The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Diving Deep into Crypto with Expert David Doss!

Episode Date: June 14, 2024

Diving Deep into Crypto with Expert David Doss! CKC.fund About the Guest(s): David Doss is an accomplished entrepreneur and fund manager with over 15 years of experience in marketing, growth, and investment. He holds a summa cum laude BA from UC Berkeley, an MA as a Fulbright Scholar, and an MBA in strategy and innovation. David has led teams with seven-figure budgets in the digital economy and alternative assets, working with notable entities such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Citi. Currently, he chairs CKC Studio Blockchain Growth Studio and manages CKC Fund, focusing on de-risking digital asset investments and providing blockchain services. He also serves on Chain Board's overseeing corporate events and managing Cayman-based alternative asset funds. Episode Summary: In this dynamic episode of The Chris Voss Show, host Chris Voss interviews David Doss, the founder of CKC Fund. David delves into his extensive background in marketing, global digital transformation, and fund management. He shares his journey from growing up in Silicon Valley to becoming a leading expert in blockchain and digital assets. Highlighting the potential and growth of these innovative financial vehicles, David provides insights on the benefits of decentralized investments and the appeal of cryptocurrencies. David Doss emphasizes the advantages of investing in blockchain technologies and digital assets while addressing the misconceptions that often surround these markets. As a watch and alternative investment enthusiast, David draws parallels between his early interest in collectibles and the intricate world of digital currencies. His expertise spans managing substantial portfolios and navigating the complex regulatory environments, particularly in locations like the Cayman Islands. Throughout the episode, David underscores the importance of proper risk management and diversified portfolio strategies in achieving significant returns in the dynamic digital economy. Key Takeaways: Investment Opportunities in Blockchain: David Doss explains how blockchain technology opens new investment opportunities, offering significant growth potential and diversification in one's portfolio. Regulatory Environment in the Cayman Islands: He provides insights on the benefits of using Cayman Islands for investment vehicles due to its stringent regulatory framework and global focus. Evolution and Growth in Digital Assets: The episode reveals the cyclical nature of digital asset markets, with notable growth phases following periods of consolidation, indicating a promising outlook for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Diversification in Digital Portfolios: Emphasizing the importance of a well-balanced portfolio, David discusses the strategy of allocating investments across various digital assets to maximize returns and manage risks. Alternative Investments: David shares his journey and passion for alternative investments, including his early interest in collectibles like trading cards, shaping his approach to the digital asset space. Notable Quotes: "We're providing blockchain services overall in two main areas: digital asset fund management and blockchain program management." – David Doss "There are roughly 25,000 different cryptocurrencies, not even counting tokenized assets." – David Doss "The crux of it is wanting to provide people with hardworking investments." – David Doss "Digital assets are acting as a hedge against volatility in other markets." – David Doss "Thinking of asymmetric upside is having a floor but not having a ceiling, which can really benefit a portfolio when properly managed." – David Doss

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. I'm Oaks' boss here from thechrisvossshow.com. There you go, ladies and gentlemen.

The air leaves. Things that makes it official. Welcome to the big show. We certainly appreciate you guys being here. As always, the Chris Voss Show is the family that loves you but doesn't judge you. At least not as harsh as your dad that time you took apart his watch and then you couldn't put it back together again. Actually, me and my brother did that.

And then he hated you for the rest of your life, which is, you know, what you shouldn't do. Don't take apart your dad's watch, damn it, especially his favorite watch watch because you never really put it back together and we just thought it was so cool we were just showing him how cool we were how smart we'd gotten he did not appreciate it but you know you can enter your dad's good side tell him to go to goodreads.com fortune has chris voss linkedin.com fortune has chris voss chris voss won the tiktok and he and all those crazy places on the internet we have an amazing young man on the show and he's going to be talking to us about a whole plethora of amazing stuff from growing companies, fund managing, marketing products and strategy, business developments, blockchain, alternative assets, and tech startups. David Doss joins us on the show today. He's an MBA and I believe he's also the founder of of kc funds so we'll be talking about his insights

there and what he does he has over 15 years in marketing growth and investment he's led teams and managed seven figure budgets in the digital economy and alternative assets he holds a summa cum laude ba from uc berkeley and an MA is a Fulbright scholar and an MBA in strategy and innovation his expertise spans nonprofits startups and digital transformation for major entities like Saks Fifth Avenue and city with seven years of blockchain he chairs CKC studio blockchain growth studio and manages ckc fund digital asset fund manager and he also serves on chain blx's board overseeing corporate events and managing cayman

based alternative asset funds david dos welcome to the show how are you thanks for having me on the show chris yeah well after that intro i'm super amped. I've got the hard rock. I've got the... There you go. ...intro. People tell me that I should walk around and just introduce them any time they enter a room.

Yeah. Sign me up. Hear ye, hear ye. Entering the room is the... David, give us a.coms or.whatevers. Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs?

Yeah. So, let's see. I'm quite active on LinkedIn, so you can find me there, LinkedIn.com, which is my David Ambrose Doss, which is my URL handle. I put a lot of educational content, post a lot on there. You can also shoot me an email at david at ckc.fund. I would be happy to talk to you there. Also, our team puts out a newsletter on LinkedIn as well as over email.

So if you'd like to, you're welcome to subscribe on LinkedIn or shoot us an email and we can add you on the email version. There you go. So David, give us a 30,000 overview of what you guys do there at CKC Fund. Yeah, so we are providing blockchain services overall in two main areas. One is digital asset fund management and then the other is basically blockchain program management.

So on the asset management side, we run strategies for fund vehicles, for investors, where we focus on basically de-risking digital asset investment and maximizing the upside. So less downside, more upside. It's kind of the nameizing the upside. So less downside and more upside. And then on the blockchain programming side, we work with businesses and high net worth individuals as well to provide tailoring solutions that solve some of their blockchain, cryptocurrency and digital asset needs. There you go. There you go. Tell us about how you grew up. What got you into managing your own fund, being interested in this field, etc., etc.?

Yeah. I mean, for one thing, I'm a watch guy. I like alternative investments like watches. I grew up even collecting baseball cards. Actually, to be completely honest it was a lot nerdier than that i was collecting like trading cards yugioh lorna rings trading cards different stuff like that but that kind of card collection really interested in alternative investments in general also kind of short sidebar but i was kind of chuckling when you're talking

about your watch story because i gave my eight-year-old nephew a watch for his birthday, and he broke it within literally 10 minutes of me gifting it to him. But, you know, hopefully he had fun for the first 10. But anyway, my background, I grew up in the Silicon Valley area, kind of against the backdrop of the tech boom and bust, and also the real estate boom and bust. So I'm really interested in innovation, technology, alternative investments. And from there, I went to live, work, study in different parts of the world, and then spent a chunk of time working in Silicon Valley on digital economy, also in New York City on startups and digital transformation. And that really got me interested in the tech innovation space

and specifically in the blockchain space because of the alternative solutions it has for basically helping people and businesses to grow, to build wealth, that sort of thing. There you go. So what was it that made cryptocurrency, blockchain, things like that really draw your attention as opposed to normal vehicles of investments? Yeah, it's kind of a lot of things in my background that I think made me interested in that.

But for one thing, I was researching in grad school basically how bottom-up social movements around the world can impact change globally. And that to me is, you know, is decentralization essentially, that those structures where, you know, private sector, small groups can really catalyze change. And then beyond that, just being very involved globally in different countries. I mean, for one thing, you know, teaching in, let's say, Indonesia,

for one, where at the time the Indonesian rupiah was, what, 7,000 rupiah to a dollar, and it's inflated since then to, like, we blew up 10 000 last time i checked so seeing the effect of of more centralized monetary policies how some of those can can negatively impact you know hundreds of millions of people around the world but also working in more kind of traditional systems like city bankank, where the level of kind of bureaucracy and red tape involved in sending, even sending money state to state within the United States,

let alone sending money internationally, is also something that really struck me working there at the time. And then lastly, just seeing the power of investing into alternative assets in general, where, you know, I've seen a lot of people growing up and in my career as well, where they've been really kind of disillusioned with the kind of same old plain vanilla stocks and bonds where their money, you know, I think a lot of people feel and and a lot of businesses as well, feel like their money is not necessarily working as hard for them as they worked to get it, basically. And so wanting to provide people with hardworking investments is the crux of it. Now, tell me about this Cayman Island segment of what you guys do. Is it a different company, or is it part of the whole umbrella of what you're doing, or how does that work?

Yeah, we are a largely U.S.-based team, but we work with investment groups and investment vehicles in different jurisdictions. One of them is in Cayman. So with that in mind, we as a U.S. team will manage, say, collective capital in a vehicle in Cayman, for example. So then there's kind of a question of the fund manager versus the vehicles that they're managing. So basically fund manager is U.S. Vehicles can be in different places, including Cayman. There you go. There you go.

