The Pomp Podcast - #477 Avichal Garg on His Crypto Thesis

Episode Date: January 25, 2021

Avichal Garg is a co-founder and partner on the investment team at Electric Capital. Avichal is a successful serial entrepreneur with executive experience at Google and Facebook, which acquired his previous company in 2012. In this conversation, we discuss Avichal’s crypto thesis, decentralized finance, why smart contracts are undervalued, crypto infrastructure, and why decentralization is the natural end state.  ======================= Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp ======================= The Rodman Law Group is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs realize their vision by helping them operate defensibly in sectors where laws and regulations haven’t caught up to the realities of the industry. The Rodman Law Group’s legal expertise combined with its understanding of blockchain technology makes it the ideal legal service provider for the industry. http://www.therodmanlawgroup.com/pomp

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Avicil Garg is co-founder and partner on the investment team at Electric Capital. Avicil is a successful serial entrepreneur with executive experience at Google and Facebook, which acquired his previous company in 2012. In this conversation, we discuss Avicil's crypto thesis, decentralized finance why smart contracts are undervalued crypto infrastructure and why decentralization is the natural end state i really enjoyed this conversation with avicil and i think you will as well before we get into this episode though i want to quickly talk about

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

All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Abishal here. Thank you so much for doing this, sir. Great to see you. Thanks for having me. For sure. Let's just jump into your background. You didn't work on crypto forever. So what did you do before crypto? Where'd you grow up? Facebook? Just tell us the whole story. Yeah. Well, where'd I grow up? I was born in India. I grew up mostly in the Midwest, Kentucky and Ohio, and came out west for school and spent most of my career as an entrepreneur. I started and sold two companies, second one to Facebook, and worked on a bunch of stuff there, worked on products and some ad stuff and had a good time.

With that second company, actually, the way I got into crypto, with that second company, what we were doing was we were actually like a TiVo in the cloud. You give us the URL, we copy whatever was on the other side of it and make a copy of it. The way that we did that was we built all of this really amazing infrastructure where we could control computers and all sorts of remote data centers. We kind of built our own little mini distributed system and we're able to cost optimize that and like buy remnant compute power all over the world.

And this was in like 2010, 2011. And my co-founder Curtis, who's also my co-founder at Electric, he'd worked on protein folding at home. He worked on like some distributed systems like 15 years ago. And he came across Bitcoin and said, hey, I think this actually might solve the hardest problem we had, which was how do you get people to donate computational resources to this network? This Bitcoin thing might solve it. For a hot minute, we said, maybe we should just become Bitcoin miners. In 2011, we just started mining a bunch of Bitcoin. This is pre-ASIC era, 2010,

2011. We were not pressing it. We were not visionaries. We didn't hang on to it. There was a period where it ran up to 100 bucks or whatever, and we basically just sold it. We're like, We're like, this is insane. We're out. And, but that was kind of like our original foray into it. And then Facebook bought all that IP and then we stuck around as hobbyists. And so we did a little bit of like Ethereum and Monero mining. And, and then we left in 2016 and we're thinking about what to do.

And we're just spending all of our time in crypto personally. We were, you know, it was kind of like the first thing that felt as raw as the internet felt to us um when we were kids where you just like go into a chat room and nobody knew how old you were where you lived you know who you were it was just like you were a handle and you had some ideas and you like threw them out there and if they made sense and like people engaged with you and and if they didn't make sense you got ignored um and you could kind of have this like just amazing experience i'm sure you remember this from like 2017 where you would um you'd show up in a in a in a chat room or telegram group or a signal or whatever and um and it would be you know like

this motley crew of people like like the group of people in crypto even to today i think it's like you know wall street people you have entrepreneurs you have um academics you have touring award winners you have professors that have dropped out of school you have college kids um you have like adult film stars you you you know obviously you have some drug dealers but like that's a really strange group of people to all be in one place um and you know like if you threw a dinner like if you're a house party and that was who showed up you'd be like what the hell house party is this right? Like I had some porn stars and some drug dealers and like my college professor and like a bunch of college kids and like some Wall Street guys. It's just be like a weird party. So it could

be a blast, right? Well, it is a blast, right? I mean, that's what makes crypto really fun. It's just like all these people on the fringe kind of like showed up to the same party. And so we looked at in 2017 and we were like, this is so fun. We just want to do this all day. So we threw, we just threw down some desks at my place and, and Curtis would come over every day and we would be in these chat rooms, we'd be reading white papers and we're hacking on some code and writing some smart contracts, just having fun with it. As the last Bitcoin cycle was going up, all these VCs started reaching out to us because we had done some companies, so a bunch of folks knew us. They started reaching out saying, hey, could you come in and talk to the partnership

about this crypto stuff? I remember you guys telling me about Bitcoin five years ago, six years ago, is it real this time? Should I buy some Bitcoin? What's ETH? What's an ICO? uh should i do one like how do i you know should this company do one and so we started doing all this education in 2017 and by the end of 2017 all these people um a bunch of the the more traditional vcs who are phenomenal i mean these are like the world's best investors really quickly realize that crypto is different and they're not really set up to do it um you have like regulatory challenges you don't want to go register with the sec um you know back then it's a lot better now but you know four years ago if you if you invest in some token network like what all of a sudden one

day like a usb stick shows up with five million dollars on it like what do you do with that does your associate just hang on to that at their house like that doesn't seem like a good idea right so they were like okay we don't want to do this can we just give you guys money like if i if i give you money of hl and curtis i know you're not gonna go buy some monero and like move to costa rica and like live that john mcafee life right so here take some money and like do what you do and just like you know we trust you guys and so that's that's actually how electric happened Um, so Curtis and I joke, we're kind of like accidental VCs. We never, we were like entrepreneurs that were just kind of doing our thing. And a bunch of people said, Hey,

take some money. And I mean, anybody who's done a company is like, if people show up with money and they're like, Hey, take our money, you should probably take it. Like we've been buried. We lived through 2008. And so like one of the number one lessons we learned is like, if people want to give you money, you should probably take it. Um, and so that's how we started electric. And now we focus a hundred percent on crypto, um, and crypto networks and, and, uh, have been fortunate to be able to do that for the last few years. You are my favorite accidental VC, which goes right next to my favorite non-VC, which is Jeff Lewis at Bedrock, who continues to tell everyone that. We've got accidental VCs, we have not a VC, and I'm sure that somebody will call us something

