The Pomp Podcast - #490: Simon Chamorro on Crypto in the Developing World

Episode Date: February 11, 2021

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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. Simon Chamorro is the co-founder and CEO of Value, which is making cross-border payments much more effective for millions of people. I was so impressed with Simon and his team's plans that I became an investor in the company. In this conversation, we discussed the legacy payment systems in South America, Value's solution, why Bitcoin is so important in emerging markets, hyperinflation, oppressive governments, and crypto's future. I really enjoyed this conversation with Simon, and I think you will as well. Before we get into this episode,

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Hammer the over and improve your odds of doubling your money. That's promo code POMP for a limited time only at DraftKings Sportsbook. You got to be 21 or older, New Jersey, Indiana, Michigan, and Virginia only. Restrictions apply. See DraftKings.com slash Sportsbook for details. If you've got a gambling problem, go to 1-800-GAMBLER and give them a call. All right, let's get into this episode with Simon. 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. Got a very special guest today. I've got Simon here with me. Thank you so much for doing this, sir. Thank you, Paul. Super excited to be here. For sure. Let's just jump right into your

background. You've got a very unique perspective on the world. So kind of help everyone understand where did you grow up and then kind of what have you done over the years before you started Value? Of course. So I guess I can start by saying that I am a migrant. Right now, I live in Colombia, but I was born in Venezuela. And due to the economic collapse and hyperinflation in the country, I decided to migrate from a very early age. You know, everything that Venezuelans, families and my family built uh was lost and so for me the solution of crypto um and what it brings to the table is something personal um i migrated to spain uh to play soccer from a very early age i played for real madrid um and then i did industrial design in the united states so that

was my second migration and in 2014 i fell down the crypto rabbit hole um essentially right after i graduated from from from college um i found about ethereum then quickly i found about crypto and then i started figuring out what what i wanted to do with cryptocurrencies in latin america especially in venezuela because of the potential impact uh to solve hyperinflation solve these problems um and now i'm living in colombia so that's a little bit about me in general i i love building companies and getting a lot of people together to solve large problems so i think crypto falls into that category talk a little bit just about as a kid uh the hyperinflation and kind of the collapse of the the venezuelan um society and government uh kind of what was your experience

there and any specific stories that kind of stand out to you to really highlight this for folks? Sure. I guess I can, you know, tell you a little bit of an analogy. You know, when we were growing up, the government multiple times because of this hyperinflation, which means everything was just getting more expensive. You know, you guys in the United States are experiencing a little bit of that right now. It's really hard to know what's the inflation rate because the Federal Reserve potentially won't release the real numbers. But everybody tells me that life is just getting way more expensive in the US. So if you're holding your currency in the local fiat, in the local currency issued by the government, then you're just becoming poorer, cash poor. In Venezuela,

that became hyperinflation, which means that money loses value at a ridiculous rate. In January, for example, we had 1,000%- January of 2021, we had 1,000% hyperinflation. If we look at it in past 20 years, we've just had ridiculous numbers of inflation, which means going back to the analogy um when we were growing up um the the government used to take out zeros from the currency because the the number the numbers were just getting super large um so today a dollar an american dollar is worth like uh one billion uh one million bolivars but if we add the zeros that the government has taken out one u.s dollar is about one trillion over over one trillion bolivars so as you can imagine um cash bills couldn't keep up with this uh with this hyper

inflation and now cash is worthless i could literally like burn you know i could take a full paper wall of bills of venezuela and burn them and and i wouldn't care uh and cash is exactly worthless so a lot of people in the crypto space may have seen that people in venezuela use the cash bills to build or to do art or to do like purses, because the purse that you make out of these bills has more value than the actual money. So those are just some of the examples and analogies I can bring to the table. But, you know, growing up in a country like that, where 50% inflation happens in a day, where you go in the morning to buy milk, and then you go out in the afternoon and the milk is twice as expensive, you really become, I guess, financially savvy

