The Wolf Of All Streets - $100M Bitcoin Fund Is Hunting 1000x Returns With Just 12 Bets | Nico Lechuga

Episode Date: July 20, 2025

I sat down with Nico Lechuga from Ego Death Capital on The Wolf Of All Streets to learn how his dream‑team fund is betting big on companies that actually earn and spend Bitcoin. Nico walks me through the wins, misses, and tough questions around Bitcoin payments, stablecoins, and those hyped “treasury” stocks – all in plain English. By the end, you’ll see why he thinks the next wave of Bitcoin businesses could outgrow simply stacking sats. Nico Lechuga: https://x.com/nico_lechuga This episode is brought to you by Binance, the world's #1 crypto exchange, trusted by over 270M users worldwide. Start your crypto journey with Binance: 👉https://binance.onelink.me/y874/wolfofallstreets Binance is not available in certain countries, including the U.S., check its Terms for more information: https://www.binance.com/en/terms ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEKDAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/ ►► Arch Public Unleash algorithmic trading. Discover how algorithms used by hedge-funds are now accessible to traders looking for unparalleled insights and opportunities! 👉https://archpublic.com/ ►►TRADING ALPHA READY TO TRADE LIKE THE PROS? THE BEST TRADERS IN CRYPTO ARE RELYING ON THESE INDICATORS TO MAKE TRADES. Use code '10OFF' for a 10% discount. 👉https://tradingalpha.io/?via=scottmelker Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://x.com/scottmelker Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c #Bitcoin #Crypto #investments Timecodes 0:00 Intro 2:30 Fund Backstory 5:20 Taproot Opportunity 8:00 What We Missed 10:20 Non‑Custody Boom 13:00 Africa Use Case 15:30 Stablecoin Reality 18:00 Treasury Stock Hype 21:00 Good vs Bad Debt 24:00 Series A Sweet Spot 27:00 VC Math Explained 30:00 Choosing 12 Bets 33:00 Timing Matters 36:00 Layer‑2 Tokens 38:40 Stablecoin On Lightning 41:00 Spend vs HODL 43:30 Institutional Buyers 46:00 Fundraising Lessons 49:00 Cycle Softening 52:00 $70 Million Bitcoin? 55:00 Closing Thoughts 57:30 Post‑Show Chat The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

Let's start with like what hasn't happened yet. Why should I do this instead of putting more money in Bitcoin, which is a great question. Great question. Bitcoin is going to be $5 million by 2027 or something like that. So it makes me a little less scared. If your CEO gets caught on a kiss cam in a Coldplay concert, like the stocks going to shake, right? It's a fucking terrible investment for anybody else to invest in.

Bitcoin Treasury Company is not a company that's using Bitcoin as its treasury asset. This is a really good question. I think those are the best podcasts. Ecodeath Capital was arguably one of the most successful venture funds in the last cycle and they recently raised another hundred million dollars. You've seen their partners on this podcast constantly, Preston Pish, Lynn Alden, Jeff Booth, an absolute all-star team of investors and minds in Bitcoin. Today I spoke with their co-founder, Nico LeCuga, who actually pitched me on their fund many, many years ago. I joke that it's the one that got away.

But we talked about what it's like to work with that dream team, what they're interested in, how they're deploying capital, and why they're deploying specifically into companies that denominate themselves in Bitcoin. This is an incredible conversation, one that you couldn't have with any other person. It's going to give you incredible insight as to how to invest around Bitcoin. As I mentioned to you off camera, ego death is the one that got away from me. You and I met years ago and it was I think right during the peak, well I should say right before the peak of crypto contagion and I was considering an investment and because of all the other things that were happening surrounding it,

I decided at that moment that I was fully deployed and shouldn't do it. And I think you guys are effectively the best performing fund since then. Is that an accurate assessment? Thanks, Scott. Yeah, Andy and I, I believe we had a great meeting with you initially.

You had a pretty diversified portfolio at the time period across all things crypto and The market turned it didn't end up happening, but it's okay you guys survived and thrive through that So obviously I don't want to take for granted that people know about ego death Even though once you start talking about it, they're gonna recognize all of your partners from many many podcasts on this channel Yeah, but maybe you just give us the TLDR really quick on who it is and what you do. Sounds great. So I'm Nico Lechuga. I'm one of the founding partners at Ego Death Capital. Ego Death Capital is a venture capital fund that invests in projects that are building

using some part of Bitcoin's technology stack. We started the fund in 2022, raised our first fund to deploy at a seed stage, and then have recently gone out to market, just closed our second fund, a $100 million vehicle to invest in a Series A. Partners in the fund, so Andy Pitt, Jeff Booth founded the fund with me. During the first fund,

we had Lynn Alden and Preston Pish were advisors. They loved it so much and we convinced them to come on as general partners for the second fund. Then we have Paolo Fernandez and Lisa Nago as technical advisors, and Pete Breger who's the chairman of Fortress as really our traditional financial advisor. So the focus is obviously on Bitcoin companies, right? And so I think you were founded at a time when most of the development in the crypto space was still on other chains. So you were founded at a time when most of the development in the crypto space was still on other chains. So you were years ahead of what I would call this Cambrian explosion

of building on Bitcoin, right? There were a few people talking about it was happening. I don't think Taproot had even happened yet. So I think it was still conceptual and most of those things were difficult to even deploy the ideas. Is that accurate? So this is a key point right here. It's completely accurate. Taper had just happened. So I had met Jeff a number of years before and Andy, the two other partners in the first fund. And we were looking at, I think right at this time period, about 2021, the billions and billions of dollars that you're acutely aware of that have been raised in alt crypto world. And at that time period, it was maybe tens of millions that had been raised to deploy into Bitcoin. I don't think

even the lightning labs $70 million round had happened yet, which was a huge, huge round for the space. But when you look at it as some of the other rounds that were raised in all crypto land, like an alchemy round of $400 million, it kind of pales in comparison to that. What we saw was what was happening was because of SegWit and Taproot, you were going to be able to have programmability on top of Bitcoin. And this was like a key understanding that we felt like most of the market did not understand. I think to your point, one of the things with investing, if you're going to be successful, you kind of want to skate to where the puck is going to be not where

the puck is at right now. And so our core belief was that the other chains well, they had some fascinating projects, incredible developers, you were building on layers that had compromised on either security decentralization or scalability. And because of these updates on Bitcoin, you now had a more programmatic environment and you could build those things on a more secure and decentralized foundational base. And so we bet big on that. We kind of bet the house on it. Yeah. And it we bet big on that. We've kind of bet the house on it.

