TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #192: Christopher Gimmer + Marc Chouinard

Episode Date: September 23, 2020

Join Marty as he sits down with Christopher Gimmer and Marc Chouinard, co-founders of Snappa, to discuss: - Bootstrapping v. Raising funds from VCs - Building many businesses and failing - The decision to add Bitcoin to Snappa's balance sheet - Why it's easier to move cash to Bitcoin as a small biz v. publicly traded companies - Small business self-custody via multisig - Asking, "What is money?" - Canada's inflated real estate market - Bullish sentiment - Bitcoin education - much more Follow Christopher on Twitter Follow Marc on Twitter Check out Chris' piece on why Snappa allocated to Bitcoin as a Reserve Asset Check out Snappa Shoutout to this week's sponsors. Cash App. Start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse when you download the app.

What's up freaks, it's your boy Marty here to introduce this episode of Tales from the Crypt. Just ripped it. Posting it right away because I thought it was a very high quality conversation. And we got a lot of episodes in the docket. I sat down with the co-founders of Snappa, Chris Gimmer and Mark Schwinard, to talk about their recent decision to allocate some of their business treasury to Bitcoin. A lot of talk about Michael Saylor, MicroStrategy's allocation of Bitcoin has been going around the last couple weeks. I thought it would be interesting to sit down with a couple of small business owners and talk about why they allocated to Bitcoin, how they came to the decision, how they built the small business, excuse me, and a bunch of other things.

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Download the cash app. Use the code stacking sats. Get your $10 and enjoy this episode. Again, like I said, we have a lot of episodes in the doc in the coming weeks. So make sure you subscribe to Tales from the Crypt on your local podcasting platform. If you're liking what we're putting out, if you're picking up what we're putting down, why don't you give us a review? Rate, review, share.

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Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's your boy Marty Bent here on the back deck. It's a beautiful day. It's starting to warm up again. It's been very cold where I am the last couple of weeks, so I'm happy to be outside in the afternoon, shorts and a t-shirt, about to jump into a very interesting conversation. Everybody in the Bitcoin world has been horny over Michael Saylor from MicroStrategy over the last few weeks. He's been hitting the podcast circuit,

but there are other people allocating some of their cash reserves to Bitcoin in the business world, and I'm sitting down with two of those gentlemen, the co-founders of Snappa HQ, Chris Gimmer, and Mark Schwinard. Gentlemen, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having us. Well, thank you for being here. Again, like I was saying right before we hit record, there's a sliding scale of individuals and businesses that can allocate to Bitcoin specifically. Everybody's been focused on Michael Saylor over the last couple of weeks, but you guys actually announced before MicroStrategy, I believe, or maybe between the first buy

the second buy uh that you have allocated uh some of your treasury reserve from snappa hq to bitcoin and uh chris you wrote an incredible piece sort of documenting uh how you came to the conclusion uh to to allocate some of your funds to bitcoin and some informational materials for people looking to learn more i thought that was an incredible piece but first before we dive into the investment thesis behind why you guys made this decision what is snappa hq How does a small tech company come to, number one, develop a treasury that has enough cash to allocate to Bitcoin? And then two, why were you guys even thinking about Bitcoin if it's not your core competency? Yeah, so Snappa is basically an online graphic design tool for non-designers.

So it's mainly used by small business owners, marketers to create usually marketing related graphics for social media, content marketing, display ads, all that kind of stuff. Mark and I bootstrapped the company. So we never raised any outside funding. So we never had, you know, intense pressure to grow at all costs and reinvest every single dollar back into the business. So we've been fortunate enough to build a sustainable and profitable business. And within the last year or two, especially, we've grown pretty well, especially with COVID. We saw a pretty big acceleration in our growth. And so we kind of found ourselves in the fortunate position of having quite a bit of cash on the balance sheet.

And we like to be a bit conservative. So we, we definitely reinvest some of, some of that cash back into the business. Um, but you know, we definitely like to, uh, maintain some of that cash on the balance sheet to either say for rainy day or, you know, make sure that, uh, we have more than enough for the future. And then suddenly, um, we, we, um, kind of came to this similar conclusion of, of, of Michael Saylor, which is, uh, we're, we're basically making zero interest on the cash on our balance sheet.

inflation is going through the roof despite what the cpi reading is is telling us um and we after you know doing a lot of research we we feel that bitcoin um was was the best way to uh you know maintain the purchasing power of of the cash on our balance sheet yeah so how big is snappa what's your your body count head count excuse me not body count you're not killing people you have a head account yeah we're seven people full-time and then we we work with a couple freelancers and contractors as well yeah it's um that's the way to do it so i actually great american mining the company i work for outside the podcast and newsletter we're actually uh funded by another company that's bootstrap buy sell ads probably similar to what you guys do

they're focused on uh it's an ad tech company basically creating a white label uh service that publishers can use to get advertising on their sites but uh the mentality behind bsa which has been brought to gam as well as bootstrap uh run lean and and grow at all costs before we get into the bitcoin thing i'm actually really interested to um to learn more about your bootstrap process why i decided to bootstrap instead of seek out vc funds because it seems to me at least having more experience with companies that have bootstrapped to be a better long long-term strategy yeah um it's a good question so you know mark uh it's funny because we actually did kind of look into raising money at one point um and you know mark created like the first version of snappa

and it's interesting because a lot of venture capitalists want to see like traction and progress So we found ourselves at the point where we actually had some good traction and some good progress. And we were like, you know, what's the point of raising money at this point when we have customers and get traction? And, you know, we just felt that I think maintaining the control and being in our own destiny was very attractive to us. And, you know, there's there's a lot of trade offs when you do raise, you know, as soon as you're taking investor money, you basically have the mandate to grow at all costs. And, you know, they want you to become that home run. And so we've seen in our space where sometimes a business could do really well at $5, $10 million a year, but that's considered a failure if you're raising venture capital. Whereas if you're a bootstrap founder and you're making $5, $10 million a year with a 10-person team, that's a phenomenal living. I don't know if you have anything else to add there, Mark. yeah I mean really it comes down to a few I think Gimmer touched on a few points there you know we took a look at well so like what kind of lifestyle we

