468: Jason Yanowitz and Michael Ippolito on Crypto Media

Jason Yanowitz and Michael Ippolito are cofounders of Blockworks, a new media business focused on helping institutional investors understand Bitcoin and digital assets. In this conversation, we discuss the current state of media companies, the challenges institutions face when trying to learn about Bitcoin and crypto, and how Jason and Mike helped Pomp launch The Pomp Podcast. ======================= OKCoin.com is the leading crypto exchange for both beginners and experienced users. You can fund your account in under 2 minutes, and get access to the most advanced trading engine, all while paying the lowest trading fees in the industry (0.1%). Visit www.okcoin.com/pomp and open your account today. ======================= Own crypto in multiple exchanges and wallets? Sync them to CoinStats so you track and manage them from one place. Track 8000+ coins and 300+ exchanges all from the Coinstats platform. Try it for free or go to coinstats.app/pomp and get 40% off your premium subscription. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 100,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com =======================

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Jason Yanowitz and Michael Ippolito are co-founders of Blockworks, a new media business focused on helping institutional investors understand Bitcoin and digital assets. In this conversation, we discuss the current state of media companies, the challenges institutions face when trying to learn about Bitcoin and crypto, and how Jason and Mike helped me launch the Pomp Podcast. I really enjoyed talking to these guys, and I think you'll enjoy it as well. Before we get into this episode, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is OKCoin. OKCoin.com is the leading crypto

• 0:41Anthony Pompliano?

  exchange for both beginners and experienced users. You can fund your account in under two minutes and get access to the most advanced trading engine, all while paying the lowest trading fees in the industry. You can visit OKCoin.com/pomp and open your account today. I've used them. I've made big boy purchases on OKCoin. It worked like a charm. I think that you will really, really like it. It's a regulated exchange, and they do a fantastic job. My favorite part about OKCoin is that they also, also are funders of Bitcoin developers. That's right. They go out of their way, and they find Bitcoin developers, and they give them funding to help continue the development of the protocol. Anyone who is a fan of Bitcoin

• 1:22Anthony Pompliano?

  developers is a person I want to work with. So go to OKCoin.com/pomp and open your account today. OKCoin.com/pomp. Open your regulated crypto exchange account today. Next up is CoinStats. Do you own crypto in multiple exchanges and wallets? Well, you should sync them to CoinStats so you can track and manage them from one place. That's right, you can track over 8,000 coins. Really, I need Bitcoin. I don't know why I got all these other coins. But you can track up to 8,000 coins in 300-plus exchanges, all from the CoinStats platform. You can try it for free, or you can get 40% off their premium subscription if you go to CoinStats.app/pomp. Again, CoinStats.app.

• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

  app slash POMP. Everyone knows that if you don't know where your stuff is, what it's worth, what your cost basis is, or what you may do with it, then you're missing out. You have to have some connectivity between all the different exchanges and wallets. Make sure that you always have the information you need at the tip of your finger. So make sure you have CoinStats, coinstats.app slash POMP. Go there today and you can use it for free, or you can get 40% off a premium subscription. Coinstats.app slash POMP. Go sign up. Let me know what you think about their syncing system between multiple exchanges and wallets. Lastly, don't forget that I write

• 2:53Anthony Pompliano?

  a daily letter to over 110,000 investors, yeah, 110,000 investors, about business, technology, and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com. Alright, let's get into this episode with Jason and Mike. I hope you guys enjoy it.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by POMP or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by POMP as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright guys, bang, bang. I've got the original OGs of this podcast back together. We'll get to that story in a second, but uh, got Jason and Mike, co-founders of Blockworks here. Thanks so much for doing this, guys.

• 3:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, thanks for having us, POM.

• 3:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, let's jump right into your background. Uh, where did you guys meet and how did you start Blockworks?

• 4:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, we met at, we both went to Emory, Emory University down in Atlanta. So we both went to school down there. We came to New York, lived together. Mike and I were kind of our only two friends who didn't go and do the traditional path of working in banking, like most of our other friends did. And I was at, most of our friends studied business and Mike was, I think, a classics guy or a psych guy.

• 4:28Speaker 03

  I was a history major.

• 4:30Speaker 02

  So we were kind of our two friends who were fitting around. Mike was working consulting. I worked at this venture firm and then went into a, it's like software company. But anyways, Blockworks was a, kind of a funny founding story with Blockworks. I went to, I went to this crypto event on a Sunday. I'd been pretty into Bitcoin since I lived in Budapest, Hungary, actually, weirdly enough. And I went to this blockchain event with, you know Amanda Guterman, Consensus. Amanda was speaking, talking about like why Ethereum was going to change the world. And before the event, there was this like side hustle consulting event about how to, how to build a consulting firm. So I show up at this event, it's like 1:00 PM on a Sunday. I learned how to create a side hustle in consulting.

• 5:14Speaker 02

  2:00 PM, I go hear Amanda Guterman blow my mind about how crazy Ethereum is. I come back to the apartment, I sit Mike down for a real serious conversation. I say, "Look buddy, we're, I'm launching a consulting firm to help Fortune 500s understand Ethereum and blockchain. You on it? You're my friend who has consulting knowledge and I'll let..."

• 5:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I was like, "Yeah, that sounds like a really stupid idea." No offense there, Jason. But I mean, honestly, like I had worked at a really small, like a boutique consulting firm. And the thing there is you're selling your, your brand and trust and all that kind of stuff. And it's really hard to do if you don't have a name, especially if you're two like 23-year-old guys, which is what we were at the time. But that was the beginning for, like, we were the only two within our friend group that really got bitten by the Bitcoin bug.

• 6:00Speaker 03

  So that was kind of, we took the very traditional route of, you know, we were kind of passing podcasts back and forth with one another. We were passing articles, getting plugged into Twitter, all the super classic things that everyone does when they first get into the space. And the lightbulb didn't really go off until we actually started go to New York. And we went to a couple of them, but it all really connected at this one event that it was an expensive event. We each paid like 200 bucks to get in and we were just super pissed off because the event sucked. You know, you're like watching these people on stage and we were just kind of sitting there and we're like, oh my God.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  And everyone in this room paid the same amount of money to organize this event, actually made, and what we were going to do was we were going to host events to help us build that brand image or that kind of name and trust in the space that would eventually lead to consulting. But that's how we got started as an events company.

• 6:55Speaker 04

  And so we have a bunch of hilarious stories, I think, that we're going to talk about today. One of them probably starts with the event that I spoke at, was this the first one you guys ever threw? Or was this one of the early ones you threw?

• 7:09Speaker 03

  This was one of the early ones. So we hosted one in February.

• 7:13Speaker 03

  Basically, Mike and I would wake, Mike and I had a full-time job, so we'd wake up at 4:00 AM every single day. We spent no money on marketing for the event. We still, three years later, spent $0 on marketing to this day. And we'd wake up at 4:00 AM, we'd each message about 300 people on LinkedIn between 4:00 and 6:00 AM. Out of the 10,000 people we messaged, about 220 showed up. Everyone paid like 50 bucks a pop. Then we had, then we quit our jobs, like the psychos we were after kind of one success.

• 7:41Speaker 04

  After one event, we had this plan, we were like planning out, yeah, we're going to do this for like 12 months. Our salaries are going to support us, blah, blah, blah. One month later, we both quit our jobs.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  Mike pulls trigger, quits his event, says, you gotta join me. I quit my, I quit my job. And we hosted a May event, May 10th, about 10 days after we both quit our jobs, lost money, thought we were complete idiots. And then the third event we had was June 28th, 2018. I think it was called like Capital Raising in the Age of Blockchain or something. And we had some guys from like Grayscale and Genesis Speak, and I think you were in maybe Japan or you were overseas, but we had, we emailed you. The funny story here is, we emailed you a dozen times. We were ruthless about cold emailing and cold calling back then. I scraped your email somehow and emailed you like 10, 11, 12 times. On the 12th email, you responded, you said, "Look, guys, I don't know who you are. I don't know who you are, but if I come speak at

• 8:34Speaker 02

  your event, will you stop emailing me?" He said, "Sure, absolutely, Mr. Paulino." And so you show up with Paulino. We had this like, like, bad little, you know, venue in Chinatown. You show up with Paulino, you speak. We auto subscribe you to our newsletter. And the rest is history.

• 8:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I don't even know if you remember this part, Poppy. You called us back into your office the next day after that to talk about stuff. And that was, that was like a pivotal moment for me and Jason, you know, getting that email from you. And it was something really innocuous. It was like, so, so what are you guys doing like as a business? Like, what are you really doing here? And, you know, we got that email and we were like, oh, man, he wants to invest.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  I looked at Mike, Poppy.

• 9:19Speaker 03

  I knew it. He wants to invest.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  Poppy was like, guys, guys, I, I like the newsletter. What are you guys up to? I look at Mike, I go, "He wants to buy us. No doubt. No doubt."

• 9:32Speaker 04

  No, I, the, the thing I remember is when I went to the event, it was in a little, you know, sketchy part of town of Chinatown there. And when I was walking into the event, you had to like go through this like real like weird looking place and like go upstairs or whatever. And there was like, you know, a second there. I was like, I might be walking into like a complete scam. These guys might be trying to kill me. And then I got upstairs like, oh, okay. This is like a nice thing. There's like food here. They must know what they're doing. And then a bunch of people came. Like, I don't know. It was like 200, 300 people, whatever it was. And I was like, all right, like, maybe they actually do know what they're doing.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, look, we've, I mean, since the beginning, we've always tried to help kind of the investor crowd to understand crypto. But at the beginning, we had to do some, some kind of ridiculous things to, to get folks there. Like at the beginning, Mike would just ruthlessly cold, cold call family office investors to try to get them to show up. And I would buy Ubers for these people to make sure that they actually showed up. And we'd have Ubers pick them up at their door. So pulled a whole bunch of tricks to get people to get there. But at the end of the day, I mean, people showed up and yeah, and then we launched the pod. And then you kind of called us in and launched the podcast with you. And that kind of kicked off the whole business. So.

• 10:44Speaker 04

  So the part, the story you guys have told me since then is, I don't remember how a podcast came. I don't think I even knew really what a podcast was. And at some point, it was like, oh, we should like, do a podcast. And I was like, I don't got time for that. And you guys were like, well, what like, basically, if all you do is you just walk in the room, record the conversation and leave, and everything else is done, like, would you do it? And I was like, sure. And I thought that you guys like, knew what you were doing, all this stuff. Because, yeah, we could do that. And then later on, I found out that you guys like, went home and Googled, like, how do you create a podcast? Like, what is a microphone? Or whatever?

• 11:20Speaker 02

  I mean, I literally never opened GarageBand in my life. And I taught myself on YouTube how to learn GarageBand overnight. We're like, yeah, Pom, we got this. We have, I was like, we have a graphic designer who can do this. We pulled up like 99 designs.

• 11:31Speaker 03

  I'm glad you're full, Deepom.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  And Mike reached out to a college buddy who did music. And we made, made the jingle. So that's, that's when people hear the Pomp Podcast, or what used to be Off the Chain. That's, that's the kind of origin story.

• 11:45Speaker 04

  So what's the biggest takeaway from how you guys got started in terms of like, there's a ton of ridiculous things, but you survived and eventually thrived? Like, what was your biggest takeaways started?

• 11:57Speaker 03

  I mean, there's, there's a lot of takeaways. But honestly, I think one of the big takeaways, especially running a bootstrap business, is just to do stuff. And when you do stuff, you kind of create your own luck. Honestly, like, that was a good. A great example of that is just us kind of linking up with you. You know, we hosted a couple of events before that. They were like, good, we made a little bit of money, lost a little bit of money, but nothing really happened until, you know, meeting you opened up this whole new line of business for us in the form of podcasts. And that lesson has replicated itself a bunch of ways, but basically if you just kind of put yourself out there and do a whole bunch of different stuff, not everything is going to work, but there are going to be some things that work super, super well. So you kind of end up creating your own luck just by trying a whole bunch of different things and doing stuff.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, mine is, the thing I would say is just ruthlessly cold call and cold email people. And just don't take no for an answer at the beginning when you're launching a business. I mean, if you, if we stopped emailing you after those first 11 emails, right? Who knows what would have happened? And I mean, we saw that so many times, like, I don't know. I remember we sold, one time we sold a family office dinner. We said 15 family offices were going to show up. It was the night before, we had two attending out of 15 and Mike scraped every single family office investor in New York City and cold called every single one and we got 18 to show up. So I don't know, just be ruthless with your outreach and good thing.

• 13:20Speaker 03

  Everyone wanted family offices back then. I had no idea what a family office was. Everyone was like, we want these family offices, we want these family offices. And honestly, the only reason we successfully got them is if we had known how hard it was to get in touch, we just never would have even tried.

• 13:35Speaker 03

  But yeah, those are, those are the early days.

• 13:37Speaker 04

  Hey, it worked. So you guys built out a pretty large business. There's podcasts, there's ad sales, you've got a newsletter.

• 13:49Speaker 04

  And then you decided like, hey, we want to kind of take a step back and really be intentional about what we do moving forward. The name went from Blockworks Group to just Blockworks, you know, a big rebrand there. And you're now relaunching as this financial media company. I think what you guys are doing is like really interesting. So talk through a little bit just about the kind of focus on financial media and specifically helping institutional investors learn about digital assets.

• 14:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, maybe I'll take kind of the the two year evolution of what got us to here. Then Mike, you can kind of talk to the editorial side of things. But I mean, just to fill the listeners in after we launched that podcast with you. Since then, we've taken we have 19 more podcasts in our network. We work with folks like we've built shows with like Charlie Shrem and we worked with Meltem Demir's and Joe Carlson and we study billionaires and Ted Sides of capital allocators and Peter McCormick. So we've got the largest podcast network in the space, one of the largest podcast networks in financial media in general. Our events business grew from like these six to 10 p.m. events to, you know, large scale conferences that we hosted in places like New York and Chicago and London.

• 14:59Speaker 02

  And so we we've built, you know, kind of a very successful events and podcasting business over the last few years that does one thing really well, which is help investors understand digital assets. And what you're talking about now is, you know, on January 12th, we've just, I'm not sure when this podcast is coming out, maybe January 12th or 13th. We've we've just launched our editorial business. And maybe Mike, Mike is kind of our operating editor in chief right now, so he can talk to that side.

• 15:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. So basically, the neat, we figured this out pretty quickly, even when we were just hosting the the tinier events. But ever since we have moved into the space, there has not been a good source of knowledge for institutions in in crypto. And it's been really interesting to watch, even over the course of the last five or six months, when you see the types of people that are getting involved in this space, that kind of Paul Tudor Joneses and the Stanley Druckenmiller's of the world, right? That's one group of institutions. That's kind of the macro hedge funds. But as this space continues to grow and onboard new cohorts of people, there are going to be some kind of like the corporate people or the enterprise blockchain people who are going to be want to be interested in how is this going to help my business? Then there's going to be a whole other group of people, like kind of the tech people, the developer focused crowd. But then there's this whole big crowd of people, which is the finance crowd.

• 16:11Speaker 03

  And that gets grouped in our space. We just call them the institutions, but it's really a whole bunch of different groups of people, right? It's kind of the macro finance guys, like the hedge fund traders, but there are also RIAs and kind of wealth management, there are investment banks, commercial banks, insurance companies. All these people are paying attention to crypto now. And they want to learn more. And you know, the space up until this point has been entirely retail, right? And so the many of the media companies that exist built their audience, you know, built their company serving the audience that existed, which was at that time a retail audience. So there really hasn't been much opportunity until now to actually build a media company that is exclusively focused on serving that new cohort cohort of people

• 16:56Speaker 03

  that are going to come in. And that's what we're really focused on doing on the editorial side of things. So yeah, that's a little bit about our side.

• 17:03Speaker 04

  And when you think about like the existing media and kind of content, Bitcoin and crypto are very unique, I think, in that there's people who are creating content on Twitter, Instagram with memes, Reddit, private WhatsApp groups, kind of like there's all this like user generated content in the community. And then you've got crypto native organizations like the CoinDesk, the Blocks, you know, and many others. And then you've got like the traditional folks who are the CNBCs, the Bloomberg's, the Yahoo Finances that are trying to cover this from more of a traditional viewpoint. And then you've got this like explosion

• 17:46Speaker 04

  of podcasts and YouTube channels. And so there's all this content. But what it sounds like you guys are really saying is like, all that content is focused on educating the retail sector. Really what you guys are doing is more almost B to B type media where you're going to go and try to create content that is valuable to these institutional investors and help them get up to speed. Is that a fair way to kind of look at the competitive landscape, if you will, and how you guys think you're going to fit into this?

• 18:13Speaker 03

  Totally. Yeah. I mean, even like anecdotally, if you listen to what Michael Saylor was saying, there's a bunch of, he's been on the kind of podcast circuit recently. And he describes what it was like educating his board about making that investment decision. And literally, if you listen to them, he was like, I was sending them YouTube videos. That is, that is incredible. First of all, the bet that he made is incredible. But the fact that, you know, a board of a public company had to learn about this space and probably the biggest investment that company has ever made through YouTube videos is absolutely nuts. And it shows you how early that like, that's insane. And to even use like a more micro example, like, let's say you're an RIA or something like that, right? And you're thinking about, you care about one thing, how am I going to build my business, right?

• 18:57Speaker 03

  You've got all these clients now that are asking you, Bitcoin just hit 40,000. What is this? Should I be putting this in my portfolio? Why isn't it already in my portfolio? Why can't you talk to me about this? So what they're thinking is, I gotta understand what this stuff is, and I gotta understand how I'm gonna get paid off of it. How is this gonna fit into my existing infrastructure? So you can kind of imagine the frustration of someone like that who genuinely wants to learn and get on boarded. And A, they get bombarded in this Twitter community as like, have fun staying poor, but all right, which is, you know, it is what it is. But you can imagine the frustration. They get that on Twitter, and then they go to a lot of these sites, and it's like, really deep dives into DeFi and ZK snarks and all that stuff. And they just kind of throw their hands up and say, this isn't for me.

• 19:41Speaker 03

  You know, I don't care about, this doesn't connect with my life. So really, when we say we're building an institutionally focused brand, you gotta really put yourself in the shoes of these people and try to understand why are they caring about the space? And that's the guiding light for content.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  I mean, Pom, you speak to these folks all day long. I just pulled up one of our, you know, another crypto media company that one of the ones that you just mentioned. Let me read these three articles. Trade Santa is giving away Christmas gifts. Reef Finance debuts as the first Polkadot project on Binance Launchpool. Cyber Vain announces proof of contribution consensus mechanism. I'm a 50-year-old gray-haired hedge fund manager looking to allocate 2% to Bitcoin. I'm throwing my hands up and I'm closing that page and telling my investment committee that we have no interest in Bitcoin. Right? But, but they're so, but, but there's so many different aspects of this space that just don't get covered. Right? From the asset managers to how Bitcoin's intertwined with,

• 20:40Speaker 02

  you know, things like central banking, you know, Fed activity. It's just not getting covered from an institutional light. And that's the next extension of our business, is this editorial arm.

• 20:52Speaker 04

  Got it. And so when you guys think about the body of work that goes into this, is this gonna be audio, written, video, a combination? Like, how do you think about that editorial output of what you're gonna have?

• 21:03Speaker 03

  I think it's a combination of all those things. I think when it comes to content, it has to conform to a specific medium. So when it comes to things like podcasts, podcasts are really good for what we're doing now, like long form conversations, expositions, kind of deep dives on specific things. That's great. That that works really well on podcasts. Written serves a different need. Written is you're kind of covering a certain space, right? And people kind of go there for more information, right? So you've got to find a way to just cover a certain specific space and deliver just short form kind of better, better content. And then I think video is another really interesting medium as well. But I think overall with the mix, we're kind of, I mean, Jason can talk a little bit more about the reasons why, why we decided to play in certain mediums.

• 21:47Speaker 03

  But the overall guiding light of the content, the audience that you're serving is the same, but it has to be different depending on the medium.

• 21:54Speaker 02

  So on the editorial side of things, Pom, so we've just doubled the size of the company in the last 30 days, a few of the, and we're hiring for a lot of more, a lot more roles for any listeners out there who are interested in joining a crypto media company. But we, Mike is kind of our operating editor in chief. He's just built a team. We've hired kind of a senior person from Real Vision. We've hired reporters from places like American Banker, Bloomberg, an ex CoinDesk employee. So yeah, we're quickly building the editorial team. But again, everything is focused on helping that more traditional investor understand the space.

• 22:29Speaker 04

  Got it. And so when you think through the types of stories, like, give us an example of what a hedge fund manager or somebody at an institution would come to you to read about. So they're not reading about Cyberchain or whatever other crazy thing, Sushi Swap, and you know, kind of all the really nuanced, highly speculative, but yet highly experimental and potentially highly innovative things, but just chewing the weeds. What is the type of content that they'll be reading?

• 22:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we kind of segment our content into four different buckets. One is asset management, so literally just covering the space of asset management within crypto. It's such an interesting, such an interesting space, right? The people that are managing money, it's still, like we talked about before, so small, right? But the returns that these people are generating now are crazy and they've got some really interesting strategies and they're just really interesting people. So one is actually just covering the space of asset management within crypto. The other is finance and financial services, right? So that's really focusing on some of those institutions we were talking about before. Maybe they're not, if they're not buying large chunks of Bitcoin, but maybe it's like an investment bank that's buying a crypto company to start a trading desk.

• 23:42Speaker 03

  Or maybe it's a bank or large asset manager that's kind of moving into custody, basically covering existing financial services and how they're starting to play in this space.

• 23:51Speaker 03

  Three is macro. So there, Jason kind of mentioned this before, but there are some topics like central banking and CBDCs are a really good one, that that's a really great overlay in between. Obviously, digital currencies is an idea that was born in crypto, but that cuts right to the heart of kind of traditional finance, right? Because it's central banking. So there are areas around kind of interest rates and currencies and central banking and monetary policy that really intersect with crypto. And then finally, the last one is a strong markets focus, right? So really focusing on things like market structure, what traders are doing, all that kind of good stuff.

• 24:28Speaker 04

  Got it. And how did you guys think about like from a business perspective? There's so many media models today, right? There's subscription, there's advertising, there's literally like lead generation, there is affiliates.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  E-commerce, yeah.

• 24:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, like how did you guys think of, or how are you thinking about monetizing the business moving forward?

• 24:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the first thing that we did is we looked at every single media company, right? And this is everything from Hodinky with watches to the Wall Street Journal to Bloomberg, which is more of a data company, to things like Morning Brew. We looked at every single media company. Our business has always been based around sponsorships and advertisements, right? So we have a really simple business. We help investors understand crypto by giving them information and insights. We build an audience that really trusts us and we allow brands to tap into that audience. Some of our big clients are like Fidelity Digital Assets, Coinbase, BlockFi, CME Group. They come to us because they want to meet investors interested in crypto and we'll allow them to tap into that audience through advertisements and sponsorships.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  We looked at subscription models. We looked at affiliate media models. Basically, our conclusion was, if you look at kind of the evolution of digital media over the last, I don't know, 10, 20 years, really decade, I guess I'd call it, B2C media raised a bunch of money and basically got their lunch eaten by social media. Big companies like Vox and BuzzFeed made huge bets that they would leverage social media to build their platforms. What they didn't understand though is that the value accrued to social media and that it didn't actually accrue to these digital media companies. So what you've seen is basically the evolution of two different types of media companies, B2B media companies, right? One of our advisors

• 26:16Speaker 02

  is a man by the name of Sean Griffey. He runs Industry Dive, really niche media company. From an outsider's point of view, inside the company, they do 40, 50, 60 million in revenue and they're profitable, right? So that's kind of B2B media companies that serve their audience. That's what we are on the kind of more like webinar newsletter. Our editorial front is a B2B media company that monetizes through sponsorships and ads. And then on the podcast front, you look at the podcast space, Wondery just got bought for what, 300 million by Amazon? Gimlet got bought for 200 million by Spotify? The podcast space is booming right now. And so what we're trying to do is basically leverage talent to sit at the

• 26:59Speaker 02

  talent is sitting at the center of this B2B media company, which we think is a really unique model. And we think that every media company in the world needs to have a talent strategy, no different than how CNBC has Andrew Ross Orkin and how Vox had Kara Swisher, right?

• 27:16Speaker 04

  And the pop podcast has popped, duh. And the pop podcast has popped.

• 27:22Speaker 04

  No, so how do you guys feel or see the institutional kind of openness really changing or the sentiment changing? Obviously, we're talking about kind of your strategy as to how you're going to move forward. I tend to agree that this is really smart for you to do and will be highly successful. But the sentiment in 2018 is a little bit different than the sentiment in 2019 and 20. And like now at 2021, it feels like everyone is, you know, using hashtag Bitcoin on Twitter. They want to tell you about the how they bought their first Bitcoin in 2018. And, you know, they're ready to rock and roll. So like, how have you guys seen that sentiment shift over time?

• 28:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's funny, there's, people think about FOMO, a lot of people use that as like a dirty word, right? But it's kind of not, right? And I know you've talked about this as well, that a lot of these guys, they had all the time and opportunity in the world to buy Bitcoin when it was 3,000, 5,000, whatever it was, and they didn't. And there's kind of a reflexive property in Bitcoin, where as the price goes up, you know, the network actually gets, ends up getting more secure. You've got more people participating, it's actually more valuable. And I think you're starting to see that take effect in a big way. And one of the other problems with Bitcoin overall is that it's always been kind of too small. Like, scale has always been a huge problem for these guys, where it's like, okay,

• 28:48Speaker 03

  you know, I'm a $10 billion asset manager, I want to put $100 million to work. The space was just straight up way too small. So I think right now, I mean, as we're talking, right before this Bitcoin hit 40K. So I think there definitely is some danger of being kind of euphoric settlement. That's not making a comment on the price or where I think it might go. But I definitely think emotions are a little bit high in the space overall. So that probably has to end at some point. But I really do think, you know, some of the best info that you can get on this, the kind of the sentiment gauge, is actually not listening to people in crypto, but listening to the more macro people. And if you tune into some of the macro podcasts, right?

• 29:31Speaker 03

  So that's kind of the Grant Williams Show, that's Macro Voices, that's Masters in Business. You know, six months ago, Bitcoin was a dirty word and Every one of these podcasts, every one of these guys talking about it and they're talking about it in sophisticated ways. They're using good arguments and they're open minded. And to me, that's a really powerful way to measure the sentiment of the overall space.

• 29:54Speaker 04

  Is it fair to say that we're now at a point where every single institutional investor is like, I gotta have a Bitcoin strategy and they're actually going and allocating?

• 30:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I can't speak to every single one, but I think so. It's a powerful tool, right? In the same way, in the same social pressure that applied when Bitcoin was at 3,000, it's like, what are you doing looking at this? The social pressure is working the exact opposite way, where, hey, it's 40,000. I need to be looking at this today, but why weren't we already paying attention to this, basically? And people-

• 30:27Speaker 02

  Go ahead, Mike.

• 30:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was just gonna say, and people don't want to be left out, right? So you gotta keep up with performance. If you think that everyone is piling into Bitcoin, and that's going to drive huge returns, you know, you can't be the odd duck left out.

• 30:40Speaker 02

  Pom, we spoke with a portfolio manager at an endowment a few weeks ago, and basically, what he described is every single fund manager is looking at this right now. Doesn't mean they're buying. Every fund manager at least has to look at this. Most of them want to allocate a small amount, right? I don't know, a few basis points, maybe 1%. If they want to invest, what's happening is they want to invest. They have an investment mandate that says that they can't invest right now. So what they're doing is putting it on their personal, inside their personal portfolios. So now you've got these hedge fund managers, endowment managers, RIAs, financial advisors, who manage most of the money in the world. They are, they have a mandate that says that they can't

• 31:24Speaker 02

  invest through their fund. They still love Bitcoin. They invest personally. Now there's an incentive for them, right? The beauty of Bitcoin is, as soon as you buy it, there's an incentive to make this thing go higher, just like any other asset. And so now, you've got the portfolio managers, the largest asset managers in the world. They might not own it on their funds portfolio, but they own it inside their personal portfolio.

• 31:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, and I think we're just at a point now where like everyone realizes is frankly, what most of Bitcoiners have been saying for a while. This is a necessity. This isn't a privilege. This is a necessity. You have to have this in your portfolio. It is the single greatest protector of purchasing power, and it's the only asset in the world that could protect you against the chaos in the traditional world, yet still provides you asymmetric opportunities, similar to a venture style investments, literally like the apex predator of financial markets. And I think that that sounded nuts at 3,000. That sounded interesting at 20. Sounds pretty damn smart at 40, right? But the same comment, it's just literally the price almost like opens people's eyes and changes their opinion.

• 32:35Speaker 02

  I'll tell you though, I think price is amazing. What's going to be, so there's Bitcoin, the asset and Bitcoin, the network, right? And Bitcoin, the network as a, as a payment settlement network is arguably more interesting than the asset. The asset can get, the asset, Bitcoin, the asset will get bigger than gold, right? At some point, there'll be the flipping and it passes gold, and that's really interesting. Bitcoin, a settlement layer and the network will become magnitudes larger than, than the asset, right? And, and that's interesting because that really globalizes the world and actually really helps. The asset helps people protect against inflation, things like that. The, the, the settlement network and what guys like Jack Mallers, I think you might have invested in Strike.

• 33:18Speaker 02

  What, what they're working on is, is, is just unbelievable. And that's arguably, you know, for any investors who are looking at this, don't just look at Bitcoin, the asset, but look at, look at Bitcoin in it, in its whole as a settlement layer.

• 33:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. Go ahead, Mike.

• 33:34Speaker 03

  No, I was gonna, the interesting thing about Bitcoin too, and honestly, if you look at something like stable coins, it's, it's kind of just a good product. Like the product works, you know? It's kind of a similar thing when people point at Elon Musk, who just became the richest guy in the world, surpassed Jeff Bezos.

• 33:50Speaker 04

  Mean lord, meme lord Elon Musk.

• 33:52Speaker 03

  Mean lord Musk, as we call him. But you know, when people point at Tesla, it's kind of like, at the end of the day, the guy made an amazing product. And when you look at something like SpaceX. The guy pulled it off, right? And it's the same thing with Bitcoin. You can say all you want, this price seems funny and yada yada. But at the end of the day, the technology works better than the existing financial system. You can literally send money anywhere in the world and it'll settle instantaneously with no middleman. It is why I actually recently had an experience trying to help someone open a Coinbase and then a brokerage account. The ease of opening a Coinbase is like click, click, click, you're done.

• 34:35Speaker 03

  And a brokerage account takes 30 minutes to do and multiple approvals. It's a nightmare working with the with the existing financial system. So look, you can look at price, but at the end of the day, it is just kind of a better product than what exists out there.

• 34:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, I obviously I agree.

• 34:56Speaker 04

  What are the things that you guys are looking forward to in 2021? In terms of obviously, once you get this launched, either milestones for the industry or milestones for Blockworks?

• 35:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, I mean, for Blockworks, what we're really just dead set focused on, we serve one audience, right? Which is the institutional audience. So I think we've done a great job building a brand so far in terms of the events and kind of the podcasts. And that's what we're known for. But really what we're doing this year, we're building that editorial kind of brand, right? And onboarding a whole like the mission statement of what we're doing is we're trying to talk to directly to this whole new group of people that are coming in. In terms of things that I think I'm looking forward to in the space over the coming year. Just keeping on what's what's happening right now as more and more people get into the space. Not only is it exciting because obviously, you know, the price of Bitcoin and stuff like that.

• 35:52Speaker 03

  But you just get more diversity of thought and opinion and you kind of build out the infrastructure and everything just feels more real, you know? So I think it just just watching as more and more people come into the space, build good products, build successful products, figure out business models, just advance the overall space in general. All that stuff is really, really exciting.

• 36:12Speaker 02

  I think there's about to be a huge hiring spree. I mean, the best part of Blockworks is hiring people who don't own Bitcoin and having them buy their first Bitcoin, right?

• 36:19Speaker 04

  Is that a requirement?

• 36:21Speaker 02

  Now it certainly is now. And but no, I think.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  Pomp, I think the four biggest things, I'm looking forward to four things, outside of Blockworks, right? Blockworks looking forward to growing revenue and the team's gonna double in size again and all of our metrics that we look at are gonna grow, but I think there are four themes to look at in 2021. The four main Bitcoin themes are gonna be, one, corporates are going to invest 1% of their cash into Bitcoin. Every corporate is gonna be looking at this and just like a lot of funds, some of them might not do it, but everyone's at least looking to invest 1% of their cash into Bitcoin. The second thing is funds are gonna invest 1% to 5% of their portfolios into Bitcoin. The third thing is financial advisors and RIAs are gonna start recommending Bitcoin,

• 37:08Speaker 02

  I think. And the fourth thing is I think the M&A space and acquisitions are gonna really heat up now that traditional companies want Bitcoin customers. So you can sure as hell believe, I know you're a big investor in BlockFi, BlockFi's on an absolute tear right now. How many customers do they have? You know, I'm assuming BlockFi will end up going public at some point, but you can sure as hell guarantee JP Morgan wants access to those BlockFi customers. So yeah, corporates investing, funds investing, financial advisors recommending Bitcoin to clients and the M&A and acquisition space heating up. Those are the four big themes that I think will take place this year and yeah, it'll be pretty damn exciting to see it play out.

