The Pomp Podcast - #707 Launching a $200M Fund Backed By FTX w/ Matthew Graham

Episode Date: October 31, 2021

Matthew Graham is the CEO of Sino Global Capital, where he has almost a decade of investment banking experience in mainland China and has been investing in crypto for a few years.  In this conversation, we discuss FTX fund, his current portfolio, China, India, and where Matthew sees the big opportunities today.  ======================= MiamiCoin is the first token to be released by CityCoins, a community-driven project built on Bitcoin. CityCoins aims to give people around the world a new way to support their favourite cities. The protocol has already generated over $7 million dollars in donations to the city of Miami and continues to grow every day. If you want to get involved Follow @minecitycoins on Twitter to stay up to date with the project. Visit chat.CityCoins.co to join the community discord and contribute to the movement. ======================= Compass Mining is the world's first online marketplace for bitcoin mining hardware and hosting. Compass was founded with the goal of making it easy for everyone to mine bitcoin. Visit compassmining.io to start mining bitcoin today! ======================= Ethernity.io: The world’s first authenticated and licensed NFT platform, trusted by over 150,000 members. Digital NFTs and exclusive real-world unlockables, authentic partnerships with athletes and artists. Visit Ethernity.io, where you can buy and sell authenticated NFTs from top notable figures, rights, license, and IP holders you can’t find anywhere else; the start of an entire ecosystem bringing utility to #NFTs.

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. Now let's kick this thing off. Matthew Graham is the CEO of Sino Global Capital, where he has almost a decade of investment banking experience in mainland China and has been investing in crypto for a few years. In this conversation, we discuss his recently announced FTX-backed fund, his current portfolio, China, India, and where Matthew sees the big opportunities today. I really enjoyed this conversation with Matthew, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.

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go to compassmining.io. All right, let's get in this episode. I hope you guys enjoy this one. and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. What's up, guys? Bang, bang. I've got Matthew here with me. Thank you so much for doing this. Thanks. Great to be here. Absolutely. Let's just jump right into Sino Global. It's a fund that you have that is focused on China. Help us understand how the fund came together, what the thesis is, and then what your

portfolio looks like. Sure. So the backstory is that I was a China-focused tech banker for many years. And so I had been following Bitcoin as a passion, as a hobby since, I don't know 11 12 and 2011 2012 and i starting in 2013 i kept trying to interject my hobby into my professional life and so that that started out with terrible results for example in in 2013 i pitched one of the top 10 telecom manufacturing companies in the world they said um tell me your best crazy idea so i said well i think you should have a bitcoin phone for power users i think this is going to be a something that's going to be a huge phenomenon in tech and you could establish yourself early by by making a hardware software combination working with another company that i

can't say but but you guys could do it together and you could have a bitcoin phone for power users and get in early on something that i think uh is going to be pretty pretty huge um that was in 13. and so the the response was well i asked for your best crazy idea that that is a crazy idea and i and i hate it so that was my first attempt to combine my hobby with my professional life but um so i i continued following very closely and then um post ethereum to me this uh was a signal that suddenly this was actually a much bigger story and so when i uh started reading about ethereum that that was um um my first true love in crypto probably um i i realized that this in my view at that at that moment uh this was now something that

was going to be as big as the internet you know in the late 1990s in the united states um um it was going to be that same feeling i was very confident and so for the internet in the 90s i was like a little too young for that believe it or not to fully get involved at that time so i i was determined not to miss this kind of like second chance at a to participate in a generational uh technology change so um i'm actually a very small c conservative type person And we started out. So by this time, sorry, by this time, I had my own shop. So I had my own boutique investment banking shop. And so we pivoted into crypto and being a kind of a conservative guy, we started out in the secondary markets and with some small angel investments.

