As a summer intern in 2019 at St. Louis data startup Invisibly, Pryce Adade-Yebesi says he heard founder Jim McKelvey talk often about payments company Block (formerly Square). McKelvey, a co-founder of Block, would talk about how Square was able to bring new innovation to payments systems.
That sparked an interest in financial technology, specifically cryptocurrency, for Adade-Yebesi.
“I was so fascinated about fintech and how it could fundamentally change the way people get to interact with financial systems,” said the 22-year-old. "When I learned more about crypto, the light bulb popped. I wanted to learn more about how these systems can be developed and I wanted to make something that inspires me the same way Square does.”
Today, Adade-Yebesi is co-founder of Utopia Labs, a nine-employee startup developing software to help decentralized autonomous organizations on the internet manage financial operations. In July, the startup announced it raised $23 million from investors in a Series A funding round.
Adade-Yebesi has taken a leave of absence from his studies at Washington University to focus on Utopia Labs. While at WashU, Adade-Yebesi launched CodeBlack, a group for Black and Hispanic students studying computer science. Adade-Yebesi splits time between St. Louis and San Francisco, where Utopia Labs is headquartered.
How did you Utopia Labs get created? I met my co-founders Alexander Wu, Kaito Cunningham and Jason Chong through Twitter and a hackathon. They were some of the most introspective people I had ever met so I knew I'd love building with them even early on. We just kept on talking and meeting up. Eventually, we developed this conviction that this is something we wanted to build. I was going to stay in school and work on this part time. We were going to take this slower approach to building the company until we had a conversation with a venture capitalist, Steve Jang from Kindred Ventures. We were raising a small round for a couple of us to go full time. He said "I want to give you a million dollars to go start this business and actually put the gas on things."
Did you always envision being an entrepreneur? No, I did not always envision becoming an entrepreneur. It really started when I got to college and I was like, this seems really fun to get to build things end to end, solve hard problems with smart people and learn from people like Jim McKelvey.
What’s your proudest accomplishment? Hiring nine of the smartest people I’ve ever met and raising $25 million. It’s not really the money, but more the fact that it’s a really cool benchmark to hit and I don’t think many Black founders at all get to hit that point. It’s been really impactful to ruminate on that.
Where do you see yourself and your career in five years? I'll still be here at Utopia. We’ve got a lot more work to do and we’re excited to do it with our amazing team and watch and help things grow.
What can St. Louis do to engage more young entrepreneurs? One thing I’ve been thinking a lot more about is intentionality around building technology communities and attracting technology companies. I’ve done a lot of traveling this year to different technology hubs like Miami, Austin, San Francisco and the ones that are just starting out and growing right, it seems like they’ve put a lot of emphasis on attracting technology companies because what spurs entrepreneurship is talent — really smart people and really curious, ambitious people meeting each other — and these companies have a certain ability to gather and grow talent of that caliber.
Who are your biggest mentors? Jim McKelvey, Doug Villhard from the Olin Business School at Washington University and my good friend Chandler Malone.