on how to survive, right? How to survive in a country like that. And everybody in Venezuela became somewhat financially savvy, you know, from people that are cash poor to rich people. And that just generated as well, my huge migration, I mean, management of the country that is not only monetary, is also from an executive perspective, there's no food, there were food shortages back in the day, mismanagement of the energy systems, so bad internet, and people started migrating, and businesses started to go broke. And now we have, we came from being potentially one of the richest countries in resources in the world, and one of the richest countries in Latin America to the poorest country in Latin America, even poorer than Haiti. So

really, really big, drastic change. Talk a little bit about before Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, what were people doing when you became financially savvy? What were they doing to protect their wealth or their purchasing power? So people were basically buying stuff, buying assets that were not trying to not hold their money in the venezuelan bolivar so um you know back in the day when this was happening people would you know turn into buying real estate or buying um or just spending it in like restaurants or storing a bunch of food um and and then trading this food so uh even barter became something uh you know not a super large of scale, but people started to barter, uh, you know, um, things. Uh, and so, uh, communities got

together, uh, to buy, for example, uh, water for the buildings. Uh, and then you would buy one of those large trucks of water, uh, once like, like to spend all the bolivars as much as you can, and you just hold your money in water, I guess. Um, and so that became the norm, just putting your money in things that were less liquid, I guess, and food and things like that. And some of the other people were starting to buy things like gold. And then when Bitcoin became something, when Bitcoin became more well-known, especially with local Bitcoins, which is a peer-to-peer trading market, college students started to understand it

and grasp the concept of storing your money in Bitcoin. I think that was in 2017, even before the 2017 bubble. And then these students got so excited and these young people got so excited that they started teaching their grandmothers and their grandfathers and their parents about it. Some of them got it, some of them didn't, but the whole country knew about it,

at least understood that there was this alternative digital currency, internet money, medical internet money that people could use to hold their value instead of the local currency. And that's from a very basic perspective. From a more financially savvy perspective, the amount of financial engineering financial loopholes that richer, more educated people could find was ridiculous. Some people,

for example, started asking credits from the banks in the local currency and buying an apartment in Manhattan and then paying that credit in Venezuelan boulevards over 10 years, 15 years, and they would buy an apartment in Manhattan for the equivalent of $1,000 or less. and so you know that's you know that's definitely corruption and in some way but i i have heard of people that did this and that's just an uh uh kind of like something that i wanted to share as you can imagine if that's one thing that you can do in hyperinflationary economy there's so many things you can do to hack the system and to you know get away with that absolutely and so let's talk a little bit about what you're building with value uh i'm an investor in the business i think

that this is a really, really unique type of solution and one that's gaining market adoption. But just talk through kind of the impetus for the idea and kind of what you guys have built so far. Yeah. So one of the things I would like to start with the problem, right? And we are potentially solving hyperinflation and rampant inflation. And even we can potentially save Venezuela. So if value, if everybody in Latin America puts their money into value, we think that we have virtually solved

the largest problem in the region. And value is essentially as a simple dollar account for Latin Americans that allow people to save money in dollars, in crypto dollars, and send remittances or international money transfers between themselves for free at no cost and immediately. So it's just an app, a mobile app, where people can connect their bank or pay with cash in more than 30,000 locations in Colombia. People in Venezuela can connect their banks because Venezuela, because of the hyperinflation, is fully banked. It's a country where even more than the United States,

people have a bank account. So if you're in Venezuela, if you're in Colombia, you can turn your fiat, your Venezuelan bolivars or your Colombian pesos into crypto dollars. You can then send them for free and immediately between anybody, between these two countries. And people can also, you know, use it for saving and protecting their assets from the hyperinflationary economy in Venezuela and from the depreciative economy in Colombia, which is, while it's not hyperinflation in Colombia over the past, for example, five years, the currency has lost about 30% of its value or more against the dollar. So this is a solution that, while the initial focus is for Venezuelans, both that are still living in Venezuela and migrants across the world, this is a solution that may help any other population in Latin America and help them have more financial prosperity.

Um, whether you're a farmer in the middle of Venezuela or a banker in the city, you can access dollars and make money every day because your money in value dollars is appreciating against local fiat. Talk a little bit just how you're technically doing this. Yeah, so we use a combination of crypto and I would like to say that we are extremely pragmatic. I love crypto. I love blockchain.

