Seeker and the rise of crypto-native smartphones

Tony Clark: This is the London Fintech Podcast, bringing you practical insights and approaches, stories and inspiration from the innovators who are building the new world of financial services. Welcome to the London Fintech Podcast. My guest this week is doing something genuinely contrarian. Whilst most of the mobile industry is locked in an Apple vs Android duopoly, Emmett Hollier and his team at Solana Mobile have built and shipped 150,000 units of Seeker, a smartphone designed from the ground up to give people real ownership of their digital assets and data. What I find interesting is Emmett's bet that this isn't a, uh, forever niche. He thinks the future isn't more cryptophones, it's every phone quietly being crypto capable in the same way every phone is now a camera and a payment device. Before Solana Mobile, Emmett was deploying conversational AI at scale inside Google, which makes him a particularly sharp voice on where AI agents provide blockchain and mobile hardware are about to collide. Welcome Emmett. It's great to have you on the show.

Emmett Hollier: Good, good to be here. Thanks for having me, Tony.

Tony Clark: So you have an engineering and AI and a mobile app, uh, background. So I think that sounds just about perfect for the role that you're in. But perhaps tell us a little bit about your career in your own words, how you ended up running seca.

Emmett Hollier: Yeah, uh, I actually started my career in finance so I was originally working at a company who built terminal software. So I worked with investment managers and got a taste for working with people who are trying to think about investments across their technology which ended up coming back around when I came back into crypto. But from there I actually fell into the world of mobile consulting in the mid teens when every Fortune 500 company realized they needed to take uh, their app strategy more seriously. I worked at a very boutique firm who uh, helped them build kind of best in class mobile apps as opposed to just bad mobile websites. And um, that ultimately led me to Google where before the days of ChatGPT and large language models and Gemini, uh, we were trying to bring the sort of like early version of that technology to big telcos primarily. So working with the AT&TS and the Verizons of the world saying you've got all this unstructured customer data, people are calling you a million times a day, they're messaging you. How can you be more insightful with this and how can you take better action? And that run of uh, fintech to really caring deeply about mobile, to being early on a technology that maybe wasn't quite ready for the Main stage, but there was still clearly some potential there. Sort of all came together just so. Which uh, led me to join Solana Mobile. In the very early days. I was the second full time hire and I've been running it full time now for uh, almost four years.

Tony Clark: Yeah, and we're going to get into that. I mean even the concept of Solana Mobile is a bit of a head spin. So we're going to talk about where this all came from in a moment. But uh, when you're not on duty and you're not running Solana Mobile, anything interesting that you're doing to decompress, uh,

Emmett Hollier: chasing a toddler around, I don't know how much of uh, a decompression, uh, that is. But you know, my family, we live in Chicago, there's a ton to do here. We feel very fortunate to get to live in such a fun city. So usually, you know, when I'm not at my desk, I'm usually not in my house. Uh, I like to be as m, as out and about as I can. Like I said, chasing my son, playgrounds, breweries, you name it, the city's got plenty to explore.

Tony Clark: I love that. Chasing your son around a brewery. Interesting.

Emmett Hollier: Yes, it's good, it's good. I tend to run a little less quickly in the brewery than I do at the playground.

Tony Clark: Okay. It's all future training for future life, isn't it? Okay, well look, we're here to talk about Seekers and there's lots to get into. Before we jump right into today's episode, a quick thank you to our sponsor, nextwave. Nextwave is an award winning consultancy that is helping many of the world's leading banks, investment managers and insurers deliver on their growth, efficiency, risk and control goals and transform their businesses. With the senior team who have come from MD level positions in major firms like HSBC, Barclays and UBS, NextWave has both the deep industry expertise and the hands on capabilities in AI, data and automation to drive real results, more business outcomes and less PowerPoint from the consulting experience, as their clients like to say. Nextwave has moved two week manual processes to five minute agentic automations, rescued global banking, regulatory control programs and digitized deal platforms, sustainability and regulatory reporting systems. And they do much of this with hands on engineering capabilities on leading technologies which include ServiceNow, Alteryx, Quantexa, uh and Camunda. So if a modern and specialist alternative to the big brand consulting model sounds appealing, one which covers the full life cycle of strategy specialists and solutions. But with small practitioner teams, rapid delivery at A better price point. Then perhaps you should talk to Nexwave. Visit nxwave.com to find out more and get in touch. That's nxwave.com. all right, let's get back to the episode. So your team kindly sent me one of these. So I don't usually have a prop for these interviews, but uh, and that's a rather unkind label. This is a lot more than a prop. So it's up and running. I don't have much crypto in my wallet just yet. I know the security works because it's locked me out about three times while I was waiting to start, uh, the conversation. But, uh, I can see that I have a, a digital wallet. I have a Defi app on here. I've actually been gifted a couple of tokens since this arrived in the post a week ago. Tell me what is, what is a zeekaphone?

