YouSaid · the spoken record

Mike Alfred

lines on the record: 57
first: 2021-09-15
most recent: 2021-09-15
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

“Very tactile. I write up a very like, I had stepped to do things in order to learn, right? Like, that's how I learned guitar. I had a few teachers, but I quickly would outgrow them. And the same thing happened in markets. I would just trade, I would buy stocks and then read for 10 hours a day about the companies, right? And then move on to the next industry. I mean, I cycled through pretty much every industry. I've made money and energy. I've made money in internet stocks. I've made money in biotech. I've made money in traditional technology. Right now, I'm really long consumer staples. grocery stocks like a value guys so i tend to tilt towards spaces that everybody hates that i assume will come back like healthcare and grocery stores which are sort of inevitable like people are not gonna stop needing healthcare it's one of the best demographs of the next 50 years and so if you're if you're fishing in that space with low multiple stocks you probably do okay over 10 years right and so a lot of it's just i went in and i did it right i read a lot of i discovered the sec website and i realized all the documents were on there i could read through 10 cues and i could read”
2021-09-15 · We Study Billionaires · BTC043: How to Value Bitcoin Mining with Mike Alfred (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I was able to engineer and exit to NIDAC last November. And I actually worked for NIDEG for about eight months doing strategy in M&A. So that's kind of the high-level timeline, Preston, but I'm sure you want to potentially go another direction with it.”
2021-09-15 · We Study Billionaires · BTC043: How to Value Bitcoin Mining with Mike Alfred (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fidelity wanted to buy the data and financial advisors wanted to know how they could prospect plans. And so we got it up to about 10 million in revenue in 2016 when I took it to market and sold it. Shortly after that, these guys from distributed global, I don't know if you've heard about these guys yet, but this is a hedge fund. Crypto hedge fund. My brother is one of the three partners. Started with about 60 million, I think today. It's well over a billion. And they were recognizing early on in 2017, late 2017, that there were all these new crypto hedge funds, Pantera and Polychain. right, multi-coin and paradigm and all these folks were coming to the market and there was no institutional grade data. So they said, hey, Mike, we saw what you did at Brightscope, building a data business. Why don't you come build a Bloomberg for the crypto space? And so I set out doing that. And I ended up raising about $10 million for that company, hired over 30 people at one point at the peak, signed a bunch of the biggest firms in crypto, had some of the biggest investors in crypto, but ultimately, you know, wasn't a huge success. I think the market was just a little bit too early.”
2021-09-15 · We Study Billionaires · BTC043: How to Value Bitcoin Mining with Mike Alfred (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Money, so I did start multiple businesses, it was briefly a financial advisor, I manage money for wealthy people, I started a company called Brightscope, which I raised about $5.4 million for. I sold it for about 30 in 2016. That was a ratings business for 401k plans. So Preston, you know Morningstar. I was inspired by Morningstar and I said, why isn't there a rating system for every 401k in America? You know, if you work at Amgen or Google or Microsoft in 2008, there was no way to find out how good your 401k plan was like, I can solve this. So I raised a million bucks from investors. I hopped on a plane. I went to Washington, DC, and I got them to release previously unreleased so-called public data, but actually we needed DeFOIA center Freedom of Information Act request to the government more than 100 times, I think, to get all the data we needed to build our rating. And so we launched that in 2009, almost instantly was a success in the sense that CNN and CNBC wanted to talk about who has the best 41k plan in America and hero price.”
2021-09-15 · We Study Billionaires · BTC043: How to Value Bitcoin Mining with Mike Alfred (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An eTrade account and I just started trading stocks. And I started with more of a conservative, like, hey, I want to own Vanguard funds, whatever. And then I woke up one day, my Stanford dorm room this freshman year, it's like 1999. I'm like, no, I want to actually learn how to invest in companies. I actually want to know what these companies do. I actually want to understand them from a first principle standpoint. I want to understand how accounting works. I want to understand how you build things. And you just can't do that as an index investor. So like no offense to the 95% of people that Warren Buffett says should be an index investor. But for me, that was absolutely the wrong path because it would mean that I would have to basically stick my head in the ground and be an ostrich about the business building process, right? And investing in real companies, right? And so I started trading stocks and I started trading everything. I traded penny stocks. I traded tech stocks. I've made a lot of money. I lost a lot of money. But more importantly than anything, it sort of imbued in me the sense that like I should be an investor. And that's something I should do for 50 or 70 years from that point going forward. That said, you know, when I graduated, I had to make.”
2021-09-15 · We Study Billionaires · BTC043: How to Value Bitcoin Mining with Mike Alfred (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I didn't really start my verse business until after I graduated from Stanford, but I did get into trading stocks in the late 90s with my own capital. So I did cut code knives. I sold the cutcoat knife, you cut the penny with the scissors and you do the presentation, people's houses and you ask for referrals. People always say, isn't that door-to-door sales? I'm like, no, there's a big difference between door-to-door sales and referral-based sales where you're asking Mrs. Jones to refer you to 10 of her best friends, right? And so I learned the value of always asking for the next intro, the next meeting, which has been super helpful over the last 20 years in all different types of business context. But the most important thing about that was I made $14,000 in seven weeks. And my mom wanted me to go work at the fairground shilling cinnamon rolls to people walking by and working the fair rides and all that. I said, no way. Gotta do something more interesting. So I'm 17 years old. I got 14K. And I'm like, well, what should I do with this? A lot of my friends were buying laptops and cell phones and cars and stuff.”
2021-09-15 · We Study Billionaires · BTC043: How to Value Bitcoin Mining with Mike Alfred (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thank you so much. It's been fun interacting with you just bits and pieces here and there. And I remember Lynn Alden would come on to some of my spaces and then all of a sudden I would see you on there as well. And I feel like we're all just watching the people that we like to listen to show up in these spaces and then we magically show up in the room too. It's kind of opt-in and just kind of magical who shows up. So I've been enjoying the serendipity of it all.”
2021-09-15 · We Study Billionaires · BTC043: How to Value Bitcoin Mining with Mike Alfred (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT