Meet the Blockchain VC, Pt. 4

Transcript

hello everyone here is martin from crypto valley association in zuke switzerland i'm very happy to have our friends maya chalak here with us to discuss new developments and their ideas about investing in blockchain venture i just do a quick introduction i start with maya maya she's managing director of o group which is based in new york and the whole group is focusing as i've seen on the governance of legacy system

and decentralized open protocol focusing also on artificial light intelligence blockchain machine learning previously maya has been the innovation officer at an emerging tech at emerging tech group ge digital and maya also helped design future of work group very happy to have you here and that you took a break and now from your travels and join us for this meeting i'm also welcoming founding partner of future perfect venture with a very impressive

cv i've seen i can't list all you have done in your life i think almost one life is too short for what you have done i think um you are focusing obviously also on on on blockchain technology early stage vc um decentralized technologies and i have seen also that you are very focused on diversity investments many of your portfolio company have a diversity angle you have been previously director of mobile investment

at o media network a philanthropic capitalist fund co-founded by one of the founders of ebay and i've also seen that you have invested all over the world and especially also in africa and you have also been about senior vice president of the new york city investment fund previously a few years ago and then we have oem from morgan creek digital morton greek digital is a head front backed by morgan greek capital you're specialized

in the fields of digital asset management financial service and venture capitalists so i think i mean you as i have seen maya chalak you are very early stage in your investments or i think you are more uh investment in two coins maybe explain a bit to start with or i'm telling tell tell me before sure yeah no so uh no we're we're kind of a classic um you know early to mid-stage venture shop right i mean actually uh contrary to popular belief where we kind of a significant amount of our focus is actually on the early stage to mid-stage

venture side and um it's we're not actively trading tokens and um things like that at least as of now i mean nor have we done that ever to be honest with you so so maybe also maya tell me why or angela why did you invest in blockchain technology what is your thesis why why why do you think that's a good place to be like you want to go or i'll go it doesn't matter we're playing so we know each other go ahead okay all right sure so um i've been you know you've already dated me martin so i can go all in and um so i um invested for intel

in the late 90s out in silicon valley i was a a tech and telecom investment banker in the mid 90s um and so saw the netscape ipo happen um in 95 and um and about eight years ago i thought you know we were just primed for a more global technology um kind of revolution not just evolution like um you know on par with what we saw with the internet and um uh as part of my exploration i went to a bitcoin conference uh in 2013 and and to me that was that was it that was uh and not only bitcoin it was the underlying the technology um the blockchain technology of um this this idea of a ledger that's verified by

computers and i started thinking not only you know can it be applied to bitcoin and currency but it could be applied to any piece of data and um and creates more efficient networks and more peer-to-peer connectivity um i've spent a lot of time in the emerging markets as you've noted and you know so much of a financial services has not reached um you know places uh like africa um like latin america um southeast asia and um a lot of it is because of the intermediary fees that that are required and and so to me you know blockchain tech was a way to reduce those intermediary fees and create new business models where we

could provide more accessibility to not only financial assets but you know healthcare all like pretty much every industry that was disrupted by the internet i believe will be disrupted by blockchain tech and so started future perfect ventures officially in 2014 um and um and we're now investing out of our third fund very much with the same thesis except you know we've seen a lot of developments um you know over the last eight years and um you know i feel like we're the the next fund is really where we'll we'll see more widespread adoption of this technology yeah i think martin what you will see across the board of a lot of folks who started early so

um like jalap mentioned it's interesting that a number of folks who've been early in the space like myself have had emerging markets experience and have seen the difficulties right in the western world we have the cards we don't think about it right and it works and when we pay our employees everything is back office we don't see it right we don't see any of this when we take loans relatively you know cheap interest rates but in these other places around the world is not the case and so i started early payments in early 2000s in africa and latin america right when i think at that time americans were not even texting and so we were carving out a broadband spectrum and

telecoms and developing mobile payments early and so i got to see the difficulties of actually dealing in business and what is that what did that mean for a rural population and and then once i sat down i remember during that time i was with a group of hackers and really early kind of starters in blockchain space and that's who gave me white uh the white paper for the bitcoin white paper and i read it and i didn't believe it and i said is this really possible this is this sounds like perfection but then i read number of uh sci-fi books um that i really liked and started to interact with folks who were really cutting edge to pretty crazy by you know normal standards

and um and then the second experience that i had that validated for me so this is early 2000s and then in in kind of middle 2000s i was a ge so first i was an entrepreneur in africa latin america then i was hired into ge to run their emerging tech but i tested blockchain technology across the board so that's early when i brought um guys like lehman and mance from hashgraph and joe lubin and vitalik and number of these different people this is 2013 and 14 right and i said okay what is smart contract going to do what's smart about the smart contract and then we got to apply it in energy and devices on the edge and wind turbines and 3d manufacturing right and treasuries

that's when you start to see the limitations and possibilities but i really thought that as just jawak said it it's the next wave of really these validation of trust right and uh when you think about it maybe not us humans but machines certainly yeah i mean i shared this i think also i mean now seeing that i'm first of all that we have still big parts of the world which do not have this lecture system which we know here in switzerland or in the us where many things are not the problem you know and that this has to be developed and probably no there will be a direct

