Before we get into it
Sunny Ray
Electrical engineer. Fifteen years in bitcoin. Ten in robotics. These days I am infatuated with three things, and they are all the same thing.
Where it starts
Electrical engineer, born and raised in Canada.
My parents are from India. And Indian parents are definitely not the ones pushing you toward sports. It is doctor or engineer. So I ended up doing engineering.
The first ten years
I wrote down the most fun job I could imagine. Then it appeared.
I put it on a piece of paper: what if I could sell robots to professors? A week later the perfect role popped up. Ten years at a Canadian robotics company, outfitting the major labs around the world.
What if I could sell robots to professors?
2011
My CEO said: India is buying a lot of robots. You look Indian.
So I moved to Bangalore. Officially to sell robots. That is genuinely what I was doing when the actual thing happened.
The actual thing
I found the white paper and I never got over it.
Bitcoin was about five hundred rupees. Ten dollars. I was taken aback by the idea, and then I was obsessed. Fourteen years later it is still most of what I think about.
I was so excited that I started running meetups. Every week. Every single week.
December 2013
We started India's first bitcoin exchange.
Two co-founders and me. It is also India's last one, because we are still standing and almost everybody else got shut down. It grew past two and a half million users.
2018
Then the central bank came for us.
They shut our bank accounts. We laid off around a hundred people. It was a genuinely terrible time, and the easy thing would have been to fold.
2018 to 2020
So we took them to the Supreme Court.
Two years of it. We won in 2020. I am told it was only the second time in India's history that the Supreme Court overruled the central bank.
The reason bitcoin is legal in India today is that case.
Someday we will make a Bollywood movie about it.
While that was in court
The job did not exist, so I made it.
We were making no money during the case. Kraken's founder is a friend and told me to pick any job I wanted. I said head of business development. He said there is no BD team. So I became their first head of global business development and built the function.
I also advised 3iQ, the world's first bitcoin fund, which had to take its own regulator to court. There is a pattern here and I have made peace with it.
After ChatGPT
I went back to the robots.
I started a small company that was acquired by a Canadian public company, Humanoid Global. I am now a director and the largest shareholder. We invest in humanoid robotics companies.
Bitcoin, robotics, AI. Same three things, twenty years apart.
Why those three
Bitcoin will most likely be used by robots in the future more than by humans.
Ten years in robotics and fifteen in bitcoin, and they finally pointed at the same thing. Machines that earn, machines that spend, machines that pay each other for compute. That is the machine economy, and you can already watch it starting with agents.
The whole thesis, in one breath
Do what you were meant to do. Do it a thousand times better with AI. Put the proceeds into bitcoin. Repeat.
Then talk to me in ten years
How the pieces fit
It is human at the centre. Everything else is scaffolding.
Every venture I run is a ring around one thing: a real conversation between two people. The technology exists to make more of those happen, and to make sure they are not forgotten. Take the middle out and none of the outer rings mean anything.
Why it compounds
Every turn makes the next one easier.
The people you interview introduce you to the next people. The published episodes make the next invitation easier to say yes to. The list gets sharper, the copy gets truer, the network gets denser.
In an era where anyone can generate infinite content, the scarce thing is not content. It is having the relationship. That is the moat, and it is the one thing a model cannot manufacture for you.
That is me
So here is what we actually do with it.
Same idea, pointed at your company instead of mine.