new. Talk through just a little bit about your thesis on crypto in general. There's some major themes that I think you guys have, but just when you sit down with an LP and you say, hey, here's how we think about this space here's why we're excited about it what do you share with them yeah um so we i mean we're we're engineers and like product people and so we came at it from like a really different perspective i think there's this really valid which we learned just just by doing um world view on this stuff which is a little bit more top down right which is like the the money supply fixed supply austrian school of economics like all that kind of stuff that we sort of um you know we we bootstrapped up into to understand but we come at it from

like a much more bottoms up perspective. Like our, our take on it is, is through the lens of software. And so what you have here is in our opinion, um, the pendulum swinging away from the internet, like the internet, as we know it today, we just like, if you think about what the internet was designed to do or what has become, it really optimizes for like speed and throughput and scalability. Um, and what we gave up were things like privacy, um, as we've now realized the ownership of our data, and hand over control to these massive centralized organizations. These crypto networks and all of this distributed technology, all of a sudden, just says, what happens if I do the opposite? Instead of optimizing for speed and scalability

and throughput, what if I optimize for you owning your own data? What if I optimize for censorship resistance? What if I optimize for privacy? What can I do? Once you change the constraint set like that um it's there's sort of that like marshall mccluhan the the medium is a message kind of a thing right it's like actually the once you change the constraints people just become really creative and you realize you can do totally different things and so the question then is okay well you have this technology stack that basically does this totally different set of things on the internet it's the inverse of the internet um so what is it good for um and i think the failing that most people have had is they look at it and they say oh it's bad at all of these

things instead of saying like what is it good for and so it reminds me a little bit of like um uh the iphone launch like i was i was actually really fortunate i slept outside musconi to be able to get into that iphone launch and i watched steve jobs like launch the iphone it was just a sick just like an unbelievable it was a master class and like how you do a product launch it was unbelievable um but the the the thing that i remember afterwards was like i went back to work and i tried to like explain to people this thing that had just happened um and i couldn't i just totally failed to explain it. The criticisms were like, hey, because BlackBerry was so dominant at the time, the criticisms were like, oh, it doesn't have a keyboard. It doesn't let me do this. The

screen is really small, or the internet connection is slow, or there's no apps. There are all these criticisms. What people totally missed were like, oh, well, it has a GPS on the device and has a pretty good camera. The touchscreen lets you just do totally different things. I think if you look at the blockchain and crypto universe, the question is, what is all this stuff really good for like where does privacy matter where is it okay if things don't happen in like 30 milliseconds if it takes a couple of minutes like where is that okay and it turns out anything that deals with money those are actually very reasonable trade-offs to make like you don't need to get a loan in like 30 milliseconds especially if like you think about how you get a loan today from the

bank um it might take you 30 days it might take you 60 days so actually like 30 minutes to get alone or three minutes to get alone, it's still way better. It's orders of magnitude better than 30 days. And so what you have is this like technology that's just good at a totally different set of stuff than the internet and a massive market, which has everything to do with money that the technology is just a perfect fit for. And so to us, that's like, that's where all this starts. And so that's, you know, like our understanding of Bitcoin and our understanding of Ethereum really came kind of more like bottoms up. And then we sort of like learned about the economic side of it. And we're like, oh, this is kind of like digital gold. But to us, it's like

the technology that's always been the interesting wedge. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit just about kind of decentralization in general. I think that this is probably one of the underlying themes across a lot of what you guys are doing and really just the industry in general. And so there's kind of a couple of schools of thought. One is, hey, Bitcoin is the king. Bitcoin will remain the king and everything will be built on top of Bitcoin. There's another school of thought that is we're going to take all of the ethos of Bitcoin around decentralization and consensus, and we're going to go apply it in a million different ways with all sorts of different technology and go touch every other industry. Then there's a hybrid, which is like, well, Bitcoin is going to be

really important, and that's likely to be the winner in the digital currency space. Then there's a bunch of other stuff, but they don't necessarily compete with Bitcoin. My guess is that you're in the third bucket, but one, I want to make sure that that's true, and then just explain everything else other than Bitcoin as you're thinking through decentralization to the protocols? Yeah, we're absolutely in that third bucket. Bitcoin is the biggest and most important protocol today. It will be one of the biggest and most important things in this entire space. It's the gateway drug for a lot of people. It's how you get into the space is you get your head around Bitcoin. Then once you start getting your head around Bitcoin, you start realizing that

there are certain things that Bitcoin is phenomenal for and great for. Then actually, if you just tweak the consideration set a little bit or the constraints a little bit, you might be able to do more. Something as simple as like, yes, technically, there's Bitcoin script and it's programmable, not quite the way that other platforms are, but wouldn't it be great if it were much easier for developers to come in and write these smart contracts? That very naturally starts to lead you to something like Ethereum. Or hey, wouldn't it be great if actually you could tweak some of the parameters and make it much, much better for micropayments. ETH has some challenges around gas fees, and that might lead you to something

like Mobilecoin, which is really optimized for payment flows. And so you can start, I think Bitcoin is really, really important, but we think that there's going to be many, many thousands of tokens, there are going to be many, many thousands of protocols, And they're going to all sort of interop with each other. And we're going to essentially recreate a lot of, in our opinion, what the internet was supposed to be. But it'll take 20 to 30 years. Like, I think we're like in the first, first ending of this. So I'm happy to talk about that.

I mean, I think that the sort of natural one that we spend a lot of time on these days is essentially the smart contract universe. I think one of the most fundamental things here that most people, even people in the space, including ourselves, I think, have not really fully internalized is what it means for computers to be able to own money. If you start from this place of Bitcoin is money, the bits themselves are the value, that's a crazy concept. It's a bearer instrument. That means, unlike your bank account, when you go to your bank, that's a representation

of money. You log in, and then you got to go to the bank. It's really an IOU from the bank, which is really funny because then that's an IOU from the government. Bitcoin is different because you own the bits. If you own the bits, you own the money. The way that you assert ownership over the bits is with a private key, which is just another set of bits.