Yeah, and it's worked out well. So maybe we should start with the things that you got right in that first cycle and maybe some things that you thought would happen that really haven't at all, won't or haven't happened yet. It's interesting, I had a conversation with David Marcus, not long ago. And yeah, who's amazing, obviously. But he, as an example, said, you know, listen, I spent two years convinced we were going to build exactly what we wanted on lightning before saying, this isn't going to work and lightning can't do it. Right. So like, I think a lot of people have learned a lot of hard lessons trying to build on Bitcoin because it is more difficult. Let's start with what hasn't happened yet. I think if we're being realistic,

Bitcoin being used for everyday payments has not happened to the degree of which we thought it would. I think that when you look at this from the standpoint of tax implications in certain regions, other regulations, these are impediments to that happening. I think if the current US administration peels back some of those things, we could probably see a more friendly environment and for those projects. And when we think about investing, you think about a twofold of one, you could have a thesis of how the world will look in the future, which is what you're basically betting on. The second part is the timing component. So if we're betting on like Bitcoin

payments four years ago, and you're thinking of venture capital funds basically invest in a three or four year investment cycle, you're probably wrong. You probably missed on that investment. And that is probably going to be in a later time period. So I think from that standpoint, the part of Bitcoin as a payment used in everyday payments, now people are using it to pay for certain things, but I would say like the majority of the population is not using it and the payment volume really isn't there to support a venture backed company at this time period. So that has not happened yet, but I think like we're moving in the right way with regulation to make that possible in the future. I think that one of the things that we have gotten right from this is that people want to one, build on top of Bitcoin and the projects are generally more secure. So if we think of something

like Breeze that's laying the foundation for infrastructure in the future, and you can put LightSpark in the same context, these are going to be core infrastructure building blocks for future future companies. And you're seeing them engage both these companies engage from people inside of Bitcoin inside of crypto and externally from that, which is a really, really strong market signal. I think from the other standpoint, we had had this this belief pre FTX blow up, pre Celsius blow up that there was going to be this desire for non custodial infrastructure on ramps in that way, shape or form, or a limitation of a platform having custody of the

user's assets till the last moment. So with that, we have a portfolio company like Relay, which is the biggest non-custodial on-ramp in all of Europe that people have really turned to as other platforms have blown up. We have Ellen Markets, which allows for derivatives trading on top of Bitcoin with T plus one settlement. So you maintain custody of your funds until that you actually entered the trade. Breeze, again, you have this non-custodial infrastructure. I think one of the other things that's really key on this is a lot of times when we're investing or thinking about investing, I think about my mom. And I was just talking to her 30 minutes

ago of like the complexity even to understand what we're talking about from broken money to a payments environment is, is it's a jump. And so if we're going to invest in a project, I think about, could this be abstracted away from my mom having to understand it and it, it offered like an order of magnitude, better environment, whatever the thing is for her to utilize. I'll give you an example of this. So in Africa, there's over 50 different disparate countries. And then a lot of those companies that work there are multinational and have to deal with this crazy environment across different currencies.

And what we're seeing right now is utilizing some of the Bitcoin's infrastructure. Those companies are positioning themselves to be able to move, call it Kenyan shillings to Nigeria and Naira in a way that's in order of magnitude better than they were before. Yeah. Bitcoin has an entire economy in Africa that seemingly nobody here talks about. I mean, especially in Nigeria, from what I've heard, obviously I've never seen it on the ground. I haven't been there, but I know a lot of people who have,

and it seems that the youth of Nigeria have really deeply taken to using Bitcoin for effectively everything, opting entirely out of their system. And I think in other places, we've seen stable coins kind of play that role, which is taking the shine off of Bitcoin as a payment method to some degree. Yeah, I think I think you're 100 percent right.

I think people are very, very comfortable thinking in dollars. One of the things that we recently just invested in and Borja Martel is the founder of the company Roxham. So Borja actually built Lemon, Lemon, the co-founder of Lemon, so one of the biggest Latin American cryptocurrency exchanges, a hardcore Bitcoiner. He started mining bitcoins at 28 years old, started mining Bitcoin when he was 14 years old. By time he was, I think 17, he had eclipsed. And he's from Argentina. So being in Argentina, he had eclipsed like his parents' wealth, and then goes on to found

this Latin American cryptocurrency exchange. But what he comes into is none of these other things matter, right? And Bitcoin is this foundational layer. And if we think about currencies that have had hyperinflation, so look at Venezuela right now, someone in Venezuela might think, okay, great, I need to get out and I need to put my money in dollars. But what would be like even more profound than moving into dollars is building a business that's denominated in dollars and that cash flows dollars when it's cash flow positive.

And so that's like the underlying thesis of the entire fund. In that these businesses, when they become cashflow positive, they are cash flowing Bitcoin. And I think that this is what you're hitting on of some of these other countries around the world. The entrepreneurs have started to understand this because they're in more fragmented and broken payment environments than we're in today. So we're seeing a lot of different use cases building on Bitcoin, of course, but we're also seeing a lot of different structures around Bitcoin and different investment vehicles than we saw in the past.

Obviously you guys are venture capitalists. You're investing into companies that are going to, as you said, sort of use Bitcoin as their benchmark or building on Bitcoin as a network. I want to talk about Bitcoin treasury companies though, because that's obviously the new wave here. I'm a huge skeptic to state it plainly. And so from your perspective, seeing so much Bitcoin go into these and seeing so much money go into these, how do you frame them?

I mean, you've been through a couple, I feel like crypto cycles in general, right? And there's there's like a similar feeling, right? Like of I see a rock. Yeah, it feels like a fraud. I think that any time that happens, whether it's a one of these these cycles or a technology cycle, there are going to be some winners, there are going to be a lot of losers. And I think that one of the interesting things that we have to look at with the treasury companies is how are they ensuring that they can continue to operate in all types of market environments. Based on what they're doing

to accumulate Bitcoin and the financial instruments that they're utilizing, what kind of environments would threaten basically their existence? So I think that from my standpoint, I think it's driving adoption of Bitcoin. I think if you get over your skis in any type of debt situation and don't have an underlying business, so this is very different from like micro strategy, like using financial instruments, in my opinion. There is a cash flowing business and they're using Bitcoin as a treasury asset

and they're also utilizing leverage, but they can pay for that leverage. I also think a lot of people view accurately his longer plan, which is to actually add financial services on top of what he's doing. So he's accumulating first to add financial services, which I think to a lot of people justifies the premium because there's something coming, whether it is or not, that's the perception. I think with a lot of these treasury companies too, there's, I think that you have to peel

back the veil and understand who is initially funding them and that there's a trading environment to it. And the initial funders are going to get a pop on that. And a lot of times with that pop, they're going to leave. And then we'll see what happens. I think it will drive short-term price action probably higher. I think longer term, if you have a threat to any of these companies, you could have a downward spiral of a center force to sell to cover their leverage.

So I think it's important, and I keep kind of harping on this, but to differentiate between Bitcoin treasury companies and what I call Bitcoin balance sheet companies. 100%. Because I think everybody is excited about a company taking 5 or 10% of their cash and buying Bitcoin. Yes. Existing cash from a cash flowing business that is successful. Yeah. So I think this is a huge point that you hit on right now. So we have, think about the companies that we're investing in. These entrepreneurs are so excited about Bitcoin. They're so excited about building Bitcoin, they get a funding

realm that's somewhere between three and call it $15 million. And they're like, should I put that in Bitcoin as a treasury thing? And I think let's hit on your point right here, which I think is one of the things that we talk to the entrepreneurs all the time is, do you have a cashflow positive business? If the business is cashflow positive, to your point, no problem. You want to sweep that all into Bitcoin or even better, something like Ellen markets that's cashflow positive and the business cash flows Bitcoin. You want to just keep that Bitcoin because like OpEx is covered.

It's like a minor. Just it's like a minor not selling or selling. Right? Yeah, don't sell it. Exactly. And then you have this like I growth tech company that cash flows Bitcoin. It's kind of like the craziest thing. But these other businesses, and we saw this, there were a number of them in 2021 that did

this and I'm sure we're going to have this, there's going to be some type of pullback. In 2021, we what would tie with 67,000, there were a number of businesses that had raised called three to $5 million. And they loaded it all into Bitcoin. And they were seed stage companies. And then when you saw that pullback to 17, suddenly the runway was gone. And they no longer had the space to figure out

how the hell they were gonna like find product market fit, get to the next funding round. They had just created this attack vector that they probably weren't cognizant was even there because they were so excited about business Bitcoin to your point with the Treasury companies. It's it's potentially Even worse in that there is no underlying operating business For most of these Treasury companies right now Bitcoin Treasury Company is not a company that's using Bitcoin as its Treasury asset

and again if the market environment continues to go up, then this delta between the cost of their capital and the compounded annual growth rate, it'll be a good trade. But if there is a weird market environment and they get a threat from there, you could see a cascade of downward pressure. Yeah, I was worried for a while that they were a significant threat to Bitcoin. I think I overstated that in my sort of early analysis. I think they're a massive threat to their shareholders.

So kind of what you described before, there's an underlying trade going on. The insiders send their Bitcoin in, they get stock at a multiple of an already public company liquid. They either sell it and get the Bitcoin out or they just buy, borrow, die, right? But they're not really interested in the long-term,

but there's going to be some retail person that buys this stock at a 9X accessible to NAV, and that will inevitably collapse, right? Even if just because there's so many treasury companies and it's arbed away, like why would you buy one at nine if you can buy one at two or whatever it is? And so I guess my bigger concern now is it's going to be the retail who buy the stock that get hurt. And then also I think maybe if we were going to get a 25% correction in Bitcoin, we end up with a 40 or 50% correction in Bitcoin because they're forced to liquidate at the lows and cause that cascade. Sponsor 2 Yeah. So I think you have to evaluate all these businesses

one at a time, if you're not part of the initial trade if there is an underlying business to them and Bitcoin is really this Treasury asset it could be interesting if This is simply a financial Manipulation vehicle and They're using public instruments to accumulate additional Bitcoin at by raising more and more capital I think you just have to evaluate what what kind of market conditions can break that. I think what will be interesting to your point is like when it does break, I think what's going to happen is that the better capitalized companies or the more sound businesses will

just buy. They're going to consume everybody. Yes. Yeah. They're going to eat them. Yeah. You're going to start. Sailors can own everybody.

You know, sailor maybe Nakamoto, maybe 21, some of the early ones who are really well capitalized. And yeah, I asked Jack Mullers about this actually in Vegas. So it was five weeks ago and this trend was really just starting and they had just made the announcement. And he said that, he said, more cheap Bitcoin for me. It's good. I said, I asked him, you know, these treasury companies, isn't this like contagion, you know,

risk is this going to be the bubble of next thing? He says, he kind of was like, I hope so. Cause we're well capitalized and we're ready. So, you know, risk is this going to be the bubble the next thing he says, I kind of was like, I hope so, because we're well capitalized and we're ready. So, you know, and that's it. That's the point. It's like, if you have the weapons ready in order to say like, okay, this thing trades at an MNAV sub of one and the capital is already ready to go. And you're saying, okay, well, I'm going to go out and I'm going to buy, I'm just going to eat that whole company. So I'm buying Bitcoin at a discount.

So it makes me a little less scared. I think the Bitcoin gets vacuumed up somewhere and it, like I said, it's just kind of the shareholders that get hurt. Okay. So that's my favorite topic. I just wanted to knock it out as we go. So I think what's more interesting probably to people listening is that you've now raised the second fund.

You have a hundred million dollars to deploy specifically into the Bitcoin ecosystem. What's exciting to you? What do you view as the next trends? What do you think is coming? Because you're always trying to be, as you said, you want to go where the puck is headed, not where it is right now. What we saw started to see the semblance and gave us confidence to be able to raise this, go out and raise the second fund, was that there was still this misunderstanding in Bitcoin

and what the businesses in Bitcoin should look like. So a crypto business, at the time period of when we started to have conversations about the second fund, they still were very focused on this token component to these businesses, which these Bitcoin businesses, they don't have. They do not have like a token warrant. So just for the all the listeners, when you invest most of the time in a crypto business, what happens is the venture capitalist is focused on one thing, and it's not the equity that he's going to get out of the underlying business he is focused on here sheet, the token warrant and a one to one or two to one match of the amount of equity that he has bought with tokens. And then the the token warrant and a one-to-one or two-to-one match of the amount of equity that he has bought with tokens,

and then the token lockup schedule and when he can dump those. I would take, just really quickly, I would take that one step further and say the majority of the ones I've seen or that go around don't even have an equity component, they're straight to token. So it's not even a one-for-one, it's just a token deal.