Emmett Hollier: Let me start with the basic part, which is it's a phone. It does all the stuff that you would expect a phone to do. It's an Android flagship phone, but it's specifically built for people who care about crypto. You know, it's, there's, there's a group of people out there who love buying and trading and holding digital assets and, and cryptocurrencies. And the truth is, like many of those power users over the last five, 10 years have been chained to desktop. You know, a lot of the crypto technology as it's kind of taken off hasn't been perfect from a UX perspective or a security perspective. There's, there's a lot of trade off decisions there. And uh, more often than not, users just default back to their computer because the mobile experience is either really bad or really insecure. And so we wanted to build a product, uh, a set of technologies that close that gap that, you know, if you're somebody who does want to trade on the go, you want to have that same level of access you do to your banking apps. But you don't want to be worried or scared or have a really clunky ux. You need a device that's more purpose built than just downloading an app from a store. So, uh, that's what we've set out to build. We shipped Saga back in 2023. We started shipping Seeker last year. And um, it's like I said, it's really targeted at those users who care about having access to and using digital assets wherever they are.

Tony Clark: So is it a phone with a crypto wallet or is it first and foremost a secure Crypto wallet with a phone included.

Emmett Hollier: Uh, it is very much a phone first because uh, that's where a lot of the complexity comes in, if you can believe it. Just making sure that a phone can connect to carriers around the world and make phone calls and take pictures is uh, no small feat. We've like learned that the hardware, hardware is hard by the name and so first and foremost we've got to get that right. But in terms of kind of strategically where our team is focused, like where the majority of our resources are, it's on everything else. So the phone is table stakes. We've got to start there. But the crypto focused features, that's where my team spends all of its time.

Tony Clark: Yeah, so, and you've touched on this, the inspiration for Seeker. So presumably there was a sizable part of the crypto community that were, were asking for this. But you know, I think four years ago perhaps, what, what was the inspiration? This wasn't your first device either. I think you said the Saga was the first device and that one had a bit of a stuttering start. Um, but ah, but tell me, where did this come from originally?

Emmett Hollier: Yeah, it's, it's funny when we look back, I think the reason we really got started was there were all these developers building, trying to build new applications on the blockchain, but they had no access to distribution. They were getting blocked out of Apple's App Store and the Google Play Store. And there were all these users around the world who really wanted to use these things on the go. And so our team kind of watched these pretty hacky workarounds being implemented in real time. We were watching users downloading wallet apps and like going to in app browsers like it was, you know, 2009. Um, and we just saw there was this very clear divide where the crypto world was building experiences that were 10 to 15 years behind their Web2 equivalents. And so truthfully we wanted to start with software. We were like, we can solve this with software, but in order to get it right, in order to make sure that what you're building is secure and really seamless, you have to build so natively and so deeply into a phone that you have to go directly to the source. And back in 2022 if we had walked into like Samsung's offices and said, hey guys, like we have an idea. Your ah, users are using crypto. We've built this great tech, like why don't you just implement it? We probably would have been laughed out of the Office. Um, and so we took matters into our own hands and built hardware so that we could kind of shortcut the path to implementation and learning. And so it was an expensive and arduous route, but in the end, it was a lot faster than just trying to play the partnership game with big existing hardware manufacturers.

Tony Clark: No, I love that. Absolutely. Owning the product and taking. Taking the first move to prove it. So you launched a phone called Saga, uh, although I think maybe you were a little earlier, and there'll be some reasons, but my. When I was researching this, I understood you had, you know, a bunch of stocks sitting unsold for a while, but then someone came up with the bright idea of giving everyone a meme coin that was worth more than the phone and suddenly sold more.

Emmett Hollier: Yeah, it was very, like, in retrospect, it was very much right place, right time. You know, there was a lot of luck involved. We rightly took our lumps with Saga. It was a. It was a first. It was like such an early idea of a product that the implementation was far from perfect. And so, you know, we. We went out, we announced it a few months later, before the phones even started shipping. FTX collapsed. The whole market was sort of in a tailspin. And so we were very much wrong place, wrong time, but we stuck with it. Just kind of continues to serve a very small audience of people who got it. And then all of a sudden, the market turned around, and some of the. Some of the perks that came with having the device all of a sudden became worth a whole lot more. And that was definitely not product market fit.

Tony Clark: Right.

Emmett Hollier: Like, a bunch of people treating the phone as physical arbitrage is not. Doesn't prove anything. But it gave us a lifeline. It gave us another opportunity to take another swing, which ultimately brought us to Seeker, where we can get a better sense of what product market fit looks like. We have much better data, we have a much bigger set of users. And so Saga was, uh, an important part of our history, but definitely not, you know, hopefully not the product that people remember us for.

Tony Clark: Yeah. And version two, which I can attest to, is really. It's a beautiful thing. This is a really nice phone. It's really well put together and, uh, slick to use. So what's the demand been like for this?

Emmett Hollier: Uh, pretty overwhelming. Uh, and we decided to do a second one. We internally said, okay, Saga, that sucked. That was very hard, but we want to keep doing it. But to do it, we have to know that there's demand there. And so we opened up kind of like a Kickstarter to the Community. We said, hey, we sold one phone. If you all want another device, if you sort of understand it and you want to see where this is going, place a pre order and internally we set the line at 100,000 phones. We said, if we can get to 100,000 Saga, we sold a total of 20,000. So we said, if we can 5x that audience we're in did it within a month. And you know, we've continued to cell phones since then. So we're north of 150,000 phones, um, which is a pretty significant step up from the initial five or so thousand Sagas that we sold before that, that kind of market frenzy, sellout. So, uh, our team hasn't grown that much, but our audience has grown tremendously.

Tony Clark: And your audience, your user base, I understand, is across over 50 countries. So what does the data tell you about, you know, who's buying these and where they are?

Emmett Hollier: That has been actually the coolest part for us of Seeker. A lot of our team, truthfully is based in North America and Europe. Um, but our phones are global and we've actually more than anywhere seen Asia as like the biggest adoption market. I think there's a couple reasons for that. One is it's, you know, the moment you leave the US in certain European countries, the iPhone is not like the standard anymore. Right. Globally, Android adoption is more, is higher than iOS, but in certain markets it's so skewed the other way. So that's the first thing is Android is just much more prevalent. But also the crypto market broadly is just seeing tons of adoption. Whether it's in developed Asian markets or developing Asian markets, there's just a real surge there. And so we've sold, you know, a little bit more than 50% of our inventory into Asia, which has been really cool because we're learning all sorts of new use cases. And um, not everybody around the world uses crypto in exactly the same ways. And so getting a product in 50 markets gives you a lot of interesting different perspectives on how people are thinking about their assets on the go.

Tony Clark: Is it becoming a sort of must have for the crypto community? I'm curious if you show up at sort of crypto conferences. It's like kind of, oh, you've got a seeker. So you're, ah, you know, you're, um, you're in the community. Is it. That's.

Emmett Hollier: It is, yeah, it's kind of like uh, it's like a membership card, I guess, in a weird way. Like it's, yeah, that's, there's this weird kind of like cultural phenomenon I think that led to a lot of the initial demand was owning one felt like belonging to something. You know, that's, that's like one of the, the, you know, hallmarks of crypto in these early days is there's a lot of this like community energy. There's a lot of, you know, people who get it, get it and they all want to be a part of the same thing. Um, we've definitely leaned into that from a marketing perspective, from a product perspective. We know the importance of that community aspect of people going to conferences, of people having the friend or the cousin who cares about crypto. And it's cool when that our phone becomes sort of like a, um, a signal to others that you get it.

Tony Clark: Yeah. And I think that sort of tribal marketing is very often underestimated by the traditional finance and traditional financial institution, uh, industry.

Emmett Hollier: It's consumer electronics. It's, it's like, it's actually crazy when we get the opportunity to, to talk to other hardware manufacturers. You know, like our journey to date has been very focused on our own products, but as we look forward we think the tech has now been hardened enough to be on a whole other set of devices at multiple entry points, price points, different markets. But as we talk to these hardware manufacturers who have been effectively in like a commodities business for the last few years now, where they just try to price their product as well as they can versus their inputs, it's like so new and novel that there is a community marketing aspect to consumer tech because that hasn't historically been the way that people choose to buy these products. They, they walk into their carrier or they walk into an electronic store and they buy the one that is at the right price, that's available to them and does some basic set of things. Getting to tap into a new type of energy is actually super interesting and very exciting to them and something that is like totally new versus, uh, how they've thought about the world historically.

Tony Clark: Yeah, to be fair, I think of the majors, Apple is the one that's built the brand loyalty that goes beyond the product. But I can absolutely see the kudos and the disruption and the innovations sort of veneer that comes with that with perhaps being part of the club and having one of these. And we touched here on uh, the competition. So you've got this sort of first mover advantage with your second device and proving this out now at some scale. So what's going on competitively? Because you know, I don't think you're alone now. In, in, in trying to uh, build crypto device mobiles.

Emmett Hollier: No we're not. So as I mentioned, our big kind of next step is working with other hardware manufacturers to bring this tech to more, more places. And so competitively we very much want to be on their team. Right? We may continue to sell our own hardware to sort of like the very core power audience, the people who are willing to go buy a phone from a crypto company. But now we're starting to talk to other hardware manufacturers and we're seeing this new opportunity. And so competitively what we look at is Samsung is investing, they've, they've built a blockchain wallet, they're doing a lot of secure self custody implementations, Apple has filed some patents related to digital assets. And so in the hardware space things are actually starting to heat up. It's been, been really fascinating. But then when you look at the software space, the centralized exchanges are doing everything they can to onboard users. Self, um, custody digital wallets are doing everything they can. So it's, you know, if, if our competitive playing field is trading assets on your phone, there's actually like a pretty wide diversity of potential competitors in the space.

Tony Clark: And is your plan to stand apart and build seeker in isolation from all of that or is there a play to license your technology into some of

Emmett Hollier: the majors more so the latter. We very much think of ourselves as a platform. And so like I mentioned at the beginning, if we had just started as a platform, like you don't just like try to be a platform, right? You build a product, people love the product, build usage, you build an audience, users, developers, and then once that has some sort of inertia behind it, then then you can consider yourself a platform. And we think we're reaching that point. And so what's next for us is take this platform, this set of technologies and bring it to other devices. You know, it's something akin to kind of licensing type deal. And the truth is as we've talked to these hardware manufacturers, most of them already have digital assets on their roadmap. It's, we like walk into the room, we're very ready to sort of pitch this from zero. And more often than not within five minutes of the conversation they say we've got this on our roadmap. We just don't really know how to start. We're not crypto experts but we know our users care about it. We want to provide something but we don't know where to begin. And so we're in a very unique position where we can really Team up with some of these hardware manufacturers.

Tony Clark: Yeah. So they're probably very much. Well, thank you for coming to see us rather than, uh, laughing out of the room, which is.

Emmett Hollier: Yeah, it's not a sales pitch. We, we actually, we just went to, uh, a conference in Barcelona, Mobile World Congress, which is like the mobile conference. It is like very overwhelming, but we went in kind of prepared to sell. It was like, okay, we gotta make the case. We gotta, we gotta pitch. And it was not, that was like, not the experience we had at all. We had a bunch of really great conversations and it felt much more of a, how can you guys help us? How can we make this work together? Which definitely, you know, makes our jobs a lot easier.

Tony Clark: Well, that's when you know you've really got product market fit.

Emmett Hollier: Totally.

Tony Clark: When you don't really don't have to try. But we were Talking about the 150,000 plus phones and the user base. And you've proven this out through shipping the product and the adoption. But just to get a sense of that footprint, how much does an average user store and spend on the Seafoam? What are users doing with the device and what sort of scale?

Emmett Hollier: Yeah, so we have a, we have a pretty skewed distribution insofar as we have a bunch of whales that hold lots of assets and trade a lot. And so an average is pretty misrepresentative. Um, for those whales, I'm talking people storing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in assets on their phones and trading thousands or tens of thousands in a month. When you kind of filter out that audience and look at what I would consider more the median user, it's typically, you know, a couple hundred dollars in assets on their phone. Somewhere between five and six hundred bucks worth of assets. And from a trading perspective, they usually trade about half their asset value in a given month's worth of activity. So views or holds, we'll call it 600 bucks. We would usually see around $300 worth of trading activity in a given month. So that's not pure spend. Right. Because a lot of that is trading one asset for another. But that volume is what ultimately generates fee revenue for the various apps that have launched on our phone.

Tony Clark: Yeah. So let's consider, for me, I'm one of those whales. Yeah, it's been a nice place to be. So I've got, I don't know, 10 Bitcoin on my, uh, on my seeker phone. How does the phone align with, you know, an offline hardware wallet that I might otherwise have? And what happens If I lose it,

Emmett Hollier: yeah, it's self custody is really scary, to be honest. Like, we, we know that there's a lot of work to be done to make it work for the next wave. But for the people who are here right now, for those whales, it's a pretty familiar model, which is when you get a phone, you set up a, uh, wallet. Just like when you get a hardware wallet. You set it up, you have a seed phrase. You back that up somewhere and you know, God forbid you lose your phone or it breaks, you can just recover that wallet elsewhere, whether it's on desktop or another phone, and you'll have access to your funds. And we're working to make that recovery process as slick and simple as possible so that, you know, the next wave of users don't have to become self custody security experts. But for our users who do hold significant assets, what we're hearing from them kind of time and time again is the pure standalone hardware wallet experience offers a degree of like, security and safety and you can kind of sleep at night, but those assets are the equivalent of just putting cash in a safety deposit box. It's not really like useful. It's hard to do anything with them. And so what I say is if you're just trying to like stow some funds away, the hardware wallet totally makes sense. But if you're trying to use your assets, if you're trying to trade or, or sort of deploy in any meaningful way, it's really cumbersome to plug something into a computer all the time and do all the clicking and clacking. And so fortunately we've built a secure, a very secure solution into the phone directly. Something that is different than just downloading a software wallet. And that gives a lot of our users the peace of mind they need to hold pretty meaningful balances.

Tony Clark: Yeah, so it's kind of like current account versus savings account in the, uh, traditional finance sense.

Emmett Hollier: Yeah, totally. It's like security is a spectrum. I think in the traditional world of banking, we don't think about it as such. Right. There's the concept that, you know, I guess the security of your bank is like how protected your password is and you're two factor auth, but your funds are insured often and it's either at a bank or it's not at a bank. In crypto, there's a spectrum where users can decide kind of for given funds, how secure do they need to be. That's, you know, like a new cognitive load for some users to kind of get familiar with. But ultimately that flexibility is pretty cool.

Tony Clark: And Emmett, you were at Google AI before Seeker. Ah. What did you learn that you brought perhaps to the Seeker journey from that experience?