So why is it good to invest in vehicles in the Cayman Islands as opposed to locally here? It can really depend on the person's situation. I mean, this is not an investment tax or legal advice. Be sure to do your own research. But some of the advantages can be, for example, that Cayman funds are very global in focus. That allows for us to work with people from around the world, different continents and countries. Another is that specifically as regards, say, a place like the US, all things being equal, there's not a lot of,

or I would say in my opinion, not sufficient regulatory framework yet for the digitalized space. And also there's a lot of clarities in in terms of regulation of private fund vehicles in contrast in a place like you know they'll require mandatory third-party audits they'll require digital asset regulation they have restrictions on basically restrictions in place to keep the kinds of things from happening that a lot of people hear about in the news the horror stories and stuff like that right yeah so that's where you know even though i think sometimes when people think came in to think of a kind of a like a bad 1980s action movie or something like that and the reality is that yeah yeah the reality of it is that

that nowadays with you know with private funds with social asset regulation, they've really been leading the way globally in a lot of ways. Huh. There you go. There you go. Good for that. Do you work in a lot of the spectrum of cyber? Do you focus on just the main cyber funds? Why is it escaping right crypto funds or do

you do you mainly focus on the main ones or can you just buy and sell everything yeah fun for you a question for you how many how many cryptocurrencies do you think are out there boy i don't know there used to be just a small amount. There's like a billion now or something. I don't know. There's Bitcoin. It's the main one, right? Yeah, Bitcoin is the main one. But then, beyond that,

there's around 25,000 different cryptocurrencies. 25,000? It's quite a bit. And then, that's not even counting tokenized global assets. It's not counting ATEs, stuff like that. So the total kind of addressable universe there is probably even much higher than that. But yeah, so to that point, what we largely do is focus on the top 1000. So kind of similar to how, you know, if you were, if you were being if you were,

say, putting money into stocks, right, you would probably, on the one hand, you wouldn't usually put all your eggs into some new thing that was right about IPO, sort of, you know, you wouldn't kind of bet the farm on it. On the other hand, most people, I mean, some people have, and it's worth having done that, and it's really not worth it. But I'd say most people would agree that they wouldn't just put all their eggs in one basket, whether it's the number one stock by market cap, or whether it's the stock that's about to IPO. And a somewhat similar concept is what we do in the digital you know, the stock that's about to appeal. And somewhat similar concept is what we do

in the digital asset space, where basically we build out research, diversified portfolios as a management team, where we're, you know, basically allocating across different use cases. Like, you know, in the stock market, you have healthcare, financial services, industrials, tech, similar idea with what we're doing, where you have use cases like smart contract platforms, decentralized file storage, currencies, that sort of stuff. And then also dividing by market cap, high cap, mid cap, low cap, these sorts of things.

And then actively adjusting the balance of the portfolio as the market conditions shift. And that's the big functional idea of a lot of what we do. Wow. That's a lot of stuff to track. So you guys probably have a lot of good systems. Of course, there's AI now and a lot of good computer stuff you can do. It's got to be quite the job to track all that stuff.

Yeah. You know, I mean, it's one of those quite the job to track all that stuff yeah you know i mean it's it's it's one of those things where it's it any one part of it is not not necessarily rocket science per se but everything everywhere all at once is a lot to handle where the analogy always is say you know it's like the difference between playing tennis for fun and playing tennis professionally you know anyone can pick up a racket and start swinging. And you know, anyone could, in theory, you know, buy or sell cryptocurrencies or other assets, right?

And there are some barriers to entry, but not all that many. The point though is that the devil is the details, where just one of my favorite sentences is, is common sense making a common practice of doing things day in and day out when you know when you're tired when you're busy when you have you know something more interesting to do that sort of thing is really the proving ground of you know kind of the little decisions every day over time there you go do you do you i mean i know bitcoin's making a a comeback

i haven't checked it in recent weeks, so I might be off by then. But I know it dipped down pretty heavily, and then it started to make a really good comeback and stuff. What's the sort of future? I mean, I don't want to put you in a position where you're predicting anything here, but are you bullish on the future of coin and different crypto assets and where they're headed? I definitely am.

So there's a couple of main things to say there. One of them is just overall that the crypto market operates in roughly four-year market cycles. So we're in roughly the kind of similar environment to how we were in, say, summer of 2020, plus or minus. I mean, there's a saying, history doesn 2020 plus or minus, you know, I mean, there's a saying history doesn't always repeat itself, but it usually rhymes. And I mean, you know, it's not like down to the hour and the minute and stuff, but broadly for your cycles.

And so thinking through that, I mean, this is something that we've seen happen over a couple of different four year period, basically there's a, there's a long bear market or kind of a downturn. And then there's kind of a slow buildup and then things kind of really explode kind of exponentially over the course of about anywhere between six to 18 months. And so all things being equal, you know, I believe in a lot of experts in the space believe that we're close to the, and the end of that huge runoff phase. Basically, this is this next cycle around where a lot of this happens kind of right after the halvings, the technical part of things that happen with Bitcoin. But basically, we just had that happen.