jump to modern systems without these systems which are run by intermediaries as we have it as we have it here and lots of the infrastructure will be rebuilt and um or maybe what is your opinion um i mean so i'll just give you kind of a similar uh background in context um as angelic and i have given um i mean for for us um you know a lot of folks were saying that this new um world of blockchain would be similar to what was going on with me in the internet about 10 15 years ago and um i think we had a um we had a thesis

that you know if you could find a handful of companies that'll that can help um build out the infrastructure around um the adoption of of crypto and and blockchain technology that um you know that would yield pretty well welcome to d phi real my name is brian rose and this is our brand new program covering was that me maybe probably but no worries let's go okay somebody's learning the background calls nobody's learning something in the background it's a different category

interesting yeah um anyways yeah so i mean yeah we would kind of come up with this similar thesis that a lot of folks had conviction over the last um three to four years um and you know i guess at that time it was a little bit difficult for institutional folks to be investing in that space right i mean it still kind of is today um it's getting easier you know um and i think the the folks that have kind of put together the the um gone through the homework of you know getting making sure things are in compliance and stuff like that um to actually successfully allocate in this space and allocate with a reasonable size um you know have since seen a lot of fruits of that labor

um for sure and we'll probably continue to for the next half decade or so um it was very interesting to see where you see i mean first of all where you're coming from and and also why you believe or why you start to believe a very early time it is new infrastructure which is built based on distributed ledger so i want to know from you [Music] will we need new protocols will we be able to do it on current protocols and also where do you invest now is it new protocols infrastructure projects

or is it mostly applications which are based on a currently known blockchain protocols well i i think for me um i look at regulation a lot and i look just because i always talk between the government and kind of public and a private side so i bring kind of the two perspectives i was never a true technologist so i couldn't just really see everything that is just perfect technology perfect protocol right sure certain things before i've invested in those um with and and knowing that they will never go anywhere in the real world uh or it will take a long time for them to go anywhere in the real world because

it's political examples could be identity protocols right but if you look at actually identity and token token identity in the last two three months in the in this bear market they've actually performed really well so depends how you're investing right so if you're investing just based on tokens and and the movement of the tokens and you know i look at my identity performance in the last couple months when when everything else was down those things performed really well and i made money there right um if i look at applications of identity in a real world it is very political right and so and i think that's one of the sore topics that a lot of people don't like to talk about but cbdc's are nothing but you know a complete um traceability of citizens right and so

people will yell for blockchain and cbdc's but reality is this is uh this is a pure traceability on everything that we do so i guess it depends for me when i'm investing now i'm investing some pretty interesting things that are pulling in institutional investors that's interesting to me um there are protocols and mechanisms that will um the custody the things that really real world needs in order to move further into crypto to feel safer into crypto to learn more in crypto or to scale their own products on on these protocols and then i will opportunistically see like i did

um the privacy tokens and i will see that they're actually have performed really well last couple months which i've told to a few people and they didn't believe me but um but if you actually look at statistics those are the ones that performed really well so that's kind of a few kind of few thoughts based on your question yeah i'll jump in um so i'm going to go back to the kind of the evolution of any any new technology and if you look at the internet so you know we can't have applications until we have the infrastructure and we certainly saw that with our first fund we were heavily investing in infrastructure and we're an investor and a seed investor in block stream

that's been very instrumental in helping build out the bitcoin uh blockchain um we were an early investor in blockchain.com um which is one of the largest wallets in the world and have built out um to institutional products um and and so we we just believe that there's just going to be some some core infrastructure that needed to be built out um certainly bitcoin and ethereum were part of that um as as as tokens but we're primarily an equity investor now with our second fund which we launched in 2017 um you know we we started to see and not in 2017 but post 2017

some um you know clarity around regulations uh and and as we saw more clarity around regulations we we became more active um on the token side and started thinking of that layer two um and and so um we invested in the graph very early and they're building um kind of developer tools uh to uh to pull data from different blockchains so we've always believed in in a multi-blockchain world um i think there will be different protocols and different blockchains that that are used for different use cases i mean just like we don't have you know one enterprise software company you know we're not going to have one

protocol that does everything um or one application that does everything and and so um but we are i'd say out of fund three very focused on that middleware layer is how do you create these developer tools how how do you build upon these protocols in a way uh where you can scale uh applications that can reach billions of users and and so we've been very active um you know pre-nft boom in investing in um in the nft space because we view that as kind of um some of those um well it's really core infrastructure for for any asset um you know a lot has been said about

art um uh but if you look at domain names um you know emojis i identity you know uh nft is our core part of that and so um we we've we have uh three investments soon to be five in the nft infrastructure space uh not necessarily the nfts themselves um and and so we we definitely see um uh are very interested in any middleware applications that can bring this technology to a wider audience yeah i think that's the absolutely right now i mean you have already responded a bit of my next question where i wanted to ask what do you prefer

to invest is it in tokens or is it inequity and maybe here i would even like to add the question i mean in 2017 i 18 we saw many icos the last few years but less where do you think are we going there also will it come back the ico spot will it be you know and explain me a bit you know now jalak you just mentioned you are focusing more on equity maybe my maybe oh i'm also what is here your opinion sure um yeah so i mean we've historically focused mainly on the

