Russ walks through the path from IoT engineer to DeFi builder and how that led to Valiant on Fogo–and why most of what people think matters in perps actually doesn’t.

Here’s what builders and traders will pull from this conversation:

🔥 What early Solana actually felt like when everyone was shipping at the same time

🔥 Why hackathon teams won money then immediately fell apart

🔥 What Serum taught builders about latency breaking on chain orderbooks

🔥 Why CLMMs work early but fall apart as real liquidity shows up

🔥 How prop AMMs win by updating faster and avoiding getting picked off

🔥 Why launching a perps front end now takes weeks not years

🔥 How Hyperliquid removes most of the backend burden for builders

🔥 Why the hard part is still risk management and liquidity not UI

🔥 Why owning the user matters more than owning the liquidity

🔥 How the best products now get built directly with user feedback

0:00 Intro

00:26 From Engineer to Crypto Builder

02:05 Early Crypto and First Trades

06:57 Going Full Time Into DeFi

08:52 Early Solana Competition and Energy

10:52 AMMs and CLMMs Basics

14:15 Prop AMMs Explained

22:56 Building a Perps Front End with Hyperliquid

34:20 Community-Driven Product Development

Check out Valiant:

https://valiant.trade/

Connect with Sags:

https://x.com/RobertSagurton

Trade without Compromise @ Fogo

https://www.fogo.io/