And there's kind of this anticipation in the markets for the next thing. Another important thing to be considering is the approval of the Bitcoin ETF, of the Ethereum ETF, these sorts of things that basically will bring more liquidity into the markets. It'll drive more demand. So as the demand, the price will start to increase. With that in mind, that's also part of why we're doing what we're doing, where if you look

at markets like gold, or precious metals in general, when gold, which is the number one precious metal, when that product's ETF, its pricing kind of got a little boxed in where, yes, it's been outside the gold, but it's been kind of more minimal than it was pre-ETF. And what a lot of smart money started doing was basically moving into some of the other

precious metals and to kind of more active trading strategies around those metals. It's somewhat similar to what we're doing where with Bitcoin, number one with ETF, basically what we're looking to provide is that active management of all the other currencies essentially, where it can basically

provide more upside and with less risk. Yeah, there you go. So it's going to be interesting to see how it goes. Do you find that more and more people, as they, I don't know, they kind of hear about crypto and blockchain and stuff, more investors are coming around to it?

You know, it's just kind of a thing of exposure? Yeah, I do think it's a question of exposure and kind of familiarizing with what's going on. A couple of relevant things, just thinking through the stats of it all, is that there are far more investors out there asking their money managers for solutions around crypto. There are far more of those folks than there are the money managers that are actually providing those solutions. So the point being, while this is still somewhat, it's an alternative investment that's going to be, in many cases, a small allocation of most people's portfolios. That being said, it's also an investment where far more people are interested in getting some sort

of professional services around it than there are those services available, which means there is definitely demand. The other consideration to be thinking through is just kind of where we are in the adoption curve. I don't think that crypto has hit what some people call kind of the iPhone moment or the chat GPT moment or that sort of thing where, you know, different technologies and assets have different rates, different speeds of adoption, right? But people were talking about AI for a whole long while before the kind of chat interface

for AI kind of challenge we face for AI kind of became so viral, essentially. And I think there's a decent argument to be made that we haven't necessarily yet hit that kind of virality moment truly with the digital asset space. So those are, I think, important things to consider. Yeah, there you go. More people know about it.

AI is going to change a lot. Apple just announced some AI stuff. I didn't know it because I use Androids. And my understanding is most of the AI that they announced are already in Androids, which is par for the course. Well, fair. What have we talked about that you guys do at your fund that we want to tease out to people? Kind of another related answer to a question I asked before. What have you talked about that you guys do at your fund that we want to tease out to people?

Another related answer to a question I asked before. Surveys of high-end worth individuals, modern portfolio analysis, analysis from Forbes, Artinvest, these sorts of places. They're all indicating that a general preference to be allocating between 2% and 10% of the portfolio into the digital asset space. For some people, it's less. For others, it's more. But directionally speaking, that's their overall preference range.

And so thinking through that, I think it's important to be considering what is the role that digital assets are playing in someone's portfolio, where they're basically, they're acting as a hedge against volatility in other markets. A lot of times when stocks or bonds or real estate have been zigging, digital assets have been zagging. Something we've seen at various points over time. So that's one consideration. The other role is basically as an asset that has asymmetric upside.

So I mean by that, that there is, yes, there is, in some cases, higher risk to investing in digital assets than to investing in stocks or bonds or real estate. Not always, but sometimes. That being said, the reward has historically been much, much higher as well. So in that sense, thinking of asymmetric upside, we talk about it, you know, if you're putting in a certain amount of capital into an investment strategy, if it goes to zero, basically there's a floor, right? So whereas it goes up like Bitcoin has thousands and thousands of percent, there is no ceiling, right? So asymmetric oxide is kind of having a floor, but not having a ceiling.

And that's when properly risk mitigated and properly managed, monitored, these sorts of things, something where controlled quantities of a portfolio being in that ceiling-less allocation can really do wonders for the overall financial wellness picture of a portfolio. There you go. Do people who invest with you need to have a minimum net worth or minimum amounts to invest? So we, it depends on a lot of factors, including, you know, the country, the person's situation, these sorts of things. But in general, you know, what we're here to do is to help educate people on the space and to help provide information that can help them to make the kinds of decisions

that are going to be most beneficial for their own situations. There you go. So give us the dot-coms, the dot-whatevers as we go out. Yeah. So as I mentioned before, I'm very active on LinkedIn. My LinkedIn handle is David Ambrose Doss,

D-A-V-I-D-A-M-B-R-O-S-E-D-O-S-S. And you can also reach out to me via email, david at ckc.fund. You can also check out CKC on LinkedIn or on its website. There you go. I always certainly appreciate you coming on the show and enlightening us, David, on all these great stuff with what's going on with crypto and what you guys are doing there at the fund. Yeah, thanks for having me on the show, Chris.

And like we were chatting about earlier, I'm glad to have the Voss Doss do it here. The Voss Doss. There you go. Coming to a theater near you. So thanks, David, for coming on the show. Thanks for joining us, for tuning in. Go to GoodReese.com, FortressCruzFoss, LinkedIn.com, FortressCruzFoss. Chris was one of the

TikTok-y and all those crazy places on the internet. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time. And that should...