This is a strange and, on close inspection, coherent career. Smolin studied finance at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas in the years right after the 2008 crisis, and went into the trade the diploma pointed toward. He was a trainee at Group One Trading in 2013, an exchange-traded derivatives sales trader at UBS by 2014, then at Gelber Group, then a research analyst covering private equity and venture at Hall Capital Partners. The résumé through his mid-twenties is the résumé of a person about to spend the next thirty years pricing options in a Chicago office park.
He did not do that. In 2017 he co-founded Headliner, a fan-engagement platform pitched around ticket-gated experiences for artists and their audiences. He was CEO through November 2021, at which point he stepped away and, almost immediately, co-founded Hang. The two companies solve close-adjacent problems. Headliner was ticket-gated. Hang, in its original form, was token-gated. In both, the customer is a brand or an artist trying to identify its most valuable fans and give them something the merely curious cannot buy.
Hang raised its Series A in July 2022, a moment when the phrase "NFT-powered membership platform" still cleared conference-room tables. Paradigm led. The rest of the round read like a Rolodex nobody had ever assembled before: Tiger Global, which was writing crossover checks into anything with software revenue; Good Friends, the consumer-focused firm from the founders of Warby Parker and Harry's; Kevin Durant's Thirty Five Ventures; MrBeast's Night Ventures; and Shrug Capital, which specializes in aesthetically self-aware early stage rounds. The narrative was that Budweiser was going to sell you an NFT that unlocked stadium suites, that Bleacher Report would issue collectibles, that Pinkberry would tokenize your yogurt punch card, and that Hang would be the picks-and-shovels vendor behind all of it.
That narrative did not fully materialize. What did materialize, quietly, was a customer list of consumer brands who did not particularly care about the NFT part. They cared about the loyalty program part. And they cared even more, once the crypto trade wound down and the AI trade wound up, about a piece of software that could take their transactional data, clean it, segment it, and send the right offer to the right customer at the right hour of the right day. So Hang's homepage in 2026 says: "The First AI Platform Built for Marketers." The word "Web3" does not appear. The word "NFT" does not appear. What appears instead is a customer roll call that would look at home on the trade-show floor at a National Restaurant Association meeting: Just Salad, Jeni's, Killer Burger, Boba Guys, Taziki's.
The pivot is real, but describing it as a pivot slightly overstates the change. A person who watched Hang closely between 2022 and 2026 would say the company kept doing what it always did - taking on a mid-market consumer brand, ingesting its customer data, and running the loyalty program - and periodically restated what a loyalty program was. In 2022 a loyalty program was a wallet address holding a token. In 2026 a loyalty program is a machine-learning model outputting a next-best offer. The person on the receiving end, the marketing director at a fifty-unit burger chain in Portland, cares mostly about redemption rates and lifetime value. Smolin, having spent years selling to that person, appears to have concluded that the buyer's preferences change more slowly than the industry's vocabulary, and has aligned his vocabulary accordingly.
This is, as software careers go, unusually literal about the thing every founder claims to have done. "We pivoted while keeping the same customer" is a line you hear at panels. Hang appears to have actually done it. The company still lists 55 employees on Apollo, still runs out of New York, and still counts Paradigm on its cap table. Smolin, per his own posts on LinkedIn, still spends most of his time selling. The people he sells to still want the same thing they always did, which is more revenue per guest and lower cost of acquisition. He gives them software. The software has a different label on it now.
The most Smolin-specific detail may be the Twitter handle: @Estimatted. It reads like the running joke of someone who once spent nights modeling implied volatility and now runs a company whose entire selling point is prediction. Estimating - customer lifetime value, next-best offer, the odds a lapsed guest returns after a targeted push - is what Hang does. He named himself after the job before he had it.
There is a version of consumer software history in which the loyalty layer becomes the CRM, and in which the CRM becomes the marketing agent, and in which the marketing agent operates autonomously on a brand's behalf between roughly ten in the morning and roughly two in the afternoon, when the marketing director is in a meeting. If that version arrives, Hang is well positioned for it, in part because Smolin has spent five years selling roughly the same product to roughly the same people under three different names. The trick, he seems to have decided, is not being right about the wrapper. The trick is being right about the customer.