YouSaid · the spoken record

Alyse Killeen

lines on the record
59
first
2021-06-23
most recent
2021-06-23
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

  1. “Do we meet and greet sorts of coffees with VCs off campus? And I thought, you know, I need to build my network to be able to raise money. And very early into that process, one of those folks just said, you know, hey, Elise, with your math, with your background in math and writing, it makes sense for you to try the other side of the table. And so I did. And that 10-week internship that I agreed to, you know, I'm 10 years past that now. a 10-week internship turned into what's now almost a decade in venture capital.”

    2021-06-23 · We Study Billionaires · BTC031: Investments in Bitcoin Tech w/ Alyse Killeen (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Participated in. And so you can imagine that in academia, there was just, there was a break from that. And so I was producing work that would be maybe read by 20 folks and that would be, you know, hopefully the goal was to have people cite that work. But then the actual application of it felt really distant. And so I dropped out after getting my master's and thought that I was dropping out to be an entrepreneur like my grandfather's. And so went into an MBA program to sort of acquire the financial tools. So I had the math background, but not, or the stats background, but not a background in finance. And so that was the intention of doing an MBA program. And in the course,”

    2021-06-23 · We Study Billionaires · BTC031: Investments in Bitcoin Tech w/ Alyse Killeen (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Which I really liked, but that the intention for having impact maybe didn't match the sorts of goals that I had for myself or the sorts of, you know, I wasn't finding myself aligned with the sorts of people that I really admired. And those were folks like my grandfathers who were, you know, who I saw having a tangible impact on the sorts of spaces around them. So as an example, one of my grandfathers did large-scale sheet metal and plumbing in San Francisco. So very blue-collar entrepreneurial work. But through that, I got to sort of see his impact and good work on the city. So I would feel like a building would go up and that we would have partially contributed to that. And that the sort of, you know, the sort of integrity he had in his work contributed to the health of the spaces that we”

    2021-06-23 · We Study Billionaires · BTC031: Investments in Bitcoin Tech w/ Alyse Killeen (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “So, what I studied in undergrad and then at the master's level was really the intersection of cognitive science and immunology. And so that fell under the Department of Psychology. But what that really means is just that I was conducting research and studying stats. So my background was really in research, math, and writing, which is sort of the background of anyone that's working in the sciences at a master's or PhD level. I dropped out of a PhD program in that study after I got my master's because it started to feel very removed from my own core values and from really frankly like the family, the common family set of values that I had. As someone that grew up with two entrepreneurial grandfathers. And so academia started to feel really isolating and it felt as though there was, you know, this rigorous pursuit of truth.”

    2021-06-23 · We Study Billionaires · BTC031: Investments in Bitcoin Tech w/ Alyse Killeen (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “As equals with folks of greater resources. And so there's, I thought that there was no more important work to do. And so being able to engage with founders, sort of accelerating that vision was just the best use of time then. And in the years since. It's still true today”

    2021-06-23 · We Study Billionaires · BTC031: Investments in Bitcoin Tech w/ Alyse Killeen (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “You know, I think that really what it was is that the design of the Bitcoin blockchain and the incentive systems, and that was what was really new, right? Satoshi's introduction of an incentive scheme that allowed for diverse stakeholders to all sort of share in interest that secured the protocol. The design of that was so simple and beautiful. It was seductive, I suppose. And so it really felt like the best possible use of time. It felt like a way to do well while also doing good work, work that had cultural impact. And what really resonated with me most was the opportunity to have an open and fair financial system that included folks across socioeconomic statuses and a system that would allow folks that were underbanked or unbanked to participate.”

    2021-06-23 · We Study Billionaires · BTC031: Investments in Bitcoin Tech w/ Alyse Killeen (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Kind of through us and through lunches with him, I was able to sort of go deeper on Bitcoin. And my advantage was that in doing that, I was coming from a background of someone who had studied cloud networking, data center software, these really deep technical infrastructure, new sorts of paradigms. And so when I discovered Bitcoin, I was able to sort of diligence it and dig in at the protocol level, which allowed me a bit of a head start, I think.”

    2021-06-23 · We Study Billionaires · BTC031: Investments in Bitcoin Tech w/ Alyse Killeen (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “2013. So I don't remember this, but when I look back in my emails, I see that the first mention of Bitcoin is me pinging someone, me emailing someone on my investment team and saying we should get the deck from that Bitcoin gaming company. It sounded interesting. That was the first record of mention that I can find. So that was my first rumination on it. And then what happened later that year was that one of the portfolio companies that we were working with was in a co-working sort of space. And I had the opportunity to be seated next to a Bitcoin founder that was mining from his desk. And so”

    2021-06-23 · We Study Billionaires · BTC031: Investments in Bitcoin Tech w/ Alyse Killeen (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Thank you. Longtime listener, first time guests. So I have also been looking forward to speaking with you for a while and to speaking with your audience, frankly.”

    2021-06-23 · We Study Billionaires · BTC031: Investments in Bitcoin Tech w/ Alyse Killeen (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT