The Derivative - Being a GenZ’er during Crypto Winter with @DeadCaitBounce's Caitlin Cook

Episode Date: October 25, 2022

How do all these smart people end up in the crypto space? Versus the hedge fund world or traditional finance, or doctor/lawyer, etc.  And how do investors separate the signal from the noise amongst all the meme stock pumps, Web 3 scams, and crypto deep dives? And is Winter coming, to borrow the Game of Thrones line… We're sitting down with GenZ'er and FinTwit staple Caitlin Cook of the @deadcaitbounce handle, where she's diving into what it’s really like working in Crypto during the current drawdown and what drives her to pump out great content on twitter and her podcasts. Caitlin and Jeff also discuss various topics ranging from women in finance and chicks of Fin Twit, bridging the gap in Crypto education (check out her new podcast, The DeadCaitBounce Experience), GenZer's providing professional content, and so much more! Plus, we wrap up the episode with Caitin's 3 BIG C's; Chicago, Cocktails, and Catchphrases — SEND IT! Chapters: 00:00-01:53 = Intro 01:54-09:33 = Soccer Goals to Finance Careers via Twitter 09:34-29:28 = Chicks of Fintwit, Crypto Education, building bridges & are we now seeing a Crypto winter? 29:29-41:56 = Women in Finance & Bridging the gap in Crypto education with The DeadCaitBounce Experience 41:57-48:10 = GenZ's providing professional content while making it human on Twitter 48:11-56:47= Chicago, Cocktails & #Getoutside 56:48-01:00:39 = Hottest take From the episode: The DeadCaitBounce Experience: https://dcbe.podbean.com/ Follow along with Caitlin on Twitter @DeadCaitBounce and @DCBExperience Don't forget to subscribe to The Derivative, and follow us on Twitter at @rcmAlts and our host Jeff at @AttainCap2, or LinkedIn , and Facebook, and sign-up for our blog digest. Disclaimer: This podcast is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as legal, business, or tax advice. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of RCM Alternatives, their affiliates, or companies featured. Due to industry regulations, participants on this podcast are instructed not to make specific trade recommendations, nor reference past or potential profits. And listeners are reminded that managed futures, commodity trading, and other alternative investments are complex and carry a risk of substantial losses. As such, they are not suitable for all investors. For more information, visit www.rcmalternatives.com/disclaimer

Welcome to The Derivative by RCM Alternatives, where we dive into what makes alternative investments go, analyze the strategies of unique hedge fund managers, and chat with interesting guests from across the investment world. Okay, happy National Greasy Food Day. Yes, my favorite is probably onion rings or really thin fries like the steak frites fries. Those are good. And as you maybe noticed, we're putting this out on Tuesday, not our normal Thursday. We had some technical issues last week and didn't want you to go a whole week without a show.

Speaking of, our next shows, we've got Mike Harris of Quest coming up next week, then Wayne Himmelsine of Logica, two great ones. So go subscribe to be the first to see when those drop. On to this episode where I got to chat with Jen Zier, who is way smarter and well-spoken and everything than I was at 24. We've got Caitlin Cook, or Dead Kate Bounce, as she's known on FinTwit, talking to us about the life of a social media maven, whether crypto winter is dampening the crypto job market and industry prospects, why education that filters the signal you need amongst all the noise is important, and what she's looking to do with her new podcast, The Dead Cape Bounce Experience. Send it. This episode is brought to you by RCM's Lunch and Learn series. We talk about education

in this episode and about once a month, our Lunch and Learns bring mutual fund and private hedge fund managers to a virtual lunch and learn with advisors and investors in a casual small setting where questions are welcome. That's education. Follow us on Twitter at RCM Alts

or LinkedIn to catch news of the next one. And now back to the show. All right. Hi, everyone. We're here with Caitlin Cook, otherwise known as Dead Kate Bounce on FinTwit. And the main purpose of this pod is so I get invited to the next Chicago FinTwit dinner with Caitlin and Brian Portnoy and Monica Mann and all the rest. So can we make that happen? Absolutely. You're on the list. Yes. All right. Problem solved pot over. So you're back in Chicago. I think we were going to record this year out in Vegas and then maybe San

Diego had all that go. It was great. No rest for the wicked was how in Vegas for a conference, and then had a wedding in San Diego. So made a week of it, but definitely excited to be home for sure. You're in that terrible spot, right? Where I think one year I went to like 36 weddings or something, right? It was just ridiculous. I'm like, nobody tells you you got to, you save for retirement, you save for kids college, like you need to save for going to friends weddings. Yeah. I'm just at the start of where I'm getting the invites year over year. So

it hasn't gotten too overwhelming yet, but next few years, I'm guessing it's going to get worse or better depending on how you look at it. I'll tell you my two favorite wedding games that you can use as you go into this thing. The first is make a market on how many people at the wedding have mustaches and always go over. A lot of people are like, oh like oh like two but there's for some reason there's always way more than you think then you have to set the rules do wait staff count whatnot um and then the second is how many weddings have you been to where the people have since gotten divorced which is a little macabre but uh but fun because that my parents have been collectively divorced seven times so i win the game just based

off being to my own parents' weddings. So mentioned the Twitter handle. Let's start with that. When did you start on Twitter and how did you know what a dead cat bounce in finance was? Yeah. So this actually started back in college. I went to a St. Bonaventure University, Go Bonnies in upstate New York. I was going to school for finance and was really close with one of my finance professors. Shout out to Jim Mehar if he happens to hear this. He listens to some of my stuff. But he actually was the one who told me about finance Twitter or FinTwit. And I think it was my second year of college that he said, I know that you're big into social media and I know that you're big into networking. There's this thing, there's, you know, I know that you're big into social media and I know that you're big into

networking. There's this thing, there's this group of people on Twitter, we call it FinTwit. And it's some of the smartest people in the industry. They're very easily accessible on there. I go back and forth with people all the time. They share their thoughts, you know, day to day, and it's all free. And this seems like something you'd really like, you should get involved. So he gave me some people to follow as a start. And it was sort of off to the races from there. I ended up meeting the group from a Ritholtz Wealth Management, Nick Maggioli, Bill Sweet, Barry Ritholtz, my senior year of college, I believe. And, you know, they- Meeting in real life?