and over a period of time and kind of increasingly confident with an increasingly successful AUM and just as a prop shop. And so then in the last couple of years is when we decided that we wanted to pivot to adding private market investments, VC-style investments, and that's when we needed kind of like a bigger presence because you need deal flow, you need to be out there in the marketplace. so that was kind of the next uh iteration um and so up until now we uh have been a prop shop managing partner capital and uh so actually by the time this is viewed we will have made a

blockbuster announcement which is that we are launching our first institutional fund um and it's co-gp with ftx as the listeners very likely know by now and we're super excited to have ftx come in as a co-GP and as a very significant LP, and it was kind of the natural next step in our relationship with FTX, where we've done deals together, and we're an FTX shareholder, and we've known them since very early days in their incredibly successful journey, and so we're pretty pumped up about these new things. So walk me back through first, before we get to the FTX news. When you were a prop shop, what were you investing in and what was the thesis?

Sure. So the thesis at a high level was this is one of the reasons we were able to get involved with DeFi pretty early is that at a high level, I've always had the thesis that financial markets tend almost inexorably to trend towards increasing complexity and abstraction. So we've always kind of looked to participate in what we thought could be the next example of that. So, for example, if you only have spot, you should start looking at, you know, platforms that are going to provide futures and options and things like that. There's always going to be a trend towards complexity and abstraction. So that has always been one of our top-level theses. But I think even more than that, really, we are bottom-up investors. I think this is a unique market in that it's so dynamic, it moves so quickly that it's enormously important to have a very agile, nimble approach.

um and uh and so really we look for unique entrepreneurs with uh with clearly differentiated visions and that are the kind of people that we would want to support uh for the long haul and and that's that's uh been our approach in the secondary market and and now it's our approach in the primary market as well got it and talk about the geographic focus that had as well uh historically sure absolutely so given my genesis as a china focused tech banker helping international um tech companies in the mainland china market with our vc hat on we look to help international blockchain companies here in this enormously complicated market in a manner that's consistent with local laws and regulations and

Obviously, it's a it's a very idiosyncratic market, even for the very best international projects. It's quite impenetrable for them in many ways. So we are their trusted partner across halfway across the globe in many cases to be able to help them access this market. And actually, we are working on a huge new initiative these days, which is that we are adding a second geography. And so we are actually adding the India market and I'm enormously bullish on India crypto market, which I think is in its early days, but growing very, very rapidly. I'm extremely excited about being able to represent our friends in this. Got it. And so when you think about the types of investments that you've been making, you've got this geographic focus. Are these traditional illiquid private company like venture capital type investments?

Are they more liquid kind of protocol or token investments? Sure, that's a great question. It ends up being a combination of both. So the most common example is token investments. And so these are also long term investments, but but in the form of tokens. The second most common bucket is equity with the token kicker. and the third bucket, which which is kind of reserved for extremely high conviction situations. That's the equity bucket. And so we are equity investors in, for example, Winter Mute and also FTX. Got it. And so let's talk about Solana. I think you were a very early

investor in Solana. That has been a spectacular investment, just as an example in terms of your investment thesis and kind of what's possible. Walk us through, when did you first hear about Solana? How did that come together? And then what was the investment? So very openly, we first heard of Solana when the decision was made for Serum to build on Solana. So we weren't like first, we were just super early. And so when we invested in Serum, that was basically a no-brainer to be able to have a central limit, order book uh on a in in decentralized world and it's you know the the ftx family so that was that was like a super quick decision high confidence but it led to the decision that we needed to find

out everything about solana like now and so we essentially dropped everything for a period of weeks and we did a lot of external tech consultations and and things like that with friends from from all around the world we did a real deep dive and um so a lot of it came down to pattern matching a lot of it came down to people on pattern matching which are two of my favorite things so people i think that if anyone has gotten to know totally in his team they're just uh exceptional people both in terms of technology expertise but also in terms of like being amazing humans so that's the perfect kind of people that we love to back that we have full confidence that they're going to make ethical decisions that we're comfortable with, that

they're in the worst case, they're going to keep grinding away, things like that. So they were like an AAA for people. And then the second bucket is so and obviously they had a clearly differentiated vision. They were building a blockchain that was scalable in a fundamentally different way. and um so i mean i'm not a computer scientist right but i'm really good with pattern matching and so the fact that you you the analogy excuse me the analogy is that um it's almost like when cpu started to hit a wall and it became increasingly difficult to increase cpu speed and then people said okay so we're having trouble um getting more performance in this way what if

what if we started, what if we went to a multi-threaded model? And so to me, that was kind of the pattern matching. And that was kind of the analogy that Solana was like a multi-threaded blockchain, which may not be perfectly true in a technical sense, but at like a 10,000 foot pattern matching level, that was something that really resonated with me. And so it was very clear at that time that it was a bet that had tremendous asymmetric upside. A lot of people were worried about the big unlock, things like that. So the valuation was enormously reasonable and it was clear that we were super early, which is we like to be, you know, we don't want to be too early, but we like to be very, very early. I remember at that time, the hardest thing actually

was to get a fill. So I had to call OTC desks all around the world, some that I hadn't even dealt with before and it was a long-tail asset so i said you know we will take all the solana that you have we literally whatever you have will eat and people were saying what the is solana you know these are crypto otc desks and they're like we don't you don't have that so it actually took a long i mean you know a surprisingly uh long period of time to get as much as we wanted that was actually the most difficult part but um what price was this uh that was in in the range of our fills were in the range of um uh 80 cents to a buck 30 in that range across across that range i think um uh you know ballpark i don't want to be more specific for opposite reasons but it was

you know it was around it was around that range let's say so it's up 150 to 170 x depending on what day it is. When you look at something like that, I'm really interested in, one, you make what I'll call the initial allocation. Two is, do you continue to invest in an opportunity like that as it goes, kind of press a winner once you see that it's working as kind of validating your thesis? Or is that initial allocation kind of the totality of the allocation? And then the third thing is, how do you think about managing a position that I'm assuming was relatively small in the portfolio and now becomes a very large part do you wasn't small it was a concentrated bet it was okay so concentrated bet becomes even bigger do you i don't i don't like um

spray and pray i'm the opposite of that okay so do you trim positions as they grow or just walk me through like once you make the initial decision you have a concentrated position do you continue to add to it over time or because it's contrary concentrated in the beginning you basically stick with uh that initial allocation sure that's a great question and so i would phrase it this way so uh fundamentally i i fall into like the paul tudor jones school of like uh you don't add to your losers and you add to your winners so that's the first thing at a high level but then the second thing um i don't really want to be fomoing in uh so what i look for is a second catalyst um or or you know a catalyst beyond the initial thesis um in the case of um solana

After the unlock, which obviously was a bullish unlock, we actually added to our position. So I can't get too specific about the price, but let's say it was in the 10 to 15 range. We actually added a second swap. And basically, that's my fundamental way of looking at it. You add the winners and you trim losers and you look for additional catalysts because you don't want to be FOMOing it. Yeah, it makes a ton of sense. And then when you look at, let's say, Solana today, I think there's a whole bunch of debate in the crypto community around Solana, Ethereum, Polkadot, Binance Smart Chain. We can just go down the line.

There's so many of these now that people have various thesis on. How do you see it playing out in the ecosystem? Is this something that could potentially disrupt or take market share from the Ethereums of the world? Sure. Sure. That's a great question. I would say that fundamentally, I am a multi-chain guy. So in my view, we are still so early just in crypto as a whole. And there's tremendous room. An enormous understatement would be to say that there's tremendous room for the ecosystem as a whole to keep growing. right we're still you know a thousandth as big as we will eventually be crypto for sure i'm convinced of that so i i tend to uh not i mean there will be some cannibalization but to me this

is more about betting on multiple growth stories um as i mentioned we were early fairly early buyers of ethereum in the secondary market and we still have a um a substantial ethereum stake and we still look at ethereum investments as well and we continue to look uh you know every month we we look at at least one or or two uh additional chains and make a a pretty thorough analysis to determine if we want to allocate capital uh in a in in a different space so for us we're bullish on solana but we're also bullish on ethereum yeah i mean of course to some extent these are going to to go toe to toe. But I think there's room for multiple players and we're quite confident across those chains. And I think that there will be other chains that emerge as well.