I love the potential that it has. um you know the transparency the permissionless uh multi-signature accounts that people can actually you know hold their keys and be their own bank uh in a way but the reality is that in latin america specifically in emerging markets um people do not have the tools uh the education and to understand this so they are really demanding for very simple stuff like is it safe is it um and is it like you know is my money going to be in dollars essentially because you The dollar is the current store of value that most people in the world think is the best. Bitcoin hasn't still gotten there, but over time, our strategy is that initially,

we're going to give people what they want, but very simple products built on top of crypto. But over time, as we increase our user base, we're going to give them Bitcoin, And we're going to give them multi-signature non-custodial accounts. But that is not the right time just yet. So the way we do this, I wanted to give that initial kind of like explanation because we have an IOU initially. An IOU because it allows us to do these free immediate transfers, which is one of the ways we essentially acquire users

and promote that you know we're effectively killing the remittance business by helping people transfer money between countries at no cost um and uh potentially acquiring all these western union uh users um so it's an iou which means that it's essentially a centralized uh accounting system that is mirroring uh crypto that we have custodied in uh places like circle um and and other places and um and so we back the value dollar which is an iou with one to one with other stable coins um and the way we on ramp is through bitcoin so initially when we started it was all bitcoin uh we were offering fiat to fiat remittances and we were buying bitcoin in the country uh of the sender and then we were selling the bitcoin in the country of the recipient to get

the fiat and send it to their bank account in venezuela like i mentioned everybody has a bank account so um so when you do the offer in venezuela you pay directly to their banks and we do that in a peer-to-peer fashion in a in like a decentralized fashion of sorts uh by doing any peer-to-peer uh exchanges and so we never touch the venezuelan banking system uh because we don't want to do that because venezuela is a dictatorship um and so we effectively can hack the system through these peer-to-peer systems, exchanges, and that's how we off-ramp. And it was all going through Bitcoin. So our main goal at the time was really how do we manage our treasury

and how do we protect ourselves from the risk of having Bitcoin for this period of time? So we started playing around with hedging and futures. And then we found that we could effectively create a synthetic exposure to the dollar through doing Bitcoin futures trading and derivatives trading. So at that time we said, all right, let's offer dollars to people, or let's offer a synthetic dollar

that is backed in Bitcoin derivatives. And we recently changed that because we were holding that in BitMEX. And with everything that happened recently, you know, it definitely showed that this is a risk. In the end, it's not that we're actually custodying these assets ourselves. this money is locked in these third-party exchanges so we finally made the decision to

back the value dollar with stable coins um and um and this is all i can say right now but we are working ourselves in building uh our own uh blockchain and our own token um because one of the most important things is to over time make this censorship resistant um it's really really important that this is censorship resistant and one of the best ways to do this is by making the value dollar not an IOU, actually creating a token, and then building it in our own blockchain, and over time, giving people with really good UX a way for them to hold their keys. Talk a little bit about the market adoption so far, right?

So where are you seeing people using this? How is it going in terms of the amount of transactions or just like any data that you could share around you know do people want this and are they using it yeah so you know we we launched 15 months ago in october of 2019 and um in 2020 we moved 10x we went from 3 000 monthly active users to 30 000 monthly active users with um and a lot of it was organic growth uh the reality is that this is a matter of life or death for some people right like accessing dollars uh or stronger currencies in a place that is hyperinflationary or even in Colombia. In general, Latin America is really hard to access dollars

and specifically in Venezuela, it's a life or death thing. So being such an intense need, what we're offering for people is really, really important. And right now we have since we launched, about 80,000 people have used our products. uh about 30 000 monthly active retained um we have moved about nine million dollars from colombia to venezuela and uh we're talking about like low-income migrants right so um super super important uh effectively have potentially helped about 200 000 or even more households in venezuela

um access the stability of the dollar um and over time uh what we're going to continue to do is um like i mentioned make it more censorship resistant making it more decentralized educating people on the advantages of these technologies and working with merchants so that the product you know is used for payments essentially closing the the pipe i would say uh today most people have to cash out into the bolivar into the local fiat to pay because crypto most mostly anywhere in the world is still not used as a medium of payment uh but in venezuela given the the situation of hyperinflation everybody's looking for something else uh to to accept payments uh you know the trust barrier for crypto is is way lower than anywhere in the world i would say so um so we're

going to be launching pure payments soon and we're going to be focusing on opening these uh merchant accounts so that commerce can accept payments in valid dollars. That's definitely going to be an important moment for us as a company to create more impact, to onboard more users.