Yes. Yeah. Nick and Bill became kind of friends of mine as well. So shout out to them. But they encouraged me to start blogging back when I was in college, even though, you know, I was very hesitant to do so. And they, you know, encouraged me to start putting my thoughts out there. So that sort of started all of it. And then when I moved to Chicago, that was obviously a pretty big component of it as well, because there were a lot of Chicago folks on finance Twitter and ended up meeting them in real life, making a lot of really good friends from it. And now I'm addicted to social media clearly, but it's done a lot career wise for me too. So it's been, it's been overwhelmingly positive overall. So the Bonneys, I went to school in upstate New York,

Union College. So I know the Bonneys. What, did you play a sport there and do anything fun? I did. So, well, for a month, I might have the NCAA record for short tenure, but I actually, I was recruited for D1 soccer, ended up playing through pre-season, playing through first game. It was an incredibly toxic environment, if I'm being honest with you. And that was a super tough decision, but I ended up, I'm pretty definitive about things and know myself very well and knew that it was not going to be the best use of my time. Made a really tough call on it. A lot of people didn't understand it considering I'd spent probably the 16 to 17 years before that only ever playing soccer, but ended up quitting that,

getting more involved in kind of the finance program at school. And to this day, it is probably top three, one of the best decisions I've ever made in terms of what it's done for me, for my career trajectory. And you stayed at the school though. A lot of people would do that and go, I'm going to go to a whole different school. Yeah. That was the interesting thing too. As soon as I announced that it was even when I had quit was before the actual, you know, semester had started, right. Because for division one, they start preseason really early. And the first question that everyone asked me was where I was transferring to. But at the end of the day, I had always aligned what I was looking for sports wise with what I was looking for career wise. And those were both really important to me. So the schools that I had looked into to play soccer at,

I made sure also had really strong finance programs and that I was actually interested in the school as well, because that's really, that was really important to me. So I had chosen St. Bonaventure for their business program, as well as for soccer. So I didn't see the point in going anywhere. I was happy there and I ended up loving the next few years and I stayed so what um what position were you I center forward for a lot of it or anywhere center forward center mid um I was kind of like both footed um too which doesn't really happen very often so left foot right foot didn't matter what side uh usually could score some goals i guess right high school 123 goals in high school yeah it was small town america too so not really

sure how much of a feat that is but not quite as competitive but it was it was a fun time um do you know jason buck on twitter uh jason at mutiny he was a similar boat went to college of charleston img academy and then got there i was like what am i doing let's learn some stuff Twitter, Jason at Mutiny. He was a similar boat, went to College of Charleston, IMG Academy, and then got there. I was like, what am I doing? Let's learn some stuff instead of play this sport. And then curious what, it's always interesting to me, right? You're college and you said in high school, you wanted to go somewhere that had a good finance. What did finance mean to you at that point? It didn't mean much. It was more of a shot in the dark just because I knew that I could always change my major if I wanted to. I didn't really take a finance class in high school and that's the soapbox I won't get on. It's talking about the need for financial literacy and

literally starting an elementary school on, but regardless, it's needed and it should start early and be often and be mandatory. Uh, money's like the only thing, one of the only things on this planet that impacts everyone, no matter what. So it makes absolutely no sense to me why it's not required, but, and it feels like we've gone the other way, right. If we're like Robin hood and all that stuff, and even some of your crypto friends, um, right. I'm like, no, get into this, get in this without the proper learning and education. Yeah. Not enough on the education side, which I'm obviously super passionate about too. So always need more of that. So let's, and so high school at small town was in New York itself or somewhere else? Yes. Upstate New York, Allman, New York population, maybe under a thousand.

We had one stoplight. we had a celebration for it every year lots of cows almond it's tiny yeah like the nut almond yep where is that i don't know that no one ever knows uh it is it is in western new york an hour south of rochester two hours south east of buffalo so kind of close to can actually, but not really an area that people go to. Most people might know it from like the Finger Lakes region. Yeah. I had a few, skinny Atlas, had a fraternity brother from there was another one stoplight town. So let's talk about the education piece. So you've done your part. Formerly you had the podcast, what was it? Chicks of Fin Twint.

And now started a new podcast. So yeah, tell us a little bit about that. Did you just want to start educating out of the goodness of your heart or it meshed with your jobs or what does that look like? So, I mean, first there, there are a couple components to it, right? So I, if you couldn't tell from anyone listening to this, I'm very extroverted and I love to talk to people. And I didn't really focus on that in terms of what I wanted to do career wise and with my life for a while, just because I always thought that I had to be technical or have some hard skillset when I realized that the soft skills are really,

really important. And a lot of people don't have them. And if it's something that you thoroughly enjoy and are good at, that you need to lean in on what makes you different, right? So with that, I wanted to start a podcast. And the real push behind the first one that I used to do called the Chicks of Fintwit was that every podcast I listened to in finance was really the same. And I love listening to them. You know, the best ones were the best for a reason. The guests that you'd have on constantly are on for a reason. They're brilliant and they are really good at what they do. But representation wise, it really was just the same old group of people every time. And that was middle-aged white men for the most part, 95% of the time. And what I wanted to do was really just diversify the group of people that we were talking to.

And there are a lot of really interesting people, even in my network specifically, that had really interesting stories, kick ass at what they did career-wise, tons of insights, really good stories, but they never really got told. So that was the start of the first podcast I hosted. And that was more of for fun, to be honest with you, more of like a passion project. And I did that for a while, but on the education side of things, it actually did tie into what I was doing for work for kind of where I am now. I worked at an early stage FinTech startup called OnRamp Invest. And really what OnRamp was doing was trying to make it easier for financial advisors, specifically RIAs, so independent advisors, to get access to crypto

for clients, whether that's viewing assets that the client manages on their own that maybe they bought on Coinbase or Robinhood or wherever they bought it and are managing on their own to have visibility into those assets or to directly manage for the client. So buying and are managing on their own to have visibility into those assets or to directly manage for the client. So buying and selling crypto on their behalf, that was a big component of it. But what we realized when we started out, I think I was maybe like the 12th employee there. So pretty early on was that education was what was needed the most. If you look at the average age of a financial advisor, right? I think it's like maybe 55. That's not the group of people that is really jumping and chomping at the bit to learn about crypto and buy it. So there was a huge

piece missing originally from what we wanted to do. And that was something that I got really interested in early on working at OnRamp. I was head of community, but really got more interested in how do we help advisors learn about this and how it applies to their practice? How do you cut through all of the crazy headlines that you see out there to get to what really matters? You know, really crafting an experience that makes people want to learn more and makes it easier rather than harder. So that was sort of the start of it. I actually ended up heading up the development of a crypto education platform called OnRamp Academy. And with that, I just absolutely loved what I was doing. And it was really, you know, it was fulfilling work. It was something that was needed. And I was really passionate about that. So I wanted to bring that into my role now at Hero as running marketing and communications is

the education component is still so critical. And that was something I found I had a knack for was taking these really technical, complex things and making them more simple. And I still wanted to do that in my job now. And my firm fully supports, you know, the podcast that I host now is called the dead Kate bounce experience. It's, you know, something that I started on the own, on my own with the help of my friend, Bobby craft, who does all the production work, but my firm's fully supportive of that. Anyone who's a builder in the space knows how important it is to get proper education to people, whether that's retail investors or institutional. So that's sort of a long-winded answer, but that's how I got where I'm at now. It's something that I plan to keep doing for as long as possible because as crypto continues to

grow, you're going to need resources that are trustworthy and that are actually simplified to what people can understand. I want to come back to the chicks, but first I'm going to ask this question that got me, like part of me thinks, is there still education to be done, right? Does anyone who wants to know about crypto has learned about crypto or is a little more nuanced of like, sure, they might know what right at the first stage was just telling them that it exists. And now maybe we're at stage two or three, whatever your opinion is of like, now we need to get into the nuance of what's what. There's a lot of nuance to get into. Yeah. I think the first step was awareness, right? And at least from kind of like a namesake perspective, there's definitely widespread awareness there. People know what it is. They see it because you can't avoid it. If you have a TV, if you're on Twitter,

it's everywhere. So even if you're not proactively learning about it, you know that it exists, but you might not know much. And I think it's very easy, especially working in crypto to sort of be siloed and assume that everyone is learning about this. Everyone knows what like different kind of very technical aspects of the space are and what they mean. That's so far from the truth. I would say a majority of people by far are still at the very beginning. And I think when it comes to resources, there are arguably way too many resources content-wise available today for crypto, but what's missing is more of specialized content, right? So what we were doing with OnRamp, if you're a financial advisor, you don't need to just know what is a blockchain.

You can find that anywhere. It's written a hundred different ways, but it's taking it a step beyond that and saying not just what is crypto. It's how does crypto impact a financial advisor's business? How do you do estate planning's business? How do you do estate planning for crypto? How do you do tax planning? So it's taking it from that 101 level and wrapping it up in a package that actually makes sense to the audience that you're targeting. It's much more thoughtful and it's more effective as well because you're directly getting to the root of what the people you're trying to reach need to know. So I'd say we're still very early in both the development of the space and then also creating content that actually

makes sense and then is actually digestible for people because it's a lot of word salad. A lot of word salad. And what happened with OnRamp? Are they still around? You just shifted over? They are. Yeah. So OnRank is still around, still building and everything. Platform is continuing to grow, continuing to onboard users and different financial advisory firms are signing up to work with the platform, which is great. What I kind of the reason for my switch, among other things, was I was sitting at this sort of in the introductory space, right? Doing this 101 level content, which again, very important.

I'm still doing that now, but it was sort of like being inside, staring out the window, watching your friends have fun. That's like a SpongeBob meme that some people might have seen. There were so many interesting things happening in crypto. And I felt that I was just standing at the starting line in some ways, just with not being able to fully dive into all of the really cool things that were happening. And I ended up having a really special opportunity with Hero, which is building kind of

infrastructure for on-chain derivatives, more in the decentralized finance space, a little bit more technical in the weeds than what I was doing before. Super interesting opportunity that kind of would allow me to get broader exposure to the things I wanted to learn about. And it just felt right. So ended up making the switch and I've been loving it so far, but Honor Imp is killing it as well. And still a huge fan of, you know, their mission and everything that they're working towards, because it's definitely needed those bridges that help the traditional finance people get exposure to this space. Like we need to continue building those bridges.

Do you read Ben Hunt at all or follow him? I do. What are your thoughts on him saying like, basically those bridges are basically have been built and traditional finance is like overtaking it and trademarking it and making it not into what it should be or what it could be. Right. It's kind of like, oh, we're, we're, we're selling the hippie clothes in Walmart now, essentially.

Right. I don't, I don't necessarily agree with all of that. I get where he's going with it. And I think that in any space that's very early, you're going to see some, some areas that are overbuilt and a lot of it won't be sustainable or last for the long run. That's, that's a given in any space that's high growth. You see a lot of people wanting to get skin in the game and it might not necessarily last. I will say though, there is still a lot of work to be done in terms of getting widespread bridges built, particularly with onboarding and offboarding assets, both from like, you know,

how do I get my fiat into the DeFi ecosystem? How do I off ramp it? That is still not smooth. The user experience on the crypto side is still something that needs a lot of work to make it easier for people to get started with. The taxes, I just did my tax on this extension deadline and I'm like, what the heck? Even though there's, I have to set up an API to pull it out of Coinbase to get it into my tax software. It's like, give me a break. Yeah, it's very clunky. And I would argue with anyone that says that we're already at a state where things are good as they are, because a lot needs to be iterated on and refined to really make it easy for people. And that's something that I find a lot of really, really smart people, whether they're in crypto or not, or like deeply involved in crypto or not,

don't always see is that what's simple to them just because they are, you know, on the tail end on the far right, you know, above average intelligence or experience in the space. That's not what will get most people started in crypto. It has to be turnkey and it has to be very, very smooth because if it's not, people won't get started in the space. They'll just continue to push it off, which is what I've seen with a lot of traditional incumbents so far. And what are you seeing? We'll come back to what do you see from investors, but just from employers and the industry wise, like are we in a crypto winter of sorts? Has there been layoffs?