But go ahead. So the token deal, right? And so let's just take a step back even farther, right? So venture capital was built to do moonshot projects, like you want to put someone on the moon, it's going to take years to do that, it's going to cost a lot of capital to do that. But if it works, the return on that should be 100 1000 X of the money that put in. And typically those projects from like inception to what we call like a liquidity event. So think acquisition, public offering, whether that comes from an IPO or verse merger, a SPAC, like you're seeing a lot of stuff right

now. Those would be considered liquidity events. And there's a real reason why you don't have early liquidity in early stage companies is because if you think about like just look at public markets right now if your CEO gets caught on a kiss cam in a Coldplay concert like the stock's gonna shake right. He's got a nice watch on though apparently. Yeah yeah um my wife pointed out his hand was in a precarious position for for being on camera but your stock's gonna shake it's a stable company if you raised $3 million, it's something like an eight to $12 million valuation, and you have this token that's in this, in a liquidly traded

token, that stock is going to shake or that public equity token, whatever you want to call it, and it becomes an intact vector for the company. So us from day one, we have blocked companies ability to issue tokens, we actually have like token blockers and all of our deals, as we do not believe early stage companies should have tokens attached to them. Now, so venture capitalists traditionally back would invest in a project and expect six to nine years out that they're going to get liquidity. And this is important until the entire token craze in crypto. Six to nine days.

It broke. It broke the venture capital model, right? You had you had sold LPs on this 10 year fund vehicle. And suddenly, the VCs were indifferent to what happened to these projects. As long as the token pumped. And six months after they had bought the token, they could sell it on to retail. And they might be able to sell all of it in six months. Some of them have like 24 month like vesting periods and like six month blocks from here. But generally, what you've seen is even if the token drops, call it 90 percent, the VCs fine because it's still like a 10x return on their entrance price to buy that token.

And there's certain retail that will just never sell it. Now, from day one in Bitcoin, what we've been investing in, those companies don't have that. They look like traditional financial companies, which if you're one of these alt crypto companies and start investing in Bitcoin or evaluating Bitcoin, it looks different than the mental model that you have conceived of what the space should look like. Because of the background of the partners within the fund, spending time in traditional finance, being entrepreneurs, this was like right in line with what we were looking at. And what we started to see was the companies in Bitcoin started to achieve revenue quicker.

So we started to get revenue bands of one to three to five to seven million dollars for companies that were raising what they would call a series A. Now, if we step back like a series A in like a traditional fintech company doing one to one and a half million dollars would be great. It's like a great early indicator the company's doing well. There's some semblance of product market fit, that we should probably inject more capital in order to hypercharge growth. And we were seeing that these companies doing those numbers, like two, three, four, five, six, seven, and raising series A's. And we weren't seeing a fund step up and take them.

We saw this void, right? You had growth equity that was willing to come in later on, and you had a decent amount of seed stage funds that are now in the space. Just probably seven to nine of us. But there wasn't a leading series A fund that could step up and say, hey, I'm gonna leave the deal, meaning, which is very different.

Like I think for all the listeners from there, if I were evaluating, if I wanted to invest in venture capital, whether it's an AI or Bitcoin or defense tech, one of the things I'd want to understand was, is the fund that I'm investing in, are they capable of leading transactions? Because if you're not capable of leading transactions, you're always waiting for what's called a lead investor, someone that's taking down 30 to 50 or potentially all the round to set the terms price it, lead the diligence of that. And because we had done that in every single

one of our transactions at the seed stage, and that the kind of the institutional brain power that we have with an ego death, we're well equipped to do it in a series A, and people trust us within the space, whether it was the co investors or the growth equity that you bring along. So we saw these strong financial metrics and then we saw valuation compression. Anytime where there's not a lot of people looking at these deals or they misunderstand it, they're fucking great deals. They're great deals. And so this was, I would say we had a couple instances of it that gave us the confidence to go out and again on the analogy of like You're gonna go to where the pot is gonna be not where the puck is out right now

Two of the biggest questions that we get from or got from investors as we are raising the fund one was Why should I do this instead of putting more money in Bitcoin, which is a great question great question? Unbelievable question we can hit on that if you want a little bit The other question was what gives you the confidence that you can deploy a hundred million dollar vehicle into Bitcoin series A companies? We would go over the metrics of where some of the seed stage companies were at and how they would come out. So you think about deploying a VC fund over a three to four year investment horizon for your initial investments and then you follow on into those companies.

What I can say to you now that's no longer theoretical is like those companies exist and right now we're in diligence for five additional companies and they have these metrics where they are generating three to four to $5 million in top line revenue. They're cashflow positive and their growth rates are incredible. We can deploy and evaluate into those companies and I think we've carved out a bright eye space. When you're at that point, it's like running a Facebook ad. If you run a Facebook ad and you know if you spend a dollar and you make a $1.15 every

single time, you just scale endlessly and make that 15% on top of whatever you spend. But you're doing that at the level of millions of dollars into cashflow positive companies. And you need to make sure obviously that the scale would be there with your injection, I would imagine. Because there are a lot of cute companies out there

that make three or $4 million, but really don't have a path to that becoming 30 or 40 or 300 and 400, right? There's a huge point. So I think like two things that you want to evaluate. So you get an initial, I would say like, it catches your eye. The money catches your eye initially of like the revenue. But I think your point is huge here.

One is, was that a flash in the pan? This is a one off event that you're not ever going to be able to replicate. Two, what does the ceiling look like for this? To your point right now, like in a different other space, like there are friends that's a very, very sharp CPG investor. So consumer package, good investor. And he's like, there's a host of companies that can get to five nights, and they will never get beyond that. And that's just like, they're a great business,

by the way, if you're a small business, but not investable. No, no, I mean, like I own a hot sauce business. We have never taken money for it. And I, everybody I talked to about it is I'm like, it's a phenomenal family asset. It's a fucking terrible investment for anybody else to invest in. Yeah. Yeah. So what I want to get back to the Bitcoin versus investing in a fund point in a minute, but traditionally, what would you say, I guess, at Preseed versus Series A is the amount of companies you need to invest in to see a winner. So for example, we kind of always have joked about the spray and pray model of Preseed. Like you throw money into a hundred things, 99

go to zero, but one of them does a thousand X and it doesn't matter, right? That's always been kind of the joke about Preseed. But at Series A, you have a lot more information. Yes. This is a really, really good point. I would say I'm not a good pre-seed investor. Your thing right there of how many companies you have to kind of spray across, it's not something I'm comfortable with. Even when we were deploying at a seed, we were probably deploying a little bit later than a seed. For an A, we're going to probably have 12 core portfolio companies in the portfolio. And I think that you're going to expect that probably 30 to 40% of them are going to fail. They might not, depending on the revenue metrics

that we have. But 30 to 40% of them at least will not perform to the degree that you probably outlined in the initial memo as you went through of like the pre parade with the company, right? I think that you're probably looking more at like two to three of them pulling the portfolio, really like taking this and to be determined, I think they just just early stage, I would still say like venture capital is series A is still like early stage investing is unclear like what future market environment is going to happen, how these entrepreneurs are going to react to scaling their business. The difference between goes to 50 grand in three months, everything looks a lot different

than if Bitcoin goes to 150 grand in three months. For some of the businesses for some of them, like it doesn't their their price indifferent like a price insensitive, right? It's like the businesses kind of work. Think of the example in Africa, like the business doesn't matter if Bitcoin is $5 or if it's $500,000. Transacting. Yeah.

