YouSaid · the spoken record

Adam Ludwin

lines on the record: 77
first: 2017-12-05
most recent: 2017-12-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Wow, I would say wow, that is amazing. I wish I had prepared, but I guess it's better I haven't. I'm gonna have to say my mind immediately went to like all the mentors I've had in my life who just helped me at different stages which they didn't need to do to teach me something or to help meet someone that landed me a job or that landed me somewhere but I actually think I have to go all the way back to my parents and say my parents just telling me you've got to follow whatever your curiosity takes you and just do your best and we'll be proud of you and that's all we want from you I think that freedom but also belief in me sort of served me really well so I got to go with that”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. Exactly. Yeah, I think the 10-year anniversary of Bitcoin, which is coming up next year, is going to be one of the most interesting years at the interplay of Bitcoin and the sort of broader financial markets. So anyway, it's fascinating.”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here, it's actually going the other direction. It's already crypto assets in Bitcoin has been started at the fringe. Now there are these sort of huge numbers of people that are participating, largely individuals and retail investors joining something like Coinbase. And it's the institutional investors who are now And looking at it and going, huh? And so it would be a very funny reversal if the institutional guys all jump in and then there's the crash. It would be sort of like sweet, you know, karma going back all the way to 2007 and 2008, which was the seeds of Bitcoin itself, right? So Bitcoin emerged out of the ashes of the financial crisis. In fact, the very first Bitcoin transaction had metadata linking to an article.”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, that's a great point and kind of just build on it real quick. Most new, so that's 100% right, super compelling, also risky. You see the downside of that with people sort of being tricked into all these ICOs. But what's so interesting about crypto assets is that We're seeing like a leapfrogging effect, just like you see mobile phones in Africa leapfrogged landlines, the same is happening in this market. We're leapfrogging all the traditional capital market infrastructure and process in this new asset class. So normally a new financial product first is created and sold to a small club around Wall Street and eventually ends up in the hands of retail investors and then the correction happens.”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These sort of cryptographic breakthroughs now being applied to financial services are going to have big changes. And you as an investor, you should try to figure out how to be long this trend because like other frontier industries, whether it's AI or machine learning or VR or drones, it's not exactly clear how it all gets commercialized, but it's pretty inevitable that these are the sort of foundational seeds of where the economy and the markets are going.”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“JP Morgan Chase, that will enable better products to be created that more people will use that will ultimately transform and move us off of a lot of these archaic financial infrastructure that we see out there that is holding us. ACH and SWIFT is really, so really quick example. Visa is launching a competitor to SWIFT. I think they're actually a blog post today on their blog about the latest on that launch that's built entirely on our platform. And it's only possible for Visa to launch this competitor to Swift because of the internals. And more businesses will transact over Visa's new network in a day than people sending Bitcoin transactions over the last year. It's just factually going to happen. So it's sort of, I think, not going to be one or the other. I think they're both going to transform but from different directions. But it's certainly, in my view, inevitable that”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every desktop is now Unix and Linux, but it didn't happen in the sort of direct assault. It happened because it was a better internals that enabled companies to create better products, which delighted users, which ultimately led to these transformations. And so Chain's sort of the way we think about how these cryptographic breakthroughs are going to transform is more along those lines, that by creating better internals underneath a Venmo, a lift”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Disruption follows delight. You have to delight people, create something that's better. Until, of course, it did and no one noticed. And what I mean is, you know, Steve Jobs got fired from Apple, started next. Next was a computing company that had a Unix core, I believe it was a BSD core. That company was acquired by Apple and next became the foundation of macOS X and Mac OS X was Unix. And so if you have a MacBook or any Apple computer, you are now running Unix on the desktop. It's not Linux technically, but it's the same idea, Unix on the desktop. If you have an iPhone and you're running iOS, iOS is a Unix-based operating system. If you have an Android, Android was a company acquired by Google that was originally a Linux operating system for cameras that then they acquired and made the core of their mobile OS. So Android is Linux. So virtually Chromebooks are Linux.”