Rekt Survivor – Startup Scars & Battle-Tested Lessons in Web2 & Web3 with Michael Michelini

They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. In this raw and unfiltered episode of Global From Asia, host Michael Michelini takes the stage to share his most painful startup scars—from a failed 3PL relationship in LA, to a DAO rug pull on Bitcoin Pizza Day, and even a 4-year-long Web3 project that still hasn’t delivered.

Recorded live in Bangkok during a community event, this episode dives deep into the real side of entrepreneurship in Asia—especially in crypto and cross-border e-commerce.

Whether you’re building in Web2 or Web3, this is your reminder that getting rekt is part of the game. This is the Rekt Survivor episode.

• 🎟 Cross Border Summit 2025 – Chiang Mai – Nov 3–5, 2025 event for cross-border leaders
• 🏝 GFAVIP Villa Mastermind – Pattaya 2025 – Application-only mastermind for high‑level e‑commerce sellers
• 🛒 Hamza.Market – Decentralized ecommerce platform founded by Mike

Thank you everybody for listening in.

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Speaker 7: [00:00:00] Episode 465 of Global Formia, and we’re talking about getting wrecked in wrecked survivor wreck stories today and the show, and I’m here. Just had a nice pizza in Ang Mai and a coconut next to me. Let’s tune in.

Speaker 8: Welcome to the Global from Asia Podcast, where the daunting process of running an international business is broken down into straight up actionable advice.

And now your host, Michael Michelini.

Speaker 7: Thank you so much for choosing to watch or maybe listen to this old podcast, global from Asia, consistency, Andre New Zealand. Coming to Cross Border Summit and appreciate you, man. Don’t know if you watched or listened to this show, but he, he is coming to the summit. He is coming back to China or Asia and he’ll be coming down the cross border summit, Chiang Mai in November and he was chatting to me and he is like, I’m one of the most consistent people on content [00:01:00] he knows, which I was like, wow, for real.

But it’s almost like ingrained in my blood, actually. Speaking of my blood, my, just talked to my dad, he’s given over 120. Gallons of blood since I was a kid and he’s going right now. I think as a recording this shout out to my dad. Saving lives, giving blood. Mine’s a different kind of blood. Content, but I feel like I have to keep these going.

465 shows, and this one is, I was down in Bangkok a week or two ago and I did a video blog on Mike’s blog, but some people are like, oh, I want the full talk. So I have like a 20 or so minute talk of my story getting wrecked, meaning like getting destroyed in Web3 on crypto as well as in web two in e-commerce.

So I figured I put the full one on this show. Where I am pretty raw. I don’t, people know me. I get a lot of people saying, don’t talk about the bad stuff. Don’t, [00:02:00] don’t, don’t, don’t do those. It’s not good for your brand or blah, blah, blah, but I keep it real. I’ve talked about failures a lot. These are some epic failures.

But without failures, I don’t believe you’d have success. If you don’t put yourself out there and you’re not willing to fail, you’re not gonna succeed. And especially in Asia, there’s still this culture of families or culture pressure to, to not fail and lose face for your family. But I hope people are getting over that hump.

Uh, I’m trying to do my part, so I’m sharing some failures today, so I hope you enjoy. And then after we’ll talk a little bit more about those. After the, after the interview, after the talk. See you in the talk. Do you enjoy the podcast? Global? Amazing. Do you enjoy all the community events that we do? The best way to support is coming out to our annual cross border [00:03:00] summit.com in Chang Mai this November 3rd, fourth, and fifth, 20, 25.

I have amazing speakers, ama, amazing people getting together. We’re pushing the limits, we’re making things happen. This is where the movers and shakers and the deal makers come. It’s a limited supply of attendees and tickets, and we have been selling out every year, so I recommend checking out earlier cross border summit.com.

So I’m Mike Micheli, and I’m, I’m not gonna share much about my project today, but I’m a founder of Hamza Market. It’s a platform to buy and sell physical products with cryptocurrency. And decentralizing Amazon Ada Shoppy to give sellers like me real ownership and power. But I’m gonna share some of my rec stories.

I have so many rec stories, but I’m gonna share three. It’s personal

Speaker 10: or

Speaker 7: someone’s

Speaker 10: else.

Speaker 7: Everything is, everything is personal.

Speaker 10: Your friend.

Speaker 7: Okay, cool. So [00:04:00] in web two, right after Coronavirus, I, I start a new brand. Called asato. You can look it up. It’s actually to, we survived being wrecked, but we sent two containers, 40 foot containers, ocean containers from Thailand to la and my friend was starting a three pl, which is like a warehousing company.