want to live you know are we are we going into this into this business to try and work on slide decks to raise money or are we working on this to create a valuable product for our customers and build a good living for ourselves as well as our as our employees so two very different ways to look at things. I think the other thing, too, is you're seeing now more and more of these kind of failure stories with the VC-backed businesses and a lot of confessions from founders saying they wish they had bootstrapped or they wish they had done something smaller. So really, I mean, we started back in 2015, really during one of the biggest, well, it

still is, one of the biggest high cycles of VC funding. But I mean, we decided to go against grain and just do it ourselves um as soon as we started you know seeing revenue come in as chris stated uh you know we kind of knew uh this is the path we wanted to go down we grew the business slowly steadily uh for the future to make it sustainable for us for for the long term yeah and just one last thing or one last point is like you know we're not like you know super anti-vc at all costs i think no uh if you're you know a company like stripe or shopify and you're just on this like insane to raise venture capital then by all means um but we just want to push back on the narrative that you have to raise venture capital otherwise you can't build a business

um and so i i think the the best way to go about it is try to bootstrap as as far as you can and if it does make sense and you're on a rocket ship then go for it uh but otherwise you know try to delay as much as possible yeah i'd like to add to that too in the sense that um you know it all depends on what industry you're in like especially with snap what we've created right it's just a a very easy to use graphic design tool um you know we were fortunate enough to get in early in the space um and and have the technical knowledge on how to build this thing and so it worked out for us but this might not work out if you're let's say in the uh the finance space or some other space which needs a lot of funding to get started um you know automotive or or some sort of hardware

product right uh so it really it really does depend but for us it's it's worked out there is this i think there's this weird uh mental blocker that people have especially with tech digital products where it's like ah you need to serve the world uh but building a niche company in the digital age is possible like you guys are evidence of that and i like to think what we're doing here the podcast the newsletter is an example of that too we have two people arguably three web dev contractor we're a very profitable business and uh people seem to want to go hit those unicorn home runs and not realizing like hey you can build a very small digital business whether it be a graphic design product or a small little media company and make a lifestyle and that's uh

that's uh something that a lot of people don't realize and i sort of stumbled into it i'm like whoa this is uh this is pretty cool i can sustain myself on a little operation that can completely control and so bring it back to avoiding vc money bootstrapping like how much more control do you guys have over what you do compared to your competitors would you say um well quite a bit i guess because we don't have a board of directors so uh um i mean really it's you know the the direction of the company is whatever mark and i feel is best and so like i was alluding to before um you know we we want to look after our employees we want to look after ourselves and we want to look after our customers um so kind of every decision that we make is to try to balance

uh the three of those those things together uh but at the end of the day there's no one really telling us a certain direction that we need to go in yeah yeah that's it really it does give us a tremendous amount of freedom in what we do with the company. We can take it any which way we'd like to. We can create additional products under the business without needing permission from outside people. Quite literally, it's just between myself and Gimmer. To give us a little bit of backstory,

we're best friends and we met kind of, what year was it again? Probably 2011, 2012. 11 or something like that probably 2011 so we have a long history together we've worked together before and uh anyway it's worked to our benefit yeah similar to how bitcoin is fuck you money bootstrapping is fuck you roadmap where it's like hey we can do whatever we want for sure so what were you guys doing before snappa um the here we go the uh the complete the complete opposite of what we're doing now which is working for the federal government oh really yes uh so my my background's in like finance and accounting so i was uh i was working

as like a controller in the government um and then one day uh this kid shows up uh in the office as a temp employee and pretty much everyone in the office was like a lot older a lot older than us so you know we kind of clicked right away and became friends and around this time um for me personally i was just getting like really tired of the the day-to-day grind and started reading a lot more about you know online businesses and listening to podcasts and reading blog posts and stuff and so when i found out that mark was a programmer on the side we just started scheming of how to get the hell out of there and start our own business it's uh and and i have to add that we've had many failed projects before we where we uh ended up today so this is uh this

a great little love story we have here and oh yeah i always joke he's my uh he's my work wife how uh yeah what were some of the failed projects you guys worked on do we go all the way back to classmate yeah go for it all right let's do it um i think the very first idea was a uh a dating website exclusive uh to students so you had to have a a university or college email address to sign up um obviously we had no idea what the fuck we were doing there uh you know and we thought this was going to go to the moon you know yeah i think at that point we saw uh you know facebook's media rise and we thought oh my gosh this is the next best thing uh completely oblivious to how this whole world works right so that failed um what

else was there the next step was i think we got like a guess yeah we had like a guest list system for nightclubs um yeah and that that the lesson there is like don't ever build something that people just aren't going to use um if they're using paper and pad to manage their guest list probably going to keep doing that so yeah that's it uh we we did web design and development for a little while um then our first real foray into actually having revenue is was bootstrap bay uh bootstrap bay was a let me backtrack your bootstrap is a css framework so bootstrap bay was a marketplace where um uh people who would create bootstrap themes could upload them and sell them on the marketplace it was a two-sided marketplace which we operated

and I mean that did okay for what it was it was really like our first kind of like I said foray into into gathering revenue and from there I mean I'll let Gimmer take the reins here because from there really we really discover the power of SEO and how can really drive the business going forward yeah so I mean one thing led to another we kind of just built off that base and right started ranking for a lot of content and eventually we ended up launching a stock photo site um and which is funny because we're using carbon ads uh which was owned by buy sell ads um and then uh that ended up leading to snappa because we discovered that there was a need for you know

a graphic design tool that kind of uh integrated with the free stock library and just made it easy so um the first couple projects like we didn't know what the fuck we were doing and then we kind of started learning this stuff and um you know learning how to actually do marketing and seo and how to do customer development and you know build things that people want and that are willing to pay for um so you know we fortunately learned our you know parlay that into some some success yeah that's a fascinating story and it's a really a testament to grinding out you said you started this journey maybe 2011 2012 uh and you're at a point where you're allocating to bitcoin in 2020 so an eight-year journey is that a correct assumption yeah so classmate catch we launched

