[Angel Investing] E2E Encryption Keyservers with Ashoat Tevosyan

See their public Notion doc which got me very interested: https://www.notion.so/Comm-4ec7bbc1398442ce9add1d7953a6c584

They are hiring: https://www.notion.so/commapp/We-re-hiring-b0a4cef3f8b34b8c91e3236c98aabcb3

Watch the video version if you prefer that (there is some screensharing at the end): https://youtu.be/lWCOruAWpW4

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Transcript

swyx: [00:00:00] Some of you might know that I do some angel investing on the side and I keep a cold email address open for that purpose. So a few weeks ago I was called emailed from someone trying to raise money for an end to end encryption startup. And that's something that I don't normally play in because they don't know anything about encryption.

So I almost turned this down except I click through and read their notion doc. And it's the most comprehensive and concise pitch I've ever received through a cold email. So I took the meeting and this conversation with Ashoat is what happened. He's building Comm, which is an end to end encryption startup, but his go to market is an alternative end to end self hosted version of discord, focused on privacy.

Of course. The long term vision is that it could replace Dropbox, Gmail, Facebook, Mint, 1Password, and so on. If he gets this key server protocol right, and successful, he gets some kind of market adoption. So that's a very big if, but the upside is also huge. And whenever you encounter one of these things, that becomes a very interesting angel investment because you'll probably lose your money, but if it succeeds, it succeeds very big.

He's looking to hire senior engineers and a product and a design lead. So stick towards the end for those hiring and collaboration details. If you are interested, all right. Enjoy. 

Yeah, good to meet you too, man. It was very impressive. Your notion doc. 

Ashoat Tevosyan: [00:01:26] Thanks. I'm glad you read it. A lot of folks kind of skim through so it's great to see that you want in detail.

Wait, so, so you wanted to record this right? Was that 

swyx: [00:01:35] yeah. Literally it's just like adjusting. I think it would be interesting to either share if you want to, if you. Don't mind sharing. We can always cut stuff out if you're not comfortable with it or you can just keep it to yourself and then look back in four years or something and think about how things have changed.

It's always nice to request stuff. 

Ashoat Tevosyan: [00:01:54] Yeah. Yeah. I'm when you say shared, do you have like a social media thing that you want to share? Yeah, I have, 

swyx: [00:01:59] I have a YouTube or an F a personal podcast where I recorded conversations that are interesting with people. 

Ashoat Tevosyan: [00:02:05] Yeah. I'm honestly, I'm down. I'll tell you, I've done.

I've done this pitch like a hundred times now, so I'm pretty good at it. So I'm pretty comfortable being recorded. Let me ask this, what's your setup? I sometimes record meetings. I use green, but I think that's more for I don't know getting transcripts to share with the team and stuff like that.

I don't know. What do you usually use? 

swyx: [00:02:23] For recording. Yeah. I mean, I've, because zoom is going to kick out two audio sources. Then I might edit in audacity for echo or like noise or whatever. And then the scripts for cutting out ums and AHS and word gaps and stuff like that.

Sometimes if a conversation needs a lot of VR rearranging, I might have to like, so I did this one episode where. There was the two guys talking about a concept, tofu, MOFU, and BOFU, top of funnel, middle funnel, and bottom of funnel. And they'd collected to define it until the end of the episode.

He spent the entire epistle talking about it and I had to go cut the thing and then put it on top and then, 

Ashoat Tevosyan: [00:03:03] yeah. Okay. Okay. I got it. I got it. It sounds like you have a more, much more professional setup than I do. So, I mean, whatever works for you, 

swyx: [00:03:10] it's immature. Put with a little effort put in. I think people can get along way towards instead of just dumping raw audio, which most people seem to do.

Ashoat Tevosyan: [00:03:19] Cool. 

 swyx: [00:03:20] Yeah. Cool. So I read through it, I read through your thing, which is why, I, it seems like you've practiced this for a bit. You have a really interesting background. I've always wanted to visit as a Biogen. Like when I saw backhoe, I was like, wow. I recognize that for me, I was memorizing it 

Ashoat Tevosyan: [00:03:33] just some background.

I think we Armenian and there is huge ethnic tension between Armenia is or vagina. You can. Think of my family more as refugees. Yeah. Were like Armenian refugees from Azerbaijan. We actually can't visit us every Shawn. If an Armenian person with an Armenian name tries to visit as her vagina, they won't let you in, my parents have not been able to visit their home since they were kicked out.

So yeah. It's a weird background, but yeah. Just that 

swyx: [00:03:58] I'd share that. Yeah. Cool. That's cool. Lots of history. The, obviously the most famous Armenian I know is a Sonoma session on the Conan show. Who is that? I 

Ashoat Tevosyan: [00:04:08] don't know who that is. 

swyx: [00:04:10] Yeah. She's 

Ashoat Tevosyan: [00:04:12] yeah. Okay. She's like his production assistant or something.

swyx: [00:04:15] Just straight up assistant. Yeah. But I think now she's a little bit more into it since then. She's he turns his staff into celebrities. 

Ashoat Tevosyan: [00:04:22] Oh, that's cool. That's cool. I only seen some secondhand Conan material floating around. I don't want it. 

swyx: [00:04:27] Well, they visited Armenia and they learned a bit about the history and the genocide there and all that.

So, It's heavy stuff. I didn't obviously pay super close attention to the police history, but I know that there's a, there's some heavy stuff going on. Okay. And then you joined Facebook super the it's just like a really inspiring story, man. And that's pretty cool.

I'm unclear on, you said you worked on comms for four years. I'm unclear on like when that transition happens, why it happens? Because it takes a certain. Awakening to quit Fang and start work on something. So fringe, I think it's been, 

Ashoat Tevosyan: [00:04:59] I don't know. I don't know. Pretty fruit and share.

Yeah. Yeah. So, so a couple of things, first, when I say I've been working on calm for four years, I actually only got the idea for this like whole antenna Christian platform. About a year ago. So when I say been working on it for four years, I mean, as well, the code base I'm working with has been around for four years and I've been pretty actively working on it.

But before it was common, something called squad cat, which is basically this app I built for my friend group...