Spartan Co-Founder: How I predict Crypto Market Cycles | E70

This is the first business that really worked out well for you yeah and you started when you were 43 with a wife and three kids yeah where does the conviction come from to take such a risk in your 40s probably one of those times when people thought the whole family was going crazy because we Casper Johansson the co-founder at the Spartan group one of the most active Venture investors in the web 3 Industry With over 500 million in assets under management what is Spartan group and what's the story we really start started by just investing

in crypto as Angel Investors we've been Tech Angel Investors for 10 years and we saw a lot of use cases like remittance crossb disruption of the banking sector etc etc we immediately had a lot of referrals of people who wanted us to work with them and the business kind of just started itself it was almost like hit us in the Back of the head are you ever able to stop and do nothing it's difficult work life balance is not like a fixed ratio some people need more work life balance for example I have a work

life balance where I have a lot of work and a little bit of life but it's very concentrated very focused and intentional you told me the other day that your life was best described by one word transition whenever you jump into Something new there's a massive transition that goes on people who have been put in transition earlier on in their life become better at it I've always benefited from transition even though at the start of the transition it's not always particularly pleasant but there's a catch to this what is your mission to be happy what's

your definition of happiness Ladies and gentlemen I have the pleasure to announce that we're teaming up with Asar Network on this show Asar network is a decentralized blockchain platform that aims to bring billions of people into web3 and the Asar team has a very specific strategy to make this happen to partner with the biggest conglomerates in web 2 and help them onboard their customers into our word the web three word star tail Labs a core developer for Asar network is currently working hand Inhand with Sony the business division of the conglomerate that created the PlayStation

in order to develop Sony's own public blockchain network the development of a new Sony public blockchain is a huge step towards the goal of web three Mass adoption as Sony has a very large user base who could hugely benefit from the benefits of a more decentralized world where assets can be fully owned and transferred effortlessly the team behind Asar are People with high integrity and great values I'm lucky to call S the founder of Asar a friend and trust him deeply to have the best interest of the industry and of all its participant at heart

if you want to check out for yourself I invite you to watch the candid podcast are recorded with SOA wanabi the founder of Star tail labs and Asar Network and please please please if you enjoy this show hit the like button leave a comment in the comment section and subscribe to This channel the more subscribers the better the guests thank you so much for your help and now on to today's episode it's NeverEnding never ending there's no such thing as weeks or days or weekends yeah there's days and nights and but it's like it's rolling

sometimes I lose track what do you think about that's a good uh start actually what do you think about kind of the pride that we might take I'd say in crypto it's 24/7 right But even in the you worked in banking right I mean you did a lot of things but you work in banking or you go you know Ma Consultants like they there's this pride in saying that they work so hard right I do so much I I'm never off right what do you think about that because we actually even we were like that

oh no man like it's nonstop and you kind of have this kind of little kick and but is it that healthy well well I think there's that's A there's a lot of factors so you know I I've pretty much always worked hard even like looking back at school in terms of and we were talking about this earlier right just terms of filling the schedule with schoolwork sports like just filling up the day of course you have some downtime but always worked pretty hard um and I've constantly tried to push myself into new situations and challenge

myself and that usually requires a lot a reset um and a lot of hard work so like When I started you know at Goldman with a law background knew nothing about Finance um it was a lot of work even on top of the usual kind of 80 to 100 hour weeks and we yeah I think you know we back then we worked so hard that you kind of almost have to take pride in it otherwise youd go crazy because you know it is really long hours and I think it's it's kind of a stamina thing

it's almost like you know you you can manage it you can also have a life and you can work That hard just like you're like a longdistance runner or whatever or an you know extreme Sports person so you know even as a Founder um I think it's it's not just about the hours you also have to work smart and work efficient but the reality is if you're running a business there's just so many things that come up even small operational matters can actually take up quite a bit of time and each little thing in isolation

maybe isn't that Important or that much but as a whole they kind of add up so if you don't just keep executing on everything on top of everything things just kind of start to slip so you're just by definition super busy so I think it's partially pride in working long but also just pride in what you kind of have built with your your own hands so to speak are you able to do nothing are you able to stop and do nothing it's difficult it's how do you Feel when you do nothing I have a big

problem with that actually I get yeah yeah I I get a bit like antsy um even today I was just just you know after I went for a run this morning and I just sat I just jumped in the pool to cool off I just sat on the pool Edge and after like 30 seconds I was like okay that's long enough let's let's let's get going right like nothing's happening it's not a good use of time so so yeah I I struggle a bit I think maybe Sometimes when I take myself out out of the

element um it's better like if I go on a hike uh for example which I do once a week um if I go on a holiday somewhere where like in the mountain some's a bit more offline then it's not doing nothing but it's kind of mentally you know hitting pause and just focusing on something else I think that to me is like the equivalent of doing nothing not necessarily just sitting on the couch with Netflix but but things like that Like that I can do but when I'm there like where I usually do work it's

really hard do you have this in your calendar hi time or nothing time I don't actually I I used to put in um block 6 to 8 for family time but then I just ended up having so many calls on top of that because like we working across time zones and our teams at the end I was just like look there's no point in having that if like you breach it every day um so now I just but I'm I'm I'm Conscious around it both in terms of of course I want to spend time with

the family and the kids and also have my own downtime so I've I've so I don't schedule those kind of things but I but I am aware around it and trying to make sure I maintain some some balance but people also have different that's what I found over time people have different um some people need more work life balance like work life balance is not like a fixed ratio everyone has their ratio and You only know yourself so it's it's kind of hard to judge others um and I have a work life balance where I

you know I have a lot of work and can have like a little bit of life but it's very concentrated very focused and very um inten I think when I when I do things outside work you build Spartan with your life partner do you think it's possible to have a life partner who is who has a very different Lifestyle so this definition of work life balance is different from them than from you I think it's I think it's possible but it depends also on the stage of your life I think when one thing one game

changer is when you have kids together that just requires a whole different level of coordination and alignment on principles of how to ra raise a kid what to do how much time to spend at work how much to spend at home vacations you know Whose family spend time with all these things requires a hold it's much more complicated than you know just a relationship between two people which is also complicated enough so I think that that's that's one thing um I mean my wife and I met at Goldman so in many ways we kind of

both been recruited into the same culture and we were in the trenches in in the same way the first few years so that I think helped create a lot of like alignment around culture And values and I I do know couples that are are vastly different and they they somehow make it work but um in terms of like one is like in a creative industry and and very different and doesn't care about numbers the other ones like a finance expert or like a like a hedge fund manager but I think they they they will have

some level of core connectivity where they they they have the same values and outlook on on life even though that like externally they Could look quite different what is your mission in life or at sportting I'd say in life to be happy but but interesting what's your definition of happiness it again I think it's it's relative but it's for me to when I reflect and I and I just reflected a lot because I just you know had my my birthday uh a few days ago I turned 50 right so that's a time to reflect uh

in a way more than Others even though one birthday is kind of the same as the next but you kind of look back whenever it's like a decade and I think to me happiness is kind of saying look based on what I've done with my time in the past and where I am now would I would I change anything I would not change anything to me that's that's one factor of then that's why I'm happy I feel fulfilled and I like what I'm doing I like where I am um I think there is and again

this varies by by People but there's also some level of security in that in terms of financially you know are you under stress or not you know there's a there's a family aspect in terms of your the older generations of the family and how stable a base you have there there's your your current relationship there how your kids are doing but to me it's to be happy in you know in what I see as three main areas is you know work and personal and family that's kind of how I roughly think about It personal would

be health health physical health friends um personal development things that are just me basically whereas the other two parts are all about other people working with other people and family cuz I think everyone's goal in life is to be happy right probably a lot of people they say my goal is to be happy yeah but it's harder than it sounds like so what's your Advice to someone who's unhappy like where do you start is it a question of do you think happiness comes with achievement or do you think happiness comes with you feel like you're

not wasting your potential basically fulfilling your potential no matter the outcome yeah I think it's more the latter and I think for someone who's not happy you of course have to try to identify why not So in other words like identify the problem and then figure out how to how to address it and to do that you have to be very honest with yourself and that some people are more honest with themselves than than others sometimes it's external factors make them happy sometimes it's internal but I think changing things up and taking risk and listening

to your gut that's kind of what I've always done I've made many moves that you know from maybe an External perspective made people shake their heads and wonder what I was up to um changing up situations that were fine that looked really good you know where I was I seemed set and then I kind of just shake it up because internally just I had done what I wanted with that but I wasn't feeling fulfilled I feel like I needed to try something else so to me that's how and I wouldn't say I was unhappy at

the time I just wasn't you know I needed to move even closer Like I need to keep pushing myself to kind of get closer to to happiness so to speak who are you yeah I'm uh I think I I think in a large to a large extent you're defined by kind of where you grow up and also your family background I'm lucky to be from an extremely stable family background and I think that's probably why I also consider myself quite stable grounded and you know solid you know Um but I grew up between cultures I

you know born and breed in Denmark moved to the US when I was seven moved back to Denmark when I was 15 you know left for London after college and then been in Asia the last 20 years so I kind of spent split my time between the US Denmark and Asia so in this current generation like my kids it's a little bit more common I think to be very International and be very Transcontinental but um InterContinental but um in my generation I I am like truly quite International and quite adaptable like you can drop me

into South America Africa Central Asia you know pistan Australia us Denmark I'd be pretty comfortable all those places the reason you moved is because your parents moved a lot you're saying stable but someone stable would maybe I mean I'm not saying you're not stable if You move I also moved a lot but yeah someone stable might just think I'm feeling great here why would I move or change something right yeah now it wasn't wasn't much it was you know pretty much once to the US and once back to Denmark um but different places in Denmark

but you know long stint in the US 8 years and then um when graduating I it was clear to me always that I wanted to go abroad so London is A natural first stop for a lot of Danes cuz it's kind of like in the neighborhood but why do you think you wanted to move that much where do you think he comes from I had the exact same I was always thinking I come from Switzerland great country it's a bubble right but I was like I'm going to do my master abroad I'm going to do

a year a gap here abroad in between and I'm probably going to work then abroad for some time if not forever yeah I mean I Think for me it was growing up in New York I saw what a city like that requires in order to make it it requires a whole different level of of intensity and you got to bring your aame every day and in especially in Europe in many countries you know you can have a amazing life without to be honest having to bring your aame necessarily every day and um London is that

kind of City too right it's full of people from all over the world everybody moves there and Everybody just has to work really hard and bring their aame to to afford the rent to afford you to stay employed and to not have to go back to their country right so to me it was kind of it was that that pushed me that in i i lacked that intensity in in Denmark but but you liked it you felt like this is there's two ways to see that either like this is amazing this is exciting I want

to become one of the best in this hard place or this not for me I'll go back to My chill place no know I loved it I loved it the only thing that I didn't like about it is at the start um I didn't feel like I like I was used to doing well in whatever I did and at the start because I didn't have a for example like Goldman didn't have a finance background I I wasn't performing particularly well cuz I just was pretty clueless about most of the stuff and that wasn't like I

wasn't annoyed by the fact that I was in that situation I I Just really had to fight and work extra hard to kind of climb back you know climb back up the the ranks so to speak or in terms of reaching a performance level that I was happy with so you know that that the easy solution there were just to go back home and and go back and in a law firm right like I was supposed to you told me the other day that your life was best described by one word transition yeah transition so

you mentioned briefly moving right to the US Then moving back home but also in terms of jobs you've done a lot of different jobs do you want to elaborate on how transition kind of defines you yeah I I think you know whenever you jump into something new like you're literally I think jumping is the right word because you're kind of on the edge you know what's behind you you're comfortable with that and you're kind of you're jumping into Something like new Waters that you're not that familiar with you can kind of see it but you

don't really know what's under the surface and you jump into it um that is really quite unsettling and and scary but you kind of feel like it's the right thing to try it it just looks so exciting you just have to make that jump um and then you know you make the jump and then there's a this a massive transition that goes on and how you handle that transition is I I think I Think you become better and better at it and people who have been put in transition earlier on in their life become better

at it and I do think it is um a very important thing to try and which is also partially why you know sometimes when my kids now in the same school for almost 10 years I feel like are they too comfortable like do I need to to shake it up and drop them into something completely new there's also benefits of just being in the zone being Comfortable and doing your thing but I've always benefited from transition even though at the start of the transition it's not always particularly Pleasant I think that I think that people