If anyone knows three pl, it’s like third party logistics. He says, I’ll take care of you. Just send the containers and we’ll, I’ll give you the a really good deal. It turns out the deal was, I don’t know, it’s just. $25,000 to get my products out of his warehouse. So I felt like I went into like a, a Venus fly trap where I sent about a hundred thousand dollars of product, plus I spent $20,000 on container shipping from Thailand and, and then I wanna send it to Amazon.

And then he is like, oh, the receiving fee and my software fee. And I don’t know, I guess. It really sucks ’cause he was my friend for like 11 years and I think he was going bankrupt ’cause he did a [00:05:00] couple other, my friends, I think he was just trying to get as much money as he could. But basically I lost, I somehow got half of it out.

I paid him some of it and another logistics company picked it up and took it out. But we only got one trip and the other. A trip. He left it outside and it got soaked in the rain in la so that was pretty wrecked. But the product, you can look it up, Asato, it’s doing seven figures now. So we’re, we’re a million dollar brand on Amazon, so I survived.

We kept sending product and financing more product to, to dig out, but that’s the first wreck story. That was 2022. But this doesn’t, no, I started with web two ’cause every thinks web threes are scams. But there’s scammers everywhere, right? There’s scammers in web two, Web3. So you, you, and maybe he has a reason, honestly, it really is horrible.

Like he, he doesn’t answer my calls. He doesn’t respond to me. So I, I don’t know what his reason was, but I guess he had a reason. But, uh, just, you just keep going in my opinion. [00:06:00] I mean, that’s being a founder. Being an entrepreneur, whether it’s as an investor or as entrepreneur, you’re gonna get wrecked. But this is.

I can’t really even read it myself. The slides,

Speaker 9: man.

Speaker 7: It’s, it’s, it’s ai man. AI made this for me. I put the text and it’s, it made it in Gamma Gamma. But the point is you get, you gonna get erected in any kind of business if, of course, you try to protect your downside. But I guess I should have had a contract with them.

But what am I gonna do? Sue ’em, even in web two? Whatcha gonna do in web two? People think web two is safer. You know, if you’re a small business, I even if it’s a hundred thousand dollars, am I really gonna go to court over a hundred thousand dollars? It’s not worth it. Even a hundred grand. So people think Web two is safer than Web3, but I mean, you can.

Small businesses scam each other all the time in Web two, and there’s nothing you can do about it. So the next one is a Web3 wreck. So this one was Sentinel blockchain. I know the founders, I know the foundation. I pitched them during, in 2021 to make a [00:07:00] hardware project of a router. So it’s a decentralized VPN, it’s DVPN ticker.

It. I pitched the foundation to, to let me, when I was stuck in China during coronavirus to make a physical device, like a deep end project for their protocol. So that people could mine by providing bandwidth with A VPN. And I pre-sold a hundred of ’em and I raised money, and then I paid 30% on the factory in Shenzhen, China, and then the software couldn’t integrate on the hardware.

So it was a, it was a huge nightmare to get. I, I’m also doxed in that project. Now I know why people are sometimes anonymous in Web3 because you get a random, anonymous people harassing you, like everywhere they find you. Yeah, yeah. They find you everywhere. So I have people finding me on every platform and they can get they, I guess because they’re anonymous, they think they can just say anything to you and it burned me out for [00:08:00] sure.

Uh, but we’re still working on this. Honestly, if anybody wants to test a new software, I just developed. Yeah. It is around raspberry pie if you’re willing to tinker the ra raspberry pie. Okay. Yeah, we’re, we’re working on it still, but yeah, it’s been four years. Four years. Man. I can’t believe 2021 is four years ago, but it was, we started this in April, 2021, but in, in Web3, wrecked.

A lot of people over promise, maybe even myself included, sometimes you, you think it’s easier than it would be, oh, I have this, just this blockchain protocol and it has a VPN service, and why can’t we just put hardware and integrate it? Things are not as easy and in Web3 is so easy, like, oh, we’re gonna make tokens and we’re gonna have incentive pools and then the first batch of buyers and get a higher incentive pool to, to use our hardware.

But there’s so many, especially I think it is true, like Web3, people really don’t execute. Web3 people are really good at marketing and hype, but when it actually comes to delivering, yeah. Web3 people like they, they disappear. There’s so [00:09:00] many pro, I’ve gotten so deep into a lot of things. I, I don’t want to expose other things ’cause the foundation would kill me and I’m not part of that, that project formally as a foundation member.