in 2012 so that was like really the first thing um and then bootstrap a was 2014 so it was like two years to really kind of somewhat figured out and then snappa was 2015 um and fortunately snappa was you know we can tell going from failures to something that has traction on day one like you can it's it's a noticeable difference yeah and it's it's exciting too right it's like oh my god revenue and yeah and i mean like i remember in the early days we're like man if we can just do like 10 grand a month like we'll be set for life and it'll be fucking awesome and then you hit that number and then you know then you hit a million per year and then you're it's just like uh we keeps getting um surprised at the upside yeah and uh so you mentioned you work for the government's

canadian government correct you're correct both in auto yeah we're both in canada yeah yeah um so like to bring this back to bitcoin uh you say you're looking at your balance sheet seeing that this cash is getting zero percent interest uh was that what piqued your interest to to uh start exploring bitcoin or is it on top of your mind before then we've always explored the possibility of maybe even acquiring another business you know we've kind of built up this cash supply over the years um you know we've always had these ideas of you know should we put this in equities should we put this in uh you know should we invest in another business you know could it be real estate we were very we were very open to all these different

possibilities um you know we always came up with reasons not to do it uh so i'll i'll let gamer take over in terms of why we chose bitcoin and i'll add to those points after the fact yeah um so i mean so we actually first heard of bitcoin in 2017 kind of before the run-up got really crazy um i think the first time i bought bitcoin personally was i think it was trading for like 5 000 bucks or something like that um but unfortunately um you know i didn't really do enough research at that time so you know i have to confess sins here like ended up buying ethereum as well because it was supposed to kill bitcoin and all that stuff it's okay um yeah you are forgiven so yeah so so you know we we had heard of bitcoin um and then uh but to be honest like we're at that time we're

we're really focused on on the business and so um fast forward to 2019 um business is going really good you know we have a lot more cash flow and just personally we were paying ourselves a bit more money um and so you know i've always been into like finance and investing and i kept hearing preston pish talk about bitcoin and that really picked me interest because i was like like, how is a hardcore value investor like shilling Bitcoin so hard? Like there's got to be something to it. And then I listened to, you know, a few of the interviews that he had done. I think he, I think he actually had one with like Trace Mayer at the time. I don't know if that guy is still alive, but he's out there somewhere. Yeah. He's out there somewhere. And then that's

when I was like, okay, I need to take a closer look at this. And that's when I really went down rabbit hole so this would have been like towards the end of 2019 um and then i started you know buying uh bitcoin personally at that time and then uh fast forward to uh you know like february and march and covet and the world's going to and i kind of come to to mark and it was funny because he was kind of also uh rekindling his you know uh like his relationship with bitcoin as well like behind the scenes with like we just weren't talking about for whatever reason and i came to him i was like listen i've been doing a lot more research on bitcoin and i know we kind of got burned back in 2017 but like i think we really need to consider potentially buying some under

the business and he was like it's freaking hilarious to say that because i've been kind thinking the same thing um and uh yeah so i you know i ended up reading like the bitcoin standard the bullish case for bitcoin listening to you guys listening to stefan um all the all the classical stuff um and then we ended up the the first buy under the business was literally a couple days before the 50 drop and uh so it was funny because it was almost like a gut check moment where it was like do we you know do we really have conviction in this thing because our first or two our first two buys literally dropped by 50 and we're like fuck it this is probably the best opportunity and then we we kind of just kept buying from there hell yeah you have anything to add to that mark

yeah i i mean yeah holy shit i mean i think this this year really just turned everything upside down right um for me personally once uh uh you know the big stock market crash happened it really and then you have the the subsequent you know uh central banks just just going haywire with qe um it really kind of dawned on me uh the question of what is money right and then you start to dig and you're and I think everyone's just focused on the day-to-day lives and you know like Gimmer and I like running the business we're so focused on building the business growing the business you never really stop to think about what is money and I think that's really important and I think a lot of people don't ask that question I think they just you know you fly

around with this idea of I just have to get more money invest my money and they never think about what's you know what's behind this this dollar here um especially in canada uh the problem with the canadian dollar and the problem with our economy it's really driven by three sectors uh natural resource extraction uh the banking sector and and real estate and if you take a look at all three here i mean natural resource extraction let's give it what 50 100 years like i'm sorry but oil is it's only going to go down in terms of like you know consumption in terms of you know vehicles and whatnot you take a look at the real estate market i mean canada is probably one of the worst real estate bubbles in the world um and then the banking sector i'm not too too

familiar with but again like this is really what's driving the economy here so okay so then you let's say you look at the US dollar, you have a central bank that's just going haywire. Like I said, with QE, you look at their balance sheet. I mean, it's unrecognizable compared to what's been going on in the past. So what do you do, right? Do you buy some gold? Do you buy some scarce assets? Do you buy real estate? So there's all these questions that kind of come to you. and i mean i have so many thoughts in my head here i can hardly form a sentence but sorry you had something no i was gonna hop in i was searching uh i actually had matthew mazingtious from the crypto voices podcast we're going over his q2 monetary base update in

canada is number two behind norway in annualized monetary base growth at 431 percent what the hell is going on up there yeah if you look at um if you look at the balance sheet of the bank of canada it's like a freaking straight line yeah it's it's like yeah it's crazy like i when i was looking at it i just i just couldn't believe it um so so you take a look at what's going on here and you look at what's really driving the economies across across the globe um i mean we all kind of know here software is in the world texting and texting the world right that should be the leading leading driver a lot of these economies again you look at canada you should we should be in that space but we're not america is really in that space so you know you dig a little bit further you kind of find

out what's the next best thing and really it's bitcoin that's what it comes down to yeah and it's interesting too because bitcoin can help alleviate some of the the problems that canada specifically is going through right now uh in all three sectors that you just mentioned like housing real estate wise real estate's so inflated right now you have foreign nationals dumping capital into vancouver and just holding it there pushing up real estate prices for everybody else that lives there uh energy extraction and distribution the government is being very strict with how people in alberta are able to extract and move that oil and particularly the waste gas like we're getting a great american mind i think bitcoin provides a perfect incentive and mechanism to

extract value from a lot of the the gas that's being either vented or flared which can help bolster those revenue streams and then banking like obviously bitcoin replaces a central bank that seems to have gone crazy they sold all their gold sold all their gold and expanded their balance sheet by 400 in less than a year it was great timing on on uh the the gold uh sale they dumped it like right at the like the the lowest point i think too so you take a look at gold and you think to yourself all right let's buy some gold right that's a hard asset scarce still has inflation you know what if there's new technology out there to uh to mine uh to mine more gold you know they're talking about mining gold and out on asteroids and

a little far-fetched for me but you never know um and then again you go back to bitcoin it is the perfect hard asset there is nothing harder than bitcoin is the perfect representation of perfect representation of what gold should be on a protocol on a network i agree even better it's like yeah even better you think like before bitcoin you had this perfect vision of gold being a gold standard, being a standard which wasn't bastardized by governments and centralized in vaults. And ideally, you would be able to create a system

of gold claim notes to make it easier to facilitate medium of exchange transactions, but you just know the incentive to bastardize that system is too strong. Obviously, it's happened throughout history. and now it is beautiful so how many more people like yourselves do you think are are going through this realization like again a little tech startup bootstrapped uh really weren't focused on bitcoin until the conditions of the world sort of forced you to

to ask the question what is money like you having questions outside of um your personal or I think a better way to frame this is since you guys have gone public with your allocation to Bitcoin have people reached out uh like friends family other businesses you know in Canada they're that are more curious um I started shilling my family before we we bought under the business so I I got I got pretty much everyone on board which is good uh but it's funny so after I published uh the article um at one person actually reached out to me and was like hey man love the article love the balls unfortunately i i wish i could do that and i was like oh why not and and he had raised some funding and he goes yeah you know i just there's no way that the board would would

go for it um and then i actually had maybe two or three other people that were just kind of asking more um i guess operational questions because they're like yeah i actually thought about doing this but you know i think it makes a lot of sense and so i was kind of just you know answering a few of their questions so i have no idea to the extent or how many uh are out there um but i mean at least from the handful of interactions it does seem that people are are thinking about it for sure i mean i hope that uh the article written by chris really gets around the small business community it would be a tremendous help for them to at least hold some percentage you know of their cash and bitcoin on the balance sheet uh that's kind of the goal here i like to think we're

leading the way in terms of like you know sharing that vision and sharing that goal uh because really i mean it's the best way to to hold the value of your time your effort your energy that that you poured into this business right yeah and now i'm extremely encouraged to see people like yourselves coming around to this realization that somebody's been screaming about bitcoin since 2012 when i was working at a fund following central bankers like these people don't have any idea what they're doing and luckily for me like i was asking that question what the hell is money and like why do we use it early on it's because i was forced to having to follow these central bank tea leaves and uh throughout the years there's always that lingering dot in the back

your head like am i fucking crazy like does this even make sense like am i just some nut so i mean as we move further into 2020 and this decade it is uh becoming clear that i'm not as crazy as i used to think i was no and i think i think it's a really good point i mean i think i hope more people start asking that question uh really going down the rabbit hole of what is money it's a really important question people just don't realize how important it is um you know and and i have to add like now's the time um if you really understand bitcoin if you really do want to go down that rabbit hole like now is the time to front run all these corporations these wealthy individuals and finally eventually i would assume central banks uh you know getting in um on this on this

asset before they all do and really reaping the benefits of the long term yes i think one of go ahead chris sorry yeah i was just going to say i think one of the really interesting things when it comes to bitcoin is just how much it's been de-risked um since 2017. so you know the number one knock is always like oh governments are going to ban it um even just within the last like six months where you know kraken got a um a bank license like the occ um you know fidelity and all these american institutions are now custodying it micro strategy putting 450 million dollars of bitcoin on their balance sheet um so it's it's become very clear that you know the regulatory um from at least from a regulatory standpoint like it's getting less and less likely that it's

to be banned especially as more uh corporations and and you know wealthy individuals start um owning it um you know on the on the the protocol risk i mean it's been it's been running for what 10 10 years now 11 years so like all of these risks um and especially oh and then i guess the other one was always like oh there's going to be another bitcoin there's going to be a better bitcoin well you know just look at all everyone who's hard for bitcoin and and look at where where their market cap is compared to bitcoin so um all of the major knocks on it and and the major risks i think um you know the arguments are get against it um they're just uh they're not nearly as strong as they were let's call it three years ago um and so you know me personally i think if

i'm being very honest with myself if you know even if i had heard about bitcoin in like 2012 or 2013 i don't think i would have had like the balls to put the amount of money that we have put into it now um whereas in 2020 it's uh i i just have a lot of a lot more confidence that uh this this is the right decision yeah it's a very good point it is and it's a very common uh line that you hear about bitcoin is it just it just has to survive the longer it survives the more confident people becoming it's a crazy positive feedback loop just keeps building block by block and uh to think that that's going to stop anytime soon doesn't really make any sense it's only going to get stronger especially considering what you just mentioned the any further bitcoin gets entrenched with

individual citizens and now businesses it just becomes harder and harder to stop and so do you guys see a wave of similar actors like yourself small businesses getting into this big corporations like micro strategy um it could me personally i think in the next three months we're going to hear a lot of big announcements of people getting into this i think it's interesting I think you have to make a significant personal investment of your time to really understand it all, right? And there's a lot of people that just aren't willing to do that. They're just so hyper-focused on what's in front of them, and they don't ask the bigger questions. So I do agree that there will be more of these kind of moves into Bitcoin from a big corporation standpoint.

and maybe maybe from small business as well but unless you're really willing to make that commitment and really understand how the network how the protocol works um you know what it's been through its history all the kind of minutiae uh i don't i don't know i mean i think a lot of people will get left behind when it comes down to it yeah it's a shame i i think um at a bare minimum I think 2020 is going to force, hopefully, you know, I think it's forcing people to question their assumptions, right? I think like a lot of long held beliefs have been completely turned upside down in 2020. So I think at a bare minimum, as more and more companies start to trickle in with these

kinds of announcements, I think it's going to cause more people to question it. um i i think bitcoin is the greatest network effect that like we have ever seen and i think it's just gonna build up like crazy as you say um i think once it hits the 20k all-time high i think that's when you're gonna start to see the flood because um you know people the like an average outsider just pulls up a chart and they say oh like it was at 20k like it's only 10k like this thing's dead right but they don't understand that it was at 20k for like a day um and you know if if that yeah so whereas like if you look at a log chart or what i um what i like to look at is you know the 200 week moving average it's just it just keeps going up right so that like those

charts tell a very different story um but once it hits the all-time high then you're going to get all the mainstream media um and a bit of like the frenzy um and i think then people are really gonna start to question like i thought this thing was dead how is it back to all-time highs yeah and that's been my question since 2017 like how many more of these manias do we have before people just accept like all right it's here it's not going anywhere it's time to get considerable skin in the game uh like do we have another 2017 blow off top and then 80 crash i'm not so convinced that these cycles are going to repeat as severely not forever yeah yeah yeah um so what is that critical mass is uh is always the lingering question in my mind um just ranting here uh but

if you guys don't mind me asking just get into mechanics of how you actually allocated a bitcoin I mean, what was, do you have just a business account at an exchange or are you self-custodying? Again, if any of these questions are stepping out of the line, you don't feel like answering, feel free to pass, but just really curious. And I bet there's some freaks out there running businesses that are curious as well if they're looking to do this. Yeah, so we have a business account at an exchange. and then we self-custody via multi-sig so we you know started out with just kind of daily buys we had kind of like a number in mind that we wanted to get to and so we just kept allocating daily weekly and now we're just essentially doing like weekly buys to you know further that position

man that's very encouraging self-custody multi-sig uh does that stress you guys out at all not really no no i mean it's the most secure way to store your coins really so we checked and double checked um we i mean like like at the end of the day i i feel safer having our reserves in bitcoin than leaving it in in a fiat bank account to sit there and rot and that's honestly the conclusion that i've kind of come to personally so i i sleep better at night now to be honest i can you think about what's going on in the world too with capital control across all these different countries and all these kind of restrictions with with capital and then you know uh and you take a look at bitcoin and its permissionless nature uh yeah i mean i definitely

sleep better at night knowing that our cash reserve part of our cash reserves are in bitcoin now it's fascinating because they're i got to not me personally i was part of a thread a big debate about whether or not businesses and publicly traded corporations should self-custody and the uh the consensus in that particular thread was like no not yet not yet like the corporate governance uh coordination alone uh is too too risky at the moment like how are you going to trust employees to handle keys and so hearing that you guys are doing self-custody multisig is like wow that's uh against what that consensus was in that particular conversation with people who, uh, are very intimately in touch with what's going on in Bitcoin and custody

particularly. So it's a fascinating to hear first, first person story about how you guys are doing it. Yeah. I mean, again, like, I'm sorry, go ahead. No, I was just going to say, so, you know, like again, Mark and I are, you know, 50, 50 partners. We don't have board directors. We don't have outside of investors. So at least from like a, um, governance standpoint, it's, it's much easier for us because uh you know like we we don't have it's just it's just a different ball game for us so i i guess i can see from like much larger corporations it's just uh it's a bit of a different ball game uh but it it is cool to see like i saw unchained capital is working on like a product to make it much um i guess safer and easier uh if there are you know outside uh or

you know people on the board or more than or more than one shareholder um to kind of i guess with the key management and stuff like that but yeah i'm sure this will be an ongoing debate um i don't know if you what you're gonna say mark oh no i was just gonna say as long as you understand the risks and and your um and your and you have a geographically dispersed multi-sync setup I don't know how much more secure you'll get than that well you know like Imre said we have a very different organizational setup with

us just being 50-50 partners here in the business so it might not work out in terms of you know if you've got like a big board of directors and how they want to handle things but if you're a small business I would highly encourage you to do exactly what we're doing yeah

maybe small businesses are more advantaged in this this regard uh which is like here yeah the the llc that we run here at tftc we self-custody our stuff as well and i feel i sleep much better at night knowing that um i know that for sure and it's uh damn man how it's fascinating isn't it because you realize how much bigger it can get among this kind of community and they're not on bitcoin twitter right like they're not there so i don't know how how you get to them exactly um but i mean that's exactly why christopher wrote his piece um i hope it's insightful and and other small businesses really take a look at that

article and kind of go aha maybe we should do the same yes it's funny i'm sorry it's funny because like a lot of um it's just kind of like what i what i've been seeing on twitter and stuff like everyone kind of assumed that it was going to be like you know the retail adoption first then it going to be the hedge funds and the institutions and then suddenly it was going to be the central banks and it seems like everyone forgot about corporations uh and and even myself like i just kind of and so i think the the micro strategy thing and you know uh to a much smaller extent like companies like us um it kind of i i think people are realizing there's this whole other amazing use case for bitcoin of you know treasury uh reserves um and you know as long as we're in

in this current environment uh it's going to do a much better job than you know cash or nothing percent t-bills so yeah and for bitcoin the network it's a much uh much better path right because it's more distributed from a supply perspective when you have millions of small businesses holding it instead of a few hedge funds yeah for sure yeah it's uh the revolution of the small businesses so you guys mentioned bitcoin twitter and obviously gimmer i'm gonna start calling you gimmer it seems like that's the uh yeah it's been my nickname uh for a while so yeah uh i don't even i don't even call him chris i don't even know he had it for it seems that uh uh i mean bitcoin twitter obviously ran with your piece and spread it

to the world but outside of bitcoin twitter have you had any traction sharing this information you I guess, have a newsletter or a, what's the word I'm looking for, a marketing avenue through which you're pushing this? Not really. I just, I kind of just, well, so I have like a personal website, but I only have a few articles on there and it's mostly just like a fun thing. Like I don't, you know, go out of my way to try to market or collect emails aggressively or anything like that. Uh, our, our business has always been the main focus, but you know, one of the goals for writing that article was something that I could pass to friends and family. Um, just because, um, some people have been asking me more about it, um, and, and friends

and, you know, you kind of get into debates and stuff. So it's nice to have something that I can literally just send them and say, these are my thoughts. You know, this is my thesis. If you have questions, uh, kind of let me know. um but yeah i was like super pleasantly surprised with um the reception to that article on twitter um but yeah i haven't really gone too much out of my way to promote beyond that but i saw that you know someone had put it on uh some of the bitcoin subreddits and and whatnot so it definitely

seems like it got uh shared around yeah i mean you're orange pilling people with high quality information that's why i love the flat and that's it's very fascinating how uh the iteration of content over the years has grown so very similarly i started the newsletter because i was like uh getting text emails it's like you know what stop texting me stop emailing stop calling me just follow the newsletter i'll give you like a little piece of bitcoin information every day but seeing your piece with everything consolidated one i'm like damn i should have just done something like that instead of having to write every fucking day we we appreciate the daily newsletter man i was gonna say i disagree i disagree i enjoy the daily news there's very

few newsletters where i'll read every single one and yours is one of them so keep doing what you're doing man i appreciate it um uh i wasn't fishing for any compliments there but just from a logistics perspective it's a lot less effort but again it's a trying to uh highlight how well done your pieces and the information that you included uh wide-ranging uh information on bitcoin obviously bullish case of bitcoin talking about the bitcoin standard and then pulling in uh u.s treasury yields and preston pishes um sort of perspective on it and then getting into a reserve asset explaining why you guys have it on your balance sheet it's very concise flows well and logically just grows on the information as you walk through it appreciate it yeah um so do you guys think

about implementing bitcoin into your company into snappa in any way um i mean so we like so snappa is a subscription basis so it's like it's a freemium model so you can use it for free up to certain limits um and then the the premium plans are on the subscription so we we hook into stripe um to my knowledge i don't i don't think they accept bitcoin payments uh at this point but they used to and then they reverted that decision or something like that yeah they took it out for some reason yeah yeah yeah so um i guess our at least our current thinking is you know earn in fiat and save in bitcoin that's kind of how how we're implementing that um i haven't thought too much about how to incorporate bitcoin more into snappa but um yeah that that's kind of what we're

doing for now i guess one-off one-off uses instead of a subscription i'm just kidding i don't i don't want to tell you how to run your business um that's fascinating so do you guys have ambitions beyond snappa do you do you see this turning into a business that'll be on cruise control one day and you guys will go on and and build something else obviously you've built many products in the past uh the the thirst for for new building get quenched once you build a successful company no um i think geez i'm not going to get into detail about what's been going on behind the scenes over the past few years but um it would be certainly nice to diversify our revenue streams so we're look we're always looking for new opportunities um quite frankly i love building

shit i love building cool shit it's super fun to build something put it out there for the world to see hopefully gets traction and whatnot so um i'm going to preface this with uh really appreciate with clark what clark and what he's done with his dashboard you know we get a lot of value from that but we want to take it one step further we'd actually like to build like a bitcoin dashboard with all the historical stats and everything in place um completely free uh for everyone to use kind of uh take a look at the you know whether it be hash rate whether it be price whether it be difficulty etc uh without having to go into all these different websites um and you know some of these other sites are kind of questionable like you know i'm not going to name them out right now

but uh so it would be nice to kind of have something like that in place so like a really comprehensive bitcoin dashboard bitbo.io that's the one yeah what uh what's what's the name uh the uh impetus for the name bitbo i like that a lot nothing uh really i just tried to find something that kind of came close to bitcoin and you know uh matt odell's been scooping up all the fucking domains can't buy anything these days god damn between him and matt if yeah yeah matt if you own bitbo.com please uh so uh yeah so that that's kind of the uh that's kind of the idea so far there's no landing page there's nothing up there completely kind of negated what's up there currently but

it's a work in progress and uh hopefully we can launch something soon yeah that's fascinating now i as somebody who writing the newsletters jumping from data aggregator to data aggregator i would like uh everything to be consolidated one place clark's dashboard has definitely been extremely helpful um and oh huge shout out to clark i mean like his dashboard is great it just gives you like a really good live picture of what's going on but we'd like to get a little bit beyond that and have a really you know historical picture of what's happened in the past versus now it really shows a real true story right you look at hash rate you look at how secure the network is now looking at the hash i mean it's just fascinating right if you really understand

what goes on you know in terms of like that calculation the energy behind um the network it's just it's mind-blowing when you really understand that yeah bitcoin has contracted out humans to keep it alive and strengthen it it's pretty crazy um mark i see you're tweeting you think bitcoin needs more documentaries why is this there's not enough sorry what's that i didn't hear you i saw you tweet it out uh was it earlier today yeah an hour ago yeah i was today there needs to be more bitcoin documentaries i'd love to see more bitcoin documentaries all the ones i've seen out there kind of so so um you know or maybe even a series a yearly series of what's going on in the bitcoin world in the bitcoin space um yeah it'd be cool to

see i mean i think there's just so much going on behind the scenes and there's so much secrecy in mining space and all this kind of like different facets of of the bitcoin world it's uh it's pretty cool i mean i think it would give people a bit more appreciation um we had some again i'm not saying this is a muscle you know having some investigative journalism kind of go into um the different facets everything from you know uh trading that like otc exchanges mining uh you know companies you know michael saylor and us obviously uh just going into all these different facets and why people are committing their time and their energy to to the bitcoin network right yeah that's uh it is fascinating actually we've

been approached at great american mining by a documentary team i think we're going to do something with them so you'll get more insight into mining particularly on oil and gas fields hopefully i'm excited we still have to confirm if we're doing that or not so it seems like we're at very very early stages of a revolution right we're born at this weird inflection point where everything's extremely chaotic at the moment particularly here in the United States and arguably Canada as well. COVID's really thrown fuel on the fire, the chaos that exists in our world due to the transition into the information age, the internet and communications technology that has been created in its wake and now Bitcoin. And so how do you, how do you guys

