Family Dinner Recap: Josh Breite

By: Elizabeth Savin

On Wednesday, February 16th, Residents of The Garage gathered together to hear from guest speaker Josh Breite, SESP '22. Josh is a co-founder at Fire, a chrome extension that simulates web3 transactions. Fire uses your transactions through your current wallet, showing you what will enter and exit before you sign the contract.

Prior to co-founding Fire, Josh had numerous experiences in the entrepreneurial space. Initially drawn to the startup world in college, Josh founded Induction Learning, a platform designed to help students succeed on standardized tests. The app allowed students to practice while learning more about how to optimize studying habits. While the project ultimately ended, Josh discovered his love for building companies and walked away with the knowledge that the best learning comes from failures.

In his junior year at Northwestern, Josh was an intern with Pogo, a company reimagining the data economy by rewarding users directly for their data. There, Josh worked on various projects that helped grow the company from 20,000 to 100,000+ users. Additionally, he led recruiting sourcing efforts, allowing him to learn the critical skills required to grow a team.

Knowing that he didn't want to work at a large company after graduation, Josh began an internship with Atomic after his senior year. He moved to San Francisco where he began to build products from the ground up. He soon received a full-time position and co-founded his company, Fire. The company raised a seed from Atomic, allowing Josh to transition to full-time work.

Starting this new adventure led to numerous failures and lessons. Josh stressed the importance of user interviews to the Residents, sharing “we started with the problem: why is Coinbase.com so easy to use, but Coinbase the wallet is hard to utilize for so many? We did user interviews and saw a pain point was that users didn’t understand what they were signing and could lose their funds.” With this learning, Josh began to work on quickly shipping to market with an extension that operated with the wallets users already have. From there, the team is now working on iterating quickly in order to support the growing user base in the best way possible. Since its release in October, the extension has protected nearly 50,000 wallets across ETH, Optimism, and Polygon.

In addition to user interviews, Josh shared the importance of growing a user base. “We take advantage of viral growth loops, creating features worth sharing,” said Josh. This creates a web of users sharing the extension with others and allowing the company to grow at a rapid pace.

Residents walked away from Family Dinner excited to dive into their work and grow their user base.

Elizabeth Savin ’25 is a Manufacturing and Design Engineering major from Wilmette, IL. She is a student aide at The Garage and was part of the Winter 2022 Propel cohort. She is excited to begin her own venture while learning more about entrepreneurship.