YouSaid · the spoken record

Jason Yanowitz

lines on the record: 102
first: 2025-11-05
most recent: 2025-11-05
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

“Nice I haven't invested in as many apps built on Monad. I've seen a few like 42 AI and a couple others. But Mega Ether think has a pretty, pretty good cohort of apps like Euphoria and a couple others that have like on there. So we'll see. It's pretty good.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's great. And in the US, they have a one year lock, so it's not like it's just traders. So, you know, they're trying to get as much community distribution as possible. They've taken that stance from day one. And so, you know, we're really excited about what they're doing.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I like they did this auction where it could have been a dollar through a billion. Obviously, they're so oversubscribed. It ended up at a billion. But the cap, I think, is nice because I think most people, I think on Hyperliquid, the pre-market is trading between four and five bill today. So at the cap of one, it'll be a It's like 20% less.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like what they're doing. They really haven't raised. I mean, I know they raised from you guys, but like they haven't raised that much institutional capital. They did the Echo. Yeah, they did an one or two echo raises, then this ICO.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They just delivered key insights into pitch in the first five minutes. I was like, guys, okay, why do we need another goddamn chain? And they're like, okay, we're very pinned on the validator. We're going to juice the validator and that, and that was in a world where like everyone's given them criticism around like, you know, you had espresso and a couple other like decentralized and like the validator. They're like, no, no, we're just going to custom and we're going to juice it up in this kind of run this chain. And this is how we solve Ethereum's like scalability issues and whatnot. I was very impressed by that and immediately kind of committed. And then I flew to Berlin where they had their first Mega ETHA. GT was there. Funny enough, I ended up passing. That was the only company that I didn't like in the cohort for a very specific reason, which they have now detracted and left Mega Ethan. So I don't think I was wrong in my decision to not invest, but of course they've done well. They partner with product and all this stuff. But I invested in a number of other projects there. But yeah, it's good to see that. I think they've been experimenting on the type of.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, actually, I think you guys Hasib, or you called me around you're doing the round, I participate in the round. Was a Steve, and I met, you know, I came into the call in Shuyao and Anamik and Yushen.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can we get 30 seconds on Mega Eth? You follow because you guys are both investors in May ETH. I've noticed we talked about this last week or the week before. There's a big trend in basically doing new kinds of token drops and new kinds of allocations. I don't know how closely you followed Mega ETH, but”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think tempo will be a very good thing for Stripe. And I think Stripe will continue to be a huge success. Do I think tempo will be very successful in its own right in a neutral manner outside of Stripe?”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you're at checkout.com, like you do not want to do anything with Stripe, right? You do not want to send your flow through them. If you're, but if you're any payments company, you're happy to do it work with Facebook. Maybe whatever, Google is not going to use DM, right, in that case, right? But all the payment infrastructure will because they're not going to be competitive.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, maybe to make the comparison here, how would that have been different from Libra? For instance, Facebook launching their own and having a network, like a consortium of partners on the validation side or whatever, very different, right? Like Facebook, not a payments company, Stripe payments company. So in that case, would you have considered Libra a bit more credibly neutral, viable for financial institutions to work with?”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But if you are any other PSP, why would you want to send money through a chain, infrastructure through a chain, and help your biggest competitor? I mean, I think this is very clearly, you look at this right now and there's even some conversation on the timeline around like, why does Solana want to have USDC be the biggest stablecoin on Solana when bases their biggest competitor? And I think people are very clearly coming to understand that you do have to be more opinionated about how you go to market and who you partner with because Stripe, let's just be very clear, they have a long history of doing this. They get close with partners. They farm you for information. They compete with you, right? And there's a lot of companies that are going to do this and we're going to see this happening in stablecoins as well.