From One Espresso to $3 Billion: Alex Blania's Worldcoin Rise

A 22-year-old physics PhD student gets a two-line email from Sam Altman: "Hey, here's this paper about Worldcoin, do you want to meet?" Twelve hours later, after sleeping one hour on an office floor and downing six espressos, he's being grilled about theoretical physics by the OpenAI CEO. Today, that student is the CEO of a $3 billion company.

Alex Blania leads Tools for Humanity, the company behind Worldcoin—a radical attempt to create universal digital identity and currency for the AGI era. With over 12 million users and 6 million verified humans, they're deploying physical "orb" devices globally to scan irises and prove humanness at scale. It's either the future of digital identity or the most ambitious tech experiment ever attempted.

In this conversation, Blania reveals the unconventional path from academic physics to billion-dollar startup, the brutal realities of hardware scaling, and why "scale first, ask questions later" became their defining philosophy in building infrastructure for a world where humans and AI are indistinguishable.

Alex Blania: I am Alex Ban, the CEO of Tools for Humanity. Tools for Humanity is building critical infrastructure for AI-driven world. The company got started together with Sam Altman around 2.5 years ago. The idea was, what kinds of tools will we need on a global scale to react to the changes that will come.

The major project is Worldcoin, which is one, it is a way to verify humanness on truly international global scale. On the internet because we think it will be really, really hard to distinguish if you're interacting with humans or AIs and that it will turn out to be a very, very critical problem. Second, it is Worldcoin, which is a digital currency that launches by giving ownership to every human. Eventually we are now at, I think over 12 million users, 6 million or so that verified, and we're scaling rapidly around the world, so we roll out these physical devices around the world.

So when I was very young, I was already a lot into technology. So I read a lot of books about computer science, but also the basics of mechanical engineering. I think when I was around 12, and I was on the front page of Der Spiegel, which is one of the largest outlets in Germany. There was an article about Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is this place where all these people go and build the future and build this new technology. Basically, since then I was, I was a very set that I will go to Silicon Valley and I will build companies, and that's what I want to do with my life.

Alex Blania: So When I started studying right next to my university, it was a new Max Planck Institute. One of the professors and directors actually of that institute was Floren Marquardt, and he was a pretty well known theoretical physicist that decided to go all in into AI. Back then, it was actually a pretty small field. Because of that, I studied kind of the beginnings of, of deep learning and kind of what later led to the transformer and these things like very, very deeply, and then did a research stay at Caltech in Los Angeles and while I was doing my PhD.

The actual story is actually, I applied at a conference called YC 120, which Sam hosted. And so the idea of the conference was that it would be 1100 of the smartest students of the world, together with like 20 of the industry leaders of the world, and you would bring them together somewhere in the US and it would be like, it's an amazing time and I got declined. I was really angry. So I just wanted to fly there. There was no address. There was no idea how to find it.

In that application period, another venture capitalist. From San Francisco, like a picture of the car I built when I was 16, and it was part of the application for YC20. So I thought that this PC is probably part of the application process of YC 120. And so I sent her my application video and was like, hey, I'm going to meet you wherever you are. I think you made a huge mistake of declining me to YC 120. She was like, I have no idea what you're talking about, but the video is awesome. I will just let you interviewed by all these associates that I have. And then because of that, I flew to San Francisco for the first time. I met a lot of very influential people. Basically a two week period.

Alex Blania: Then I got admitted to the Caltech Research Program, went there, and then through a series of coincidences, which was like partly driven by the people I met before on that trip, Sam and Max, which were the two other founders of Worldcoin, reached out to me, like a two liner, basically. It was like, hey, here's this paper about Worldcoin. We're looking for software engineers. Do you want to meet?

It's by far the craziest story of my life, I think. First of all, I didn't sleep all night because Max let me sleep in in the office. And there was no blankets, and it was like freezing. I slept like an hour, 10:00 a.m. right when the sun was going up, so it was a little warmer so I could like finally catch a little bit of sleep. I get this email by Sam. It's like, hey, you want to come by now? So I didn't sleep, didn't even have clothes with me really, and I just went there and drank like 6 espressos or something on the way there.

So I come in and then we sit down. My first question is, explain to me the standard model of theoretical physics in detail. The standard model of theoretical physics is like really, it's quite a thing. I also think it doesn't make much sense or like. There's actually deep flaws in that in that model, and so this is my first response, and he just laughed. That's how we, we hit it off.

Alex Blania: I was definitely a software engineer. I was also not CTO. I was like something in between. I actually brought on the rest of the founding team, which were kind of the most talented people I met on my university journey. Most of them were physicists. There was kind of a technical team. Then I became CEO roughly 1 year in, or 8 months, 9 months in, I think like after 8 months we started raising the Series A, and so it was the first fundraise, and during that fundraise I became the CEO.

When I became CEO, I got a lot of coaches, so like actually 4 of them, and so every Thursday I had a couple of hours with each of them basically in a row. 70, 80% of my Thursday was just getting grilled and learning like what are all the things I did wrong this week and what should I improve next week and how should I run a meeting and so this was like a supercharged learning experience probably.

Alex Blania: But then the second thing which I think is actually probably much more important is like I think being a CEO. What that actually means, I think, is that you're a problem solver in charge. There's like always this like confusion about what it means to be a CEO. It's like, OK, now you can run performance cycles and you can do this, and, but all of that actually really doesn't matter. Most of the things you have to do is a complete distraction.

What you actually should be doing is you should understand technical and product challenges. You should understand the biggest problems the company's facing. And so while running performance cycles and doing this and that, like I hit it with passion. I do love. Solving problems, and that's what I did my whole life and I was always pretty good at. And so while there's a lot of new things, the core of it is what I always did.

Alex Blania: The most unexpected one, which is actually something I took away from Ben Horowitz, is this idea that, and as a founder, you're successful mostly because of two things your competence and your confidence. This idea that you need to manage your confidence and see it as an actual KPI for yourself, and if that falls below a critical. threshold, you will fail and everything will crash and burn. Almost certainly.

You need to be very conscious who you surround yourself with, because what you certainly learned in your private life is there's always people that are pessimistic about everything all the time and they drag you down. In a company. These kinds of people exist, but completely turbo chart because it's so easy to be cynical about everything and be negative about everything. But the problem is what it does to you as a founder, it nags on you on a daily basis. It takes away this one thing that keeps you going. Which is your own confidence.

And so your leadership team, the people around you need to be people that increase and don't decrease your confidence, otherwise you will die by 1000 cuts essentially because it's very obvious somehow like no one thinks about these things, but that was probably the biggest unexpected learning.

Alex Blania: I think in terms of coaches, every mentorship relationship that's actually not even specific to business because I had the same relationship with my professor in university is much more one-off situational. So it's like you're you're faced. With a certain situation and as an inexperienced person, you don't know what is right or what is wrong, what you, what you can be doing.

So a lot about growing up, especially as a founder, is learning when to stand your ground, when to be direct, when to be indirect, and that you can really only learn by reference. I think the biggest learning from Sam was just indirectly seeing how he deals with certain situations very early on. These kinds of things, I think, are the biggest invaluable learning lessons that you cannot write down. You can write a blog post about these things.

Alex Blania: If you really think about it, many of the great companies start with uh Keith R Boz, I think, has a saying that the best companies are much more like a Hollywood script than a problem. What do you want to see in the world, and you formulate that, you hire the best actors that you can find, and then you go after it.

If you think about it, opening I was like that, like, what's the problem? We don't have artificial superintelligence in the world, Crya river, right? That's not a problem. That's a positive thing that would exist in the world, and Roca was pretty similar. How What would the world look like if you would have truly multi-billion people commonly owned financial network, that would be completely crazy and would certainly reshuffle a lot of things in majorly a very positive way. So how do we get there?

So it started very similar. It was like, OK, how do we get to this crazy outcome, then outlining basically step by step, what would it take? First one, we will need to solve proof of person or prove a unique humanus. Second, we launch a digital currency. By giving ownership of it to every human and so soft proof of personal launch of digital currency scale and show initial utility, which is what we currently do, and enforce decentralize the whole network to scale even way further.

Alex Blania: One of the earliest debates that we had was around essentially having more like a developer focus and trying to talk to companies, explain them world ID, all of those things, versus what sand coined as scale. First, which was like such a ridiculous statement. At least it sounded like it. Usual advice would be you do a, you talk to companies, you explain them World ID, and they will be so pleased that you have built World ID, and they will integrate it. Everything will be great.

Sam was like, Well, what we're going to do is we're going to completely ignore that and we say we just run towards a billion signups and we do everything we can to get to these billion signups, and we're going to have a religious obsession about that. We're going to make it a company value. Because on the path to get there, we'll resolve all of those questions, but we will resolve them much, much faster.

And his point was that he felt he learned in his career and observing companies like Reddit that they have this like very strong emergent effects happening as a result of the user base. Things will start happening that he didn't even predict, and I think that was probably the biggest bet we took as a project and still we're taking, and it feels like it was the right call.

Alex Blania: And pretty early actually before we raised Ser A, Sam's idea or question was essentially, we realized we have to build hardware, otherwise we thought we could not solve the problem. Sam's definition of when we are ready to actually raise money is you take such a hardware device, you go out in the city on the street, and you can sign up and verify people and they're actually interested or willing to do that for whatever reason, and You can do that at a scale that would show you that with reasonable capital, you could scale it up to millions of people.

Simple math we did back then was, well, we would need somewhere between 70 to 100 signups a day with one of those devices, and if we would achieve that, we could scale it up drastically. And we just built the first prototype. So it had two eyes because it actually had two cameras. It injected a physical coin in the middle of it. So it looked like a very ugly face because like the coin injection was basically the nose and then I had like these like two stupid eyes, so it looked like a very stupid face, and it was blue because that was the 3D printer and it was polished.

So it basically it looked like a stupid smiley bowling ball. And then it also talked. You had like a blue bowling ball with two eyes and a stupid nose that was telling you in a female robotic voice, come closer. And it was also actually blinking. It's like red LEDs in there, so I guess we could have had ideas why that maybe it would not work, but, and so we went to this park, we worked like for months on this device, so like the whole team was like super excited, and so we had the team behind me with cameras and like everyone's like taking pictures.

Alex Blania: So I approached two girls in the park and I was like, hey, do you want to verify with this device, you get free Bitcoin, and we just need this device to make sure that people don't fool the system essentially. So the first girl was like, Absolutely not. And the second was, well, you're kind of cute, so sure, but I need your number then after. That was basically it. That was like the success for the day. We couldn't verify anyone else. That was basically it. Team was like super demotivated and kind of everything somehow failed.

But then what we did is, so first of all, we're working 7 days a week and we were basically living together in the office. It was a pretty small team back then. It was COVID, it was nothing better to do anyways. And so I said, there's shipping Saturday. And so every Saturday we need. Ship a completely new version and I will be out every Saturday with this new version and we will test it.

So then we just iterated through like, OK, maybe it kind of looked like a bowling ball and maybe it needs to look a little bit sexy, and then like the mirror optics came in and it was like somewhat interesting to people and then maybe it shouldn't say come closer. Then we at some point we went to Berlin and one of the founding team members, Sandro, sent me these items a day and that was done at the Ser A and we called. Horiz, that was how we then initially raised the Series A. Zen had this mental model that OK, 70 times a day, multiply that with 50,000 devices that you can get it to a growth rate that can lead to billions of signups.

Alex Blania: I think with any startup, I think the much bigger threat is that you always face an existential threat, essentially, like whatever it is, but that's why you're a startup. I think developing anything was generally not the hardest thing. The company was probably about to Certainly more than 2 times, probably 4 times the BDS CEO talks about that quite frequently is like all of those companies are even 1000 times harder than you imagine them going into them.

So it's like essentially you sign up for years of pain and suffering, and you still need to push through. And I think that's a really hard thing. It's not one particular piece of technology. There was like a lot of technical things we had to figure out along the way, but keeping going was the much harder one.

Alex Blania: Yeah, I've read about Founders's mode recently. I spoke to my heart. When you run a company and the company gets bigger and bigger, there's like strong pull from people that are coming in that try to convince you that running a well-oiled machine is what you really, really should care about. You want to set up processes and you want to run like all these like great programs, and then everything that happens is like you just sit down with the leadership team and everyone is happy.

That's like what people describe to you versus busy as far as it gets from how it actually should be in companies as well as in things like science. Almost everything comes down to one or two or three problems. You can really only do that if you go really, really deep and you really understand it, because otherwise people will tell you all kinds of things, why it doesn't work or why it can't work.

And it's really, really hard as a founder to have the fortitude of ignore all the people. That try to tell you that you should not be involved. Everything is great. Keep yourself out of it, ignore all of that chatter and just keep going deeper and deeper and deeper until you really understand the problem.

Alex Blania: Well, I think there's actually one more comment that is maybe important to make. You could also use that as an excuse to be a horrible manager. There's like a big difference of you are a very capable problem solver and you should nail down problems, and that's your job as a CEO and no matter what people. Tell you that's, that's it, and you should understand them, you should get them, and you should not let them loose and they're solved versus you're just an asshole that runs through the office and keeps annoying everyone and just like wants to be involved, doesn't add any value, then leaves the room again, and which is another thing that happens, right?

So like, yeah, I think found remote is problem solver in charge, figuring things out, not being an asshole.

Alex Blania: The world is a really large place and if there is great governs. And there are places where just nothing is working, and there's even places where the government works against their citizens actively. And I think there is some kind of infrastructure, the kind of infrastructure that makes you truly a human, no matter who you are or where you should come from, you should have a right for. And how do we build systems that can do that independent of where you come from or what do you struggle with. And I think that is why Robin.

That is why if such a change would happen, if we have strong AGI systems, we need to rethink how we handle our economy, how we handle our social systems. It should not be just for the 50% in the world that are living in great governments. It should be for everyone, because getting it to scale is actually the thing that truly matters. You know, people in Germany having better lives on the margin, that will not change the world. Empowering billions of people will change the world.