mainstream labs
in my first year at UBC, a friend I knew from highschool debate reached out to me with an idea: a token-gated forum. The premise was simple; crypto communities require discussion to coordinate--if you didn't hold tokens of the community (did not have skin in the game), then you shouldn't, by default, be able to contribute to core conversations.
I built a prototype in a couple days while my friend was crafting UI on Figma.
Fast forward several months, we were deeper in building our product. I flew to NY to a hacker house he was at during my midterm season. I met his founder friends. We coworked at various WeWorks. I got the chicken over rice at a halal food truck on E 83rd and 2nd Ave every other day; an entry from my journal:
march 11
- woke up at 2
- got halal food truck
- went to a new wework near fifth ave
- figured out high level how awards will work
I return to Vancouver. We started to talk to investors. I finish my first year and fail a class.
Fast forward several months, it's just after crypto peaked (in retrospect). I'm taking a gap year. We closed our seed round funding. We hired great talent--one cracked designer, a high-integrity engineer, and two engineer interns. My desk is covered with empty 1.42L Starbucks Unsweetened Medium Roast Black Coffee containers.
We feel the crypto winter coming. We're at a Nonce event in Korea, coincidentally a day after LUNA collapsed. We tour Europe, hitting all the ETH conferences while staying at hacker houses. We make more founder friends, reconnect with others. We sleep in a castle for a week for a DAO meet-up.
I'm back in Vancouver. I start dating. FTX went bankrupt. We kept building, heads-down. I break up.
We try a soft launch and struggle to get sizeable traction with the original product (Mainstream Client), so we build another (Pager). We toy with the idea of moving into DeFi or AI. Our core team meets up in Korea. We hit all the cafes and WeWorks, co-working--it's a great time.
Fast forward a year+, we sunset. We focused too much on product (we wanted to build a tasteful, beautiful, complete product)--we couldn't see around the corner that the entire DAO space would largely disappear. I worked hard. We achieved many things. I was proud of what we built (this is a bad thing). A lot of mistakes, epiphanies, learnings, and growth.
Both my co-founder and I still enjoy building (now, even more). But, we decided that we keep Mainstream as the decentralized organization lab and sunset it, as opposed to pivoting to a completely different field under the same name. Our intention is to return, either together or separately, under a different name.
Sincerely grateful towards my co-founder, our amazing investors & angels, and previous teammates.
I'm working on a write-up that more thoroughly accounts my journey with Mainstream--the learnings, surprises, and failures. For now, this page will exist as a placeholder.
Artifacts of our startup (haven't gotten to putting the actual apps back online yet):
mainstream.so / beta.mainstream.so
getpager.xyz / app.getpager.xyz
Last updated May 13, 2026