• 37:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 37:48Speaker 03

  I would even call a shot a little bit and say, because the other really interesting thing that just recently happened is that OCC announcement, which basically, you know, seriously disrupted SWIFT, right? And there's a lot of incentive there for kind of investment banks to get involved in crypto now. The other thing about banks is that they're just in the business of gathering assets, right? Like, that's what they really do. They're in the asset gathering business and then lending out at a high level. So crypto used to be not very exciting when it was $2 billion or $3 billion market cap asset. Now it's a trillion dollar asset and who knows when it's gonna stop, right? So at some point, those banks are gonna say, I need, this is a whole new pool of assets that I wanna have, that I wanna

• 38:32Speaker 03

  have access to. And honestly, the best way that they're gonna move in there is to buy existing companies that have successfully gathered those assets so far. So the M&A spaces, I agree with Jason, it's a really interesting space to watch.

• 38:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, the thing too that seems to be really valuable is as these companies grow, they continue to hire more and more people into from the legacy financial world or legacy media or legacy tech companies and bring them into the crypto space. And it feels like that's just only going to accelerate and become faster, bigger and more important over time.

• 39:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, and with every single person that comes in, it's another person who owns Bitcoin. And once you own Bitcoin, you're incentivized to tell more people about it. It's an amazing, it's an amazing system. I've got this goal going on right now. I just posted on Twitter, get 100 friends to buy Bitcoin. Six days into the year, I'm at 12, right? And it's like, there's, there are thousands of people like me who are telling their friends about Bitcoin. And so every single 30 year old JP Morgan employee who comes over, starts working at Coinbase, they're telling 20 of their old colleagues at JP Morgan about Bitcoin. So.

• 39:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. There's a really great article by, I think Andreessen Horowitz put this out, like a couple of years ago is now. But basically, it's the idea that kind of everything follows price. And on these big uptrends in, this is, this has already started, right? Because what ends up happening is the price ends up going up, the media ends up covering it, a bunch of eyeballs get on this space, and then a bunch of people end up moving into the space. So that's a, that's a really exciting thing that you don't necessarily see reflected, but just purely the amount of human capital that's going to get dragged into this space after this recent run up, that's, that's something that's already in motion. I guarantee you that that's already starting. So one way to measure that is, is companies hiring

• 40:23Speaker 03

  right now, but that's kind of more staffing up in anticipation for a bull run. But over the next like two or three years, the amount of human capitals that's going to flow into this space, especially from the like legacy financial system is really, really interesting.

• 40:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it also just feels like as more people come into the space, they're more experienced, they've got a different skill set, in some cases they're more intelligent, right? Like you just kind of like almost professionalize some of what's going on. But at the same time, what's really important is keeping the same ethos and the same edginess and the same kind of, you know, absolute fanatical obsession that has made Bitcoin what it is. So it's almost like you're gonna end up having both sides of the coin, where you've got kind of a professionalization and adoption by institutions. At the same time, you know, jump on Twitter real quick and you'll get told, you know, "Have fun staying poor" by somebody who's literally living anywhere in the world and wants to take down the government. Like, it's very rare that an asset can kind of

• 41:23Speaker 04

  walk the line between those two camps, but that feels like what Bitcoin is doing and will continue to do in the future.

• 41:29Speaker 02

  It's an entire industry that understands that the memes are the message, right? How's that hire the chief meme officer coming along?

• 41:37Speaker 04

  I have somebody.

• 41:39Speaker 02

  I know you, I bet you do.

• 41:41Speaker 04

  I have many, I have many people. Many people are sitting there. They keep DMing me all this nonsense, but I got one guy who, he's working on some other things for me too, but he is fire with the memes.

• 41:55Speaker 02

  Amazing.

• 41:55Speaker 04

  I may or may not have a 40K meme sitting in my arsenal right now, but I have not had it yet. Since while we're recording this, it dumped from 40 down to 37.5, you know, just to make sure everyone remembers that this is a wild beast that can't be tamed.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  Nice little sell order up at 40.

• 42:15Speaker 04

  All right, before I let you guys go, I have three questions. The first thing is, what is the craziest thing that either of you has seen in the crypto industry?

• 42:28Speaker 03

  Oh man, where do you even start with that?

• 42:33Speaker 03

  Craziest thing that we've ever seen in the crypto industry?

• 42:40Speaker 02

  On a micro level, it's, I mean, this sounds kind of, I don't want to promote scam stuff, but there's some pretty intelligent scammers out there. Like, every day, I get hit up in my direct messages on Twitter about some like, you know, my, my son, you know, my son just died, like, can you send me some Bitcoin? I don't want to promote those, though, so I won't, I won't use that. I'll think of a better one. But those are, I mean, I, I don't know if that exists in other industries.

• 43:07Speaker 04

  It's the modern day Nigerian, Nigerian prince.

• 43:10Speaker 02

  Everyone wants to get their hands on some Bitcoin, you know?

• 43:14Speaker 02

  The craziest thing I've seen, honestly, is, this isn't gonna feel that crazy, now that Bitcoin's ripping so much and it's becoming the norm, but like, just every time I hear about, you know, Yale's investment manager, Bitcoin to me is still, I heard about this thing in 2015 when I was living in friggin Budapest, Hungary, right? And so every time I hear about Yale's portfolio manager buying Bitcoin, it, it, it, I don't know if that'll ever cease to amaze me. I'll be honest with you.

• 43:48Speaker 03

  I've actually got one here for you. I actually think the craziest thing that happened in crypto happened in 2018 or 2019, and it was when those pensions invested in Morgan Creek and took that risk. That's the craziest thing. Because if you work at a pension, you're tasked with handling money for everyday people. And they're so, you know, conservative, and the incentives are not there to take the risk. So, the fact that they went out on such a limb and invested, you guys are amazing at Morgan Creek, you guys, but the fact that they went and did that is the most amazing thing that I've seen in crypto.

• 44:27Speaker 04

  It's the least risky thing they could do.

• 44:30Speaker 03

  Probably didn't feel like that at the time.

• 44:32Speaker 02

  Well said.

• 44:33Speaker 04

  That, that was my point, was like, hey, y'all want to keep playing this, uh, this, this crazy game? Go ahead, but, uh, there's another path. So, uh, I guess I can say it, uh, their cost basis in the first fund is fifty, five hundred dollars.

• 44:47Speaker 02

  Not too shabby, my friend. Nice little ten Xer.

• 44:52Speaker 04

  They're doing just fine. Um, all right. The two questions I ask everybody, and then you guys get to ask me a question. Uh, what is the most important book you've each read?

