Agora co-founder Charlie Feng on building compliance solutions for decentralized governance, and lessons he learned from his earlier startups.
In today's rapidly evolving digital economy, decentralized governance is emerging as a powerful new option over traditional corporate models. One of the players of this movement is Charlie Feng, a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Agora, a compliance and governance platform for the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
With two successful startups under his belt like Clearco, a cutting-edge data-driven lending platform, Feng brings an exclusive combination of technical knowledge, business acumen, and battle-hardened experience in scaling companies in high-risk sectors. During this interview, he describes the vision behind Agora, its design principles that drive it, and his vision for creating strong products and teams in a high-growth environment.
Interview Date: 6th August 2025
Agora is my third startup. We stumbled ourselves into the crypto on-chain world. Generally speaking, if you travel to different countries, one of my core beliefs is that I think 10 years from now, a lot of the payments, a lot of the infrastructure of the internet might not be on the blockchain as we know it today, but being some version of on-chain makes a lot of sense when it’s verifiable, it’s easy to see transparency behind it. I think that’s what got us excited about this space.
We basically at Agora build compliance for crypto companies. The same things that you see as a shareholder when you own stocks or the rights you have as either a stock owner or as an equity owner of a company, we try to replicate that for token holders. These are crypto companies who similarly beg the question of how do you govern a protocol, who is governing and what rights do they have? So we do compliance for that whole space.
As you kind of mentioned, governments, governance, at the end of the day, it’s how do you… I think governance is a bit of a complex word, but it’s also a bit of a misnomer, where I think people think governance is such a complex topic, but really, governance exists once you have more than two people in a room. You might be implicitly doing just like, “Hey, you and me need to agree on something,” or once you get to three, four people, maybe it’s a small vote, maybe it’s a small committee. They’re just different scales of governance, and yes, when you get to millions or hundreds of millions of people, you have governments of that scale.
We basically help a lot of the largest on-chain communities run their governance. These are folks like Uniswap, who has as much trading volume as Coinbase. These are folks like Optimism, ENS, and there are fairly large communities ranging from hundreds of people to thousands, if not tens of thousands of people. Basically how you make decisions, I make decisions. Like I said, three people in a room, maybe just as long as two of us agree, majority wins. How do you do that at scale with hundreds of thousands of people, and how do you do that across all the different decisions that need to get made in a company?
Traditionally in a corporate company, it’s very much the CEO with the iron fist, they decide what goes and what doesn’t. What we’re starting to see in more decentralised structures is not so much deciding everything via committee, but having the right people responsible for the right things. You want the marketing department to respond to the marketing task, you want the engineering department to respond to the engineering task. It’s about diffusing and spreading out that decision-making while still being able to move quickly.
Our goal is that ideally we can make… I think one of the things we see around crypto or on-chain is that the idea of the rules that you write or what you say is actually written on the blockchain. It’s permanent, you can’t change them. And I think a lot of things where whoever sets the rules decides to change them once they become large enough, or once their incentives are different.
One of the things that’s exciting is that these are rules you set from the get-go, whether a set of principles or philosophies, and you can’t change them. You govern the community based on those rules. The second thing is if you actually programmatically execute these rules. That’s probably the part that excites me the most. As a bit of a tech nerd and product person, you can start to do things automatically.
This is something you can’t really do in the traditional world. There, even if it’s similar in concept, it still requires mediation, the legal system, lawyers, suing someone. The rules aren’t automatic. There’s a difference between “it’s a law” that still requires you to fight it, versus a system where if you do this, it automatically happens. I think there’s a lot of potential there, and we hope to enable that.
Our mission is: can we make on-chain tokens or companies just as good, if not better, than the traditional world? We hope that 10 years from now, people will be building their businesses straight on the internet, or on-chain, rather than incorporating in Delaware or other current jurisdictions.