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We might see that change over time as people try to control their fiefdoms. And I think to the point around acquisitions like MasterCard buying Zero Hash, maybe that pushes them to push something versus the other. And I think, you know, everyone is looking at acquisitions at this point. But when you're a service provider like Stripe and you launch a wallet infrastructure and virtual accounts and then you launch a network that theoretically allows you to bypass your biggest partners, you are clearly not neutral anymore. On top of that, like if you launch a chain and you say, okay, well, this chain is for payments. And so we want all payments companies to come on chain. But our main distribution partner is the competitor to all of these other payment companies, then why would they want to use it? And so it might be clear or they might be able to build infrastructure that is better than everything else that exists. And people just say, hey, I need to use this infrastructure because it is so good.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it means a lot of things. I think the question that people have to ask themselves, because you started this with okay, well, what does it mean for V said MasterCard? Right. Visa and MasterCard are networks that want to serve all banks. They want to serve all merchant acquirers. They want to serve all PSPs, right? They want to serve all merchants. And to do that, they have to take an opinion every day around how much they want to compete with any of those people or how much Not compete at a lot of parts of the stack and to also not push like a certain bank versus another bank, right?”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What is incredibly neutral mean? Because then Robinhood, for instance, is interacting with public infrastructure. But what the end customer can't, like they can deposit tokens, but they can't leave. So they're imposing restrictions. So they're using, again, incredibly neutral public infrastructure, but the end user is definitely being served and it's a very opinionated offering to capture the most amount of LTV. When you think about credibly neutral, like what is that? What does that mean?”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's what will happen. So, credibly neutral is one of those things like decentralization that can mean it's sort of amorphous. And you and I were talking about in the panel at DAS, like what does that actually mean in this case? Because you have, for instance, Western Union deploying on Solana. You have Circle launching, what is it, ARC? You have stripe launching tempo, and then you have public infrastructure like Ethereum and whatever.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, and so, like, this is happening at Stripe. So, Tempo can say, well, it's like we're credibly neutral because we're going to let all these other things happen, which fine, but I would be, and I will tell you that the networks and the other PSPs, they might, and they definitely will support tempo because if their clients want to use tempo, they will allow it, but they will actively push other things. That's what will happen.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, no, the tempo guys would disagree with you, but the stripe guys would not disagree with you. And depending on, but I will tell you, I know for a fact that there is now stripe employees, a CRO there, who is actively packaging a bridge plus stripe plus tempo capability and selling it to people.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I don't think the networks are going to do their own chains, right? And so I think for the networks, the whole pitch is we are credibly neutral, right? And Stripe has taken the perspective, depending on how much they lean into tempo, which depend on who you ask, they lean more or less into it and depend on who they're pitching, they lean more or less into it. But that's a very credibly non neutral play for Stripe, right?”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talking about stripe, tempo, some of the commentary in the timeline yesterday was hey, you have now MasterCard. I don't know if it's an actual good analogy. I want to get your take, but like, or a point, which is Mastercard buying zero hash, Coinbase buying BB&K. Give us an update on tempo, like beyond like they're empiring like crazy. How do you see players like Mastercard and Visa going on? Like, are they just going to want to do their own? Are they going to?”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we're really big in Latin America as their main market. Rail got acquired by Ripple earlier this year. But for 200 million bucks Yeah, and there's kind of that big gap in size between Bridge and BBK, and then the rest of these guys. I think there'll be a few more that get acquired. There'll be some aqua hires. One of the things that I think about is actually as each one of these assets get taken off the table, the remaining assets get more valuable. Yeah.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So on the orchestration, so I think on the orchestration side, so there was basically the largest orchestration businesses were Bridge and BB&K. And then there was kind of a step down and you've gotten zero hash. They've obviously, they're large from about the same size of BB&K in total revenue. I think of their orchestration business. They're kind of a pretty big step down. Conduit pay, which is one of ours.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mastercard's been kicking the can or king of the tires of a lot of these guys. So they've been talking to pretty much everybody. I was just at Money 2020 to what you said earlier, Money 2020 for people who don't know as the biggest fintech conference in the world. A lot of payments, a lot of banks, a lot of people building across all parts of the stack and fintech. And every single large org are kicking tires of potential acquisitions and stablecoins right now.