But there’s a lot, a lot of, a lot I got, I learned a lot in that project. And then a recent one. Coin Pizza day. Anybody get some pizza on Bitcoin? Pizza day?

Speaker 10: Yep. Without pizza. They were getting pizza.

Speaker 7: Yeah. Every

Speaker 10: go, every event here in Thailand you’ll get pizza. True.

Speaker 7: Where’s the

Speaker 10: true?

Speaker 11: Yeah. Thailand is all about, let’s get into the cheapest pizza.

That’s, that was my thing of binary holding. So binary holding. If you’re hearing this pure pizza, it is the worst fucking thing you can do for people. Like, don’t be cheap. Like it’s 300 bucks pizzas. Why are you feeding those bread?

Speaker 7: So I’m in, I’m, I’m based in Chang, Mai Chang, Mai Thailand, and I heard about Pizza Dao.

So Pizza Dao is, is a Dao I think it’s been around like [00:10:00] since the last cycle. I don’t know what year. It was like 20 18, 20 19, maybe even earlier. And they have a Bitcoin pizza day every, every year. And they, they have funds. So basically it’s, it’s a cool project. So you can apply to be an organizer to organize a pizza day in your city.

So I didn’t do it. I didn’t even know about it, but I heard about it. Some anonymous person applied to do the Ang Mai Pizza Day, put out posters, found a location, promoted it. I heard about it. I started telling my friends, I go there. He rugged heed bill. Rugged, the, the, the guy didn’t show up and was anonymous, deleted his telegram, deleted a Facebook event, deleted like all this stuff.

And then I contacted the Dow Pizza, Dow guys a, a a a day. And he just wanted, and I was like, dude, it’s like the guy, they ghosted and then they’re like, oh yeah, we, he pushed us to pay. Yesterday ’cause he said 300 people [00:11:00] registered and he didn’t have enough money. So he like took like, I don’t know, I think like four or five, 600 US dollars.

And then, and then rugged.

Speaker 11: What? Yeah. So you get it right. Like, so I’m a member of za da. We actually hosted Za Dao in Bangkok. We had over a hundred people attend. I’ve been a member of Pizza Do for three years. I know this chang my story, but that’s just the way things go. Unfortunately. When we talk about decentralized, I’m sorry.

Speaker 7: No, go ahead. Go ahead.

Speaker 11: We talk about decentralization, we talk about DAOs, we talk about self sovereignty, we talk about self ownership, self-regulation. What happens there is we started with a very good intention, and the intention is if I sit across you on the table and if we have a drink or a meal or a conversation, then we come from a background where if you say I owe you, then it’s an I owe you.

Right. So if you say, Hey Mo, I don’t have my card. Can you [00:12:00] get me this time? Next time I’ll buy you some beer. Right. That’s an IOU. That’s a man to man, IOU. That’s how decentralization ethos and principles started. However, what it attracted, and it keeps attracting our opportunists.

Speaker 7: Yeah. Right.

Speaker 11: And those are people that see that shiny thing, have no skills, have no principles, have no foundation, have no.

You need to have ethics. Right? Like how? Like it’s, it’s a very old way of saying how do you go to sleep when you do something bad, right? They do, and they sleep very well in their pen. And they wake up the next day with the lady boy and they continue doing this, right? These are the same people. Sorry. If anybody like Lady Boys, this is exactly what happened, right?

A DAO is started with the intention of what? By saying a core team of individuals that have established and collected that experience expertise because they paid the price. I’m now [00:13:00] wanting to transfer that knowledge and give that power onto the hands of others. Right. So we will open that for you with the treasury or with benefits.

Speaker 7: Yeah.

Speaker 11: What happens most of the time is people can manipulate that system, walk in, tell you that they’re the best at what they do, and they get those funds. Again, I’m not trying to self show, but short show only founders. We meet founders every day, right? That are like, they’re selling the dream. They’re like, great, they’re doing this, and I sit with them.

My only question to every founder is one, always for the bullshit meter. Tell me about your distribution. If any founder can tell me about their distribution, we deploy capital, right? 99% of founders fail there. I don’t want to know about the tech. I don’t want to know about anything. Tell me, distribution, right?

99% founders fail there. The next question, tell me about your token economy. They feel that, right? And this proves a [00:14:00] point that you’re playing in the game, that you don’t understand the rules. I told Milton yesterday when we were talking, I was like, sorry to hijack this, but very simple, right? I was like, the game is simple, right?

I say like, I’m gonna go hang out with my friends and we’re gonna go play basketball, for example, right? So we have a court, we have everything. Edmonton says, I’m gonna show up. And I have the ball, so I trust him because I said, we’re gonna play basketball in a court, right? And he shows up with the football.

That’s fucked up. Second scenario is Milton shows up by saying, I want to play the game, but he’s wearing his golf shoes. Right. That currently is the situation that we are in in Web3. Everybody can bullshit their way all the way through, and there’s no other layer of validating, checking and authenticating if that person that you’re giving authority to, ownership to or doing a transaction with is capable of delivering.

Same thing with KOLs. That’s why I’m anti Kol. Name me one good Kol. [00:15:00] Me. You ready? This one is okay because he’s, this one is an exception, but maybe one anyone here has worked with any KL that they can literally say that this is one of the top tier KL that they work with. Please, anyone? I would like to know a name.

Anyone? No. Right yet. Every startup chooses to spend over 30% of their raises on KOLs, calling it distribution. That is not distribution. That is money laundering. Distribution is when you can entice, when you can make an awareness. And then to be our users. We all wear shoes, right? Where, where? Does Adidas pay you to wear Adidas?

Right? You still go and buy them, right?

Speaker 7: Buy I think. I think these are fake. I think these are the fake ones actually. Right.

Speaker 11: I don’t make content about it. I don’t post it on my Instagram. I don’t post it on my Facebook. I pay for it. [00:16:00] Right. How is it that we are trying to change an industry with the narrative of saying that we are gonna take the money that we give to distributors and give it back to the community?

Through ownership, so we’re not gonna pay for ads, but we’ll give it to the community. But then we are giving it to the community that doesn’t use your product and doesn’t even know your product. They’re dumb as, and you are paying them huge amount of your equity and token location for mind share. What mind share is brain rot.

That’s not mind share. You have no users Show me one project on Kaito. Kaito has distributed, by the way, sorry to hijack this. Kaito has distributed $970 million in token since they launch nine $70 million. So getting, they’re getting close to $1 billion on token. Distributed Right. Not a single project on Kato has sustained from launch Average.

Average debt on Kato, every project launch is 65%. [00:17:00] Who pay the press? Founders like you. Founders like me, founders like you, founders, every founder in this room, every packer in this room, every supporter in this room. Who gets threatened on your discord? Who gets threaten messages on your telegram? Who gets emails?

Who gets real random things? Who gets hacked? The founder, whose treasury gets

Speaker 10: trained. The founder, whose community Les the founder. Can I add something here? The thing is that I’m super, let’s say, supporting you in terms of the founders, but let’s look on another shade named investors, and this is who’s behind.

So we see talking, we keep talking. But because I used to invest in product and anyway, understand that the project is doing everything [00:18:00] for good distribution, taking care about the planet, bullshit stories, I never even look at this person because this is money used. Mm-hmm. If I know someone who really know how to, sorry.

And don’t you me, I need has control of this motherfucker story. I will abuse him, give money, will abuse someone else. I will make a profit. I agree. This is only one way of the business. Sorry that I, this is funny story.

Speaker 11: I lost a lot. I hundred percent agree. I was on gate space with Gate Ventures two weeks back, and they clearly said that the VCs are only deployed capital with projects.

That’s very

Speaker 9: quickly. Yeah.

Speaker 11: What does that even, so what does that mean? That means A, they’re not VCs anymore, they’re Walter capitalists. Yes. My definition of VC is one calculus. If you want to get free and you want to enjoy that experience, go talk to a vc. A. I think again, this a cx that that works [00:19:00] good.

Yeah. Everything right? It it, it’s the same thing. Like that’s why we are stuck in a position where we have these events. Marco, what correct is what each one of us has paid the price. Why have we paid the price? Because we believe someone’s narrative. Why did we believe someone’s narrative most of the time?

Because that narrative is true, it touches us. We believe in that message. We believe in execution. We believe in that product. We believe in that person, but what we don’t understand is who’s behind this person. Right. When you get to understand this, and if you can see this, you then understand if you really want to invest, and it’s very easy to distract, right?

If you go, any of you that live in or in Bangkok, if you go down to, it’s all just glamorous lives. They’re easy to distract you. Everything looks pretty when you have a few beers and everything looks attractive, right? That’s what web me, crypto, Twitter is right now. It’s everyone talking about everything, right?

Walk in and talk to any of them. [00:20:00] Ask them, tell me, walk me through a product, right? Ask them, walk me through a product. Like just gimme a walkthrough tutorial right now on the

Speaker 10: meme coin.