who've had a lot of transition I just tend to Vibe with them quite well it's kind of like a common theme somehow because one of the key skills that you develop when you do that let's say you start to move around quite a lot when you're young is you realize It's scary right in the beginning or even you start businesses or you change career but then you realize that at the end of the day nothing that bad can happen yeah like you're still alive right yeah and so you're basically lowering a lot you're increasing lot

your tolerance to stress yeah which means that every time you're going to have be faced with a new stressful situation it's basically going to feel like this is nothing compared to What I've done before right what's the worst that can happen yeah while a lot of people might not have moved a lot of been in very stressful situations I mean obviously everything is a I mean stress is a subjective right for everyone it's different but they might react completely differently and uh being good at dealing with stress I mean very stressful situation is probably one

of the best skills you can have because because your decision making is Everything right yeah yeah and also just both making decisions in stressful situations and also knowing when to just kind of take your time and not unless you're forced to not make a decision right there and there and just kind of absorb digest and then go away think about it then make a decision and not making like a kneejerk emotional decision sometimes that that takes some some practice that's probably more something that comes with maturity and Age the second one right yeah can you

train the first when you when you're younger maybe less we're more impulsive When We're Young some people are naturally very good at it but you're right it's probably more dis experience haven't been in so many situations that even if someone on the other side of the table or argument or whatever it is negotiation from you is just in a place where you just can't even start to understand how they could get there You're so able to kind of take a step back put yourself in their shoes and then think okay I still disagree or like

now I kind of see and then you know figure something out probably extremely useful in uh relationships it's it is in romantic relationships in business partners relationships ABS intersect of the two yeah right obviously yeah yeah yeah which not a lot of people have the chance of living but you Have it yeah um why do you think people should embrace transition and kind of the chaos that comes with the transition instead of striving for stability in their career because that's completely the opposite of what we have been taught yeah all our life right especially I

mean I I wanted to say especially in Europe but it's not true in Singapore it's the same right yeah or you go to India hey you should become a An engineer or a doctor otherwise you're no one right it's safe right in Europe hey go to this University have the best grade and go for mckin or Goldman right but what you're saying is you're kind of arguing against that right I mean obviously you've done it and you've done it successfully but why do you think that's the case well not saying that people need to necessarily

jump around a lot I mean keep in mind that I've had like a Very I'm old I've had a very long career right so the transitions I've made are maybe every on average five years but sometimes I'm somewhere for eight years sometimes you know it's it's more um sometimes it's less but the you can also within a company or in a university or whatever make a transition somehow without external kind of changing your your your resume by just trying different things but I I think that the problem with not having transition is You get to

into a comfort zone um and then you don't really you don't push yourself you don't necessarily learn new things and you don't keep keep testing yourself it's just like this this question of like you know who's who's the best footballer in the world right is it someone who played in a club for 18 years just had the comfort zone had the status and then constantly given the best opportunities CU that or is it someone who jumped to five different Clubs and was able to crush it at every single stage right um from a career perspective

yeah obviously if I if I get a resume with someone who moves every nine months it's a bit of a concern because you know are we going to invest in this person you know bring them up to speed which takes easily six months and then risk losing them afterwards and other hand it also shows that they're not afraid to take the hard decision if they feel like they're in the wrong Place or maybe they just don't fit anywhere and they're not you know so it's it's not it's not easy um but in general I would

say for most people for example for us when we're hiring just making that transition into jumping into web 3 or crypto which you know is getting increased amount of adoption and and understanding and acceptance is still for many people you know when they have to go home and explain what they're doing where they're going is still a big Leap it's still difficult to explain to the parents the family to the partner what they're doing so even by the fact that they're applying and want to do this in many ways it ticks a certain box what's

the most compelling kind of obviously there's a lot of different CVS you get right but what's the most compelling kind of CV that you like to see but what do you like to see and what do you not like to see I'd say both from a Founder Is applying at Spartan to get some funding and for someone who's applying as a as an employee right I think for as an employee I like to see that they have had something that they have been passionate about and really good at and excelled in that so that when

they get into something they can really Excel that's what I like to see I I really don't care whether it's ice skating or mountaineering or ancient Greek philosophy or law or whatever it is They've had a certain area because that to me that's that's kind of how Goldman recruits to so you know people in my year and I keep coming back to Goldman because I it is quite foundational for me but I like the way the recruit recruit on on culture fit which is what we recruit on and then the fact that there's this raw

material there um that is has a certain level of Drive intelligence and ability to just focus on something and do well and then for For Founders um I think it's ultimately um their passion for for what they're doing and their reason for doing it and then also of of course their track record in terms of have they why are they doing this have they found their things before how did that go you know even if you found it and failed before it not necessarily a strike against you it depends more on like why did you

fail what did you take away from it and what are you applying in in this Case from from your learnings ladies and gentlemen I'd like to take a short moment to introduce our partner mental who helps us make this show possible mental was created to hyperscale the ethereum network with what we call a layer two that helps users like you and me transact much faster and at a fraction of the cost of the ethereum network mental has over $2 billion in total value locked has a mega treasury of $3.7 billion do in Bitcoin eth and

Stable coins and has the largest ech fund of the industry with more than $200 million to invest into new projects that want to join the mental ecosystem the team behind mental are extremely smart people who are personally trust with some of my money and who I personally know outside of crypto we actually had Ignus and Jordi Alexander on this podcast who both are key figures in the mental ecosystem so I invite you to watch these two very candid and in-depth Conversations to develop your own opinion and please please please if you enjoy this show hit

the like button leave a comment in the comment section and subscribe to this channel the more subscribers the better the guests thank you so much for your help and now onto today today's episode what's your advice to a 22y old dude went to a good uni that his parents paid for and whose next logical step is a safe job in Tech Consulting or banking but who feels that his Destiny lies into doing something less consens consensus such as building a company I would say that first of all you're 22 and you've got that generation at

least 78 more years to live right so there's there's no rush right I started Spartan when I was 43 I started companies before that but there's nothing wrong with spending the first two three four five years out of School just getting solid training in an organization learning how to navigate you know politics people learning how to eat dirt you know it's not necessarily A Bad Thing but it's a very it's a very personal thing for some people it's it's something like for me it's always been something I wanted to do at some point I felt

like when I came out of school I didn't have to do it right away and also I didn't have like an an idea that I just had to do this I knew it would come Someday something some opportunity but I just didn't have it then and so I I think it's and then there's there there is also now now I'm on the other side of that trade right where I'm about to send my eldest off to college next year m so in four or five years I could be in a very similar situation right where

I've I forked out a lot of private school and college tuition over about 20 years right and then they want to go and and do something which maybe From my perspective is not what I expected of them and is certainly not very remunerative and I don't even see how they could pay their rent with it and you know I think it's going to be disrupted by AI or or whatever right but I think I think you need to let people go on that journey I sometimes there's Financial extenuating circumstances there's there's medical bills there's whatever

then you just got to do what you got to do but in you in a situation Where you're flexible then then I I don't I don't think there's a rush to do these things I actually think you know each person has their time that's very interesting that's very interesting because it's kind of a double edged word right for for me I started at 23 right after uni I started my first company and I never had an employer from that but and the reason why unemployable well I think Naval says the taste of Freedom makes you

unemployable Right naal rikan but that's in theory right now the truth about doing that why did I do that because yeah I I did my bachelor in Switzerland and I did a a gap year in Hong Kong and Singapore right I was an intern for a large luxury company for two times three months I was in this cubic calls every day and I was like it's going to be hard for me to continue like that but that's where I developed my first business idea by building by by basically solving some Issues there the reason I

started a company though was because the amazing thing in Hong Kong and Singapore is it's very easy to meet people like you basically yeah like I'm 21 22 I you know you're kind of naive you have big mouth you're going out out there pitching yourself yeah my pitch was at that point my pitch was I'm going to do the GMAT I'm going to do a top NBA in or Masters in in Europe and then I'll go for mcken and so I was basically Meeting people ex mckin or ex Goldman who had done the whole thing

and then at they were 42 43 and basically starting a business or running a business since two or three years and they were telling me man my only regret is not having started when I was your age in my mind I was like what that's weird like the people who who've been through the carer path that I aim because that's kind of what the society and school tells you and the brands that you see in the universities And everything big four mckin be B and Consulting Group Etc they telling me I should not do that

and I should start now right so that's how my mind switched basically and then I started the first company but honestly was [ __ ] horrible cuz I was 22 23 no one gives a [ __ ] about you right like and you have a very Network this zero Network you know it exist you don't understand the corporate politics and you dare like man like I'm going to die I mean the business is going to die before I even have a chance to show anything to anyone because no one gives a crap and No One

Believes In Me I'm just a kid right yeah and so the double edged word is on one hand if for for many years I was I mean I was still pushing and building the first company but I was thinking had I spend the first three four or five years in a consulting company building my network and my skills probably would Have been much easier yeah to start the business itself but would I would I would I have been able to leave a job that pays me well and gives me a comfortable life yeah and take

the leap I don't know right that's where a lot of people get get stuck um I think those people who were 42 43 which is the same age I was when I started Spartan and also had similar experience right I think that's easier said than done Because they now have the benefit of almost 20 you know 15 20 years call it a work experience and network and also some level of savings right to fall back on when they're starting their business that is very different although it's also scary in a big leap it's very different

from being in in one way when you're younger you have nothing to lose you have nothing so you have nothing to lose but on the other hand you also have no base no buffer right so in a way You're you know you're Jumping On a Plane without a parachute right so I I think that's easier said than done it's very hard to be successful when you're that young to start a company um and then yeah in in terms of um getting this experience in a in a big company me I I I I think it's

good I think you can also have small companies like I would say we're like that right you can get very solid M learning and experience and use that as as a base you Don't necessarily have to jump straight in into entrepreneurship but um of course you have much more time to try and fail um if you start when you're 22 you can do a new startup every two years there's this because I was I was like that I was thinking I'm taking the leap but then I have my friends you know they're starting their career

mckin I don't know Twitter and you make 10K Month directly out of you know school they're building the here and I'm like I knew inside of me is the right thing because I was thinking there's no ceiling to what I'm doing but I same I was like if it doesn't work maybe I'm just like you know you compare yourself to others especially when you're young yeah so like maybe I'm doing a massive mistake here and I'm going to be five years behind the others yeah who just took this easier I mean it's not easier But

different path and maybe what I'm doing here doesn't make sense because I'm not sure and I think that's still I think it's the truth I don't think big companies value entrepreneu experiences yeah like if you go apply to a big company and say hey look I've tried this and blah blah blah and I failed they be like you have no experience right yeah so so nowaday maybe more but not still not not not the same right yeah yeah yeah so so what's your message to Because you left uh Goldman right when you were 43 no

the I actually no you did a things yeah the first time I left Goldman was right after I made executive director M which is like again for me it was the right time because I reached a new level I I'd unlocked the level that I wanted and then now it's time to try something others looking both colleagues with and Goldman and friends were like what are you doing you're crazy like you finally made it to the level and now You're leaving now is when you're going to start getting paid for real etc etc and you've

got this recognition and for me it's just like something I I had to do at the time you living in Hong Kong it's super expensive we had a 2 and a halfy old you know it was it was a big decision but it was just something I had to do and something that I I wanted to do do you think they really thought you were crazy or do you think they were almost I want say jealous but like how Does he have the guts to do that when I also want to do something else I

think it's a combination most people almost everyone says they want to do something else and they're going to leave next year just one more bonus right um some are just literally kidding themselves and they should really just accept the fact that they really like what they're doing and that's totally fine right not everybody has to start a company others actually really want to Do it and then just don't do it and again I'm I'm carving out people who have whatever personal circumstances that mean that they have to keep the the cash flow coming and have

have bills but yeah it's it's not especially in Hong Kong and Singapore it's not the most usual thing to do um also with you know when you describing your 22 23 like if you're going around doing that somewhere like San Francisco know you might get a lot more traction and there's there's a Track record of people doing that Stanford grads Stanford dropouts whatever and people will listen to you and take you seriously but in in many especially Financial capitals there's not a huge startup scene and anyone taking startup level risk is basically seen as a

bit crazy also because and this is also why ultimately we move to Beijing because the cash flow in Hong Kong the cash disappears very very quickly once you don't have an income It's just really hard and your savings just get get carved out really quickly still even today right Singapore Hong Kong it's it's a tough place to be as a as a Founder absolutely which is why that's I mean I think more and more people especially from younger Generations understand the notion of uh geographical arbitr when you start a company but you always have again

is a kind of double edge like I was in pet for a couple of days now And there's a bunch of crypto teams there spent a few days with the founder of anango which just lounged their layer one and their Bas there but yes it's cheaper but Singapore is amazing because the people you meet so it's always yeah either you take the cheaper routes which maybe you you're forced to because you have to either you're like oh man kind of same as what you were saying in the I I need to stay in Singapore I

need to Stay there but if I'm here I need to make it worth it staying here therefore I need to destroy myself like I have you know like sense of urgency yeah which probably makes you better because you have the sense of urgency there's also more of a network here especially if you need Capital there is just although there's still not a lot of capital compared to like New York or San Francisco but there's still a lot more Capital in a place like Singapore versus pette so you made a lot of decisions in your life

you know moving changing jobs starting [Music] companies stopping companies that didn't work investing in Founders that's a hard decision to stop company that doesn't work let's let's go with this one first yeah yeah yeah I mean the when I left Goldman the first time when I just made VP right that I launched the Big Data Company we raised money for it we ran it for about um three and a half years before we decided that you know we just weren't finding product Market fit we weren't getting enough traction we had to go raise more Capital

was this really you know Prime Time Of Our Lives right like early mid-30s the founders was this really what did we want to double down on this or was this the time to say look we we killed ourselves and we we Literally did like 100 hour weeks for you know three three and a half years we decided to say no this is the time to stop that's that's a very difficult decision how long did you take to make this decision and how long do you think you should have taken yeah people always say it's the

same when you fire someone right yeah should have been much faster yeah when you break up should have been much faster I I think we probably from when we got feel knew it was the case Till we actually decided probably took a year um and and then yeah it probably took about a year which you know overall I would have liked to fail quicker so to speak but um we were all firsttime founders so I think that that's one factor we also had you know Angel money and it's a little bit more personal when it's

friends and family money versus I mean we always have to respect investors money but the fact that someone's hard earned savings Vers which it in fact also is in a fund but it's just abstracted away through multiple layers but that that makes it hard and then because when you build especially a very early stage startup like a lot of people are are relying on you trusting you getting options and and your team going back to them and saying sorry like we're you know we're we're shutting down and you're all fired basically um with with you

know whatever one month notice is is really difficult I remember firing my first person I mean first employee actually had to fire first co-founder yeah I remember crying crying crying and then I remember also like the first employee that we had to fire it was not even his fault we had lost a big client because of an internal politic reason the guy who hired us we were we were doing consulting implementation of data analytic Solutions actually and the the guy who hired us got fired for some Reason I don't know why and therefore like we

I knew this project is [ __ ] maybe not directly they're telling us it's fine we'll continue but I was like yeah I don't think so you lost your sponsor so then you're like oh man this guy has a family and everything and I'm going to have to fight like remember two nights in a r not being able to sleep being completely destroyed and then being like okay we have to fire you but I'll buy you some plane tickets to go Wherever you are because I felt so horrible right and uh one of the hardest

things for me was at that point I had spent over three years and worked you know Monday to Friday and then also every Saturday full day and then often part of Sunday and my first child was between 2 and 1/2 and 5 and A2 at that time so I sacrificed a lot of time with her away from her working in the office on this thing that ultimately turned out to worth zero financially right so I had A huge amount of guilt over that too that was almost harder or it was it was up there with

you know everything all the other considerations too obviously I gained a lot in terms of personal development and and learnings and things that that later on in life I've built upon to be able to provide you know what I'd say is a good life but at that time it's very hard to yeah you oh yeah Co I learn all that stuff blah blah blah but at the end of the day what do I have to Show yeah nothing right yeah yeah it's it's tough It's very l i mean you told me the other day so

basically this didn't go well right you told me once you roll the dice once if it doesn't work keep rolling them yeah yeah yeah I mean and what I mean by that is if you have it in you to take the kind of risk to jump you know to tr to do a transition if that first transition doesn't work like don't don't keep like just jumping like be be thoughtful about It but you've shown that you're willing to take some level of risk to try to shake things up develop yourself do something create wealth whatever

reason you do it then then do do it again because I've you know I've tried a few companies didn't work out I've obviously invested in some Angel Investments didn't work out you know but but I think you have to keep trying you just you need to make sure that you in terms of mental health and financially have Enough kind of stay alive so to speak to keep trying till you figure what what works for you if you just try it once and then go back to that stable corporate job like almost certainly at some point

you're going to get the itch again and then you should my view is you should go for it again do you think it's if you keep doing that obviously in a thoughtful fashion right do you think that Success is Not Inevitable basically it's not it's not inevitable unfortunately no it's not no so if because I'm I mean maybe it's because I'm too optimistic but I'm just thinking if you have if you're the kind of person obviously you're not doing random thing in a random fashion but you are you have this power of saying I'll jump

take the leap I'll try and you have this it's a mindset basically it's kind of like a or lifestyle yeah at some point you'll find That thing that works out it's kind of mathematical it's the first time probably going to work second time probably and I I see all the people I I interview on this podcast for example I mean for example Yan from wintermute Mega company super successful but he's the first he's also saying right I built three other companies before that that kind of worked but not really uh I mean he said life

life in life in General I built I'm 39 or 40 now I had to build three companies the fourth one to be really successful I had to go through a 10year marriage that didn't work out and have two kids to find the wife you know like basically the more you try the more it's likely to work yeah and it's probably not going to work directly which were being sold at least I'd say maybe less now but when I was at school 20 let's say Master's I bash Master between 2010 and 2015 Instagram Facebook all these

Mega companies kind of overnight success right I mean overnight 10 year overnight success but like in the newspaper it's not that it's like oh look I mean Instagram one or two years so you're being kind of told that you're going to you should first you should be an entrepreneur it's second it's cool third you're going to build a multibillion company in a year yeah and then you try and you're like Yeah you're just like it's not cool no it's [ __ ] hard no one gives a [ __ ] and where is the money yeah

yeah yeah yeah basically no but so just to say that people just in my maybe very optimistic mind it's the more you try the more you're likely to find something that works yeah maybe same in dating right the more you date the more you start to understand what work what doesn't work who who is good for you or not and then find the right person yeah Instead of being like I put yourself so much pressure that I should the first person I date marry them or the first company I build should be a multi-billion dollar

company yeah but what I I think I think I'd come back to the fact that it's important to just kind of be able to stay alive from the perspect so example of what I did not that this is the recipe but that worked for me is I it wasn't Goldman I left tried something Didn't go out didn't work out know for three and a half years Goldman asked me to come back I came back I replenished the coffers 2 and a half years try something again that kind of worked out not really then I you

know did something else but what was the second thing that you tried um when I left Goldman I went inh house with a client um to do an IPO we did the IPO but then the parent company went bust and went to chapter 11 and kind of The whole financial play around it fell apart and I ended up feeling a bit of a fool having walk away from Goldman for the second time and probably not able to go back again right to to you know to replenish the coffers and then but ultimately made it work

out and then in in some ways you know the the path led me to where I am now so I'm I'm thankful for it but these kind of rolling the dice and trying things there's also a Bit of a like a bias arounded where you could look at okay where am I now and man if I hadn't done that I would wouldn't be where I am now so the right model is to do what I did but necessarily cuz if I done all these things and then not had ultimately success and luck with what I

did you you'd look at it and say like yeah of course because you just kept jumping to so many different things you should have just focused on one thing Because look at this guy over here he focused on one thing and he's very successful so this second thing out the chapter 11 right that was the thing okay how so it's the second thing that you try right and it's kind of working because IPO so I guess you had stock options and all that stuff but then it doesn't work chapter 11 yeah how do you deal

with maybe you are more mature so it's maybe easier you were in your 30s right The biggest problem in Failure is how we think we're going to look stupid towards others probably the thing that makes people not start things initially right you're thinking if I fail everybody's going to be looking at me and hahaa I told you so right or come with their best advices I Told You So or kind of like love about you and like so how do you deal you're like oh I tried almost got there but maybe God or destiny doesn't

want really doesn't want me to To be super mega successful because there is always something else or is it just part of life like to make it big you probably have to make it try fail but also maybe sometimes you make it big and then you kind of lose a lot yeah and then continue instead of abandoning at that key moment right where it's so tempting to just say okay enough try enough tries now I'm just going to go back to the safe yeah spot yeah I mean I know a lot of successful People right

many of them have been on your your podcast and been friends in other Industries right and there's not a single one of them that hasn't been through very difficult times um both in their past as well as in their their current company it hasn't been like a straight line to success there's been many instances where they felt like it was near death or at least very very critical so I think that's um you have to kind of persevere through that and And keep your belief it's never like a never a straight line and even when

you from the outside see people that are very successful there's still constantly things that come up where you know you you you got to you have to keep running you have to keep pushing always in in a company even if it's successful maybe we can talk about that um what happens if you don't what and this is a big thing in crypto when everything goes so well it's So easy to fall into comp complacency yeah what happens if you become complacent I think it of course depends a lot on what kind of company you have

but for example in our situation if you become complacent what we risk is that we no longer get access to the best Founders be it you know building with them investing with them advising them which is what we do because we we just you know a bit chill and there's no sense of urgency there's No intensity we're just kind of comfortable then we go into that more comfortable mode and nothing wrong with that but you just have to recognize that you're no longer kind of top of the game and you're not on top of your

own game because you it's like you know it's just like if you're an athlete if you stopped the training because you just kind of broke the world record or did really well you can't expect to show up at the next race and do what you did before and If you expect that you're going to be very disappointed so I think at some point everybody has their own point in time where you kind of say okay now is the time I'm going to step back and you know I'm not going to train for the gold medal

anymore but as long as you're kind of if if you're in the game you're running a business you just have to you have to keep pushing otherwise it also you'll lose your your passion because if you're used to kind of doing well in Whatever area you're focused on and all of a sudden you feel you'll feel that you're not it it it's very difficult to to accept and then yeah and then you'll get back to what we're seeing in the beginning which is happiness right yeah you you're going to lose that yeah you know you're

it's a bit either or it's a bit either or like just like I know people who are top tennis players and when they stop they literally just stop Because they can't accept just playing a bit for fun and then you know losing like maybe later they come a bit back to the game but it it's very hard to just just kind of take it down 30% and say you know I'm I'm I'm going to I'm going to go down to 40 hours a week and then but still keep doing the same thing it just doesn't

work that way that's a super interesting point because there is this Utopia where I'd say in the in in in life in General but again very applicable to crypto I made it I can chill now yeah but there's no such thing right I think it's hard because of the personality type too like yeah sure if you went into Bitcoin 2011 put $100,000 worth I don't know 100 million now and you haven't really actually built anything you just kind of sat on that pile then maybe that's one thing but if you've built up a company you

you built up a fund what whatever it is it it it just to this Point earlier about sitting still it's very hard to just say well I kind of have enough like because at some point I think initially you you do it for the money and because you want to generate wealth and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that that's how great businesses are built but then you kind of reach a point where when you started you have this goal of I want to reach here and once I'm here that's financially all I need for me

my kids And then I'm going to retire and you know in some cases the bare Market comes and you dip way below that again and realize that oh oops okay I'm not quite there yet and but but even for people that that reach that point um part of part of the issue is that Target keeps moving because you keep like oh actually but I kind of need this too and like no but like two houses is not enough like I have to get here or or whatever it is depending On personal habits consumption but for

most people they reach a point where they realize that you know it's not just about that they really actually enjoy what they're doing they're building something want to keep building it probably one of the good um you know first cycle first crypto cycle you if you play it not too bad you print a lot of money at least on paper and then you start to become like very you might become entitled and you're you're the King or the queen of the world and then you probably get wrecked and the moment you get wrecked it's really

painful but it's also the moment that probably your mindset is going to shift towards why am I here anyway yeah what's going to make me happy in life what's the definition of Happiness right what do I need to be happy and it's probably being struggling and improving and feeling progress every day rather than a number yeah and as Long as I have enough to have a great life I I probably don't need as much as I think to have a great life anyway but if I'm doing something that I'm struggling at every day and I

feel that I'm really giving my best yeah the fact I'm giving my best is going to provide me happiness and that's why no matter if I reach that Financial goal I'll continue afterwards which a lot of people probably who are new to crypto might not understand like why don't you Stop when you're at that number that non crypto people you know they might say ah they I have a million I'm going to change my life or I going do this or they have 10 million right but if you I always tell them if the day

you have that number you going to change your life probably you want to change your life now because you're not going to be happy to get to that number anyway because the source of your happiness is not a number that's right It's what you're doing yeah but you probably need to get maybe to that number or higher and then lose it to realize what changed and nothing ah maybe that's not those S of Happiness ah maybe I should focus on the right things I think being a crypto founder is a very very it's a very

