Paul Murphy tells us how Credmark is a financial modeling platform powered by reliable on-chain data.
Tell us about you, your career, and how you founded Credmark.
Paul Murphy: I started my career in traditional finance, literally working on trading and backend processing systems on Wall Street. I then got the startup bug and founded a startup in the medical and telephony spaces. Telephony got me to audio analytics just as machine learning took over the field. Interesting times.
My introduction to crypto was a lecture (talk in a cave, if correctly I remember) by Gavin Wood. He described a smart contract system he was working on. At the time, I thought he was crazy, but the implications kept haunting me. Eventually, I co-founded the pre-cursor to Credmark with Neil Zumwalde.
Do you have small habits that made a meaningful impact on your life and business?
Paul Murphy: I write all my notes twice. I’ve been doing this since I was 10.
I used to take notes in class and then transcribe them when I got home. I’d reorganize them, so they made sense to me in the process. Teachers, it turns out, often don’t present information in a very logical way. I discovered that I didn’t even have to study for tests by doing this. I think I saved myself a lot of time. I definitely saved myself from stress!
When I joined the workforce, I had an easy time keeping up with things, but when I joined the startup world, I found that it was challenging to keep track of everything. As a founder, I was responsible for many things in which I had no experience. In 2010 I went back to my school habit. Since then, I’ve transcribed hand-written notes from every single meeting in Confluence. Writing notes by hand lets me focus during my meetings. The transcription process cements the meeting in my brain. I tend never to forget TO-DOs thanks to this system.
How does your company market its product/services online?
Paul Murphy: We are a DAO. Our community markets for us.
What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to manage your online marketing?
Paul Murphy: OK, truth be told, we have a core team member who takes care of marketing. He uses tools like Google Analytics and Hotjar to understand what our users are doing. He uses all the social platforms, Discord and MailChimp, to get the word out.
What is your hiring policy/process, and how do you retain your employees?
Paul Murphy: All roles at Credmark are remote. Our hiring process is pretty rigorous. Because we’re a distributed, very multi-cultural team, I interview people for cultural fit. Only about 5% make it past that filter. After that, we give technical candidates an at-home test. The few who impress us there are passed through to the department manager. After that interview, we compare notes and make a go/no-go decision.
How are you funding your growth?
Paul Murphy: We’ve sold utility tokens, CMK, to investors and our community. We are close to launching a layer on top of our core processing platform that will pay people for contributions in our token. Users will pay for services with CMK.
Once this is all in place, our community will be self-sustaining.
Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?
Paul Murphy: Our biggest competitors are The Graph, Dune, and Nansen. We take a different approach to data management and financial model development. There’s room for all of us.
Tell us a customer success story of yours.
Paul Murphy: One of our first customers offers under-collateralized loans thanks to the models they’ve been able to develop on our platform. We are critical to their business. That was early proof that we were building something significant.
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