Notes from ZebPay’s team meeting last week, where CEO Rahul Pagidipati welcomed new team members.
Last Monday at 8:00 am, around 50-odd members from team ZebPay were up and awake with coffees in hand to welcome new joinees via video call. Our CEO, Rahul Pagidipati, has begun a tradition of company-wide town halls every month. Since our team is spread across the globe and still working from home, town halls serve as great occasions to bring the team together to bounce ideas off each other—or discuss our love of ice cream, as we inevitably do in every meeting.
Rahul often likes to ask new team members what ZebPay stands for, and then proceeds to challenge everything they think they know. We’ve all been through it, and as a result, come away with a totally fresh perspective on what we’re working towards here at ZebPay. Today we thought, why not share it with you, our community? Here’s what he had to say:
We believe in the freedom of money. The freedom to think how we want, and value what we want. This represents a new way of thinking about finance and who has access to it.
Everyone in the world deserves to have financial services. The current system makes that much harder than it should be. If you ask proponents of traditional finance (so, most people) for the solution, they’ll tell you that it’s about banking the unbanked. They’re wrong.
Really, it’s about: how do we unbank the bank? Banking has been around for thousands of years. It hasn’t solved the problem yet, and there will be no magic solution in the next 10 years. Today, more people have smartphones than bank accounts.
It’s time to start asking ourselves—Can we use the blockchain to end poverty?
Can we provide low-cost financial services to the vast majority of the world?
Bitcoin and the blockchain is not so different from atomic energy, another revolutionary innovation. It’s technology that can make the world better if it’s in the right hands and used the right way, with the right intentions. We think of ZebPay as a social enterprise to make the world better.
At this point, Rahul posed a question to our new team members: if you had to describe ZebPay in one single word, what would it be? They all pitched in with different answers—‘freedom’, ‘finance’, ‘action’—all valid, but not exactly what Rahul was going for.
There’s one simple answer to that: ZebPay = Bitcoin.
I look at Bitcoin as the big bang. It created the first element, hydrogen. Everything you see around you, the matter, is a variation of hydrogen. Cryptos are all variations on Bitcoin.
I buy 1 ETH every day, and I have one rule: if you work at ZebPay, you can’t not own crypto. (Rahul asked everyone in the company to own some amount of crypto before our next meeting in October, whether it’s worth 10,000 rupees or 10.) The DNA that binds us as an organisation is the blockchain, and everyone needs to be a part of it.
If you’re waiting for a good time; there’s never a good time. It’s a priceless asset and you’ll always feel like you’re paying too much. Consider using dollar cost averaging. What is it? You compensate for volatility by buying over time. I learned about BTC when it was $3. Imagine what dollar cost averaging could have led to.
Now to a question our community often asks us: Why don’t we have a ZebPay token? The answer is simple: Bitcoin is already the best coin. Why make something inferior? In 15 years, financial services will be mostly on the blockchain, the same way mail is now mostly electric. Our goal is to make it a smooth transition for everyone.
