you build your financial identity and invest in things that make sense, that you care for. Eventually, I think that's the best way to be able to sustain the drawdowns: if Tesla goes through a huge dip, I'll be buying more. Right now Bitcoin has lost a lot of appetite: bought more. Solana: bought more. Because all these things, I care for them. And if you care for your investments, and not only for the performance, and you have the right behavior, which is what we're putting in place with the Cyborg advisor, then you are going to do fucking great. You're really going to be able to maximize your future and become financially free. And I really wish everyone does that, because when you do, you wear a tie if you want, you put on a hat if you want, you do whatever you want. And then you don't need to pretend to be this fake person at a company you hate working for.

Shamil Malachiyev: Thank you. I think that's a great note to finish this week's episode on. I want to thank you so much for making it here and devoting an hour. I want to wish you the best, especially at this time when there's so much more opportunity going into the new AI era. I wish you a lot of prosperity and a lot of energy on this path.

Cyrus Fazel: Thank you, Shamil. It was really nice. Thank you so much, and thank you to the listeners. Speak soon.