Talk to me about Bitcoin in terms of how you see that fitting into the ecosystem. Do you guys hold Bitcoin? How do you think about it from a portfolio construction standpoint? And how does that play with the other investments you have? So we do hold Bitcoin. And so in my view, So we probably want to be I'm bullish on Bitcoin. We hold Bitcoin for us. We want to be a little bit further out on the risk curve. So it's not what we would view as a substantial source of alpha for us. Part of that, too, is because we don't really view ourselves as macro guys. I'm not I think it's very difficult to predict in general.

There are exceptions. But in general, I think it's very difficult to predict bull and bust cycles in the crypto space. There was maybe one possible exception where we went that short. But in general, that's kind of my thesis, that the extent to which you would be successful predicting those cycles would be dwarfed by the gains that you miss out, Just from the fact that we're in across long time periods, a industry that's growing so fast. So basically, we hold Bitcoin, but we don't view it as where we're going to get our primary alpha for from. And we want to be further on out on the risk group. So I would kind of view it in that way. Got it. And so talk to me about this fund with FTX. They're coming in as a GP partner with you. So you two, you and FTX will both be co-GPs.

that correct yes that's correct they're coming in as a co-gp and also a very substantial lp as well and it was kind of the next uh it was kind of kind of a very natural uh outgrowth of our long-term and deep relationship with ftx uh and with sam specifically and so we had done deals together and um it was just kind of very natural actually in fact when we made the initial decision it was about a five minute conversation to do it in true Sam style. I said, Hey, you know, I was thinking about this. And then we talked about it for five minutes. And he said, All right, let's do it. Very, very Sam style. Got it. And so what is the thesis of this fund? Is this going to be China and India? Is this going to be all early stage protocols? Like, how do you think about

that thesis? Sure. So it's going to be a continuation of our Sino process, which again, It tends to be very bottom up. And so basically, to answer your questions about geography, in general, I would say it tends to be the other way around. Actually, it tends to be we help international companies in these geographies. And so that's the reason why they want to have us on their cap table, because we're extremely strategic for them. it's enormously difficult for even a stud entrepreneur in silicon valley or lisbon that hasn't interacted with the china and india markets before to be able to do so in an effective manner and so if we're on your cap table we can help you you do that and so we do go the other way as well um in terms of investing in uh in in china and indian entrepreneurs actually we're

working on a blockbuster deal in India, as we speak, and Delta Exchange is a portfolio company based in Bangalore, but at least historically, historically the concept has been that you want us on your cap table because we invest in a traditional way, a very long-term way, and we're gonna help you in markets

that are 2 billion people, more than that combined, right? China and India. And you probably know that that is going to be something pretty helpful to you and that you definitely can't do it yourself. So you need a high trust partner that's going to work with you in a long-term way to make that happen. Got it. And this is both in liquid protocols and also in equity deals? Yes, that's correct. Yeah. Okay. And then what size checks are you guys looking to write out of the new fund? Sure. So it is a stage agnostic fund. So I would say that we can do seed through series B. And so the check size is quite variable. I would say most of our checks go in the $500,000 to $2 million range, but we can definitely go higher in very

specific high conviction situations we could definitely do five or or ten got it and when you think about uh what the opportunity set is uh ftx obviously being a partner uh and a large lp is there other institutions that you're going to raise capital from uh individuals like how do you think about the other uh portions of the capital base sir so um the reason to there are a couple different reasons that we wanted to go institutional and so first and foremost is um i don't know if you're familiar with like the naspers story but naspers um was one of the early investors uh in tencent they invested in tencent you know it might have been even at seat and they never fucking sold any right i hope i can swear on on you can i swear i my habit is to swear constantly

