December 23, 2022
Article by
This interview was originally published by Genfinity.
—
King Solomon interviews Calaxy CEO Solo Ceesay as part of the Hedera Corner in the LightHouse by Genfinity! Brought to you by LightHouse Report sponsor Hedera Hashgraph and in collaboration with our partner and Hedera wallet provider HashPack.
Calaxy App – Solo Ceesay – Founder & CEO
We hope that switch of the world or Instagram looks to integrate social token civil platform they could use that infrastructure all on Hedera.
Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
Awesome. Thank you so much solo for the answer on that. Moving forward because this is probably really interesting for you to talk about especially with Spencer and I think Ezekiel Elliott and some other people. But can you talk about Partnerships and collaborations and maybe even you know because you guys had a massive achievement back in June I think with a 26 million raise. Partnerships, collaborations and kind of what that raise looked like and what that kind of means for you guys moving forward with that type of an achievement because I mean 26 million is obviously quite a good runway for you guys to really try to deliver out value to the community.
Calaxy App – Solo Ceesay – Founder & CEO
Yeah, absolutely. I would say from our perspective there's a couple things to consider. I know that regulatory environment has definitely been interesting over the last couple of months even you know throughout the history of time within the asset class and we're very very sensitive to that. Myself having an investment banking background in a traditional Finance background I'm very familiar with entities like the SEC and wanting to make sure that whatever we do is lawful compliant and we want to make sure that we don't introduce any sort of additive complexities or risks to the creators that we work with. I would also say to the beauty of our platform is you know like I said you know having a co-founder like Spencer being in the world that I was. I was a division one athlete myself we know these influencers we know the ways in which that they you know we know the pain points that they're looking to solve and so it gives us a little bit more information when it comes to creating an ecosystem that kind of brings light to those problems and solves them in an efficient manner in the way in which that other platforms struggle to find. They have to do tons of market research that's only so good. They don't have the relationships to kind of get in the room and talk to these people which has definitely been our biggest mode I would say. And then in terms of you know how uh you know the rays and all those things uh you know we're super excited to have been able to close that. The market has definitely been uh you know not so forgiving to a lot of other people. There's definitely been a lot of attrition within our ecosystem and in the world of web3. Uh so thankful to continue to have the opportunity to continue fighting. But yeah to your point um the idea of Partnership is super important for us and one of our taglines is for creators by creators and we're very much so a product that's been designed uh with the Creator in mind. Um like you said before you know these web 2 Solutions don't necessarily always have the right incentives and so we want to hopefully shift some of that incentive structure back over to the uh power of the Creator so that they can really capture the value they create.
Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
What's the um as far as the team size you guys have right now how how big is the team building out the application or I'm sorry the platform um you know kind of the back office functions or yeah just as a whole like how big is Calaxy's team at this point in time?
Calaxy App – Solo Ceesay – Founder & CEO
We're about 15 internally and then we also have a Dev shop that we work pretty closely with that brings on another five to eight engineers at any point in time. So the team at any point in time is 20 22-3 people uh at any point in time. So it's definitely a sizable team um but the big thing definitely engineering heavy as well. But the big thing for us is at the end of the day um the most important thing that we do is gonna be finding a user experience that meets the needs for these people and meeting them where they're at. I think when you think about us as a as a Company, you know our team is very diverse in the sense that you have myself with a traditional Finance background also entertainment industry uh tangential like you have Spencer who's an Entertainer himself uh you have Rusty Matt V Richie strategy officer who came from Madison Square Garden adventures and so he has a very deep background and connections within the Venture world uh you have uh you know Chad Weston he's our chief design officer as well um and so we have a very diverse team and a very diverse set of talent to help create what has been very tough to create in web 3 because of a lack of skill set. I think you know when you think about the average web 3 product a lot of times it's engineering heavy or it might be something that's a little bit you know crypto heavy in a sense where it makes sense for the hardcore d-gens but when you're talking about Ezekiel Elliott love him that's one of my best friends he doesn't care about private keys public keys he doesn't care about like we have to make them care by creating products that are actually useful the idea you should care about decentralization because centralization is bad but it doesn't impact your life in any way is a very weak argument to create incentives for people to move over and so what Calaxy's main core value proposition is finding a way to build that perfect experience and you know I know I get tweets all the time people when are you coming out, when are you coming out and all those things and um you know I'll actually uh you know hope if it's sooner than you guys will think uh but the idea of building something like this is it's just so tough and you're going to lose a lot of people without having the right experience and so we've definitely had the ability uh to to take our time and are thankful that the community has been behind us in doing that because we're looking to bring a lot of activity to Hedera. We want to make sure that we do it the right way.
Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
I couldn't agree more uh again when you kind of talk about making it make sense to people just because of the fact that especially if you've been in crypto for long enough like you see a lot of projects or products launching that are like super web 3 Centric for the sake of being web3 Centric when there's been hundreds upon hundreds of billions of dollars to build that web 2 infrastructure out that people are used to using people are used to using web 2 and then just injecting in web3 where it makes sense. So I totally love it. I totally agree that you have to make the you like the user experience kind of the first priority um and you touched on it briefly uh how 2022 has kind of been a crap year for the space as a whole or at least most of it the latter end of it um what does the roadmap look like for Calaxy moving into 2023 um as far as what you guys you know plan to announce plan to launch um maybe drop some Alpha for us if there's some stuff that you guys have planned for like q1.
Calaxy App – Solo Ceesay – Founder & CEO
Yeah for sure. I think what people should expect is because obviously a lot of people in the community are kind of interested into figuring out what we really look like um so Calaxy is to and to be very clear it's meant to be the easiest place for a Creator and fan to meet it is a social adjacent platform it is a marketplace. We're looking to hopefully have that out early next year um that's as specific as I'll go um but we'll be pretty active on Twitter in the coming weeks and coming months to let the community be aware but uh yeah I think that's kind of the main thing that people should really look forward to and just continuing to see the different ways in which that we can get creators involved within the Hedera ecosystem. You know if they're with us at Calaxy, they might be doing some other things and being leveraged tools for other parts of the ecosystems as well. Um and then yeah just continuing on the protocol side, building out the robust nature of the foundation in the same way that the HBAR Foundation stood itself up and kind of found it self-sustaining rhythm. That's kind of what I think people can expect on the infrastructure side and then on the development side for Calaxy Inc, U.S company. Uh, it's really looking to refine that user experience to a point where we feel comfortable shipping to the large audiences. I mean we have over 200 influencers and celebrities signed LOIs looking to use our platform to start. Um and honestly, a lot of them are a lot more people waiting. Uh and so just looking to get through that and kind of get out there and uh really get this in people's hands and get captured some data and start uh you know finding product market fit, building onto features that people love and starting to can the ones that people don't into really building the best uh most sustainable platform for a long time.
Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
I'm glad you touched on that too as far as kind of the foundational aspects. I was going to ask from the foundation standpoint if there was plans down the road to cultivate and have adapt because all the stuff that you kind of do see within most you know web 3 based foundations and that's great that you uh provided us with that um as far as driving traffic towards uh Calaxy right now where would be the best place that you would like people to go is it the Twitter uh is it kind of you know is there a Discord is it kind of just the website where would you like to drive people um as far as where we can kind of push that the traffic for this audience listening.
Calaxy App – Solo Ceesay – Founder & CEO
Yeah absolutely. I'm very vocal on Twitter. I talk a lot. I talk a lot of trash but a lot of fun satirical stuff. I'm pretty active on Twitter so my account's a good place to look. The Calaxy Twitter is a good one too. We have a Discord as well so I would say those are probably the main channels to look at uh as well but I think in the coming months you know Spencer's channels as well is another one I forgot to mention too but I think in the coming months we'll be very active and very loud. I think once we kind of emerge from stealth mode with a very clear picture on like what the next year looks like uh will be the first to communicate with the community but obviously appreciate all the support that we've had and, uh, yeah, we're coming, and I think the Hedera community could really use, uh, what Calaxy’s value proposition is to build to the table. Just when you think about the general sentiments that people have about it, uh, you know, for the longest time people always ask me, 'Yeah, so you guys are building a Solana?' Like people would just say it as if it was an assumption just because of the type of project we are, but I think it's about time that people realize that there are some really cool people building some really cool consumer-facing use cases within the Hedera ecosystem as well.
Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
I totally agree. I think 2023 is going to be really interesting to watch, especially getting out of the doldrums of whatever this past six months has been in the web three space. I have to say, thank you so much, Solo. I'm sure that you're insanely busy, so thank you for coming on and having this discussion with us today. Shout out to HashPack, shout out to Hedera sponsoring the Hedera corner within Genfinity. And I am sure that this is not the last time we'll be having a discussion. I'm looking forward to having another one with you guys, hopefully in Q1 of 2023 or whenever it makes sense and we can really kind of dive into the application and the platform together. Uh, again, that'd be awesome. So, Solo Ceesay, thank you so much, and we appreciate your time.
Calaxy App – Solo Ceesay – Founder & CEO
Thank you, sir. Appreciate it. Thank you so much.
.png)
