When I was 14, a friend showed me a baseball signed by Anthony Rizzo. The ball itself was worth less than a dollar, but, as my friend explained, the name made it worth hundreds.
At the time, my family and I were missionaries in Rwanda. Before that, we'd been in China. My young self had little exposure to the wild world of celebrities and fame happening across the pond in America, which is probably why the idea fascinated me so much: a baseball was worth more simply because someone's name was on it. And it wasn't just athletes. A T-shirt jumps a hundredfold in value with Taylor Swift's signature on it. Same for an actor, or even a politician.
I was hooked. But how the heck could you actually track this mythical value?
I distinctly remember being at my grandma's house in Andalusia, Alabama, shooting baskets on the rusty hoop in her driveway. I wanted to build a company. I wanted to be part of this fascinating market. But first, I needed a name. I knew I wanted it to sound high-class and elite. I liked the word Porsche; it rolled off the tongue and sounded expensive. I liked Louis Vuitton and Versace too. Okay, so high-class words have a P and a V. Throw some vowels in between. Pauv? I like that.
Ever since that day, I knew I was going to start a company. It would be called Pauv. And we were going to price the value of a name.
Easier said than done.
For the rest of high school, the Pauv questions kept mulling in the back of my mind. What made one signature more valuable than another? What if it was on a ragged T-shirt versus a clean, new hat? Are signatures even the best way to capture the value of a name?
That led me to even more questions. What if it was like a stock? That seems right. But what gives a stock value? How many shares are there? How do you determine any of this madness? All of that was way out of my depth.
Then, in 2020, COVID hit. With eight hours' notice, we evacuated Rwanda overnight. A year later I was 18, enrolled at Harding University in central Arkansas on a full-ride academic scholarship, with enough dual credits to start as a second-semester sophomore.
Education time. I graduated in May 2025, at 22, with an MBA, a bachelor's in finance, and a bachelor's in international business.
Then I moved to Austin, Texas with my best friends, sat down at a desk with a few thousand dollars in my bank account, a computer, and a plan: make Pauv.
From years in finance classes and tinkering with crypto and the stock market, I knew two things for sure: these "names" had to be digitally tradeable, and each one needed a supply. My first instinct was a normal order book, but that only works when there are buyers and sellers on both sides, and nobody's lining up to make a market for a nobody. What about x*y=k, the standard AMM? It works, but it needs real upfront liquidity just to open, and if you skip that by listing everyone at the same tiny starting price, you've basically built a launchpad for massive rug pulls.
So, a bonding curve. Supply starts at zero, and the second someone buys, the math sets a price they can instantly sell back into. No order book, no waiting; you can trade anybodyin a single click. That was close. But one problem remained: if I wanted to list LeBron at $40 or Drake at $30, the curve had to allow downward pressure on the very first order, otherwise a new name could only ever go up. Perps? Way too complicated for a normal person, and worse, we'd be fabricating the price instead of letting the market decide it.
We needed something that didn't exist yet.
So I sat down and started building. Barely eating. Barely sleeping. I backtested, scribbled on whiteboards, and created, scrapped, and redesigned a dozen models. Finally, after about a month of 14-hour days, I emerged with VBC 4.1: the Valence Bonding Curve. It's a linear bonding curve with a softplus. But most importantly, supply can go negative. When you "short" a name, betting it'll drop, the curve mints negative tokens, pushing the price down by the same amount going "long" would have pushed it up. And the softplus makes sure the price can get close to, but never touch zero.
I had something workable.
Using a Claude-assisted MVP, I raised some investment through a SAFE, and between August 2025 and February 2026 I worked my tail off on compliance, regulation, and legal.
The first problem: we couldn't even get a business checking account. We were too high-risk. An unproven model. We couldn't hold customer funds, take fiat payments, or facilitate transactions. All in all, I got turned down by 42 financial institutions before piecing together the stack to make it work. And there were 100 times I almost just gave up and walked away.
But even through the setbacks, people believed in the idea. I met a veteran senior developer who joined full-time as CTO, Febin Mathew. I met others: Jake Peterson, our CMO; Brent Shows, our COO; and Angel Mohammad, our product designer. None of us took a salary. Every month or two, I'd wrangle enough investment from angels to cover our legal expenses, and barely enough to cover rent.
We also realized we needed the network effect. It had to be shareable, viral. So what if anybody could list themselves? Completely free, no qualifications, 10 minutes. The value of YOUR name becomes a tradable asset, and we give you 0.5% of every transaction on it as passive income.
The guitarist pouring their soul out on TikTok. The high school quarterback leaving it all on the field. The artist spending weeks on a single painting. We wanted their fans to share in their success story, and for them to profit off their potential.
In May 2026 we landed a big-fish investor (mind you, before a single dollar of revenue or a single user) who prepaid six months of rent on a three-story, five-bedroom house. The team and I live and work there. The dream. We soft launched Pauv in June 2026 and have seen insane growth. In the first month we had 200 million views on social media, 5,000 trades, and hundreds of people wanting to be a part of our story.
It all comes back to that realization I had when I was 14: names have value. People have potential. And we let you trade on the world's greatest asset:
each other.