We recently enabled cash-ins in Venezuela, which I believe is the most important thing we've accomplished as a company. Effectively helping people turn their high-inflationary currency into dollar in Venezuela. back in the day the only way they could access this was through their family members in Colombia

sending them remittances but now they can actually you know cash in in Venezuela and and so that's effectively what we have done so far how many people are using it and and what's I guess what's also interesting is that through the Venezuelan use case which is this diaspora that has led the country to Colombia, Peru, virtually every country in Latin America, the United States, Spain, we can expand to all these other places, all these other regions,

build the on and off rooms for them, for the Venezuelan migrants. And then once we have these on and off rooms, then this is a product that also works for local populations of Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Mexico. So the Venezuelan use case is really, really strategic. And so when you think through, you know, kind of just Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, value dollars in South and Central America, is this something where you think that, you know, we're going to eventually replace the legacy fiat currencies with these new digital currencies?

Or will there still be coexistence? It'll just be like the fiat ones are really bad at doing what they're supposed to do. The digital ones are better, but the digital ones don't necessarily knock off or kill the fiat currencies. Yeah, I think time will tell. Our bet and the reason why we started value down here in Latin America and the American markets is first because Latin Americans love the US dollar and stable coins have this mirror value to the dollar. and it's a good kind of like gateway drop into cryptocurrencies I guess for most people you know these are stable points

and over time hopefully you know things like Bitcoin take over as well but I do think that well time will tell Latin American emerging economies are the places that are more prone to be for the system to be replaced by crypto

because the chaos us in the impact of financial crisis down here, in emerging markets in general, it's really, really large. From macroeconomic perspective, not only we have hyperinflationary currencies and economies, but we also have, like I was mentioning, the depreciated economies, which means that we import a lot of things.

only produce primary commodities like petroleum which is now less in need from first world countries uh we haven't made the investments in education and all these things so over time a crisis down here will just prove the system to be uh way more ineffective um and um and uh and specifically in countries like venezuela like i was mentioning uh if i i truly believe that venezuela can become the first crypto economy in the world and um if the political uh uh uh um if the government changes and uh and the power changes hand in venezuela which you know time will tell i can tell you that that the good guys that we know them are pro crypto are pro building because they we we're actually seeing the effects of

actually air dropping money to uh venezuelan teachers and medical workers through crypto And this is being led by the opposition, by the good guys. So they're already actually seeing this potential that it has of overcoming centralized authoritarian regimes. So I truly believe in 10 years, we'll potentially have the first crypto economy, hopefully down here in South America. And hopefully that spreads throughout the region. Talk a little bit about the education of the population. So the technology, obviously, we've talked a little bit about in terms of how that's evolving and how far along it is. What about the actual knowledge of the people to know that this is a better system, that there's very simple ways to use it, and to basically just get them up to speed so that they feel comfortable using the technology? What do you see happening there? And are there any areas that would surprise people? Yeah. I think, you know, education is the most important thing, for sure. And it doesn't have to be boring education. It doesn't have to be, you know, long, long information and papers about, you know, how money works and how crypto is better. I think education starts by building great products

and then teaching people the features that these products are giving them. And so it has to be embedded in the product itself. It's not that you have to teach people how to use it because then you have a shitty product. You have to really build great, great products. But you can also take advantage of these opportunities to quickly hint and show them why this is better.

And this is a really, really important challenge and a big challenge to follow. And so, and I think that is, you know, apart from a few other things like on and off ramps, PR on and off ramps, the key for crypto mainstream adoption is education, for sure. What do you think is the biggest risk or the thing that you're most worried about when it comes to adoption in South and Central America? you know um we continue to have i guess this is not only for central america and south america we continue to have uh democracies right um and i think the democracy has uh democracy has failed as a political system um it's a it's a it's a system where um you know you have parties where people are divided, where, you know, you make a career of being a politician instead of actually, you know, everybody should be a politician to work for the people.

So this democracy system, and, you know, I can't keep on talking about this, but I'm not going to get into that rabbit hole, but democracy has failed, in my opinion. And so that means that power is so centralized and we are so dependent for crypto to be successful on politicians that that worries me across the board, even in the United States. And so I think that unless we move really fast as an industry, unless we really stay true to our values, because we're seeing more and more companies enter the space, more and more people enter the space recently. and um but most of these people haven't been in the space since the early days and they haven't been here because of why this why crypto is better um there there might be a lot of people just trying to make a buck or or make money by building a company in the space but um and these might be successful companies so that's when when when it really becomes a scare for me i really think that you know the good guys in the industry the people that are working on decentralized

systems, fully decentralized on non-custodial accounts, on privacy, these are the people that have to win. And, you know, us at Value, we're, you know, learning every day and we're making our best to, you know, pragmatically first acquire the users and then help them transition into this new, more sovereign systems and these new, better systems. um so i think those two those those are the two things that worry me most uh the political uh dependency and uh and uh and what which are the companies that are going to actually uh lead the way in space got it and so when you think through uh kind of where this is all going right let's

zoom out and look forward 10 years how do you view uh value 10 years from now and kind of what would be the milestone of success or kind of the, maybe not finish line, but kind of the thing that you're aiming at? What does that world look like a decade out? So contrary to what most people think, I think the crypto space has a really unique characteristic where this is not going to be a winner takes all type of industry. The reason is exactly because of what I just mentioned, the regulatory hurdles. These regulatory and compliance hurdles will mean that there will be silos of companies that will target specific regions. And so for value, I think what the most important thing for us is dominating Latin America and helping Latin Americans

transition into crypto and into dollar accounts and then into Bitcoin. So 10 years from now, We hope to be dominating Latin America from that perspective and then connecting Latin America to the rest of the world. Because we are saying if we imagine a world where we have these silos of companies that are in different regions and they're all working in blockchain and in crypto, the interoperability, you know, I'm sure in 10 years we'll have interoperability with cryptos and blockchains. um it'll be just a more global uh you know uh financial system um so that's where i see value in 10 years very very very much focusing on america and connecting latin america to the rest of the world on that path what are the uh data points not necessarily the numbers you're trying to achieve but just what are the data points you think will be most important uh for you inside of value or for folks who are interested in the crypto markets in general to pay attention to

Is it number of users, transactions, exchange traded volume, price? What do you think is the most important things there? I do believe it is two things. Assets under management for the companies that are in the space. So, you know, the amount of crypto, I would say crypto under management, which means effectively that people are holding their crypto. And that if they're paying with crypto, they're paying to other people. But the crypto is not living back into fiat. So if we see that trend growing over time, that's going to mean the crypto is actually overthrowing fiat and that it's being successful.

Secondly, which goes hand in hand with that, is cash-ins, so on-ramps. Effectively, the amount of people turning their fiat into crypto through cash-ins. And I think those two things are definitely going to be really, really important. And of course, we're talking about, like any company, market share in terms of users. We have about, I believe, about 600 million people in Latin America, and half of them are unbanked yet, which is really an awesome opportunity for crypto. And so the fact that anybody with an internet connection and a smartphone can have their own uh money and and don't go through the banking system uh i think that's a really really important

um uh kind of development for for the region and um i i would say those those are the three things that an amount of users uh you know compared to the market um uh cash-ins and crypto under management yeah those are three definitely great ones uh before we wrap up i always ask everyone the same two questions. The first question is, what is the most important book that you've ever read? The most important book? Oh, man. You know, I have to say that I became less of a fan of business books over time. I, you know, following very much what Naval says, I figured that a lot of these concepts, I can learn them from YouTube videos and things like that. However, I can tell the one book that i really enjoyed and this is not related to crypto it's actually related to

company building is the hard thing about hard things by ben horowitz uh if you're a ceo or a founder even in the early days a lot of these advices for when you're actually starting to scale up but even from the early days if you uh read that uh it's i think it's super super valuable um and of course uh for people that are interested in crypto read the bitcoin white paper I think that's a great piece of advice. The second is a question brought by our friends at Eight Sleep. They've got a thermoregulation bed, so it makes it very cold for you to go to sleep, get deeper sleep. I sleep with it every night. I love it. What is your sleep schedule? I used to be one of these people who didn't sleep at all, and now I sleep like a little baby. I'm a convert to the sleep religion, if you will. What is your sleep schedule every day? i sleep um like clockwork at 11 p.m sometimes at 11 30 p.m then i wake up at 6 uh 6 a.m 6 30 so i usually sleep uh seven hours it works for me so far over time i have seen that the older i get i need less sleep um i wake up you know uh rested uh after less time um i do value the sleep a lot

and i value uh you know habits for me my my schedule is is extremely uh strict um so that's a little bit of my sleep schedule i love it uh in terms of the the third question uh it's a little bit more fun aliens are you a believer or a non-believer i'm a believer i'm a believer i I don't know if we have, you know, have any contact with aliens, but from a math, just from a math perspective and what we know so far from the universe, it's very unlikely that there's no aliens. So, yeah, I think they're out there, man. We'll see. I think they're there somewhere, but I don't know if we're ever going to run into them. That's for sure. You could ask me one question to wrap up. What is the one question you have for me, man?

how the hell do you create so much content? Listen, I'm learning, right? And this is a third podcast that I'm recording today. And I basically have sat here for a number of hours and I'm just learning. I get asked all these questions and it's pretty crazy. Like the way I look at it is I get to sit here two days a week. So Wednesdays and Thursdays normally in the afternoon. And I just have people come on and they tell me everything that they know right they tell me all the secrets they tell me all of their insights and so that helps from a podcast standpoint and then the rest of this stuff is i just kind of live my life on the internet right it's uh when i think of something i say it i uh got something to respond to somebody i respond that just kind of everything i do i i

have no uh no things that aren't on the internet and what it does is it allows me to kind of put out like the uh um you know the the bat light if you will right you remember when batman would put it up in uh in the sky it's the same thing uh people know what i'm you know into what i want to learn about the type of people i'm looking for and so i just use the internet to my advantage and part of that is creating content so i'm having a blast and i'll keep doing it at some point i'll probably get tired and then one day i'll just wake up and just i'll disappear off the internet yeah i asked that because i'm i'm i'm starting to focus on creating more content for spanish-speaking people and you know running a running a company that's that's not my priority

so i'm trying to figure out how do i optimize for that uh you're tweeting in spanish more right i'm i'm gonna be starting i'm starting to do that uh and i'm gonna continue to do that more and more both in Spanish and English but definitely with the focus of helping spread the education and educate people in Latin America about money, why money, why

crypto is money, the problems with the infrastructure and all that so making it by size abstract and complexity is really really important yeah I mean look it's obviously very clear that if you're able to

take what is, you know, kind of all the ideas and analysis that's in English and get it into Spanish and really help people in kind of the part of the world that literally they just can't understand it, right? It's just in a different language. It's, if you can kind of bridge that divide, because it goes both ways, right? People in the United States, they don't know what's going on in South and Central America because they don't speak the language. And so I think that by bridging that divide would be fantastic. So please, please, please keep doing that. yeah i i will i will where can we send people to find you on the internet or find uh value so uh you can find me on twitter uh at simon value uh value is uh v a l i u like volume

like a drug but without m so simon value um in twitter i don't have instagram yet um uh or facebook so and you can follow value uh as well at value co uh or value come for spanish-speaking people in twitter um and if uh you know you have a spanish-speaking people uh listeners that are in colombia or venezuela want to try our product uh you know just go to the app store uh or google play and type value and you will find it right away amazing listen thank you so much for for coming on and talking about this. I know you're very busy and we've got a company to build. So keep going. I think that it's a no-brainer in terms of providing the solution to people in South and Central America. So I'm excited to be part of the journey and just really proud of all

the work you've done. So we'll have to do it again in the future. Awesome. Thank you, Bob. Take care, man.