sharing the full story of how I started Turnkey:
in 2022, i was working at Trade Republic, now the largest neobroker in Europe, where i led the launch of their crypto offering.
at the time, we were evaluating different wallet infrastructure providers and got on a call with one of the bigger names in the industry. the entire process was INSANELY slow.
there were weeks of back and forth, multiple calls, and we couldn’t even get sandbox access until we were deep into the sales process.
i remember leaving those calls thinking to myself that if crypto was actually going to become mainstream, this couldn’t be how developers built products.
wallet infrastructure needed to be:
- self serve & open
- built for developers & easy to integrate
- flexible across use cases
you shouldn’t need weeks of sales calls just to figure out if you a product is going to work for you.
so I realized there was a massive gap in the market. from there things happened fast. my co founder and I put together a deck (peep the old logo on the first slide) about building "Turnkey Wallet Infrastructure," shared it with a few friends to see what they thought, and a week later had a $7.5M term sheet for our seed.
that became
@turnkeyhq.
today, we’ve grown into one of the leading wallet infrastructure providers for companies building crypto and stablecoin products.
if there was 1 piece of advice i could give to founders:
you don't need to lock yourself away to start a company. instead, pay very close attention to the things that frustrate you. if you keep running into the same problem with a vendor, product, or industry process, there’s a good chance others are dealing with it too.
if something feels broken, go build the better version.