equity component i mean um i think with with tokens um it can be a little bit of a challenge to i want to say the word underwrite but i don't know if that's the right word but it's a little bit of a challenge sometimes to fully understand okay is this um i mean equity is a little bit low risk we'll just put it that way right um with with with the token that someone may be launching um there's a lot more unanswered questions right and i guess from a institutional fiduciary standpoint and sometimes it's you know can get a little bit complicated as to you know whether you're out you're able to even ask the right questions let alone get the right answers to those questions right um so i mean it's it's rare for us to do any sort of token deal i mean

we've done it but you know it's very rare i mean that's less than five percent of dollars allocated i think so well well below that um i think when i when i hear your question um sure straightforward answer is both um where i can where i think that the company is really playing with institutional investors where as jalak said in payment companies or things that have a possibility of pulling in millions of people or when there is institutional in play larger names i definitely look more for equity and however though for me crypto has really been interesting because

crypto to me is purely a software movement and doesn't really depend on hardware kind of build out right um where kind of internet did and i know because i was part of a lot of the work that we did in africa are laying out tables and negotiating that between governments and and private sector and building out cell towers right i have a firsthand experience of doing that so when i look at crypto i think of just purely software movement and you know that expands so rapidly and i think you'll be crazy not to take advantage of that type of investment in you know in that code or in data or right and something that is open source um because i do think in a lot of

instances that will take a lead um and ultimately i will never forget an experience i had in africa in some of these meetings where i really understood that the power of software uh power of software is just exponential um and when you're really playing with some technologies that require hardware it's just much harder investment and much more riskier investment just in my opinion right so i i'd say i split my uh investments in two opportunistically talaq you want to add something here also yeah i mean i i you know mentioned that

we we are taking more token exposure but when we do so we don't we we stay we're an early stage investor we're very clear about that so even if we do take on any token exposure it's with a long-term view and often it will be at the pre-sale if we do any kind of open market buying it's because we believe in the long term however you know at the end of the day a lot of these tokens are still trading as speculative assets and and so um you know we're we're not in the business of tracking these day-to-day um and and that's why we've veered more towards equity or pre-sales

when we also get to know the teams we do the same diligence we don't you know just invest in a random t i mean you know i think what i do on on a personal account versus as a fiduciary with the fund um are two you know very different elements and at the end of the day uh we are fiduciaries to our limited partners and and do the diligence that we need to do and if we uh can't do that with a particular investment we we don't invest through the fund i think this is interesting i mean i'm as i told you here i'm based in switzerland we have quite some foundations which manage protocols and i mean the

foundation is it is an opposite to you know an equity-based company in the end you know if you want an increase in ecosystem you want to take you know that everyone is participating you want to build a governance structure which is purely the interest of the token holder of the project owners which is truly decentralized and i mean there of course we often also start with the company but in the end this company will be acquired and merged into the foundation so that there is no conflict of interest between token holders and equity owners i mean

there could be a conflict of interest and thinking back the owl equity company structure i would say it's a child of industrialization it was built i mean it's like like blockchain per se it's a creation of human beings mind which was used to finance huge infrastructure projects in the early 1800s or the late 1700s and i mean now we go also into another time where you know it's much more easier to access um through internet through

uh digitalization everyone understands i think the token aspect it's it's it's very interesting it's easy so in the end um we will see what will happen in the course of the next few decades will the equity model still be the preliminary model for our economy or will it be the token model huh i think that's an interesting question but i think i mean i don't have any response for it it's just we will see and but in the end for sure it's important that that that now where these new nets are created that we have

an equal and very transparent chair and probably the token is a very simple and effective mean to create such an environment and then that so um i mean i i think this is going to be transformative for uh businesses and the way businesses are structured and the way people work and you know ev everything i i think we're in a very transitional phase with a lot of speculation and and so um you know once we start to see projects really take hold that stay true to the ethos of decentralization and i think we're going to see that over the next few years that will be you know when the

transformation really really occurs um and um yeah i i think it's inevitable but like you said the time frame is the question mark perfect so maybe something a bit more specific about your companies could you tell me how big your portfolio is how much capital you invest typically per year or in your funds chalak you're already at your third fund but uh maya and eduard please also let me know how how what's what's what's the capital you have to deploy sure i can go we um don't have specific

capital that we are very opportunistic depending so for example two opportunities that i'm looking at at the moment one is we'll go as high as million bucks and as low as ten thousand dollars uh it really depends sometimes i will play and i will say okay if i do believe kind of something but maybe haven't had the full-on due diligence and spent some time and i kind of want to place a bet on it and willing to lose right it would be 10 to 30k and i'll say okay this is kind of i'll gamble in a sense right because i think as you just said correctly we don't know if some of this is gonna work right even some of the stuff that

um you you think should work right best tech doesn't win right it really depends on so many things and i think particularly now in crypto really depends which type of institutions you've gone in front of what type of data that you have you know who are you gonna partner what is the what is the utility of something you're going to do right and then you look at some tokens that have zero utility right but it made us money and and just sometimes there is no pattern to some extent what i do look at is the team i look at the code and i look at the kind of go to market and do i think that this is something that the market will want to want to