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Listeners that were kind of paying attention to technology in the 90s will remember there was this meme going around which was Linux on the desktop. Linux on the desktop was this idea that Linux had this early success in servers and at the same time Microsoft had this monopoly on the desktop with Windows. And people, Microsoft was public enemy number one by the late 90s and the early 2000s. People wanted to take down their operating system monopoly. And so at that time there was this chorus of opinion that the way it was going to happen was getting Linux to be a desktop operating system for people and that will just create a user-friendly version like Red Hat and then that will disrupt Microsoft. Of course that didn't happen because disruption doesn't work that way. You don't aim for the system or aim for the man and disrupt the man.”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and B, we can't even see the data. So even if there was a leak in a worst case scenario, it's all encrypted. So those are two examples of when you get down to the root kind of R&D level, it's the same R&D that's enabling technologies like Zcash, like Ethereum, like Bitcoin, digital signatures, zero knowledge proofs, et cetera. So it's taking the same low-level breakthroughs. The crypto asset half of the market is assembling them to enable a new form of software. Our company is assembling them to enable a new medium for existing assets to transact more securely and much more efficiently in a sort of a digital native way with modern software. We don't think one is better than the other. It's just that's what our company does. And in a way, I'll give one more analogy real quick.”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We just want to snoop around and see your data. Well, we can now with more advanced techniques encrypt the data that is in the ledger, not only the data at rest, which is sort of the standard thing you'd do, but encrypt it such that we can still do computations over that data, but we can't see what the data is when we look at it. And that's an area called confidential computing. And it's the frontier that all the cloud vendors, the Azure, AWSs, Google Cloud, Oracle, they're all working on this, as are we, so that we can say to financial institutions, you're already using the cloud for CRM, you're already using the cloud for communications technologies, you're already using it for file storage. Now you can move your ledgers, all your balances, all your transaction processing to the cloud, because again, A, we can't transact unless you sign.”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The ride sharing service has to sign every transaction with their private keys that sit within their wall. So the amount that they have to manage goes down like 100x to this very thin thing, which is just the private key. And so we cannot add or change the ledger at all because we don't have the transaction signing keys. You do. So we can take the burden of managing the ledger without also taking over the control to transact. And so it's a huge cost savings, a huge efficiency gain. The second thing we can do with cryptography, you use the word encryption. So the example I just gave is just about digital signatures, which is one piece of cryptography. Encryptions, the next piece, which is you're running your ledger in the cloud. Okay, but what happens if that data gets leaked? What happens if a rogue employee wants to look at the balances of drivers?”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All that's got to sit in some ledger. Database plus a lot of other things that sort of sum up to your ledger infrastructure. And to date, you've kind of had to build that and keep it in a fortress inside your four walls. So cryptography gives you two things now that allows you to move that to the cloud, which is sort of the value prop of sequence. The first thing is, even though we're running and managing the ledger for you,”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, sure. So let's talk about, I like that framing defensive and how does that give you some unique value prop in your financial database? So a lot of our customers are fintechs that want to, that are already using the cloud for basically everything and want to run their ledger in the cloud as well. The challenge, of course, is that the data in a ledger is some of the most sensitive data you will have in an organization. And so we offer a cloud ledger called sequence. And part of the reason it's getting adopted by FinTech is for the defensive properties that the cryptography gives you. So specifically what I mean is sequence can run the ledger for your mobile wallet or for your fundraising site or for your ride sharing app. So ride sharing is a fun example. Drivers are accumulating balances. Riders might have credits or points.”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Within NASDAQ, sits under Venmo, sits under Coinbase. All of those services have internal ledger systems that are benefiting from the same cryptography at the R&D level that is enabling decentralized applications. That cryptography can be employed to just create a more secure and flexible data structure that can manage the transactions across payments across capital markets, insurance, et cetera. That market is often referred to as sort of the so-called blockchain market, enterprise blockchain private blockchain, permissioned blockchain. We really don't use those terms anymore partially because blockchain sort of is very suggestive of decentralization, multiple nodes, different organizations transacting. And a lot of our software is used simply as an internal database. Managing within a single org.”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we have products that are essentially modern ledger software, not for accounting purposes, but for tracking and managing financial instruments inside of traditional financial applications. So another way to say that more simply is like we're building modern financial databases. We have databases for, we have many, many different flavors of databases for different use cases in the world today. A ledger is essentially a database for money. And the breakthroughs that are coming out of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency crypto asset world around how to create secure append-only authenticated logs of transactions, those breakthroughs are very applicable to the financial infrastructure that sits within a bank, sits within visa, sits with”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So chain operates in the half of the market. We have spent zero time on Which is fun for me because I spend all my time talking about that half of the market as my day job. So when I do a podcast.”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because people are going to regret it later for sure. The last thing my co founder Devin says that to me yesterday that was really interesting, which was he thinks that there will never be an example of a company that ICOs that is later acquired or has an IPO. Like he doesn't think it's ever going to happen. I think that's probably right. I don't think Facebook wants to acquire your company and inherit those thousand angry Redditors. And I don't think an investment bank is going to take any company public that has that kind of hair on the deal. So I think, again, you got to think long and hard. Like, this is your shot. If you want to take it, go for it. Get the money. Great. Be ready to live with the consequences and ask yourself, is it worth it? Is it worth it in the end or not?”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Any other market crash in history where some people get made examples of. And so you always have to keep that in the back of your mind too. But I think for all of those reasons, you should really only do a token if you are trying to create a decentralized application that needs one. Because most of these projects that are doing ICOs don't need a token, at best they need a virtual currency, like Facebook points or Starbucks points, or at best they just what they're seeking is just modern payment system, like a modern payment rail. They're not actually trying to instantiate a dap. So I think the same rule of only invest in things you understand from the buy side applies to sell side, the issuer side, like only create a token if you understand fundamentally why you need one. Don't get trapped by this siren song of all this money.”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's right. So I think it's hard to see that right now. And we haven't seen it. We didn't see it in the prior crash because in the prior crash, we didn't really have ICOs. We had these altcoins. And there weren't like hundreds of thousands, if not low millions, of sort of retail normal people putting money in. But we have that now. And so I think you're going to have like, I just don't think you want to have that angry mob following you around the rest of your life. And I think some of those angry mobs are going to turn into class action lawsuits. And some of these projects are going to be made examples of. And I leave that for the end of my point because I don't think the risk is like, oh, the SEC and the IRS and whatever and you're going to go to jail. I don't think for the most part you can do these in a way where you're insulated from that because you do it above board. At the same time, like after every crash, whenever there's pain, there's this inevitable pattern in every other market history.”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just like the amount of grief he gets just for being like the inventor or something on Twitter and just ask yourself like, is it worth it to have like 10,000 people in an angry mob following me around for the rest of my life?”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Theory. But here's the self interested reason not to. If you raise a significant amount of money, you're talking probably about somewhere between 10,000 to 50,000 people. Who are going to be buying your token? The market's going to correct or crash. Like it's inevitable. And what do you think is going to happen to you and your project when thousands and thousands of angry redditors start to email you, start to call you, start to show up at your house, start to write you angry letters in goat blood, which will happen and is already happening. I have friends that are sitting inside several of these ICOs, and we haven't had a correction. The markets just continue to go up. There's an active percentage of token investors who are incredibly aggravating to them. And this is where either the token hasn't launched or it's launched and it's gone up a little bit. And if you look at like Charlie Lee, the inventor of Litecoin.”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, if there's $100 on the ground and nobody's picking it up, I'm not going to not pick that up. Okay. So here's why you shouldn't pick up the $100 bill. Here's why you shouldn't ICO. There's a term in investing, especially in like private equity called the winner's curse. And it's usually used to mean that a bunch of bidders for an asset, whoever wins there's a bunch of bidders, whoever wins sort of has the winners curse, they won because they paid the highest price. That's not what I mean by the winner's cursor. The winner's curse means if you are lucky enough to do your ICO during this period of time, raise $50, $70, whatever million dollars, you're going to feel great for a short amount of time. Then what's going to happen? Here's the argument that is the self-interested reason not to do it. Not even the moral, like you're kind of a jerk. Fully exploiting the greater fools.”