i've been on my best behavior so far but but so they invested really early in tencent and they never sold fucking anything right so naspers now is sitting on at the very least tens and tens of billions of tencent stock actually it might be hard might even be like 100 billion dollars this uh south african conglomerate um so there's naspers on the one hand and here's a different example we all know that goldman sachs they're the smartest people on the planet these guys are really fucking good but one thing where they messed up pretty big is they invested uh in cedar series a i guess it was uh in alibaba and they sold alibaba in like 2000 i don't know two 2002 2003 something like that so they sold when it was still hundreds of millions of valuation

and they missed out on all those weekends i want to be naspers so uh the first reason that we're doing an institutional fund it's i'm not selling my fucking ftt or my salon or any of this stuff i'm holding this like indefinitely so we wanted to take outside capital to enable us to keep on our existing propriety um for us um one of our the advantages that we can help with your international uh venture uh you're doing the international aspects especially in asia of course. Right. But so for us, that means we want to be able to have stakeholders all around the world. We want to be able to bring in LPs and friends of places like Berlin and Lisbon and just all around the world. Right. So that was an additional reason for us to move to this new

institutional model and take outside capital for effectively the first time. Got it. And so what exactly are you looking for? There's lots of people who work in the industry that are listening to this. What are the things right now or themes or specific opportunities that you're interested in so uh you know again i would emphasize that we really are bottom-up guys and that's because i just think this industry moves too fast i'll give you an example of why that actually was to our benefit um i fully admit that you know crypto kitties was cool but after that i didn't really think about nfts too much um and that would not have been one of our top-down theses if i if i if we were a top-down investor would not have been one of them right but then about two years

ago i started to see early signs that uh nfts were picking up and so we started to invest uh in in the nft space because we we looked in a bottom-up way for people that were doing cool in that space and so i think that's kind of a and as a result we were able to be pretty early on with with nfts um and i don't think we would have been able to do that if we were locked into these top down theses so fundamentally i think we're just more bottom-up guys i look for um i look for people that are doing uh differentiated that have differentiated visions in the long term uh uh that are working on in a long-term sustainable way and then obviously i look for these these these you know tech studs or just uber geniuses like uh you know

totally and vitalik and of course we all know spf right it's just you know what he is talk to me about sam why are you so impressed with sam so you know a lot of this obviously as pattern matching but we we actually we met sam uh when ftx looked like three people i cold called them and i visited them in hong kong and you know at that time so again this is a great example of why i don't believe in top-down investing also nobody thought somebody could um dethrone finance it was basically inconceivable at that time or at least it wasn't on people's radar nobody was thinking like oh somebody's going to come along and they're going to kick finance's ass this is basically not anything that anyone thought was likely anytime soon or that they should be

actively looking for but then you go and and you meet sam and i mean he's just you know you you can't talk to the guy without five minutes you know for more than five minutes without realizing that he's clearly one of the smartest people in the world and um but i actually don't think that's the secret of his success i think it's sleeping on that bean bag you know working and out hustling uh everyone else number one and number two the fact that he has successfully built um an ftx culture that is composed of people who are also really smart and sleep on bean bags so that's to me what the real secret is with ftx but um you know obviously um wasn't like i i met him and instantly knew that it was going to be potentially the next

jeff bezos but it was very clear that this was um an asymmetrical path that i wanted to take in in the biggest way that i could which is what we did got it and then talk to me about ftx's rise it's been absolutely incredible obviously uh um has taken everyone by storm but what's your read on that having been an early investor sure so um i think you know again it's um it's the extreme level of technical and business competence um gets you kind of like the ante but again you know i really think it's the fact that they're out hustling people with um with product iteration and with the fact that sam will literally answer uh people's dms about you know tech questions or whatever question things like that um i i think they're just out hustling people as well so if

they're definitely smarter than the competition honestly and they're also out hustling everyone you're gonna get some pretty good results over time um so and um you know one thing that i was thinking about the other day though which is just fucking amazing they have five engineers that built out the ftx platform five so think about how good these guys are um so it's not like a super huge organization yet but they're all fucking studs yeah and they're all hustling do you think another exchange had come along and uh and dethroned them or do you think that they've got what it takes to uh to remain at the top um i think these things are always hard to predict i think um the the bar is now incredibly hard and it would be i don't think you can ever say well

no it couldn't it couldn't happen i i don't believe in that that's not a real thing for anyone including you know amazon or google or whomever but it gets increasingly difficult because you you build the mode and you know it gets it gets harder and harder the more dominant and established you are so um i think uh ftx is a good example of the institutionalization of crypto which a lot of people you know view as maybe not good but i view as amazing because me because i'm you know i am a tradfi guy in my in my origins maybe maybe it's i'm not as good at being a revolutionary maybe but but look this is about institutionalization and these guys are studs they um they came a lot of them came from gene street um which is not a household

name because proprietary trading firms um manage their own capital and they have no reason to be household names but jane street is um you know right up there with uh citadel and companies like that and and it's even more elite than than golden sacks basically which we already as we already talked about they're fucking studs over there so these guys are best of breed and um i i never believe in it's not possible to get knocked off but it would be incredibly difficult uh for someone to compete to go toe-to-toe with them absolutely how big is your team in terms of uh as you've of built this out you've really made a name for yourself been very successful how do you think about building your team so i i think of it um i'm not a big believer in in having

uh huge teams we've got 12 people i i um we're actively looking to expand we're especially hiring for india um but i don't really believe in having huge teams we have a distributed team so we have two people in the united states we've got europe we've got all across the world But everybody's focused on the China and India markets. One thing that I do believe in, though, which I believe very strongly in, we have a super unique and tight corporate culture. And I think it's one of our biggest assets. And the reason that we have that is because from day one has been intern to hire. So everyone except for myself started as an intern, paid intern, of course, including our general counsel and head of investor relations.

uh started as an intern he just joined us full-time but he started as a 39 year old intern with a law degree so um so we have an extremely tight-knit uh very unique corporate culture which i think is our strength and i i believe very much in in this intern to hire model um but i don't necessarily believe in having like these big cooking teams it's not super interesting to me especially not for a vc yeah i i love the intern to hire model that is fantastic I think especially there's an element of intellectual humility if somebody is willing to start as the intern, even if they've been successful in their career. So the one thing about that, though, intern at Sino is a little different. So in intern, you can have enormous responsibility starting day one because it's basically a trial by fire.

It's the opposite of like getting coffee and things like that. You're you're doing everything as if you would, as if you were already a, you know, an investment analyst, investment associate or whatever the jump function would be. So it's it's in turn in the sense of being a trial by fire for up to three months. And but it's it's very much doing, you know, extremely serious work from from day one. You can you have enormous responsibility. Got it. When you think over the next 25 years. What are the one or two themes that you want to focus on? Are there big kind of macro type themes that you're like, OK, we are going to do our bottoms up research and investing.

But here's the the big thing. Crypto in general, however you want to define that, obviously, is the biggest macro theme. But are there kind of sub themes within that? It's very difficult to answer questions like that, obviously. But, you know, I would say that in my career, I've made two huge bets. There were two times when when I said, OK, I'm going to take that that big swing, the home run swing, I'm going to take, you know, I'm going to really go for it. There were two times that I did that. And the first time was was I bet on China. And the second time it was I bet on crypto. And the third is that I'm betting on India. So I would say I've made three taken three home run swings in my career to try to hit the ball out of the park.