difficult sector to be a Founder in because for most crypto Founders um and some some have pure Equity businesses but like many are associated with a token or portfolio or A fund right and you can almost you can track your personal wealth and people can kind of roughly track your wealth whereas if you're more traditional web 2 founder like you do your series a you do your series B B C D and yeah maybe after the series D on paper as a Founder you're worth 100 million on paper but it's not violently moving up and

down every day you know you might have some trouble in the company sometimes and people always know that this is equity It's IL liquid it's subject to you know an IPO or selling the company whereas in crypto a lot of the wealth if fairly quickly becomes liquid so technically we could have all just cashed out near the peak and literally just had that in cash or stable coins right it's not like it's paper value but a lot of it is is is very real like you could actually realize it right so the psychological impact of

seeing that evaporate versus if you're a series D and have to do a Down Round And you you know it's it's actually much tougher in in crypto I would say it's you know a lot of people you need a a pretty strong uh personal like you know gut it it can be gut big gut wrenching so that your your founder group the people around you is is very important around that but also as as you say your perspective in terms of you can reach a point in the peak bull market where you feel like you

know you just you at least On paper you reach a point where you're like wow this is just absolutely crazy um and then very quickly you become humbled again and be reminded that if it was in some way Easy Come it can also very easily be easy go the the easy the important thing is to build something like a a franchise a business something a foundation of value that you can just over time keep increasing so you get you know higher highs and higher lows over time but it it's just it's just going to Be

very volatile but it's it's yeah could be pretty jarring so you're bu a crypto founder you founded Spartan group what is Spartan group and what's the story yes I founded it with Melody and Kelvin my two co-founders uh in 2017 um we all have a background from Goldman Sachs um as in different parts of the organization but um we really started by just investing in in in crypto as Angel Investors we've been Tech Angel Investors for 10 years and we saw a lot of use cases we liked especially remittance cross border um you know disruption

of the banking sector etc etc new social networks via monetary value so we we decided to we looked at we liked investing we want to do this full-time Melody and I are good at working with companies as advisers like we're investment bankers so we immediately kind of had a lot of referrals of people Who wanted us to work with them and funds that want us to work with portfolio companies so the business kind of just started itself it was almost like hit us in the back of the head where it's like wow so many people

are asking if we could work with them there's a real business here let's do it right it just made sense while you were still employees we were all trans kind of semi in something and semi transitioning we we were all in doing Something where we're kind of launching our own thing participating in something where it wasn't too hard for us to jump out like sure we had to jump out of something and you know focus on SP in fulltime but it was a good period for the three of us to do it and we decided

to launch an advisory business and then an an asset management business so that's kind of what we launched in 2017 so that's what that's still our two core businesses advisory where we do Token launches token raises Equity raises m&a all in crypto and we have on the investment side three funds a liquid token hedge fund a def5 venture fund and a gming and metaverse Venture fund then we also added a third Arm about a year and a half ago which is Spartan labs where we it's a venture Builder where we co-build you know mainly crypto

consumer facing products with with Founders this is the first business that really worked out well for You yeah and you started when you were 43 yeah with a wife yeah three kids yeah where does the conviction come from to take such a risk in your 40s yeah it's um it's a good question again probably one of those times when people thought we were not only I was crazy but the whole family was going crazy because we um you know we both kind of stop what we're doing so we and and obviously as as Founders we're

pretty much paying not not paying Ourselves the first few years right so we like re income zero um and then we put all our eggs in one basket and that we started the company together and that we also then took most of our savings and put them into the liquid kken hedge fund the Spartan fund that we started um so we were pretty much all in you could say the conviction I think came because you know I'd worked in banking a long time I'd been a tech founder Melody had worked in banking inventure had been

a Tech founder herself Kelvin had a long career in banking and also been a tech investor for a long time I think we at that point had enough experience that what we saw especially this was of course Bitcoin as the macro play but with ethereum and all the apps being built on on top and the you know they like sure it was slow and all that but we we kind of saw that potential of this whole new technology we all felt like you know like in theom Bubble or boom and then bust right we were

actually all old enough to have participated in that we were kind of you know 2024 we could have participated but we were all doing like corporate e type things and kind of missed it and we felt like this this is a a whole new paradigm that's being set up it's like it's deconstructing existing business and putting it back together and now we are actually at that time although we felt we were late in 17 because there's a lot Of like serious ogs at that time like early bitcoiners right including my my former co-founder um at

least on the building you know on the ethereum in terms of on the the growth of the sector we we were quite early um and we felt that we were early enough to really established ourselves before much bigger names and more people came in so it's just we just had a super high conviction about the technology and This intersect of technology and and finance where we found ourselves so you launched that in 2017 but when early mid late because makes a big difference right and and the reason I'm asking that is you might have the

right conviction the right timing go all in there's this meme maybe it represents the question better there's this meme uh that's these days On Twitter it's something like ah you've been in Bitcoin since 2020 or 17 or whatever you must be rich and then the guy is like because it's so easy to be early yeah but lose everything especially the first cycle right so now imag I mean I guess it didn't happen to you obviously that's why we still here but maybe let's say it's early 2017 you go in you can print a lot of

money on paper but if you don't manage your risk Well you can probably lose most of it and then the entire story is different yeah that's right what did you do right to be at least able to survive the 2018 and 19 bare Market what I did right and I put this down to a combination of just skill luck and you know whatever but we started investing in 200 early 17 M and so we were you know starting in q217 we started investing in the icos right and back then there was no concept Of token

lock up or anything like that it everything's liquid right away and all the there weren't that many tokens of the exchange just list binance all these like listed them right away right k okx bitrex at the time um so you could you could quickly turn them over you invest in one it goes up you liquidate you invest the next and you could kind of build some accumulate wealth quite quickly like compounding um wealth there and what I think was Important from me and melly's perspective is pretty much sold everything at the Peak at the end

of 17 like I remember sitting in um yeah we we had a we had a small ski place in in China and we were up skiing and I remember sitting in the evenings after coming back from the slopes and just selling everything in late December um why just just I guess because I wasn't completely orange pilled yet right at that time like we Jumped into it but I still it's just like it was even though it was like only from whatever 3K to 17K which feels really low nowadays it was just the hype back then

even late 17 and it was super frothy and it was very there's a lot of very scammy projects coming out and it's just it just a a frenzy and it just felt like too much and I just wasn't you know getting given the risk we were running to in terms of um you know our just the fact that we're all in I just wasn't Very comfortable with it so I kind of just decided let us let us go get out of the market and then wait and see what what happens here and like if I

give up another like turn if it goes from 17 to 30 and I miss out so be it I was wrong but at least I can kind of have that face and then after that it all went down um and then kind of was able to start buy buying back into the market in in about half a year later but then we rolled most of that into our fund so if I hadn't done that we wouldn't have much to put into our fund to be honest that's probably where the previous two or three failur actually

helped right yeah maybe you're thinking oh man I don't want to feel like it's going really well but like end up losing it all again right yeah because we felt like on the advisory side we really felt we were adding value to these projects and there was a business there like maybe it would be a difficult time and we would but we We would be able to run a profitable business because because we could do all the work ourselves just the two of us if we had to me Melody and advisory side we had a

small team but we could do it and there's a real business there and it it's it's sustainable so I was kind of comfortable with that from a cash flow perspective that we could you know could just about eek it out and then on the capital side partially I knew that we'd have to make a sizable contribution into Our own fund kind of mid year so I needed to like have that ready and then partially it also felt a bit too frothy so um I can't I mean there's been other times since then where I wish

I had had the same Clarity and sold right but I didn't so it's not like you know sell when I sell buy when I buy sometimes you should do the opposite but that particular point in time I think was the most critical because if I hadn't done that and we watched it wrote it all the Way down you know it could have been more more critical in terms of hey should one of us go take a job right so then there's this bare Market you still keep complete conviction I remember it was a bad one

because I was also also involved yeah then there is a uh covid March crash I mean you told me that you basically went back in six month after late 2017 so that's like mid 2018 so mid 20 August 1st 2018 was the first close on our First fund so that's where we rolled pretty much all of our crypto in I mean we turned it into cash and then we we rolled it in um so at that point A lot of it was all of it pretty much was in our fund and then um you know

our co-founder Kelvin then was deploying that fund but deployed very slowly so even like half a year after launching the fund which was the bottom half a year after launching like early 19 late 18 that's half a year after we were Still like only 30% just sitting in 70% cash then we started to ramp up in q219 which turned out to be really good timing so that that worked out well like I'm happy I gave you know Kelvin the the money to manage too like I don't know whether I yeah done better or worse but

I'm very happy with that that strategy and of course early on WE it was mostly our money so we talked a lot about it now we have a lot of external LPS and it's you know it's more of a you it's It's a very professional process but um that that I think was was critical um and but yeah it was a difficult time but we we also survived by keeping costs really low both on the personal front I mean right now we have a not luxurious but we have a nice lifestyle but like our lifestyle

and like our kids have seen it right we we've our our rent where we live how we travel when we travel how much we travel do we eat organic apples or regular ones like that Varies a lot depending especially the early years of the company based on how we're doing right so um but there's definitely sit like a period in like 1819 where we're kind of like wow can we afford to live in Singapore anymore between you know rent Health Care international schools for three kids wanting to travel see the family there's definitely like some

a time there where it was like you you it show you like in hindsight you maintain conviction but There's you know you you can't not question yourself um it's impossible not to question yourself at some point in time like what the hell am I doing did you question yourself in March 2020 when covid crash happened there's a lot of fun that blew up right even if you didn't blow up it's kind of a catastrophic moment for crypto yeah I mean obviously you entered gradually during the bare market So maybe you're not that much down or

maybe you're still positive but still it's a really bad moment where that's where you be you conviction is being being tested right because Bitcoin is supposed to be a store of value but it gets completely wrecked the rest gets wrecked even more yeah it's uh we had Arthur on the podcast talking about the infamous moment where we got DS attacked you know like we'll never know what happened but Like it's a really bad moment like what goes on through your mind at that moment yeah that's one of the moments where I at least you know

I I felt like what was happening in the crypto side was not specific just to crypto it was like a total macro meltdown in general and a risk off so I didn't feel that like in 1819 people were questioning you know is crypto here to stay it's just going to be Bitcoin it's just even an industry Like what's going on um you know regulation was really you know difficult um in 20 it felt it already felt more like an industry it's here to stay and it was a it was a crash and it was really

bad but I didn't feel like it was there was kind of fundamental foundational concerns about like what did I do and is this a is this an industry that continue but it was super painful in terms of just you know Mark to Market on on you know on a portfolio Basis definitely super painful and at that time I also I sold some Holdings which in hindsight I wish on the personal front I wish I hadn't sold right but I felt that I needed to to De risk right um but it was also just I also

invest outside of crypto and it was just it was painful across the board really that's when I wish I had had you know dry powder and the balls to kind of go in right but I was was kind of Fairly fully invested at the time so it was Yeah it was but I think it picked up pretty quickly after that right like we had some really good mandates um there was also a bco Hing short shortly after so if you believed in that yeah it was kind of like a good thing to fall back on

and say it's bad but the Hing is coming anyway yeah maybe it's a better entry if you really have conviction but it was it was hard around the 2020 having because the previous having before that was 2016 and and crypto wasn't an industry back then right it was a collection of very early adopters and sure you had you had coinbase and you had a few others but very early adopter it was largely Bitcoin and a few other things but it wasn't like a real industry and it wasn't as massive a market cap and you know

a financial asset so it was hard like I feel much more comfortable making judgments and predictions now based on the 24 and 28 having I just feel like in 20 the data points was like you know one or two yeah basically 2013 2016 yeah exactly so you're like can I even rely on that yeah it not not much you know not much of a graph right so in terms of like a to B so I think 20 was was and then with everything else going on around Co it was really hard to have conviction about

anything at that time um versus like this time where I think we're much more comfortable around it so it's a bad moment but then for the People who stuck around which is what happens every time crypto if you stick around the bad times you probably rap the rewards pretty like pretty handsome rewards right and so 2020 21 was crazy yeah crazy good after the crazy bad crazy good how do you still stay levelheaded when you were right your thesis is playing out and you're printing like an insane amount of paper wealth and for me the

most important Point Point here is I I don't remember who I was talking to about that another guest we were saying about the paper wealth is very addictive and it's kind of unhealthy right yeah and makes me feel like you're King but there's something else that's a bigger drug than that being right being right early and telling people I was right right I got And that's why a lot of people get wrecked because instead of saying oh now it's enough they rather like keep bragging about the fact that they were right and become cocky which

is uh which happened to a lot of people in 2021 then they got wrecked so how do you stay levelheaded and stay alive and maximize the kind of amount of cash you have for the next complete Ed right yeah I think that we I think we Stayed relatively levelheaded like me in one way was you know just on the personal expenditure side like yeah you can you can tweak your lifestyle a little bit but you know if if you change it completely based on your new found wealth that then evaporates 6 months later it can

be quite jarring right so that's something that I think because we all came from Investment Banking where it's also fairly volatile and you can get a very nice bonus one year and the Next year it's not very nice so you cannot base your lifestyle based on paper bonus or potential bonus or or wealth right you have to look at have a base level and that's what you what you use I think we follow the same philosophy so we tried to keep we stepped things up a little bit but we didn't like increase our burn same

thing in the company we tried to really maintain cost discipline even in 2021 like We give I would say generous variable bonuses at the end of the year if we performed well but throughout the year we try to really focus on maintaining cash flow and cost discipline so that helped buffer some of the crash because we w we weren't forced to because of financial reasons let let anyone go like ultimately we reduce the size of the business but it wasn't because of financial pressures because because of that I think another is Um we um on

the advisory side we work with Founders on you know getting funding for the business selling their business so it's always um a grind working with these Founders and there there's always challenges even in a even in a bull market uh you know you're constantly trying to achieve something better because like maybe the year before you should have sold it for 50 and but this year selling it for 100 is not Acceptable because you could sell it for 125 so there's constantly even though the market is up there's constantly this this pressure to to perform so