view this geopolitically, especially as Canadians with a government that seems to be more and more overbearing by the day uh do you see bitcoin as an integral part of a liberation of the individual in the digital age one of the reasons i've never put too much stock into the governments are going to ban bitcoin argument is just because it's a digital age um it's it's it we're you know we're living in a global society so i think any government that comes down on bitcoin is really going to pay for it in the end um so i almost see bitcoin as like a check on governments um and i think if they stray too far um you know my hope is that bitcoin will kind of like keep them grounded uh to a certain point um you know there's a lot of people like

line um and now that we're you know self-custodying bitcoin we can hop on a plane memorize 12 words and you know end up in another jurisdiction and so um you know if you kind of follow the sovereign individual thesis uh i think at a bare minimum whether it gets to like you know the predictions in the book um but but i hope that bitcoin does uh serve as that check on you know just how far governments can push things I would agree with all of those points I there's a lot of doom and gloom I guess I should say on especially on Bitcoin Twitter I hope it doesn't get to that point I'm guilty of it sometimes yeah i i'm more uh i like to have a bit more of a positive outlook

on things i hope i'm bullish on humans so i hope it doesn't get to that point um you know in dire situations we we tend to help each other out as a whole uh so i i really don't have anything to add here except for really just save your money save your time and put it in bitcoin really it's just the ultimate way to store your your value okay um and i think that it'll really protect against uh you know these nefarious politicians that just keep spending and these central banks that keep printing money and devaluing your currency well that's one uh good sorry i keep doing that uh one last thing i can't remember who tweeted this out but someone was saying like um you know when michael saylor when they bought like 450 million dollars

bitcoin like everyone was like happy about it and cheering it on and it kind of is like a testament of like everyone's on the same everyone's on the level playing people with bitcoin um whether you're stacking you know a dollar a day on cash app or you're putting 450 million dollars like we're all kind of in this together and that's what i love so much about bitcoin is that um we're all on the same team right and so i think um you know just as far as like humanity and doom and gloom uh i i think like that is one of the most underestimated things about bitcoin is that we're we're all in this together we all want we all want a brighter future um so that that that makes me hopeful and bullish yeah me as well the eternal optimist comes out of me every once in a while

and that's we've come too far to fuck it up at this point right and uh bitcoin again like i was very pessimistic before bitcoin like this is all fucked this is all gonna shit now bitcoin does provide that uh the guiding light if you will to to lead us to to brighter days and a world that has become a little off kilter and that's why i wanted to have you guys on because i think it's extremely encouraging uh that individuals and small businesses are adopting bitcoin because again it it's hard to uh it's hard to negate the fact that bitcoin is helping out individuals and small businesses in the economy when when they're adopting and saying hey i want this like how 11 years into this technology existing could governments in mass around the world say no

it's not going to happen you can't do that yeah and we're so early too right so really in a matter of uh i mean i don't think we're going to see any sort of um level of discussion that goal is that up until maybe 10 20 years from now um i mean this is just a bullshit prediction but that's kind of my thought on it so yeah i mean i would agree and i think you know whether you have like like gimmer said whether you're you're you're stacking ten dollars at a time 200 200 dollars at a time 425 million dollars at a time we're all on the same team i think a lot of this unnecessary infighting has to stop and there

needs to be a bit more optimism yeah it's hard though when you look at the United States you have two gentlemen in their 80s who that's politicians though that's a whole different ball game I mean they're not on the

same level right? Well so this gets to a good point right and it ties into needing more people to ask the question what the hell is money It just feels like, especially when you're dedicated to Bitcoin and understand Bitcoin and focused on the Bitcoin network, you sort of, you take the orange pill. You're like, oh, my God, everybody fighting outside of this is completely swinging at branches. And that's, so the thing that dismayed me is the false framing of the quote unquote problems that are driving inequality today are just, it's bad framing.

people are again swinging at branches and focusing on uh what i would deem actually not the most important problems which is red team no it's a distraction yeah it's a complete distraction to to really uh keep people's minds off the true problems of society right so it's just finger pointing really yeah yeah no like you said earlier in the episode you guys evidence of this covid and reaction to it from the political class and the regulatory class and expert class is probably a better better definition for regulatory class uh they don't know what they're doing it's like what the fuck man yeah it's just i mean i i always kind of default to like you can't i think you said this on the pod many times before like you can't centrally plan complex systems right um and

it just seems like the more they try to do it the more out of whack it gets and then the prescription is to keep doing more of that and at some point you just got to say like what the fuck like this just doesn't make sense yeah yeah there's a natural entropy to that centralized attempted centralized control of these complex systems that's it's gonna uh it's gonna the end game's gonna come at some point you can't you can't expand your monetary base by 431 percent year on the air for too long before uh before people go like this doesn't make any fucking sense i mean you have fucking dave portnoy calling the u.s dollar shrew bucks like oh that's good i mean you look at real estate prices you ask your parents what you buy your

house for and there's your answer right it's that simple and i remember i have this very vivid memory when i lived in northeast philly before we moved to charleston south carolina i was like nine years old around our stoop and uh my mom and our neighbors were talking about like another neighbor had sold their house they're like oh my god i can't believe we got sixty thousand dollars for that was like right you try to buy a house for sixty thousand dollars anywhere in philly you're gonna get like nothing and you're gonna tell me that that inflation is two percent right get the fuck out of here yeah it's crazy because like ottawa um you know our real estate market It has always been like decent, but never, you know, like Toronto and Vancouver kind

of standards. And then, you know, the last year or two has been pretty crazy. And then after and, you know, a couple of friends, my fiance's friends, they've been looking for a house and, you know, just graduating from college and stuff like that. And every house they put an offer on, they're getting outbid by like 80 grand. And and it's it's it's just crazy. Like, how is a young person coming out of school supposed to afford a house and come up with this crazy high down payment? Right. Sure.

The mortgage payments are low, but if you don't have the money to come up with the down payment, you're basically priced out of the market. You know, the people that have houses there, you know, they're fine and dandy. but you know i i really feel bad for young people um trying to buy a house right now like it's yeah i worry about the younger generations for sure yeah but no i mean somebody moved out of brooklyn was paying an astronomical amount for rent of a fucking studio uh i'm very happy to be and fortunate very happy that i am fortunate enough to be able to lay low rent free in my in-laws house um save money so that we can buy a house i mean and i'm then we're going to stay here longer than originally expected because everybody's buying up all the houses in the

places we want to live driving up prices astronomically i heard we were talking yesterday about one house in the town we want to live in uh in april was worth um x amount and today it's where it's 75% more than it was priced in April. Yeah, that's insane. You have all the New Yorkers moving out of the city and just bidding up the price, exactly what you were describing earlier, Gimmer. Yeah.

My wife and I bought our new house about a year, almost two years now, two years ago. Just to give you an idea of how crazy the real estate market is, I had to sleep in my car in minus 40 degree weather, which is, sorry, that's Celsius. I think it's about the same Fahrenheit. At that point, yes. I believe yeah I think there's a crossover point right for two nights just to line up and this is

a new build right just just to get the house uh we just sold our current house actually yesterday uh congrats 70,000 thank you for 70,000 dollars over asking which is just insane here like we're so used to this kind of market here in Ottawa where you list your house at x and usually get offers a little bit you know under that right um this you know qe low interest rate um scenario has just blown price discovery out of control and this is the other thing that comes down to right what these central banks are doing um they're just they're you're getting the wrong price signals in the markets here that combined with of course like covid and people moving out of big cities and whatnot and it's an absolute shit show yeah were you talking about price

signals this time last year no so that's another thing like so you said it's a big time investment but is it really a big time investment to learn about bitcoin like is the opportunity cost of not investing that time that much you know what i think it is i think it comes down to people's willingness to learn you know there's just so many people out there you kind of start having the conversation and you can tell they put up a wall uh whereas you have other individuals that just have a natural curiosity and they're willing to learn they're willing to dig a little bit deeper uh so i think those people that have that natural curiosity and really ask hard questions are going to benefit long term i mean for me personally like you know when i started hearing

preston talk about it i was like oh this is really interesting and you know then read the bitcoin standard and and then like i just couldn't get enough bitcoin content like i certainly didn't view it as like, uh, you know, a time, well, it was a time investment, but like, I enjoyed the time I spent learning, you know, Mark's obviously the same way, but kind of like Mark's alluding to, unfortunately, not everyone is like that. Um, so I think, you know, the people that are curious and, and do, you know, have that willingness to learn, um, you know, a lot of people have gone down the rabbit hole. There's going to be plenty of a lot more. Um, but unfortunately you know it's wishful thinking to think that like everyone is gonna you know spend

some people don't even want to read a single blog post or listen to a single podcast episode and um but i guess i guess that's where uh you know the price will kind of lure those people into it so we'll see yeah number go up technology is is the best uh the best lure for getting people to bitcoin exactly ah gentlemen it's been a pleasure do you have uh anything else you want to get off your chest as it pertains to bitcoin what you guys are doing at snappa state of the world anything i mean it's it's a difficult time it's it's hard to be positive when a lot of people are you know losing their jobs or getting sick or you know constrained by whatever by governments like if you if you have a small business or a restaurant for example uh feel for those people but um maybe

the uh the world needs to go through a little bit of pain to understand you know what's really going on i hope more people ask that those hard questions um but when it comes to bitcoin i'm i'm bullish as fuck man this is this is we're just getting started we're we haven't seen anything yet i'm so fucking bullish it's crazy all my no equity is on my plate anymore just 100 and on bitcoin on the personal side so if anyone's having second second thoughts just come talk to me boss yeah for me um one of the most exciting times in my life was when we both quit the government and and started our business and just the the freedom um just actually making a difference instead of pushing papers um you know it was just we have so like so many good memories and um bitcoin is like

the only thing that that i've been so excited about um in kind of the same way we're like just devouring through content and you know my podcast speed is just it's it's hard to keep up with it um so i'm just excited like i'm just so excited about um how the you know the space is developing and bullish as fuck as well i too am bullish as fuck and mark to your point like i do think the world needs a little kick in the ass we've gotten too fucking complacent i'm sitting in the fattest fucking country in the world and and you know what hopefully bitcoin can help people lower their time preference fix their diets and and save the monetary system yeah that's that's something i need to uh to start working on especially with uh the two kids i don't want to

you know die prematurely or anything i think a lot of people need to hear that message too right chris you your gimmer excuse me you posted something yeah you uh you whipped yourself into shape did i see that yeah it's uh so funny i'm actually my next article is going to be about that so but um i i yeah in my 20s i've i was always in pretty good shape and stayed active but kind of just lost my way a little bit at one point and kind of yeah whipped my ass into shape last year and oh sorry we missed that last part you cut out yeah i missed that last part you whipped your ass into shape yeah i whipped my ass uh back into shape last year and i'm not not gonna go back yeah i'm uh i teeter on the edge i can fluctuate like 20 pounds within a given six months uh i i

sounds like me but I'm at that point where I'm like alright I've been a degenerate this summer surfing a lot luckily which has helped curb me getting too fat but I need to drink less and work out more as we head into fall

just gotta put it out there weed has zero calories this is true this is true yes zero carbs which is the most important part eat less carbs freaks uh yeah gentlemen thank you it's been a pleasure great conversation far-ranging uh thank you for

doing what you do to push uh bitcoin on small business balance sheets forward the again give me the piece you wrote it was a credible mark i'm very excited to see what you guys build with bitbo.io matt if you got.com uh share the wealth and uh yeah that's all we got this week freaks i'm actually going to post this uh right away i think you know what fuck it yolo thanks for having us marty it was awesome chatting with you uh uh thank you guys peace love