[Feature] In-depth Investigation of Tieshun Roquerre, Founder of Blur

Tieshun Roquerre, the founder of Blur, is undoubtedly one of the hottest figures in the cryptocurrency world recently. His NFT exchange, Blur, which he established more than 400 days ago, is now the largest NFT exchange in terms of trading volume in the NFT market. Moreover, he had not disclosed his true identity until February 22nd.

By reviewing his personal and entrepreneurial experiences, we found that Tieshun Roquerre, also known as “Tie Shan” (Iron Mountain) in Chinese, is 24 years old this year, and his mother is Chinese. He dropped out of high school and college twice. As a serial entrepreneur, Blur is his third venture and his second project in the crypto world.

During his high school entrepreneurship period, he received investment from Greg Brockman, co-founder of OpenAI, and Y Combinator, a famous startup incubator in the United States. When he entered the crypto world, he also gained recognition from crypto expert Anthony Pompliano.

As a boy who started working as a full-time engineer in high school and studied computer science at MIT, he is not just a tech geek. He has his own set of methods for promoting and operating businesses. He has conducted in-depth research on how major social software in China promotes and operates, and has practiced the " bidding order auction " and "airdrop" operational strategies that he now uses on Blur in his first crypto project, Namebase. The success of Blur that we see now is the result of his accumulated entrepreneurial experience.

A serial entrepreneur who dropped out twice
Tieshun Roquerre's mother immigrated to the United States with her family at an early age, and Tieshun described himself as half Chinese on a podcast. Growing up in a Chinese-American family, Tieshun joked that his parents did not have a "Tiger Mother" style of education and always supported and encouraged his decisions.

During the summer of his sophomore year in high school, Tieshun began interning at the startup company Teespring. Prior to this, Tieshun was curious about the platform company that only sold T-shirts. He discovered that the platform simply distributed a large amount of customized targeted ads on Facebook, but generated $1,000,000 in sales per day. Anyone can design and sell their own T-shirt through this platform. He was impressed by the technology behind it and the philosophy of the platform, and saw how technology can create wealth and change people's lives. "Many people who make a living by selling T-shirts are not very successful people, but ordinary people in your daily life, like a housewife in the South who has some free time and starts designing and selling T-shirts. They can really send their children to college with this. This is something that I find very exciting. This theme has been with me throughout my entrepreneurial career."

During his high school years, Tieshun was not only curious about technology, but also had a concern for how business could change the world and for public society.

Out of his curiosity for Teespring, a company that sells custom T-shirts, Tieshun created a clone website during his spare time in his sophomore year of high school. He sent an email to the CEO of the company and was offered a summer internship. This opportunity turned out to be life-changing for Tieshun, as he took a one-year leave of absence from school to work full-time at the company. During that year, he moved from the East Coast to Silicon Valley, which was a turning point in his career.

In his third year of high school, he founded a recruiting platform for startup technology companies. The platform received a $120,000 investment and incubation from Y Combinator, a famous American startup incubator, in the pre-seed round in 2016. According to Tieshun himself, the platform also received investment from Greg Brockman, the former COO of Stripe and now co-founder of OpenAI.

It seems that Tieshun's entrepreneurial journey was already smooth during high school, and he could have continued on this path to achieve success quickly. However, he decided to return to school. According to him, he needed to go back to school to learn how to communicate and cooperate with others, and also to meet like-minded people there.

Tieshun applied and was accepted into the computer science program at MIT. Here, as he had hoped, he met his business partner for his two subsequent entrepreneurial ventures, Anthony Liu, a Chinese-American woman who also majored in computer science and specialized in network security. With similar technical pursuits and backgrounds, this may have been the foundation for their collaboration.

It was from this point that Tieshun began his journey in the field of crypto entrepreneurship.

Replicate, improve, until successful
In 2018, the famous crypto investor Anthony Pompliano praised him as "an undiscovered talent in the mainstream crypto world, we must go and see him" on Twitter. We do not know the content of the conversation between Tieshun and Anthony Pompliano, but from this year on, Tieshun gradually emerged in the crypto world, and we have to admire Anthony Pompliano's ability to identify talent.

At this time, Tieshun received a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship (Vitalik also received the scholarship) and dropped out of school again to prepare for his first crypto startup project, Namebase, with Anthony. When they saw the Handshake (HNS domain name project) white paper, they decided to establish an auction trading website for HNS domain names. They eventually raised $4 million from institutions such as Coinbase. On Namebase, there is a trading model similar to Blur now, which is a bidding order auction.

However, the liquidity within Namebase was not high, which may be related to the fact that HNS domains themselves did not become a revolutionary project.

Devoting himself to a market for decentralized domains also aligns with Tieshun 's interest in pursuing a decentralized internet world. In his podcasts, he pointed out that some governments use a series of technologies and firewall settings to control the internet and export their technologies to other countries. What Tieshun does in the crypto world is to fight against the increasingly centralized and authoritarian aspects of the internet.

From Namebase onwards, Tieshun's talent for marketing and user acquisition became apparent. Similar to the techniques used for Blur now, during the Namebase period, he used airdrops to attract new users. At that time, he would distribute 4,200 HNS tokens, valued at ￥5,000 CNY, to each eligible Github users.

In terms of business, Tieshun has done extensive research on how to operate an early-stage product. According to his blog, he deeply studied popular Chinese internet apps such as TikTok and analyzed how they succeeded in their operations. He has a deep understanding of how to attract new users, inheriting the true essence of Chinese internet marketing style.

At this point, the exchange market had already become a fiercely competitive "red ocean", so it was the right approach for Tieshun to focus on a more niche and differentiated area to break through. However, Namebase did not bring him success, so he applied the lessons learned from that experience to Blur, and fortunately, he succeeded this time.

Tieshun learned the lesson from the low liquidity on Namebase and combined the bidding order auction and airdrop strategies on Blur. This move prompted people to bid on Blur to receive the airdropped tokens. This model has indeed increased market liquidity and made Blur the NFT exchange with the highest trading volume. It seems that this has solved the pain point of the weak liquidity in the NFT market.

However, currently, most people are just placing bids to receive the airdrop. For the NFT market, low liquidity is determined by the nature of NFTs. Can a trading platform completely solve the low liquidity problem of NFTs by changing its trading model? Looking back at Namebase's strategy and development process, we may be able to catch a glimpse of Blur's future. However, the NFT market is bigger than the domain market, and after the promotion budget is spent, what will make users stay on the platform is still the trading experience and transaction fees.

Blur has already captured the market, and with good operation, it should not be too bad in the near future.