Speaker 11: That’s why I love meme coins watch, because there is no reality. It, it’s a dream, right? And you’re just betting on when the bubble will burst and when the dream is.

Over and when it becomes a nightmare. So you’re just betting, right. It’s kind of like a casino for me. For example, say something. Meme coins are the most honest coins. They are the most honest. Meme coins are the best because it’s a casino. You just go in and say, right until I’m over. Guys, at the risk of this turning your panel, that’s not like finish almost done after this

Speaker 7: Anyway, I’m at the pizza soda.

Basically the pizza is, they’re cool. Like, actually, like I said, the, this anonymous dude like ripped, ripped off the Dow, but I bought the pizzas myself ’cause I had a lot of my friends come in and, and it was a good time. So I just prepaid and I got re, they reimbursed me, the Dow reimbursed me. So it worked out.

And [00:21:00] it was only a couple hundred dollars so it wasn’t even a big deal. But just to recap, I kinda went through three different ones. Web, two wrecked, Web3 wrecked in real life, well kind of maybe Web3, but in real life wrecked. But I feel like it’s part of the game as part of, of learning, right? Especially in Asia, a lot of people are the families and the cultures to teach you not to take a risk, to not to fail.

But I’m, I’m happy to see, like, oh, founding as, as a Thai founder, I, I, I really wanna see more Asia founders because I think the, the parents and the families tell ’em, don’t take a risk. Don’t fail, you lose face, you’ll, you’ll like tarnish the family’s reputation or something. Maybe you guys could say it better than me, at least something like that.

But I hope that there can be more like people willing to, to be wrecked. ’cause I think if you’re not gonna take a risk and not be willing to put yourself out there and not become wrecked, you’re not gonna succeed. And I’ve succeeded it many times. I have many successes and that’s only because I [00:22:00] believe I’ve been able to, to put myself out there and to be wrecked.

So I’m only sharing some of the wrecked, but I’ve had a lot of success and some even some of those are becoming successes. So you will get wrecked if you want. Join the rec survivor group, and this can be you. You can get anonymous people harassing you on the internet all day long and get ripped off by VCs and well, you can’t.

Or you can join Rec survivors here. I’m a happy member and admin and thanks for coming today. And we have another couple speakers. One more. One more speaker. So Ed and I’ll be around, but thanks. I don’t have any QR codes or anything, but if you’re interested in like listing a product, I get he’s in the group.

I gotta get gotchu on Hamza. If you wanna list some products, which you bro, later. Later, my hotel’s right down the road platform. Platform. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. Thank you.

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Speaker 7: All right. I hope you enjoyed that talk. I, I love this camera. Honestly, I got the GFA sticker on my microphone. I hope this audio’s loud and clear.

I know most of you’re still listening to the audio, not looking at my coconuts here in Chang Ma Thailand. Just had a nice pizza talking some friends and doing his intro. An outro for GFA. Shout out to Alvin, our amazing editor. We have an [00:24:00] amazing team. We have an amazing mastermind in Batya. Less than like a less, like basically a week, the show will go out.

We’ll be almost going to the mastermind, 10 amazing sellers really experienced. And we’re gonna make some upgrades. Upgrades on content. So the way we do it using ai. I can’t wait to just keep leveling up and being willing to put yourself out there, being vulnerable. ’cause you can’t grow if you don’t like share, and you don’t share your hard times and your good times.

That’s what I’m trying to do here. Even if we’ve never met, never talked, I hope this helped you. I hope this inspired you. Maybe you laughing at me, calling me stupid for making mistakes I’ve made. Sometimes I still feel embarrassed. Some of those mistakes I’ve made. I try my best to accommodate the situation and keep as many people happy as possible, but it’s kind of impossible.

Take a sip of water outta this tin can. [00:25:00] Ugh, thinking about some of those hard times. But you push yourself, in my opinion, that’s just how you grow. Just like you grow muscle, you grow your mind, you grow your ability to. To take risks and to, to win to succeed. This is the way to succeed. Putting yourself out there, pushing your limit.

So I hope, enjoy my business on global information.com/wrecked survivor. Enjoy and I can watch my video blog, which is more like behind the scenes personal, like five minute video of mike’s blog.com/wrecked survivor. Alright, take care. See y’all later. Bye-bye.

Speaker 8: To get more info about running an international business, please visit our website@ww.global from asia.com.

That’s ww.global from asia.com. Also, be sure to subscribe to our iTunes feed. Thanks for tuning in.