I think that that kind of helped us keep us levelheaded but you know we we were definitely um you we were expecting a blowoff top in the market and kind of waiting for that and that just didn't come and then you know we were we were caught out a bit on on that um then obviously this time around if there's a Blowoff top and you sell before it you're going to be like oh man but but you also have to just sometimes say like look okay I'm okay to miss out in the last 30% right

it's been a it's been a good ride but it that is just so much easier said than done because you get caught up in the Euphoria and yeah you you do sometimes you lose a little bit of perspective in terms of like you know I've been calling it you forget the last bare Market you're like I've been Calling it right the last year year and a half I just need to stay fully invested and then you kind of get get caught out it's it's really difficult to for that even like you look at some of

the best you know traditional fund managers most of them at some point in their their career have also been caught out despite you know phenomenal track records you have rules that you follow to manage your risk for example for for me what's Really interesting is I mean obviously every cycle is kind of similar but it's actually different right hey we are expecting a btop it's not coming hey we going to there's the Bitcoin Hing and after 6 months after the Bitcoin Haring we reach previous alltime High we reach previous alltime high before the Bitcoin Haring

how do you navigate that in terms of the risking like do you have a framework that is more around prices then around time or do you have Both a price and time factor that you put together is yeah to say that's the moment I'm going to start their risking my liquid positions and maybe that's the moment I'm I'm going to stop investing in Venture fund even if I think that the Venture that I might invest to into now is good but it's too late in the cycle how do you navigate the whole thing I think

it's to it's in this sector it's hard to have such a a rigid framework unless you're running more of a Quant Type strategy you know um when you're running a fundamental strategy like us both in the liquid token hedge fund where it's based on like yeah sure there's when the market is slow and in the start of a bull market you're more heavy Bitcoin and eth but you know as the market heats up you transition out of Bitcoin and E and more into the altcoins and on the altcoin side it's really a there's a view

developed a thesis developed on each one In terms of what needs to play out and then you look at price on an on an absolute basis but also on a relative basis versus you know peers and comps and I think it's it's more about like you primarily focus on that but then of course we also take a step back and we look at factors impacting the overall market and we every week we look at not just crypto factors but all the macro factors and inflation and FX and you know shipping rates and all the Different

oil price commodity prices Golds like all the different factors to try to figure out like okay from a high level perspective where are we in the market um but what you risk um I think as a crypto fund manager is at the end of the day people are are paying you to invest in the sector there are many times for example in 21 ahead of November 21 when it peaked where you could all look at all these factors and you could say like In April 21 like man everything is running into the red and Now's

the Time to jump out but you would have missed like another you know 12x on on the return and and even going to the top and then losing 30 40% you're still way above where if you've gone out in April right so it's really difficult to judge and be too formic about it but we of course there's there's factors like a dashboard that we have we we we keep track and if we feel like it's starting To get really overheated at some point we start we start trimming the positions uh across the board and and

and der risking um maybe even start you know shorting the market more but you have to you have to be really really quite you know you have to be very agile I think in in crypto more than in traditional public markets so the Hing is in 20 days something like that 22 days yeah Bitcoin is at basically broke alltime High Previous alltime High where do you think we're at in this cycle do you think everything just happened earlier because of these ETFs or do you think and the cycle kind of like is going to look

similar to what it looked like before or do you think it ends up earlier this kind of a consensus now December this year it's kind of over yeah I mean I wouldn't so again it's how do you play I Mean obviously you have to be agile and you're going to have to look at things how they evolve but like right now what's your is a mix of feeling and data right yeah I mean if you ask me in like some years ago okay so at the next having where are we ahead of that having I

would have said that we'll probably at near or slightly above the all-time high that's kind of what I would be expect to me reaching the alltime high is a start of the bull Cycle not the end of it like I have lots of friends contacting me saying hey like we broke all somehow I should have sold my Bitcoin I'm like no that's just the start um and I'm I'm glad that the market kind of has cooled off a bit recently because one of the concerns I had was I do think that the having was um

the the price ran up quicker because of the Bitcoin ETF approval because it is such a massive factor and I think we're just starting To see the effect of it I don't even think we've seen the real effect of it yet start um but people always want overnight results so even you know now the volume even though it's like the fastest inflows ever in an ETF people are already like poo pooing it and saying like oh now there's outflows today and it's all over and people aren't interested I don't think that's the case at all

but I do think it it ran up quicker ahead of having than it Normally would have it would have been a gradual increase and bounced a bit around and then maybe up towards the having it goes from whatever 50 and up towards the oldtime high but now we're kind of settling into a bit of a range right where it's it's bouncing around the all-time high and I think that's fairly healthy ahead of having I would be surprised if you know having happens and a lot of people expect fireworks and it's just like you wake up

the next St Business as usual minors are just getting half as much right um so I wouldn't be surprised if there's some volatility or bit of a dip after having but in general you know having has preceded 18 20 month bull market and that's still my my base case um I don't think it ends the end of this year I think it goes deep into 202 five and well probably towards the end of it but there's there's many other factors in just crypto there's also interest rates Interest rates elections Wars um elections but right now

I think the political Outlook is quite positive also for it just based on where us elections will probably fall out how that'll impact interest rates how that'll impact politicians and The sec's View on on the crypto sector so I think right now now I'm not usually like overly optimistic I I'm very cautious optimistic but I'm I'm I'm feeling fairly optimistic actually Also because there's a lot of interesting things new products Financial products Games Etc being built in in crypto there's actually like people have used the bare markets well usually there is a kind of consensus

is that you look at previous alltime high for Bitcoin and you do maybe a two or 3x so maybe ah look previous Tim High 2x maybe start to day risk be careful Etc do you think the in your mind the ETF changed this in how High it can go and also in how much we can crash afterwards so there's two separate question the first one is maybe not like a concrete price prediction but like can we go higher than what people think you know 5080 for example Yan he thinks 250 something I know really how

so that's maybe the first question is how what's a moment where you're like okay we captured enough of the we could go that high but we capture enough gains to like Start to be like they risking because you said your friends asking previous alltime high now should i d risk no it's the start yeah when do you there risk obviously there is factors but price is one of them and the other question is do you think there is still despite the ETF and all these uh forces and other crash afterwards 70 80% Bitcoin 97 99%

on the altcoins yeah I think um I think it's not just about the ETF it's also about The derivatives Market I mean derivatives markets play an important role in trying to for Price Discovery also and we've seen derivatives markets like you know when you know there's expiry dates or when you know there's a short squeeze people get stopped out that impacts the price quite a lot I do think the fact that there's a growing derivatives market around crypto especially around the large cap coins and it's been there for a while but There's more and more

value coming in and more more institutional and sophisticated volume I think that that will help um to an extent will naturally reduce the the upside but it could also it also reduce the volatility so yeah I think something like a two to three x for Bitcoin on alltime highs is not unreasonable like I'm probably ALS Al more in the two handle camp like we go to somewhere 2 to 250 um but that's again it's who knows but that just gut Feel feels reasonable to me I think where a lot more value will be captured in

this cycle is in the alt coins both in the the layer ones layer twos all the other layers as well as the apps built on top there we we could see you know like I I think Bitcoin dominance will go down significantly and then you know maybe in the next bare Market comes back up again but I I do think there'll be a lot of of value created and maybe eventually Destroyed also in in that that area but I just think that there's we're at a totally different place than 2020 if you look at all

the infrastructure available now to to build on um uiux is still a challenge for many apps but I do think it has improved and there's a lot more users a lot more openness to it and then the the ETF just brings in this whole different C atory of money and funds that hasn't been able to access it before right it's like the whole you Know the the number of people are throwing around is the Baby Boomers in the US sit on about 80 trillion dollar worth of wealth right and they are going to pass you

know they're all like you know they're all 70 80 and there's going to be you know inherent and so forth going into the hands of people who are probably more open to an understanding of digital assets so all things being equal that is a net positive that is a lot of wealth on the sideline when you Think about you know the the market cap of Bitcoin is what let's Round Up say it's 1.5 trillion right that's that's another it's not all going to go to bitcoin but Gold's you know bitcoin's 1.5 Gold's 15 right 80

trillion is a lot to flow in and sure there's Global markets but the US is such a large Capital pool Capital Market and access to these products is substantial and people haven't even started really selling the Bitcoin product yet it's there's reactions to inbounds of people wanting it but I don't even think we've seen the start of PE of this really being distributed properly yet yeah talking about 1.5 trillion for Bitcoin we uh Alex we when we did the podcast he actually maybe two month back three month back he was saying that he was very

he was very beish real estate and he was explaining why and I found it really interesting because not a lot of People talk about that and then I saw a thread from your co-founder Kelvin talking about real estate why bearish Andrew Kang why bearish and talking about Miami real estate 1.5 trillion trillions of dollars from Boomers being passed down to Millennials and JZ yeah who even if you don't think it's only going to crypto it's going to divert from Real Estate but probably is going to go to Crypto because our I mean crypto assets which

there is a lot of difference right yeah um because that's how I Our Generation kind of thinks we just think completely differently yeah yeah also they're less tied down it's a pain in the ass to own stuff to be honest AB do you think the same yeah I mean I I I still would like I still own like I have like a family house back in Denmark and we're there we create memories I'd much rather do that Than Bounce Around different hotels but it's not like from a value perspective it's it's very small it's a

very it's a nice little house but it's nothing like amazing and then that's I don't plan to change that it's just more to have a spot but it's not like if you look at previous generations like the percentage of their wealth they would have put into real estate when they achieve it is way lower I think like I mean Alex doesn't own real estate anymore he sold Everything Yan doesn't own real estate any sold everything yeah and they're kind of what mid-30s 40 Our Generation you know mid 25 30 we're just like we want to

be free of hassle yeah we're just think I'd rather own if I don't I'd rather own an S&P 500 that is liquid yeah or I'd rather own just Bitcoin yeah like put my put your money in Bitcoin and it's just it's going to be easy and you're going to have to deal with all this maintenance and all this crap that Comes with it because we're building businesses we have something else to do right yeah uh and the return is better yeah actually so you said lots of value created and ultimately destroyed in the layer one

layer two apps on the top so basically you're in the camp I mean obvious I'm in the camp to that we going to have these Mega crashes again right especially in the ALCO Market I mean it depends on The it I think over time all things being equal because of things like the HFS because of d atives because of there being just more real use cases and products that you will have booms and busts just like you do in the traditional financial markets too they've been around for hundreds of years but I I do think

they'll be less extreme but there are certain things that just you know can get hyped up and run Up way ahead of themselves and of course they're also bound to come down quickly the the the tech bubble which you kind of looked at but didn't participate in is kind of for example I was look at I might be wrong on numbers but I was cuz I was thinking people asking oh but the ETF is changing everything right but then you're thinking what's the kind of Target previous alltime high for crypto was maybe three trillion the

target for some people for this cycle maybe 10 Trillion which sounds like a lot but anyway let's say 10 trillion then I was looking at what was the total market cap of the NASDAQ in 2021 when he crashed and there was I think there was some ETFs back then right I think around 10 trillion too so and it went it crashed a lot right so it's possible with ETFs and the big Mania that goes to 10 trillion that it still crashes a lot yeah and people get wrecked especially on the altcoin side obviously yeah it