Exactly. Yeah. But so we have those, I think like 12 core portfolio companies, you're looking at this revenue band that we're talking about. Like we want these companies that are Series A to be generating one to three million in top line revenue. We want some semblance of product market fit. So your point right there of the ad, I put in a dollar, I get a dollar 15 back.

You want to see something of like, OK, I have something that I can replicate with more capital. Now let's test it. Let's figure out what the upward band is and let's inject some more capital here. And I think that the other part of this is historically with venture capital, you would need like the next funding round and the next funding round.

What was really good within the market downturn in 2021 is you really had Bitcoin entrepreneurs become much harder in that that capital dried up when they had to raise much, much smaller rounds. What they ended up doing was that they made a choice of whether the business could become profitable or not. So we have portfolio companies, right, that will like teeter on profitability. They'll drive growth because you want to drive early stage growth, but they could, if they needed

to make the business profitable and not fail almost overnight. And I think that that's like to the other part of this, okay, you've raised an A, if the B isn't there, can the business still exist today? It is really, really key. Yeah. So let's talk about Bitcoiners wanting to invest in anything other than Bitcoin, because I know that that is to some degree a challenge, although I think we're finding that at certain prices Bitcoiners become capitalists who also like yachts and second houses. 100%. I think that, I mean, Ross Stevens in his, one of the shareholder letters with Stone

Ridge was like the point of like Bitcoin and money is not to just accumulate it is actually to transact and buy things at a certain point. I just had this conversation with a friend that's in the space. He has two young kids and they were thinking about like a purchase for their kids and their family and he was like, well, how do you conceptualize this versus me just buy more Bitcoin? I was like, dude, the memories that you're going to make with your like five and seven year old or said this so many times, man. Yeah.

And the second I would sell Bitcoin to buy a house to like raise my kids in that it was amazing and would give me memories that not everything is a financial transaction. It made Joe Rogan hit this on the head and it wasn't with Bitcoin. He didn't realize it, but he was talking about billionaires and he was like, great, you've won like spreadsheet math. You won the spreadsheet math game. Like, what did you, what was the value that you created with your life? So I think a lot, like if with your kids, like to the example of this or your family in general, like if you have the ability to do that, I think it's an amazing, amazing thing on Bitcoiners evaluating whether to buy more Bitcoin or invest in our fund.

I would say like right now Bitcoiners, a lot of Bitcoiners that I talk to that are evaluating these things. So I might be skewed because they're already reaching out and I'm talking to them. They're looking for ways to make money on their Bitcoin or to outperform Bitcoin. I think there are loans applications right now where they could receive some type of yield on their Bitcoin or to outperform Bitcoin. I think there are loans applications right now where they could, they could receive some type of yield on their Bitcoin. There's ones that use DLCs. There's ones that are custodial.

There's a whole host of that. I think that the lending environment against Bitcoin right now is just starting to take off. Like I talked to this individual that manages all the money for the credit units in the United States. And he was talking very defensively about stable coins and I was saying to him, you should think offensively of if you can grow your depositor base by offering a new financial product that you already offered in another context, this would be interesting. I said Bitcoiners today, like if I own an equity portfolio, my equity portfolio is $5

million and I want to buy a million dollar house. You're going to just say to you like, transfer me custody of 300,000 of your equity portfolio. You won't have to put anything down and like you're going to give me the loan on the house. I said, why should that be any different than if you were managing someone that had a bunch of Bitcoin? If you truly understood it, like all the Bitcoin lending right now is overcollateralized. But Bitcoiners, I think, like, would be happy in certain scenarios.

So go back to the house thing. Okay, great. Like, I will allow you to buy this house with no money down and potentially like I'm going to look at this of I can collateralize the house and collateralize the Bitcoin that is still in custody and the Bitcoiners will get the Bitcoin back when the house is paid off. So you get the upside of the Bitcoin and you get the house. So I think Bitcoiners are like constantly thinking about this. What we tell investors all the time is the things that we are looking to invest in are high growth tech companies. And when they cash flow, they will cash flow Bitcoin. And if that happens, you have a company that can exceed Bitcoin's annual 30 to 50% growth rate.

And its treasury asset that is built in, that doesn't require board approval, that doesn't require a shareholder vote, is Bitcoin and it's this explosive thing. We have examples within the portfolio right now that at the early stages have exceeded greatly exceeded bitcoins growth rate, whether we are right on that thesis longer term, and that plays out like we were talking about by time these like later liquidity events to be determined. But if you're evaluating this and investing in a fund, you should probably just whether it's a financial advisor, or whether it's an AI, think of it as a private equity bucket. I'm investing in venture capital. This is my entire investor portfolio.

And it's not 100% in Bitcoin. I want to take 20% and invest it in X and you choose someone you trust to do that for you. And exactly. In that case, also, Bitcoin doesn't have to be the benchmark because you actually just want some diversity. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. We have a number of investors that were doing that. They're like, this is uncorrelated to Bitcoin from here. And this, this serves as my venture capital buckle. I would say it's not for everybody. And you have to be in the right like investment position to take

the swing in it. But we think like, if we are right, longer term with the fund, it will outperform Bitcoin and why we're spending all of our time here evaluating these companies, building these relationships, supporting the companies is because we believe that these companies do have the ability to outperform Bitcoin. So obviously, Jeff Booth is one of my favorite people to have on the show is one of my favorite people in general. And I'm sure one of yours as a founder, co-founder. Yeah. But he has very unique and very particular views on where Bitcoin needs to go and how it needs to be used to eventually achieve the vision that people have for Bitcoin. And one of those is sort of the premise that you said that's been difficult, which is payments. Like Jeff is one of the few Bitcoiners out there who actually says, go spend your Bitcoin

to dominate your life in Bitcoin. Use your Bitcoin because you can't be a currency without it actually being used. I think I had him on a month ago and we discussed this at length. Is that a core premise? You know, as a company who's attached to him, do you share the same sort of core beliefs or do you have to change those slightly because it's a business and not a thesis on where Bitcoin goes? And do you think payments becomes or transacting becomes a core part of Bitcoin in the future? Because I see it moving in the other direction right now. I agree with him actually 100% for it to become what it could be that needs to happen. But right now nobody wants

to spend their Bitcoin, it feels like. So I agree with you on the latter. I think no one wants to spend their Bitcoin. And I agree with him on the part of people have to spend their Bitcoin in order for it to become. I think that the one component that we're missing here from me sitting in an investor's seat is the timing. So if we are evaluating a project of... like we had talked about at the beginning of the conversation, that deals with Bitcoin payments. So we are enabling Bitcoin payments on Shopify, Wix, Squarespace. We are abstracting away the regulation complexity in Europe or the US. The first question that we dive into is just the data. So like you can look at Overstock that has allowed crypto payments for a while, I think

is the company. And when you dive into the data, it's like a subset of a subset. It's like less than I believe 2% that is utilized the last time the data was out with those payments. I think that two things, a couple of things have to change. And I think we can bifurcate Bitcoin the network and Bitcoin money. One, if we're talking about Bitcoin money, so I'm spending actual Bitcoin, not using Bitcoin the network to transact using like a tether stable coin across it, then part of the regulation and

tax environment has to be peeled back. I can't feel like I'm getting hit with this tax thing and it's in the back of my mind. Your coffee being 40% more expensive doesn't make a lot of sense. So I think that if one country will, if the US were to do that, that would be a huge, huge step. Yeah, actually all these guys who are transferring 10, 20, 30,000 Bitcoin in a clip to treasury companies to be tax efficient would go by just buy stuff with Bitcoin if the taxes weren't so awful, right? Right. Yeah. Right. So that's one component.

The other part is the network. And I think that we can, this is where that bifurcation we were talking about comes in. If the network, which we're moving in the direction, can support a massive stablecoin, then the network will grow and all these other Bitcoin infrastructure companies will grow with it. And you kind of are bootstrapped by like the stablecoins until like the world is ready to transact in Bitcoin. That's kind of my thesis. Does that mean that we need a massive stablecoin on Bitcoin?

Because that's been to me one of the biggest head scratchers is that we haven't seen that yet. I mean, we saw it seen Tether talk about it, I think coming to Lightning. And we've seen Lightning incorporated in some places, but why isn't there a hundred billion dollar market cap stable coin that moves on Bitcoin? I think until, so using Lightning, right, you had to have the Taproot Asset Protocol

and Lalo just, I forget, um, six or eight months ago, they sent a different asset across lightning. And so the infrastructure really like was not there in order to support like a stable coin going across it. And then you have to have the stable coin issuer want to support that like a big known stable coin issuer. Like there are stable coins that can be transacted across lightning right now, but you wouldn't use them.

You're not going to use like a new one on tether, right? I think. Yeah. Yes. So I think that like that's happening and that's coming. Um, I don't think we're far away from that, like talking to different, different teams. I think the transaction again on Bitcoin or utilizing Bitcoin in this everyday

means if the tax part of it would pull back like you and I then would spend. But you just look at the evidence by thinking this through. Most Tether transactions, which is obviously the largest stable coin, I think most people think are happening on Ethereum, but they're happening on Tron. So your average person who wants to send somebody five bucks, I think they just don't give a shit remotely how they do it. Fast, cheap, and grandma, as you said, or your mom, like UX UI is simple enough that a friend can say,

hey, download this app, I'm going to send you 10 bucks. And they don't know that they've got a Tron wallet and they probably haven't written down their seed phrase. And so maybe that's the challenge, is it like, it's a big leap to care when you're sending a microtransaction, what the base layer network is for it. I completely agree with you. And I think that this goes back to the other point of, if you're going to be solving something, it has to be better than any other solution by like an order of magnitude. You can't be 30% better and introduce friction into people's lives,

because they don't care. And so when we will look at these projects, like a number of, I think one of the good questions to ask is like, what would this look like? Is this easier on Solana? Is it easier on Tron? Is this easier on Ton? And then for the stable coin component of this project, would it be better suited on one of those other chains today? And if that's the case, and there's additional complexity because of that, then like we probably need to evaluate, is this the right thing to invest in? That makes perfect sense. So obviously, you made it very clear that you don't invest in anything that has a token associated to the point where you have it in your contract that

nobody will launch a token even down the road if you have it in your contract that nobody will launch a token even down the road if you're going to invest. That said, we're seeing a lot of layer twos and token issuance even by companies building on Bitcoin. Right? So what do you make of that trend? So I wanna just like clarify one component of this. So we do, we block and it's a consent right for them to be able to issue a token.

What we believe internally is that there will be some time period where you have tokenized equity with real companies, like big companies. That's different. That's like non-fungible token, but yes. So this is, this is like, we are supportive of that. We just want to, so we invested in Roxanne, right? Like Roxanne, that's the belief. Like assets, right? Exactly. So like, like we had had from the beginning of the fund, the belief that there would be an exchange that would be dominated if Bitcoin is going to be the world's reserve currency that would be denominated in

Bitcoin, that you would have like an Nvidia Apple to list on. So like that's being built with Roxanne. What will happen with some of these portfolio companies, six, seven, eight years down the road, maybe sooner, they will want to list in that type of environment. And like that equity will be tokenized in this way, but it's not going to be a token in the way that you think of like we think of crypto. That's wildly different, but a great point, because I think there's a lot of crypto people, to differentiate from Bitcoin, because I think there's a lot of crypto people, different from Bitcoin, are very excited about real world assets being tokenized. And I think they don't realize that that's not going to be the pump they're looking for.

Because it's going to be very difficult for them to actually invest in because JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, when tokenizing an asset and trading it between each other, it's not going to need some public crypto token that you bought in pre-sale. Right, totally. Completely agree. To your point of like the layer twos and the other tokenized projects, I think it's very exciting that different developers are excited about building on Bitcoin. So if we look at Citrea, Alpen, Botanixics bob babble on like these are very academically complex projects solving very interesting. I would say programming things on top of bitcoin and they're doing it in all different ways and they're also providing an environment where. thermodynamics where the energy is moving from these other ecosystems to Bitcoin. Now, are some of those projects just hot air 100%? And are some of them just looking at like a token pump? Yes. Are some of them looking to replicate what has happened on Ethereum, Solana,

Tan? Sure. But that doesn't mean that we're not going to get some some seriously great developers that come into here or that we open up the ecosystem to other people. From our seat, it's always a question of, okay, when we're evaluating a project, like what evidence do we have that this thing, especially the series A has some degree of product market fit? How do we believe that they're not in the camp of requiring what we would like to call like two miracles or like think of a rocket. So a rocket going up in the air, every additional stage of a new rocket firing to take something

to space introduces additional complexity. Now when those those rockets have to be fired by external features, which some of these like layered projects have to have, so they would have to be the go to scaling solution on Bitcoin for their sequencer to work, that is, I would say, uncomfortable for the stage that we're investing in for us to place capital. That makes sense because it's hard to handicap things that are beyond that company's control necessarily. 100%.

Yeah. That's a hundred and sixty-six. Yeah. And you're having no problem, I would imagine, finding people to pitch you. We're having a lot of people pitch us, yeah. No issue there. The deal flow's been great though. Like I think that, so just for the listeners, typically with a fund at this stage,

you wanna deploy the initial capital to your core portfolio companies, which you're then going to follow on into in three, maybe four years. So you would anticipate at the stage that we're at being like 25 to 30 something 33% deployed with the projects that we have in diligence right now that we're very much so like like they meet all these different metrics. There's a there's a high chance we're at like 51% between like initial and following capital that you would earmark.

So the deal for is really good and we're not. And you're not writing a $50 million check out of your 100. So you're gonna have to find 50 investments or 40 investments or whatever it is to deploy the entire fund 30 to 40. I don't know if you're doing two, three million bucks a clip. Yeah. So like thinking of the core portfolio companies that are in there and you wanting 12. So you're writing like a three to call it $6 million check and then reserving like a quarter of the fund for following investments a little bit for earlier stage to try or lower

the cost basis. Like we're very, very selective and we could go a quarter or two quarters without placing capital. But then if we see something that we really like, like we go after it. That makes perfect sense. Yeah. So I mean, I'm very, very happy with where we're at with the space. I think it's like getting to work with the brain trust that we have internally is amazing. Dude, if I could sit in a room with Preston, Jeff and Lynn on any given occasion, you know,

it's pretty powerful brain trust and yourself, of course, sorry. But you know, it's just really an incredible group. So I have to ask the last fund you basically raised deployed executed entirely in what we'll call a very unfavorable environment for the industry. How much has the regime change and sort of having the governor lifted all obstacles removed now affected your core business? Or was the fact that you're on Bitcoin and there was really always some clarity on Bitcoin not as much of an impediment as maybe it had been for the rest of the industry? I think just like clearing through the noise, like this is the worst private equity fundraising

environment in the last 25 years across the board. And when you and I first talked, before the complete meltdown, we had set out to raise between 25 and $30 million because like that's where this stage, the industry was and you are like know what the other VC funds had in crypto.

They were raising like, and resums I have $4 billion fund. Heke insanity right around then. We were like, we want to raise 25 to $30 million. First venture capital fund, we had line of sight, let's say all these verbals, and you know, part of it's gonna fall out, verbals for above the 30, and then we're like, okay, we're gonna initiate the first close. And this is like the market started to fall.

Dude, the first close on Fun One was like $11 million. And then you just like grind it out for the next- I was not a unique butterfly. I was just a part of the crowd, yeah. I mean, we all saw it. It was just timing. Yeah. It melted down.

We ended up raising $25.2 million, but it was a slog. And we deployed that fund and really just were able to, I would say, execute on what we had had was a thesis and a belief at that time period. The second fund, I would say the regime change has been really helpful. It's been helpful to have the data from the first fund. It's been helpful that 90 to 95% of our investor base is family offices. We don't require institutional money. Some of those family offices have done quite well over the past number of years, and they are looking for a place that can handle the diligence and give them access to companies that they wouldn't else be able to like place capital into.

And we've kind of become one of the go-to, the go-to places to get that exposure. That makes perfect sense. So looking at where Bitcoin is now, we're recording on Friday. This will come out Sunday. You know, let's call it 120. It's probably 170. I haven't looked, but, you know, out Sunday. Let's call it 120. It's probably 117. I haven't looked, but call it 120. It's a big number.

Where do you think we sit in this cycle? And as you're looking at this, obviously, do you think cycles are even really relevant? Or is Bitcoin sort of changing into a different beast? Those who believe in the four-year cycle would have believed all coins would have been going nuts for the last six months and nothing happened there, right? So I think the traditional four year cycle and the impact of the halving maybe are being diminished. This is a really good question.

I think that we're probably gonna see higher highs and not as low lows. And I think that one of the components of this is the newer entrance. There is friction as low lows. And I think that the one of the components of this is the newer entrance. There is friction as they enter. So if you and I enter Bitcoin right now, like, and we have a life event, you and I can just go out and sell the Bitcoin. It doesn't matter. But if a publicly traded company enters Bitcoin or decides to allocate a certain percentage to a treasury asset, it's going to require asset, it's going to

require a board approval to sell it. They might have to actually like contact the SEC. They certainly can't puke on a random Sunday at noon when they feel like it. Yeah, during a market meltdown, it becomes very hard to liquidate the position. Same thing for like a treasury asset of a sovereign. And because of that, I think like the market contagion that you've seen, like, when you had the Celsius FTX, like three arrows meltdown, that they were just all able to liquidate overnight, I think that that is going to cause some calmness with the market, I think to the

point of that Jack Mallers are saying of their supersuit, there's well capitalized buyers, extremely well capitalized buyers, and that will just reach out and grab it. I think that we're just in the early innings of broader market adoption, whether it's people using it as a treasury asset or sovereigns or just like my mom deciding more of her position to be a Bitcoin. I think the other part though, and the thing that I would think that I would lean on of like what causes the downturn, I think it's some of these positions becoming like over

their skis for the amount of like leverage that they've taken out to buy this asset would cause a downward spiral. But I think because of that, yeah, you could see this. And again, I'm not a great prognosticator in this regard as to like where does the price go. But I think you could make an argument that because of that, like the cycles are not as profound as you've seen them in the past. You know, if we want people to watch the podcast, you have to say big ones, you'd be $5 million

by 2027. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you can talk to27, or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. You can talk to one of my partners about that. Yeah. Yeah, I was just saying, Jeff's really good for that.

You know, I think Jeff said to me in the podcast, something to the effect of, you know, the fair value of Bitcoin right now is like $70 million a coin. Right. Right, man. We're cooking with gas right now. I like that.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I imagine that world. I can't even imagine that world. Yeah, yeah. I don't know how I'll know what dystopian Mad Max future that is where Bitcoin's chilling at 72 million a coin. Right, right, right. Definitely gonna need an army to take you to gas town. Yeah, seriously.

And then the part of just, there's only so many things, I think, in that scenario where people that have a lot of Bitcoin would buy and then push the money back into the economy. So like we do want, if we want this to be used for transactions, like you need some type of exchange for goods and services where people want to want to do that. So we'll see. It depends on the timing, timing component, right? Like if that happens in 50 years, 70 years, it's to be very different. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I think like, um, your point on the treasury stuff is like spot on. Like I think that we get a situation. I, I'm curious like what happens when, cause right now everybody's making this trade of what two trades millennium Citadel are making one trade of they're buying the pipe at

X and like they see the initial trade and they're going to pop out of that, which is fine. That's what the PMs are going to hit. But then the treasury companies, well twofold and I would, I would be curious like who you could get on that would really like give you this bit of information. So I would make an argument that depending on who the sponsor is of the company, they might even be in it for a quick trade themselves. Yeah, I think that's 100% true. And the way that you're like, this is like ICOs. It's like the token thing that you describe just with public markets, much more liquidity and I guess a little more transparency, maybe. Yeah. and I guess a little more transparency, maybe. But if you send in a million dollars in Bitcoin and the next day you're a publicly traded

company and you have $7 million in stock, who's not going to sell some of that? Great trade. And I think that the way through the noise that I would look at and the way that you would discern is if someone was the sponsor and they instead looked like the operator, so they align the incentive with them with the long-term business, then I think that you're building something that probably they're looking at it

from the standpoint of like, I want an underlying business with a Bitcoin as a treasury asset. And I've made use of like, someone's gonna do that, of like market forces right now in order to make this happen. So is the current-

So is it capitalizing a future cashflow business by taking advantage of the opportunity to collect Bitcoin right now in order to make this happen. So is the current nationalizing a future cashflow business by taking advantage of the opportunity to collect Bitcoin right now? That's kind of what I would say. That's how I view sailor. I don't know what he'll do, but to some degree, I think there will be some other operating business there down the road. But I haven't seen anybody like none of these have a underline. They vaguely allude to it.

Like, and I'm not hating on anyone, but I remember Pomp's, he said something like we're going to, that will be based on the appreciation of Bitcoin and future financial products to be built, but purposely vague, it seems like. And Pomp made- I think everybody's making their money. Yeah, exactly. And I think from Bitcoiners, it's amazing, these big name Bitcoiners, I think that they've missed out on these token pumps. And I think to do the former, what I was saying, if you said,

hey, the administration's here and I have an opportunity to build something that's sustainable and long lasting, you would probably say the timing is right for it now. But the other part is just it is so easy for people to make 40 to 50 million dollars right now by being a sponsor of a SPAC. I mean, when you start talking about like reverse merger, RTOs, SPACs, like all three in the same transaction, you know, that you've gotten into some wild territory. Like I don't see JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs backing any of these, you know, their investment banks taking these public, you know, like it's vile.

Yeah. Or the lawyers, right? Like, like if you had, if you had like Cravath or Wachtell that was like, hey, we're going to play ball with like one of these things, like it would probably be like the thing, the thing is different. Like, Wachtell is the greatest M&A attorneys in the world, like bar none. They're the best. So if they were like, Hey, I'm going to

back something you're not you're seeing Reed Smith do the documents for this. And it's like, it's not it's not to say it won't happen. But I haven't seen it yet. Yeah, I haven't seen it yet. And from what I hear, the demand is drying up already. So yeah, we'll see. At least for the book. I think it's difficult to just go out and get bucks. Yeah, $4 billion like insane. Yeah, I'm sure you're being pitched left, right, center. I am. And so like I actually came on as advisor recently for a

publicly traded Canadian company. It's like a Sullivan company, very small. But my literally the contingency for me to do it was that they never said treasury company they listed as a Bitcoin balance sheet company and we're just taking 1.5 million of their 10 million cash and buying Bitcoin efficiently. That's it. That's what it is. I'm like, I will help you.

I have a friend with a great algorithm that we can buy Bitcoin a little bit better and you go about your life and run your business. It's awesome. The day it was announced to investment banks called and we're like, we'll match your 10 million treasury with another 10 million. If you convert to a Bitcoin treasury company, we have investors that want to do this and we're like, no, I thought my, like, this is my, you know, my partner, the founder, he's a friend of mine.

I'm like, this is his passion. Like he believes deeply in Psycho-Celliband and has done that. This is his company. He's believes deeply in Psycho-Celeb in and has done this. This is his company. He's not a Bitcoin treasury company. Yeah. They're like, you spin that into another business. And I was like,

oh my God, man. Right, right. But then he had to his credit. Like we very quickly said no to 10 million bucks. But it's longer term shareholder value, I think is like that. So the part, the other thing that I think that, so two things, I think that if you had long term incentives with some of these and like you had one of

those big names that we had from the banking and the legal front on this is probably different than the second thing is if someone that could raise a lot more money came out and did less and here's the reason why. So like the sponsors get a promote share right. But if you were really about like the Thomas Lee or the like whatever the if you went out and you raised 400 million instead of like a billion dollars because you're saying like I can multiply shareholder value quicker, like I'm going to grow this fucking business and I'm in this for like the long term. But this is all I want. I don't need any more money, which is to the point of like what you just did there. Like I don't need the 10 million. I have the money that I have right now. Yeah, that's a business. That would scream to me, okay, I should probably pay attention to whatever the hell that is. Yeah, I agree.

It's gonna get really weird. Nico, man, thank you so much. That was really an awesome conversation and very different from most of the conversations we've had because we really haven't gotten even with your partners into the VC side of what you're doing and how you sort of view the market and how you invest. So really, really, really helpful, I think, for the audience and really great conversation, man. Scott, thank you so much for having me on. Always happy to talk to you. It's an absolute pleasure,

especially on a Friday. Thank you so much. You got it. Let's do it again soon. Thanks, Nico. Sounds great. Thanks, Scott. This episode is brought to you by Binance, the world's number one crypto exchange trusted by over 270 million users worldwide. Start your crypto journey with Binance at Binance.com. Binance is not available in prohibited countries, including the US. Check its terms for more information, check its terms for more information www.finance.com slash en slash terms.