And so very quickly you realize, well, doesn't that mean that like a piece of code can create a wallet and, and have its own private key. And it never tells me what the private key is. And then I could send money into the wallet. And actually now that piece of code essentially custodies the money. It owns the money. Um, and that's a pretty fundamental breakthrough because what that means is that computers can be counterparties to humans and there doesn't need to be a human on the other side.

Or what it means is that actually computers like machines can pay machines. And so once you start playing that out, you're like, wait. So that means like you could do really crazy stuff eventually things like you have a self driving car driving down the street and enough of them line up and they like all decide to pay the stoplight to turn green. And so you can do like microtransactions and actually now like all the lights in the city would turn, um, green kind of at the right, you know, at the right times. And you're like, your traffic would flow more swiftly.

And actually you'd be gathering taxes exactly for the streets where there's the most usage, right? Like that kind of stuff that you're like, Oh, that could actually now happen. And there need to be no humans in the loop. Like you just, the way you go to the gas station, maybe you like plugging your car to charge and like using your mobile app, you like fill up the wallet on your car's, um, wallet. Right. Um, that kind of crazy stuff can, can start to happen.

Um, but in the short term, um, you start saying, well, you know, what are these things really good for? And in our opinion, um, going back to this idea of like money, um, smart contracts are, are this really interesting thing because what they do is they take like a quadrillion dollars of stuff that's happening in the world and allow you to express it in code. And so if you think about anything that has to do with money, right, a will or a trust or an escrow or a mortgage or a security or a derivative, like literally a quadrillion dollars of the world is here's a pile of money. And here's a bunch of rules around that money. Like, you know, Anthony has access to it. Avicil doesn't. But like in six months, Avicil has access to it and Anthony doesn't. So like in some future time horizon, like, please execute these instructions.

And today we just do that with like spreadsheets and legal documents and email. And like, that's actually how all of that stuff works today. And so along comes something like Ethereum, which is just like, well, I can own the money and now you can just write those instructions out in code. And it's deterministic. Like I can tell you exactly what the code is going to do and there's no way to change it. And that's, that's literally the one thing that computers are better than humans at is

like deterministically executing instructions. So to us, it's just like, you know, literally a quadrillion dollars of stuff is going to get eaten up by these kinds of, uh, of tools, um, how it happens and stuff. You know, I think it's going to take a decade to play out. We're still in the really early days. I mean, we very well, you know, using a Facebook analogy, we very well may be in the, like my space era of this, where we kind of are starting to see that this is possible, but actually like, we haven't realized how it's going to go mainstream yet.

Um, or maybe if you're in this Facebook, we don't, we'll know in 10 years. But, you know, I think I think we haven't yet really figured out how this stuff is going to change everybody's lives. And I think it's going to change everybody's lives. I think it's going to touch seven billion people. So I completely agree with you. How do you think about like, let's just take smart contract platforms in general. Right. So I think Ethereum is by far the leader there. There's a bunch of people working on bringing smart contract functionality to Bitcoin. But then there's also, you know, a gazillion other, it seems, smart contract platforms that are popping up that really, you know, Ethereum killers competition. however you want to kind of label them. But how do you think about this? Is it a

one smart contract platform to rule them all? Is there coexistence? Is it literally every protocol will have to have smart contract compatibility? And so it's less about like, which one is the smart contract platform? And it's just like, at what point does a protocol add that functionality? Just like, how do you think about that among the different protocols? Yeah, I think it's a really good question. And it's a tough question. And there's a different question there's like a slightly there's two different questions there there's the question of like what happens in the world uh and what do you think is going to happen in the world and then there's the like investor variant of that question which is like okay well then how do you construct

a portfolio you know to minimize your downside but maximize your upside and you might do something slightly different like you might be really convinced that ethereum is going to win but as a as a you know that might be like a 90 chance you're like okay i just think ethereum is going to win but as an investor you might still take a bunch of positions into things you know to just in case, right? From a return perspective, it might still make sense to do that. So to that first question, I think the way it's going to likely play out is it's going to be winner takes most because the network effects are real. Developer network effects, integration network effects, fiat on-ramps and off-ramps, regulatory network effects. These are all things that are

moats around a layer one protocol. And Ethereum far and away has the lead there, but it's still very early days. And then I think you'll get number two, number three, number four. And Depending on how you think about it as an investor, that could still be a fantastic opportunity. If you look at social networking, which is another network effect-driven business, Facebook was obviously the big winner, but LinkedIn did fantastically. Twitter is really important. TikTok is really important.

Snap is really important. If the market size is large enough, it's multiple billions of people, then odds are you can have second and third and fourth place winners that are still really, really massive. And so I don't think it's winner take all. I think it's winner take most. But actually, we're in such early days here that actually, from an investor perspective, kind of having a few different bets, you'll probably still do really well if you pick well.

And then each of those networks will specialize in the same way that media companies or social media companies or other network effect things do. And so you might get one thing that's sort of the money chain, which might be like ETH. You might get something that's much better for NFTs because scalability is such a challenge and gas fees are so high that it crowds out a lot of non-fungible token use cases. And so maybe that just moves somewhere else. And so I think it's TBD who wins and how they win. But I think that my best guess is that's how it will be, is winner take most and then specialized

chains for different use cases that are optimized to meet the needs of that sort of crowd of people. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense. And the beauty of it is the market will ultimately decide, but I think that that's a pretty rational view of the world. Let's flip around. You talked a lot about kind of the technology infrastructure and kind of how that plays out and really where investors are thinking about capital and returns. But how does this look for users in terms of how does the crypto infrastructure kind of change the products and services and goods that we interact

with on a daily basis? I think people understand the argument for Bitcoin as money and that not being kind of fiat or kind of in the traditional technology format. But what else? Like, how do you think about the actual everyday life of a person somewhere in the world changing because of this crypto infrastructure? Yeah, I think it's going to be kind of like the phone in a sense, which is to say that it's going to change everything, but you will stop thinking about it as a separate thing. So like there was a time when people were doing mobile apps, where like investors would see pitch decks or founders would go in and pitch and be like, we're a mobile app company, right? And here's what we do. And like, if you did that today,

