YouSaid · the spoken record

Ryan Selkis

lines on the record: 70
first: 2018-08-07
most recent: 2018-08-07
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

“Know and it worked out right like within like two weeks I went from like okay my career's got like a major setback we're going in the throes of like the worst recession and like you know since the the Great Depression and then somehow miraculously went from like that to I just skipped two years of banking and got like right into venture and it was like the best like job that I possibly could have had out of school I was totally underqualified for it and pretty much everybody at Summit that hired me and then didn't fire me in the first three years and then my manager Pete Connolly who was just terrific first mentor and coach, I'd say.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've joked around this guy, Annie, from Fabric VC. He and I were joking that I think, I forget who came up with the title, but for my autobiography, it'll be something like my entire life has been an accident, right? So I've just caught a tremendous amount of breaks. But I think by far the, so obviously, you know, my parents wife for family reasons, but I would say when I've started my career, I was in the throes of the recession and my offer at the JPMorgan Investment Bank was deferred. It was just, I think it was like it would have been like a pretty significant setback, just psychologically and kind of career-wise. But I accepted on the spot the summer prior. And so I went back to the well for like the friends that I had that, you know, would have recruited me, I thought. And this guy, you know, JP Sande, who's a friend of mine at Boston College, he was like, yeah, we'll get you in like right away. And so he like fast-tracked me at a venture firm called Summit Partners, which I'm sure most of your listeners probably.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a world in 15, 20 years where blockchains replace a lot of different traditional financial markets and you have things like autonomous agents and decentralized autonomous organizations that become these unstoppable forces. Augur this past week is a great example. There's prediction market that pretty much immediately got a million dollars in bets placed and then assassination markets popped up pretty much on like day two for Donald Trump and a number of other like high profile individuals. These autonomous agents, you know, they sound great in theory, but like what happens, like how do you avoid the black mirror episodes that come from some of these innovations? Like, who's developing the kill switches? Like, who's thinking about how to actually keep this in check? Those are the people that I get excited about working with.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember testing out x.ai, which is company based in New York four years ago. And then Amy, the AI assistant, you know, it kind of worked. It kind of didn't. And I tried it again like another six months ago. I was just like, oh my God, man, if this is the pace of innovation, like this is like how smart things are getting, you can kind of see this freight train of change to the economy that's really scary. I can't remember if it was like Tim Ferris or Sam Harris had a podcast with someone on.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My kids learning to talk. That obviously is, I know you're asking about economic sectors. It might be more interesting. I think AI, like machine learning, is like, you know, all these really, you know, there's a lot of buzzwords and jargon and fascinating stuff that's happening there. But that watching that unfold is I kind of go back. Like I can't really think about it that much because I kind of just, you know, I worry that like everything is going to be machine driven and we're basically coming back to the matrix and the singularity is near and kind of all that. For me, just watching all these AI assistance pop up and how sophisticated they're getting them.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's not, oh, we've built this censorship resistant decentralized currency. Most of the hashing powers is with one company in Bitmain, right? So, you know, and up until very recently, like most of that capacity was behind the great firewall. So, yeah, so much for your censorship resistant currency that can be co-opted and owned by the Chinese government, right? So I think that's one of the bits of marketing language that everybody uses, but isn't quite true. But yeah, I think if you can make that a little bit more fluid, right, you can't disrupt Facebook. Today, right? Maybe it'll take some time. But the boats that some of these big tech companies have are pretty sizable. So it's not like you have really low switching costs of something like Cambridge Analytica happens or worse. It's almost like they're too deeply entrenched.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That somebody gets remarkable. The thing is, it's human nature. Completely. I think making centralization and decentralization, making that process more liquid, maybe that's the real”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The people that work on the team that actually put everything implement thing and kind of put things into action, they never get any credit, right? It's just like the face of the franchise. And I think most good, especially younger CEOs or executives will basically say like, I don't know what the fuck I'm doing, right? Like, honestly. But luckily, I've got a knack for hiring the right people to do. And, you know, so ultimately, like, they're the ones that get the brand off the ground. And I'd say, you know, when we acquired Coindesk, we were basically down to six full-time.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, if we can build an open data layer, the authoritative data source for a new financial system, that business is going to make money. We'll find ways to make money in 50 different type of verticals. And so I'm not too hung up about it right now, but you always have to be kind of conscious of the tension between how do we capture value and how do we make this open source. So those are like some of the big sticky issues that I think a lot of teams in the industry face and we're cognizant of them.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, just like selling FOMO and just kind of playing people off each other, like horse trading, whatever. And that's basically this is not today that technically complex to do the TCR. It's very politically complex, I guess, to get the right initial distribution. So if you can get aligned investors that will kind of like make the leap with you, it almost becomes, I think, self-fulfilling because you just need to solve that kind of political coordination problem and that a lot of good things happen. And when it comes to value capture for us, whether you're talking about the token economics or anything else”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of like the same pitch, right? With consensus, it coined as the big flagship conference in crypto, I ran Coindesk prior to Masari, and that's really the lifeblood of Coindesh right now. But the first year that we really blew it up, we go to kind of all of our friends in the industry. And basically the pitch was something to the effect of everybody's coming, you should get your ticket before prices come up and before you run out of speaking slots. And then the next week, you'd basically have the same conversation with the same people and be like, oh, yeah, so-and-so, so and so, and so and so are like on the main stage and you're not and you know you should you know You're describing every business every”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're going to raise $10 million and we're going to sell 20% of the tokens. So basically the other 80% will sell over the next five years. We have constraints just on a nominal basis to like how many partners we can pull in. Because if you have 40 different partners that want to come in, is anybody really going to care if they put in like a quarter million dollars and they're running a $400 million fund? No. You have to give people enough skin in the game and interest and excitement like, oh, this is going to be a billion dollar network, but you can't concentrate too much power on one hand because so much of the importance of how we build these governance systems relies on the initial distribution of governance and ultimately the ongoing distribution of governance. So it doesn't get centralized prematurely before it has kind of escape velocity. So that's one thing. Now, the nice thing that I always like to joke about is if there's anyone that's done more faking it until you make it in the industry, I'd like to see them, particularly around consensus, the conference, right? Like that's, it's a lot of it's kind of”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And these are just kind of high level numbers. And these are not what we're raising at. So I'll use it for kind of illustration.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a political challenge. We will not be successful if we don't get a critical mass of exchanges, funds, underwriters eventually bought in. And so that's why when we did our initial fundraise, we went out and we looked at globally who are some of the top funds that can get us boots on the ground in Korea, in China, in Europe, in North America, right? And we did that. We got a fantastic syndicate together of really smart investors. That's kind of step one. Step two is kind of how do we expand upon that? How do we start to get more of the exchanges and other infrastructure providers behind us? And it's a distribution problem and it's a political problem. And all these assets are kind of reflexive in some sense, right? So the more we sell value it is, right? It's a lot of marketing. But it's, I think the right kind of marketing, but the challenge is what's the value of this network today that doesn't exist? This is like the whole like venture capital dilemma. If you back in and you say.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's something between Wikipedia of Bloomberg and Edgar and then I'd even say maybe like a little bit of like a World Economic Forum type of system because I don't want to say like SEC or like Finra or anything like that because basically”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh man, yeah, it's great because there's like 50 entrepreneurs right now that are building the Bloomberg crypto, right? I hesitated smiling. No, no, no, no, no. Our investors want to kill me because I always say, no, no, we're building Edgar. Before you can build Bloomberg, you need to build Edgar. And they're like, well, that's not sexy enough. It's like, I know. That's why when I talk to people that need sex appeal, I say Bloomberg. But it's really more foundational than that. At the end of the day, the Bloomberg of crypto is not going to look like the Bloomberg of Bloomberg, right? My analogies suck. Yeah. Well, no, I think it's a fair analogy, right? Like, that's the I would say where we ultimately want to be from a kind of leadership standpoint and kind of building this base layer.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then another kind of core piece is just curating content and information and trying to curate research, whether it's ours or someone else's, giving people a single dashboard where they could cover to cover, do their investment diligence and come to some type of decision.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we want to build an authoritative data resource for the industry. So if you think about building a new financial system, what type of infrastructure needs to be built, high quality, standardized, universally consistent reference data is a core component of that. And I think we're tackling that from a few different angles. So there's all of the on-chain effects which we just acquired that has pricing, volume, market cap data, and then on blockchain transaction data and things like developer activity. And we're kind of adding a whole slew of metrics to give people a better dashboard and sense of how these assets are doing comparatively speaking. Obviously with Masari with the TCR product, what we're really trying to do is bring more regular enforceable disclosures because many of the newer projects are kind of quasi-private, quasi-public. So the insiders really, you need to know what they're thinking and what they're doing, or you don't have a complete picture of the economics or kind of the fundamentals of the project.