Have you seen salaries come down? All that kind of good stuff being inside the space. It depends where you're looking. But from a market perspective, I mean, crypto markets, traditional markets this year, calendar-wise, have not been doing well. So definitely in the middle of what most people would perceive as a bear market there, for sure, price-wise. It's interesting, though, to see they're still, you know, working in the space. The people that are trying to build sustainable long-term solutions, it doesn't seem like there's a bear market at all. Like, they're continuing to push. They're still building. They haven't stopped by any means. Seen a lot of firms get a little bit more conservative in terms of, like, you know,

trying to hire and whatnot. But you see that with any sort of pullback, any company that's reasonably like, you know, using their capital and being a steward of that capital for the investors that gave it to them are going to be more conscious in a market pullback of the resources that you're using and how they're using them. So employment wise, I mean, there are still a lot of opportunities out there because there are so many different people building, but I don't have any statistics on it, but I would assume that that has definitely pulled back a bit. You're losing a lot of the euphoria that you see both in traditional and crypto markets, you know, with pullbacks like this. Yeah. That's a fair point of like, well, that's not the end of traditional markets because we're in a 25% drawdown. So,

and just popped in my head here, but going back to your college days, when you were thinking finance, were you also thinking crypto? Was that a big deal where people all were like, oh, I've got to get into the crypto industry and make a lot of money? It wasn't. So I wasn't in just like kind of time set here for people. I was in college from 2016 to 2019, which crypto was becoming a little bit more mainstream, depending on, you know, what you're using it for and whatnot, but still not that widely known, at least in the first few years. And again, like 2017, there was like a huge crypto market pullback, if you can call it that. So wasn't really a talk when I was in school. And it wasn't

something that I was considering at all. Actually, I was very, I was always very career oriented and thought I had a plan of what I wanted to do. And as everyone knows, it rarely ever goes the way you think it will. So I started my career in asset management when I was in college, I studied for CF, like level one of the CFA exam had passed that thought I was going to continue on to be a CFA charter holder and eventually make my way into working for an institutional allocator, like an endowment or a pension. That's really what I thought I was going to do was more of the traditional asset management investment. You're too much fun for that.

Yeah, I'm too much fun. And when the opportunity with OnRamp came up, the CEO is a friend of mine from Twitter, actually. So crypto wasn't anything I had explicitly considered. I'm very boring investment wise in terms of what I do. I'm not a trader. I literally set my money and leave it and dollar cost average, like very, very simply, because for me, the power of investing is putting it there, leaving it, not worrying about it and tracking back 10 years from now and seeing what compounding does for the most part, not really looking for those asymmetric bets. So crypto was never really something that I was necessarily attracted to for that. I don't like play around with markets too much, but once

I started learning about it, I mean, the value proposition to me was really clear. And this is really just, you know, people try to turn it into this very philosophical thing with like decentralization and, you know, putting power in the hands of the individual. And that's, you know, that's powerful. But for me, I just see this as the next technological innovation in a long line of innovations to make everything that we do day to day, more efficient, more seamless, cheaper, just more efficient overall. And that's how I view blockchain and crypto. Around money or overall? So, I mean, overall, but I think with the way that I describe it to a lot of people from like a 101 level is thinking back to the most earth shattering

innovation that we've had, at least in my lifetime. I don't remember when this came around because I was too young, but when the internet came about originally, right? So what the internet did was bring people closer than ever before from a global perspective, made it so there's ability for instantaneous communication for anyone that had internet connection. I could talk to you. You could talk to me. It didn't matter where we were. From a cost perspective, it made communication more efficient than we've ever seen it before. And where I see crypto and blockchain coming in is providing an equivalent to that for value transfer, bringing it to be digitally native, making it so it's instantaneous, removing friction points. So removing the middleman that might be adding costs, be adding time and just making the

entire process quicker. And not necessarily just quicker, but also more like there are a lot of different efficiencies about it that we could get into. And those obviously aren't perfect yet because we're still early days. But you start out with this innovation that is the blockchain. And now you're seeing developments in decentralized finance. You're seeing people building various applications on top of it. We saw the same thing with the Internet in the early days, right? People took this base idea, this base technology,

and you and I are talking on Zoom today. That wasn't the original intent per se, was to have video communications like this, but you take this base layer technology and you iterate on it and it develops over time. And that's the same way that I see Bitcoin and crypto and blockchain evolving as well. So what would detractors say to that of like, okay, but we're just exchanging middlemen, right? Instead of the banks in there, now you have the creator of this new protocol who's going to charge a gas fee

or it's the people who are staking that token or whatnot. So you could argue like, oh, you're just exchanging one middleman for the rest. Maybe it's digital and it's faster and it's easier to track. Maybe that's worth it. But yeah, that would be my other side of it. Yeah. We could, we could go back and forth on this all day. Cause there's always like a, what,

like, well, what about that? What about that? Right. And there's, there's always going to be someone, there's going to be someone providing the service, whether it's a collective or an individual, you know, like a bank or something like that. I think, oh man, I don't even know where to go with that one because I feel like we could just talk about this for a while. And I know that's not your plan for this, but there's always arguments to be made on this. And I think it's more of a, it's very easy to kind of turn this into a polarizing conversation of an either or, which we see way too often on social media when people talk about traditional finance versus decentralized. It's always, well, one or the other, or like DeFi is going to win or DeFi will fail and like traditional finance will always reign. It's more of on a

spectrum to me of, you know, maybe we find that decentralization makes sense where you're not having one central point of failure, one central point of control that's making all the decisions. And it doesn't happen overnight to have those changes. So yeah, in some ways there will be a quote unquote sort of intermediary or someone collecting fees on it. It's just more of a transition to an, more of a, like an in-between transition sort of phase moving towards an ideal. I don't know if that makes full sense yeah definitely and like i've bought houses like going through the title process like and putting your medical records like there's so many things yeah i'd be like hey this would

be great if this was just transferable and on the chain and everything was made super easy so i get all that but it's also like i don't really mind if that's centralized. Yeah. Right. I don't know if some of that needs to be decentralized. So it needs to be. And I think that's another thing that gets caught up in this. I just get very frustrated by people always do this, right. Especially on social media, how polarizing we try to make everything, you know, Republican or Democrat dogs or cats, like everything. It doesn't matter if it's like, I actually just had an article come out today that I wrote for one of my podcast producers magazine, but kind of on this topic of, it's very easy to do that because it's kind of what gets the headlines. It gets people going, it fires people up. But realistically, the answer for almost

everything is somewhere in the middle. There's going to be situations where it makes sense. There's going to be situations where it doesn't. There's going to be situations where it doesn't. And not everything has to go on chain. That's something I see on Twitter all the time. It's like, oh, such and such concept, but on chain. And it's like, well, it might not make sense in this situation. And it's going to be more of taking what's best from, you know, kind of the traditional systems we know today and the decentralized ones that are being built. And you're going to take the best of each to make

something that's better for everyone. It's not going to be all on the chain or all off chain and centralized, right? It's going to be a mix. Yeah. We had, I'm going to forget his name now, Anthony Zhang of VinoVest, right? And they like let you invest in wine and all this stuff and then he was like like well that sounds like a perfect thing to wrap a token around and do all this he's like no you don't really need that you could it was refreshing to hear like a young entrepreneur be like no we're not doing the chain or a token we're just have this business that works as it is yeah um and then my other view on that is like, if there's success, why doesn't, which you already start to see Apple, right? Like, Hey, don't use a credit card. Just have it in our ecosystem.

Amazon could have a point, like all these places could just have their own system, especially if Amazon gets medical records and all this stuff, right. I just live inside the Amazon ecosystem and it makes it way easier. Yeah. But that's kind of arguing the point as well. Wanted to jump back to chicks of FinTwit and talk to a little bit about you being a woman in finance and what you found with, well, we'll start with that of like in the crypto world, are you the odd man out, odd woman out? Or are those old fashioned views or what? It's funny too.

This is such an interesting topic to have with people. And I even thought about this with my podcast too, just because for me, I've never really, I'm so used to, you know, I was a finance major in school. There were very few women in that. I worked in traditional finance and retail asset management wholesale, which is, I found out later on was the lowest percentage of women of any area of asset management overall, like literally the lowest percentage of women for whatever reason that is. And I, I didn't really notice it that much. I mean, it's just something that you get used to. And for me, I try not to,

you know, face every situation that I've experienced in the industry as a, well, this was because I was a woman. And I think that we've sort of gotten into a day and age in 2022 of just kind of absolute woke-ism that can be good and bad. It's just sort of a double-edged sword. I mean, obviously diversity is really important. It's diversity of thought, diversity of experience, diversity of background, diversity of people that you work with is huge. But it was a really, it was something that was sort of in the back of my head, not really at the forefront when I was working within it. Same with crypto too. Whether it's, you know, it's definitely still more male dominated. It's not even close, but I will say there are a lot more women in, you know, NFTs in particular, there's like a very, very diverse

group of people, both age, background, gender, everything really versus what I've seen in traditional finance. I think the space is definitely more open than I saw on the traditional side of things. And on your chicks of FinTwit, did they open up about that? Like the difficulties of being a woman? The few that we've had on here and we try and be diverse, they're hesitant to open up about it,

which I'm so weird. I'm like, no, I wanted you on here. I wanted you to be able to talk about it. We had Nancy Davis and she was like, no, just if you have a P&L, nobody cares if you're boy, girl, blue, green, like it doesn't matter. If you have a P&L and you make Goldman Sachs money, they don't care what you are. So she had a very like transactional view of it. And another woman was like, I'd prefer not to talk about it. So yeah, it's a weird

thing to get people to open up and say like, yeah, it sucks or it's not a big problem. Yeah. It's hard just because a lot of it is so subjective too. Right. Like I can't tell you what your experience has been in the industry and explain that back to you. Like I, like I know it myself and I can't say that for other women in this space as well. I don't want to make those generalizations because they can be sorry about that. They can be, you know, definitely one-off situations as well I mean I think there's a lot of you know from a harassment standpoint that is definitely something that is widespread that people don't want to talk about I had I like am very open about everything and I am really my first year of working in corporate America I there was like

a lot of like harassment there was literally like a grown man that got fired for harassment that I dealt with at a conference that literally one of an employee that I worked with that I knew. So these things definitely happen and I'm open to talking about them, but I can see from a career standpoint, why someone who is working within a bigger corporation would want to kind of hide those things just because sometimes whether it's right or wrong, it can come back on you in, in a poor light if you talk about it too. Um, but for my podcast, and this was something that I talked about with people quite a bit because there are mixed reviews, right? Is I very strongly did not want to make it a podcast about talking to women about their experience like that from that perspective. I think it's a fair question to ask. I think we should talk about it, but

here's why these girls kick ass. Yeah. And it was more of, I want to view them in the same way that I would interview you. I want to interview them in the same way that I would interview the male CEO of a tech company or like a developer or someone, anyone who's like killing it at their job. And I want to talk to them about what makes them tick and why they do what they do and how they do it. And I think that highlighting that talent and highlighting that, you know, perspective and having diverse people as guests is going to in itself be beneficial for women, right? Like getting exposure out there. I really, really tried to not make the focus of it. Talk to me about being a woman because so often, whether you're a minority or whether you're a female, you always get sort of pigeonholed into

having conversations about that, where I really wanted to make it more of, you know, you put all of this work in for decades. Why don't you tell me about that? Because that's a unique experience as well with a lot of value that is, you know, other people want to hear about too. It's like, I just listened to the smart list with Kevin Bacon and they're like, after he got up there, like, I'm so glad we didn't ask him about six degrees of Kevin Bacon. Right. It's kind of like that. But then on my side is like white male.

I like want to bring it up so people don't think I'm ignoring it. So there's like a weird, it's a weird thing active. Yeah. Yeah. And I think addressing it's important. You can definitely, I think there's, it's, you know, you want to open up that conversation and sort of see what happens. I just think making it the sole topic of conversation doesn't really move things forward quite as

much for, at least for what I was aiming for with my podcast, right? Like I wanted to cover a bunch of different topics across financial services and have interesting guests on who happened to be women and make an effort to speak to people who aren't often highlighted on podcasts. So that in itself, I mean, that was a big part of the mission, but from a content perspective, I did want to focus more on them as a professional rather than them as a woman specifically. Right. It's almost better to flip it. And when you have the white male and be like, how do you address diversity and getting enough

women in the spot? Yeah. Cool. So then what happened with that? You just, that ran its course or you left on ramp is when that ended? So it wasn't related to anything job wise, really, per se. I think that I'm more so look back at, you know, I love what I was doing with that podcast, too. So don't get me wrong there. But I think in terms of what I wanted to do career wise, what made sense, what was had

synergies with like what I was trying to do with my career. It made more sense looking back on what worked and what didn't with what I was happened to be doing at OnRamp, which was crypto education. I was doing that on social media. Yeah. Well, it made more sense for me to concentrate my efforts on what I was most passionate about and where I sort of had dug out this little niche for myself was crypto education. Most people weren't focusing on one-on-one level targeted towards traditional finance people. That was my audience. I had built it over many, several years. And I had done that at my last job where I was recording a video of myself every single, for OnRamp, but every single day for eight or nine months. It was like a term of the day,

crypto term of the day. And that was an action. Yeah. It was a lot of, it was a lot of- Were you showered every time? Were you like put together? Like, oh, today's is, oh my God, what day is it? For the most part, I, the consistency part of it is the most important thing when you're trying to build an audience and do content. So at some point it got more of a, the first few months, it was pretty tough to do. I did like 12 takes or 20 takes and had to write out like bullet points for myself. After a while, it became more kind of like going through the content that I was putting out there, the audience I was targeting it towards, there was a need there. It was something that a lot of people weren't doing. And I found that I had an affinity for taking these really complex things and watering it down to what do people really need to know? How do I remove the fluff from this so that it makes it more or less intimidating?

Because this space is pretty intimidating. It's all developer speak, really. Can you do that for us right now with staking? Oh, gosh. Yeah, do we want to get into that on this one? Or yield farming? What's the easier one? Oh, man.

I mean, both of them, right? I mean, there's definitely a demand for on the lending side of things in the crypto space. And when there is a higher demand for those assets, the yield that you get for offering people who are involved in a community, regardless of what that project is, giving them the ability to stake those tokens or contribute them to the network or provide liquidity, whatever the reason those tokens are being in need for, and being able to earn back from that. So I don't want to get too into the specifics on the different ways that that can be done, but it's like the next generation sort of lending products i guess in some way it might not be

perfect but if any of my crypto friends are hearing this but maybe for another time and then um give us the uh the new podcast dead cape bounce experience. Yeah. So like I was saying to very passionate about education, big on crypto education and my audience coming from working in asset management and then working at on-ramp working with financial advisors and family offices, that was a lot of my network. And I had kind of carved out, at least in my mind, like a bit of a niche with crypto education for that audience. And I wanted to keep it going. The desire there was pretty palpable from a lot of people that I had spoken to. You know, I'd have people ask me to go on podcasts to talk about crypto, speak at conferences, talk to family offices who were doing research, that sort of

thing. So with that, in addition to it being something I really cared about and working for a firm that was building in decentralized finance, where it kind of made sense to do research independently and meet more people in the space. I wanted to launch a podcast outside of what I was doing for work to keep the education efforts up. Named it after my Twitter handle, just because that's sort of where everything started. And it's really, I just put out my sixth episode today when we've recorded this, but the idea of it is really meeting with all of the really bright people that are thought leaders and builders in crypto. And they might be people who have been on podcasts a ton of times, but the crypto podcasts that are out there today are, I would argue, overwhelmingly

targeted towards people who are already in the space. The conversations go straight down the rabbit hole. If you listen to an episode of Bankless, for example, that's a really, really good crypto podcast by two guys more focused in the Ethereum community, but that doesn't matter for this. If you listen to one of those episodes and you're new, you're like, I want to learn about crypto. What's a podcast I can look at? Oh, this is one of the most popular ones. Five minutes in, you'd be lost. And you may never listen to one again. So for my podcast, I first episode spoke to Brett Harrison, who is the president of FTX US.

FTX is literally building bridges for people who want to buy crypto for the first time, don't know how, want to have an experience that looks like a traditional brokerage app. So something that's more welcoming. And they have onboarded tens of thousands of new users. So they are someone that is literally living the mission of this whole podcast, which is bridging the gap between the world that we used to operate in, or some people still operate in, in traditional finance in this space that's being built. So it's really just having guests on who are leaders in what they're doing and really stripping back the conversation to, if you're new to this, what's the 101 level content that you need to know? What are the questions that someone who's new would want to ask that you probably

wouldn't get on most crypto podcasts? Because most people already know that are listening to that. Hopefully you can get Tom Brady. I'm working on it. He might have some more free time after the divorce there. Maybe Matt Damon as well. But she has more wealth than he does. So who knows? We'll see how that works out.

Switching gears. So you're big on twitter we've talked about big on social media in general like how do you view your i wanted to call you millennial but you're actually gen z um so right to me when i see a lot of your stuff i'm like what is she posting that for like what i don't right it's like in my age you're like oh my god don't put that out. Like maybe you're in a bathing suit or you're getting dressed for a party or something. So like, how does your brain think about that? Of like, do you even think about it? Do you even have a moment of like, should I put this out there? Or it's just like, I'm letting it out there. It's the world. It's so instinctual for me now. And the way that I approach it isn't how a lot of people do, but I know that it's worked for me is I try to keep a mix of both, you know, covering things from a professional perspective, putting out educational content, which I love,

and also making it human, which a lot of people won't do, whether it's, you know, their compliance departments like watching, or they're trying to only focus on, you know, the newsletters that they're putting out or something like that, keeping it strictly to the data that they're putting out, things like that. I think strictly to the data that they're putting out, things like that. I think that there's a huge opportunity for people who are willing to be like vulnerable and authentic because at the end of the day in most businesses, and this is also with like financial advisors and people building businesses, people want to connect with people, not a product or not a business per se.

And they're going to work with people that they like. They want to connect with people that they like. They'll follow people that they like. They may not agree with everything they put out there, but if I can, you know, you put yourself at, you know, you have more of an ability to form connections with people if you're willing to share things about yourself. And, you know, there are definitely some things on social media that maybe you should or shouldn't, and some people overshare and some people, you know, won't share anything and are very closed up and that's, you know, your own choice. But for me, I like to think that I've struck a balance of keeping my account very approachable, try to keep it fun. And just like true to who I am,

where if you're trying to build a brand or trying to build a business, it shouldn't, to me, building a personal brand shouldn't be building. It shouldn't feel like work if you're actually doing yourself. And that's all that I've done with mine. You know, I have a lot of people ask about my strategy and I really, I've never, yeah. What strategy, right? I've never said. I go to brunch and I post some pictures. Yeah. Share what I care about and, you what I care about and share thoughts that I have about things I know about. And that's about it. Make friends with people. I've gotten two jobs from Twitter. I have met probably hundreds of people in person at this point from Twitter and some of my best friends in the world. Actually, most of them are from Twitter. It's really more of a tool that if you invited on this podcast, best part yet, you just open yourself up for opportunities. If you're willing to put yourself out there, that's more than what 90% of people will do. Most people will lurk and like people will do this in different ways. For me, it just happened to be Twitter that it worked and I found something that worked and I stuck with it. And that's where I'm going to put my resources. And

it's returned tenfold for me, I'd argue. I'm 24. And to have like the, I'm very conscious and thankful for a lot of the opportunities I've had, and they never would have happened without using Twitter. And how do you write in? If I asked 10 other 24 year olds, I'd probably be like Twitter. What are you talking about? Like Insta and like, you got to get off Twitter. Nobody's on Twitter. But for this no matter the platform, it's more of the searching for it and finding it, um, in like nurturing it and meeting other people, like finding those people. Right. And then also sticking with it. Um, it's out there. I mean, everyone has different interests. You just have to find your little corner of the internet really, which is kind of hard to do sometimes. So it doesn't surprise me that a lot of people never get there. And what, and then it's also be careful, right? It's, it can get you jobs. It could also keep you from getting a job, right?

If you, if you jump the shark and you're posting some, whatever. Yeah. I mean, it's just common sense for a lot of it. Right. I mean, that's the thing with like oversharing. Be yourself, unless you're a creep or a racist or something bad, then don't be yourself. Some people shouldn't be themselves. Yeah. You gotta be careful. It's a double-edged sword. Like anything else, if there's going to be an opportunity for high reward, there's not also a high risk associated with it as well. So you just have to be cognizant of what you're doing on it. And then talk, I'm sure there's creeps and weirdos that you get. Oh yeah. Yeah. So how do you handle that?

Yeah. I it's, it's funny though. I found that, you know, there are some, there are random accounts and things that pop up that are either like creepy or really rude or trolling me or like, that's always going to happen. If you're building up an audience, that's inevitable. You're never going to escape that. There's always going to be someone trying to bring you down. Someone trying to distract you. You just can't really give much attention to it. But the one thing that I've found that, you know, I even have friends that have quite a few followers too, that are like your followers are so nice compared to mine. And like, we'll have like one of my coworkers too. She's wonderful. It's just, we have very different base follower groups and mine happened to be much friendlier than hers. When we talk about it all the time,

I don't know really how I went about it and I don't know how it happened, but I, you find your group of people. And after a while, there's sort of like a loyalty there and you sort of that like, you know, clear out the ones who shouldn't be there. And, you know, the ones who are meant to find you on there want to have similar interests and that you get along with tend to gravitate towards you. And I've been super lucky with having followers that are actually pleasant. But the Internet's always got a dark side to it. So it pops up from time to time. You just can't really focus on that part.

Did you do you know who Lisa Gilroy is? A comedian? Yes. Twitter lady. Did you see her latest? She's like a note to my followers. I'll send you the link it's hilarious uh it starts out and she's like almost crying it's very very and then it's a it's a joke at the end but i'll let you experience it in real time

let's finish up let's talk about chicago let's talk about your catchphrase get outside and maybe some cocktail talk so first so you moved to chicago had you ever been here before yes so when i was in college after i quit soccer i had more free time and i am very i like to be busy i like to be involved in things i ended up getting involved in my school's student run investment fund as a freshman. Um, like one of the only freshmen there, we were like managing some of the school's endowment. It was real money. How much did I give you guys? It's like, I think the fund at the time was around $2,000. No, it was, it was like a $500,000 fund. Um, not all of that was the endowment, but a portion of it was maybe like, I think it was like maybe a third. I'm on, I'm actually on like the board for it now,

which is kind of cool, full circle sort of story there. But it's, we, I was very involved in that in school. I decided that was going to be my thing. I wanted to pour myself into something productive. I didn't understand a damn thing the first time I sat down in class and I proceeded to not understand anything for like the whole first semester and most of the second one. But I figured it would be beneficial to like be around it. You start hearing it, you become more familiar with all the terms. You know, I was doing like stock pitches and things for different investment opportunities. So I was learning a lot and I wanted to get involved in, you know, the management side of things in the club very quickly. I couldn't really do that

not having taken any of my finance courses yet. So the one thing that I kind of latched onto was making me like head of operations and HR really which it was more of just doing kind of the backend stuff for planning our trips every semester. We went to New York City in the fall and Chicago every spring because we had a lot of two big finance hubs, but we also had a lot of alumni there. And I ended up, you know, that was

one way that, you know, the networking connection that I made through our alumni network for planning those trips ended up getting me my first job or helping me get my first job, which is great. But long story, less long, went to Chicago, my first year of college in the spring for our investment club trip, met with a bunch of different people from the university that had graduated and went on to work in finance in different areas, TD Ameritrade, Thinkorswim, you know, options trading, startups like the small exchange that we're doing, you know, many options basically, or many futures, Deutsche bank, things like that. So some of the, a lot of different areas of finance and whatnot, went to Chicago, love the people, love the city, ended up going back

in the spring, um, my second and last year as well. And really, really liked it. Um, I was between there and New York city for a job. So I ended up picking Chicago, the job in Chicago, pretty much the city. Yeah. Between the two. It was night and day. I love New York as well. But Chicago just won out in my eyes. And I've been here ever since. The difference is we have alleys. Right. So we can hide our trash bags. That's the main difference. And so what are some of your favorite things, uh, since you've been here? Anything on the lakefront. Um, I, I like to ride bikes and everything. So I do a lot

of bike riding on the lakefront path when it's nice out. Um, there's literally no better city in the summer. I would argue that all day. Um, city literally just comes alive. I think we just get more excited because it's always cold in the winter and we take advantage of the weather when it is decent. Um, I say it's like God's like stomped on a human ant pile, right? The first day it's about 50 degrees. It's like, Oh yeah. 10 million ants just come out of everywhere. Yeah, pretty much. Um, so that's probably some of my favorite parts. I mean, it's also a huge food city and cocktails, which I'm a big fan of. So those are some of my favorite parts too. And then it's, it's a really busy place too,

which I also like I'm very, again, like very active social person. So if you're looking at place in the States that you can get that city feel that you get with New York city, Chicago's decently comparable to that. So it definitely keeps things exciting. There's always something to do. What's your go-to cocktail? Oh gosh. Tough choice. I love a French martini though, which is a vodka, raspberry, a little bit of pineapple. Really, really good. Okay. Um, lastly, the get outside. Uh, where'd you get that from i love it you're always posting great picture you've actually made me be like yeah you're right i do need to go get outside

