Hany Rashwan didn’t set out to build a a global crypto powerhouse — he just wanted to make his mom’s life a little bit easier. Along the way, he pulled off what we think is the largest exit by an Egyptian startup founder — ever — selling his crypto startup 21Shares, the first and largest crypto ETF issuer in the world, to FalconX, the leading prime brokerage for digital asset in a transaction made public late last month.

Hany won’t say how much the transaction was worth, but a source with first-hand knowledge tells us it’s a bit north of USD 1.2 bn.

From an idea designed to make life easier for two moms (Hany’s and his co-founder’s), 21Shares today has c. USD 12 bn in assets under management across more than 50 exchange-traded products and funds listed on stock markets in the United States, UK, Switzerland, Australia, Austria, Brazil, France, Germany, Sweden, and the UAE, among others.

We caught up with Hany between flights to unpack how he built the business, why it was the right time to exit, what’s next, and how being an Egyptian was one of the superpowers that let him build what he did. Edited excerpts from our conversation:

ENTERPRISE: What is 21Shares? What does it do?

HANY RASHWAN: 21Shares makes it easy to invest in crypto — without having to deal with or touch crypto. Normally, if you want to buy BTC or ETH, you’d need to open a crypto wallet, manage private keys, or use crypto exchanges. Instead, 21Shares packages each crypto asset into a traditional financial product — think of it like a stock or an exchange-traded fund — that anyone can buy using their regular bank or brokerage account the same way they would if they were buying Apple or Nvidia shares.

E: Let’s go back to the beginning. Why crypto in the first place? Take us back to that moment.

HR: I moved to San Francisco to do my first startup when I was 20 years old. It was a payments company, so I found myself in the middle of fintech in Silicon Valley. That’s why and when I first heard about BTC, sometime around 2011. I remember getting c. USD 50 of BTC from someone I knew, not knowing what to do with them, seeing the USD 50 become USD 15, and subsequently losing the whole flashdrive. It just really wasn’t that important back then.

E: That’s real money in today’s terms…

HR: The USD 50 was 3 BTC, which were then priced at around USD 15 each, but today would be valued at USD 110k — meaning my flippant attitude back then prevented me from seeing USD 50 go up 23,000x to more than USD 350k within 15 years…

None of this is unique. Everyone has dismissed crypto or BTC at some point. Some still today.

I sold my startup, Payout, in 2016 and started thinking about what to do next. I wanted to stay in fintech and was exploring a few ideas in that domain, but crypto’s promise was unlike anything else. Though nascent at the time, it promised something that none of the other fintech ideas did: an instantaneously global offering. Fintech is so regulated and complex that you often as a startup become siloed to one country or one region. Crypto, on the other hand, was always-on and global from day one.

I believed in that bullish crypto vision and still do today, though it’s much more refined today. Ironically, though, I never intended to build a company in this space at all. That part happened almost by accident.

E: What was the original thesis for 21Shares, or Amun as it was known when you started. What was white space in the crypto market you were trying to fill? What made you say, “Yeah, a crypto asset management business — that’s the ticket.”

HR: Oh, the thesis back then was so simple: We weren’t even trying to build 21Shares at the beginning. A good friend of mine and I had the same problem. Various members of our families, including our mothers, had by 2017 heard about and were interested in investing in BTC and ETH, but they couldn’t find simple products they understood and they were deeply uncomfortable with crypto exchanges or handling their own keys and custody. All we were looking for at the beginning was a product for them to use.

We ran into some really terrible products that, unfortunately, a lot of people were forced to use, and we then asked ourselves, ‘How hard could this possibly be to build?’ Turns out it was pretty damn difficult. That good friend of mine was Ophelia [Snyder], who became my co-founder and built 21Shares with me from scratch.

It took us about a year and a half to find a jurisdiction that wanted us and that made sense. We eventually found our perfect home in Switzerland and launched the world’s first physically-backed crypto exchange-traded product in November 2018. My Egyptian mother and Ophelia’s Italian mother were very happy.

But even back then, we didn’t really comprehend how big the opportunity would turn out to be. The first product we built was a basket composed of the top five crypto assets. Our customers then asked for a single-asset ETF, like a BTC ETF or an ETH ETF. So those were our next five products and we grew quite slowly, slowly for a couple of years before then riding the crypto wave up to bns of USD in AUM from dozens of products across dozens of geographies serving mns of customers.

In retrospect, 21Shares was much harder than we thought, took much longer than we wanted, and turned out to be much larger than we imagined.

E: You mentioned to me that the company was founder-majority controlled and profitable for seven of its eight years. How did you pull that off in a frothy climate?

HR: We pulled that off because of the climate, not in spite of it.

Our company and our products were written off by most experts, both crypto bulls and crypto bears. While the company’s products may seem obvious today with how popular BTC (and other crypto) ETFs are today, the entire crypto asset class was dismissed by most back when we started. To make matters worse, native crypto users thought back then that ETFs were completely counter to the decentralized philosophy, not appreciating the central role ETFs would take in bringing institutional and retail money into the space.

So when we launched, we were a little ahead of our time and the company at the beginning was a little of a slow burn. Switzerland has a more nascent tech startup scene and American Silicon Valley VCs aren’t really known for investing much outside of the Valley — let alone America.

As a result of all of that, very few investors were willing to give us money at the beginning, which is the stage where most of the dilution and board seats happen. By the time they caught up to the fact that this would be a great investment, the company was already doing nine-figures in revenues, worth too much, and was too large for most of these seed investors to invest in.

That’s how we managed to maintain control for so long. We were forced to be profitable to survive. But because we were profitable, we as a company thrived with vision as founders firmly in control of the company’s direction.

E: Did you learn anything from your previous businesses that was key to your success building 21Shares?

HR: I learned something from each product company I built and I have built three such companies so far.

With my first company, I learned the importance of the co-founding partner you have. It’s not enough to be excellent at what you each do. Given that even semi-successful startups take close to 10 years to get to that stage, who you do it with is of paramount importance. You and your co-founders must work well together and that often means things like shared values and frameworks. My 21Shares co-founder and I couldn’t be more different as people, but when it comes to values and the important stuff, I can’t remember us ever having a disagreement. That support and lack of infighting allowed us to build a crypto giant without the internal distractions a lot of startups sometimes have.

With my second company, I learned the importance of markets. Not even a great founder could succeed if the market is bad. A terrible founder can get lucky sometimes if the market is massive or euphoric or very fast growing, and we’ve seen some examples of this in every bubble from AI to crypto. The most powerful position is to grab a lot of market share in a market that’s overlooked because it’s so small but has rapidly compounding growth. That leads to the kind of success 21Shares had, starting contrarian enough that no one notices but then seeing both the products and market size exponentially improve.

With 21Shares, I saw first hand the magic of owning good distribution. Once we had a good product and great distribution, we were able to grow at a rate neither old or new competitors could catch-up with and it’s part of what led to such a great outcome in the end. There’s an adage that first-time founders fixate on product and second-time founders fixate on distribution. I’ve personally found that to be quite true.

E: Why Switzerland?

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