• 45:01Speaker 03

  I think for me, actually Jason introduced me, so you're about to get a two for here, Jason, but I think the ascent of money was actually one of the most interesting ones. And I don't come from a background in finance at all. Like I, like Jason, I was a classics major in school, classic psychology. And learning about what money is and how it has evolved and how things like credit have evolved were really, really instructive and interesting to me. And I think getting that full history was really what gave me context, honestly, for my interest in crypto and Bitcoin. So I'd say the ascent of money is one of my favorites.

• 45:36Speaker 02

  For me, I got two answers. One is the one to make me sound sophisticated. It's the book I'm reading right now because I'm a history nerd. It's the team of rivals about Lincoln, but that's the one to make me sound more sophisticated than I am. Honestly, I mean, it's almost like a little embarrassing to say, but the one, the books that changed, it's a series of books that changed my life when I was 18. It's four books. Exactly. No, it's a seven part series. I did love that one. But no, it's, it's, it's a book called Think and Grow Rich. There's a book called Rich Dad, Poor Dad. It's a book called Richest Man in Babylon. And there's a book called, it's a Dale Carnegie book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. And I probably read all four of those books at least 10 times in college.

• 46:21Speaker 02

  And I mean, I was still a shithead in college, but I felt like I had a different mindset than people because of these four books. And that totally changed, like reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad, I was like, I'm going to be an entrepreneur. I'm, I'm never, I'm never working for the man. I'm not doing the nine to five game. And so, yeah, it was the Think and Grow Rich, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and Richest Man in Babylon, as cheesy as those might sound.

• 46:45Speaker 04

  Those are the three books I read when I was 20 years old that changed my life. So that's good.

• 46:50Speaker 02

  I could have been in a book club.

• 46:52Speaker 04

  Nah, I wasn't talking about it. Uh, aliens, how much do both of you believe?

• 47:00Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 47:01Speaker 03

  100%. Not, not only do I believe in aliens, I think there is a really good chance that they are already here. I don't know if you guys saw this article that came out about this Israeli guy who was in the military for like 30 years, and he just came out and he was like, look, man, I've done my whole thing. I've built this respected career. I've worked in the government. I've worked in academics. I never said this before because I was afraid of being called a crackpot, but now I'm old. Aliens exist. There's a galactic federation and there's, it's straight up humanity is not. And you know, honestly, I think everyone's allowed one conspiracy thing that they're allowed to believe in. And this is mine and I, I fully.

• 47:44Speaker 04

  It's not a conspiracy, it's science.

• 47:46Speaker 03

  It's, yeah, I agree. I'm right, I'm right there with you.

• 47:49Speaker 04

  Jason?

• 47:50Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 47:52Speaker 03

  Why, why not?

• 47:55Speaker 02

  I was in the room the first time you asked this question. You think I'm crazy enough to say no? I just wanted to see your response. Of course aliens exist. I went, I took a 10 day trip to Cairo, Egypt, two years ago by myself, 10 day trip. I saw those pyramids of Egypt. Once you see those things, aliens, they're a lock. They're, they exist.

• 48:14Speaker 04

  You think the aliens built the pyramids?

• 48:16Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 48:18Speaker 03

  Man, I don't know about that. I didn't sign up for that.

• 48:21Speaker 02

  You haven't seen those things.

• 48:22Speaker 03

  I didn't sign on to that.

• 48:23Speaker 04

  I never been.

• 48:25Speaker 02

  Those things are like geometrically down to the inch, miles apart, and they're to the inch at a 90 degree angle. I mean, I mean, I'm Jewish. I know the Jews are like good at building those things when they're slaves, but like, you don't know. You don't know.

• 48:41Speaker 04

  If, if aliens are real, where do you think the most likely place that they are? Area 51?

• 48:48Speaker 04

  I got a wild theory.

• 48:49Speaker 03

  All right, let's hear your theory before we answer.

• 48:52Speaker 04

  In the ocean.

• 48:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, man.

• 48:55Speaker 03

  Abyss.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  The depths, the depth of the ocean.

• 48:57Speaker 04

  And who's going down there? Nobody's going down there.

• 49:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, except for those fish that have the 12-foot rods hanging out with the little light bulb. That is.

• 49:05Speaker 04

  But like, but they can't talk. Like, no, nobody's going down there. So like, how do we know that they're just not chilling in the ocean?

• 49:11Speaker 02

  That's fact.

• 49:13Speaker 03

  Can't verify. Can't verify.

• 49:16Speaker 04

  Just saying, just saying.

• 49:18Speaker 02

  Oh, this is not my question. I'm not using my question on this one.

• 49:21Speaker 04

  All right, what were you gonna ask?

• 49:22Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, would you rather go to the bottom of the ocean or to the moon?

• 49:26Speaker 04

  Not to the moon. Well, we're going to the moon altogether anyways, but.

• 49:29Speaker 02

  I was a lamb. I had to lay that up.

• 49:33Speaker 04

  All right, what question you guys got for me?

• 49:36Speaker 02

  I got a question. If Bitcoin didn't exist in this whole space, you've always said, since the day I met you, you, you're a tech investor. And that Bitcoin is just some of the most interesting technology in the world. You're not a Bitcoin investor, you're a tech investor. If Bitcoin didn't exist, but you had to dedicate yourself to one space, whether it be biotech, psychedelics, and, you know, mushrooms and things like that, self-driving cars, what, what one space would you dedicate the next decade of your life to?

• 50:09Speaker 04

  Oh, I just really say it's tech investing, like.

• 50:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, if you had to get more specific than that, though.

• 50:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, so like, I, I think that people think of that as, oh, that's just like investing on cross. I think of it as, it's one very, very specific skill, which is you're actually investing in people. And it doesn't matter what they're worried about. It's more psychology, I think, than anything else. And so the way that I think about it is like, finding the world's most interesting people who have a higher probability of success going after like a massive market, right? And so like, those markets, like by definition, there can't just be 20 people who all win one market. So it's actually like, you have to like, cut it a different way. And it's just at the earliest stages. There's a lot of people who are really good Series B, Series C investors, a lot of people who are good Series

• 50:57Speaker 04

  Investors, but like, I kind of think that it's a little bit uh different and even cheating to some degree. To wait till it's a series B company and be like, oh, this one I think is gonna win. Like, yeah, it's working already. And sure, they can mess it up, but like, you have data, you have all this stuff. But it takes an absolute, you know, just a crazy person to sit down with somebody and they say, I'm gonna go build a billion dollar business. And for you to say like, cool, I believe you. Here's, you know, a hundred thousand dollars, just two hundred fifty thousand dollars. So let's go do it. And it also takes a crazy person to be the person who sits down saying like, you know, I'm gonna go build a billion dollar company from scratch. And so like, I just genuinely enjoy

• 51:39Speaker 04

  meeting those people and having those conversations. Um, and I've now invested in the seed round of four, I think four companies that are a billion dollars or more. Uh, and so like, when you start to get a couple of those data points, you start to realize like the people are the exact same from a like a structured standpoint. Uh, and the way that they think, they're going after different industries, they're all facing different challenges. But I think that like, almost like the science of identifying those people and studying how to do that uh, is fascinating to me. And so like, luckily, I get to do Bitcoin and that, but if Bitcoin didn't exist, like, that would be the obsession that I have.

