I heard the story of someone who started with $200 and made it through 12 years without any funding, and it was truly fascinating. In a podcast, Bobby Ong of CoinGecko laid out his entrepreneurial journey—not just a simple success story, but his perspective on the market was really different.

It’s interesting what led him to get into cryptocurrency in 2013. He majored in economics, and after the financial crisis, he focused on studying monetary policy. But after graduating and facing real-life situations like negative interest rates, he said he felt his textbooks were all wrong. So he taught himself programming and discovered Bitcoin on Hacker News, and what truly drew him in was the idea of “being able to control my own money.” Bank account money disappears if the bank goes under, but when it’s in my wallet, Bitcoin is truly mine—that realization hit him.

CoinGecko was established in April 2014. At the time, there were many serious-sounding names like Coinbase and CoinDesk, but they chose animal names because they wanted to add a bit of fun. They said it was because geckos are adaptable, fast, and widely spread. In the first five years, they ran CoinGecko intermittently while doing full-time digital marketing, but when the cryptocurrency market took off in late 2017, they began to focus on it seriously.

The real turning point, they said, was the DeFi boom in 2021. Back then, major platforms weren’t interested in long-tail assets on DEXs, but CoinGecko perfectly integrated on-chain data and tracked all DeFi tokens. That was what made it unique. Thanks to that, they secured the lead for 6 to 12 months and became the “preferred choice for cryptocurrency data.”

It’s also interesting why they didn’t raise funding. Early on, they talked with venture capitalists. But the investors in Malaysia didn’t know much about cryptocurrency, and people in Silicon Valley thought it was impossible to make money through advertising. In the end, the lack of funds led to creativity. While thinking about how to do marketing without a huge budget, they focused on SEO, and that paid off.

There’s something interesting in the comparison with CoinMarketCap. He said the only real advantage they had was SEO. They started 11 months earlier and secured a lot of media coverage, so backlinks piled up—because journalists automatically linked to them. They really created a self-reinforcing cycle. But CoinGecko supports more on-chain DEX tokens, and in terms of API stability and accuracy, industry experts recognize them.

He was also optimistic about NFTs. Even if things look like a downturn right now, he believed that most future physical assets would be realized as NFTs on-chain. However, he said we still don’t know who the true winner will be in the future asset market. After all, back in 2000, no one could imagine Uber or Airbnb, so in the crypto space, he doesn’t think the “Uber” has appeared yet.

He was cautious about rumors of a sale. CoinGecko said it’s a profitable independent company and that it is regularly reviewing strategic options. There’s no set timing for when it would be a good time to sell, and there’s also an element of luck. Ultimately, he said it depends on the judgment of the co-founders and whether it’s the right or wrong decision for the company.

What comes through in this interview is that CoinGecko isn’t just a simple data platform—it’s a service created by people with a crypto philosophy. Their determination to provide users with accurate data even under funding pressure, and their agility to respond quickly to changes in the market—those are what likely made CoinGecko.