your investors would just be like, well, like, of course you are like, what else would you be? Right? Like, of course you're a mobile company. Right. And so I think that will, that's kind of how it will happen. So the question is like, what are the use cases where people are going to use these things? And they won't even realize that it's behind the scenes. Right. And then one day, five or 10 years from now, like every company will just have this and it'll just make sense to use these primitives. Then you won't even call them crypto companies. It'll just be that's just like an app or that's just a company. A really concrete example would be like Facebook is doing this, what used to be called Libra is now called Diem, which is the idea that you could have this

way to move money really, really quickly between people all over the world. Of course, that makes sense inside something like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp and in a lot of other use cases. Like Shopify is part of that network and then try to make that happen. They have all sorts of challenges. But you can imagine if they launched that, like, all of a sudden, a billion people would be moving money around the world using crypto infrastructure, because that's actually a better way to do this stuff. It's actually like the 2020s computer science version of how do I move money around the world, instead of like 1970s infrastructure, which is kind of how we do it today. And so I think that's how it plays out. Or like another good way, this is, I think, going to

play out is like through the creator economy, like creators are, you know, musicians and artists, and you know, all these people that are just so creative about how they're using media. And they're, they're, you're already seeing, starting to see it happen, right? Like, what does it, what does it mean for a musician to like make music, but retain the rights to that music, right? Is there a way for them to essentially have like the rights be digital and be guaranteed that they own them, but perhaps be able to resell them? Or what does it mean for a creator to be able to like raise money, right?

So creators are really interesting. Creators are like the new small business. Like 15 years ago, if you were a SaaS business and you went to a bank and you're like, Hey, look, we have really good ARR. Will you lend us money? The banks were like, no, I don't. That's not a that's like not a physical asset. How do I lend against that? They didn't understand this concept of recurring revenue. How do you do that as like a YouTube creator or TikTok creator today? Can you go to a bank and be like, hey, I have 18 million fans or followers. Like, please lend me money so I can like hire staff and make better content and like monetize better. Like no bank

is going to give you money. Right. Because they don't understand that asset. But your fans might. right and so maybe what you can do is like issue a token and your fans will all buy that token um and if you're if they find you when you're when you're just starting out and there's a limited number of tokens and those tokens give you benefits like you get to be a part of a an invite-only fan club like maybe those tokens appreciate in value over time um and so when that when that creator is really popular then those tokens are worth a lot of money um and so you know that you get and creators are playing with this kind of stuff today right it becomes for the creator like a financing mechanism and for the fans a way to like support the people that

they create care about but also potentially participate in the like financial upside of identifying people so you can become like a talent scout that's totally going to happen um and it very well what will happen on crypto infrastructure it's just like people may not realize that that's what they're doing behind the scenes right so i think that's that's kind of how it plays out is like five over the next five years there will just be some killer use cases um and and the average person won't even realize that what they're using is crypto and so those killer use cases i think i separated into two buckets, right? One is like, hey, Amazon already has gift cards. And so that's a version of a quote unquote token. It's got a different technology form factor, but it unlocks

certain types of behavior and certain value for that ecosystem. The other would be something like, hey, Uber wouldn't have been possible without mobile phones with GPS in it. And therefore, there was a technology leap. And then that unlocked a whole bunch of services, not just Uber, but many like it that use that GPS functionality. And so it almost sounds like you're basically making the argument like both will happen right it's not a binary world like some of it is just taking existing things in the world and now using tokens and protocols and smart contracts to now put them in this new technology form factor but also because there is innovation around the technology that we can unlock brand new use cases uh and brand new things in the world that we

haven't seen before because of that technology leap yeah that's right and and i think um you know there there's like a couple of different ways to look at that so um the historical analog is like if you go back i went back and um read a bunch of articles from like the early 90s when the internet was just getting off the ground and it's they're hilarious i totally if anybody is like uh like a student of history you should totally go back and read these articles because like you see them trying to explain this new thing the internet and they're just like to to now to us it's just like so obvious but they're just struggling and so you have these like hilarious videos and stuff of people trying to explain the internet and and the prevailing wisdom at one

point was once people got their head around the idea that the internet was like the information superhighway, the natural conclusion was, oh, well, of course, this is going to be great for CNN and the New York Times. They're going to be just huge businesses. Walmart is totally going to be able to sell stuff online and be an even bigger company. In retrospect, you're like, oh, that was totally wrong. The real winners were Facebook and YouTube and TikTok and Twitter and Amazon. It was not, you know, the, the incumbents. Um, and, and the reason is that, um, like adopting this technology natively and using it natively, um, requires you to change the human organization around the technology. Right. So like at Amazon, the people that make all the decisions

are the engineers, not the brand managers. It's not the guy who has the relationship with Procter and Gamble that gets to make the call. Um, and so the, the question in crypto land is, yeah, all of this stuff gets baked into existing companies, Shopify and Facebook and whatever else. But what does a crypto native organization look like? And what use cases does that infrastructure unlock that you just couldn't do before? Because if you play that forward, Amazon was sort of an obvious one, in the sense that you could see e-commerce was going to happen. But a lot of the really biggest businesses that came out of the internet were the things that were really counterintuitive. They just didn't make sense at the time. It's hard to imagine now,

but like Facebook, Facebook and Airbnb and Uber just like made no sense at the time. They actually, you know, like they're basically the biggest business on the internet or like basically all of the things you're not supposed to do, right? Like you're not supposed to talk to strangers. You like, shouldn't get into a stranger's car. You feel like shouldn't go to a stranger's house. Like really, you're going to take everything about your life, like where you live and who you are and who you're married to and like what your kids look like and put it into a

public database where anybody can find you. Like, these are all the things you're not supposed to do. And they're like the biggest businesses. Right. Um, so the question I sort of think through is like, what is the wave of stuff where it's going to look really obvious in hindsight, but in the moment you're like, that looks batshit. Like, why would anybody do that?