extend is it short-term or long-term there's also that um and you know there are things that i look at in china but then i say to myself okay well if i invest in this you know do i actually think is going to touch the chinese government and how do i play with that even if i invest in companies that are in the west i really look at regulation too and i don't play with something that that is not going to withstand the regulation right um one of the biggest investments we've made has is a reserve token uh with a couple of million and um peter kill is invested in that we're number one app in venezuela now it's a phenomenal project um but for example for that project we

can't hire enough of developers we can't hire we have our demand is so high we can't the only reason we can't grow is just where they can't grow is because we can't hire enough of customer service and we need a lot of local support so there is some of that too you can see projects but there's a great need or lots of people will go to africa or i can hear a lot of these younger kids now going to africa and latin america saying oh my god there's all these things that you can do reality is to scale that in these places is a whole different ballgame right and so you can have a perfect tool and go to market and a need exists to make you millions and billions of dollars but reality is the scaling that you know so so when i'm investing i

really look at kind of the reality of a situation and we run through a strategy we run through guys that are on the ground what is the step-by-step kind of growth uh but yeah checks are anywhere from that size very interesting i think i mean just now it's not in my questions here but i you mentioned it twice and so i would like to take a few minutes also on this subject about regulation and i i'm also very much a believer you know i mean there are many let's say kids on the block they think everything is possible you can do whatever and it's great and you also mentioned the privacy uh coins etc which are yeah

now i one thing is the current regulation and i think what is even more important is to try to foresee future regulation because then if you invest into a project it's not about now it's much more about how will the regulation be in two three five years i in my opinion i mean we have to follow basically the regulation approach which is also given for traditional means of let's say transfer or assets or security or

whatever but then there is another um trend i mean we have very diverse you know different approaches from different countries huh i mean you know as we see now obviously nigeria venezuela maybe china has a different approach and regulation as switzerland uk europe or the u.s have so maybe also here i just wanted to know what where do you think i mean now regarding regulation regulatory compliance where do we go and what would you think um is important i mean still and i think

this is so sorry that me as moderate right to a bit too many claims maybe here that would more like need your opinion than than my own but still um how do you see things developing what is what do you expect yeah i i think i and angelic also i know and uh um have both i know from john because i know her definitely has a lot of experience here but um from what i've seen in the government and being a lawyer myself i mean look under the classic howie test right um you know when offers where you're selling tokens in the pre-network phase right before launching the actual network

are likely securities right and so if i start from that basic premise as a lawyer i look at that and i look everything through that lens and actually if you look at a lot of funds now recently they all all have beefed up on regulators and people that have regulatory experience and legal experience because um yes um yes regulation is heavy also i would argue that technology sometimes well not sometimes all the time is probably ahead of regulation right and and business and making money and all of that right just like mining was in 80s and hedge funds and everything else right they pushed the regulation to regulate that so

um i do see the same thing happening here but you're right martin i think a lot of countries are going to have a slightly different approach i do think that scc has a long arm and that a lot of that will come from the sec unfortunately or fortunately depending on how you look at it or who looks at it from which country um i definitely look at it and i do think that we've got another probably a year and a half two years until regulation clamps down what's interesting is if when i look at some of the stuff that guys like andreessen horowitz have invested in or um or um polychain capital uh they invest in a lot of decentralized

and a lot of a lot of d5 and a lot of nfts and d5 currently if i look at the coders and projects they're all all hurrying and really in a lot of um hurry to make systems and make networks so big that the center that the regulation will have a hard time catching up that's kind of what i'm seeing i don't know what's going to happen um but i do think that obviously it is going to be there and i think it's kind of normal particularly in the us right and is that a good thing i actually do think to some extent it is a good thing because most crypto um enthusiasts will argue and say we don't need government in the current system

okay i started in this industry because i was kind of in between and a bit you know um naive or idealistic or you know anti-establishment but reality is that they are people and money makes people greedy and so once crypto grows get really wealthy then they want to take power in their own hands right what happens then is that they can literally scam a lot of people like it happens in a lot of these icos and tokens and everything else so do you need you know it's a double-edged sword we wanted the centralized system and somebody will argue well the system and the code and perfect math will sort itself out i'm not really sure that's the case so i'll pause there

maybe i think it's an interesting topic what's your view on this i mean or you agree or do do you agree fully with that or you have something to add here um yeah i mean i'll i'll quickly kind of add on i mean look it's it's a hundred percent um well i'm gonna say 99 but you know just you know we we know for a fact that this space is um it's going to be filled with you know let's call it dangerous ideas that you know may um you know be some somewhat scammy and one other we've seen that already over the last three to five years um and it'll continue to happen just out of unfortunate you know people just trying to take advantage of of the excitement and hype and so the reality is is that you know

the regulation and stuff like that will definitely come and i don't think anybody can or even tries to dispute it now what i've what what we've seen pretty working pretty well and you know it's not done yet is a lot of the leading companies in the space i think have um it's kind of kind of like uh maya just said you know back in the day you know when hedge funds and mining companies et cetera we're all kind of sourcing um they're we're kind of helping build out the regulatory environment that they're willing to play in um but it's also they're kind of doing that today right and so what that does is um you know you've got a a lot of the large name companies you know i mean obviously everybody knows coinbase block five finance all the

uh um strike there's a zap payments and stuff like that a lot of what what they try to do is say hey look here's how we want to operate right um you tell us you know mr scc mr gov whoever you know whichever regulator regulating entity it is how can we make sure that what we're doing is okay right and what happens is the government the folks in government then are able to take you know are able to learn hey look here's what even though this sounds a little scary what they're doing is not let's call it unethical or scammy or something like that right um and having that kind of very close relationship amongst especially the larger companies in the space i think that makes it a lot easier

uh for the next you know two to three decades um and a lot of those smaller companies that are you know may not have that sort of pull um to pick up the phone and call someone at the you know at various regulation regulatory bodies and things like that so good yeah i think also i mean in the end i hope it's there are two approaches one is to make the system fair and just and to protect the participant and i think this is a very good motivation also to regulate i think this is absolutely important and if we see in general what happens in tech with these huge companies i think it's very important you know also

to have you know not to not build monopolies and but on the other hand and i think one risk is also that you know there of course uh the whole space is also huge competition um for current uh players and i mean let's hope that not let's say all intermediaries they will just make it impossible to build a new system we also have known these kind of systems where just the old one you know push it you know just don't want to allow new and new participants to enter into the market and this of course and we saw it in many countries who followed this approach

in all regions into very much some regions in the world they were 10 after a few decades they're just behind because there is no way no no innovation possible anymore now coming back again leaving now this regulation topic i wanted to ask you if you invest in projects do you prefer to act as a lead direct lead investor or do you prefer being a co-investor coinvestor for me mm-hmm yeah um yes good good good but we'll do both um you know one of the

reasons i launched um future perfect was that i thought there were a lot of aspects of the venture capital model that were broken and and not necessarily staying uh ahead you know which is ahead of the times which is what ironically vc's supposed to do but um you know i believe for a long time that this purely ownership driven uh investing is is going to go away we're going to see that certainly with with tokens and tokenization um but and and and so that follows with us you know being flexible um you know we come across very early stage projects that um you know we may have certain expertise in and you know we

this happens a lot in the emerging markets where you know it's very hard for some of these teams to find investors that know their markets that know crypto that know and and we'll step up and price around and lead and we're happy to do that um we also believe and and you know strong syndicates um and and uh being uh involved um you know with with other great co-investors so um you know it really depends on the situation i mean we're very cognizant of you know leading does take time and and um you know i'd say we do the same amount of diligence but there's there's definitely more effort that goes into leading and so we do you know we we balance that with with

the bandwidth we have on the team um and then for for us um it's kind of similar to what angelica just said i mean look we've um we kind of take it case by case um i'd say we do have a little bit of a preference to lead where we can um but you know sometimes it makes sense for other groups to do it and you know we just want i mean if there's an opportunity that's interesting and you know we're um you know we're still bullish on it um it doesn't it's not necessarily a deal breaker right so um next question how how do startups find you do do they approach you or do you have a systematic approach to

to scan the environment how to how do you find your investment targets um first i mean it's just been natural i mean if i go through my inbox from early days people just kind of know you the space has grown since 2010 a lot right so in 2010 when we were it was just kind of a handful of projects we were all investing in um but then you know people either find you or you find people you go specifically hunting i know that right um i was looking for somebody who's gonna provide kind of certain things for the space and you

know you just ask around in your network and you have great network as i said earlier you know in our private chat the gen lock does this really amazing group of women that we connect with that are really powerful in the space and i have the same network and there's a gentleman called gabriel abed who has been really early in this space who he all he has a group that is just pretty much all old jesus space anybody that has created a protocol so you just kind of have your network and uh people share also in space it's really interesting people just say to you hey i came acro like i had a call the other day but somebody um is quite known in the space and hey i thought you would love this project

you want to invest with us and you know it's just uh it's very organic and very natural and you're nice to people and chances are people are nice back and you always get these opportunities and it's what's fascinating to me to this day is that i had so much money in and out of my account without any contracts than in beginning i just trust people i had so much eat back and forth and so many of these guys a lot of money and you just kind of trust people along the way and it's really fascinating right that's that's that trust and that's that i think earlier i think jollof was saying how why she invested in blockchain that's that's the reason right i mean i i put in so much money in some of these projects i remember sending it

to some of these dudes that i've never met just over the internet you know and with these early projects of you know hobie exchange and you know eos protocol in the beginning and that and this right and it just um you just kind of trust and and things come back which is fascinating it's nice to hear that yeah maybe okay remind me of the question can we find you if you want to all right okay especially you know if you've been in

the space for a while um it's people know what you know what your thesis is what you're you know particularly interested in investing in um and really entrepreneurs you know um uh they reach out but i also i mean you know i've always done um proactive outreach um sometimes the best entrepreneurs aren't raising or don't need to raise and and um and i'd say you know we do we do both it's it's you know our network bringing things to us entrepreneurs bringing things to us directly and me doing outreach um and and the last uh two deal that like the ones that are in

process and about to close were were actually from from outreach that that i did um uh as i you know i try to set aside um one full day a week um to just read um and um it's become harder and harder as the spaces has grown and our portfolio has grown but but i think it's an important part of because this is such such a fast growing industry and we do want to stay ahead um to be able to absorb and think about you know where things are headed next and finding those teams um in a proactive way actually just on that one martin just before um if i can jump in that's such a good

point on the spaces it's like two different worlds postcoded right because we haven't seen everybody yeah you're in touch with people but it's very different we had so many conferences we were attending right i remember from 2011 to you know 1920 it was just you invested in the spot in these conferences right you just kind of did your thing and then it was covered and then post covid now um what's interesting is projects that have come across my desk in the last couple of days it's fascinating um before i would definitely look for scalability and less at the team and how they're going to launch it

now it's more wow part of the team is x finance x coinbase x this right so there's this already a time that has passed of experience of some of these folks who have now moved on to more mature projects and so you kind of look at the backgrounds of the people where before i didn't even care were you a flower shop owner right and and you married with the tech guy and you created a great thing right i'll just invest but now i actually pay more attention um uh who who is in the t because it's also getting harder right it's going to get harder there'll be a lot of m a in the space and a lot of projects will fail too right so that's just something that

inspired me by what july said yeah perfect um yeah i mean and for me it's kind of the same thing i mean look it's a small community um you know there's a reason i was in miami about six hours ago and you know it's like i mean it's angela's there like half the half of the society and the space is there now um it's it's a small world and there's a lot of sharing that goes on whenever there might be some uh like-minded you know deals that people are looking for um and then i mean i'm surprised none of us said twitter but you know i'm just kidding um but and people are throwing around ideas on the internet all the time and you know occasionally if you see something that's interesting it's very easy as a simple couple cold emails if you know it's a

space that we're actually kind of um hunting for um some activity in or something like that um so yeah i mean i think it's a uniform answer that every every person in this space would probably give but the reality is it's just it is that's exactly accurate so thank you thank you i remember one of the biggest biggest things i don't know if your that's where i actually met you in the beginning it was like 17 18. david namdar was a partner at galaxy and he's the one that actually started it a galaxy ventures he actually brought so many people for these happy hours once a week and i swear to you i invested in 80

of those projects that were in that room right it's just because there were people there and he created that he invited everybody from wax to you know to mining guys big fury guys to and it was just really early and and everybody was in the room right now it's just getting a little bit bigger i just remember that yeah yeah yeah those were fun fun meetups they were in new york or where did you do this new york yeah david did them in new york galaxy's office yeah it was really early great so uh another question in which regions uh do you

of the world do you invest oh i don't i don't i'm i mean i lived 10 years in latin america and africa i understand both markets really well um yeah so i mean all over i don't really have a bias yeah so could be switzerland could be europe could be asia could be yeah all of them yeah um for us uh i mean historically it's mainly been in the us but that's not necessarily because of um you know any sort of biases i think now it's a lot easier to understand what's going on in other

parts of the world um you know how how this space has evolved over the last uh two and a half to three years um and before you know when going back to that regulation topic we were just on about 5-10 minutes ago um it was a lot easier to just understand what's going on in your own backyard um you know whereas now i guess people can it's you can get a little bit more knowledge about what's going on okay you know if we're investing in a project out in europe you know what's the regulatory environment that look like looking like it out there um versus asia or something like that so i mean our last our last deal was a company in europe right i mean it was a significant size check actually for us um and you know so now we've kind of grown agnostic in fact

we're probably i would say we're probably even hunting for more stuff outside of the u.s um now i mean you know latin america pan-asia middle east whatever is interesting so yeah we um the another reason i started fpv was was that i thought that early stage investing had to go global and that was actually a very radical idea in 2013 and and 14 um most bc vc stayed within their backyard and i mean i moved from the valley to new york and 04 and i remember people you know you didn't see people

of funds from the valley in new york until about like 20 20 10 uh and then you know you'd run into them on the streets of soho and so that was a radical departure um and i think covid has has really shown that um cobid plus just the fact that innovation this is open source innovations happening everywhere there's a lot of growth happening uh outside of the us and there are regulations that create different opportunities in different different places and so um uh we have always you know we i mean we were an early early investor in bit pesa in nairobi um i happen to have been born there and and so i'm very kind of comfortable with the african uh continent

um i'm also have a lot of experience investing in india we've invested there we've invested in the philippines um uh in in mexico so um so we we're we're we're global and we you know uh we we i've kind of built those networks through the course of my career like maya has done and and so it's a very natural kind of fit to to look globally and and a real i'd say competitive advantage to be able to do that and offer those networks to to the entrepreneurs perfect so i have another question regarding your investment targets um

this is i i i put two questions together first what product are you looking for what's what's the criterias for the product and then i think we also tangled it already a bit before what qualities of the team are you looking for when you say product what do you what do you mean like is there something specific that we are looking at in terms of a product something specific but doesn't need to be can also be you know a quality of a product like disruption potential uh could also be specific i don't know

it's a it's an open question yeah i think um for me has been for sure team credibility of a team i do like to do some dd on people uh just in terms of credibility values morals it's really important as i said earlier i've transferred a lot of money people have entrusted me with a lot of money so that's really important important uh your reputation is your currency and i've never messed around with that so i do think that is that to me is key when i look at the team are they reliable there's i've only had two instances in crypto where that's not been the case unfortunately

um and but i was lucky enough either people have had others um so i think what's also interesting in this industry is that people will call you out if something happens right much faster um so that's that's a good thing um but the quality of teams for sure um technology and disruption yes but um again it can be the best disruption and best tech doesn't necessarily mean it will be a great investment so i think it's a combination of things it's the go to market right i mean if i look at some of the autonomous vehicles or some of the ai stuff right um phenomenal

right mind-blowing uh mind-boggling but it doesn't necessarily mean it's a short-term investment sometimes it's 10-year to 15-year horizon these things will come about i'm actually heavily now looking at crispr um i'm getting my final certification from harvard on crispr and gonna take the test probably going to fail it first time but that's something that's really fascinating to me with blockchain and sequencing of the cells and dna and everything pharmaceuticals and you know everything to do with that i'm kind of looking at that area at the moment heavily but again there's such amazing code and amazing technology for example one of the amazing technologies we invested in heavily is mina protocol

o1 labs phenomenal project but how is it doing right now right not so well in terms of tokens how is it doing in terms of team quality one of the best team qualities out there is it gonna win i don't know um did i put my money because i thought the team was fantastic and code was fantastic yes go to market long term so what do i mean by long term probably next two to five years right um to some people that could be long term um but that's kind of how i would answer that question yeah to add to that um

a lot what what i see missing and some of the teams that i talk to is is context of what's been tried before you know there are a lot of i mean the great thing about the sector is there's so much energy a lot of new entrants um you know people thinking creatively about how this technology can be used but there is a lot of history i say you know one week in crypto is equivalent to 10 years and anything else and i think unless like you are in the sector you don't really you you don't appreciate that and in terms of how quickly things develop how quickly things start and fail or start and you know succeed or or then go sideways

and and then and and so that kind of a velocity um and that appreciation of what's been trying and so much of what i see these days has already been tried now you know the timing is likely to be right this time around are more likely to be right but when entrepreneurs don't have the context when i you know mention a company that you know tried this even just two years ago which is not that long ago and there's no context around that you know i find that worrisome um so so that you know that and that that's really important i i think and then the other is resiliency um you know um and this is maybe a little bit less important i mean

it's always important an entrepreneur but it was absolutely 100 essential like you know i started investing in the sector during a crypto winter like post mount gox that's actually when i thought the opportunity you know was but but that required you know a lot of um resiliency to um for entrepreneurs to get started during that time now we've seen several cycles so i'd say you know it becomes less risky every cycle when you see that but but um you know these entrepreneurs like peter smith from blockchain uh you know adam from block stream like all these companies uh elizabeth from bit pessa you know they they were

their uh building through several crypto winters several cycles um you know and and and that you know that is that's just so key um uh to uh to to a sector that's new um and and the other is um you know and i i probably you know i try to do this as an investor is just you can't get caught up in fomo you know like you just can't um and and that's you know a lot of times i get asked you know why um you know what's made the funds successful and and i'd say that that is a key and and you have to be willing to go out there and and be

you know everyone likes to think they're contrarian you know and and uh and but you have to even as an entrepreneur you have to believe and i have to take information from the market and um you know know when to evolve your model but you also cannot get too worried about what other people are doing or too concerned and stay true to your vision for the long term so you know that's different if you're a speculative investor or you're a hedge fund you know i'd say it's a whole different model but but in early stage investing and and what teams and characteristics we look for those are the essential ones um and i'll kind of like cap that off so

definitely what they both kind of described as well um but i think to answer your question martin i think you had asked about products and the team is that is that right just kind of refreshment so um on the product side um i think for us the way that we're looking at the world there's probably two two core categories that um and there's more than this but two core that we we like to look at right one so one is anything that is building our infrastructure around the adoption of blockchain um so what that means is you know and my my favorite example of this is you know more uh home home equity lines of credit you know mortgage refinancing stuff like that

used to take you know 30 or i'm sorry 60 to 90 days now it can be done in you know three to five days uh using blockchain technology with a couple um there's there's a couple names out there but you know we've invested in a company called figure that's done that pretty well right um and so what it does is it takes away the sort of friction of you know there's a there's a hefty amount of cost and fees associated with several middle uh middlemen um and you can basically save a significant amount of time and money and whenever any sort of space where we see that as an opportunity somewhere where we'd love to you know at least evaluate the um you know allocating into um and the other one is driving the

adoption of crypto ownership as an asset not necessarily blockchain right so um that's you know and that's an easy one i think everybody talks about those two categories pretty um generally nowadays but um you know anything that's enabling an institutional pension fund manager to hold bitcoin on the balance sheet or even you know a random person that won't even 100 bucks worth of bitcoin as an investment of you know their personal net worth um there's several companies building several products and services out there um you know obviously a handful of them will be uh super successful a handful of them will not um so those are you know to answer your question on the product side that's kind of what we look what we look for at a core and then i mean on the team side it's you know my

angelica kind of covered it right i mean look we always you always want to look for folks that have done something and similar in that space and maybe you know hey look we used to build financial products on wall street for you know fix for the foreign exchange desk and now we want to bring it over to crypto well you know those two worlds are a little bit different but they're also kind of same they're similar right so you're more likely to have a success um with someone that's done this with a different asset class uh than as opposed to you know someone that used to you know be in the world of or be in a completely different world i mean i can't give you a good example of that but um and generally speaking the way that we've have found success in finding that

is you know your first two or three conversations they don't necessarily have to be interrogative right um you don't have to walk in and ask a million questions about the company it can be more like a brainstorming session and that can give you a good indication of hey is this the right team that's actually going to be able to scale this from you know a business with seven employees to to 700 right um so those are the kinds of kind of things that we look out for um because it's you know it's everybody knows it's a challenge but you know it's hard to kind of look for the diamond in the rough neck so thank you yes i mean i think we have a few more minutes so um i would like to ask you

my last question and then maybe i'll do a little last word from my side and then i'll let you say also bye bye to our public my question to you um what do you love most being an investor in the blockchain space i i love the creativity um people that i meet um just fascinating some of the smartest people i've met i think have been in the space i just really uh also um maybe also that we all like to feel important right that's kind of part of a

human dna and when you have some of these younger folks who have who are just brilliant and the ways that you know i will personally never be in terms of code and everything else and then you help them really scale something will help them connect the dots in strategy or go to market um and execution hiring the right people just really um that's kind of just even now talking about it you know i'm getting goosebumps because you're helping somebody build a company and helping somebody build their dream and you know we all i think two most powerful words in human existence are love and hope and i think

we you know with this technology i always hope that we can have as i think julax said in the beginning can have a better world and i think owen said there is always a possibility of going the sideways and i unfortunately think we might be going into 1984 or well to some extent um some extent not um it's that soon i don't know but i'm i certainly love the thrill i love personally i love sci-fi um and i think this just gives me a creativity in my mind and constantly something to read and learn i'm never the smartest person in the room and that's just so humbling so yeah very interesting yeah i i mean it's all of those things

and i you know i i just feel like we're just so fortunate to be part of something that is transformative and and and will change the world and now the question is how exactly is it going to change the world and how is this technology going to be used but to be in the early stages of forming that and partnering with with teams that um that are doing that um is um you know i i did it earlier in my career through when i was at intel you know and with with with the internet but that was much earlier in in my career and i actually think this is way more global way more transformative um enabled by what was

all done through you know the pipes and the infrastructure and the business models that came out of the internet but um you know i i feel like it's all of my life's works and passion all in in that you know it's people you know before i started the third fun people said are you going to retire and i was like are you kidding we're just getting started we're just getting into the meat of um of this and and to see so many brilliant minds um you know working on on the future and what you mentioned with the equity versus tokenization and you know i mean hopefully we'll have different ways of running businesses that are more equitable that um

where more people can participate in the ownership and create more value out of all of that and and that's the world i want to see i don't you know we'll we'll see what if if and when that actually happens but that's what drives me every every single day um and and um yeah and it hopefully is you know keeps me and keeps me young to be around all these minds perfect um yeah that's in longevity hopefully um and to add to that right i mean obviously there's there's definitely a fun and exciting uh piece of being a part of you know something that may have a significant amount of global change and

whatnot um and then yeah the other piece of this is it's just a lot of fun right i mean like it's it's and i know that sounds like the most blanket answer ever but the reality is is whenever you see okay two and a half years ago you know we had invested in a business that had let's call it 20 to 30 employees something like that now today they have 700 on their way to 800 right i mean it's a you know every every month you go back and you know you have a an update of some sort and it's like oh you know x y and z is now happening and then you know x y and z again is now happening right um to it's it's then before you know it i mean you know two years have gone by three years have gone by and it's like

um you know you don't even remember blinking right um and obviously this this happens a lot in the venture space but i think right now because of kind of the heavy amount of excitement and money flowing into you know crypto and blockchain in specific um you know we're we're seeing a little bit higher of a frequency of that than we would have if you know we were in a different niche right so i think those are kind of two pieces of it i think this was very interesting this discussion and i mean i also for me also i i believe that digitalization is really a big thing it's comparable to the steam machine in my opinion

the steam machine was the basis for the last 250 years of development on our planet with advantages and what we see currently now many disadvantages uh destroying our planet i mean not yet destroying don't be too alarmist but still causing lots of harm and i believe that digitalization is also probably possibly the biggest invention for the next 200 300 years lots of blocks will be played in but still the basis is what we have seen here and we as a generation we were you know the ones we had this

privilege to be born in these times which maybe uh yeah every thousand or every few hundred years happens and now we are we are here at the forefront and uh able to to to shape this and i think uh this is a huge privilege which we should use and i really love to see how you that's my impression how you imagine the future and now we are now asked what do we have to do now to get there where we want to see our future and i mean maya mentioned is there are many risks

because i mean digitalization means also traceability of everything i mean i grew up in a time very basic you could do whatever you wanted if you would if you were not called in the moment then it was good and now if you see now i mean you have traces everywhere and basically it's impossible to an enemy to be anonymous and this of course there are huge risks we have these huge companies who control the digital space now and i think and i hope that blockchain technology will enable and help us also to bring back power you know to the people and not being

just instruments of uh or large organizations and and governments and um yeah i mean i want to give you the last word from my side i want to say i mean it was really very it was uh great to have you here i'm also very proud you know to have with charla camaya now a majority of our lecturers who are female and i thought i think you gave us all a very inspiring and great example of the new way of business and uh thank you very much and i wish you all

success thank you so much for having us thank you thank you thanks everybody