There is a temptation when starting a company to wait.

Wait until the idea is clearer. Wait until the market improves. Wait until you have the right co-founder, the right pitch, the right product or the right introduction to an investor.

Philipp Zentner’s story of building LI.FI is almost the opposite.

When Philipp entered Web3 in 2021, he had never owned crypto. What he did have was a thesis.

The blockchain ecosystem was going to fragment. There would be more chains, more exchanges, more asset types and more ways of moving value between them. And if that happened, someone would eventually have to make all of that fragmentation easier to navigate.

That became LI.FI.

Today, LI.FI is a much larger infrastructure company with around 100 people working across aggregation, transaction routing, intent systems, DEX aggregation and other parts of the stack.

But it started much more simply.

The first product came out of a hackathon

Before LI.FI became a B2B infrastructure company, Philipp and his team built a consumer product called Transfer2XYZ.

They shipped quickly, saw people using it and learned from what happened next.

Then they did it again.

In their first year, the team participated in 13 hackathons.

For Philipp, the value of a hackathon is not simply the prize at the end. A hackathon forces a founder to compress the entire early-stage process.

You have to build something. You have to stop worrying about perfection. You get an audience immediately. You meet technical people and potential collaborators. And often, investors are already there looking for interesting teams.

That early exposure gave LI.FI something more valuable than validation on a slide: real people using what they had built.

The consumer demand eventually pointed them towards a bigger opportunity. If individual users had this problem, other companies would have users with exactly the same problem.

LI.FI became a B2B company.

It is a useful reminder for founders who spend months debating whether an idea is good enough to pursue.

Sometimes the better question is simply: What can we build this week that puts us closer to the problem?

Don't start with the idea. Start with the problem.

One of the most interesting parts of our conversation with Philipp was how he thinks about startup ideas.

His advice for founders interested in emerging areas such as AI and Web3 wasn't to sit in a room trying to invent something that combines the two.

Build instead.

Use the technology until you find its limits.

Try five different products. Notice where they all fail. Ask why something is unnecessarily difficult. Pay attention when you keep encountering the same problem.

That is where ideas begin.

It is also how Philipp describes the way he originally pitched LI.FI.

He didn't begin by explaining the product. He began with the problem: the market was going to fragment.

Once someone understood and believed that premise, the need for an orchestration layer became much easier to understand.

For early-stage founders, that is an important distinction.

Your technology isn't necessarily the story.

The change happening in the world, and the problem that change creates, is the story.

Fundraising is a lot less glamorous than it looks

When Chris asked what separates founders who get funded from those who don't, Philipp's answer was remarkably simple.

They show up.

During LI.FI's early days, that meant travelling to conferences, staying cheaply, signing up for dozens of events and talking to almost everyone he could.

He describes the founders who stand out to him today in a similar way. They follow up. They keep appearing. Sometimes they are almost annoyingly persistent.

There is no clever growth hack hidden inside that advice.

Getting from zero to one often means doing considerably more than everyone around you is prepared to do.

The same principle applies to pitching.

Philipp believes you get good at pitching by pitching repeatedly and watching what happens.

Where does someone stop listening?

Which sentence makes their expression change?

Which part requires five minutes of explanation when it should require twenty seconds?

You learn by having the conversation enough times to see the pattern.

And when approaching an investor, less is often better.

If someone asks for an introductory blurb, the purpose of that blurb isn't to explain your entire company. It is to create enough curiosity for the next conversation.

Then the purpose of that conversation is to get to the next step.

Founders often want to tell the whole story immediately. Investors rarely have the attention span for it.

Learning how to package information might be one of the most underrated fundraising skills.

Your advisor call shouldn't end when the call ends

There was another point in the conversation that particularly matters for the soonami community.

Philipp has advised founders through soonami.

Some of those conversations, he said, were very good. The founders listened carefully and took the advice.

Then the relationship stopped.

And that is a missed opportunity.

A simple message a few weeks later saying, “You suggested this. We changed it. Here's what happened. What do you think?” could completely change the relationship.

An advisor can become someone you speak to again.

That person could eventually become an investor.

Or introduce you to one.

The lesson isn't to treat every relationship transactionally. It is almost the opposite.

Relationships compound when you maintain them.

Getting access to someone experienced is only the beginning. What happens afterwards often determines how valuable that connection becomes.

A bear market doesn't necessarily change the reason you started

LI.FI has now been through several difficult market cycles.

Philipp's way of dealing with them is to return to first principles.

Do you still believe in the underlying technology?

If yes, what do you believe the market looks like several years from now?

What bet is your company making about that future?

Markets move. Narratives change. Capital becomes easier and harder to raise. Competitors appear and disappear.

Your customers still matter, of course. So does constantly questioning your positioning.

But a difficult market doesn't automatically invalidate the fundamental thesis behind the company.

Sometimes you have to sit through the uncomfortable part.

That requires having a much longer time horizon than the news cycle around your industry.

The founder is part of the infrastructure too

Towards the end of the conversation, Philipp offered advice that doesn't normally appear in fundraising decks.

Take care of yourself.

He described the company as being deeply connected to the founder's ability to manage their own mind.

That can mean meditation, therapy, coaching, journaling, exercise, music, dancing or simply maintaining friendships with people who have nothing to do with your company.

Sleep matters. Nutrition matters. Appearance can even matter if it affects confidence.

It sounds disconnected from product, capital and growth until you've spent years building something under pressure.

Obsession may be required.

But so is finding enough balance to sustain the obsession.

Build enough to find the problem

There is a thread connecting almost everything Philipp shared.

You cannot think your way into every answer.

You learn what users need by putting something in front of them.

You learn how to pitch by pitching.

You meet investors by showing up.

You turn advisors into relationships by following up.

You discover startup ideas by building until you encounter problems.

And you find out whether your thesis survives a difficult market by continuing to test it while everyone else is questioning theirs.

For the founders building inside soonami, perhaps that is the most useful takeaway from the conversation.

You do not need to know exactly what your company becomes before you start.

But you do need to start.