• 52:21Speaker 02

  Can I get a follow up question there, which would be?

• 52:23Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 52:23Speaker 02

  You said they all kind of look alike, right? Four companies. What's, what's one trait? I'm sure there are a few different traits, but what's one trait of the, some of the founders of these companies?

• 52:35Speaker 04

  Um, I think that there is uh a critical thinking and problem solving trait that usually goes undisclosed. Like everyone was talking about like, oh, they're smart, or oh, they're good at hiring, or they're good storytellers. Like, yeah, duh, you have to be able to do all that stuff. But at the end of the day, it's just this like, uh, deep seated, um, kind of like fire of when I see a problem, I want to solve it. When I see another problem, I want to solve it. And I'm constantly on offense when I see problems. The defense. A lot of people when a problem pops up, they go, ooh, I don't want to like, like they go away. There's a hard conversation. They don't want to have it. If there's an issue, they would hope that somebody else steps in and solves it before they have to.

• 53:20Speaker 04

  The best founders that I know who've built the most successful companies, if something happens, they immediately attack and they just, what's the problem? What is, what's the information that we have? How do we make a good decision here? Who's responsible for owning this in the future? Like go. And they do that over and over and over again, all day long. And when you're building a company from scratch into a multi-billion dollar business, like it's just a series of solving problems and making sound decisions. So you have to enjoy the problem solving just as much as you do making sound decisions. And I think we always focus on like, oh, this person, you know, smart, successful, yada, yada, whatever. But like the problem solving piece is like, that's where you gotta roll up your sleeves and really do the work. And so the best founders, like they really enjoy doing that stuff, even though it might not be fun at all times because the problems suck or they're unexpected

• 54:05Speaker 04

  or it's on vacation or, or holiday or whatever. But just they just have this like obsession with getting the problem solved and keep marching forward.

• 54:13Speaker 03

  That's good. Yeah. All right, Paul. I've got, I've got one question for you. What is the best investment you've ever made? And I don't mean which one did you make the most money on? That's not what I'm asking. And wide ranging, it could be a founder that you invested.

• 54:31Speaker 04

  I know the answer.

• 54:31Speaker 03

  All right.

• 54:32Speaker 04

  I know the answer. Planet, Planet by far.

• 54:35Speaker 03

  Oh, that is great. That is great.

• 54:38Speaker 04

  I think it's just, um, when you think about, uh, investing in Planet, I talked about this like very early on in our relationship. I said, look, there's like basically two paths that lead people to, uh, having a successful marriage and kind of partnership for like many years. One is, uh, you either meet somebody young. And you essentially reinvent yourself and they reinvent themselves over and over and over again for literally, you know, let's say you meet if you're in a high school, for example, you meet when you're sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old. And then basically you've got to transition from like, okay, we were in high school. It's now we're like in college together. Okay, we survived that and thrive. Then we gotta go from college to like early professional life.

• 55:20Speaker 04

  Then we gotta get to like mid to late twenties. Then you gotta get to like, okay, now I wanna have a family, right? Then you get to like, oh, now we're like really doing well professionally. Then it's like, okay, like now our kids have gone off to college. Like, there's so many different almost acts to that maturation process. And so the odds that you're gonna meet somebody like really early in life and successfully make a lot of those transitions, especially the earliest ones, it's just really small. Like the sample size you're pulling from is small. It's like, who did I go to high school with? Yeah, sure, maybe, but like, that's a really, really difficult thing. Or the second thing is people basically go on their own paths and then eventually they meet at some point, usually kind of late twenties, early thirties, maybe even into their forties.

• 55:59Speaker 04

  And when they meet, it's like, hey, I've already had to get some sort of traction in my life in certain aspects uh without you. But now like all of these future transitions, like that's something that I think we can do together. And so like, I was in the camp of like, I am never gonna get married. Like, people say that. I was like, I'm never going to get married. Why would you ever get married? That sounds like the dumbest thing in the world. Like, what? You you mean that like now you have to make decisions and like somebody else can say like, I don't wanna do that and you might have to listen? Nah, if I wanna go party, I'm gonna go party. I don't eat McDonald's. I wanna eat McDonald's. If I don't wanna do anything today, I'm not gonna do anything today. That's my approach to life.

• 56:45Speaker 04

  And when I met Polina, uh, it was like almost immediately, we were just like, alright. So I think that like, maybe I'm not gonna just do whatever I want for the rest of my life. And and so to me, it's just like, that investment of like time and like really open mindedness, I think has been the best investment. Because what you begin to realize is like, it's hard. Hard to grow as an individual by yourself, but you only have the perspective of the world that you have. And so like, whether it's planning, like looking over my shoulder, being like, eh, I wouldn't tweet that. Like that's, you're not like thinking about this other thing, like you're gonna be an idiot here. All the way to like me coming up with, oh, hey, I have to make a really important decision professionally. Like, let's sit down and talk about it.

• 57:28Speaker 04

  Like, having somebody there that has the same context, that has the same kind of goals and aspirations. That's like really, really valuable. And so I think that people just underestimate like that element of it. Uh, and they always focus on like, what company did I invest in? Or like, you know, where I chose to move to or whatever. But to me, like, by far, that's been the most impactful thing and like, nothing's even close.

• 57:54Speaker 02

  That's a great answer. That's a great answer. BlockFi is a distant second.

• 57:58Speaker 04

  She paid, she paid me a lot of money to say.

• 58:00Speaker 02

  Episode sponsored by the profile.

• 58:04Speaker 04

  The episode is not sponsored by the profile. We have no free sponsors. You don't get any advertising unless you pay. So we will not be giving out the readtheprofile.com URL in this episode, because it's not a paid sponsorship.

• 58:16Speaker 02

  We'll only be giving out the URL, blockworks.co. So hit it right now.

• 58:22Speaker 04

  All right. I appreciate you guys coming on. Uh, blockworks.co is, uh, the website. You guys should go and, well, not you two, you guys are gonna be there anyways. But if you're listening or watching this, you should go check it out. Uh, I'm a huge fan of Jason and Mike, uh, and they've been super helpful to me as all this stuff has gotten built. So go check it out, blockworks.co, you two. I will, uh, talk to you soon. We'll definitely do it again in the future. And, uh, to end it, I've got to, you know, just throw a little jab in there. Uh, Mike, your, uh, Zoom name is Maria Ippolito, so we'll talk to you again.

• 58:56Speaker 02

  That's the name of my beautiful.

• 58:57Speaker 03

  We try to cut costs.

• 58:58Speaker 02

  Not a jab at all.

• 58:59Speaker 03

  Not a jab at all.