How a Chance Meeting at the First Avalanche Summit Created GoGoPool

Steven Gates wasn't looking for a co-founder when he arrived in Barcelona for Avalanche's inaugural summit in 2021. He was tracking down a stranger from the Internet—someone he'd met online only a few days earlier after finding his GitHub repository and realizing that he had solved a technical problem that had been vexing Gates for weeks. 

At the time, Gates was developing a blockchain platform for content creators, having pivoted from his previous venture in AI video recruiting software that had been devastated by the pandemic. He was struggling with a particularly difficult technical challenge related to the infrastructure for the content creator platform he was building on Avalanche. After weeks of searching for solutions, he discovered a GitHub repository belonging to Jonny Gault, a developer in San Diego who had solved exactly the problem he was facing.

"We started chatting anonymously, hopped on a video call and said ‘hey, the Avalanche Summit is happening in 5 days, should we go meet everyone?'" Gates recalls. That face-to-face meeting in Barcelona quickly evolved into a partnership that launched GoGoPool, the protocol that now powers 30% of validator nodes on the Avalanche network.

A FOUNDER’S JOURNEY FROM WEB2 TO WEB3

Gates, like many of the founders now building on Avalanche, cut his teeth as a Web2 entrepreneur.  With degrees in applied mathematics and computer science, Gates has always been interested in Web3 technologies, but for most of his twenties he didn’t really consider it seriously as a space he might want to build in. When he was in college, he wasn’t even sure if he wanted to build a startup at all. 

"Throughout university, my biggest question was whether to get on the PhD track because applied math and computer science are my jam,” he says. Hackathons became his gateway to entrepreneurship and he developed a taste for the sleepless coding marathons that are so typical of early stage startups. There were problems to be solved and products to be built—and hopefully a lot of money to be made along the way. Gates quickly realized he had found the answer to his question: he was going all in on a startup. 

THE BIRTH OF A SALESMAN

Once he had made up his mind, things started moving fast. Gates graduated early, moved from Ohio to Boston with his best friend, and launched an AI video interviewing platform for recruiting after securing seed funding from 1517 Fund. The technical challenges energized him, but the business needed someone who could sell what it was building. Gates had no experience in sales, but he had the gift of gab and a dogged determination to make it work. So Gates learned to sell. 

"For the next six months, I basically went and learned how to do sales from scratch—cold calling, doing demos, selling it to big companies, small companies, whatever," he says. He built a sales team of five people and was preparing to raise a proper funding round to scale the company when the pandemic arrived like a guillotine, severing 90% of their revenue in a matter of days as hiring freezes spread faster than the virus.

GATES’ DEFI SUMMER

During the first year of the pandemic, Gates’ startup was in stasis as it worked to honor its commitments to early customers during a global hiring pause. The startup was eventually sold to a management firm and Gates began exploring blockchain technology more seriously as he prepared to apply to Y Combinator. At the time, his plan was to build a Web3 company for content creators, which would use blockchain technology to enable new business models through shared ownership and revenue attribution.

"Blockchain was a really good promoter for this concept because it allowed them to share ownership with communities and fans," Gates says. But as he dug deeper into the technical requirements for his project, Gates became increasingly fixated on a more fundamental question about trust in digital systems. 

"I was obsessed with this idea of where the code is actually run—where is that server and how can I trust that," he says. "Then I learned about the EVM, the different byte codes and op codes, and how consensus works. I thought it was very cool that there’s this immutable server farm with a secure, shared database that’s sitting in the cloud now—that was my aha moment."

This epiphany coincided with another realization: it was 2021 and the fundraising markets for blockchain projects were "insanely hot” as crypto markets ripped toward all-time highs. If he was going to build a Web3 startup, he had to move fast. After exploring several L1 ecosystems such as Polkadot and Cosmos, Gates eventually decided to build his startup on Avalanche because he believed it offered the most robust technology that could serve as the foundation for a real, billion-dollar startup.

"It was clear that Avalanche is the realest tech, the one I could trust the most,” says Gates. 

Yet as he dove deeper into Avalanche's ecosystem, he realized there were still significant infrastructure problems to solve before his content platform could thrive. This is what led him to Gault’s GitHub page and their meeting in Barcelona where they swapped notes and soon realized that there was a bigger opportunity in front of them than either of them had realized working in isolation. 

Their shared vision went beyond specific applications to a more fundamental opportunity to build the infrastructure layer that would make Avalanche more accessible to all developers and lower the barriers to building blockchain-backed businesses that could avoid the misaligned incentives between companies and their users that both Gates and Gault saw as an inherent blight on Web2 business models. It was the seed of the idea that launched GoGoPool.

BUILDING TOWARD L1 SEASON WITH GOGOPOOL

GoGoPool's innovation addresses a critical barrier to Avalanche’s wider adoption: the high cost and technical complexity of running validator nodes. Prior to GoGoPool, running a validator node would require staking 2,000 AVAX tokens and considerable technical expertise, which put the network out of reach of many founders who would be interested in building in the Avalanche ecosystem. GoGoPool's solution allows operators to launch nodes with just 1,000 AVAX, with the remaining stake matched from a pool of liquid stakers who receive ggAVAX tokens representing their stake plus accumulated rewards.

"What GoGopool does is that it is that final kernel that makes it really easy for these new businesses to start launching new blockchains and start decentralizing," Gates explains. "Previously, that was extremely complex both technically and economically to manage that process."

Only four years after GoGoPool’s launch, this approach has already proven remarkably successful. Beyond powering nearly a third of Avalanche's validator nodes, GoGoPool recently launched COQNET, a new L1 network fully secured by their validator fleet. Gates sees this as the opening salvo heralding the arrival of an "L1 season" where specialized blockchains proliferate as the barriers to building on Avalanche are lowered for both Web2 and Web3 companies.

Although Gates can’t offer specifics just yet, he says GoGoPool has several more L1 projects in the pipeline and that founders in the gaming, AI and DePin industries are particularly interested in what GoGoPool has to offer. Later this year, GoGoPool will be releasing a series of case studies that showcase how Web2 companies have successfully built bespoke L1 chains using GoGoPool, which will be followed by a push to make GoGoPool’s infrastructure truly permissionless. 

What began as two strangers meeting at a conference has evolved into what Gates hopes will become a multi-billion dollar protocol establishing L1 tokens as a new asset class in the Web3 ecosystem.  But as Gates looks toward GoGoPool's future, he remains grounded in the human connections that made it all possible. The technical and commercial advantages are what brought him to Avalanche in the first place, but ultimately it’s the people—not the protocol—that’s kept him sticking around.