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is not dilutive, it's not debt. I don't have to pay anyone back. They're only buying it because they anticipate it will appreciate. And I can get liquid on it. I can hold on to 10% of this and exit before my project starts. Usually the exit comes at the end why it's called exit. With ICO you exit before you start, which is amazing. And so a lot of people and a lot of smart people are looking at that and going,”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why would I not take advantage of this? So we think about that. Yeah, I think there are, so his instinct is what you are seeing play out in the market. People are going, I would be stupid not to take advantage of this. I would be stupid not to take advantage of the fact that if I have a credible enough team and concept, I could raise fifty, seventy, a hundred million dollars, which by the way, given”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dumb, and you're like, well, I'm probably not smart enough to understand it. So I'm just going to put money in. So, anyway, build something people want, product market fit. I don't think a lot of people want the underlying services. And I think there's a lot of shoehorning of projects and sort of these very long-winded justifications for why a token should exist for a web browser or mobile messaging app or something else where it really, it's hard to justify.”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number one question listed is, and I quote, why is there a double coincidence of wants problem in asset exchange? So your face shows me you don't know what that means. I don't know what it means. We're both kind of like in this world of finance and blockchains and we don't even know what the question means. I guarantee nobody buying the token knows what that question means. And this is like the frequently asked questions. So there's almost this perverse thing happening where because nobody understood Bitcoin or Ethereum and therefore they passed on it and then those turned out to be huge winners. There's almost this like thing where people are like, well, the more complicated it is, the less I understand it, the more it's likely to be something real. So people are checking their judgment at the door. And again, like issuers are playing on this or preying on this and creating projects that are just confusing or sort of obfuscating so that you sort of feel”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the product is a way to potentially get rich quick. But they don't have the sort of traditional startup type of product market fit, which is people actually want to use whether it's Filecoin or Steam it or Ethereum for their stated purpose. So my investment approach to all of this is, first of all, like follow Warren Buffett's advice, like only invest in things you understand. So if you don't understand what the thing is, like avoid it. My best example of that, by the way, is there was a token called Bank Core. And there's an FAQ section. And this project raised $150 million. And so I was putting a presentation together and I was like, what the heck is Bancore again? I got to remind myself because they just raised $150 million and someone's going to probably ask me. So I go to their frequently asked questions.”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's this really great phrase that Mark Andreessen invented called product market fit in the startup world. And product market fit is just a fancy way of saying that. You've got a product that people want. Yeah. And why Combinator has this great saying, which you walk into their space and it's like everywhere. It just says build something people want. And the reality of these token sales is that they do have a kind of product market fit. The market are people who want to get rich quick”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The biggest thing I struggle with is that teams are getting a false signal that people want their service. They're telling themselves, oh, everyone's buying my token. They must really want my upcoming service. And the partial reality is like nobody cares for the most part about your DAP. And you probably know that too.”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When it feels like most of these new tokens are created by teams who are trying to justify the need for one in an effort to just raise capital that is neither equity nor debt, which is very attractive, obviously, as a seller, as an issuer. But coming back to your comment, yeah, I really”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. And private traditional VCs are getting in these sort of discounted rounds or high net worth folks are getting. So you have to sort of start with what's the valuation I'm buying in? So that's one challenge. The other thing is when you buy into an ICO, oftentimes you're not, you don't even own the token yet. Tezos is a good example of this. People that funded Tezos funded a Swiss foundation. They didn't put in Bitcoin and get back a token. By the way, the same was true of Ethereum. You didn't get Ethereum. And so it's actually not the initial coin offering. It's actually a bit of a misnomer. It's the initial promise to get a coin later offering. And so again, it's very hard to justify the risk of what could go wrong between when I fund and when the coin is actually issued. And also, it's hard to justify.”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's the first red flag on any of these. But, you know, I think Ethereum is a good example of an ICO worth participating in. But recently, it's become very, very hard to justify investing in ICOs for a couple of reasons. First is the ICO is not usually the initial offering anymore. For projects like Filecoin and Blockstack and others, there are often several rounds that happen before the ICO.”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A good investment and an example of a project which just look at the pattern there. You had Vitalik and a handful of others who had a vision that was differentiated from Bitcoin, that was informed by their work on other so-called meta protocols, attempts to layer in other assets on top of Bitcoin through the off return of Bitcoin and realizing that's not going to cut it. We need a whole different model. Solving some really interesting problems, charting a course to get to greater scalability with proof of stake with sharding techniques, etc. And someone who was creating a model that was internally consistent, what I mean by that is Vitalik was trying to bootstrap a decentralized application called Ethereum. A lot of ICOs are trying to shoehorn a token into a normal company.”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because if you look at what makes Bitcoin appealing, again, it comes back to censorship resistance. A big piece of that is anonymity and approaching kind of the ability to transact not only trustlessly, but invisibly. And you can't do that on Bitcoin. You can with Zcash. And it sounds like, again, it sounds like a spy tool or something, but privacy with respect to transactions you might have with counterparties is extremely relevant in virtually every capital markets transaction. Dark pools are obviously the latest mainstream example of that. So finding different”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You ultimately play this market by buying and holding the crypto assets that have differentiation that enable some service that you could see or imagine people using. And I think Bitcoin is still obviously the best example of that to your point earlier that, yeah, international so-called wire transfers are really difficult and expensive. And Bitcoin's much better for that. And your friend in China is a great example. Store value, an index against or a hedge against inflation and other things. So that's a good bet. Ethereum, I think, is a good bet because it enables this emergent behavior more than Bitcoin. Bitcoin's not really a platform. It is what it is. Ethereum is a platform. Again, it gives you a lot of optionality on what could emerge. Zcash, another one that I'm investor in the company and also in the asset there.”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Coming out of Y Combinator and trying to wrap my head around what the opportunity set is. And ultimately decided this was a big enough thing that I should spend all my time on it. Like I didn't want to just spend part of my time and invest in it. I wanted to spend all my time on it. And that's ultimately what led to Chain. So fast forward to the present day in certain ways my thinking hasn't changed that much in that I still think”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We hosted an event at his office with the 12 people we could find who had ever heard of Bitcoin. Three of them were like in New York. One of them was from clandestine government agency who was like doing early research. A couple guys from Stripe. And we just sat around for like four or five hours with Fred and Albert and a dozen of us talking about cryptocurrencies and trying to figure out with our traditional VC hats on like is this investable? How do we commercialize this? And realizing by the end of it, it's just an entirely new ballgame and new rules and the way you make money here is not the way you traditionally made money in VC. And so that was sort of my introduction. And I started to think pretty much exclusively about cryptocurrencies while at RRE and meeting all the companies and getting to know, for example, like Coinbase when they were just”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bitcoin was like, look, we already have the internet. What's the least we can add to it to get some money in payment system? It's like a very thin layer at the bottom of the stack. Or really, it's a new stack. It's like a big reset button and says, okay, start over new stack. And that was like mind shifting. It was also mind shifting because I read the Bitcoin paper. I had never heard of it. It wasn't in the news. And so I was sitting there like, what is this? Like, is this like an entrepreneur somewhere? Like, who's the Satoshi guy? Am I going to fly to Japan and meet him and try to invest in a series A? Those are my head was at. And so I started to like ask around in New York, like, who's heard of Bitcoin? Who's thinking about Bitcoin? There's another VC called Fred Wilson who's at Union Square Ventures. I had co-invested in another company with him at a board meeting, asked him, what do you think of Bitcoin? He's like, oh, I'm really interested in Bitcoin. So we started.”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cumbersome. We're in the era of the iPhone and the web and social networking will build something that feels as good as your iPhone that's for your financial life. That's Venmo. That's Wellfront, et cetera. And that's what FinTech has been. It's been this thin layer of UI that is more user-friendly and sits at the top of the existing financial stack. But underneath that is all the same old payment rails, banking infrastructure and forms of money and SWIFT network and ACH and everything else.”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was really like top of the stack of the financial industry. The basic premise of most fintech was it's hard to use your bank account, it's hard to use your brokerage account.”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had a good friend of mine who ran a security company, not securities, but like information security company in 2011 sent me the Bitcoin white paper. And he sent it to me because I was a venture capitalist at a firm down the street from here that invested a lot in fintech. So a firm called RRE Ventures backed companies like Venmo, Wisdom Tree, which is the ETF guys, Braintree, on-deck capital, peer-to-peer. So, you know, I was exposed in seeing all these fintech projects, and my friend said, hey, you're working in this FinTech early stage investing firm. What do you think of this new kind of fintech idea of Bitcoin? And I read the paper, and what struck me immediately was it was nothing like any of the fintech we were investing in. FinTech, quote unquote, pre-crypto era”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I might make money, the recipient might make money on the transaction. So as a settlement intermediary, let's say, you know, buying $100,000 of Bitcoin, sending it into Venezuela, they sell it. It's certainly a store of value over that transactional period, and certainly a better mechanism to get that money than sending gold bars.”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The answer is there is no answer. The answer is like first day of economics class supply and demand. It's like demand driven. There's sort of arguably this, or not arguably, there's a scarce supply of gold. And so the price is driven entirely by demand. That demand is driven entirely by, I think, largely like it's a fear index and it's a lot of these macro arguments around inflation and nation state sustainability of different things. And so that's why And so I think, yeah, I think it's certainly a store value over a short amount of time. If I needed to get $100,000 of value to Venezuela today, Bitcoin would probably be my best way to do that. It may go up or down ten or fifteen percent, but I could write that off as a fee.”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In practice, it's being used mostly as a story, to your point, as a store of value, which is mostly a way to view Bitcoin as digital gold. And like gold, you can have all these justifications for why it's valuable, but it's largely just everyone believes it's valuable and therefore it is. And like gold, if I said, why is gold worth $1,000 an ounce? What is the price of gold right now?”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, if Bitcoin kept going, like, people make the store a value argument during bull markets when the price of Bitcoin is high, and you don't hear them very often when the price of Bitcoin is low. Like, if you, if a bunch of people listen to your podcast, buy Bitcoin, and then in a year from now, if there's a correction or sooner and it's down 80%, and they're like, wait, I thought you said there's a store. So store value is like a fuzzy term, but at the same time, it's the one that I use to sort of explain to kind of friends and family right when I'm beginning to explain Bitcoin to someone what's interesting about it. And it is, even though the original intent of Bitcoin was to be a mechanism for more seamless commerce on the internet, that's a stated goal in the paper.”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a killer app. I like it. I think it's the best argument for why Bitcoin is valuable and interesting, although it's sort of circular. Bitcoin is a store of value because a store of value and the price goes up, therefore it's a store of value. If Bitcoin”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Even a depository receipt on a gold bar is not good enough, right? Because if that warehouse or that manager goes under that warehouse receipt just becomes a claim on their debt, right? It doesn't I owe you. Yeah, it's an IOU.”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. And the same was true of PCs a decade earlier. There were killer apps from the beginning. Word processing, spreadsheets, more advanced computations and calculations, so-called microcomputers, later personal computers had killer apps from the beginning. And so what I struggle with is I don't see like the seeds of that outside of the sort of off-the-grid wannabe off the grid cohorts. And that's the part I struggle with. I worry that if we never get there, we'll look back in 10 years and be like, oh, I was right because the seeds of those killer apps weren't there in the beginning. But again, I struggle that I'm genuinely torn. And the reason I continue to be long crypto assets is you probably want to make a bet because it's so hard to predict. And the medium of money and assets hasn't changed that dramatically.”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of, like, complicated and nerdy. But for those that were using essentially the early internet and the early web, it was undeniably exciting and real, and you could point to those things. And the question was just like, are quote unquote normal people going to want to do these things? And the answer, of course, was yes. But no one was saying, like, look at all these networked computers. We have no idea what to do with them, but maybe something will emerge. That wasn't the argument.”
2017-12-05 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Ludwin - A Sober View on Crypto - [Invest Like the Best, EP.66] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source