also Depends on the amount of Leverage in the system too and you know there is a lot of exchanges a lot of Leverage available but I also think that's being taken down a bit over time do you think yes doing the bare Market but doing bull market there is espcially in crypto people are very Innovative yeah to invent new type of Leverage yeah and it's what kind of and what every bubble is is that at the end of the day the way I see it at least in a very simplistic Fashion is a bull market

is a leveraging event a bare Market is a deling event and in crypto when start things start to go crazy people mortgage the house and all that stuff and that's one of the reasons why I'm so bullish in that I think we haven't even we've started a bull market but we're in the first quartile because if you look at when I talk to people right now they're struggling to get leverage I mean the market makers they want to Borrow money they want more leverage you know you look at the yield that you get on you

have to pay to take out loans and stable coins like 20 25% I talk to Founders who have different types of companies in crypto be it know payments companies lending companies Market making they're all growing less quickly than they could because the lack of access to leverage so and I think there's a lot of money sitting on the S lines that will come in later on and Provide that Capital that leverage and that's when we'll see prices really move so I think now it's almost like sure there's leverage in the system but the price moves

so far have largely been you call it unlevered so that's why I'm I'm I'm just not seeing that I'm not seeing us running into the even close to to the red on the doll yet we talk about Bitcoin e layer one layer two applications on the top there's another one that's been pretty crazy the Meme coins yeah what's your take on what's your big brain take on Meme coins I don't have a big brain take but I have a take um you know they they're they're interesting they're social phenomenons right where I mean Dogecoin of

course is the king of the meme coins and it is top 10 market cap and it just perseveres and it has this kind of you know GameStop is type you know Diamond hands ecosystem Around it um and similar to you know some nfts also have this you know they're not meme coins but they're in a way meme nfts because it it creates a community uh it creates an asset that that people like and they they believe in it I think it's incredibly easy to launch a token and it's incredibly easy to launch a meme coin

so I do think the vast Majority of them will will will come and go very quickly some of them have meteoric rise and then meteoric crashes but I do think there'll be a a group of them that stay around and some of them will just be for the sake of it but others will also actually be true communities and and start building more more things around it but um I think it's just it's a it's a freedom of expression in a way right like just like you could put up a Website you put anything in

the internet you can also just launch a mem coin it's there's technically not complicated at all you can just kind of throw it out there there's also been all kinds of you know you probably call it more toxic meme coins launched recently but that's very similar to like the internet where ultimately you create a new channel new Forum you create Twitter there's going to be people putting toxic stuff up there Too you're from traditional Finance initially so you understand how traditional Finance people think right Y and they will come to crypto with a a certain

way to Value assets how would you explain them crypto let's start with mcoin because is like the most extreme thing right like they're probably going to be like what the [ __ ] is this [ __ ] yeah right but even Then they might look at some really interesting crypto projects Lio for example Unis swap great Revenue great businesses not performing well yeah meme coin let's not take the far right kind of like [ __ ] of mean coins that but you know you have a you have you have DOD but you you have Dodge

but then you have whff you have Pepe so these ones are kind of like the for me there is I mean maybe simplistic but there's two three Categories of the of of mem coins first one is Dodge Sheba you know like multicycle but huge market cap probably going to do well but like limited then you have the flavor of the day yeah toxic all that right it's complete Casino then you have the one in between which are like the one that maybe are now they were like couple of hundred million now there maybe two three

Billion with Pepe yeah probably going to do really well in the cycle just because if Bitcoin 2x Solana 5 6X whatever yeah with Solana on Leverage but the same kind is like the the new mcoin but is not too new to still have enough liquidity like this kind of like and look at Dodge market cap of ship left cycle probably can reach that yeah performing amazingly well versus some great protocols that make so much revenue yeah but don't Perform well how do you explain that to a traditional Finance person when yourself you were a tradition

Finance person before mean I would I would go back to basics and say if you're traditional Finance at the end of the day you're capitalist and you believe in free markets free markets are about supply and demand where and you believe in in the efficiency of capital markets which ultimately means that the market prices assets and sets that price Like why does Amazon trade at this why does Google trade at that why does a Rolex cost this why does a Louis Vuitton you know cost this why does a birken bag cost that it's not due

to the the input the raw materials there's many other factors and ultimately it's priced at what people think is worth right and to me these these coins are the same they're the ultimate expression of capitalism where people are willing to pay a150 for that Coin and that in itself is the value of it because someone's willing to pay for it as Bitcoin does it need to have it's just like why is a dollar worth of dollar it's just it's a piece of paper right backed by the you know full credit and US of the US

government and the military but at the end that they why it's why is it worth a dollar why is anything worth anything you I think they just a lot of people because they don't there's not Necessarily a rational explanation they can't immediately they can't accept it but the reality is just it's a liquidly liquid traded market and you look at the volumes like they are they're traded there's big volumes it's it's not like a you know low volume and it's not a it's a real market price out there so I don't I I think it's

it's kind of as simple as that and then yeah at some point if the market loses interest in it then the price evaporates but that's because it Loses it Social Capital loses interest something else comes along that's new and shiny but you know the the people will lose some they'll win some but end of the day it's it's Capital allocation and you could also say that it's you know maybe it's due to the failing of traditional Finance to to one give people access to the system and two put products out there that are interesting enough

for people to invest it instead of with right I mean there's a reason Why people are investing in these things people you know traditional Financial system it's people in many markets so how do you get Interactive Broker account how do you even get a bank account how do you get any US dollar asset people in developed markets they maybe have lost faith in a lot of these large companies they don't like what they stand for they feel like despite the fact that there's accounts there's just such a lack of transparency in There or they don't

like what they're doing they don't want to invest their money in them so it's like traditional finance and kind of it's these guys are the capital in these coins are taking market share from traditional Finance which is why they don't like it right they make money off of Capital flowing and now it's flowing in this sector but it's just because they're losing market share and so at The end of the day they're they're also you know upset about that and that's just their own feeling are you just looking at that and thinking it's interesting or

are you participating in that well as a in terms of personal investment like hey I'm having some fun in dabling in whatever with or Pepe or Dodge or maybe even in the liquid fund because you think there is a thesis around that that maybe was less explainable last year or two years Ago but now has become more consensus I mean we it's hard for us to punt on individual meme coins because it's just you know it's it moves so fast and we the way that we invest is we develop a thesis a catalyst and we

it's it's a little bit of a crossover of venture and liquid investment so it's it's hard to do that in the mean coins and it's hard to do it quick enough to even like write participate and get that upside um but what we do for example we invested in Memeland we invest in the the platforms like the enablers like some of the infrastructure around it so maybe not bet on one coin just like in our gaming fund yeah we have individual games but we have a lot more invested in the gaming infrastructure that enables all

this so we we don't know which one the winner will be but we believe in the overall theme we we believe that What's Happening Here is real and it's valuable but we we maybe can't pick the one out Of the two out of the 50 that will really do well that's more like that that is a lot of luck and maybe some intuition but that that's kind of how we think about it and the personal front I don't don't really have much time to invest personally to be honest and and I feel like you don't

you give everything to the liquid fund I have a little bit myself but it's it's kind of deployed in a fairly boring manner I would say and I have a Specific for for that one you asked earlier I have a much more regimented in terms of my targets sell 10% of this sell another 10% of this because I I have a use for that I have something in mind that I want to do for it do with it right but you know and I don't have to answer anybody else even if I live leave 100%

the top 100 off it's it's okay I'm happy with it it's not maximizing the return is hey how do I translate that into something useful in my life right Yeah it's more like hey we have this now at the start of the bull market let's try to 3x it if we get that 3x we could use it for this that we think will you know we could use for something that would make us very happy and and set it aside and that's okay could it go to 6X maybe but that that's okay we we have

so much exposure other so it's okay meme coins we talked about mem coins before we talked about NFS M that are kind Of meme coins with a picture but non fible right you own your yeah piece of the community or your access key to the community yeah I was uh I think was yesterday evening I was in a dinner and there was a husband of a friend of mine and he was saying oh you in crypto crypto yay cool but like not too excited right he's kind of like dabbling but kind of more what we

call Normy right so he's like oh yeah crypto cool I mean not doing bad right But I got I lost 200k a few years ago so like you know I'm waiting for it to go back up but nft is dead right yeah for me it's very bullish when I hear that I'm like yes like like mem coins last year dead or B or crypto last year overall right are nfts dead absolutely not I mean nfts are one of the things that for me are should be intuitive for everyone like yeah meme coin you discuss and

and Bitcoin as a Macro play and but nft is like a digital collectible that is unique you know it is traceable it's yours and you know if it's if it's a good one has a community around it right to me that is just like a total no-brainer as a concept now you can debate value should it be worth 10 e 5 e 1 E that maybe some of them are not right now but over time get overpriced and need to come back down but as a concept I I don't even think there's any Good argument

against why there shouldn't be nfts and and and they can take many forms nfts can also be ultimately when we start seeing more traditional Financial assets on blockchain a lot of them will be nfts because it's a specific debt contract to someone that's an nft or it's a it's it's a title for a property and that's an nft but nfts in the more pfp social type way I think in the last bull cycle people just launching all these random Collections so that's why I referred those to me are more like meme coins because people don't

have a personal connection to them right they just kind of trade them as if they're mean coins even though they're nfts whereas now with what's happened there's been a few collections I mean I mean p you Penguins to see the obvious one I know you've had LC on and you've had you know um you've had lots of people talk on talking about it and You know you had Alex Han and Alex is the one that ultimately got me me into it but um I felt I was late but again now looking back at it I

was early enough right but to me there's a real Community around there right there's a Meetup last week I missed it um but there there's a real Community people have a emotional attachment to it you know it's my my Twitter profile pick is my my penguin one of them right so why because I I want to Signal one I I like it and I like it better than having my my own mug shot up there um and I think it's it's cute and I think it um it's I I like the community like if I

stop liking the community even if it 10x is from here if I stop liking the Penguins Community for any way in any way then you know i' remove it there I wouldn't like because I wouldn't feel like like I would sell it if I stopped feeling some sort of Cultural or personal alignment with the community and what what Luca and the TEAM stands for what they're doing and all that right um more so than it's it's like the problem with these PSPs is once they go up in value right and penguin now is about 50k

give or take right it could be seen as being a bit like like flashy signaling hey look at me I just I got an nft for 50k you know I'm super wealthy I can just buy these like jpegs but in reality feel like a lot of People that have had their profiles they they've had those picks up there since it was like 1 2 3 four e and eth was at 1200 and this was like still not a not a cheap thing but nothing like luxurious um so it's much more about that and that's why

I think some of these nfts the ones that have the it really is a community and that's why it's it's powerful and of course some of them just stay that way and that's fine and others build massive businesses Around it like Pudgies is doing but but there'll be other nft connection collections that are legit maybe don't have like like crypto punks are also super cool but you know they're not like crypto Punk dolls and the movie and all this out there you guys invested in the py penguin Equity right uh I did personally you did

personally yeah why to me it was the simple I mean I've been investing in Founders for 25 no sorry 20ish years right and sometimes you just meet a Founder that you don't need to be in a call with them for very long before you realize they're a beast and you just have to invest in this person and L that was Luca to me like it was a total no Riner like I it was like I I I just looked at his experience I looked at his Drive um and I think that had it been another

collection like I don't know squiggles like squiggles of toy Squiggles a movie doesn't really work like it it it was almost like a non crypto play in many ways if you look at the you know over time it'll be a combination between you know the the World the game you know linking the the physical kind of doll to a you know a profile and you know but it won't be just a a pure it's not a pure PL it's not a purist web 3 it's a realistic business model of combining online offline Web Two web

3 and that Takes a a special a unique kind of founder to execute on that one that has experience in sales marketing Distribution on the because it's very hard when it's physical real stuff it's so much harder like I have investments in in those like pollution mask companies shoe companies other stuff and it's there's so many things that can go wrong versus like just a digital business but then at the same time in Addition to that expertise you have to understand the web three Community respect the community um respect the importance of that ecosystem of

the 8,888 penguin holders right and to combine those two is not easy and I think Luca had that which is that's kind of what convince me to invest in it and also buy more Penguins so you are an equity shareholder you own a bunch of penguins where do you think it's going Because we had Alex I don't even have to ask them where do you think it's going like Alex is like 10,000 bucks per e 100 East per penguin I SCH mathematics so basically a million per penguin I mean 100 East James who 100 e

Luke Belmar he's also I mean he bought he bought it with h with Luca yeah I watched I watched the podcast with him so it's like 100 yeah I don't disagree I I think it's very if You look at where B's went to last time around I think did Peak at a 150 or something but of course the eth price was lower MH um those but but the top ones of course go for more but if you look at the floor or the average yeah I I don't I mean there's only 8,888 penguins which on

a global scale is is very little um I don't absolutely don't see why they couldn't reach that level the question of course is how long do they maintain that where do they go from There um and also you know it can also it is a bit of a double-edged sword because you know if the these nfts become so unsustainable that you you can in reality only buy one or hold on to one if if you have a reasonable amount of wealth otherwise if this is the only asset you have it's worth a million you're just

clinging on to it then you're a different level of of ballsy right but that's so I I'm I just don't want it to become too elitist Either if you know what I mean but that that's also always a risk of the price going up of nfts absolutely that's why there is little Pudgies yeah uh and then there's a yeah the RS and like but the the one of the strength is actually the community because it's a lot of Builders and the good thing if you think in investment terms right if you have a lot of

big builders in the crypto space owning PG they're people Who are probably wealthy already and don't have to sell them right so they're here for another reason than pure that's right gain which is probably I mean yeah probably a positive factor yeah to not say more you also super bullish on uh Bitcoin Layer Two and I mean applications on the top of Bitcoin yeah and you've been actually actually involved already since five years when it was not a hot narrative now it's the Hot narrative but five years ago probably a lot of people were not

were actually thinking it was completely dumb right or didn't make any sense especially the hardcore bitcoiners I mean we've been tracking and working with black stack since they were founded right they're now called Stacks they're the original Bitcoin layer to and the only operational one right now they're going to have a big upgrade in about three weeks and there's about 10 to 20 Other Bitcoin l2s that are going to be launching over the course of this year so in in combination they're going to make and they all have different flavors but in combination they're going

to make building on top of Bitcoin much easier more approachable and the reason why we've always liked this sector is we feel that I mean again and it's not it's not like we're not Maxis like we still think everything that's been built on ethereum salana and the other L1 are Super interesting and it's not we don't feel like they're necessarily competing they're just collectively growing the pie MH and I think a Bitcoin especially is growing the pie because as a as an asset especially now with the ETF it is by far the most accepted asset

kind of in in broadly it is the only one that's really completely out of the woods in terms of it's clear it's not a security you know so and it's just the market cap is so Big it's been around for so long building Financial products that ultimately are secured against the Bitcoin blockchain and where Bitcoin is a native currency building block in those is just something to me that makes a lot of sense so much sense so being involved in that both on the the defi on bitcoin Finance on bitcoin as well as the nft

or ordinals you know on on bitcoin just makes makes a lot of sense to me it's not like shifting all the Attention all the capital to that but it's something that's really worth being involved in and so that's why we've gotten quite you know fairly deeply involved in that so you have a few Focus because you can't be everywhere right yeah so they start with Stacks what's so special I mean was the first one right yeah what what's so special about the project and the team why do you like them so much and why maybe

you haven't kind of jumped shape And went to fully support someone else yeah I mean we there's also keep in mind we have an advisory business and investment business the investment business job is to generate returns so that one will invest more broader in the ecosystem and might you know not invest in 10 or 20 l2s but might invest in three of them to see what which one works out and they all have slightly different focuses and you know the the capital we invest doesn't move the Needle ultimately for any of them but we have

kind of our our our bets um spread out but on the advisory side the reason why we've been working with stacks for so long and have have known them for over five years is it starts with a team right so the original founders of blackstack you know that that M and JP are both you know obviously incredibly smart people from cryptog rers from from Princeton phds so they know like technically very Strong and then also they they've just been very pure about their mission throughout so even throughout you know the the last hype cycle and

so forth they couldn't have done done a lot of things that were more shortterm to monetize you to to Hype it up to to push things out there but they just really focused on building and they've focused on building it the right way so now that this new upgrade that's coming you know it's it's really really long overdue Because it's they've learned so much now from building for so long that you know the the the first version that's out there right now is just a little bit difficult to work with a little bit slow to

build on but these these upgrades are kind of a not the end game but it's it's it's a very important step in just making it a lot more lot easier for developers to to build on top of it so for me it's just that that they've had this Conviction and perseverance when you nobody else was talking about building on bitcoin and everybody else were like why aren't you doing look at the salana ecosystem look at the ethereum ecosystem look at all these ecosystems coming up right so that that conviction and that perseverance and the fact

that they now have so many years of of of experience and now there's also new interesting things being built on top of of of stacks and you know the the the things Being built on top of stacks are being built in a way where they will be fundable across the whole Bitcoin ecosystem including other l2s too so there will be like a Bitcoin L2 War just like there's an ethereum L2 war of trying to win market share that's that's a good thing right May May the best chain or L2 win and it's not going to

be one Winner Takes all but it you know we'll see how it how it all plays out there's a lot of really good teams Really smart people building in that space so which which one RS for me to win hard to say but as a as a theme as a group I'm very optimistic about it you said nfts are a no-brainer and you say that building on the top of Bitcoin is a no-brainer there is an nft project on the top of Bitcoin that you super bullish on it's called unchain monkeys yeah why again it's

maybe a bit uh purist so The the founder of that or one of the founders is Danny Yang who was uh my co-founder in the Big Data startup I did um 15 years ago so I've known him for a fair amount of time and what he stands for and he is a um also a bit of a a purist in what he does so you know Anin monies the way I won't go into the technical details but the way they generated that collection first on ethereum and then they ported it over to bitcoin is is

a lot of Firsts in in the Use of the ordinal protocol and the in the use of doing nfts and Bitcoin so I think over time it will be recognized as a crypto punks type of collection on bitcoin like a Genesis collection that just has so many firsts um and I don't you will'll see what they do with that over time they're they're they're launching other things but I just think it'll be crypto Punk like because it's again the team is not hypy it's not it's just very genuine Builders that like the the technical aspects

of what they've done with this collection SEC cure and floor price for this one sorry what's the current Flor price for this one just for me because I'm going to have a Look Tonight one 1.2 e okay okay so it's still valued in E despite being on top of Bitcoin um well they have um yeah they they they trade in like I look I look at the pricing in e as all comparable but they yeah they Trade in in they exist still both because they haven't all been ported so it's it exists part of the

collection exists on Ethan part of it exists on bitcoin and then they have Bitcoin native derivatives or collections they've launched since on Direct on bitcoin including o ocm d on chain monkey ocm Dimensions which also has a lot of interesting firsts about it okay you recently LED 10 million round for a project called Alex which does Defy on bitcoin yeah I mean I think with the announcement was just a few days ago right yeah what compelled you into not only investing in this team but also leading the round so that was an introduction from the

Stax team where they're like this there's this crazy group of Founders that has been building on us for a couple of years now despite the fact that you know they're really waiting for the V2 Upgrade right but just really believe in our mission and believe in the infrastructure so I was like okay we got to meet these Founders right and um they're all very accomplished you know kind of in in their own right mathematicians phds and they have background they they they've all pretty much been at you know they've been at JP Morgan golden Goldman

Morgan sanley as as uh Quant derivative structurers so very complicated Financial products so They they understand complexity and and how to pick it apart how to put it back together and that's really what what Alex is because it's not building Define on top of Bitcoin is not super straightforward when you're the first one doing it so you require these really like um experience you require quite a bit of experience to do it and they are they're building multiple things on on top um of the uh the STX layer and then ultimately on all the other

Bitcoin Layers including you know a protocol that can allow all the Bitcoin because one one of the things on ethereum that's challenge with the l2s is the fragmentation of liquidity right there's all liquidity sitting in all these different l2s they're building a a link basically for share liquidity across the whole Bitcoin L2 e system that's that's one of the things they're building they also build a launch platform they're going to Do a stable a BTC based stable coin they're doing a lot of things that because they've spent a number of years building up all this

infrastructure it sounds like they're launching a lot but they've actually been building the foundation in order to do all these things and all these Primitives that exist in other ecosystems but not on bitcoin and and all of that is effectively spinning out of this this one protocol and accur value back to it Also that's why we we like the the team that's why we're working with them that's also why we invested in them you told me just like Magnus grimland who was who is one of your best friends and who was here on the podcast

actually you both told me that you never really struggled with mental health before maybe it's the European Nordic side but you definitely had some low moments where you felt betrayed yeah can You give me some examples of hard moments you overcame in your life and how you picked yourself up yeah and I've noted a few things the first startup The Big Industry players in 2022 and the chapter 11 so you said you were in chapter 11 for one year maybe you can go through and then I'd like to link that to chapter 11 that we've

seen in crypto cuz there's some really shady [ __ ] happen I mean for People who understand chapter 11 probably is not that shady or you understand how the game is but for the customers of those exchanges yeah it's disgusting yeah um yeah yeah so Magnus and I started he started antler at the same time I started uh Spartan with meline Kelvin and we also actually shared an office the first three four months to save costs we shared a wework office so we kind of saw each other grow um and I Think one of the

reasons why what him and I share in common is we both have military backgrounds right um he was on Navy Seal in Norway um I was in a not a special forces program but a fairly demanding program in in Denmark also so I think we were both broken and rebuilt like as they do uh in those kind of programs so I I think that probably provided some level of like steal that meant that later on even if you faced really tough Situations like it didn't like mentally like affect you in the same way but um

so that that that's you know one reason why I think some of these situations where um you're able to to navigate and survive those tough situations but it it still doesn't mean that you don't get disappointed right and to me that's also like I I build we're all about Founders so relationships are all quite you know personal um so you know when you see People build something up and then when they disappoint you that that that's that's very emotionally difficult versus just like you invest in something you get it wrong you lose money it's not

like there's not a personal connection there so yeah I think you know just um you know taking them in chronological order um going through um the chapter 11 process the reason why that was difficult now it wasn't my own company It was a the parent company that went went broke um but obviously knew the executives there and you know for anyone who goes through a chapter 11 process there's obviously a lot of restructuring um a lot of people lose their jobs a lot of people have Equity Financial upside that's quite substantial that all of a

sudden is either worth something when things are sold or worth nothing and it can be very meaningful so the knives literally come out and becomes Incredibly political and it becomes you know like you really just have to look out for yourself at that point and you know I um being a fairly trusting guy I relied on certain people during that time and many of them disappointed me so that that was um that was difficult to deal with and I think just kind of got over that through time really and then moving on to something else

um in terms of in crypto I think the the one thing that really Disappointed me was when when FTX blew up because we um we we did a few deals with with FTX where we were on the other side of all the deals so we were the you know working with Founders to sell their assets to them so we never represented them but but we interacted with you know Sam early on and you know before I would say before things went off the rails obviously it's hard to say internally what they did how early on

did that start but at least in terms Of mental Clarity and focus and ability the times we interacted at that point in time in 1920 things were still I would say running relatively well there at least you know professionally um and obviously it was a a key piece of infrastructure in the sector um and I think there's generally nothing wrong with businesses failing it's kind of part of you know it's a natural course of things that you you run a business sometimes you don't run It well goes bust um but when there's you know fraud

involved and you feel like yourself and many people you know have been defrauded then you get you get really really disappointed right and you especially when I personally had a lot of funds on FTX so getting that I didn't feel it was stuck at the time I felt it was lost because it was just clear that this was such a complete and utter [ __ ] show wasn't even sure whether the money Was there it had all been embezzled where it was at the time nobody knew it now seems like there might be a full

recovery but at the time you just had to zoom it to zero right and then you feel really stupid you feel disappointed in kind of trusting the people behind this and also in yourself in that you you know still you know not your keys not your money right but you kept that a centralized exchange despite being having been in the SE sector for a While maybe linking the FTX you say full recovery but what does that mean because from what I read is full recovery but at yeah like if you had if you had crypto

on there it'd be at the valuation at the time so you had 300K on there you're gonna get 300K back but if you just kept that Bitcoin of course it'd be worth a lot more today so that that's that's a difficult question that's where I want to get because of chapter 11 right yeah and okay some of the things I'm saying Might be wrong but like I've seen some complaints online I try to verify but I'm not sure but for me it's really this bitter because you spent one year in chapter 11 in traditional finance

and you said you saw how people are in there yeah and obviously chapter 11 we had Celsius FTX Voyager I mean a lot of these right and you start to see how it takes much longer than it should because the lawyers make a lot of money the advisor Make a lot of money even the people internally like CEO whoever is appointed the longer it last the more money they make and then the customers get [ __ ] multiple times because first they lose maybe everything or maybe some something probably the worst is not knowing right

yeah I don't know it's horrible like at least it's lost okay yeah right off but I don't know and then you're in this situation where like Market pickup like Celsius bankruptcy period kind of but June 2022 kind of bottom yeah I mean for for eth at least FTX bottom for Bitcoin and then there's the let's take an example FTX and Solana so the people who got their Solana stuck in FTX get $16 per Solana yeah per coin the customer yeah Solana today is let's say 200 maybe a bit less but so it's already [ __