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was a C6 deck. $35 million valuation back in 2018. I was having this discussion with Breyer, who I think has one of the largest holders of Circle. And they're on the board. And my comment to them back then was, I don't think you outperform Bitcoin. And they, as much as circles run up a lot, you would have been better off putting just Bitcoin outperformed.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I. MasterCard clearly through their send product, they want to do a lot more merchant type payments. They want to be able to get a lot of different payment types in. They clearly want to be able to have the infrastructure to move a lot of stable coins. They want to have good wallet infrastructure, et cetera.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the business, as I understand, the business is roughly the same size of BBK, they're really similar sizes. The majority of the president today, though, is still, as I understand it, this brokerage as a service, it's less around called stablecoin money movement. And the way where that's entirely BPNK's business, a fan of Edward, and obviously they've been leaning into even growing the stablecoin orchestration type business and the on-ramp offering business. as kind of the core part of the future I find it for MasterCard a very kind of odd deal personally.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“2019. I hear you. This was June 12, 2018. My message to Edward. I hear you, Edward. We think you are far along and have impressive traction which makes it particularly hard to pass at this stage. I sense we may sense we may end up looking back and kicking ourselves for it. That said, it's best for us to stick to our decision at this stage. Let's definitely stay in touch.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes Interactive brokers wants to launch crypto trading. They do that through zero. Yeah, yeah. They also, if you go on Kalchi and you try to put crypto onto Kalchi, that's zero hash on the back end. Yeah, they've got, what are the licenses? MTL and MSB, I think”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Though I would add one caveat to that, which is that they do the largest part of their business today is still their quote unquote brokerage as a service. So what does that mean? That means like for IBKR or E-Trade, it's not just like call it on and off ramp, but it's also like, hey, I want to buy Bitcoin or ETH or interact.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, CTX. So Edward Woodford actually is one of the first ever first podcast was Pomps podcast off the chain. Now it's called The Pomp Podcast. And Edward Woodford was like the third guest ever in 2018. Anyways, they, um... They shuddered their trading platform in twenty twenty and went all in on focusing on basically they provide the licensing and the technology for the on and off ramps, I would say.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very interestingly, actually, the first wave of all the stablecoin companies of crypto, and a lot of the ones we're talking about now all started as exchanges. So they all started as exchanges and they were like more crypto native. And they sort of pivoted into this like stable coin payments meta. One of the themes that we've had as an investor is not to derail this has been that. Now the actual payments people are coming into the space and they just kind of understand money flow, I think, a little bit better than some of these other guys. And so I think. Know, my guess is that a decade from now, the names that we're talking about today are probably not the names that we're talking about then.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No zero ash. They just raised out a billion. So the round they raised recently was primarily basically all of their strategic partners. They did talk to and we talked to them as well a lot of the venture funds, but the investors were almost all strategic partners in the reason around.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pay for lunch or something. Vetting money doesn't move the needle, you know. It's more of a pride. I'm going to have to give you something you can wait for. You're going to pay me that. Oh, no. It's not about that. It's like, I don't like making beds for money. Is it more of a symbolic thing?”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For shits and giggles, ladies and gentlemen, 10K, you're going to put 10K in Seoul. I'm going to put 10K in Western Union. Maybe a couple more decimals, and then we will come back here in New York and whoever wins is going to pay for coffee or whatever.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't hate the payment as much as so you know everybody on Twitter hates the pay-to-play game basically And I think they have that because in the past it's failed, right? Whether it's a polygon in Starbucks or Arbitrum and Robin Hood, like actually Arbitrum Robin Hood probably will work out. But I think people don't look at the history of platforms. And this is a very, very, very common thing, right? Whether it's, you know, Facebook paying. Publications like CNN and Fox to come onto their platform originally, millions of dollars, or maybe a better one is Amazon Alexa. When Amazon is starting, Jeff Bezos went to all the dominoes, Uber, Walmart, and said, hey, pay 20 million bucks to go develop on the Amazon Alexa. You've got to kickstart the flywheel in some way. Totally.