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Pranav Kanade

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2024-04-30
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2024-04-30
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  1. “Yeah, exactly. So when they look at their overall portfolio, they have to have a certain balance of illiquid and liquid. And crypto VC is illiquid and they already have too much illiquid exposure in their book. So they're looking for distributions from the previous vintages of venture funds so they can do more allocations there. That's the two things that they're connected. And then there's retail that's very, very different, right? As I said earlier, the theme of the year has been retail coming in to try it at 100x. Given that sort of middle dynamic of what I mentioned, which is venture funds have not made big distributions, retail has kind of psychologically realized, well, I don't want to own things that venture funds are invested in because no matter what they are likely sellers at any price to make distributions so they can go raise their next fund. So retail decided to play a completely different game, which is, I'm going to go to meme coins and narrative coins. The point of all this is to really get an overall picture of money flows and how does”

    2024-04-30 · Forward Guidance · The Crypto Endgame in 2024 | Fireside Chat with Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager of the VanEck Digital Assets Alpha Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Of how people like myself look in this world. The VCs obviously are doing a very different thing, which is they're trying to find the next kind of 100x type thing over a three-year time frame from a less liquid perspective. The issue the VCs are battling with is these traditional allocators who are now looking at crypto. They've been sort of stuck with an overall portfolio that's become less and less liquid over time because there's been less IPOs and less exits. Equity markets haven't been hot.”

    2024-04-30 · Forward Guidance · The Crypto Endgame in 2024 | Fireside Chat with Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager of the VanEck Digital Assets Alpha Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Had no allocation to digital assets or has chosen to allocate to maybe Bitcoin and maybe some ETH. But the Bitcoin ETF has really been a catalyst for adoption. So that money is so far has started flowing through the Bitcoin ETFs. But that money has also now become intrigued with everything else beyond Bitcoin, right? Once you sort of buy some Bitcoin, you understand what it's about. Then you want to know, well, what is all this other stuff about? Is that interesting as well? And should I think about getting exposure there? And the way that money makes its way to that part of the world is through folks like us, VC funds or liquid strategies. And the way we allocate to assets is based on sort of what is fundamentally interesting. As an again, goes back to that, what's going to take the 10, 20 million users to hundreds of millions that has sort of this killer app-like feature. And that really drives the core premise.”

    2024-04-30 · Forward Guidance · The Crypto Endgame in 2024 | Fireside Chat with Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager of the VanEck Digital Assets Alpha Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “In that case, we're just going to simplifying this idea that crypto is an overall ecosystem needs inflows, including Bitcoin, right? Bitcoin's still inflating in supply and that goes to the miners and the miners have fiat-based costs and they have to sell some Bitcoin to manage that fiat-based cost. But if you look at everything, again, Ethereum is probably the only example or exception to this rule where Ethereum is somewhat deflationary. So there's not more ETH being created every day. But most things in crypto outside of ETH really is inflationary and has essentially a need for outside capital to come in. And so one of the things we do is we say, okay, there's basically three pools of capital and really like that middle pool is intertwined with the first two, but this institutional capital is basically endowments foundation sovereigns family offices, just the traditional pools. What is that interested in doing? Well, that money historically has either”

    2024-04-30 · Forward Guidance · The Crypto Endgame in 2024 | Fireside Chat with Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager of the VanEck Digital Assets Alpha Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “We spent a lot of time the last few months looking at because there's so many of these, let's just say DeFi projects on a variety of different chains and even infrastructure projects on a variety of different chains that are doing this points airdrop farming game. And so you'll see a lot of users and TVL and quote unquote traction on many projects because people can earn some points, which ultimately might equate to some airdrop. But that is not sustainable in itself. People should be doing the underlying thing because they're getting a utility out of it. The utility could be entertainment, right? It doesn't have to be like, I'm saving some money or saving some time. It's purely like people, you know, consumers do things. Most of the things consumers do on the internet is like entertainment-based.”