Um, and that's really hard, but I think those are going to be actually the really big thing. So there's like this set of obvious stuff that we just talked about, like, you know, mobile payments. Um, but I think there's going to be just be some really, really wild stuff that I don't think we've like fully scratched the surface up, um, that that's going to start to happen. And the other thing that is important to realize is like, that takes time, you know, like we didn't we didn't start to see the counterintuitive stuff on the internet in some sense really start to hit until like 15 years later right like the internet really started let's say 1990 ish um

like the really counterintuitive stuff was like 2005 is like people were ready for it um or like even with the iphone right like the iphone happened and the first version of the apps were like skeuomorphic it was like leather and paper and wood right it's just because like it was touched so we're like oh we're used to like touching wood so we should make it look like wood um or you know have like a GPS. And so we could take like the desktop maps and say like, Oh, okay. I can put a map on a phone. Now we get like ported over. Um, but it literally took like, I think Uber was 2010. And so that means it took about three years of people playing around on the iPhone for people to figure out that like the killer app was not that I could go somewhere, but it was that like

other stuff could come to me. You had to like turn the idea on its head. And that was actually the killer app for GPS. Um, and so like, I think we're, we're still like in the very early days of this exploration. And it might, it very well might take like three to 10 years for us to stumble into a bunch of like really counterintuitive stuff, which just turns on its head, the idea of like any of what, what we think is possible today. And so that's like the really fun stuff. I mean, you know, this too is like a venture investor. It's like the stuff that you like, you walk away from a meeting and you're just like, okay, that was either the stupidest thing I've ever heard, or that was brilliant. And I don't know what, right? Like, I don't know. It could be either

one and I don't know. And that's like the really interesting stuff in my opinion. So one of the things that the venture capital community has figured out is like, sometimes the best investment strategy is like, I'm going to go find the smartest people that are going up to the biggest markets. I'm just going to give them money. And like, why do I think I'm smarter than like, they'll just figure it out. When it comes to crypto and decentralization, is the team or the person less important? Because you're now talking about a decentralized system, they don't have control and kind of

there's all these, you know, new frameworks or paradigms, or actually, is it still the same thing when you think about allocating capital, like you're just looking for really, really smart people going after unique problems or hard problems. And that's kind of a big, um, you know, milestone or thing that you look for when you're actually investing. Yeah. So I think at a high level, I think great question because, um, well, cause I think the real answer is nobody knows yet actually. Right. And we'll find out in 10 years. That being said, I think we tend to think that, that value creation follows great people. And so just like give people who give the best people the most money and they'll do, they'll do great things

with it. Um, that being said, I think the challenge is that the, what, like, how do you define great? Like, what does it mean to be great in crypto versus what does it mean to be great on the internet? And, um, you know, on the internet, you had people like Jeff Bezos or Travis Kalanick or Mark Zuckerberg create just huge amounts of value. Um, and they had a certain archetype. There was a certain profile there. There was a certain set of skills. And I think what's interesting about crypto is that um the skill set is very different um and so you have brilliant people like vitalik um but he operates totally differently from zuck as you know right like um and and there's this sense of like um what is that set of skills that it's actually

going to take to be successful and like a bunch of the people that move over i think from the internet are probably likely to fail even even if they're super successful because it goes back to this idea of like what does it mean to be a crypto native entrepreneur um so it's actually i would say it's probably the hardest part of my job actually it's just like you you meet these really really brilliant people but you're not sure if there's like founder market fit you're like is this the kind of person that can succeed in this market and that's sort of a process that i think all all the investors and all the founders and everybody's kind of trying to figure out is like who are the kinds of people that can really be successful here and why um but i mean i think

you can look at somebody like vitalik and you're like i don't know would he have been successful like going through y combinator maybe um but he's clearly clearly the right type of person to be to be operating crypto network and be sort of, you know, the steward of that. Yeah. Talk a little bit about, uh, conversations with, uh, limited partners or investors in your fund, uh, and how that sentiment has shifted over the years in terms of, uh, 2017, 2018 people sound like they were just like literally throwing money at you. Like, Hey, you solved my problem. I don't understand this. And then kind of how that, uh, maybe went through a trough and then has, uh, has recovered a little bit. Yeah, it's yes. Yeah, it has. Um, and in a funny way, I think for crypto,

COVID was a great catalyst. COVID was tailwind for Netflix and Amazon, but also COVID was great tailwind for Bitcoin, in part because all of these things that Bitcoin people have been saying and crypto people have been saying, like, hey, look, the money printing is just going to get worse. They're not going to dial it down. This is going to get really bad. We don't trust our institutions anymore. There are real problems here. Censorship is a problem. All of these things that crypto people have been saying for years and years, and we all sounded like loonies. All of a sudden, the LPs that had heard these people talking about these things sat up one day and were like, wait, maybe you're right. And that basically happened in March, April. And I think that was a pretty

pivotal moment. But even before that, I think you have to kind of break down institutional investors into what kinds of institutional investors. And there are large family offices or ultra high net worths. There are endowments, there are pension funds, there are sovereign wealth funds. And so there's a spectrum there. And in 2017, the people who were kind of clued into crypto, I would say we're essentially ultra, ultra high net worths, like billionaires and some family offices. And where we've moved, where the dominoes have moved to now is the endowments and a very small number of very forward-thinking pension funds and corporate treasuries, folks

like Square or MicroStrategy. But we're not yet at sovereign wealth funds. We're not yet at central banks. We're not there yet. And so that's where the line is. And I think, um, you know, the conversation, the, the big shift basically has been that every time, like the best way to, in my opinion, to like have LP set up and take note is if the person to their left just made a bunch of money.

And so like what ended up happening in like 2016, 2017 was a bunch of billionaires had some friend or a friend of a friend who was like a, you know, a hundred millionaire. And like that guy became a billionaire. And then they looked over and they're like, wait, that guy's a billionaire. Like, how did that guy become a billionaire? there. They started looking at what he's doing and there was crypto in the mix. All those people started to buy in. When those people started to buy in, the really large family offices started to look over. Then once the really large family offices started to look over, endowments and

pensions started to look over. You have this domino effect. At this point, we're far enough along that the rest of the dominoes are clearly going to fall. The other thing I'll say is I think one of the big learnings for us too is even inside every group of LPs, there are some people that are just way more rational about it than others. And so I've been really impressed to the degree to which there are these like really smart, ultra rational investors. And when you meet them, how quickly they get it.

And like the three things that those guys are all into now that all those people are into, these like hyper rational, smart institutional folks and they get is crypto, marijuana and e-sports. It's like really interesting. Like they get those things in a way that like a lot of other institutional investors don't um and so you know if um if we were if we were talking to the lps like three or four years

ago i think we looked like crazy people and like today you have the same conversation and people like oh man like you guys are you have like seen the future it's like pretty dramatic how quickly it changed too i i always laugh and say you can go talk to like any kid between ages like maybe i don't know 15 and 25 and be like hey our electric vehicle is going to be a thing like of course every car is going to be electric like hey is you know digital money going to be a thing like of course like what are you talking about you know is esports going to be a thing of course and so there's this element of like uh when i talk to much institutional investors a lot of them will literally reference like my kid is all into this right and like it's driving them they

hear them talking about it and for whatever reason they have this inclination like my kid's probably right my kid knows nothing about investing but like my kid's probably right uh and so i do think that that has a big impact though right that's yeah it's hilarious yeah i mean that's that's a fantastic investment thesis. You should just like do what the young people are doing. If you just like bet long on that, you'll probably, you'll probably do the right thing because all these things are going to happen. And you're totally right. The other thing that I keep, uh, keep going back to as well is, uh, I've been fortunate enough as I'm sure you have as well, uh, to talk to some of the most successful investors in the world. Um, and most of these folks are considered

the most successful because not only have they had great returns, but they've been doing for a very long period of time. And so just naturally with experience comes age, right? And so they, they end up being in their 50s 60s sometimes even older and in almost every single situation they have somebody who is younger than them that has gotten them in right so whether it is their child a friend you know whatever it is and so it's always fascinating to see that uh in those conversations they'll say something like oh you know my kid's been like every single time i see him like he's always just pounding away at me about this stuff but then all of a sudden they see market prices move and they say wait a second like maybe i should spend more time here or maybe

actually this is the right kind of thesis. And so how do you think that that plays out not only from a Bitcoin standpoint, because everyone's paying attention to Bitcoin, CNBC, all the media organizations pay attention to the Bitcoin price, but what about everything else, right? When everything else starts to kind of move up, does that further unlock even more capital than just the Bitcoin price? Or do you think institutions yet aren't paying attention to like the things outside of Bitcoin necessarily? And so we still got some way to go until they start to really understand the rest of it. Yeah, it's very early days for anything that's not Bitcoin. When we talk to institutions, I would say the most forward-thinking ones look at Ethereum

and they think it's going to be a thing, kind of the way they thought Bitcoin was probably going to be a thing in the 2017 move, and they have not yet made the decision to move into it, where we've had lots of conversations with institutions that are trying to figure out how to own Bitcoin directly. Whether or not they've actually pulled the trigger, they're at that point now. The investment committees are OK with it. but nobody, no, very, very, very few people are there with Ethereum. And that's just Ethereum. That's not even trying to touch on like DeFi or any other alternative tokens or, you know,

thinking about things beyond Ethereum. So it's still very, very early days when it comes to like institutions coming into the space. And, and, and to your point, yeah, a lot of the times there is usually one person and they almost, I would say 90% of the time, not always, but like 90% of the time they tend to see you younger. It's kind of like that, that saying, it's like um things that are created when you're like 65 don't make sense uh and are like unnatural things that are created when you're 35 are uh you know innovative and things that are you know created when you're five are just like the natural order of the thing and you have the world um to your point earlier right so like um for like a 15 year old today like all this stuff is just like how the

world is going to be um but yeah i think most institutions are not quite there yet i mean i think the other thing that that's worth noting here is like um they're not irrational right like these are really smart people and part of what happens behind the scenes is like how these decisions get made and so like i think like i didn't know this before i became an investor is like the process by which an institution decides to make an investment decision a is a pretty heavy lift the bigger the organization the heavier the lift but also b is really hard to unwind and so you got to get the entire organization there. Um, and there's a lot of like, um, principal agent risk mixed in, which is, you know, like, or am I going to be the person that puts my neck out

to do this? And like, why am I going to do that inside this organization? And so you either have to have people who really, really, really believe, um, or there has to be some sort of catalyst. And this is where I think like COVID really changed a lot. Like everybody sort of realized that if we're going to a zero interest rate world in, in USD dollars, like USD denominated world, like the Euro is already there. Then if you have like yield targets, if you're trying to make 7% a year, like how are you going to do that? And so all of a sudden people are open to the idea because kind of they have to be. And so I think it's inevitable, but yeah, it's still very early days for anything that's not Bitcoin. Is there anything that you think maybe is getting tons

of attention and a lot of people are flocking with individual like intellectual capital or financial capital that maybe you're not as bullish on or something that you think that, you know, might not actually be sustainable yeah well i think these things all go through like a hype cycle and i think hype cycles are actually really important like i think a lot of people think hype cycles are a bad thing but i think they're necessary it's just like you have to get the hype cycle because the over investment is what allows you to invest in the stuff that needs to like go mainstream or cross the chasm and if you don't get the over investment the thing is never going to accrue enough capital or enough attention or enough people to like really make sense um and

you see that there's like this, this whole, like, if anybody wants to go read Carlotta Perez, there's like a whole economic theory around like why you need bubbles basically. Um, and it's an important part of like innovation. Um, and, and the thing that I think might be in a little bit of a, of a hype cycle right now is essentially decentralized infrastructure. Um, and in part, it's, I think, you know, the, the people who are forward thinking developers have experienced this themselves, like developers have been experiencing this pain of like, Oh, I used to build on Twitter and then Twitter shut down the API on me, or I used to build on Facebook and then Facebook shut down the API on me and kill my business. Or we just saw this last week, right? Setting aside

the politics of it all, it doesn't matter what you think of Parler. The fact that Amazon can just shut that thing off and Apple and Google can just kick it out from the app store, all of a sudden, I think the world woke up and said, wait a second, five companies control whether or not you exist. And if they decide to take you out from the internet, you don't exist. And developers have been feeling that pain for a long time. And so now everybody, I think, is starting to understand that the pain is acute. I kind of, I kind of liken it to the Bear Stearns moment in 2008, where like, if you were paying attention, Bear Stearns was a really big deal. Um, but the Lehman moment was like a year later. And so I think we're now building up to this, like bigger

and bigger stuff is going to happen. And the world is waking up to the idea that literally, you know, five to 10 companies control whether or not you exist on the internet and the internet is like your life. Um, and so all of that is now a problem statement, but I don't think the technology is quite where it needs to be to actually solve the problem yet. It's getting there, but it's not quite there yet. And so I suspect what's going to happen is those things are maybe where DeFi was in like 2015, where a lot of really smart people are going to pour a lot of energy into it, which is great, but it's not going to quite work the way that we need it to work yet. And then there will be sort of a hype cycle around that and probably flames out. And then on the other side

of that is where this stuff really starts to work. But I suspect that's like, you know, three, four, five years out. I don't think it's like in the next 12 months, all of a sudden you can just go truly decent like you can't i think it's gonna be hard to build like a truly decentralized twitter that just works in the next 12 months yeah and it feels like we're now getting to the point where technologists understand like centralization is a risk but maybe the users don't yet and so uh i keep talking about like the develop it's the developer's responsibility to build decentralized systems because the users don't care but at some point in the future users will care right it's kind of like encryption like now users do care about encryption but uh maybe 10 years ago like

that wasn't as big of a deal and so if you wanted to protect your users you put encryption in but they weren't necessarily demanding it it just feels like that like we're getting pulled in that direction um what's kind of your thought process around like the regulatory response to all this so like you know you and i sit down and we're super bullish and we get really excited and we're like oh my god bitcoin's gonna like you know have this great ascent uh there's gonna be all these decentralized systems like you know the internet is the the king um and there's a lot of regulators who are like okay crazy guys like chill out uh that world's never gonna happen right like we don't want that to happen um it's like who wins essentially right or is it actually there's

coexistence like maybe there isn't such a competition it is literally just coexistence like how do you think through that yeah it's a really great question i spent a lot of time thinking about this and and have spent actually a fair amount of time talking to um to regulators and policy folks and and um and people in the intelligence community as well um and law enforcement and and i think um you know if you have to sort of think through it i think game theoretically, which is like, who are the actors and what are their incentives? And what does that mean? And I think if there were only two actors in the mix, if it was just like the U S government and, and the crypto people, it would probably play out sort of straightforwardly, which is like,

Hey, we don't really like this. Like, you know, maybe we'll shut it down, but there's a third actor in the mix here, which is the Chinese government. And I think the Chinese government actually is the like hyper rational, like amazing. I mean, like they're so impressive in how they manage to use technology. Again, setting aside what you think they do with the technology, just their ability to use technology, they're the best government in the world at this. What are they doing? Well, what the Chinese government has done is they basically said, you know what? We're going to let the supply chain for Bitcoin exist here. Yeah, make the ASICs. That's great. Run them here. Run your mining pools here. That's awesome. We love that.

But you know what? We don't really love people buying a lot of this stuff. We're going to make sure that that's pretty much under our control. They hit this perfect sweet spot where they have influence over this stuff. They're building capacity. President Xi said, we're going to invest a bunch in blockchain infrastructure. We're going to subsidize that. We have the blockchain network happening. They're investing in their DCEP system, their digital currency electronic payment system, which is a blockchain-based central bank digital currency. Then they're going to take that, which now lets them have truly digital cash, and they're going to push it through the Belt and Road. They're investing trillions of dollars for these strategic initiatives in developing markets

all the way from Singapore to Sri Lanka to East Africa into the Gulf and into Europe. They're just going to push it through there. All of a sudden, if you're doing any kind of international trade, if you're doing any kind of goods transfers, if you're doing any financial transactions, all of a sudden, you have this way better system now. It's not like the old school 1970s Fedwire system that takes weeks for your cash to show up where you need because it has to go through three hops and three different people need to settle along the way. It's instant. and that's pretty compelling. If you're trying to do business, that's pretty compelling. If your largest trading partner says, hey, why don't we use this platform? That's even more compelling.

That's what's happening. That's the third actor is now the Chinese government could actually become the platform on which international trade is settled. If you're the US government, that is actually a much bigger challenge than crypto. If I'm the US government, if I'm treasury, if I'm FinCEN, if I'm the CIA, anybody in government actually needs to be thinking about how do we operate in a world where today, one of the best tools for US national security is the fact that the US dollar is the reserve currency of the world. And if that gets weakened, and there's an entire system that allows countries to circumvent that, what does that mean for us? And that is a pretty existential threat. So you say, OK, well, that's a given. That's happening.

that's not like crypto you know paranoia like literally you can just go read like that's literally the chinese government is very transparent about this um and so if that's what's happening what do you do if you're the government if you're the u.s government and you kind of have two options you can either try to like compete with them head-on um and if you try to do that i think you fail like healthcare.gov you know the history of the u.s government writing technology in like the last 20 years is not good so they're going to try and they should like you should modernize these modernize these systems but you're already seven years behind and you don't have a great track record so i don't think you win if you do that but how do you win if you're a startup

person like you immediately start thinking about like startup 101 is just like what is the judo move here like what is the thing that you can do that the other person just can't do structurally right so like snap won um in large part because they just did the opposite of facebook like you opened up the phone, and it was a camera instead of a feed. There was no permanent identity. It was all ephemeral, and Facebook is entirely about permanent identity. It's just like they did the opposite of Facebook in so many ways, and that's why Facebook had such a hard time with it. What do you need to do if you're the US government? I would argue you actually need to embrace crypto, because crypto is the one thing that the Chinese government will not do. They don't want capital

to leave China and not be in their control. They don't want to give away privacy. Crypto is about privacy and self-sufficiency and censorship resistance. All of the things that make crypto work are all of the things that the Chinese government doesn't want to do. I think if you're the US government, you double down on crypto, actually. You really embrace it and you say, this is actually our offensive tool. We're going to do all the stuff we need to do to upgrade our infrastructure and try to compete, but let's actually embrace US-backed stablecoins. Let's get USDC and Celo dollars and Libra or DM dollars or whatever. Let's just get that everywhere. Let's get that into the developing world because that's reinforcing the network effect of the US dollar.