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, they're just bad. They're just dumb investments for the most part. And if you're going to take that exposure, the smart play, and, you know, I think this is the pitch of most crypto funds is to invest as an LP. Sure, you're going to take a little bit of a haircut, but you're going to do it in a vehicle that's tried and true and you're going to basically offload all the risk onto the VCs, the hedge funds. So I think that makes a lot of sense. It's basically a tax on the folks that can't take the professional risk.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, that's like you didn't figure out custody and we don't really care whose fault it was, like off with your head, right? So I think that's like the most important thing that's going on this year is can we figure out institutional custody now Coinbase has their solution, you know, we're starting to see like bigger, bigger money funds kind of pile in with what they're doing ledger is doing a lot of always been kind of at the forefront with Bitcoin. I love Wensus. He's a purist and he doesn't believe in Ether, so he doesn't custody it. And it's like costs him so much. I'm sure, but he's just like, no, we're not doing it. So good for him. But there are plenty of those actors out there that are working on these institutional grade custody to kind of get over that hurdle right now.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I kind of feel like I was a few years early to this and like the this type of framing, but my framing was if Mark Andreessen and Fred Wilson are wrong, I feel like less bad about being really stupidly wrong about crypto and Bitcoin. If they were making a career bet and ran reputational risk bet, even probabilistic one that's ended up turning up very, very well. If they're good making this leap, then I am as well as, you know, at that time, like 27-year-olds. So I think now you multiply that by like a million in terms of where the tech stacks are, where kind of mainstream consciousness of this is kind of an innovative new asset class. I think it's much less risky to get behind something like one of the cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, Ether, Zcash, Monero. I don't think that's a bet your career type of risk anymore. What is, is, okay, if we buy this and then there's a hack and we lose all of it because it's a faulty custody solution.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really be in situations where they don't really start with any intrinsic value, but then the team at some point has a pivot and like, oh, shit, like we should do this instead. And now it's really helped improve alignment across the entire stakeholder base. And it just like something clicks and it really takes off. I think the important thing there is that's only going to happen if there truly is some innovation in the incentive scheme where it's an alignment improvement. And that's what's missing.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At some point, things become so overvalued that they've kind of become indistinguishable from really terrible projects and assets. Because it's just tough to see some of even the interesting projects like growing into their value, simply because at the end of the day, when the tide goes out, are these tokens actually capturing the value, you know, the implied valuation of the network suggests that they are? And the answer almost universally is no. And that's why I think the categorization of securities, which look at the cash flow, look at even if it's speculative cash flow or look at the asset value, you can do that. Currencies, it's like, what are they replacing? Is this better than gold? So should it be some percentage of the gold market? Should it be some percentage of Bitcoin as like a replacement to Bitcoin? Those all make sense, but it's this kind of middle bucket where you can bang your head against the wall as much as you want. You can run whatever models you want, but you're just not going to get there under almost any circumstances. And there will be a few outliers where I think the outliers will.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do like a lightning round where I just talk about all the terrible projects that are on the top page of CoinMartin. No, actually, I'm not going to do that because I would totally, you know, maybe over beers, I'll do it.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tamper free computations or storage or funds flow. So I think that's one element. And then probably the other element is are there coordination problems that exist within a given market that monetary incentives might be able to solve? And so this is something that people that smarter than me have talked about. But basically like blockchains and cryptocurrencies is coordination mechanisms. I think it's probably the best way to think about it. Is there like a structural issue in a given market that requires a better type of economic incentive system and coordination mechanism that just would be very”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I guess people in the industry talk about censorship resistance a lot. So I think there's certainly a category of applications that you could argue you must do this on a decentralized basis if you want truly.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm glad you're asking him because I know I'm probably getting way, way too. And you know the funny thing is people that aren't familiar might be like, oh, that sounds like really interesting, but I don't understand it. And then everybody in the industry is like, you know, so basic. You're such like a dumb fuck. You didn't explain any of that correctly. So, you know, I'm sure that I'm going to disappoint a lot of people in the industry every single time I open my mouth. That's just kind of my operating assumption, right? So keep, you know, bringing me back down to earth”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People will still speculate, right? Of course. So that's, yeah, you can't, I don't think you can stop it, but I do think that you can motivation matters. Yes. Yes. And I thought that about, I think it was one of the longest posts that I've written. I wrote Why I invested in Filecoin, right? And it was basically like a protest investment almost because I thought that they did things the right way. And like, you need in their system as designed, you need Filecoin to actually prove that space and certain storage capacity has been committed for a provable length of time. And so there's a holding period, there's kind of real world comp in AWS. You've got this Airbnb type of model so you can figure out what the replacement costs would be. There's a lot to like about that. And that system doesn't exist without Filecoin in theory. We're starting to see more projects like that, but it's a valuation.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think what Token Foundry did with the foam space ICO, and I think it's the 27th today, I think it's kicking in. You can register until like the 31st. I'm not recommending it, but it's kind of ongoing. So hopefully this airs after that. But I think the way that they structure, the way that I tried to basically create suitability standards. If you were kind of doing this as an investment advisor or broker, you'd have kind of suitability standards that you'd have to check to see if a certain investment made sense for even an accredited investor. And so now this isn't accrediting people by wealth. It's basically accrediting, are you actually going to use this token for its intended use? So that's very interesting to me.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It really is for utility. I think we'll do well, but I think the kind of hand waving around, oh, we're using it for this, but really we need to raise $5 million. Or a lot more, right? Like that's where people get into trouble. And I will give a shout out to one group that I think is really doing a good job on how do you actually prove that people are using these tokens and not just speculating?”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, oh, now you're going to do a shitcoin. So the other thing that I think makes us very, very different is that, you know, one, I'll make the argument that everybody else makes all day long is truly the token holders in our system are using the token, not just speculating if the long-term value goes up, that's fine. But I believe that very strongly. That's another hour that I could make that argument, but people can take that with a grain of salt. But the thing that really matters is that it's only all of the natural users that I just outlined are all accredited institutional investors. We're not talking about mom and pop investors that are going to suddenly take interest in basically creating Finra or the SEC type of enforceability. It just doesn't make sense for them to hold the token because they have no skin in the game strategically and all the other token users would be a little bit more strategic. So that's, I think, how we try to separate what's interesting about our token. I think any other project that it's purely for.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decentralized, so like, who actually claims that they can even report on behalf of these networks? So you've got some pretty tricky issues there. But I think at the end of the day, what we're trying to do is ensure that in the absence of that regulator or even the self-regulator that they might be able to bless to do this work of kind of enforcing standards, the TCR, the owners of the TCR are able to basically come together and ultimately create that out of thin air, right? So there's a little bit of fake it to you make it, like create this order of inevitability. There's, I think a tremendous flywheel that would kick in. If you can get a critical mass of funds of exchanges of regulatable entities around the table saying, yeah, this is how we should do things. This is very obvious. We're not talking about $150 page 10Ks. We're talking about very remedial type of information, right? So that's number one. And they're very, very important number two because I know I get crucified all the time because I've been so outspoken on ICOs and how they're overvalued.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this is the whole problem in the industry right now. The ICO market has become like capital raising tool primarily. And in theory, these tokens aren't supposed to be equity or any equity-like instrument because that makes them securities. And so this is like the issue that everybody dances around. And when we're thinking about doing something for Masari, a couple things kind of stand out with how we're considering structuring this token curator registry. The first is we kind of see it as an enabling feature to kind of fulfill the mission of boosting transparency and getting to more fundamentals focus. And the reason I say that is there is no SEC or equivalence that can mandate Edgar-like disclosures from token projects. And then you get into the issue of how can you even pick and choose because Bitcoin, who's going to register Bitcoin, who's going to register Ether, you know, and maybe some of these other tokens that got out the door early, maybe they're kind of sufficiently”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Preserve your institutional integrity. And in fact, many of these, like the blue chips have said that they haven't sold. But the thing is, we don't know on a...”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're going to draw a line of sand and nobody else does, well, you're never going to invest in one of these projects unless you have a USV or Andreessen type of brand where you're so far in the money anyway that you can afford to hold for multiple years just so you kind of.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this isn't an ethical problem, right? It's a structural one, and it goes back to the incentive alignment issue because if you think about your responsibilities as a money manager, you've got fiduciary obligations. So you invest at 10% of what the IPCO price is. And then three months later, there's the ICO and it shoots up 20x, your fiduciary. You got to take chips off the table, but at the same time, you've basically, you know, one of the reasons that this went up 20x isn't because the fundamentals of the project change is because, you know, you as like a blue chip brand investors have clearly given a signal that this is a high quality project. You have your own brand, basically. Yeah, right. Yeah. So it is. It's exactly that. It's like arbing of your own brands. And I think people recognize this is like a structural issue, but the issue is one of kind of continued access because if you're doing your own kind of back of the napkin, well, if you're in a position where you know that you can exit quickly, then you can pay more on end.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Communities and the token holders and the issuing teams and kind of the early investors. And one of the kind of corollaries to that is very important, messy structural issue is the issue of how do you set standards around venture capital lockups for these pre-sales because what you've had to date is a dynamic where VCs have been given preferential kind of inside access to different token sales at a significant discount, in many cases mere months before kind of a broader launch. And they basically know they're in the money from day one because they know there's a flip. And to date, there hasn't been really any restrictions on when they can exit.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the key is just alignment. And the problem with the current ICO market is that you've got instances where the documents say these are donations. You have no rights. You don't exist. The tokens don't exist. They never will. These are like the fucking disclaimers that we have in the industry in some of these ICO docs. And we're laughing, but it's true. Like, you know it to be true. You've seen some of these. And so it's totally skewed and nobody cares or nobody has cared just because, you know, 2017 was such a monster year and everybody made money. Now that that's starting to cool off, now is when you're starting to see the teams think much more closely about incentive alignment. If we deliver on these milestones, how does that value get captured by the people that invested in the token? Sorry, purchase the token. Everybody knows that they're investments, right? So I think that is kind of super, it's important in business and economics anywhere, but there has been no incentive alignment between kind of community.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in terms of those early principles, you talk about table stakes. I mean, in the public markets, supply is something that's on the cover of the 10K. Let's get the fucking cover of the crypto 10K first before worried about the computer science elements of these different economic systems, right? It just doesn't matter at some point. So I think that's kind of where we come in. And part of that thesis is that any of this matters eventually. And right now, the truth is everybody's just treating these as binary bets and trades. But ultimately, there will be a right sizing of these different network tokens and people will start to think about these on a more fundamental driven basis. And so that's what we're positioning for, which is really the 5, 10, you know, 15-year infrastructure play.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What does that process look like for kind of exiting on the open market? Because if you were talking about a security, an insider was selling a significant amount of stock, well, that would be disclosable. In crypto, that could be a significant amount of inflation in whatever system you're talking about. And a good example of this is, and Vinny's great, he's a friend of mine, I've known her for a long time, Vinny Langham from Civic. But his team emailed us and they're like, hey, you know, fix, you got to fix the market cap. We wrote this blog post. We talked about how we're doing our treasury. No one picked it up, but it's basically 33% inflation if they were to sell it like immediately. And they're not, but that wasn't picked up anywhere. And this is, you know, multi-100 million dollar asset. I forget where it's trading now, but it's a lot of money. And now all of a sudden you've potentially added tens of millions of dollars of inflation overnight, which is many multiples of daily volume.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you know that the founders reward vests over a four-year period and this much goes to the foundation and this much goes to the community pool and this much goes to the founding team and whatnot. That's really valuable information that isn't really available anywhere unless you're computer science guy, right? So like actually getting the projects to just verify that these are the contracts pull directly from these contracts any kind of information that you need about the financials and particularly the supply and we will fill in the details and only we can fill in which would be okay once they vest do you necessarily sell them”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're not even looking at quality right now. We're Switzerland in terms of reporting. It's like here are the things that we're trying to track. They're either true or they're false. You either input them or you don't. You either have this information or you don't. Either have these policies or you don't. Let's make it as black and white as possible for the first iteration. And then over time, you can add complexity and you can borrow from other innovators within the space regarding what logic you incorporate and how you can automate the reporting and disclosures for some of these projects. But we call them our Nova principles, non-controversial, objective, verifiable, actionable material. What's going to move the needle? What can we immediately check? What's that clear binary? And then really important right now, what's not going to piss people off, right? What's easy? Because you take something as simple as token supply over time. Some of the best projects out there have been extremely transparent with how they're managing their token supply. In some cases, in many cases, they actually embed it in the original ICO code.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“measures. And I think the most transparent projects generally are going to rise to the top anyway. So where do you start? Well, you start with extremely remedial information. How are you managing your token supply? Who are the people on your team? Where are you located legally? Do you have legal counsel? What are your verified web assets and web addresses so you can't get people don't get phished or spoofed and they can kind of easily verify when they're sending money to a legitimate project versus a Twitter bot and ETH giveaway scam. If you just start there, you can pretty much immediately find”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Retail investors don't care. They just want to know is something going to pump, is it going to dump? I think we have this lofty ambition that everybody's going to become Warren Buffett of crypto and really study the token documents in great detail. It's all bullshit, right? We all know that. But at least optically leveling the playing field a little bit more and making it easier for people to actually understand what's going on at these projects. So I think that to me is probably the area that the SEC has come out most vocally and most clearly and said, you know, here's an area where you guys could self-police. Jay Clayton and his kind of initial remarks in November said there may be ways for these different markets to kind of self market actors to self-regulate via transparency measures. And he wasn't just talking about crypto. He was talking about penny stocks and a few other areas. But I mean, he said he like explicitly said, you know, self-regulate via improvements in transparency.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, what's the SEC's mandate? Capital formation, fair and efficient markets, and consumer protections. Capital formation is not the problem. I think the industry's got that well in hand. This is clearly, you know, it's been proven that this is some disruptive innovation. I think there was just something out in Forbes yesterday. ICO volume in Q2 was 45% of the IPO market in the US. So, I mean, yeah, it's real. Like it's got people's attention. The problem comes down to kind of the fair and efficient markets piece, which is more on like the exchange front and then the consumer protections piece, which is really where we're focused on. I think most of the answers to protecting consumers, and I tend to lean more libertarian. So in my eyes, many of the protections that you could give to consumers are just by offering better transparency and more kind of consistent findable data on these projects.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pay for it. That is an indirect roundabout way where they're paying for it because they're offering up their data and in return they're being sold advertising. I think that's true in many of the other kind of early TCR applications. There's a company called Relevant that's working on this for kind of curated content.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So, well, I would argue, I don't trust that, right? Because you are the product. And so, you know, you're not actually getting the most valuable information. You're basically just getting plugged into their system and you're just part of the flywheel that allows them to sell more advertising dollars. So it's actually, you know, I think the reason that some of these social media platforms have gotten so much backlash is because their incentives have become misaligned. And by the way, that's kind of the same with traditional media too, right? Like that's why it's bifurcation of like MSNBC and Fox News. And like there's never any intersection of the Venn diagram anymore. So it's like two alternative realities. And it's because they're, you know, for the most part infotainment. So I think the goal with TCRs, whether you're talking about content, whether you're talking about credentials, is ultimately to have people that are interested in paying for high quality synthesis of information, like truly reliable synthesis of information, like give them a way to actually.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't because they make the rules, right? Their algorithm, I'm not even getting into the politics of it, right? But just in general, their algorithms are basically encoded and programmed so that we get more dopamine hits and more visits and much more tweets. I definitely trust them.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the governors of these systems, the curators of these systems have every incentive to only admit onto their nice lists, projects or companies or people or whatever that kind of meet certain thresholds. And they have every incentive, on the other hand, to kind of actually set standards and make a certain bar high enough that it's valuable for folks to clear that.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the game theory here is that if you're voting in your own kind of self-interest long term, you would be wise to only pick candidates that are actually going to add value to the list long term. Because if you accept anybody into Harvard, Harvard's diploma doesn't really matter anymore. And so the whole exclusivity of lists is something that's always been important.”
2018-08-07 · Invest Like the Best · Ryan Selkis - The Crypto Barbell and Token Curated Registries - [Invest Like the Best, EP.98] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source