    2024-04-30 · Forward Guidance · The Crypto Endgame in 2024 | Fireside Chat with Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager of the VanEck Digital Assets Alpha Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Yeah, and that's not sustainable either, right? Because to your point, if the token price starts going down, then people don't want to do the thing. That's at the crux of a lot of what we do. And I think it's one of the things that”

    2024-04-30 · Forward Guidance · The Crypto Endgame in 2024 | Fireside Chat with Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager of the VanEck Digital Assets Alpha Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “This is where, sort of asking a very critical question is important, which is the project creating value for users outside the token itself. So in Axis case, in our opinion, that was more or less DeFi yield farming sort of, but in the context of gaming, right? So you have these little Pokemon looking thing and you're doing things within and you're earning some tokens. The token just acts as the accelerant to the adoption of that business model”

    2024-04-30 · Forward Guidance · The Crypto Endgame in 2024 | Fireside Chat with Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager of the VanEck Digital Assets Alpha Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “If that makes sense. And so there are several projects that have that mechanism where price appreciation can lead to accelerated adoption.”

    2024-04-30 · Forward Guidance · The Crypto Endgame in 2024 | Fireside Chat with Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager of the VanEck Digital Assets Alpha Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Yeah, actually, there's more nuance to it. There's sort of this reflexivity to crypto in general, which is as the price of something goes up, it's potentially more likely that people use the thing you've built. Let's give the helium example, right? Because we were talking about this earlier. The way the network works is generally someone spends a couple hundred dollars buying these hotspots and they put in their house and they earn token rewards for doing that. On the other side, if I buy a helium mobile plan and I share my location with a network, I own some tokens as well because I'm providing them valuable data. They want to know where I'm using the network so they can encourage other people to put hotspots in those areas so that traffic doesn't have to go through T-Mobile, it goes through the Hilli network, right? So if you think about it as the token price in this model goes up, people's ROI on both sides of buying up mobile phone as well as having a hotspot is superior than it was at a lower token price, which then accelerates network adoption.”

    2024-04-30 · Forward Guidance · The Crypto Endgame in 2024 | Fireside Chat with Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager of the VanEck Digital Assets Alpha Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Adoption changed dramatically in six months, or has it been a marginal improvement? And is the risk reward less favorable today than it was six months ago?”

    2024-04-30 · Forward Guidance · The Crypto Endgame in 2024 | Fireside Chat with Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager of the VanEck Digital Assets Alpha Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Success for Helium, right? So there's no standardization on KPIs. It's that kind of like saying what's good for an oil and gas stock is very different from what's good for Apple's stock, right? You measure those things very differently. So for every project, we kind of say, what are the right ways of measuring success? We think of it as binary. It's either like this thing is going to have zero users in two years or it's going to have 10s, 20s, hundreds of millions of users in two or three years. Then we ask, okay, there's been an appreciation, what does this thing worth in that sort of downside case and what is it worth in an upside case? And then it's a probability way to expected value analysis. So if I think something today is trading at, I'm making up numbers, $10. And we think in our bull case it's worth $100, then if we think there's a 50% chance it goes to zero and there's a 50% chance it goes to $100. There's an expected value there, right? So that's more the qualitative element, which is for us saying, has the probability of mainstream”

    2024-04-30 · Forward Guidance · The Crypto Endgame in 2024 | Fireside Chat with Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager of the VanEck Digital Assets Alpha Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Correct. Yeah, users of these products, right? Like the example would be if 350 million people that people owned an Apple iPhone, but only like 20 million people use the App Store. So, you're not really using the thing for its full utility. You're just kind of buying something, buying a financial asset. So the premise of all these things is that people use on-chain products and they will spend money to use on-chain products. And that ultimately then creates some value to these token assets, right? So for us, that's not a done deal by any means. We think there's a 50% chance that these products are adopted and there's a 50% chance potentially all these things can go to zero because nobody uses them and the industry doesn't figure out how to make these things usable and hit mainstream. So we think purely in terms of probabilities. So when we look at a project that let's just say we hold a token position in and that token position has gone up by 10x, we then ask, has there been commensurate increases in fundamental KPIs? So every project is unique. What defines success for, let's just say, a layer one blockchain like a Solana is very different from what defines”

    2024-04-30 · Forward Guidance · The Crypto Endgame in 2024 | Fireside Chat with Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager of the VanEck Digital Assets Alpha Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Yeah, so our framework for the asset class as well as our strategy is pretty straightforward, which is the entire space is still a call option. And our job is to try and pick the best call options at the right expected value. And so the way we would describe that is essentially we're trying to, as I said, find projects that essentially look like monopolies and have clear economics and great teams and all these things. But the key to all this is sort of saying there's probably 350 million people in the world that own digital assets and some centralized exchange. The number of users of on-chain products in aggregate is in the tens of millions. So the call option is on this idea that the tens of millions will grow into 100 million plus.”

    2024-04-30 · Forward Guidance · The Crypto Endgame in 2024 | Fireside Chat with Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager of the VanEck Digital Assets Alpha Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Like lack of substance, like speculative casinos don't have necessarily running room. And so we need things with substance that gets people excited that then ultimately. Creates a real bullet.”

    2024-04-30 · Forward Guidance · The Crypto Endgame in 2024 | Fireside Chat with Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager of the VanEck Digital Assets Alpha Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Not just the narrative, like we need substance, right? So, like, the narrative this time around, the best one I've seen is like this idea around financial nihilism, which is, you know, younger people feel like they've been left out of this whole wealth creation thing. Housing's more expensive. Everyone's burdened by student debt, all these things. And they're just kind of looking for ways to gamble to catch up. And they're looking for like the next 100x. And you saw that in the first quarter of this year, right? The best performing subcategories within crypto, I would say were meme coins, narrative coins, essentially things that VCs didn't really own and where like retail couldn't, there wouldn't be like natural sellers to these tokens. So retail said we can go speculate on these things. Yeah, that speculative energy oftentimes is interesting, but it does not have like substance and sustainability to it, right? So we saw this with GameStop and all the Reddit stocks back in the day. It was a point in time and then it died, I'm sure, because other examples of this, but like these.”

    2024-04-30 · Forward Guidance · The Crypto Endgame in 2024 | Fireside Chat with Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager of the VanEck Digital Assets Alpha Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “2020, 2021. It was DeFi, and then eventually NFTs in gaming, and you kind of put all those things together, which then became GameFi, right? All these things, ideas got people really excited. I don't think we've seen anything that net new.”

    2024-04-30 · Forward Guidance · The Crypto Endgame in 2024 | Fireside Chat with Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager of the VanEck Digital Assets Alpha Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “I think this time things are a little different. If you kind of look at historical boat markets, you have a Bitcoin halving, which then brings attention to Bitcoin. I personally think Bitcoin cycles are driven by demand, not necessarily supply. The supply is a catalyst to create demand. So we kind of did this internal research project on our team in trying to figure out what has the highest correlation of price. And it turns out it's just creations of new wallets that then buy the native asset. So if you look at the history of Bitcoin halving bull markets begin, you know, several sort of months after the halving. And that's because everyone starts paying attention to this asset that just went through sort of this halving of supply. And so demand creates the bull market in Bitcoin. But historically, what's also been paired alongside that is sort of like these new ideas on everything else that gets people excited on the possibilities. So again, 2017 ICOs.”

    2024-04-30 · Forward Guidance · The Crypto Endgame in 2024 | Fireside Chat with Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager of the VanEck Digital Assets Alpha Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Token supply of helium or mobile in this case is going up when packets go through the helium network, cash flows come in and then they burn the token supply from data credit purchases from Nova Labs. And it sounds a little complicated, but going back to the question of what's the monopoly here, well, think about the moat, it's like a two-sided marketplace, right? On the one hand, supply, which is hotspots. On the other side, it's demand people with mobile phones. And as both these things scale, it's very hard for someone to copy paste that. It's very hard for someone to come and disrupt that. So if mobile on a blockchain or mobile leveraging a blockchain as an idea takes off, this theoretically could look like a monopoly where there's very clear cash flow characteristics.”

    2024-04-30 · Forward Guidance · The Crypto Endgame in 2024 | Fireside Chat with Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager of the VanEck Digital Assets Alpha Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “I pay 20 bucks a month to use it. Again, compare that to Verizon ATT, where folks pay $40, $60. I think the ARPU in the United States is like north of 100. So it's way cheaper than any mobile plan. When I'm using my cell phone in an area where there's no hotspots, it uses T-Mobile's network. But when it kind of goes into an area where there are helium hotspots, it uses the helium hotspots. Now, what's the benefit of routing traffic through helium hotspots versus T-Mobile? a magnitude cheaper. So if you think about it, the mobile plan is run by a company called Novo Labs, just regular business. And on their end, they're trying to manage their cost structure, where if packets are going through the helium hotspots, they're paying the helium network of packets are going through T-Mobile, they're paying T-Mobile. And the helium hotspots owners are theoretically benefiting from the economic arrangement where that data goes through the helium hotspots. So essentially.”

    2024-04-30 · Forward Guidance · The Crypto Endgame in 2024 | Fireside Chat with Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager of the VanEck Digital Assets Alpha Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “So we've talked about this public again, not financial advice, any of this, but we made an investment in helium. HT is the token. I don't know if you know too much about the project, but essentially started off as an IoT network where they said to folks, plug in this little box in your house. And when you plug in this little box in your house, they will propagate service, leveraging your Wi-Fi. And you'll earn some tokens for doing that. And eventually someone will build IoT devices to use that network that people have built. That didn't scale. because they kind of had this classic problem of like you built this network but then the demand never came and so you had this ever inflating token supply but they eventually you know i wouldn't say pivoted but they started building a mobile network on the side uh so healy mobile is the plan whereas similar idea which is folks plug in a little hotspot in their house they earn some tokens for doing that um but then on the other side people buy a mobile plan the helium mobile plan i have one on my phone”

    2024-04-30 · Forward Guidance · The Crypto Endgame in 2024 | Fireside Chat with Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager of the VanEck Digital Assets Alpha Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Things together, you have a call option with sort of this intrinsic value component embedded, which is very similar to what you have in distress.”

    2024-04-30 · Forward Guidance · The Crypto Endgame in 2024 | Fireside Chat with Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager of the VanEck Digital Assets Alpha Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “That I focus on, my team and I are hyper focused on tokens that have a couple of very specific characteristics. One, the underlying product or project that the token represents essentially ownership around has to look like a monopoly because crypto in general, crypto projects in general are just generally open source code and anyone can copy paste your thing. So it's very hard to find projects that theoretically could be monopolies in the category they're in. The second component of that is we were looking for things that are monopolies that can have pricing power where that pricing power ultimately flows to the token in some shape or form, which then creates that intrinsic value for it. And ultimately the asymmetric call option you're betting on is that most of these projects have maybe a million monthly activity users max depending on what you're looking at. You're betting that that million monthly active user number is going to go to 100, 200 million in the distant future. So you compare the”

    2024-04-30 · Forward Guidance · The Crypto Endgame in 2024 | Fireside Chat with Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager of the VanEck Digital Assets Alpha Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “So I would break up credit markets into maybe three buckets. There's investment grade that's high yield and there's distressed, right? So when you're buying an investment grade bond or a high yield bond, yes, you're very much selling a put, right? Because you're buying a bottle, you're buying about a 90, has some coupon max you can make is your coupon plus some price appreciation, but really you can go to zero. default rate and credit is pretty low so you're playing this probability game that you're not a complete moron picking credits and like if you get enroned you get enroned right you can't manage for that distress is actually more like crypto in the sense that there are some assets or cash flow to some underlying business that creates sort of this intrinsic value and then buying something at 50 or 60 cents you know your downside is limited based on that intrinsic value so actually buying a call that that that a value appreciates and this thing actually behaves more like an equity rather than a piece of debt and that's something similar i think with crypto at least the space of crypto”

    2024-04-30 · Forward Guidance · The Crypto Endgame in 2024 | Fireside Chat with Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager of the VanEck Digital Assets Alpha Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “The moat the banks had on providing liquidity, trading deaths, how profitable it could be. And then how those two things were kind of intersecting. To me, the probability of crypto actually becoming mainstream one day went up because there were sort of interesting things happening beyond just capital formation, which was 2017.”