] up except if you say oh but they sold that $16 at least you would have the excuse to say Ah they sold that $16 so that's the only money they have but obviously is not true yeah so they make a lot of money on these coins where does it go and second because you understand chapter 11 so where does the difference between 200 and 16 go because probably not everything goes to the lawyers or the bankers whoever is involved but then there is panta coming in and saying hey I'm raising 250 million to get

this Sol $60 so panta who is probably doing a lot of good for the industry right but for some reason is allowed to come in there raise money get the Sol $60 where they make a 3X like that okay it's vested whatever I I mean I feel the customer are [ __ ] three times they get $16 per Soul which is now worth 200 so there is a big amount of money in between that should go to them or at least some part of it and then there's another third Party that comes there and say

because I'm panta or maybe I'm Spartan or I'm no I'm allowed to just come there and just buy this stuff right yeah what the [ __ ] so I think you know the the chapter 11 process is something that's enshrined in in law right in terms of how the process has to be run and and and how it how it functions so you know if if Sal had gone to zero you know the flip side of this is Lana got to zero very few people those Had that NX account they would have said like no

no no no I needed a $16 because I would have sold that and that's what it was worth when you took my money so give it to me at 16 they wouldn't say like yeah went to zero you're right I shouldn't get anything because it's my Solano right so that's that's one perspective on it and that's that's where in in and I'm not an expert in US Bank law not not the details of it and I think there's this might still be Litigated and I think some people are litigating it it's the same thing with

mount g right where it's like do they get the Bitcoin do they get the money it varies also by jurisdiction what what the rules are but it's kind of meant to be a snapshot in time of what is the value at the time where you hit the stop button of what people are owed so for example if it's a more traditional bankruptcy it's a a furniture Company and you know you prepaid you're based in Singapore and you prepaid a th000 for your sofa and now it's just stuck right because Furniture Company went bankrupt in the

meantime that ,000 when you paid it it was worth you know 1,400 sing now it's only worth 1,200 sing because of the exchange rate movement in the meantime like should you get 12 or 1400 or should you get your thousand but like these kind of questions are like a bit tricky right Because it all depends on the situation now crypto is so extreme that the law I don't think nobody when they wrote the law thought that you'd have an asset there which then 15 X's you know in in the year and a half right so

it feels like super unfair um and I to me it feels a bit like I If luckily I had USD right if I had salana there I'd be I'd be out there banging the table myself saying no no I want want you know I want the current market value or at least Something more for this right or you guys you guys should have sold it when it ran to 120 or when it ran to 80 or whatever you shouldn't just sat on it right because you should have sold it and I should have gotten the

proceeds from my salana that you sold for me either that or give me my salana back but don't give me like $16 but it's this then comes back to actual bankruptcy law and so it's not the lawyers and accountants they get More of a mainly a retainer based and time based payment there there is sometimes something for the liquid air in terms of how much they recover and they get percentage off of that but the anything incremental here that is left over after all the account holders have their funds that's that acres to the equity

or or debt or debt holders but I think in this case account holders also are seen as kind of De holders so that basically means that anybody who's Invested would get a small equity pay out because there'd be some stub left for them it wouldn't go to to the lawyers and accountants themselves so I think they are just trying to follow the the process that they have I think if someone then litigated it and won and said no you have to get the salana back from their perspective it's like okay we think we follow what

it was but if the judge says this then okay we'll do that but I I like so I'm not into the details Of it I like I can see both sides of it but I understand why people are pissed off about it it feels like really unfair like first of all you freeze my money don't know if I have it now the Market's come roaring back you guys are still sitting on it and you're not giving it to me right I'll give you an personal example of unfairness but like at some point you just look

into what's ahead and you do something better I had 7 million of uh Dollar worth of Luna that turned into $5 in two days and I was doing Arbitrage on a Terra station Luna B Luna you could like do 1.5 to 2% every 21 days so like that was like 50 60k every day just pressing a button so it's on Terra station right fine but then I'm going to Bali for 10 days invite 20 people let's go together have some fun so I'm like I'm not going to leave all this money on Terra station Because

it's not safe there I'm not there I'm not at my lapop I put it on celsus I go to Bali the crash happens right I lose all the money then for two weeks I mean obviously I'm destroyed but like for two weeks I'm like they talk about this Luna 2.0 thing I'm like oh maybe out of this 7 million I'm going to have 200k back which during a bull market maybe goes to a million whatever it's going to be Something right yeah but the snapshot for Luna 2.0 happens at the moment where the crash happened

just before right and that moment my Luna is on Celsius just for 10 days but then Celsius goes bankrupt and Luna 2.0 is a has vesting the future payment especially for the big Luna holders right so it doesn't enter into Celsius liquidation estate because it's not Luna one one right so basically it's in Norman's land and probably mashinski Or whoever can just go and get the freaking coins because he's not in the right estate right yeah these are all these technicalities right and then it even comes down to like what your right is and Celli

versus FTX might also not be the same depending on what were the you know the terms and conditions of the account what kind of account is it held in is it segregated is it not is it what jurisdiction is it in so all these like you get into like a Lot of very specific legal mesh ations around it that you know from the outside very difficult to to figure out even when I was in that chapter 11 which is like a traditional industry like a renewable energy company there's definitely some decisions made in terms of

divestures of some assets that I really was left scratching my head at but even though I was there without seeing the full picture is really hard To figure out like what what's going on why these decisions are made which maybe the sum up of this kind of situation is especially as very Optimist that we are right and looking forward and building businesses and there's two ways either you go down the legal proceeds route for us there was also a lot of legal actions I mean maybe you have a more balanced view on that than me

but for me I'm like you know what [ __ ] all this [ __ ] what's going to Be my power even if I do a lawsuit even if I win it's going to take me year is going to cost a lot it's going to wreck my mental health I'd rather focus on like I learned my lesson it's a write off no same same and you just move on and that's it the reason why I mean because I originally I have a law degree right I have a bachelor masters of law so I and bankrupcy

law was one of the areas I quite liked when I was studying so I can also like see things from a Legal perspective so I understand to some degree the complexities of like bankruptcy law but I also understand you know the complexities of like of litigation and yeah my my general view is litigation is like there there's no winners in general in litigation and I I have friends I've had family who've been through litigation and whether they lose or win it kind of leaves them emotionally scarred and and sometimes it is enough Capital that you

just really Don't have a choice like you have to pursue it but if it's something that you can live with yeah I mean just it's life is too short like really to go to put yourself through that what would you tell your 18y year old self if you met him today MH I would say trust your God don't be afraid to take risk do you think you started taking risks too Late no I don't think so um it also depends on how you define risk right when I was drafted into the military when I was

18 um I could have just gone the standard route of you know get doing whatever four six nine months like being a private getting out of the way and moved on I specifically applied for a more advanced program right that didn't know what I was going into and which was much longer that's already Like probably an example of taking risk right that's that's not something I had to do like it was as risky I could have gotten kicked back out I could have gotten injured I could have like mentally impacted me um and and likewise

when you know I ultimately decided to go into banking despite having studied law for five six years that was also really risky because I kind of stepped away from a very comfortable situation so I think there's different risks different Types of taking risks now not necessarily just jumping out and starting your own company so I don't I I think no I think I was uh taking risks fairly early on but but it's also a very personal thing right like people some people just are take risk right you can see some kids like you're just like

oh my God this kid's gonna they're going to kill themselves they're just like constantly taking risk constantly pushing the limits and others Never get there and others do it when they're when they're older but like what I would say I I generally tend to not take uncalculated risks I tend to at least try to understand the risk reward before I take a risk I don't just run headless into something did you learn that from a big failure where you actually took too much risk or you always a wearable to do these calculated risks for example

from the Luna thing I learned yeah yeah it's Not the first time I got really wrecked I also got wrecked in in March crash 2020 I was levered 3x on E with all my crypto portfolio yeah which was 80% of my net worth went everything went to zero but then had so much conviction I bought you know with the 20% that was left in equity go whatever I bought e and then I mean anyway so I learned from that don't use leverage yeah and greed is going to kill you Every time yeah what I didn't

understand was that the entire 2021 buun was basically fueled by leverage lending companies if if you put your coins there and you earn 5% or whatever you have USD yeah everything is a leverage right so basically even without using leverage you're involved in the leverage system yeah well I only yeah I actually did learn a lesson early on that I think saved me a lot of Money later on which was and March 2020 which was like Peak NASDAQ literally um I had put myself in Denmark you don't pay for University but you you still have

expenses and so forth I've worked throughout University I'd never taken out any student loan but I had the right to take out all those student loans through my you know four or five years of college and you can kind of Accumulate it so I hadn't take any and then like March 2020 when I was a year away from graduating I took the max loan like my whole period I put it all into NASDAQ like a NASDAQ ETF Bas on advice from my banker because you know sex stocks were hot and like crazy so that's so

basically the only time I ever took any debt I just levered up and I took the entire student loan I just immediately put it into that that equity and then literally like a week later Like it got wiped out by like 80% or so like just gone and all of a sudden I was just there with all this debt and really nothing to show for it right then one year later when I got my first few paychecks at Goldman I just I paid that all off and got rid of the debt but since then I've

never traded with leverage um and in crypto I've never traded with leverage and even our funds don't really use leverage so that of course sometimes means leaving money in The table because you know if if you get it right you can enhance your returns substantially by using leverage but I I'm I'm happy not to use leverage and it also means that even if the [ __ ] really hits the fan if I believe in it longer term I can just I can write it out sit on it what's your biggest prediction for next 12 months

o um biggest prediction um well obviously I'm as I mentioned I'm I'm very optimistic um about the market overall I I think I think we see a a broad crypto bull market and across the board in the with Bitcoin and Bitcoin ecosystem the ethereum ecosystem the salana ecosystem nfts um and in in gaming also I think we start we see a lot of like really good games come out that in maybe are not like totally web three native but in incorporate parts of it and get people on board with you know web web 3 gaming

I I I think we we see a like a lot of good products coming like just a broad-based bull market driven not just by like finance and macro factors but by by really good products coming out I think we see you know Republican presidency in the US and I think that means that the regulatory environment the financial environment in the macro environment is good but also the general attitudes towards crypto if not positive at least is neutral and not like out Outright hostile I think that that really helps because the us drives a lot of

this so um and then in many other countries around the world where crypto regulation either is in place or is put being put into place I see that coming into place so just also just globally see a Much More Much broader adoption and acceptance of the the crypto space what do you think Mark is the end of the this bull run what could be something thing that people really don't Think about that could Mark the end I don't know if it'll be anything unusual that marks the end of this I think it'll be too much

credit in the system too much leverage that that that then crashes it um what's the maybe one or two factors that people can look at to to Gorge man there is too much credit now in the system um it is definitely the the derivatives just in terms of like the Open interest out there and just you know when um you just the you can see in the dtive space like how much Leverage is in there I think that is that's a key indicator um and then I think also in the yeah there's there's different factors

in terms of like you know the fear fear greed factors that just look at at these these Trends I think those are quite telling too like I'm not a huge fan of technical analysis but I do Think like looking at at some of these charts you know you'll by by you'll reach a point where by any metric on any one of those charts no matter what analysis you use and you know golden crosses or moving averages and the logarithmic charts and like you reach a point where like on pretty much every single metric it just

looks like really really expensive and really like just crazy like unsustainable that that to me I think is Like because there'll always be charts to point in different directions but you reach a point where just it's just clear that it's just not not sustainable but I I still think Leverage is going to be the the key factor there could be other macro factors there could be you know but again we're we'll get the US presidential election over with this year that'll be another four years out and I think there's not many elections globally that matter

of course there's Like geopolitical things like you know what Putin does what C does like these these probably those two people people are the ones between other than the US president between the three of them are the ones that can move geopolitics move you know forces Wars and if if anything extreme happens there then kind of all bets could be off across the board not just crypto but I I don't I'm not too concerned about that I think I think it'll sort itself out in a I mean not necessarily un tragic way but not in

a way where we move into something some larger broader in Conflict amazing thank you so much for your time Casper no I really enjoyed it that was a great conversation a great 2 hours and 36 minute conversation oh wow okay