Emmett Hollier: When I was, it's a good question. When I was at Google, we, we were trying to bring technology into user journeys where like, they did not want to be disrupted. Right. So like, when you think about customer support, when you call your, your telco, everybody just slams zero. I mean, your chat, you just like hit agent, agent, agent. And so I, when I was there, I was like, we are, you are so careful. You're trying not to break anything. You're trying to just make things as you don't want to be noticed, basically. And so when I came here, it took a while to like change my perspective to, oh, no, like, we are trying to break things, we don't need to be so careful. And in retrospect, I wish I had sort of embraced that sooner because this is the kind of space where you can really innovate and take swings and learn very quickly. Um, you know, and now as we sort of look to the future of expanding to new hardware partners and new types of users, we're probably going to be slightly trending back towards like, don't be too disruptive. Uh, and so our core audience is great. Seeker has been great. We can, we can take a lot of swings. Um, but I kind of wish in retrospect we had taken even more swings.

Tony Clark: Yeah, well, perhaps. And you talked about usability and uh, customer experience and it's slickly put together. So that sort of low friction usability, I think is something that, from the, uh, short time that I've spent with the device seems to have made its way into Seeker.

Emmett Hollier: Yeah, that's been, that's been our primary focus. You know, at the end of the day, we want to build a product that people love to use. Like I said, our ambition is to be a platform. You don't just become a platform. You have to build something that people really love. You know, in the same way that people fell in love with their iPhones and the basic apps that were available from the start, which then became a full app store with tons of other apps from tons of other developers. We want to build a really slick, seamless experience like the, the, the crypto mobile experience doesn't have to be really kind of scary and gnarly. And I think realistically, if Blockchain continues to develop and accelerate, mobile is going to be a very logical entry point for lots and lots of users. And so somebody has to really try and get that right. And that's what we've been doing.

Tony Clark: Yeah. And I think you said before, in five years, no one will talk about crypto phones. They'll just be phones as they are now with cameras and all sorts of things inbuilt.

Emmett Hollier: Yeah, I think that's right. Well, uh, actually, cameras are a great example. In the very early days you had a camera phone or, or a phone, but now it's just a phone and every one of them has a camera. Uh, similarly, in the early days of Tap to Pay, there were some phones that had it and it was like this new and novel thing. Now every phone has it and it just works and it's really, really seamless and kind of blends right in. I think we're in a very similar position where right now it feels very intentional to buy a phone that supports these things natively, but it's going to increasingly become the norm. Like I mentioned, Samsung's investing in this. We know Apple is filing patents around this. There's an inevitability to it. You know, even when you look outside of just phones that natively support it via hardware, Stripe is totally rethinking their link payment systems to be built on top of stablecoins. There's all these things that are kind of happening in the background that I think will make it just eventually just blend in.

Tony Clark: So it's, uh, the structural and sort of mass adoption of crypto rails in sort of all spheres that's driving and perhaps giving you the confidence that this is very much direction of travel and it's going to be complete adoption. Because that wasn't necessarily the case, you know, five, 10 years ago.

Emmett Hollier: No, I mean, one of the. Honestly, one of the things that really helps in conversations we're having with hardware manufacturers is just looking at all of the big institutions who are trying new things on top of blockchain. Whether it's Western Union or Stripe or blackrock, there's all these big, familiar, primarily finance and payment names who are thinking about what this technology means for their businesses and that sort of like, air of legitimacy. The like, oh, okay. If all these other big companies are trying it, we can too. Is not where we were four years ago. Like, it just, it just wasn't. Uh, and so that's given us a lot of room to work with, is seeing all the really cool innovation that traditional finance and payments companies are trying.

Tony Clark: Yeah, and I've had your colleagues from Solana on this show and I've spoken to Coinbase. We've got an Episode coming out and a, uh, couple of conversations with folks from Franklin Templeton. And it's everywhere, all across the sector. So, I mean, I agree. I think you're on something.

Emmett Hollier: Yeah, yeah, it's good to hear. I think it'll be, it'll be an interesting few years. You know, my hunch on all this is you don't really think about how a website is built. You don't, um, you know, when you visit it, you're not like, oh, this is hosted on AWS or this is hosted on Google Cloud. Similarly, when you wire money in and out of a bank account or you transfer money, you're a little bit less concerned as a user as to like, okay, what rails is this money moving on? You just know right now, okay, it's going to take three days for that to land or, okay, this is going to take two days for that to land or, uh, I'm going to have to pay a tax on this. So, you know, it's going to get intercepted. I think this is just going to be one of those things where the technology slowly makes user experiences better kind of across the board as opposed to everything headlining. With crypto, it'll just become this kind of superpower beneath the hood.

Tony Clark: So I was going to ask you about designing for crypto power users, but I think you somewhat answered the question that this is a trajectory to everyone using these devices. So my mom's going to be trading her bitcoin on her seeker phone. Right?

Emmett Hollier: I think, I think we're a little ways away from it. The truth is like we right now, we build for the power user and those are the people who want to trade all the time. They want to trade meme coins, they want to trade, you know, traditional cryptocurrencies. And so we're serving the demand where it is right now, but in hopes that this is on a path towards something that is a little bit more mainstream. And it might not be that every bank account is backed by crypto in five years and that everybody who holds money does so in self custody. But you know, there's 700 million plus people around the world who hold digital assets in some form or fashion. I think that number will continue to increase and I think people will start to look for new ways to get access to these types of assets. Um, they might not all be power users trading meme coins 24, 7, but, but they'll care. It's money and it's finance. And uh, so we're, we're very much building for what we have Right now with an eye on where things are going.

Tony Clark: Yeah. And we've not talked about it yet, but you're building on top of and with what I think is billed as the world's fastest blockchain, Solana. So how does Solana figure as part of the proposition? How important is it that Seeker is actually built on that chain?

Emmett Hollier: Uh, from my perspective, it's extremely important. Uh, you know, our team is a part of Solana Labs. Solana Labs was behind the original launch of the network. You know, these days the Solana foundation is really responsible for adoption and the strategy of the chain overall. But we were sort of born out of Solana. And the truth is, I think even if we were starting from zero, from outside of the Solana Labs walls, it would still. Solana would still be the most obvious home for all of this. You need one, you need to have a community. Solana's already got a very fervent community of both users and builders. So that's extremely helpful from a pure technology perspective. Mobile demands speed and capacity and cheapness. Mobile interactions are constant, they're frequent and they're quick. Like imagine, you know, taking out your phone and it, uh, requiring you to watch something to happen for five minutes. That's so orthogonal to how we think about mobile phones historically. Um, but Solana is in a position where it can support really quick activity, really quick trades. You know, you get a notification, you can trade in an instant. You don't have to wait for things to settle for 5, 10, 15 minutes. So there's a very natural kind of technology overlap in addition to the community overlap.

Tony Clark: And perhaps this is a good illustration. What have you seen with the Middle east crisis over the last six weeks or so? Because when traditional banking rails go down or you don't have access, which for some people in the region, I'm sure has been the case. I mean, there is this possibility of using stable coins and alternate rails to, to continue to, to trade. And, and I, I think to some extent may have been somewhat of a lifeline for folks, but what have you seen, um, in terms of usage during that?

Emmett Hollier: Yeah, we're, we're actually pretty careful with respects to data collection and so trying to understand who is doing what in what regions. We, we don't have a perfect sense of that. But what I will say is we, when we started this whole thing with Saga the first time around, we were mindful of the tension that self custody sort of introduces. But we wanted first. And so for users who need access to funds anywhere but don't want to do so in a way that feels really vulnerable. Like, it was literally our starting point. One of the big knocks against our first phone was the security outweighed the usability. And that was very intentional. And so as we look at various crises around the world and people wanting to keep access to their money, needing access to their money, but also being able to deploy it, that's like what we're trying to build every day is like, uh, uh, a secure way to hold your money, but also when you need to use it, it's right there for you. You don'. To go chase it down or unlock it or ask somebody to give it back to you. So, you know, it's always tough to see these types of crises. It's not something I'd ever want to market ourselves against, but it's a good reminder of sort of why we hold security so paramount in everything we do.

Tony Clark: Yeah. And I guess that's one of the sort of foundation principles of defi and the blockchain, anyway. But, um, situations like this, sort of put it under the magnifying glass and perhaps amplify the, uh, relevance.

Emmett Hollier: Totally, totally.

Tony Clark: Yeah. So we've got this far without talking about AI, which is remarkable. So let's go there.

Emmett Hollier: Yeah.

Tony Clark: 2026, the year of AI agents sort of popping up everywhere. Or they. At least we're hearing that they're about to. And the crossover between crypto wallets and AI agents. And the crypto will be the currency for your agentic workers and your agentic pals and your agentic digital twin. What's your view on that? And how will that sort of play into what you're doing with Seeker agentic,

Emmett Hollier: uh, payments and trading is going to be, I think, really interesting. We're seeing it starting to pop up more and more. I think, like, the natural thing that worries me is, oh, no, my agent spent all my money. I didn't, I didn't approve any of this. Oh, no, it's. It's all gone. That's actually something we're sort of proactively designing for, is thinking about how do you sort of build a set of rules in a way that's not super onerous? It doesn't mean you're, like, spending two hours each day trying to define these, like, very specific little windows. But we have this really cool, interesting proprietary tech that says, hey, you know, when a user wants to sign a transaction, we need to know that they're alive and with their phone and, and that they are who they say they are. Um, so we've already got this like very hard part of that equation solved. And so thinking about the right way to delegate approvals on an as needed basis or make sure that the agent comes back to you if it's going to cross some line, um, and get your explicit approval. That is something that we're sort of uniquely well positioned to build for. And we don't have anything live on that front yet. But as we've built our seed vault security layer from the ground up, like agentic and delegated accounts has always been kind of in the back of our mind.

Tony Clark: I love that it's sort of agentic pocket money and parental oversight. You know, I have this thing in the UK for my kids called Go Henry which has been very successful, which is a kid's credit card. And uh, you can monitor from the parents app and you can say, nope, you're not getting any more. If you go to the sweet shop

Emmett Hollier: this afternoon, that's probably the right mental model for agents. Right? Is like you're their parent and it's like, okay, you can go spend some money. I want you to be helpful but like, don't cross the line. Uh, I'm going to make sure you don't. Or if you want more, you're going to have to come ask me. Yeah, I think that's like maybe a pretty good comp. And the hope would be that, you know, I don't know, Go hunry as well, but like that you're not spending tons and tons of time trying to configure everything and make it just so. But that you can feel pretty confident that uh, should any limits be crossed, you know, you'll know and you can take action. I think that's, that's how we're thinking about things.

Tony Clark: Yeah, it's a great app. I have not had them on the show, but it's been a fintech success story I think for the UK and very easy to use. And you can uh, set regular bits of pocket money or you can get some money for your kids in return for washing the car or whatever. It might be very cool.

Emmett Hollier: Yeah, I think that's how we're thinking about the world too.

Tony Clark: I understand that you are actually very much part of the future stack for mobile crypto and that you may have some plays in discussion with some much bigger firms. And that all sounds very exciting.

Emmett Hollier: It's our goal. I think it's going to take time. The truth is, uh, hardware manufacturers, they are, like I said, they're kind of commodity sellers at this Point. And so trying to innovate and create new revenue streams and create potentially new selling features is, it's not like an overnight thing, but we have a ton of momentum there, so we're going to continue to tap into it. And that just gives us, that gives our stack the broadest opportunity. Space positions us to create more value added services. So that's the path we're taking. It's going to be a little bit of a pivot. But as I mentioned at the top, you know, hardware is hard, it sucks. And so if we're spending a little bit less time thinking about our own hardware, that frees us up to spend a little bit more time making sure that user experiences are as good as can be.

Tony Clark: Yeah, and you've been doing something super innovative in an already innovative sector. Uh, and it's a unique combination of hardware crypto users. The way you've put this together. Is there anything you've learned in the last 12 months that's really surprised you? The sort of insight you went, because you don't see these things until you start doing them and you go, well, I didn't expect that to happen.

Emmett Hollier: Yeah, yeah. Uh, I think one of the things I mentioned before is there's just a ton of room to innovate with this audience. And what we've learned is the thing that you become sort of scared of when you're building tech is changing something, breaking something, sort of turning off users who have fallen in love with something, and we've seen the total opposite, is every time we try something new, new, we've, we've like cultivated an audience of people who are not only anxious to try it, but anxious to give feedback. And so it is unlike any experience I've had in my career where every one of your users has that early adopter Persona. It is just like, it's like a superpower because it gives us the opportunity to actually try things and get feedback and not be worried that we're going to make some huge dent in our monthly active usage by, by making one foot out of line. Now granted, uh, because it's a very communicative feedback forward audience, they will let us know if we do something bad. Like they will make us, they'll make us feel it. But you'd rather have that than just this kind of complacent user base who, if you do something they don't like, they're just going to leave and go somewhere else. It's cool to have this type of relationship with our audience.

Tony Clark: Yeah. So you've Got a focus group of 150,000 people who tell you exactly what's going on at the time.

Emmett Hollier: Um, exactly. It's the world's loudest focus group.

Tony Clark: Yeah, love that. Okay, so what's coming next for, uh, Solana Secret, apart from shipping your next 150,000 units.

Emmett Hollier: Yeah, that's first and foremost. We gotta sell, sell more. Always sell more. I think, you know, one of the things we didn't talk a ton about is we've cultivated this audience of developers as well who are building apps natively for our user base. And so I think one of the things that our existing users and future users can look towards is a lot of really cool and interesting experiments coming up. One, you know, one of the analogies I make is the early days of the Apple App Store was uh, you know, the like beer drinking app where you would hold it up and it would like the level would shift or kind of bad flashlight apps. It was, it was, didn't quite feel like innovation, but people were trying stuff. I think the early days of our App Store was kind of similar. It was people trying new things. Maybe it didn't have product market fit yet. Maybe some of these things were a novelty. I think we're just now starting to cross the line into people unlocking new and novel use cases that rely on the fact that you're on a mobile phone, the fact that you're trading assets on chain. Um, and so I think that is where what I'm most excited to see in the next few months, in addition to hopefully selling plenty more phones and

Tony Clark: what sort of cool apps are on there at the moment. I haven't had a delve through on my device yet. I did have a quick spin and there were some oddly named tokens listed because of the ABs.

Emmett Hollier: Yeah, they, uh, I think unsurprisingly, a lot of the trading experiences are kind of top of the charts, like, so it's what a lot of people like to spend their time doing in our audience. But the way that you approach trading on a mobile phone is very different from a desktop. Right. If you took like a full Bloomberg terminal and put it onto a phone, that would be totally overwhelming. That's not, it's not what phones are for. So we're seeing a lot of experimentation on what it means to have like a mobile first trading experience. Um, so I would say that's first and foremost. And then the second thing we're seeing is a lot of games. Obviously, like games have been keeping the Apple App Store and the Google Play store alive for 15 years. We're just now starting to see what it looks like to take a really great mobile game and think about what you're doing in that game tied to your money and your assets. And that's like a totally new vector of gaming. So you're not just trading, you know, candy crush points or whatever, but actual real dollars or real assets. Uh, so those are probably the two areas that we kind of see the most traction right now. But the truth is, you know, we're at almost 900 apps, so there's quite a bit of diversity at this point.

Tony Clark: Oh my word, I'm going to have to get one for my kids. If anyone's going to pressure test gaming on a mobile phone, it's them.

Emmett Hollier: Yes, we have a lot of our most, A lot of our power users spend a lot of time playing games.

Tony Clark: So if we've piqued the interest sufficiently and folks are this far into the conversation and want to get a seeker, uh, I mean mine arrived, I think it was by dpd, uh, inside a week. But where to find out more and get your device?

Emmett Hollier: Yeah. Solanamobile.com we still have plenty of seekers. We, you know, if you're somebody who doesn't have one, we would be more than happy to, uh, to get you one. I think if you're on the fence and you're not, you're not sure, what I'll say is this is, I think, a pretty good glimpse into where things are going. Some of our users, this is their second phone, but they kind of treat it as their, their money phone or their asset phone and their other phone is like their personal phone and for some users it's their primary phone. So there's no kind of one size fits all approach. Everybody gets to kind of make the phone what they want. So solanamobile.com, um, I would definitely encourage people, go, go grab one.

Tony Clark: Thank you. And so, just at a more personal level as we wrap up, you're, you know, a very interesting point in your career, but I've still got many years ahead of you and I'm sure lots of interesting things. But at this point, is there something that you've learned from the first, and I'm going to guess 20 years or so perhaps of career that you have, Emma, um, at this stage that you really wish you'd known at the start that you perhaps could share with our audience?

Emmett Hollier: Yeah, I, I think one of the things I've learned is I wish I hadn't felt the pressure to specialize quickly like out of the gate. I think there's this kind of like existing pressure that as soon as possible you sort of like pick a specialty and go really deep on it. And when I look at, you know, I kind of outlined at the top, I was working in fintech and then I was building mobile products and then I was doing AI, uh, for telcos and those don't actually have that much in common. But each time I took a new opportunity it was because I had a sense that more doors would open on the other side of it. And I just think that's like a really good framework for thinking about building your career. Certainly if you have a passion and uh, an ability to do something really well and you want to specialize in it, go for it. But if you're not that type of person, which I'm not, it's actually totally okay to keep your mind open and try different things because eventually there will be a reason that you worked in fintech and on mobile products and on innovative technology and it comes together in something like the role I'm in right now.

Tony Clark: Yeah. So stay open minded and curious. It is a balance. Uh, I had a great conversation with James Benham at the InsurTech conference a couple of months ago and his one takeaway was focus because he said I'm always trying to do too many things at once. So I think you've got to balance that.

Emmett Hollier: Yeah, I guess when you're doing something, give it your all and stay really focused on it. But as you move between things, don't, don't assume that where you've been has to be directly in line with where you're going. I read a great book a few years ago called Range by David Epstein that is really sort of like in support of the idea of being a generalist, just, you know, not forever but for a time. And I think that was, you know, I felt very seen kind of reading that because there was not a lot of rhyme or reason to some of the career decisions that I had made. But now in retrospect, like they led me to a pretty great point.

Tony Clark: Yeah. And you're definitely not a generous with what you're doing here, but you're bringing that experience.

Emmett Hollier: Yeah. So well every day there's a little bit of generality. But yes, the business that I'm working in is obviously very specific, which is fun. It's been a really fun learning opportunity.

Tony Clark: Yeah. Well, you've answered the what are you reading at the moment question. Is there anything on your POD list or anything you're listening to that you'd recommend?

Emmett Hollier: Uh, uh, yeah, well, actually on the reading front, I, so I read range. The other thing I'm reading right now is London Falling. I'm a big Patrick, uh, Raden Keefe fan. I've read like four, three or four of his books, so love that. On the listening front, I'm like very, very all over the place, uh, in podcast land. Uh, but just for pure personal pleasure, I tend to love listening to film podcasts.

Tony Clark: Oh, really?

Emmett Hollier: Just conversations. Yeah, conversations about movies, conversations with directors. That's um, you know, I, I love movies and love movie history and so that's kind, uh, of my escape. I don't, I don't tend to listen to too many work related podcasts. I tend to try and escape towards like more cultural pursuits.

Tony Clark: That's great. I mean, I find that I end up listening to some of the AI and futurist podcasts and uh, it's um, it's good to switch out sometimes and just get something completely random and different.

Emmett Hollier: Yeah, I don't, don't get me wrong, I still totally do, but when I, when I need a little bit of a break, I, I like to pivot over into filmland.

Tony Clark: Yeah. Film podcast. I did listen to one which was an interview with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon talking about their film company. But very cool. Fair. They were mostly just sitting there sort of. Yeah, sort of having a sort of loud bromance about their production company.

Emmett Hollier: Uh, I will say that the business of Hollywood is also fascinating. It's one of those things that, uh, being in more traditional industries does not come close to like reflecting. So. So yeah, I can imagine. That was super interesting.

Tony Clark: Yeah. Okay, look, well, we have run out of time and we got things to do, I'm sure. But Emmett, thank you. I mean, the business that you're leading is super interesting and a glimpse of the future. Uh, and thanks for sharing your insights and coming on the show.

Emmett Hollier: Yeah, of course. I appreciate you having me.