    2024-04-30 · Forward Guidance · The Crypto Endgame in 2024 | Fireside Chat with Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager of the VanEck Digital Assets Alpha Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “In 2018, 2019, just a big asset manager continuing what I do. But I started to allocate to crypto and just follow other managers. COVID happens, and I'm in between jobs. I'm sort of transitioning from Managel going to Millennium. I had a garden leave. So I went down the rabbit hole on all things DeFi in that sort of 2020 timeframe. It was all just by I had very little to do and there was something interesting again happening in DeFi in 2020. DeFi was very different from the ICO wave, which again got a whole new cohort of people interested in crypto again and said. And people said, well, what is this about? Right, which is at the time the key things people are doing was providing liquidity on Uniswap and then borrowing and lending permissionlessly on Aave and Compound. Obviously, then that created this massive boom in other DeFi protocols, people kind of tinkering with the same ideas. But that intrigued me again because I started my career on a market making desk and I understand.”

    2024-04-30 · Forward Guidance · The Crypto Endgame in 2024 | Fireside Chat with Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager of the VanEck Digital Assets Alpha Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “To use an asset, in this case, ETH, and essentially people around the world could subscribe to ICOs, ideas on a piece of paper. And it was all smart contract based. So you knew ahead of time what ownership you'd get in that project. And it was all sort of programmatic did not require any investment bank in the middle, right? to facilitate any of those capital formation-like activity. So that was unique and different. Everyone had sort of some great interesting blockchain-based idea they wanted to ship to the market at the time. So I started following crypto more actively then. Obviously was very disappointed when those ideas that came as white papers never were fulfilled their vision for a variety of reasons. So I decided, look, there's something special here. I don't really exactly know where it goes. I don't want to sort of build a career around this yet. I'm just going to allocate to other people and see how it goes. I continue to sort of do my distressed high yield credit job. I was at a firm called Angel.”

    2024-04-30 · Forward Guidance · The Crypto Endgame in 2024 | Fireside Chat with Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager of the VanEck Digital Assets Alpha Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “So I was doing all of that at some point during that period of time. I discovered Bitcoin and I'm weaving it back into crypto. It was probably 2015. And my brain just thinks of optionality, right? Like what are some good call options at all times? This oil and gas trader talking about, that was a call option of a trade. Bitcoin at a time seemed like a call option, so I didn't think too much about it. I wasn't like a monetary policy guy. I was in like a dollar debasement guy or anything. It just seemed like an option seemed interesting. Bought some Bitcoin, didn't think too much about it. And then fast forward, 2017 comes around our sort of oil and gas cycle trade has worked pretty well. Visiting my college roommate in Austin at the time, this guy, Kyle Samani, who runs a firm club Multicoin. This was before he started Multicoin. And so he articulated his crypto thesis then. I was intrigued. This was right during the ICO mania. And what was most interesting to me got me excited then was this ability.”

    2024-04-30 · Forward Guidance · The Crypto Endgame in 2024 | Fireside Chat with Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager of the VanEck Digital Assets Alpha Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “And so we got right on that. We had the trade on, but we didn't know how it was going to work. And that ultimately worked because oil price is corrected. And then thankfully, on the other side, we were able to find some interesting oil and gas assets to buy when oil went to 25 bucks and every bond went to sub 20 cents.”