Let's actually embrace Bitcoin. Let's actually make sure that all the crypto innovation that's happening happens in American companies and happens in American banks and happens onshore, basically, instead of pushing it out to regions of the world where other governments have more influence. It's maybe a little counterintuitive on the surface, but I actually think the game theory optimal move for the US government is to double down on crypto and really embrace it because that's actually how you can have a shot against competing against the Chinese government, without which I think you're really going to struggle with the US government. And I think, at least in my conversations, I think there are enough people in government that actually get

that. So there's actually a contingent of people inside the US government across all of these different groups that get that and are trying to make that case right now. I could not agree more. I think that the whole idea of what the government's going to ban is the exact kind of intuitiveness that ends up not coming to fruition. And it's the counterintuitive move of, no, the first countries to embrace this actually win. And although the United States is very good at sometimes getting in its way, I do think that that is where we're going to end up. And you're alluding to everything from there's congressmen, there's senators, there's people up and down the U.S. government that I think are kind of starting to wake up to this. And as somebody said to me

in a very blunt way. They said, look, all old people die eventually and they're replaced by younger people. And so the odds that a president in the future is a Bitcoiner or a crypto person is like very high. And that's just maybe 20 years from now. But like that happens at some point. Right. It's just naturally, if you grew up like there's people who now are assuming positions of power and influence in the government that grew up with a cell phone in their hand. Right. And they're just starting. And so 20 years from now, like almost everyone will be that way. So it's pretty interesting. Before we get into the rapid fire questions to wrap up, what is kind of your sweet spot from an investment standpoint? So for founders or people who are building in the crypto ecosystem, what kind of what are you looking for, both from a thematic standpoint and also from like a stage of the company or the project?

Yeah, we're seed and series A investors. We'll do tokens, we'll do crypto networks, we'll do hybrid, we'll do equity. so we're trying to do everything but our sweet spot is like you know a couple people and an idea um and and maybe a prototype uh because we're builders and we kind of know how to take we've seen a lot of companies inside crypto and outside um go from from nothing to something to you know a couple billion dollars to an ipo like we've seen that whole life cycle um and so in the earliest stages where we can be the most helpful and that's where we add the most value so that's where we focus um in terms of sectors and stuff it goes back to kind of what we're talking about before, like there's a bunch of stuff that we have conviction on things like, you know, DeFi

and decentralized infrastructure, frankly, we think it will happen. But the stuff that gets us really excited is like, when you meet with a founder and you walk out of the meeting saying, well, I went into the meeting believing X, and I walked out of the meeting believing not X, like that person actually turned upside down. Like what I think about the world. That's the kind of person that you, you just bet on. You're just like, okay, like I had some long held belief about the world. And you actually changed that. Um, you found something, you figured out something that's true about the world that most people think is not true. Um, and when you find somebody like that, you're just like, okay, take all my money. Uh, and that doesn't

happen that often, but those are the people that like, we love working with. It's just like, you find one of those people and you're just like, cool, take all my money. I love it. That is a fantastic thesis. Uh, all right. I got three questions for you. And then you'll get to ask me when to finish up the first is what's the most important book you've ever read. Oh, we did this before. It's still the Bible. Second question is a new one. What is your sleep routine?

Our friends over at Eight Sleep have officially sponsored this question now because they know I'm a big sleep nut and I try to get at least eight, if not nine hours a night. What would you say is your sleep routine? I would say my sleep routine is terrible. I don't have one. We have a little baby and so I don't get it. I don't get it. My sleep routine is terrible.

I wish I had a routine. how old is the baby? Uh, he's eight months old now. So he's starting to settle in. Okay. So, so here's the, uh, the three answers that I get. One is I work too much. Two is, uh, I'm religious about my sleep and I already have an eight sleep and it's amazing. Uh, or three is I have a young child. And whenever somebody says I have a young child, it's immediately known just like there is no sleep schedule. It's horrible. You're lucky that I showed up here and like showered before I came. Yeah, no, it's, it's, uh, it's hard, but it's, it's wonderful in all sorts of other ways. a plus plus like would recommend everybody should have children it's great uh last question is uh

aliens are you still believing are we do we have any change of opinion uh from a galactic federation or whatever other crazy ufo stuff that's uh starting to come out i'm still a believer i don't know have you been tracking like the david favor stuff with like tic tac and and gimbal and all that stuff and then uh that mama which was like the harvard guys convinced it was the spaceship you've been tracking all this yes i'm people naturally send me everything uh and so all all the things you just mentioned yes the one that i recently saw that i have not looked at yet is uh i guess rogan had some guy on who claims that he might have been abducted by a ufo or something oh really and supposedly from what i gleaned again i didn't listen yet but what i saw

online was uh he and his friends went into the woods there was this big white light something happened he basically blacked out he came to many days later his friends ran away they've all taken polygraph tests like multiple times throughout the years and they all have the exact same story they all pass the polygraphs every time uh and so like i'll have to listen to kind of all the details but like you know if that stuff starts to happen where it's like you know same story for 20 years polygraphs are passed like i don't know man it's uh you you start to wonder you know what's really going on have you um have you heard of uh you know the betty and and uh barney hill abduction from the 1960s it's like 1964 or something it's like a really famous one yeah

so it's um it was like the first modern uh ufo abduction that kind of like went into the press and so it's like the first modern one but it turns out um that guy's granddaughter is an mma fighter um and so she's like just a super interesting person so if you want to guess to like talk about like alien stuff but also it's just like a super interesting person she's like a legit mma fighter too be like my grandfather got abducted by aliens and now i beat people up in the ring it's super interesting because i just saw her tweeting about it um a couple days ago and she i think she's going to do like some she's she's going to talk about her grandparents or something and all the stories that they told her about this stuff that's okay i'll definitely go check that

out uh you could ask me one question to finish up what you got for me uh what are you most looking forward to in 2021 getting back to and i'll put in air quotes normal like just you know kind of getting vaccines done masks open up the businesses just just get back to the closest semblance we possibly can of normal you know you know many people will debate like i don't know if we ever lived in a normal world so like are we you know where are we going back to uh but but just i think a lot of the the additional obstacles and hardships that people are facing like just get over that stuff yeah that'll be nice to get back to normal whatever that is now the new normal for sure where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about electric yeah just uh follow

me on twitter at avicil um electric's pretty easy to find or just electriccapital.com awesome man well listen thank you so much for doing this i'll see you again in the future yeah look forward