So right now I'm really thinking about the fact that India has an enormously youthful population with a slice of the population that goes to schools like IIT, Indian Institute of Technology, which is actually a series of schools, kind of the way that the Cal Berkeley, kind of the way the Cal system works. But those schools are every bit as good as any tech university in the world, up to and maybe even including MIT. So they've got a swath of extremely educated, enormously talented engineers. They've got a very youthful population that's increasingly interested in crypto. So favorable demographics, a rapidly growing economy and in a tech literate population, I'm making a big bet on India. I would say that's that's the thing that that's the third big bet that I'm that I'm making in my life. And I you know, when I make these kinds of big bets, it's definitely a 10 year bet. Got it. Where can we send people to find you on the Internet or find out more about the firm?

so um our website is sino global capital.com but also i would encourage you people to check out our github because um i i believe in kind of the crypto ethos and so as a part of that we open source all of our investment theses and our reports and things like that and uh so i believe our github is sino global cap cap for capital short for capital so uh that's our github with all of our open source investment theses and that's also the company twitter as well sino global cap and then as many people know um i'm available to talk shit on twitter at maddie sino all right before i let you go we got to talk about twitter you are a a prolific tweeter in a very unique way there's uh strokes of genius and i've seen you tweet things like wow that is

a really profound insight and then there is just complete shit post as well so what is the what is the twitter strategy that uh when you sit down you're like here's here's what i'm going to tweet today what is the thought process well uh so here's the thing so um it none of that this was intentional um so i i just started like tweeting one day just as like a form of creative expression this was not a calculated marketing strategy or anything like that um so uh obviously you know it's actually grown into a powerfully uh effective tool um and and so i you know i've thought about it more over time but at least in its genesis it was not a calculated strategy it was just me expressing myself and look i'm pretty fucking eccentric to be honest so it gets a little

you know a little fun and it gets a little weird and there's there's me um with some some cool insights and then they're you know i love to talk shit uh so there's some of that um but um so it started out as a non-calculated just way for me to express myself because you know i'm uh i i don't really have a lot of i i'm working you know 80 hours a week and i'm at my computer and and i like to fire off you know a couple tweets as uh as my way of taking a break every hour or whatever so started out as that but actually i really think that uh especially in crypto increasingly you have to have a brand as a dc so it came about naturally but i i think it's it's um had a a great effect in terms of uh sino being able to have a unique brand and uh and personality and people um feel like

they know us because they do they you know i'm i'm very open about who we are and what we're like and things like that. And it's a great way to get to know entrepreneurs better and to get to know people better and to support our portfolio companies and things like that. So it actually is a pretty powerful business tool. But, you know, the genesis was just me expressing myself. I think you're doing a great job. I enjoy it. I enjoy both the insights, the shit post, the locking of horns, the whole nine yards. I think it's important. And it's one of the only industries in the world where this happens out in public for everyone to see so it's uh it's pretty damn i don't want to say you handled the shit talk better than basically anyone i've seen

matthew because you know there are two there are two categories of of shit talk that i do the first category is with buddies of mine like you know larry cermak or whoever that i'll make fun of i don't know he's like nine feet tall you know whatever um but then the the second category is people i don't know as well but i i'd like to um uh you know i i talk shit and and i i like to kind of make a point at the same time but i really like yeah i like you punched back and i really fucking liked it because because it was a combination of two things it was the fact that i respected that you you were like enough is enough and you punched back and then i especially respected it because um uh you know because i i dm'd you right and i was like hey you know i just

want to let you know that it's it's not personal like maybe i was trying to make a little bit of point here but also i like to talk shit and you were super fucking cool about it and both of those things i really like so i have to i have to say you you handled it uh better than almost anyone that i've i've seen because i do like to talk shit and i thought that was pretty cool so i did just want to say that well i appreciate that but uh you know you know why uh that is i have four younger brothers and in my house of five boys the the language is talking shit yeah you just that's how you, you know, like when you walk into the room, you have to talk shit. If you don't talk shit, you're going to get mowed over. So I have decades of experience in this realm. You didn't

know that you were dealing with a expert shit talker. It makes sense now. Awesome, man. Well, listen, thank you so much for coming on and doing this. Obviously the work that you guys are doing is fantastic. You have established yourself as one of the best investors in the space. and then obviously with the new announcement and FTX joining as a co-GP on this new fund is very exciting stuff. So we're excited to see what you guys are able to do there and we'll definitely have to do this again in the future

as you continue to grow and succeed. Thanks so much. This was fun. Great to be here.