Almost everyone reading this has used Venmo. Far fewer know that it started as a way for musicians to get paid.
Iqram Magdon-Ismail co-founded it in 2009 with Andrew Kortina, who had been his freshman roommate at Penn. The two of them had spent years on scattered projects before that, some together, some apart, working at a long run of other people’s startups. Venmo was the one that caught. Braintree acquired it in 2012 for $26.2 million, and PayPal acquired Braintree the following year for $800 million, which is how the app ended up where it is today. Magdon-Ismail stayed at PayPal for a while afterward, then left to build other things.
What he’s building now is JellyJelly, a short video app built on the Solana blockchain. The idea is videos of real things in your life with money attached to them. Instead of a like button, you can send the person who posted a small amount of crypto. Part of his argument for it is that feeds are filling up with AI-generated video and it’s getting harder to tell what’s real. The other part is reach, since anyone with a connected device can hold a crypto wallet, which is not true of a bank account.
On October 19, he sat down with the Leslie Founders cohort for an hour of questions, and the most interesting stretch had nothing to do with the exit. Two students, coming at it from different angles, asked him some version of what actually prepared him to do this. He gave two answers, and neither one was engineering. He said theater, and he said being the child of immigrants.
A theater background, put to use
A student asked whether a non-traditional background counts for anything in a field that rewards technical training. Magdon-Ismail said his theater background was crucial.
What theater teaches you, he said, is how to make people feel more excited about something than the moment strictly calls for. That sounds cosmetic until you consider the first year of a company: convincing engineers to join something that doesn’t exist, convincing investors an idea is inevitable, convincing users to care about a product that barely works.
He was pushing back on the assumption that a good product finds its audience on merit. “You have to be different in a way that attracts people.”
What being an immigrant gave him
Asked why so many immigrant founders end up in this ecosystem, he named two qualities.
The first is adaptation. Immigrants adjust to an unfamiliar environment quickly and without much choice, and the early days of a company demand the same thing.
The second he traced to his mother, a very hard worker. What he took from watching her wasn’t a work ethic exactly. “It’s a kind of drive that you have that’s different.”
How the first check actually happened
Venmo’s first investor was a man named Sam, and he didn’t show up as an investor. He was an advisor, part of the team. “He wasn’t interested in investing,” Magdon-Ismail said. “Actually, we didn’t even know he was investing. He was just part of our team.” Six or seven months into brainstorming together, Sam asked what they were building, and then said he wanted to be the first investor.
That sequence is the advice. Instead of a list of investors to approach, build a group of people you enjoy who could plausibly invest someday, and include them in your thinking.
He was realistic about the timeline. People want to see what you can do before they commit. Until then you figure out how to make ends meet, which is what he and Kortina did.
The five dollar trick, run twice
Venmo used to simply give people five dollars. Most ignored it, until the day they actually needed five dollars and found they had an account.
At JellyJelly he gives people a small amount of tokenized stock instead. Someone receives a little SpaceX and forgets about it. Then a notification says it’s worth more, and suddenly they’re paying attention. “That’s part of the way we used to market Venmo,” he said.
What he’d start now
Software tools are becoming easy enough to build that competing on them is getting hard. He sees founders reach a few million in annual revenue with a personalized tool and then struggle to grow past it.
He’d look instead at autonomous systems, energy, and hardware, including people who want to build the next phone.
What to take from it
The throughline across both companies is money moving between people who already know each other, and his advice is the same shape. The first investor was already on the team. The growth came from friends showing friends. The marketing was five dollars in someone’s pocket.
Find the people who might back you someday, bring them into the problem you’re working on, and let the money follow the relationship.