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the people that they go and look at in terms of for payment activity specifically, right? But if you still look at that report, all of the payment activity is still on ETH or Tron or a little bit like Polygon or BNB, right? It's not really on Solana. I think Solana is either the fourth or fifth. And so that's still what's happening because the clients are the ones picking and the clients either have stablecoins already or there's liquidity already on these chains. And so clearly what Solana is trying to do is they want to play there. And so if they can get Western Union to put the flow through, it makes complete sense. The question is whether or not a deal like this actually results in that happening.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can see obviously the strategic rationale, but if it's hey, it's six months of exclusivity and then they're going to go do what most of the stablecoin companies do today, which is that they actually allow the whoever the customer is to decide what chain to put it on. And we just, the Artemis guys just put out a stable coin payment report, an update to it last week. We're investors in Artemis, full disclosure, but we helped draft the report, but the first one and the update. And it shows that, you know, B2B payments is up 300% over the last year. P2P is kind of trending down, but we're seeing some, they're kind of flat, but we're seeing some. We talked about this.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Different for Western Union and for PayPal than it is for Solana, right? And it's different. And so for Western Union, we just got done talking about why this makes sense for them. And if Western Union can digitize their business, they can put all of their volume on chain. And if all of that volume goes through Solana, then absolutely. Like it's a win for everybody, right? And it's absolutely worth whatever they paid if they paid 2550, $100 million even, right? And so.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a few things that are happening here. One is that people want real business on chain. There is a belief that that is where the market is going. There's a belief that you need to win that market if you're going to be the winning chain in the future. There is an attack on the monolithic chains by the more opinionated ones right now. And Solana and everybody involved with Solana has a very specific view on how Solana is supposed to grow and why you would be on a monolithic chain. So do a lot of people, Anath. And then at the same time, you have people like Robin Hood and Stripe and Circle and all these people building their really opinionated chains. And so to win these people believe distribution, you have to probably pay for that, right? And so that's natural. And that's what's happening. That's what happens in traditional business. Whether or not there is ROI on it, I think remains to be seen. And it might, I think in a lot of these cases and probably most cases where people are paying, there's probably not.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Becomes is the real ROI on this, right? And so for in some of these products, so for Robin Hood, for example, I think there was a controversy around this as well. There was a bidding more for Robin Hood on where they would build. We know who won and who didn't win. Now, is that chain because it going to accrue a lot of value to the token of the protocol that won? Well, so far, that has not been true, right? Now maybe it'll be true over time as Robin Hood builds and they get this types of volume, et cetera. But I think there's a real question on that, right? And we see things like, you know, for instance, some of these tokenized equity projects I know have been paid as well. And none of them have any volume, right? And so you look at that X stocks on Solana, Kraken keep saying they're doing tons of volume on Kraken, but Xdox is doing basically no volume on chain whatsoever that you can track, right? And so I think there's a”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I don't know, and I don't have any insight information about this specific deal. What I will say is, do I think it is likely they paid them? Yes. And the reason I think that is true is because almost all of these deals are paid, right? In almost every instance where you've seen a large org come and build on a specific chain, they have wanted to de-risk their initial build out through some sort of payment up front. And a lot of it has also been around the liquidity incentive. So this was true of name all of the names that you could think about. I don't know what's public and what's not, but pretty much every large org that has come on chain that has issued an acid on chain, they have either been paid to build there or they've been paid in liquidity incentives or both, right? Now this is typical of, you know, call it a lot of types of partnerships that exist and outside of crypto. So I don't, it is certainly not bad that that is happening. I think the question.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's true. I do think, listen, all economies are going more digital. So over what time frame, let's see. But if you look at like Allipay, Ali Pay has like 98% distribution or penetration in their core markets in Asia. Like everybody is using digital payments. And then you come to some of these other markets. They're not. But it's coming, right? It's just over what time frame.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And so I think that's where I see a lot of opportunity of like finding these companies where you could be sitting there as an analyst hearing Colson Brothers talk about like stablecoins or room temperature semiconductor. You're like, holy, like Max Long on everything that if you control F with 10K, like write an LLM of like if there's a stablecoin tokenization thing on any 10K 10Q earnings call max long I don't know that like I just think we It misses the point around like There's still friction, and stablecoins don't solve everything. You have to think about yet, but no, but you're not going to solve that. There's still things that don't change. Consumers still want cash in emerging economies.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We just need to ask ourselves that kind of question. Like, for him, I think he's been very creative. He went, I think, to the A16Z startup school and worked a lot with them. And a lot of the time that he's been spending on is solving for working with local merchants and convenience stores, tiendas, or to really kind of solve for that. Because that's what Western Union has. They have an incredible amount of relationships with people want easy cash in and cash out. That doesn't go away. Like as much as technology comes and solves a lot of the stablecoin transfer, you don't have to have as much FX risk. Like you can transfer money faster. You still have to source liquidity”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I love Brandon, and Sebastian actually went to school with they Brandon built the first, I think, neo Bank of Pakistan and had a decently good outcome. A lot of the conversations I had with him were, look, I believe in stablecoins. We're all bulls here. But where I focused on getting to know him is like, how are you going to leverage how are you going to source liquidity? How are you going to acquire customers? And that's, I think, to your point around as the industry continues to grow.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so you're an angel investor. And then Andreason just led the yay and we continued to participate. And Tsar is basically doing, they're trying to recreate in many ways what Western Union did, but from a digital perspective,”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the interesting things about what happened yesterday, too, is so they announced this deal and congratulations to them for being forward thinking here and for the partners around the table. We announced we had led a seed round into a company called Czar last year. And then I know you're the first.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Phenomenal book. Dell, I was a JP Morgan when he took a private. The TMT group was doing it. So the books are phenomenal kind of account of that. But that to me is an example of similar instance where the market back then, 2012, you know, the PC market was in a terrible, wasn't growing. People were again saying PC is going to go away. Your business is dead. Michael being founder, CEO, he was like, look, the market just does not understand the story, hadn't really accounted for that being a core mode to do other stuff. He had to take that business private because again, being in the public markets, I think is just very distracting word of advice for dad companies and other crypto people that want to go public. And so I think, again, I agree with you. The market just may not appreciate, like they're all super hyped up on growth. And it probably is hard for a company like Western Union to implement this playbook in the public market.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The one thing I do want to say here, though, is If you look at the last 15 years of public markets and you say, okay, I was a fundamental investor or I was a growth investor who made money, the growth tech investors, right? And what we've seen is the market is willing to pay for growth, especially in a world where you have inflation, right? In a world where you have, I mean, let's see what happens with interest rates, but there's an expectation for most of that period of time, interest rates have been low or zero environment. We're probably going there again, right? And so people are much more likely to pay for growth. And the belief was that Western Union might just like bleed out to zero, right? And so maybe that's not true. And this is where the opportunity comes in for your business specifically, right? Because you can buy the distribution, you can buy the brand name, and then you can bring growth, right? But the market will today, they do not care about fundamentals if you are a secularly declining business.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so you look at that, and it's like, I think distressed steel mill operators back in the 80s were trading out like eight times PE. And I was just like, make it make sense. This business is not going to go away. To me, that was like a screen. If you're an activist fund, go buy 5% of this company. Maybe change management, implement this strategy. Like, where's Ackman? Is he still interested in crypto or is he still? He's a politician.”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But again, you talk about remittle and other more sexy technology forward remense operators. They trade at like 20 plus. Some of them are not even profitable. I couldn't explain again going back to fundamentals why there was such a big disconnect. One is overvalued, Dylan is deeply undervalued in my mind. It's like the market, I think, tends to do this thing where everyone's so hyped about technology that you go max long stuff and forget about their monetization model and profitability. And then you leave for dad something like a Western union that has distribution, has connectivity. You walk around the street here in New York with anyone that is sending money. What's the number one name that they'll tell you? Where would they go and who would like Wes”
2025-11-05 · Forward Guidance · The Next Chapter For Blockworks | Empire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT