YouSaid · the spoken record

Seth Ginns

lines on the record: 71
first: 2021-03-15
most recent: 2021-03-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“A lesson that I learned recently, which I had a little bit of a hint about before, was there's no substitute to working in a growth industry. Having this secular growth tailwind for your business, whether you're employee number three or the founder or employee number 1000, it's just luck breaks in your favor much more often. You see so many different opportunities from a business management perspective, from a career management perspective, when you're in an industry that has very strong secular growth tailwinds. So I'd say that's one recent discovery that I would have loved to have learned earlier, but I've been very lucky throughout my career. So that's nice to have.”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think my parents are very intellectually curious. My dad's an MD PhD, medical researcher, my mom has a master's in teaching French. And I think just teaching me that the more you know about something, the more interesting it is. So if you can create that basic intellectual scaffolding, then you can spend hours or days or weeks researching that area and find it incredibly interesting and make connections that others maybe don't pick up on. So that served me incredibly well in equities research and now in crypto research.”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this goes back to my equity days. I would say a lot of people on the buy side like to talk about how worthless the sell side is. And I actually think the sell side, and I'm talking sell side research in particular, and IBIS consensus, right? Having consensus numbers out there, I think that's so, so important to properly functioning equities markets and having those like aggregators of sentiment and kind of like where people are on even micro questions about specific companies. I just think the sell side research and their work around estimates and consensus is incredibly important for equity market functioning and massively underrated and people complain about it all the time and that's one of my pet peeves.”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Haven't read fiction in a long time. I read a lot of nonfiction, but I'll talk about fiction. I love magical realism, Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I'd say Borges, magical realism has always been one of my favorite areas to read.”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reading the journal, the FT, the post, and the times every morning if I can. Read the journal every day, and then the others kind of trail off just based on how crazy things are when I wake up. I think the journal is the most underrated source of context than alpha in like any asset class that you're investing in. Everyone assumes it's information that's already out there, so you're not going to get much value from it. And the reality is most people, because of that assumption, just don't read it religiously. And you get like the pulse of where sentiment is. The journal in particular is such a good Fed source. So you kind of pick up on like what's happening in the Fed weeks or months before it comes into the broader consciousness. I find it's been so helpful in shaping my investment thinking.”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Work in family are big components. I love Angel Investing. I love traveling often for work or with the family and getting out on the slopes as well.”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's fascinating is what resonates with one particular institution could be completely different from what resonates with another. But that's actually the beauty of the diversity of this ecosystem. There are institutions that are all about finding the fastest horse macro hedge and Bitcoin is really what resonates. But then we have conversations that start out with, you know what? I don't really get Bitcoin, but man, the Ethereum ecosystem reminds me a lot of growth equities. And I'm just super excited about what's happening there. So what's great about crypto is it's as fundamental a technology as the internet. It spans verticals. It spans use cases. It spans even macro. And I think once we understand what a client or a potential client is looking for within their portfolio,”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In those conversations, when someone's close to the edge and then they reach the tipping point and they engage and they invest. What do you typically see as the key part of the case that gets someone who's done their research?”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of institutional purchasing has been concentrated in hedge funds and in corporate balance sheets, the few very big corporate balance sheets. And then we're starting to see broader engagement in the institutional landscape writ large.”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's quite interesting. We've since inception, we've had a lot of really good institutional conversations, but September was really a light switch moment when those conversations went from, sure, I'm willing to do a monthly or bimonthly conversation to get the big picture to, okay, how do we implement? Do we do only Bitcoin? Do we do Bitcoin and ETH in a fixed ratio? Do we expand beyond Bitcoin and ETH? Do we do that internally? Do we do that with active funds? Do we do that as venture? Do we do that as hedge fund or a combination? So really Light Switch moment last fall. And I'd say a broad base of institutional engagement. I think fully reflected across the podcast discussions that you've had in this series. Everyone from Sovereign Wealth Funds to endowments to foundations to find benefit pension plans. But to be honest, this initial way.”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Crypto functionality in the PayPal app. 50% of them are daily active users. So there's this real engagement and there's this really big engagement benefit to crypto, which I think a lot of traditional financial players are starting to realize Square is seeing that as well. And I think we're going to see it's a little bit of crypto's Trojan horse visa MasterCard picking up on this as well. I think we're going to see a lot of additional activity. And by the way, the big players in crypto like Coinbase are going to be all over this as an enabler for bridging the traditional financial institutions and their particular niches of the financial markets into the liquidity, the users, the engagement, and really the design space and functionality of crypto.”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think the theme of convergence is a very big high level coin fund theme. And we kind of saw the breadcrumbs tied to that over the course of last year. And I think that that's just significantly accelerated. We have conversations frequently with the big investment banks, with commercial banks. And they're thinking about ways that crypto can play into whether it's wholesale payments, whether it's consumer divisions, yields right now in DeFi are much higher than the traditional world. How can traditional actors offer that to their customers? There's some really interesting dynamics here, though. So the CEO of PayPal was interviewed in December and he said, you know, for customers and PayPal, very big event, watershed event for the space. In the fall, they started offering crypto buying and selling for users. He said people that use the”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right now, your firm, for example, has venture investments. You have liquid, though it sounds a lot like they're sort of more liquid forms of underlying venture investments. And we have Coinbase going public in the not too distant future. How do you think about when this entire crypto world starts to converge with more traditional capital markets in the eyes of institutions?”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While at the same time make sure that these are financial rails that are monitored and that aren't used by bad actors or are rails where we can at least minimize the usage by bad actors because guess what? Cash USD is used by bad actors. And that doesn't mean that we outlaw cash USD. So I think it's like the hope would be a similar open-minded approach to regulation, but that's certainly where the risks lie. And we have a new administration in the US where we've gotten some positive initial reads, but still TBD. And that's a real risk. And I think all of the major market participants are ready and willing to participate in that dialogue. We have good intentions and are super excited about where things could go over time and want to see the US in particular be a really big part of this.”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Given how anti-fragile and resilient this open source global and open competition market is, the Bear case really comes down to regulation. That's been the bear case for a long time. And I said 2020 was kind of a watershed year for regulation in crypto. And the market agrees with me because I look at what Bitcoin has done, again, just as the largest market cap proxy. And I think Bitcoin breaking out to a new all-time high and continuing to move higher is really a reflection of that regulatory de-risking to a good extent. So when we think about writ large regulatory de-risking, we're kind of going down the right path. But now we're getting into this question of, well, okay, KYC in the wallet, there are a lot of different ways that that can be implemented. How do we implement that in a way that doesn't kill off the innovation that we're seeing in DeFi?”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was just floored. I don't care if it's three to five years or ten years, but to have Bank of New York Mellon talk about that was very, very impressive. But I think regulatory clarity is an important part of that. And KYC in crypto wallets, again, done the right way, done in a measured way, and done in a thoughtful way will likely be a big part of that as well and leads to some very, very interesting dynamics when you think out a few years.”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We think that regulation is going to have a very big role across the crypto ecosystem. I loved your podcast last week with the acting commissioner of the CFTC talking about how regulation has been one of the big advantages of the US commodities and securities markets. And I completely agree with that. I think regulation needs to be thoughtful. It needs to be supportive of the innovation that's happening here. I've never seen a cadence of innovation like what I see right now in the broader crypto universe. It's global, but in many”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Autonomous Tesla into it. We're going to give you a little bit of equity for every hour that your car is in there. Tell me how quickly that network bootstraps and just crushes Uber a Lyft in the markets where it's operating. And then you can get into wild dynamics where retailers incentivize people to come in on Black Friday by giving them some equity for every dollar they spend in a few hour period. And you get into these like blurring of stakeholders. And, you know, how does Walmart attract people when they're only growing earnings at 10% a year and an upstart is growing their store count by doubling every year? And so you get into very interesting dynamics quickly.”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I see in the wallet again in a thoughtful way over time. And that kind of gets into if you'll allow me to talk about like the multiple years out type of really interesting things that you can imagine doing, you can start thinking about taking securities off of venues and allowing for peer-to-peer securities trading. And by peer-to-peer, that could be in these decentralized exchanges that we're kind of like talking about now with Uniswap and SushiSwap. You can imagine a world where startups incentivize users to come use their products by giving away equity, like true, true equity. So the example I like to give is Elon starts a new company for his autonomous ride-sharing network and he says, hey, if you take a ride, we're going to give you a little bit of equity in this new company. And if you contribute.”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's quite interesting. At the beginning of last year, China launched a pilot of the Digital RB. And before that pilot launched, there was very little talk of central bank digital currencies among the Western big central banks. After that successful pilot, the rest of 2020 was the year of central bank digital currencies. The IMF held a full day event on central bank digital currencies in the fall. Brian Brooks, who was head of the OCC, talked a lot about a push towards central bank digital currencies and maybe having some of the private stable coins be a bridge to true central bank digital currencies. So when we think about what central bank digital currencies mean and what private stablecoins mean for crypto, that really comes down to this idea of an advancing regulatory regime, one in which you start having K.”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You see, particularly with Bitcoin, this question of how central banks will respond should Bitcoin get increasing importance over the next couple of years. What do you think happens with central banking activity in the digital asset space?”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of like the vision of where we can go with renewable energy and space and all of that. There's this forward thinking mentality where it's like, man, we need to at least sharpen our pencils and make sure this doesn't make sense. So I think that's really a game changer.”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Specifically on the announcements Michael Saylor and MicroStrategy, a big tailwind for the industry really one of the core catalysts in the fall, you look at mass mutual. And if you're one of their insurance competitors and Mass Mutual just added Bitcoin to their general investment account, you're going to seriously consider adding it because a big move in Bitcoin could affect their ability to price premiums in the near term. It creates real competitive dynamics. then I think Elon, there's really a dynamic around Tesla's purchase where if you are your typical board a few months ago, you were saying, do we really need to consider Bitcoin? This seems like a fringe dynamic when Elon buys, it becomes, why aren't we considering Bitcoin? After he's proven so many people wrong is such an inspiration for young engineers everywhere and kind of”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say a few things here. One, I think what's happened with just about everyone I know from traditional finance, you start with Bitcoin and your antenna are up and you start to pick up on, well, there's a lot of exciting stuff happening in DeFi on Ethereum. And what's this whole NFT space? NBA Top Shot and the excitement there. What are these challenger blockchains? What does that mean? So you end up opening your eyes to the diversity of this ecosystem. And I think we're certainly seeing in the institutional conversations that we're having a very quick progression from either Bitcoin alone or Bitcoin and Ethereum to start to looking at a broader set of crypto assets. And it's not a two-year progression. It's more like a three to six month progression.”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As we look out, there's been a lot of interest, particularly starting with Bitcoin, Elon Musk buying Vertesla's balance sheet and Mass Mutual and obviously Michael Saylor at Michael Strategy. How do you think about the impact of these initial moves onto the evolving ecosystem?”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think active management in crypto, there's an element of crypto investing across the liquidity spectrum that's still very much a venture. So even large cap, you could think of Bitcoin as being maybe a series C, a series D type venture investment. So I think active, given how fluid competitive dynamics are, given how fluid the innovative environment is, active management and the ability to course correct either with something that we own or realizing that we missed something and that it's a long-term winner and we need to be there, I think there's actually a ton of value add that can come from active management in crypto. Of course, I'll tell you, Ted, my bias is also that there's a lot of value add from active management and equities as well. But that's a bias from having grown up in the industry. And I think...”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd say all analogous to equities investing, re-underwriting dynamics are very important to me on the liquid side. So if we have a, depending on the volatility of the asset, if we have a 20 to 25% relative drawdown versus Bitcoin, let's make sure that our thesis is playing out. Let's make sure we understand the dynamics that are at play. And the reunderwriting decision can be to size up again to the original position, or it can be that there's some competitive dynamics that are changing or some emerging threats that lead us to either want to have a smaller position or be out of the position entirely at that moment. We're investing with a denial. That ends up being a buff for a risk mitigant, and those tokens end up outperforming in these drawdowns.”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This fight on the day of recording, Bitcoin is down quite a bit, and we are still above the 20-day moving average, which I would call one of the shortest term, most MOMO moving average indicators. So we are well into confirmed bull market territory right now. So it actually doesn't end up being much of a day-to-day factor in our analysis. Right now is kind of the profit maximization, get into the fundamentals, find the best opportunities for the next nine to 18 months.”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, for our high level regime, we just use some long term technical support level. So that's one element where I think fundamental analysis could potentially lead one astray, particularly when you're looking at a cycle like this cycle where institutions are engaging in a material way. So I think we could pull forward the next Bitcoin cycle, have this be a super cycle. So to me, using a technical support level as that regime change indicator makes a lot of sense. And we use one that's sufficiently long term such that we don't get a lot of false signals.”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, to the extent that Bitcoin is the bellwether for those bull, extreme bull, and extreme bear markets, how are you assessing, are you using technical analysis to assess, how are you trying to figure out what regime you're actually in, which is usually much easier to see after the fact than ahead of time.”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And really using that as a high level portfolio construction tool, which then feeds down into the individual portfolio construction dynamic. The last thing that I'll say is crypto has tended to have a four-year cycle. I believe that's tied to Bitcoin's having cycle. The new supply issuance of Bitcoin gets cut in half every four years, roughly. We call that the having. And as a result, you tend to have three good years of performance, usually two good years and one extraordinary year. And then you have a 70 to 80% correction historically. So that's one more layer of risk management that we apply to the portfolio on the liquid side, thinking about whether we're in kind of that capital letter, bull market, or bear market regime for crypto, managing to either absolute return or higher maximizing return rather than Absolute return”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'll take liquid end venture because they're obviously a little different. On the venture side, we really believe you need to take a non dogmatic view to the space. There are a lot of things that are constantly changing, a lot of innovation that's constantly emerging. So we take a pretty diversified approach about 50 investments. And the idea is we have room to continue to support and size up down the road, but we're getting a lot of exposure. The winners are going to be wildly asymmetric, very big return potential. Our prior funds have had 1,000 X's. So we want to make sure that we have those thousand X's in the portfolio. In the liquid fund, the idea is really to think about the different factors in the crypto universe. I'd say today the factors are Bitcoin, Ethereum, base layers, and DeFi. And there's some sub factors that look like they might be emerging in there as well.”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“High reward relative to just about anything in the traditional investment world and still in the first or second inning of its development, that could be in the 5% to 10% range on an initial cost basis. So I'd say that first layer is kind of traditional equity sizing based on risk and conviction. But then we put in an overlay of liquidity risk management. And there's a wide range of liquidity of these tokens going from small cap up through Bitcoin, the largest, most liquid. And we want to make sure that we're risk managing the portfolio in a way that where we would be able to exit positions or reduce risk in a reasonable amount of time if fundamentals were to materially change. So that's a big component of portfolio construction as well.”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very interesting question. So, I think of it very much the way that I would in equities portfolio. There are varying degrees of risk that we're taking on with different protocols. Oftentimes there's a very interesting novel new concept. Let's say it's a primitive that allows you to build structured products on Ethereum. And it doesn't have any activity yet. It's very risky. It hasn't really been battle tested from a security perspective either, but it's certainly in the lead in that vertical and we want exposure. That might be a 50 basis point position or a one-point position. Whereas something like Aave that has been battle tested has a lot of collateral locked in it. It hasn't been hacked. I'd say probably lower risk, slightly lower reward as well, but a very...”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So fundamental work means evaluating the code base all the way through to evaluating the competitive dynamics of that particular subsector and how that new company or protocol fits into those broad dynamics. So it's everything that you would think of with regard to fundamental analysis for equities plus some.”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really bringing in a bigger fold of users and developers into these ecosystems really caught its stride. When you had the skin in the game with governance tokens that could actually vote on protocol. So we saw this greater level of engagement. We saw a fast pace of innovation. And then we were tracking engagement with the protocol itself and really just saw that they were seeing a lot of adoption.”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a great example is a borrowing and lending protocol. I've gotten to know Stani and Jordan, two of the principals there over the course of the last year and change. And the process really started out by saying, okay, what's the competitive advantage of this protocol and this team? And what we started to see, because there are very successful other borrowing and lending protocols out there, and we're actually big fans of a lot of them compound maker. What we saw with Ave was an iteration on development and openness to community engagement. And I think community engagement became a very big theme last year. It's always been a dynamic within crypto, but really governance tokens and driving an iterative development process and the chat.”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Check is understanding that they understand some of the latest trends and changes and some of the emerging competitors. And then that's really when we start putting pen to paper and figure out how large we think the addressable market could be and think about how a protocol like that would likely be valued, not just in the current market environment, but in a market environment of where we think things will be six months or a year down the road based on where the new protocol is and its development.”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have some questions about it though, or I have some suggestions, or why aren't you doing this, this way? Or guess what? I'm a coder, and I think I could improve this function for you. Would it be okay if I helped you work through the dynamics there? So the fundamental research function starts in the exact same way that it would for the average 25, 30 year old that says, hey, I think I might want to invest in this new protocol and I want to learn more about it. So it's the chat groups, it's white papers, and then we reach out and get the team on the phone and really start to dig into what they're doing, dig into their vision for where things are going. And that's very important because, of course, we're talking to a lot of different projects. There's a lot going on from a competitive dynamic fluidity perspective. So a big part of the”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's certainly an element of thematic. I think that's a benefit of having venture and liquid under the same house. We're constantly thinking about what's happening in the next one, three, five, ten years and taking long-term views. So we have that thematic overlay. We're talking to a lot of other funds in the space. The community is very collegial. But there's also this dynamic of chat groups. And this is like a very interesting dynamic. So this is on Discord. This is on Telegram. And I think an element of crypto that really appeals to the younger generations is the fact that all of the big projects have these chat groups. The founders of the projects from the CEO through to the CTO and everyone else that's working to push the community forward is in these chat groups. And you can be an average investor that says, I think that this new protocol looks super.”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Period of time, it absolutely affects how we think about risk management and how we think about position sizing for those liquid assets today.”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“to being relevant in liquid crypto in six months and having a 500 million or billion dollar network value so we're constantly drawing connections between what we're seeing emerge in the early stage and how to tie that into not just what we're seeing real time in the liquid markets but how that informs where the liquid markets are likely to go in the next year, in the next two years. And that really informs position sizing on the liquid side. So we could have a protocol that's just going from wind to wind to win, and we're seeing that on the liquid side in their adoption and engagement, but we're starting to see an early stage venture some really novel competitors come in with something that's different, something that's not in the liquid markets today, but that could be directly competitive in a relatively short”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a really interesting question. And I'd say by virtue of, I think one of our core advantages at CoinFund is being relatively small and having venture through to liquid crypto and having both partner and analyst resources that are all looking across the entire gamut from early stage through to later, the dialogue that we have in our morning meeting every day for an hour where we're talking about everything from venture through to liquid really spans the earliest embryonic companies within crypto that really have a vision but no product yet all the way through to projects that have demonstrable traction that we can track on the blockchain and encrypto the time from early stage to liquid is much shorter than inequity so you can go from being this embryonic company”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, liquid means that the token trades either OTC or through exchanges or through DEX's decentralized exchanges. And the investment process looks a ton like the equities process that I was doing at Genesis and all of those years. And that's why I think the transition was actually pretty straightforward. I mean, we talk to teams.”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd love to dive into all these aspects of an investment process and let's start with you brought the lens of a large cap growth equity investor with some startup experience. How do you go about thinking about your investment process in this space and maybe just walk right through it by starting with what does liquid mean?”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it kind of shows how enthralled he was by the technology, how important that was to the founding mission of CoinFund, and it's still very much our North Star guiding mission today. Fast forward to 2018, we launched our second, primarily venture fund. That's done very well, really raised our profile within the ecosystem. And then when I joined, we launched our first pure liquid hedge fund. Again, the idea was, okay, we have our 2018 fund was structured such that we could participate in liquid markets and then also have a side pocketed liquid component. What we're doing now is kind of splitting those out. We have the liquid opportunities really looking at the more mature side of the ecosystem and investing in real innovation with a fundamental research and traditional equities risk management body.”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Coin fund, I wear a few different hats. We're a high growth startup investment firm founded by my partner Jake Brookman back in 2015. We started out as an early stage venture firm really engaged with the New York ecosystem, in particular Jake's the technologist with a quant trading background. And he came across, I'd say, Ethereum and the Ethereum ecosystem really early and saw investing in the ecosystem as the best way that he could contribute to really growing it. And what I love to include as part of our origin story is a lot of funds, particularly in crypto, start at kind of the height of a bull market. 2015 was the deep, dark depths of a bear market. The bull market peaked Thanksgiving of 2013 at 1100 for Bitcoin. And Bitcoin was like below 200 when Jake was like, I need to start an investment.”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Time sensorized data out of those housing markets to be able to adjust your valuation models based on what's happening on the ground at that time, commercial real estate, foot traffic monitors, payments, rails monitors. So this is really the future of investing. And a lot of it is kind of emerging out of the organic innovation that we're seeing come out of crypto, which is what's really, really exciting.”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As well, you won't need to know which blockchain you're on. One other thing I'll add on NFTs is they cross over into DeFi. So another big use case for NFTs would be the title for a home or the title for a car that's being used as collateral for auto loans. So you can imagine then creating structured products in DeFi that all have these NFTs at their core. So instead of having structured products back in the global financial crisis where no one really understood the cash flow dynamics of the underlying constituent mortgages, you could have them as an NFTs fully prosecutable, real-time on the blockchain, seeing whether the payments are current, actually then being able to pull in real”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At over $2 billion. This is now a pre IPO business, and really showing the first real crossover use case of NFT's scarce digital goods, collectibles as a crossover into mainstream. And by the way, a crossover where the NFT and blockchain component is abstracted away. And that's actually what we think blockchain and crypto is going to look like going forward. Mainstream users don't have to know that they're interacting with a blockchain. What's really cool is like in the future we envision, they'll get all of the benefits from these blockchains without having to know whether do you know if your video service is on AWS or Google Cloud or Azure, it doesn't matter to you in very much the same way that the blockchain that it's on, as long as it's functional, it's powerful, it does everything that the service needs and interrupts.”
2021-03-15 · Capital Allocators · Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source