There are probably a couple of different ways. For the most part, we very much believe in a holistic user experience. One of the things we do is we think the ones that have the best client apps write their own smart contracts. We’re probably one of the few organisations, like the old Alan Kay saying, “Those who are serious about software build their own hardware,” for us, it’s “those who are serious about the crypto front-end write their own smart contracts.”
We’re one of the few shops that does the full stack of the app, both the client app you see, and the smart contract running under the hood.
Design is one of those things I think a lot of people get wrong, especially those not in design. They think design’s purpose is to make things look pretty. Great designers are really product thinkers. At the end of the day, design’s job is to best help the user accomplish whatever job needs to be done.
For us, that job is trust. We’re compliance at the end of the day. We make sure people aren’t going to jail, that the boxes that need to be checked are being checked, that clients are following the regulatory rules they need to. Trust that our software works, because it’s moving hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars across contracts and wallets. Trust that the money is safe. Trust that the system works. And trust that the boxes are being checked properly.
It’s honestly hard to tell. We’re still early, so it’s hard to see if some of these design choices have panned out yet. I believe metrics are important, but sometimes intuition is too. We’re in long-term B2B sales, so you don’t always see results quickly.
One area we’re starting to see is bundling and unbundling of software. Maybe five years ago, in crypto or software generally, people would piece together five to seven different products: one for forums, one for voting, and so on. Now there’s a bit of consolidation. People just want one all-in-one tool. They don’t want to go to three different sites or use three different tools. So we’re leaning into that. Time will tell how it goes.
It goes back to trust. For some reason, people really like Agora from a community perspective, and I think a lot of that comes down to brand and design. My co-founder is a designer, and there’s a certain degree of care and professionalism in everything, not just the landing page, but also the slide decks for demos, even the contracts we send.
Polish makes people feel you’re professional. Trust is built when you do what you say, over and over again. Even something as boring as an MSA contract is designed with care, as much as you can give a legal document.
A lot of battle scars and war stories. My first startup was a couple of years out of university, an AI startup before there were LLMs. We thought we had AI, but it was really just fancy Python scripts and if-this-then-that functions. It was my first taste of venture and how business works. I was naïve, so it was eye-opening. Ultimately, it didn’t go anywhere. But I learned the importance of finding something people truly care about, and selling early to get strong feedback, charging so people put their money where their mouth is.
My second startup was ClearBank (ClearCo). We were one of the first data-driven lenders in North America, underwriting businesses using Shopify and Stripe data instead of credit scores. We hit product-market fit in e-commerce, a sector where businesses often need capital quickly to grow. I saw the good and bad of startups, learned from hyperscaling, and made plenty of mistakes. It was sobering, it made me think about what kind of business I truly want to build, and that not everyone needs to do a venture-scale company.
I would say it’s not selling. And by selling, I don’t mean the money is the important part, that comes later for revenue, but early on, charging someone $100 or whatever you charge isn’t going to pay the bills anyway.
The important part of charging money is to get high-fidelity feedback in the early stages as quickly as possible, to de-risk the riskiest part of your business. A lot of people avoid that and instead tackle the easier parts. Engineers will overbuild because they love shipping code. Designers will overdesign. But they don’t address the most risky question: does my customer really want this?
The best way to test that is to show customers what you have. There’s a trade-off between how much fidelity you put into your MVP and the quality of feedback you get. If you pitch only an idea with no fidelity, friends will say, “Yeah, that sounds great,” but it’s not helpful. Show them a Figma mock-up, and you’ll get more feedback. Build a true MVP, and you’ll get even more. The highest level is charging them. Once someone has to put in their credit card, the real feedback comes through.
I don’t think there’s a magic formula. I wish there was, for myself as well. Market selection is quite important, because no matter how you pivot or change direction, you’ll probably stay within your sector.
For example, with Agora, if we changed businesses, we’d still likely stay within crypto or somewhere adjacent. At ClearBank, our first customers weren’t e-commerce, we tried Uber drivers, then Airbnb hosts, but it was always within fintech.
So it’s important to pick a market that’s big enough to disrupt and that you’re excited about. People underestimate that. Startups are a grind, you’ll be in it for years, often 7 to 10 years before seeing real success, so you have to want to work on it that long.
Lastly, you need a strong wedge, a unique differentiator to tackle the market. It could be in distribution, product, design, anything, but you have to be different.
In some ways, you can have both, but you’ll pay the price. It’s like the old “speed, quality, cost, pick two.” You can have speed and quality, but it’ll probably be more costly.
It also depends on the business you’re in. Are you in a space where you can afford multiple iterations, or does your first release to a customer have to be right?
For us, in B2B compliance, I don’t want to iterate on regulatory rules. I can’t say, “Sorry, the compliance forms we gave you were wrong, here’s a fix.” That erodes trust. So we have non-negotiables, like votes can’t fail.
But if you’re in B2C or social, you can ship fast, fix things tomorrow, and speed might be worth the trade-off.
Not as much as I’d hope. I wish my Dota and StarCraft days carried over more. But games do have mechanics worth studying, especially in B2C: retention and monetisation.
Many modern businesses mimic game monetisation, token-based systems, microtransactions, paying a little extra for an action. A lot of AI tools now work like that. These microtransaction mechanics are creeping in everywhere.
I haven’t played many new games recently, still on some old ones, but two stand out. One is RuneScape, which I played as a kid and didn’t even realise was still alive. The company is actually crushing it, with revenue growing every year, over a billion dollars now, and a loyal player base.
The other is Riot Games. I’m a Dota fan, so part of me is supposed to hate League of Legends, but I respect them as a company. Their investment in ecosystem and community is huge. They’ve gone beyond gaming into media, Netflix’s Arcane, K-pop collaborations, great music. Most gaming companies won’t touch that, but Riot has done it tastefully and effectively. Every time I watch Arcane, I want to play the game.
I haven’t done a lot of formal advising, but I’ve invested in over 50 early-stage startups. Many have changed a lot, including Agora.
One that impressed me is EvenUp, a legal tech startup. They started closer to a ClearBank model, lending money, but realised their real value was in the IP and AI software they were building. They pivoted to selling the software, moving from a capital business to a software business with much better margins. They executed that pivot very well.
It depends on the stage. Later stage, I care more about metrics, is the go-to-market engine working, is the product working?
At the co-founding stage, when there’s maybe just the start of a product, my investment is a bet on the people. I look at three things:
Funding in general is back on the rise after cooling last year, especially around AI.
San Francisco has far more capital and investors, so your odds of raising are better there. That said, I’m optimistic about Canada. Many angels who lived in SF are moving back and committing to building the Canadian ecosystem.
The talent is here, Waterloo, Toronto, but we don’t have many big wins. Shopify is the standout, before that, it was BlackBerry. Wins matter for building the ecosystem. But in the next 10 years, I think Canada will grow a lot.
Two areas. First, global financial problems, things like remittances and FX costs in smaller markets. Many countries still pay 10% in foreign exchange fees, or face 50% inflation. Moving money globally is still hard, despite Revolut and Wise improving it. North America is lucky, we don’t deal with those problems daily, but they’re huge in other parts of the world.
Second, AI. But if you’re building in AI, make sure you’re “ChatGPT 8 proof.” Whatever you build should benefit from model improvements, not be destroyed by them. I’ve seen startups solve an immediate problem, only to be killed when GPT-6 arrives. There will be GPT-7, GPT-8, you should assume the models keep getting better and build so that helps you, not hurts you.
Charlie Feng's mission is an example of perseverance, adaptability, and the concept that trust underlies lasting products. With Agora, he is applying those principles to one of the most challenging issues in technology, creating fair, secure, and scalable governance systems for decentralized organizations.
Agora Website: agora.xyz
Charlie Feng on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/charliefeng
Charlie Feng on X: x.com/charliefeng
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