yeah like sitting in here and right working like i could be doing something i could be listening something i could be on a call and walking around the block but i'd like yours are a little more in my opinion like no go like get into a national park or go get like really outside yeah so I think it started during COVID just because you know everyone needed to get out of their house I might have started it before this but I really really dug in on it when COVID hit just because everyone needed to get outside you needed to do something to stay sane and that fresh air is even more important when you're shut in but really the get outside thing was just proof that if you say anything enough times,

people will latch onto it. It's more of just being consistent. And at the beginning, I just, I just do have a strategy. Yeah. Yeah. Literally just repetition and being omnipresent with it and just continuously pounding the same message day in, day out. Most people won't do it because it doesn't, it takes a while for people to catch on and attach to it. But the get outside thing, I think it was also, you know,

it's healthy. It's good for you. So basically what I started doing is posting a picture every day when I was outside on Twitter and during COVID, my roommate at the time, and I would go for walks every single day, like six mile walks at five 30 in the morning. Every day we'd get coffee, walk outside. It would be the dead of winter. It could be zero degrees outside five 30 every day outside on our front steps, go for a walk. And I started posting that just because one, there was nothing else to talk about. I really couldn't do anything other than work. Um, it was ended up being like really good for me. I don't think I'd ever been healthier than like the eight months or nine months that we did that every single day. Good exercise. And people started picking up on it. No one else had anything else to do during COVID either. And

after a while of my posting it, people would, you know, the Twitter algo is work in such a way that like I'd open Twitter and I'd see even someone I didn't follow that happened to follow me. That was like, Oh, hashtag get outside with a picture of them walking their dog or at the park. And it was really, really nice. Like it just started this whole sort of movement. I think at least in like the small corner of the internet that I have it. Um, I have to be more consistent with it now. It's been harder being busy with work. I haven't been as dedicated, but you see it pop up all the time now, which is great. Um, so I'm glad now it's been harder being busy with work I haven't been as dedicated but you see it pop up all the time now which is great um so I'm glad that it's become bigger than just me posting pictures of the sidewalk when I'm on how do you square the love of cocktails with the 5 30 a.m

wake up call um that wouldn't work for me yeah just being youngounce like a rubber ball. Yeah. It got a little more tough too. So I guess the other half of the hashtag things that were built on is, and you might not even know this actually with the cocktail stuff, but during COVID as well, I was working at, in, at the asset manager that I worked at. I was not super happy to be honest with you at that time. So I was making a lot of drinks better now. So not doing that as often, but also stuck at home. And I literally started anyone in Chicago knows Binnie's, which is like the most impressive liquor warehouse that you could possibly see. They have everything you can think of. Their slogan for the listeners outside of Chicago is if you can't find it at Binnie's, it's probably not worth drinking. Exactly. And I wish they would sponsor me because I'm just like their biggest fan, but I went to my

roommate and I went to Benny's during COVID all the time and just stocked up on all of these different, you know, ingredients that you could use for cocktails. And I would, I just started making, you know, a lot of the classic ones that people would make. Um, and then I also just started experimenting with a lot of things and started posting those on Twitter too. Again, like you said, balancing out like the going outside with like less healthy things was hashtag dead cake cocktails. And they actually, at one point that people did not know was working on a book deal for a cocktail book and then started working on a startup and pushed it off. But that was a big thing for me too. And I'm still a huge cocktail fan. I still like kind of mess around with that from time to time of experimenting with things. So a little YouTube channel on the cocktails. I'm sure there's only 10 million of

those. Oh, yeah. Yeah. If I ever find more than 24 hours in a day, that is something that I would, something I would go for. We're just not there yet. Let's finish up hottest take we ask all our guests this year or if you want you weren't around my first year we asked everyone their favorite star wars character um so i'll let you choose your favorite star wars character or your hottest take or both i could do both um for the buffalo people here i'm not even that big of a football fan, but I said this before we started recording. Bills to the Super Bowl. It's inevitable at some point.

So let's go Buffalo. And I'm not. I don't know if that's such a hot take because they're like favored to go to the Super Bowl. You know, yeah, but look at their track record. They're really not doing like how often they actually meet expectations on that. Yeah. So that that's my like hot take. And then I mean, how do you not love yoda that's just easy but i i did actually watch the star wars movies so it's still my day

perfect good call um all right let everyone know where to find the podcast where to find so you do writing but where do you where do you put that out, I used to write. Give us all the goods. So the biggest, the biggest way is the easiest way to follow and like get all the stuff for the podcast and everything. There's a Twitter account for the podcast. It's DCB experience is the handle there. It's on YouTube. It is on Apple podcast.

It's on Spotify. It's on pod bean. It's on pretty much every major podcast streaming platform. I know those are the big ones that people use again, also on YouTube for people who like the video versions. And then for, you know, following myself, I'm on LinkedIn at Caitlin cook. I do post things there still. And on Twitter at dead Kate bounce, Kate. I got to pick your brand. I want to start doing in-person pods, but not like going to a studio. And how do we, how do you do that? Right. Do you have like have to have two cameras going?

I haven't done it before either. I want to figure that out just because there are some people in the Chicago crypto scene that I'd like to interview. And it seems kind of weird to be 10 minutes away and do it over video. I aren't too far away right now though. So I guess maybe it's pretty normal. Yeah. It happens all the time. And I'm like, we could be doing this over a cocktail. It'd be way more fun. Maybe next time. Next time. All right. Well, thank you, Caitlin. This has been fun. And I'm going to hold you to the dinner invite with all those other fun people. And we have to leave Brian Portnoy out because I've given him this complex of people he knows and I'm like, oh, we're at dinner. And I tweeted out and he's like, what?

Again, I wasn't invited. Brian's the best. He's got to be there. Got to be fun as well. I won't request. All right. Thank you again. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you. You've been listening to The Derivative. Links from this episode will be in the episode description of this channel follow us on twitter at rcm alts and visit our website to read our blog or subscribe to our newsletter at rcm alts.com if you liked our show introduce a friend and show them how to subscribe and be sure to leave comments we'd love to hear from you

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