Today we’d like to introduce you to Connor Borrego
Hi Connor, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Hi, I’m Connor Borrego, and today I run playhaus; a smart wallet for digital twin data. I believe that everyone using the internet should have the right to privacy by default, and want to use web3 technologies to give all users that ability.
My parents gave me my first computer in 2nd Grade, it was a bulky white Gateway 2000. It wasn’t hooked up to the internet & I wasn’t some hacking savant, I just played a lot of Zoo Tycoon & Command & Conquer Red Alert. This early familiarity with technology made me an eager guinea pig for the all the latest and greatest gadgets as I was growing up, though chasing that novelty is no longer something that fulfills me.
This exposure to technology allowed me to discover open source software, peer2peer encryption technologies like TOR and the Pirate Bay, where I delved deep into the catalog of american culture through movies, tv, and music before Netflix was a streaming giant. Now I wasn’t as savvy as my friends older brother to turn this library into a home streaming service complete with a interface branded for my family, but it sure inspired me to know it was possible.
My family has always been in medicine. Aunts, Uncles, Grandmas, Grandpas, Cousins, my mom, my dad, my step parents, now my wife and many of her family members. It’s an exhausting list, but it’s also why I went off to school thinking I was going to study neuroscience & become an anesthesiologist. Instead my love for neuroscience, transitioned to psychology, applied psychology, political communications, marketing, and eventually statistics & data science through a masters degree.
While in school I worked as an analyst in several government backed economic support programs, mostly funded by the DoD, which tee’d up well for my first role at AdAdapted, an adtech startup based in Ann Arbor, MI. I was employee number 9 when I started as an entry level sales cog, in the role I automated my prospecting work and used the free time to learn SQL, before starting my eventual masters program. This initiative got me moved to a product & operations role under the CEO. This was 2017 and I had only recently bought my first few Satoshi’s because Bitcoin was expensive for someone in my position at this point, but I spent my hours outside of work consuming content about the emerging world computer project, Ethereum.
After starting my masters, while still working at AdAdapted, I was approached by recruiters from Google. One of the companies that defined a lot of my childhood. My curiosity lead me to Google my way down a lot of Wikipedia rabbit holes. That opportunity allowed me to become a product expert for their AI powered bidding systems, and I got to help startups that raised between $500k and $50M to deploy those funds on Google and use a data warehouse to make it more efficient.
The final semester of my schooling was the summer of 2020, and for those in the web3 space already, they know it was DeFi summer. Where I took my winnings from BAT & XRP and parlayed them into a downpayment for my first home. I also received a fairly identity shattering letter for my birth mother, because as if this story wasn’t complicated enough, I am also adopted.
Anyways the culmination of all of theses things coming to a head at once prompted me to quit Google, dive head first into building an ethical solution with a viable business model to flip FAANG on it’s heads from everything I had learned to date.
That was 4 years ago and boy have I only learned more; mostly about the challenges of starting a business, much less a software startup. We are on track to break $100k this year for the first time since I had a salaried job and that has me fired up. But more importantly we have useable software built, several customers on long-term contracts, and a fired up team of supporters around us. We’ll be a hot investment pick soon enough, mark my words.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
No the road has not been smooth. I have a strong idea, great credentials, and work reputation, a really strong network. But fundraising has felt like a complete 180 from my expectations. I certainly didn’t think I’d be four years in with only really convincing my wife to invest in my. I also have my mom, and two best friends, but my wife’s investment 10x’s that. I am lucky to have the partner that I do, because without her we wouldn’t have been able to get to the operating breakeven we are at, and I still don’t even eat from the pie yet, which means neither does she. I didn’t think fundraising would be easy, but I didn’t think it would be this hard. I think the challenge is the technology I’ve chosen to utilize and the motivation for the company, and how the product benefits consumers don’t really align with their investment theses and goals. Which makes sense, because it’s mostly about stripping the control chokepoints from the systems that turn them into money extraction machines, but I digress.
Outside of fundraising, which is a challenge for most people, my other challenges have been primarily around hiring, firing, and people management. There are a lot of people out there who promise big things, demand the world, and deliver nothing but hot air. It’s best to pay these people with money, keep the contracts short and see how the pan out before giving them any real power or control. In most cases their ego and vanity is greater than their work ethic, and that is a toxic combination for startup that wants to move fast.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
playhaus is mostly known as a digital advertising agency and software development shop today. We set ourselves apart from other full-service digital agencies, because we use our data systems infrastructure to quantify the value of our creative work and our focus is delivering high quality creative to drive success. We do this by building bespoke data warehouses for all of our clients that pull their data from CRM, POS, ERP and other platforms like Google Ads or Facebook Pages to give you a holistic view of the health of your business, but more importantly use downstream customer activities to train the advertising algorithms, rather than site visitors that include many non-customers. We believe that this data extraction and transformation process in building the data warehouse is the foundation of returning control of that data over to users. Our mission is to leverage fully homomorphic encryption to log the states of that data to chain so that users can leverage this data as NFTs and using a smart contract resell it to the predictive analytics and forecasting systems that depend on it. Which is why we call our product a smart wallet and it’s purpose is to contain your digital twin data. We are just starting with business’ because they’ll pay for it.
Today this mostly results in us using the data to bring customer acquisition costs down by 30% or more with all of our customers.
What would you say have been one of the most important lessons you’ve learned?
There is nothing that you are above learning how to do. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it made the boy, king.
Pricing:
- Agency Starting Retainer $3,500 / mo
- Software Early Access $500 / mo
- Ad Hoc Consultation $300 / hr
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.playhaus.tv
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/playhaustv/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/playhaustv
- Twitter: https://x.com/URplayhaus
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@playhaustv
- Other: https://www.playhaus.agency