    2024-04-30 · Forward Guidance · The Crypto Endgame in 2024 | Fireside Chat with Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager of the VanEck Digital Assets Alpha Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “Yeah, 2013, 2014. That's probably the right track. Yeah. And then sort of you did the macro math, which was, if I remember correctly, at the time, the world consumed something like 95 million barrels a day of oil. Saudi Arabia was a certain chunk of it. I think it was like north of 10. OPEC was basically over a third of the market. And obviously the U.S. was just growing at an accelerated pace. You could kind of tell if something didn't give, i.e. OPEC didn't cut the price of oil was going to potentially collapse. We didn't know when, we didn't know how. But one of the things we did at the time was sort of do this dispersion trade in our portfolio, which was you just bought high quality bonds and shorted low quality bonds in the oil and gas space, purely defined by like, what's your breakeven cost to produce a barrel of oil, all in shale. And the spread differential between two is pretty limited. So you kind of had this great optionality that if commodity prices did correct for whatever set of reasons, then that quality differential would play out.”

    2024-04-30 · Forward Guidance · The Crypto Endgame in 2024 | Fireside Chat with Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager of the VanEck Digital Assets Alpha Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “Fun. I was looking at like Italian telcos and it was kind of trying to understand how to underwrite an Italian telco distressed debt while you have sort of this macro restructuring type risk as well. And how do you sort of bake those things into analysis, but also how do you sort of hedge some of those tail risks? So that's where I came into that world of investing. Went to the buy side relatively early. I was at a firm called Hutchin Hill for a period of time, I think five and a half plus years. I was a pretty young guy on the team. I was a team T guy by background, but someone at the time told me to look at energy. I knew nothing about shale. I was pretty young. And so, you know, I started to learn. This was like, I started learning about Shale right when the boom started where everyone was issuing a high yield bond at 7% to go drill somewhere. And they kind of gave you all these great theoretical economics of like, hey, it might take us two years to recoup our cap.”

    2024-04-30 · Forward Guidance · The Crypto Endgame in 2024 | Fireside Chat with Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager of the VanEck Digital Assets Alpha Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “Every senior at Stern at the time was pretty depressed because all their banking jobs were going away. I was like, you know what? I have a couple of years to figure this out. So I explored VC. I explored, you know, kind of business development at a startup. And ultimately stumbled into distress credit. I took a course in debt. I was called debt instruments at the time and I also took equity valuation course. And I thought credit was an interesting place because you got to kind of look across the capital structure macro plays a little bit of a role into how you invest in credit. And you really get to look at the asset side of the balance sheet and say, what are these assets worth? And then you get to then also look at the other side of the balance sheet, the liabilities and equity and say, where does kind of value sit? So it gives us this more holistic picture of things. Started in the world of credit in 2011. I started my career at UBS on the distress test, distress high-level desk, right during the European credit crisis, which was”

    2024-04-30 · Forward Guidance · The Crypto Endgame in 2024 | Fireside Chat with Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager of the VanEck Digital Assets Alpha Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “Yeah, I guess it's a part of like Indian culture, too. I'm Indian, obviously. I remember in high school into college, I was really into biotech stocks. And I was like, well, I kind of want to learn how to value equities. And so that's how I stumbled into finance. NYU was pretty well known for having a great equity valuation course. This guy, Professor Oswat de Motorin's famous, unfortunately, I didn't get to take his class, but I did take an evaluation course with his mentee at the time and who was teaching the undergrad version of this. But that was by far my favorite course in undergrad. So I went to the undergrad business school, kind of explored a variety of different opportunities. I started freshman year at NYU a week after Lehman blew up.”

    2024-04-30 · Forward Guidance · The Crypto Endgame in 2024 | Fireside Chat with Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager of the VanEck Digital Assets Alpha Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “Born and raised in India, I grew up in the town in Bangalore. My parents were doctors decided to be adventurous, moved to States when I was 12 years old, brought me with them, went from Bangalore to like a small city in Connecticut or a small town called Cheshire, ultimately wanted to get out back to a bigger city. So I went to NYU for undergrad business school. I actually wanted to go to film school, but my parents said they were not going to fund my excursions in film. And hindsight, that was a good decision.”

    2024-04-30 · Forward Guidance · The Crypto Endgame in 2024 | Fireside Chat with Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager of the VanEck Digital Assets Alpha Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT