Mike Silagadze and the trouble with sitting still

In March 2009, Mohsen Shahini came home from class and discovered that his living room had changed professions. There were computers. There were co-op students. His roommate, Mike Silagadze, had converted their shared apartment into an office. Shahini later joked that joining the startup was hardly a choice. The company had already moved in.

It is a better opening to Silagadze’s career than a funding announcement. Before the investors, the acquisitions and the second act in cryptocurrency, there was someone arranging the furniture around a business that did not yet have much of a business. Shahini took time away from his doctorate. The two began building what would become Top Hat.

Silagadze had graduated from the University of Waterloo in 2007 with a degree in electrical engineering. Shahini was a teaching assistant who knew the peculiar frustration of explaining calculus without knowing what was happening inside the students’ heads. A quiet lecture hall could mean comprehension. It could also mean that everyone had privately abandoned ship.

Their answer was to give those students something to do. Top Hat Monocle, as the company was first called, let them respond to questions and interact with demonstrations on devices they already carried. The phone, ordinarily a professor’s natural enemy, had been offered a job on the teaching staff.

A professor, a phone and an actual customer

The early product supported smartphones, older mobile phones, laptops and iPods. Professors could ask questions and see responses while there was still time to change the explanation. The appeal was practical: a teacher could learn whether a room understood a concept before the exam revealed the answer several weeks too late.

Waterloo’s engineering dean, Adel Sedra, was among the professors the founders approached. He supplied pilot funding and advice about charging students directly rather than licensing the software to institutions. By September 2011, the company had 12 employees and roughly 20,000 to 25,000 student users. It had also moved out of the university’s Accelerator Centre into its own Waterloo office.

Silagadze brought an engineer’s appetite for building things. As an undergraduate, he had started a robotics team that, he later recalled, grew to 80 members. But he also carried a warning from an earlier job: sophisticated technology could absorb years of work before anyone established what a customer actually wanted.

One early Top Hat user began using the software outside class, an application the founders had not planned. They expanded the product accordingly. For a founder who liked setting the direction, this required a useful accommodation: sometimes a customer was already standing farther down the road.

The Mazda did not make the meeting

There was another education underway, this one in finding money. In his own account of a 2009 fundraising trip, Silagadze described driving a 2005 Mazda 3 toward an important investor pitch when a truck struck the car. The Mazda was wrecked. He took a cab and arrived about 15 minutes late.

He made the presentation and eventually secured the investment. Years afterward, the investors told him that they had been uncertain about both education technology and his experience. His determination to turn up helped persuade them. It is an unusually expensive way to demonstrate punctuality, even allowing for the quarter-hour.

The anecdote became part of how he explained perseverance. It also makes the early company feel less inevitable. An investor could say no. A car could become unusable. The next meeting still needed a founder, and the founder still needed a way to get there.

Twelve years, then a different chair

Top Hat grew beyond classroom questions into course materials and digital textbooks. By 2020, Silagadze was writing about the value students received for the money they spent on higher education. The company announced a $55 million Series D round that February, with plans to accelerate the move from printed textbooks to interactive material.

His argument made room for the professor. Technology should help educators understand students’ performance, adapt a lesson and build more engaging coursework. He wanted better educational value alongside lower costs for course materials. That was a more demanding brief than making a lecture look modern. It required the software to earn its place in the class.

In 2020, Waterloo awarded Silagadze and Shahini its Team Alumni Achievement Medal. The recognition connected a company serving millions of students to the apartment where the pair had started. The furniture experiment had become an institution large enough to have its own institutional memories.

The next year brought a handover. Top Hat announced $130 million in Series E financing from Georgian, and Silagadze selected Joe Rohrlich, formerly Bazaarvoice’s chief revenue officer, to succeed him. In his February 2021 announcement, he thanked a workforce of 500 and explained that the company needed a leader with experience taking a business through its next stage.

He would remain on the board. That detail matters to the story: leaving the chief executive’s chair was a decision about how the company should grow. The enterprise he had started could continue under someone else. A founder’s name on the origin story did not require his hand on every subsequent page.

“Boring is what we are going for.”

Silagadze had been buying Bitcoin since 2011. For years, crypto ran alongside Top Hat, an interest rather than his full-time occupation. He later said that the emergence of functioning decentralized-finance products around 2019 and 2020 helped persuade him to commit his working life to the field.

In 2021, he and Andrew McGrath, a former Top Hat employee and the founder of Checkout 51, launched Gadze Finance. Its first fund began with $25 million under management. Their proposed approach combined lending and other yield strategies, liquidity provision and arbitrage. Silagadze’s stated preference was wonderfully unhelpful to anyone trying to sell a glamorous crypto lifestyle: “Boring is what we are going for.”

That was an ambition, rather than a guarantee about investment outcomes. It nevertheless put a useful marker down. He wanted products that people could use for financial purposes beyond wagering on the next price jump. Meanwhile, he had joined Ripple Ventures as a venture partner, helping other founders with the work of building software businesses.

His next company returned him to making a product. By February 2023, ether.fi had raised $5.3 million. Its initial proposition concerned Ethereum staking: letting users help secure the network while retaining control of their keys and delegating the technical operation of validators. The problem had changed completely from classroom participation. The task of persuading people to trust new software remained.

“Boring is what we are going for.”

Mike Silagadze, on Gadze Finance, 2021

An island, a small team, a large obligation

Silagadze relocated to the Cayman Islands. He explained the choice in concrete terms: proximity to North America, convenient working hours with Toronto and New York, and a workable process for hiring people internationally. He wanted to establish the company in the place where it actually operated.

Asked what might strengthen Cayman’s technology community, he proposed an engineering university. It was a revealing answer from someone whose first company had grown around Waterloo’s students, professors and support for entrepreneurship. Even after leaving education software, his explanation for how a technology community might develop began with a school.

By May 2024, ether.fi was handling more than $4 billion in total value locked with a team of 12. Silagadze described both excitement and pressure. He spoke about the obligation to users and the risks that could emerge when financial protocols became interconnected. Rapid growth had brought work that a celebratory graph could not perform.

He was already describing a broader product suite: staking, investment vaults and a spending account. The ambition was for people to save, invest and spend without repeatedly moving back into conventional financial services. To make that happen, the company would need more than an attractive return on a screen. It would need to work when someone wanted to buy something.

The next test comes with a receipt

In 2025, Silagadze described keeping close contact with the people behind ether.fi’s assets. “We know probably half the TVL,” he said, explaining that the team knew those users and maintained conversations with them. Behind a number usually displayed as anonymous capital were customers whose questions could still reach the people building the product.

The pattern recalls the professor who used Top Hat outside class. A product can grow through a close reading of what people do with it. At ether.fi, that meant extending beyond staking toward a coordinated set of financial tools, including the Cash card. Silagadze’s proposed destination was an alternative to the conventional banking relationship.

By August 2026, ether.fi’s summer release brought trading, borrowing, spending and transfers into a redesigned app. The company reported more than half a million members and a $2 billion annual transaction run-rate. Those are company-reported measures of its progress, rather than a measure of Silagadze’s personal wealth. His ambition was direct: “Our goal is to replace the traditional bank for most users”.

The October update was less theatrical and, for that reason, interesting. Users gained downloadable account and card statements, transaction exports and proof-of-ownership letters. There is a particular kind of product maturity in remembering that a customer may eventually need to satisfy an accountant or a landlord. A financial revolution still encounters a request for a PDF.

Silagadze’s career has moved from students answering a professor’s questions to customers answering questions about their money. Across those different settings, his work keeps returning to participation, useful information and the mechanics of getting something done. The living room became an office because he put people and computers in it. The next ambition will be judged in similarly concrete terms: whether the thing works when somebody needs it.