Alt Goes Mainstream: Recent Episodes

Michael Sidgmore

Alt Goes Mainstream

Welcome back to the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.

Today’s episode features a pioneer in the sustainable investing world. Bill Orum, who is a Partner at Capricorn Investment Group, has proven that investors can do well and do good at the same time. Bill and his Partners have led Capricorn, a $9B AUM sustainable investment platform serving families, foundations, and institutional investors for over 20 years as a full service OCIO and investment platform.

Capricorn has been an innovator for a number of years and has evolved into a firm with three distinct but related investment strategies: an OCIO, a GP stakes business that backs asset managers focused on sustainable investing, and the Technology Impact Fund, a VC fund that manages both Capricorn capital and outside capital and is focused on backing companies providing climate solutions.

Capricorn has managed to navigate a complex investing strategy — impact or sustainable investing — and the many geopolitical and governmental challenges associated with climate focused investing in order to generate impressive investment results.

Bill and I had a fascinating conversation. We discussed:

The evolution of impacting investing.
How and why generating impact and strong financial returns aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.
How to find and seed managers.
Why it’s so important to allocate capital to solving the climate challenge.
How they’ve helped normalize sustainable investing.

Thanks Bill for coming on the show to share your wisdom and knowledge and for being a pioneer in the sustainable investing space, something so important for the future of our planet.

Welcome to the 3rd episode of a collaboration between iCapital x Alt Goes Mainstream.

Here’s the latest episode of the Monthly Alts Pulse, a live conversation in studio with Lawrence Calcano, the CEO of iCapital, who as the leader of a platform that is responsible for the majority of individual and advisor-led investment flows into the alts space, has his finger on the pulse of what’s happening in private markets.

Watch the Monthly Alts Pulse

On this episode, Lawrence and I had a fun and lively discussion. We covered:

What iCapital is seeing in the market now.
The importance of developing long-term partnerships in business and life.
Why there’s a need for advisors to understand how alts fit into overall client portfolios and innovations needed with technology and analytics through innovations like iCapital Architect.
The path to including alts in model portfolios.
Why alts are still sold, not bought — and how iCapital’s Marketplace may change that dynamic.
How GPs needed to be educated on why and how working with the wealth channel made sense for their business.
How the market has evolved to where many GPs are focused on working with the wealth channel.
How things go slow and then they go fast, particularly in asset management.

Welcome back to the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.

On today's show, we have a fascinating episode that combines the macro and the micro.

Nimble Partners Founder John Burbank and Partner Ken Wallace come on the show to share their unique perspectives and discuss both the nuances and intricacies of investing in private markets and early-stage venture.

Nimble Partners is a technology investment platform that invests into early-stage fund managers through their manager selection program and as well as direct and co-investments into breakout performers from their fund manager relationships.

John and Ken have had illustrious careers in both public markets and private markets, investing in many of the biggest technology trends and many top early-stage managers over the past 15 years.

John was a top macro investor from founding Passport Capital in 2000, where he was amongst the best hedge fund managers of his time. He’s been investing into early-stage fund managers for the past decade. As a long-time macro investor, he has consistently focused on sectors and investments where technology can be disruptive and accelerate change. He’s also an investor in the Golden State Warriors, the championship winning NBA team.

Ken joined John to build Nimble after a stellar career at Industry Ventures, backing a number of emerging managers, most notably Chris Sacca’s first-time Lowercase Capital fund, which at over 200x+ returns, was amongst the best performing venture funds in history. At Industry Ventures, he specialized in hybrid fund of funds strategy, originating, valuing, and managing primary fund commitments, early secondary LP investments, and direct co-investments.

We had a fascinating conversation that spanned a number of topics:

Why this is not the end of venture capital — and why the winners are still to going to win and win big.
How global macro impacts venture capital.
The framework that John and Ken use to evaluate technology trends and emerging managers.
How the “portfolio manager” model can be applied to venture capital.
How information is a huge edge.
Why duration is the most important thing an investor can have.

Thanks John and Ken for coming on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast to share your wisdom.

Welcome back to the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.

Recently, I had the pleasure of hosting a live podcast at the Allocate Beyond Summit, where I interviewed Avy Stein and Jordan Stein from Cresset.

Allocate’s founders Samir Kaji and Hana Yang brought together a fascinating and thoughtful group of allocators, family offices, and VCs for an engaging two days of discussion about private markets.

At the event, I interviewed father and son duo from Cresset. Avy Stein, the Co-Founder and Co-Chairman of Cresset, and Jordan Stein, Director of Private Capital at Cresset Partners, joined me on stage to discuss how their firm has achieved astronomical growth over the past few years, largely due to their business building acumen and in part powered by their focus on private markets.

Cresset is a client and family-owned award-winning multi-family office with over $40 billion in AUM that was built by founders and private equity professionals.

We had a fascinating discussion that covered everything from how and why Avy and Jordan built Cresset to the evolution of the wealth management space and how private markets is playing a large role in that.

Thanks Avy and Jordan for sharing your wisdom and thanks Samir and Hana for hosting such a fantastic event.

Welcome back to the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.

Today’s episode dives into an important and growing part of the alts ecosystem: how investors can access and invest into alternatives through their retirement funds.

We have Eric Satz, the CEO of Alto, a self-directed IRA custodian, with us today to discuss how he’s on a mission to provide everyday Americans with the same investment opportunity long favored by institutional investors.

Alto provides custody for a wide array of alternative assets, including private companies, real estate, crypto, loans, and securitized collectibles. Alto has streamlined the process for companies, funds, and SEC registered investment platforms to include IRA investors in their offerings. They’ve partnered with firms across the alts space, including AngelList, Coinbase, EquityZen, Republic, Masterworks, and others, to enable investors to invest into private markets with their IRA.

Eric is a serial entrepreneur and former investment banker. He worked at DLJ / Credit Suisse First Boston before co-founding Currenex (acquired by State Street for $564M), Plumgood Food, and Tennessee Community Ventures. His passion for entrepreneurship led him to serve on the Board of the Tennessee Valley Authority from 2015 to 2018 and he teaches an entrepreneurship class to high school students.

On today’s podcast, Eric teaches us all about the merits of a self-directed IRA. He shares why and how it makes sense to use an IRA to invest into private markets investments and how he’s taking lessons learned from prior IRA businesses to build Alto.

Thanks Eric for coming on the show to share your knowledge and passion for alternatives.

Welcome to the 2nd episode of a collaboration between iCapital x Alt Goes Mainstream.

Here’s the latest episode of the Monthly Alts Pulse, a live conversation in studio with Lawrence Calcano, the CEO of iCapital, who as the leader of a platform that is responsible for the majority of individual and advisor-led investment flows into the alts space, has his finger on the pulse of what’s happening in private markets.

On this episode, Lawrence and I had a fun and lively discussion. We covered:

What iCapital is seeing in the market now.
How allocators are balancing strategies that make sense right now versus strategies, like venture, that may pay off in the future.
How the alts space has evolved over the past 10 years.
How the change in wealth management market structure and the rise of the breakaway broker has driven alts innovation forward.
Some of the biggest challenges that iCapital has encountered over the past 10 years of growth.
How Lawrence & iCapital have built a platform to serve different clients on the GP and LP sides.
How iCapital took inspiration from prior market structure evolutions and innovations, like ETFs and mutual funds.
What companies did iCapital look to for inspiration?
The importance of UI/UX in B2B financial services — and how does this change with Millennials and Gen Z’s becoming customers or users?
Building the desktop real estate for alts.
What does a quote from a Dirty Harry movie have to do with the growth of iCapital?

Wealth managers are increasingly participating in private markets, and for good reason. Today’s podcast is with an expert allocator in the alts space, Phil Huber, who has not only been actively investing in private markets as the CIO of $18B Savant Wealth, but has also authored a book about how advisors can approach private markets.

This podcast is a must-listen for any allocator, particularly in the wealth management space, as Phil shares actionable insights for how LPs can go about building a strategy for investing in private markets and how GPs and alternative asset managers can work with the private wealth space.

Phil is the CIO of $18B Savant Wealth. He comes onto the show to discuss how he approaches allocating to alts on behalf of their clients. Phil has spent much of the past 15 years thinking deeply about alts. The has culminated in him authoring a book, The Allocator’s Edge, A Modern Guide to Alternative Investments and the Future of Diversification.

Phil is a Certified Financial Planner professional, has attained his Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation, and is a member of the CFA Society of Chicago. Phil has been featured in a number of notable media outlets, including the WSJ, New York Times, and Bloomberg TV, and Phil recently won RIA Intel’s CIO of the Year award.

He produces his own investing blog, bps and pieces, in addition to authoring his book.

Thanks Phil for coming on the show to share your wisdom.

The Allocator's Edge: A modern guide to alternative investments and the future of diversification

Welcome back to the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.

Today we peer into one of the most fascinating companies in private markets, AngelList, and talk with AngelList’s CEO Avlok Kohli.

AngelList is building the operating system for modern startups and tech innovation, and as such, they see themselves as building a company of companies. AngelList has had almost 19,000 startups raise capital from syndicates and funds on their platform, they support over $15B in assets, and 40% of all US unicorns have had a GP invest in them through AngelList.

To date, AngelList's GP business has largely been known for its marketplace and fund admin product. That changes this week when they begin to release a series of software products available to any venture firm, even if they don't run a fund on AngelList, which automates and adds intelligence to the most onerous and ambiguous parts of running a fund. It all starts with the most comprehensive and tailored banking product, built specifically for venture funds.

Avlok has an impressive background as a tech founder and operator and gives us an insight into how AngelList is building their business.

Avlok is the CEO at AngelList and the Founder and CEO of LegalReach. He is also the former Founder and CEO at Fairy. He created Fastbite, a food delivery service, which was acquired by Square a few months after launch and was integrated into Square’s delivery product as Fastbite by Caviar.

Avlok and I had a fascinating discussion about how AngelList’s product driven culture has enabled them to evolve with customer needs and build all sorts of products and services for GPs, startups, and LPs. We discuss:

What makes AngelList a n-of-1 company.
How his experience at Square has informed his company building strategy at AngelList.
How AngelList's data can track relative health of companies and what will make a “sustainable unicorn.”
Why it’s almost impossible to compare them to a single traditional financial services company given the breadth and depth of their product offerings.

Thanks Avlok for coming on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast to share your wisdom and experiences and for all the work you're doing to power private markets.

Today on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast, we have the third podcast in a special three part series with some of the titans in the alts world.

We are partnering with CAIA, the leading global professional body in alternative investment credentialing programs, for a very special episode that dovetails with the release of their latest report on Renewed Professionalism and creating client centered outcomes for the Portfolio of the Future.

We are lucky enough to have Jenny Johnson, the CEO of Franklin Templeton, one of the world’s largest asset managers with over $1.5T AUM spread across a number of specialist managers.

Jenny and I had a fascinating conversation:

About the evolution of the asset management industry.
How companies can be considered nation-states.
How to distribute alternatives to all investors in a responsible way, which is a particularly interesting perspective given that Franklin Templeton has over 25% of its $1.5T AUM in alternative assets.
Why net of fees is the most important question in the fee question debate.
Why now is a great time to be building in the crypto space (note: this episode was recorded prior to the recent crypto news).

Jenny is the President and CEO of Franklin Templeton. She joined the firm in 1988 and held leadership roles in all major divisions of the business before becoming CEO in February 2020. She led the historic $6.5 billion acquisition of Legg Mason in 2020 and has been named to Barron’s list of the 100 Most Influential Women in US Finance.

Jenny has been instrumental in building Franklin Templeton into a firm that serves clients across asset classes and has over 25% of its $1.5T AUM in alternative assets. Jenny spearheaded Franklin Templeton’s acquisitions in the alts space, including the $1.75B acquisition of secondaries PE firm Lexington Partners and private credit firm Alcentra.

Jenny has managed to bring the past, present, and future together at Franklin Templeton, balancing being the third generation in the family to lead the business, helping the firm to maintain its culture through numerous acquisitions, while also looking to highly innovative corners of the investment world, like crypto and blockchain to keep Franklin Templeton ahead of the pack.

Thanks Jenny for coming on the Alt Goes Mainstream Podcast to share your wisdom. It was a pleasure to have you on the show.

Today on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast, we have the second podcast in a special three part series with some of the titans in the alts world.

We are partnering with CAIA, the leading global professional body in alternative investment credentialing programs, for a very special episode that dovetails with the release of their latest report on Renewed Professionalism and creating client centered outcomes for the Portfolio of the Future.

We are lucky enough to have Michelle Seitz, a stalwart and veteran of the asset management industry who is the Founder and CEO of MeydenVest Partners, LLC, a private investment firm, and was most recently the CEO of Russell Investments, one of the largest investment firms in the world with $300B in AUM and $1.2T in assets under advisement.

During Michelle’s five year tenure as Chair and CEO, she helped to modernize client offerings by adding leading edge capabilities around private markets and ESG investing and elevated diversity and inclusion programs.

Michelle’s illustrious career includes a number of accolades such as Barron’s Most Influential Women in U.S. Finance and American Banker’s Most Powerful Women in Finance.

Prior to joining Russell, Michelle spent 22 years at William Blair, where she was CEO of William Blair Investment Management and on William Blair’s corporate board of directors for 16 years. She took the helm as CEO at the ripe old age of 35, where she led William Blair’s institutional, mutual fund, and private wealth management businesses. She drove 5 fold growth at WBIM and transformed an $11B business into a $74B global asset management firm and a five-time winner of the “Best Places to Work in Money Management.”

Michelle and I had a fascinating conversation starting with how her career started with the crash of 1987 and what it meant for how she viewed the asset management world and how to focus on the client’s outcomes, the importance of portfolio construction, how and why alts may not be a fit for every investor depending on the risk, portfolio construction, fee questions, and the importance of understanding risk.

Thanks Michelle for coming on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast to share your wisdom. It was a pleasure to have you on the show.

Today on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast, we have the first podcast in a special three part series with some of the titans in the alts world on how they’ve built and run some of the world’s largest asset managers.

We have partnered with CAIA, the leading global professional body in alternative investment credentialing programs, for a very special episode that dovetails with the release of their latest report on Renewed Professionalism and creating client-centered outcomes for the Portfolio of the Future.

We are lucky enough to have Luke Ellis, the CEO of Man Group, one of the largest active investment firms in the world. Man Group manages $142B (as of June 30, 2022) across a range of liquid and private markets strategies and has the central objective to deliver alpha for clients.

Speaking of alpha, Luke and I had a fascinating discussion about what it means to create alpha. Luke believes that alts are all about the return the client gets and he and Man are focused on doing important work to ensure that the end client, the saver, is generating returns over time for the risk they are taking.

Luke’s background has a consistent them of helping to make certain investment strategies and asset classes go mainstream. He was part of the early days of the development of the derivatives world at JP Morgan and was a pioneer in the hedge fund space, helping hedge fund of funds FRM enable hedge funds to become a mainstream part of investors’ portfolios.

He’s since taken over the helm at Man Group for the past 12 years and has helped steer them become one of the most important investment management firms in the world.

Please enjoy this wide ranging discussion where we talk about everything from the importance of active management to fee compression to the importance of technology in investment management to the impact of human behavior on financial markets to focusing on the end client to how Ted Lasso’s management style has informed how Luke thinks about building Man Group to enable clients to achieve alpha.

Thanks to Luke and CAIA for collaborating on this important topic. We hope you enjoy.

Today on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast, we have two guests who have built alts behemoths: the CEOs of iCapital, Lawrence Calcano, and SIMON, Jason Broder.

iCapital and Simon recently completed a landmark transaction in the alts space, with the joining together of two of the largest digital platforms that enable advisors and individuals to invest into private markets through iCapital’s acquisition of SIMON.

iCapital has built the leading platform to drive efficiency and alternative investing for the asset and wealth management industries. They had grown to over $138B in platform assets before acquiring SIMON, which focuses on helping financial advisors understand and manage structured investments, annuities, and other risk managed products. SIMON adds a track record of $48B of issuances in 2021 to iCapital’s platform.

Lawrence and Jason both come from Goldman Sachs roots before building their building their respective businesses.

Lawrence spent 17 years at Goldman and was a Partner, where he was Co-Head of the Global Technology Banking Group in the Investment Banking Division. He was a perennial winner of the Forbes Midas List award for the most influential people in venture capital in 2001, 2002, 2004, 2005, and 2006.

Jason also spent almost 17 years at Goldman, where he was a Managing Director and Head of Private Investor Products Group in the Americas, which focused on the creation and distribution of structured investments to Goldman’s private wealth management management clients and third party distributors.

Lawrence and Jason are both experts on product distribution of alts to the wealth community so it was a treat to have them on to discuss the anatomy of this landmark SIMON acquisition and how this revolutionizes distribution of alts products.

We had a fascinating conversation. We discussed:

Why this acquisition is so important for the alts space.
The importance of building a one-stop shop alts investment platform for financial advisors.
How important it is to comprehensively serve financial advisors.
Why the platform who figures out distribution will be the winner in the alts space.
How data and analytics will play a key role in educating advisors.
How alts will no longer be alts, but will be mainstream, as investors think about the reconstruction of the 60/40 portfolio.

Thanks Lawrence and Jason for coming on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast. It was a pleasure to have you share your views on the continued development of the alts space.

Today on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast we have a guest who has rich experience in the alts space.

Robert Picard, who was recently tapped to become the Head of Alternatives at Hightower, a $117B AUM wealth management platform, has over 32 years of experience on the buy and sell side in alts.

Robert came onto the podcast to discuss how he’s witnessed alts evolve over the past 30 years. He’s worked with top-tier asset managers, built private wealth units for banks, and is now building out Hightower’s expansive alts capabilities in-house to provide bespoke sophisticated solutions for some of the industry’s best wealth managers.

Robert was recently First Republic’s MD and Head of Alternative Investments. At First Republic Private Wealth Management, he consolidated two alternative investment businesses into a single platform and generated meaningful growth in wealth management team participation in alts and fund offerings across all asset classes.

Prior to First Republic, he founded and was CEO of the Rumson Ridge Group, a consultancy focused on building alternative investment platforms. Prior to Rumson Ridge, he held senior leadership positions at The Carlyle Group / Rock Creek, Optima Fund Management, RBC Capital Markets, and InfraHedge / State Street.

Robert and I had a thought-provoking conversation about the evolution of alts and the importance of alts in an investor’s portfolio.

We drilled down on how an expert like Robert performs manager due diligence and what he looks for in a successful fund manager, which is becoming increasingly important as many new managers enter the alts world and as new allocators look to invest into funds.

Today on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast we have a fascinating episode with a wealth management veteran who has transformed his firm into a full fledged asset manager with significant private markets capabilities.

Lorenzo Esparza is the CEO and Founding Principal at Manhattan West where he leveraged his legal, corporate, and financial experience to form the modern version of an investment firm.

Lorenzo and I had a fascinating conversation that spanned the evolution of wealth management, how advisors are approaching the alts space, how platforms and tech is democratizing access to alts, and Manhattan West’s unique model.

Lorenzo manages Manhattan West’s strategic direction while overseeing day to day operations. He is focused on building the firm using a top-down approach to working with clients across a broad suite of services and investment categories.

Lorenzo is looking to position the firm as a leader in the investment industry serving ultra-high net worth clients, family offices and institutions across the United States.

Lorenzo began his career in financial services at Alliance Bernstein before joining JP Morgan Securities. He launched Manhattan West immediately following his tenure at JP Morgan.

Lorenzo is an avid Philanthropist where he supports numerous causes that benefit underprivileged youth. Active in the community, he is a former Board Member of the Richstone Family Center, the former Board Chair of the Cancer Support Community-Benjamin Center in Santa Monica, and is a former Board Member of the Stroke Association of Southern California.

Thanks Lorenzo for coming on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast. It was a pleasure to have you on the show.

Today on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast we have a guest who has seen virtually every evolution of the internet and financial services since the 1990s.

Graham Jenkin is the co-founder and CEO of CoinList, the leading token issuance platform in the crypto space that has helped a large number of the top crypto projects by market cap get their earliest funding and customers with an initial token sale on CoinList.

CoinList has played a critical role in the crypto ecosystem for early-stage token projects from doing token issuances for Flow to Solana to Mina and more.

Given the quality of projects that they work with from the earliest of days, it's no surprise that they have attracted millions of users to CoinList. They have over 5M users on the platform.

Graham's background and blend of consumer, engineering, design, and finance lends itself incredibly well to building CoinList.

Prior to helping spin out CoinList from AngelList and co-founding the business, Graham was the COO and UX engineer/designer at AngelList over a 6.5 year period. Prior to AL, he led the redesign of the user interface of the world's most profitable online business - Google AdWords, where he also won the inaugural Google Great Manager Award. He also understands financial services innately well - he led BofA.com to two Webby awards.

Graham is a fantastic operator with a clear vision for how to build special consumer businesses and a critical piece of crypto market infrastructure.

Graham and I had a fascinating discussion on the evolution of crypto market infrastructure, how CoinList provides a critical service to both projects and investors, and the importance of Web2.5 in a world that is transitioning to Web3 by discussing how CoinList is building a centralized bridge to a decentralized world.

Thanks Graham for coming on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast. It was a pleasure to have you on the show.

Today on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast we have a guest who has seen the alts and crypto worlds from multiple angles.

Don Stalter is a Partner at Global Founders Capital (GFC) where he focuses primarily on the US early stage venture market. He has a deep operating background as a founder and operator at some of tech’s leading marketplaces.

He co-founded CityDeal, which was acquired by Groupon. He then built Groupon’s international offices in Europe and Asia.

He subsequently led BD at Airbnb globally and launched multiple offices organically and through M&A.

At GFC, he’s been an early investor in fintech titans Brex, Checkr, Deel, Slope, and more. He’s also invested in a number of crypto funds.

We had a fascinating conversation about the evolution of technology and venture capital. We also discuss how companies can think about integrating crypto – namely the likes of Airbnb and Brex – into their payments flow and how VC funds can approach investing into crypto funds and companies.

This was a fascinating conversation with a really thoughtful VC. Thanks Don for coming on the AGM podcast.

Hi from Mexico City. Today on the Alt Goes Mainstream Podcast we travel to one of the most exciting regions in the startup world – Latin America, which has seen venture backed funding dollars of $14.8B flowing into the region in 2021 come in higher than the prior 6 years combined.

Brian Requarth comes onto the podcast to talk about building the company that he wish he had when he was an entrepreneur in Latin America.

He’s the co-founder of Latitud, the a16z and NFX backed infrastructure and accelerator for startups. With Latitud, he’s building the operating system for venture backed companies in the region.

We had a fascinating conversation about why founders and investors should be #LongLatAm. We discuss:

Why LatAm is such an exciting region to invest into right now.
How community is the new lean startup and the equivalent of Stanford of the internet.
How the confluence of talent, capital, size of the market, and opportunity make LatAm a region of focus for VCs.
Why Latitud will play a critical role in developing the startup ecosystem in LatAm.

When he sold Brazilian online RE marketplace Viva Real for $550M several years ago, he had to pay over $100M in capital gains taxes due to incorporation errors made early on. It was quite the expensive mistake and one that he hopes to help fix with Latitud for the next generation of founders.

Brian is a serial entrepreneur who also worked with ZAP Imoveis, which was owned by Grupo Globo, Latin America’s largest media company.

As an angel investor, Brian has invested in over 150 tech startups in Latin America, so he’s quite familiar with the inner workings of starting a company in the region.

Thanks Brian for coming on the show to talk about such an exciting region in the startup world.

Today on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast we have a guest who is making alts go mainstream by streamlining the process of investing into funds.

Carta and fund manager veteran Tim Flannery is the Co-Founder of Passthrough, a fund workflow automation tool that digitizes and automates the fund subscription process.

We had a fascinating discussion about how Passthrough is providing critical market infrastructure to the alts space and what the future of investing into funds looks like with Passthrough.

We discuss:

Why there needs to be innovation around fund closings.
How data matters in the fund closing process.
How creating an investor passport can lead to efficiencies across the alts space.
How Passthrough is the “narrow waist” of the alts space — building the connective tissue for funds and LPs to complete closings and then use that data in all sorts of places and sit on top of platforms like iCapital, CartaX, AngelList, Republic, and others. In a sense, Passthrough is a solution for the alts space in a similar manner to how WalletConnect is the connective tissue between wallets and DApps in the crypto ecosystem.

Fund closing is generally a painful process for everyone involved — LPs have to manually input data into subscription documents, which means they often miss questions or err in their answers. Much of this data is unstructured, hidden within PDFs, meaning that funds can’t use this when LPs re-up to following funds or to other funds. Fund managers have little visibility into the raise and timing for closings.

Tim is building a product with Passthrough that gives fund managers one of their most valuable assets — time — back and provides for a great user experience with fund closings. Passthrough automates the fund closing process by digitizing subscription agreements, turning them into a custom, TurboTax style workflow.

We were lucky enough to use Passthrough for our investment into Lowercarbon Capital and we never knew how easy a fund closing could be after using Passthrough. Passthrough’s fastest sub doc completion on record is said to be 6 minutes and mine wasn’t that far off.

The process is simple, automated, and efficient since Passthrough collects relevant data on LPs so that it's easier and quicker to subscribe for the next fund.

Tim has a great background to be building Passthrough. He was previously the Head of Go-To-Market for Investor Services at Carta and also worked on a number of large strategic accounts. He also spent time as a Partner at Pilot Mountain Ventures and started his career at JP Morgan in PE fund services, so he's seen the lifecycle of a fund investment from all angles.

He's a sharp, thoughtful, and focused founder who is building a product that many GPs and LPs already love.

This was a fascinating conversation about bringing technology to automate the alts space that I’m excited to see play out over the coming years in the space.

A few weeks ago, Alt Goes Mainstream went to the capitol of capital for alts, AltsLA by CAIA, the largest alternative investments conference on the West Coast, to speak with industry leaders about how they are allocating capital.

Alt Goes Mainstream partnered with CAIA, the premier educational organization for the alts space, to have topical conversations on the world of alternative investments.

With the backdrop of an uncertain macro environment and changing investor preferences that have resulted in a 60/40 portfolio no longer, top allocators in the industry discussed how alts are becoming an increasingly important part of investors’ portfolios.

Over the past few days, we have brought to you CAIA shorts: live interviews with the people who are making the decisions for many of the world’s largest investment institutions. Apologies in advance if there is background noise on the podcasts, but it’s because we recorded live and unfiltered from the AltsLA conference.

There were 10 great podcasts with such rich conversations from some of the world’s smartest investors, so we have released these episodes in 4 parts.

Today's episode (10/10), the Finale, in this CAIA mini-series is with Bill Kelly (CEO) and John Bowman (EVP) at CAIA. Bill, John, and I discuss the portfolio of the future, why 60/40 is dead, and how institutional investors will adapt to the current market environment.

A few weeks ago, Alt Goes Mainstream went to the capitol of capital for alts, AltsLA by CAIA, the largest alternative investments conference on the West Coast, to speak with industry leaders about how they are allocating capital.

Alt Goes Mainstream partnered with CAIA, the premier educational organization for the alts space, to have topical conversations on the world of alternative investments.

With the backdrop of an uncertain macro environment and changing investor preferences that have resulted in a 60/40 portfolio no longer, top allocators in the industry discussed how alts are becoming an increasingly important part of investors’ portfolios.

Over the next few days, we will bring you CAIA shorts: live interviews with the people who are making the decisions for many of the world’s largest investment institutions. Apologies in advance if there is background noise on the podcasts, but it’s because we recorded live and unfiltered from the AltsLA conference.

There were 10 great podcasts with such rich conversations from some of the world’s smartest investors, so we will release these episodes in 4 parts.

Today's episode (9/10) in this CAIA mini-series is with Alicia McElhaney, Senior Reporter at Institutional Investor. Alicia and I discuss what the institutional investor’s portfolio of the future will look like.

A few weeks ago, Alt Goes Mainstream went to the capitol of capital for alts, AltsLA by CAIA, the largest alternative investments conference on the West Coast, to speak with industry leaders about how they are allocating capital.

Alt Goes Mainstream partnered with CAIA, the premier educational organization for the alts space, to have topical conversations on the world of alternative investments.

With the backdrop of an uncertain macro environment and changing investor preferences that have resulted in a 60/40 portfolio no longer, top allocators in the industry discussed how alts are becoming an increasingly important part of investors’ portfolios.

Over the next few days, we will bring you CAIA shorts: live interviews with the people who are making the decisions for many of the world’s largest investment institutions. Apologies in advance if there is background noise on the podcasts, but it’s because we recorded live and unfiltered from the AltsLA conference.

There were 10 great podcasts with such rich conversations from some of the world’s smartest investors, so we will release these episodes in 4 parts.

Today's episode (8/10) in this CAIA mini-series is with Jane Buchan, CEO of Martlet Asset Management. Jane and I go back to the beginning of the private equity and hedge fund industries to discuss the different market cycles and why diversification is critical.

A few weeks ago, Alt Goes Mainstream went to the capitol of capital for alts, AltsLA by CAIA, the largest alternative investments conference on the West Coast, to speak with industry leaders about how they are allocating capital.

Alt Goes Mainstream partnered with CAIA, the premier educational organization for the alts space, to have topical conversations on the world of alternative investments.

With the backdrop of an uncertain macro environment and changing investor preferences that have resulted in a 60/40 portfolio no longer, top allocators in the industry discussed how alts are becoming an increasingly important part of investors’ portfolios.

Over the next few days, we will bring you CAIA shorts: live interviews with the people who are making the decisions for many of the world’s largest investment institutions. Apologies in advance if there is background noise on the podcasts, but it’s because we recorded live and unfiltered from the AltsLA conference.

There were 10 great podcasts with such rich conversations from some of the world’s smartest investors, so we will release these episodes in 4 parts.

Today's episode (7/10) in this CAIA mini-series is with Matt Hougan, CIO of Bitwise Asset Management. Matt comes on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast one year after his first appearance to talk about how much things have changed in crypto, particularly around regulation and institutionalization. But one thing stayed the same - his favorite alternative investment (Ethereum).

A few weeks ago, Alt Goes Mainstream went to the capitol of capital for alts, AltsLA by CAIA, the largest alternative investments conference on the West Coast, to speak with industry leaders about how they are allocating capital.

Alt Goes Mainstream partnered with CAIA, the premier educational organization for the alts space, to have topical conversations on the world of alternative investments.

With the backdrop of an uncertain macro environment and changing investor preferences that have resulted in a 60/40 portfolio no longer, top allocators in the industry discussed how alts are becoming an increasingly important part of investors’ portfolios.

Over the next few days, we will bring you CAIA shorts: live interviews with the people who are making the decisions for many of the world’s largest investment institutions. Apologies in advance if there is background noise on the podcasts, but it’s because we recorded live and unfiltered from the AltsLA conference.

There were 10 great podcasts with such rich conversations from some of the world’s smartest investors, so we will release these episodes in 4 parts.

Today's episode (6/10) in this CAIA mini-series is with Ashby Monk, Head of Research at Addepar. Ashby and I talk about how he’s helping the world’s biggest investors make smarter investment decisions and create a positive impact at the same time.

A few weeks ago, Alt Goes Mainstream went to the capitol of capital for alts, AltsLA by CAIA, the largest alternative investments conference on the West Coast, to speak with industry leaders about how they are allocating capital.

Alt Goes Mainstream partnered with CAIA, the premier educational organization for the alts space, to have topical conversations on the world of alternative investments.

With the backdrop of an uncertain macro environment and changing investor preferences that have resulted in a 60/40 portfolio no longer, top allocators in the industry discussed how alts are becoming an increasingly important part of investors’ portfolios.

Over the next few days, we will bring you CAIA shorts: live interviews with the people who are making the decisions for many of the world’s largest investment institutions. Apologies in advance if there is background noise on the podcasts, but it’s because we recorded live and unfiltered from the AltsLA conference.

There were 10 great podcasts with such rich conversations from some of the world’s smartest investors, so we will release these episodes in 4 parts.

Today's episode (5/10) in this CAIA mini-series is with Evan Darr, Partner at Invesco Private Capital. Evan and I discuss how the fact that we are in the midst of a technological revolution has changed the GP and LP landscape for both technology and crypto.

A few weeks ago, Alt Goes Mainstream went to the capitol of capital for alts, AltsLA by CAIA, the largest alternative investments conference on the West Coast, to speak with industry leaders about how they are allocating capital.

Alt Goes Mainstream partnered with CAIA, the premier educational organization for the alts space, to have topical conversations on the world of alternative investments.

With the backdrop of an uncertain macro environment and changing investor preferences that have resulted in a 60/40 portfolio no longer, top allocators in the industry discussed how alts are becoming an increasingly important part of investors’ portfolios.

Over the next few days, we will bring you CAIA shorts: live interviews with the people who are making the decisions for many of the world’s largest investment institutions. Apologies in advance if there is background noise on the podcasts, but it’s because we recorded live and unfiltered from the AltsLA conference.

There were 10 great podcasts with such rich conversations from some of the world’s smartest investors, so we will release these episodes in 4 parts.

Today's episode (4/10) in this CAIA mini-series is with Elizabeth Burton, CIO of Employees' Retirement System of State of Hawaii. Elizabeth and I discuss how a $23B pension fund CIO makes allocation decisions in a world where the 60/40 portfolio is breaking down.

A few weeks ago, Alt Goes Mainstream went to the capitol of capital for alts, AltsLA by CAIA, the largest alternative investments conference on the West Coast, to speak with industry leaders about how they are allocating capital.

Alt Goes Mainstream partnered with CAIA, the premier educational organization for the alts space, to have topical conversations on the world of alternative investments.

With the backdrop of an uncertain macro environment and changing investor preferences that have resulted in a 60/40 portfolio no longer, top allocators in the industry discussed how alts are becoming an increasingly important part of investors’ portfolios.

Over the next few days, we will bring you CAIA shorts: live interviews with the people who are making the decisions for many of the world’s largest investment institutions. Apologies in advance if there is background noise on the podcasts, but it’s because we recorded live and unfiltered from the AltsLA conference.

There were a number of great podcasts with such rich conversations from some of the world’s smartest investors, so we will release these episodes in 4 parts.

Today's episode (3/10) in this CAIA mini-series is with Dominic Garcia, Chief Pension Investment Strategist at CBRE. Dominic and I discuss how the lines between public and private assets have become blurred and how investors need to think about finding truly idiosyncratic alpha.

A few weeks ago, Alt Goes Mainstream went to the capitol of capital for alts, AltsLA by CAIA, the largest alternative investments conference on the West Coast, to speak with industry leaders about how they are allocating capital.

Alt Goes Mainstream partnered with CAIA, the premier educational organization for the alts space, to have topical conversations on the world of alternative investments.

With the backdrop of an uncertain macro environment and changing investor preferences that have resulted in a 60/40 portfolio no longer, top allocators in the industry discussed how alts are becoming an increasingly important part of investors’ portfolios.

Over the next few days, we will bring you CAIA shorts: live interviews with the people who are making the decisions for many of the world’s largest investment institutions. Apologies in advance if there is background noise on the podcasts, but it’s because we recorded live and unfiltered from the AltsLA conference.

There were a number of great podcasts with such rich conversations from some of the world’s smartest investors, so we will release these episodes in 4 parts.

Today's episode (2/10) in this CAIA mini-series is with Ariel Babcock, Managing Director and Head of Research at FCLTGlobal. Ariel and I talk about how to help investors adopt a long-term perspective and rewire capital markets to be more supportive of longer-term businesses and investments.

A few weeks ago, Alt Goes Mainstream went to the capitol of capital for alts, AltsLA by CAIA, the largest alternative investments conference on the West Coast, to speak with industry leaders about how they are allocating capital.

Alt Goes Mainstream partnered with CAIA, the premier educational organization for the alts space, to have topical conversations on the world of alternative investments.

With the backdrop of an uncertain macro environment and changing investor preferences that have resulted in a 60/40 portfolio no longer, top allocators in the industry discussed how alts are becoming an increasingly important part of investors’ portfolios.

Over the next few days, we will bring you CAIA shorts: live interviews with the people who are making the decisions for many of the world’s largest investment institutions. Apologies in advance if there is background noise on the podcasts, but it’s because we recorded live and unfiltered from the AltsLA conference.

There were a number of great podcasts with such rich conversations from some of the world’s smartest investors, so we will release these episodes in 4 parts.

Today's episode (1/10) in this CAIA mini-series is with James Keenan, BlackRock, CIO and Global Co-Head of Credit at BlackRock Alternative Investors. James and I discuss the evolution of private credit fitting into investors’ portfolios and the retailization of alts.

Today on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast we have a special guest on an important topic that is core to why alts are going mainstream – community.

We have community builder extraordinaire Max Rothery, the VP Community at Finimize. Max is responsible for engaging and serving Finimize’s 1 million global audience. Finimize is building the world’s largest finance community of investors globally – and building community are they doing.

In 4 years, they reached over 1 million subscribers, 60 thousand per year attend member organized events, and Finimize was recently acquired by 197 year old Abrdn plc, formerly Standard Life Aberdeen, a FTSE 100 investment firm with over 464B pounds AUM that’s the UK’s largest active asset manager.

Max brings a wealth of experience in community building and digital transformation to the table as he builds community. He previously led innovation and digital transformation for Societe Generale’s private bank. He also brings a unique perspective from the creative industry to bear as a founder of an independent production, publishing, and recording company.

Max and I had an absolutely fascinating conversation on the underpinnings of community and how to build an engaged community in financial services businesses. His thoughtful views on how to build community serve as a playbook for how to successfully build a thriving and engaged community. We talk about everything from how community gives companies a way to scale trust and relationships to how to enable the community to self-regulate itself to taking me back to my days studying international relations as we discuss the parallels between nation-building and community building.

Thanks Max for such a rich conversation that we can all learn from on how to build community.

Today on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast we have a guest who helps us bridge the gap between the past, the present, and the future.

Ethan Kurzweil, a Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, who is leading BVP’s crypto efforts and the BessemerDAO, comes onto the show to help us make sense of the evolution from the Web2 to Web2.5 to Web3 world.

Ethan and I had a fascinating discussion. We talked about:

The evolution of venture capital and private markets.
Bessemer’s thesis on Web3.
Why Bessemer decided to start a DAO and how they are innovating on portfolio services by building out a community.
How Web3 gives people the primitives to fulfill on the premise of decentralization and ownership.

Bessemer is a storied venture fund that got its start back in 1975 after spinning out of Bessemer Trust. Fast forward to today, they are one of the best technology investors on the planet investing into industry defining companies like Shopify, Twilio, PagerDuty, DocuSign, LinkedIn, Twitch, Yelp, Wix, Sorare, and many more.

Ethan brings a fascinating perspective to the world of Web3 and consumerization of private markets investing given that he spent the early days of his career at early metaverse company Linden Lab, the creator of Second Life, and working for Dow Jones, where he managed the turnaround of the international editions of the Wall Street Journal.

Ethan then went on to join Bessemer, where he’s a Partner investing into developer platforms, data infrastructure, digital consumer applications, and consumer facing crypto. He’s invested in the likes of PagerDuty, Intercom, Twitch, LaunchDarkly and crypto companies like Sorare, TRM Labs, and Fold.

Thanks Ethan for coming on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.

Today on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast we have a fascinating conversation about how soccer is a compelling alternative investment.

We talk with Justin Papadakis, the COO & Chief Real Estate Officer of the United Soccer League. The USL is the largest and one of the fastest growing professional soccer organizations in the United States.

Justin and I had a fascinating conversation about how sports and investing are emerging in large part because of the collision of culture and finance.

We discussed:

How soccer is such an underrated investment opportunity.
How the USL has seen a rise in team valuations from the hundreds of thousands to some teams valued in the $60-70M range — with a big opportunity to increase revenues through various revenue streams that include media, player transfers, sports betting, stadium related revenue, real estate related revenue.
How the intersection of sports and real estate factors into the investment thesis for sports teams.
How the transition to OTT media can positively impact sports league and team revenue.
How more more professional investors and funds are now becoming involved and investing into sports teams and what this means for the development of sports as an investable asset class.
How women’s soccer is a sleeping giant and what the USL is doing to help make it an investable opportunity.
How democratizing access to sports ownership through crowdfunding and DAOs — and the power of community — can play a role in the sports investment landscape in the future.

In his current role, Justin oversees numerous departments that are critical to the league’s success, including expansion, stadium development, digital media, emerging technology, finance, and human resources.

Justin combines a real estate background, having worked six years at a REIT, with his soccer playing and sports management experience as he navigates building a league that is expanding in leaps and bounds.

He holds a JD from Cleveland Marshall College of Law and earned a dual degree in public policy and economics from Duke University, where he also served as a goalkeeper on the Blue Devils soccer team.

Thanks Justin for coming on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast to talk about how the beautiful game is continuing to grow thanks to the world of investing.

Today, we have a guest on Alt Goes Mainstream who lives at the intersection of culture and finance as sports is increasingly becoming an investable asset class.

Angel City FC Co-Founder & President Julie Uhrman and I had a fascinating conversation about how sports and investing are merging together – and how that’s informed how she’s building Angel City FC.

Julie and team have been innovative in the way that they’ve engaged fans, players, and investors.

We discuss:

How ACFC has used entertainment to have an impact.
How athletes are building their own platforms on and off the field - and what that means for player, fans, and teams.
How new types of investors — both professional funds and celebrities — are leveraging their platforms for impact to help sports teams build a differentiated brand and business.
How ACFC is taking lessons learned from innovations in technology, community-building, and Web3 to engage fans and create new revenues for sports clubs.
How mission and capital can co-exist together as sports becomes a compelling alternative investment.

Julie is a serial entrepreneur and force of nature who is bringing her deep expertise in gaming, media, and entertainment to build our her most ambitious project yet – Angel City FC, the expansion professional women’s soccer team in her native Los Angeles.

And build is what she and the team have done.

In a mere two years, Julie and team have built one of the most recognizable and successful brands in women’s football — without yet having a team on the field.

They’ve done an incredible job of creating purpose driven content and engaging fans across various social media channels.

They’ve secured a top tier front of kit sponsor in DoorDash and have achieved record season ticket sales in the NWSL.

They’ve built a true fan community to the point where ACFC has passed the "tattoo test" – some fans have gotten inked!

And they’ve brought on a diverse, talented group of investors whose life and work aligns with Angel City’s mission as the club looks to make a positive impact in the community and on women’s soccer.

It’s no surprise that Julie has been able to build up ACFC in such a short time.

She was most recently the President of Media for PEI, where she oversaw the company’s media offerings across all verticals. Prior to PEI, she served as the EVP & GM of Over-The-Top Ventures for Lionsgate, building and managing the company’s multiple streaming franchises. She also founded and was CEO of OUYA, a pioneering Android-based game console for the living room which raised a record-breaking $8.6M in crowdfunded capital on Kickstarter and VC funding from Kleiner Perkins and Alibaba before selling to Razer in 2015.

She’s deservedly been given a number of awards for her work, including being named to the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company and one of the most Creative 50 by Ad Age.

Thanks Julie for coming on the AGM podcast to share the story of your pioneering work at Angel City FC. We look forward to watching ACFC continue to grow on and off the pitch.

“Our aim is to create the biggest entertainment brand in the world, starting with sports … we are building a cult brand around NFT collectibles and we are bringing usage value for them in the fantasy game and the physical world.” - Nicolas Julia, Sorare.

Today on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast we have a fascinating discussion about the intersection of culture and finance with Nicolas Julia, the Co-Founder & CEO of Sorare.

Nicolas founded Sorare to build the next entertainment giant. His NFT platform, Sorare, is enabling people to own their game and live at the intersection of work and play – they can play fantasy soccer and trade digital collectibles – and, at times, earn money while doing so.

We covered a number of topics, including:

The merging of culture and finance.
How Sorare is building a next generation entertainment brand across multiple sports and geographies.
How NFTs are integral in on-ramping the next 100M-1B users to crypto.
What it means for investors / users to own their in-game assets — and how it changes how they make decisions playing games and investing into NFTs.
How Sorare is building the critical market infrastructure across the lifecycle of a trade for NFTs.
How sports leagues view NFTs as a new revenue stream and fan engagement tool.
The game within the game — who players are playing games within the game of football.
How the beautiful game — soccer cards — and NFTs are a sleeping giant in the US.
How women’s sports can benefit from the world of NFTs and how bringing on an Advisor like world-class tennis star Serena Williams can help achieve that.

Nicolas has built Sorare into an astronomical success in a short period of time. He grew a team smaller than a starting 11 on a football pitch to hundreds of millions in sales and a record-breaking $680M Series B led by SoftBank in September 2021 that followed a $50M Series A led by Benchmark in January 2021 as NFTs boomed last year.

Sorare was an integral part of the NFT market growth as they enabled people to play fantasy soccer and collect / trade NFTs of professional soccer players.

They are building a critical piece of market infrastructure for the NFT and sports world by leveraging crypto rails to enable an incredible consumer experience revolving around sports and collectibles.

Thanks Nicolas for coming on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast. It was a pleasure to have you help us understand the future of entertainment, NFTs, and sports and how everyone can own their game.

“What I’ve come to realize is that investing literally shapes the world that we have. It is effectively at the highest of levels, allocating resources, whether financial or human capital, to things and teams that build the future that we all live in. Investing builds the world.” - Ian Lee, Syndicate.

Today we discuss the topic of a revolutionary new construct – DAOs – and how it can change investing for the better.

Today’s guest is Ian Lee, the Co-Founder of Syndicate.

Ian combines a background in financial services with a prescient view on the future with what he's building at Syndicate.

We discuss:

How Syndicate is doing to investing what YouTube did to film and media.
How Web3 enables community ownership where Web2 didn’t and how investing will become more community driven.
How DAOs are a social financial technology coordinating social and financial capital seamlessly and natively on the internet.
How DAOs are unlocking participation from all sorts of communities who historically haven’t had access to investing.
Why Crypto Covens is one of his favorite NFT projects because it’s changing the face of investing.
And how we are in the middle of a multi generational shift of decentralizing and democratizing - and how Syndicate’s Web3 Investment Clubs enable that to happen.

Ian has been a serial founder, he's worked in the Office of the Global Chief Innovation Officer at Deloitte, he's run the Lab Network and Acceleration Fund at Citi Ventures and was Head of Bitcoin & Blockchain at Citi before co-founding IDEO's CoLab Venture fund, where he led their crypto efforts and made over 80 investments in the crypto space.

Most recently, he's founded a ground-breaking company, Syndicate, which is a decentralized investing protocol and social network that is creating the infrastructure for DAOs to run efficiently and effectively. Syndicate is creating the infrastructure and mechanisms for much more efficient, digitally native human coordination.

DAOs have similar properties as corporations, but they are significantly faster and cheaper to set up and run because code governs the decisions and actions taken.

It's hard to put into a short paragraph how profound the creation of Syndicate could be for the formation and governance of organizations and Ian's background lends itself incredibly well to both understanding how things worked in a Web2 (and financial services) world and how they can work better in a Web3 world.

Ian and I had a fascinating conversation about his desire to make investing more inclusive and impactful – and how DAO structures can enable that.

Thanks Ian for coming on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast. It was a pleasure to have you help us peer into the future of investing.

Today on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast we have Web3’s wizard with words. Jarrod Dicker, Partner at TCG, where he focuses on crypto investments that are enabling the consumerization of crypto.

Jarrod is an expert at the intersection of crypto / NFTs and the media world. He was both an entrepreneur and investor in the media world prior to joining TCG.

We had a fascinating discussion about the transition to the Web3 world.

We covered:

Whether or not everyone is now an investor and everything is now investable.
How social credentialism and the idea of time as an investment – is key to Web3.
We ended the podcast with some of Jarrod’s famed Web2 // Web3 tweets because he truly is a wizard with words and is a translator for the world of Web3.

There are few people in the crypto space whose content I enjoy reading than Jarrod's. His Tweets and writing (on Mirror.xyz, where he's an investor) are incredibly prescient and speaks to his knowledge of the crypto space.

He joined TCG, the famed consumer investor (Twitter, Barstool, Crunchyroll, Hodinkee, Headspace, Dapper Labs), to invest into companies and protocols that create the onramps for consumers to the cryptoeconomy.

They've invested in the likes of Zed Run and Dapper and Jarrod's thought leadership and experience in the media and content worlds should help them continue to access the best.

Prior to TCG Crypto, he was the CEO of Po.et, a decentralized media tech company, where he was a pioneer in bringing blockchain to the media and advertising space. He formerly led innovation at The Washington Post, where he was responsible for building out their research, experimentation, and development team and running all of their innovation / commercialization efforts as VP of Commercial.

He also held similar roles at RebelMouse, Time, and HuffPo. Jarrod is one of the most thoughtful thinkers on how Web3 will change content, content creation, and creators relationships with their community.

I’m excited to see how he builds out TCG and the types of investments they make into the infrastructure building out Web3 so that crypto truly goes mainstream.

Thanks Jarrod for coming on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.

Today, we have a unique episode on Alt Goes Mainstream. We have our first episode with a founder and their lead investor from their Series B.

We have the founder of leading alts fund investment platform, Moonfare, and their Series B lead investor, Fidelity International Strategic Ventures, on the podcast to talk about why both of them believe in the future of retail distribution in alts and the anatomy of their deal.

Steffen Pauls, the founder of Moonfare, has had an illustrious career in the private equity world. Prior to founding Moonfare in 2016, Steffen was a MD at KKR where he was responsible for the firm’s coverage of the German market. Prior to joining KKR, he was the CEO of firstfive AG. He also served on the Advisory Board of Versatel, Serbia Broadband, and Hertha BSC.

Alokik Advani, who runs Fidelity International Strategic Ventures, is an expert in the financial market structure. He’s been right in the middle of investing in many of the core technology solutions that have powered market structure evolutions across equities, fixed income, commodities, and now alternative assets. At Fidelity, Alokik invests into category defining FinTech companies. They’ve made a number of FinTech investments that have helped shape the alts space, including DriveWealth, Moonfare, Capdesk, PrimaryBid, and others. Prior to Fidelity, Alokik was a Managing Director at Goldman Sachs, where he invested out of the Principal Strategic Investments team into many companies that have shaped market structure evolutions across asset classes.

It was fascinating to have the perspective from both founder and investor on the evolution of the world of alts. We discussed how investor demand has evolved from institutional investor to the retail and private wealth communities. Steffen and Alokik provided fascinating views on how the alts market structure has changed and how Moonfare and Fidelity are helping to shape the market.

Thanks Steffen and Alokik for coming on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.

Today we have a guest who is an expert from both the traditional financial services world and the crypto world, which has equipped him with the ability to bridge the two worlds and build onramps into the crypteconomy.

Tom Jessop, who heads Fidelity Digital Assets, is an expert in market structure, capital markets, and crypto.

There are few who have seen as much as him when it comes to the evolution of market structure.

He’s an OG FinTech investor, investing into FinTech before it even had that moniker.

He has a knack for finding trends before they are big. He did it with FinTech – and more recently he’s been on the forefront of another major trend: crypto.

He’s the President of Fidelity Digital Assets, where he’s responsible for helping one of the world’s largest asset managers build out a full-service enterprise-grade platform for digital assets.

Fidelity has long been a pioneer amongst financial institutions in crypto. They started R&D efforts on crypto in 2014, started mining bitcoin in 2015, and tested their first wallet and storage solution with employees in 2016.

With over $11 trillion in client assets under administration and over 2.4 million trades processed per day, Fidelity’s participation in the cryptoeconomy is critical to onramp large financial institutions and wealth managers into the space. Tom leads a team that is in large part responsible for making this happen.

He was previously the Head of Corporate Business Development at Fidelity, where he was responsible for identifying and executing strategic opportunities.

Tom joined Fidelity from Chain, a leading provider of enterprise blockchain solutions to global financial institutions.

Tom previously had an illustrious career at Goldman Sachs, which culminated with a role as Global Head of Technology Business Development, where he was responsible for investing in and partnering with early-stage tech companies across blockchain, AI, and cybersecurity. Tom was also a founding member and senior leader at Goldman’s Principal Strategic Investments team, investing in the likes of Circle Financial, Kensho, Digital Reasoning, and DataFox.

Tom and I had a fascinating conversation about how we can take experiences from the evolution in traditional market structure and apply those learnings to crypto market structure and DeFi.

Tom is such a smart, thoughtful, savvy investor and company builder. And he’s an even better person who treats everyone incredibly well.

Thanks Tom for coming on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.

Today we have a guest who is transforming the private debt markets.

Nelson Chu is the Founder & CEO of Percent (formerly known as Cadence), a leading digital securitization and investment platform for private credit.

Nelson has built a marketplace to revolutionize private credit by leveraging technology and data to enable efficient price discovery and funding for originators so they can lower their cost of capital.

The business has started to take off in the past year, with Percent recently completing their largest securitization ever - $144 million for FAT Brands – and raising a $12.5M Series A led by White Star and B Capital. To date, Percent has issued over $400 million in private credit transactions.

Nelson has the Wall Street background to understand the private credit world and the startup background to understand how to build companies.

Prior to founding Percent, he founded Lumenary, a strategy consulting firm that specialized in helping companies build products and raise capital for growth. He worked at BlackRock in their Fixed Income Portfolio Management’s Strategy Group and in the Global Wealth and Investment Management Division at Bank of America.

Nelson is also an active startup advisor and angel investor, investing into companies like BlockFi, Cadre, Care/of, Clover Health, dv01, Tala, and Uala.

Nelson and I had a fascinating conversation about the future of debt capital markets and how Percent is changing the game for originators and investors as they leverage technology and data to bring transparency and speed to the market.

Today we have a founder who is creating a modern insurance provider for the collectibles industry that was made for collectors, by collectors.

Calvin Bradley is the Founder of WAX, a digital insurance company for collectors to protect the value of their collections by making collecting safer, easier, and more community-oriented.

Calvin and I had a fascinating conversation about how the modern world of collectibles requires a modern, digital insurance solution, how NFTs factors into the world of collectibles, and what the future looks like for WAX.

Insurance is a major challenge in the collectibles space. It is often hard to properly appraise valuable items on a real-time basis as there has yet to be real-time data in many collectibles markets.

WAX is building a modern insurance provider, for collectors, by collectors. Founded by a team that has deep experience owning collectibles, they have created a mobile app to enable users to take pictures of their collectibles and have them protected.

And, as more collectibles purchases move online, WAX is working with retailers point of sale systems to offer insurance at time of purchase.

Calvin has quite a fascinating background to launch WAX. Calvin was a former Olympic level Modern Pentathlete from South Africa before teaming up with David Nichols, the former Global President of K-Swiss to launch WAX. Calvin also co-founded Blockchain for Change in 2016.

They have since launched a product that is built for the digital age of insurance and for the collectibles world.

Thanks Calvin for coming on the AGM podcast. We hope you enjoy the episode.

Today on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast we have a guest who may be young in age, but has already done more and lived through more than many people twice his age.

Anthony Zhang recently turned 26 but has already successfully built and sold two companies, secured funding from Mark Cuban, and received a Thiel Fellowship grant before starting Vinovest, his third company, which is making it easier to access fine wine as an investment product.

He also has an admirable and awe-inspiring personal story, working hard to come back from a devastating accident that left him paralyzed from the neck down. He was in the middle of running his second company, EnvoyNow, when this accident happened and, despite the tremendous adversity he faced, was able to continue to build the business and achieve a successful sale.

Anthony recently founded Vinovest, a platform that has been described as the Robinhood of wine investing. He’s built an investment platform that is unlocking wine investing to the masses.

We had a fascinating conversation. We talked about:

Anthony’s background as an entrepreneur.
Some of the lessons learned from starting 3 companies by the ripe old age of 26.
How fine wine can be a compelling investment during periods of volatility.
How to identify an investment-grade wine
Some of his favorite wines (that he drinks and invests into!).

Wine as an investment has been largely inaccessible to the individual investor due to high account minimums, a lack of wine expertise, concerns about fraud, and the excessive costs associated with storing and insuring wine. Vinovest is abstracting away many of these issues with their automated investment platform that helps investors invest into fine wine as an asset class.

Thanks Anthony for coming on the AGM podcast. We hope you enjoy this episode.

Today on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast we have one of the OGs of the crowdfunding space on to talk about how he’s built platforms that have evolved in tandem with the alts ecosystem.

Slava Rubin is the founder of both Indiegogo, one of the first crowdfunding platforms, and Vincent, a platform that is making discovery and alternative investments easier for investors. He is also the founder of humbition, an early-stage investment firm.

We had a fascinating conversation about the evolution of the alts space – from the early days of equity crowdfunding to now wading through all the different options of investment platforms in the alts space today. We talk about:

The evolution of the alts space.
The alts portfolio of the future.
The need for an aggregator – and how once other industries, like travel, had an aggregator, the space took off.

Slava founded Indiegogo in 2006. He grew Indiegogo from an idea to over 500,000 campaigns and more than $1 billion distributed around the world. While at Indiegogo, Slava represented the crowdfunding industry at the White House during the signing of the JOBS Act and helped navigate bringing equity crowdfunding to the American public.

Slava also pioneered security tokens in the US. He created a way to sell fractionalized ownership of the St. Regis hotel in Aspen, Colorado using blockchain technology.

Slava’s latest work in the alts space is to bring transparency, discovery, and diligence to investors. He’s founded Vincent, which he’s likened to Kayak for alternatives, to enable investors to easily search, discover, and invest into all sorts of alternative assets.

Thanks Slava for coming on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast. We hope you enjoy.

Today we have a special episode of Alt Goes Mainstream – the co-founders of Rally on to discuss how people can now invest into defining cultural moments and assets that are aligned with their passions.

Chris Bruno and Rob Petrozzo grew up together – and they have combined their respective talents to form what has become one of the symbols for the financialization of all sorts of assets.

Rally, which started as a platform to enable investors to invest into shares of classic cars that would be unattainable to many investors, has become a multi-asset investment platform that allows individual investors to invest into all sorts of exotic, rare assets at low minimums.

Chris, Rob, and I had a fascinating conversation about how Rally built and evolved their concept from classic cars to all sorts of rare, grail assets. We discuss:

How they got into collectibles themselves.
How they’ve waded through complex regulatory structures to figure out how to offer these assets to the masses.
How they grew up together and have now built a company that aligns with their passions.
And how on earth they were able to IPO a triceratops skull and IPO a rookie card of the United States (hint: the Declaration of Independence).

Chris, Rob, and team have created a leading fractional investing platform for the alternatives space. They recently raised a $30 million round led by Accel, who invested in GOAT, to help propel their marketplace further.

Rally has already achieved an active, engaged, and passionate userbase of over 200,000 investors who have invested in everything from Pele rookie cards to classic cars to dinosaur heads to, soon, the Declaration of Independence, or a rookie card of the United States of America as Rally investor and Upfront Ventures Partner Greg Bettinelli has called it.

Chris, the Co-Founder and President, comes from the VC and startup worlds.

He was an Associate at Village Ventures before co-founding two companies, Health Guru Media and Spotter. He’s a classic car enthusiast, which ignited his interest in unlocking the asset class to individual investors.

Rob, the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, has been the creative inspiration behind Rally.

He has brought his background as the in-house lead designer and creative consultant for Sony BMG, where he worked on the likes of Kanye West’s GOOD music imprint, and as the creative director for a few startups to bring Rally’s brand to life in person and in the digital world.

Rally has also done some really interesting things with their brand, opening up a showroom to their investors, creating and offering stock certificates to their investors, and creating exclusive merch drops (including the limited edition Michael Jordan rookie card sweatshirt that I wore for today’s podcast).

Thanks Chris and Rob for coming on the AGM podcast. We hope you enjoy today’s episode.

Today, we have an expert in lending and capital markets on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast to discuss how his company, Pipe, is building a new asset class.

Michal Cieplinski is the Chief Business Officer for Pipe, a fast growing fintech company.

Pipe has seen a rapid rise over the past year. They are one of the fastest fintech companies to reach a $2 billion valuation – and it’s in large part because investors see the potential to build a platform that unlocks recurring revenue as an investable asset class for the world’s largest institutional investors.

Michal deeply understands the inner workings of credit and lending on both the borrower and lender side from his experiences helping to build Fundbox, LendingClub, and now Pipe.

Pipe was born from the idea that entrepreneurs and companies should be able to grow their businesses on their terms – without taking debt or dilution.

This was a fascinating discussion with someone who has seen the evolution of a number of lending platforms. Michal and I discussed:

Lessons learned from building marketplace fintech businesses.
How Pipe is empowering founders to adopt a trader mentality by unlocking recurring revenue as an asset class.
How Pipe is creating an efficient way for companies to turn their predictable revenue streams into a way to access capital without sacrificing dilution.
How Pipe is building out both the buy side and sell side of their marketplace.
How Pipe handles churn on SaaS contracts of their sell side borrowers.
How he thinks about the evolution of Pipe as a platform in terms of the types of assets you would "pipe" and how any sort of recurring revenue stream - like ISPs, streaming services, even PE / VC fund management fees could be "piped."

Thanks Michal for coming on the AGM podcast. We hope you enjoy.

Today, we have our first LatAm guest on the AGM podcast. And it was a special one.

Bitso, LatAm’s leading crypto exchange, is fresh off of raising a $250M round led by Tiger Global months after raising a $62M round led by QED and Kaszek - and has been minted as one of LatAm’s newest unicorns.

We had Bitso’s co-founder and CEO Daniel Vogel on to talk about what it has been like to build a leading FinTech company in the region and provide access to investments and financial services.

This was such a fun conversation. We could have gone on for hours. Daniel is such a compelling and fascinating storyteller. We discussed a number of things including:

How Daniel has dedicated his life to unlocking monetary freedom for people through crypto.
How a talk with his friend, a janitor at his company in Silicon Valley, opened his eyes to the need for real applications of crypto to help people send money cross-border.
The origins of Bitso and how Bitso was a pioneer of an online brokerage account in Mexico.
How Bitso has become the on-ramp for financial services for many consumers across LatAm.
The meaning behind Bitso’s slogan #makecryptouseful.
The power of stablecoins and how it’s enabling people in countries with inflation and currency fluctuations to save money.
How Bitso balances being a centralized company in a decentralized world.
How religion and community play a unique role in crypto.

Daniel is an early crypto pioneer and a thought leader in the space. He became intrigued by the idea of bitcoin well before many other people had heard of it and really thought of crypto as a way to unlock monetary freedom and access to financial services for the underserved.

After founding the Bitcoin Club at Harvard in 2013 while he was doing his MBA, Daniel founded Bitso with co-founders Pablo Gonzalez and Ben Peters soon after he left Harvard Square.

In Bitso, Daniel and his co-founders Pablo and Ben have created the on-ramp for financial services to many consumers in Mexico and across LatAm.

As Daniel said in a recent TechCrunch interview, the growth of the crypto ecosystem in LatAm has been nothing short of remarkable. It took Bitso six years to get their first 1 million clients. And over the course of 2020, Bitso has surpassed the 2 million client mark. They have also doubled their assets on the platform. And their transaction volume during the first quarter of 2021 exceeded transaction volume for all of 2020.

It is clear that Daniel has a passion for building out the cryptoeconomy and for making a difference in people’s lives, so much so that Bitso has made their tagline #makecryptouseful.

Thanks Daniel for coming on the AGM podcast. We hope you enjoy this episode.

Today on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast we have a domain expert in the world of VC – and someone who has been a visionary when it has come to one of the biggest movements in VC over the past 8 years: emerging managers.

Samir Kaji, the Founder & CEO of Allocate, is a well-respected industry leader in the VC world. He has spent over 20 years partnering with VCs at First Republic Bank and Silicon Valley Bank, where he led the Venture Capital and Private Equity banking efforts. At First Republic, he built out the infrastructure and client base that served the VC and PE community. He’s evaluated over 800 VC fund managers and worked with thousands of LPs at First Republic.

Samir and I had a fascinating conversation about the evolution of venture capital and what's to come for the industry. He’s seen a lot in his career in Silicon Valley that has spanned multiple market cycles. He shared his perspective on:

The challenges that GPs and LPs face during fundraising.
Why the structural inefficiencies of allocating to funds - and perceived risks with emerging managers - led so many LPs to miss out on the Fund I’s of now legendary emerging managers Lowercase Capital, K9, and Initialized Capital.
The case for emerging managers in a venture portfolio and why emerging managers are the future of venture capital.
The trend of non-institutional capital coming into the venture world.
How LPs will be able to better discover and allocate to fund managers in the future.

In his time in Silicon Valley, he’s become an unquestioned thought leader in the world of VC, particularly in the emerging manager space.

He has consistently written seminal thought pieces and instructional guides on the topic – and now talks about the space with his podcast, Venture Unlocked.

His experiences working with many of the top VC funds and LPs globally has culminated in a journey that he’s now starting by founding Allocate.

He has observed a number of inefficiencies with emerging managers when it comes to firm building and capital raising.

He’s seen many emerging managers struggle with fundraising due to the difficulties finding the right LPs.

He’s seen the challenges that LPs have with being able to locate and allocate to new emerging managers, many of whom have gone on to outperform benchmarks and become the next generation of brand name firms.

He believes that the ecosystem is ready for a decentralized, democratized, and diverse ecosystem of fund managers. And Allocate is the connective tissue that will solve these challenges for both GPs and LPs alike.

Thanks Samir for coming on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast to share your wisdom about the world of venture.

Today we have a guest who is bringing farmland investing to the masses.

After working for one of Canada’s largest pension plans, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, and running Operations and as the CFO at a platform for buying and selling produce, Artem Milinchuk founded FarmTogether to bring an asset that has largely been the domain of institutional investors to individuals.

Artem and I had a fascinating conversation. We discussed:

How farmland deserves a place in all investors’ portfolios – in large part due to its features as a hedge against inflation and a passive income generating investment.
How to underwrite a farmland asset.
How he one day envisions the ability to invest into farmland embedded directly into one’s brokerage account.
He also made a great case for how we can eat our way into supporting farmland investments, like hazelnut farms, which happen to be some of the types of farms that Artem likes to invest into.

FarmTogether is a technology-enabled farmland investment platform that provides investors with direct access to US farmland as an asset class. They have developed an end-to-end investment platform that allows investors to review carefully vetted farmland investments and invest in properties.

Artem has over 10 years of finance experience in food, agriculture, and farmland. Prior to founding FarmTogether, Artem was the first employee and CFO / VP of Operations at Full Harvest Technologies, a post-Series A b2b platform for buying and selling produce.

In addition to working at Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, he also worked at Sprott Resource Holdings, E&Y, and PwC.

Thanks Artem for coming on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast. I hope you enjoy the conversation with Artem.

Today we have one of the pioneers of the European tech ecosystem on to discuss how the European early-stage VC landscape has changed since its early days – and how their fund, Passion Capital, has unlocked access to investors with their latest fundraise.

Eileen Burbidge, a Founding Partner of Passion Capital, and I had a fascinating conversation about all things VC, opening up access to the asset class to individual investors, what it means for the future of venture capital, and Eileen’s love of Arsenal and why she’s not a fan of the European Super League.

Eileen has built a reputation as the go-to VC for seed stage companies in the UK and Europe – and for good reason.

Her aptly named fund, Passion Capital, has built a name for itself as one of the top early-stage funds in the UK because of her passion for rolling up her sleeves, much like she did in her days as an operator at Skype, Apple, Yahoo!, and Sun Microsystems.

I won’t forget when we met last year at her office – she had just stepped out of non-stop meetings with one of her growth-stage companies, where she was helping them figure out team and talent questions.

Not every seed stage VC has the ability to stay involved as their companies grow nor does this type of work, but that’s what separates Passion from the pack.

Eileen is just as much at home in her office, which doubles as a co-working space for Passion portfolio companies, as she is in 10 Downing Street, where she has been named the UK Treasury’s Special Envoy for FinTech, has been appointed by the Chancellor as the Chair of Tech Nation, and was awarded an MBE in the 2015 Queen’s Birthday Honors for her services to businesses.

So maybe it’s no surprise why she’s been described as “The Queen of British VCs” by Fortune Magazine.

She’s certainly backed many of the British startup royalty at early-stage, being a Seed investor in Monzo Bank, where she still serves on the board, Tide Bank, GoCardless, Digital Shadows, Marshmallow, Butternut Box, and a number of others.

Eileen has also had an illustrious career as an operator, working for Apple, Yahoo, and Sun Microsystems in the early days of the internet before moving to London in 2004 to become one of Skype’s earliest employees and Head of Product.

She then founded Passion in 2011 as one of the first Seed funds in London, serving a critical market need for the entrepreneurial ecosystem in London.

She’s now trailblazing once again by being one of the first funds to open up their LP base to the crowd, where they have partnered with Seedrs to allow individuals to invest into Passion’s latest fund.

She’s also an independent non-executive board director at Dixons Carphone, a 10B pound revenue electrical and telecoms retailer and on the Transformation & Innovation Advisory Board at UniCredit.

Thanks Eileen for being a pioneer in the European VC ecosystem and bringing innovative structures in venture capital to LPs.

I hope you enjoy.

Today we have a special guest who is one of the foremost leaders in the alternatives industry.

Bill Kelly is the CEO of the Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst Association (CAIA), the leading global educational and professional credentialing body dedicated to delivering greater knowledge and alignment for investors in the alternative investments space.

Bill and I had a fascinating conversation. His thoughtful and eloquent views on the evolution of the alternatives space led us to talk about:

How the Retirement Promise has impacted consumers and investors and what it means for alternative investments.
The importance of being a fiduciary.
How CAIA consistently evolves their educational program to cover emerging trends like crypto and DeFi.
How partnerships with leading investment platforms in the alts space like iCapital help to move the industry forward.

Bill brings an operator’s perspective to CAIA. Prior to joining CAIA in 2014, Bill was the CEO of Boston Partners and one of seven founding partners of the predecessor firm, Boston Partners Asset Management, which was sold to $215 billion global asset manager Robeco in 2002. He then led Robeco’s US operations as CEO.

Bill’s illustrious career in institutional asset management spans over 30 years, where he’s been in CEO, COO, and CFO roles across a number of firms. He is also currently the Chairman and Lead Independent Director for the Boston Partners Trust Company, which has over $2 billion in AUM.

Bill has been an independent board member at Salient Partners, a $16 billion investment advisory firm, and an Independent Trustee at Bank of America’s $50 billion mutual fund complex business.

He’s also an Advisory Board Member of the Certified Investment Fund Director Institute, which strives to bring the highest levels of professionalism and governance to independent fund directors around the world.

Bill is a lifelong learner and a tireless advocate for shareholder protection and investor education, which led him to his current role at CAIA, which he has helped grow the membership to over 11,000 members and 31 chapters across 95 countries.

CAIA serves a critical role in the alternative investments industry – they educate industry stakeholders and fiduciaries on the most current knowledge and best practices across the evolving landscape of alts.

They have a sophisticated credentialing and thought leadership program that equips everyone from fund managers to distributors of alternative investment products to individuals who want to learn about alts with the tools they need to understand the industry as CAIA looks to consistently raise the standards across the industry.

Thanks Bill for sharing such important and interesting thoughts on the alts space and for providing critical education to the space through CAIA.

I hope you enjoy.

Today, we have a special guest who is changing the mechanics of private company stock ownership and investing for the better for employees, companies, and investors alike.

Kelly Rodriques is the CEO of Forge, the leading private company stock exchange and investment platform.

On today’s podcast, Kelly and I discuss:

How private markets are the new public markets.
How companies like Forge are unlocking a huge wealth management opportunity hidden in plain sight.
How Forge is creating new accredited investors directly on their platform thanks to secondary market liquidity - and what that means for the alts space.
How the private markets can innovate with structured products like index funds that provide diversified exposure to blue-chip private company stocks.
How and why strategics like Deutsche Borse and BNP Paribas see Forge as critical to the private markets ecosystem.

Kelly has helped build out the private market investment ecosystem at scale for Forge, bringing together a trading business, a private markets exchange with data, and managed liquidity solutions for late-stage private companies. Kelly and Forge also acquired and operate IRA Services, a self-directed IRA custodian with over $13 billion in assets across 1.5 million accounts.

Forge has transacted on over $10 billion in deal volume and counts many of the top private companies as customers. They’ve also received meaningful investment from strategic investors like Deutsche Borse, BNP Paribas, TD Ameritrade, and Munich Re.

Kelly has a great background to be building Forge. He combines a background as a successful serial entrepreneur with multiple exits, the deep marketing acumen, and the expertise from leading one of the largest self-directed IRA businesses, Pensco, to a successful sale. Prior to joining Forge as CEO, Kelly was the CEO of Pensco, one of the nation’s leading alternative asset custodians, which had over $16 billion of assets under custody and was sold to Opus Bank for $104 million in 2017.

Kelly was also a founding investor of mFoundry, the leading provider of mobile banking services, which was acquired by FIS in 2013. He also built Totality, which he sold to Verizon in 2006, and has run an early-stage FinTech VC fund, Operative Capital, that has made 26 early-stage FinTech investments.

Thank you Kelly for providing such an insightful and fascinating look into the transformation happening in the private company stock market space. Your passion for innovating in private markets is palpable and such a welcome addition to the industry.

I hope you enjoy.

We had a special live episode of Alt Goes Mainstream this past Wednesday on $COIN Day to celebrate a landmark moment in the crypto industry that has, in many respects, signified the mainstreaming of crypto - the Coinbase IPO.

Adam Draper, the Co-Founder & MD at Boost VC, was one of the first investors in Coinbase’s Seed round in 2012.

He joined the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast to discuss what he saw in Brian Armstrong, Coinbase’s Co-Founder, when he decided to invest in their Seed round, what excites him about the future of crypto, and why he looks for founders who are rational people doing very irrational things.

Adam is also learning how to play the guitar, so we were lucky enough to hear the exclusive release of a special new song that he created just for this podcast. Adam’s attempt to play the guitar and sing was quite admirable, but I think I can safely say that he should stick to investing as his career choice.

Adam is one of the most thoughtful, energetic, and vibrant people you’ll meet. This episode was signature Adam - unfiltered and unedited - which is much of what makes him so unique, interesting, and able to “see the ball” (as Adam calls it) with generational founders and ideas. It was a lot of fun to talk about Coinbase, crypto, and life with Adam on such a special day for him and the crypto industry.

If you want to see the live video (you won’t want to miss seeing Adam play guitar!) of the podcast, you can view it here on this Twitter link or here on this YouTube link.

I hope you enjoy.

Today on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast we have Matt Hougan, the Chief Investment Officer of Bitwise Asset Management and one of the leaders in the crypto industry.

On today's podcast, we talk about:

Matt's views on crypto.
How Bitwise is bringing crypto to the wealth advisory community.
How crypto's evolution is similar to that of the ETF market.
How community has played such a big role in making crypto go mainstream.

Matt has had an illustrious career at the forefront of major industry shifts in financial services. He's been a pioneer in the creation of not just one, but two major asset classes and financial products. First ETFs, and more recently, crypto. Matt is the CIO of Bitwise Asset Management, one of the leading crypto-asset investment platforms with over $1 billion of AUM. Under Matt's leadership, Bitwise has pioneered the first crypto index fund and is the leading provider of rules-based exposure to the crypto space.

Matt and his team have brought institutional quality frameworks and learnings from the development of other industries within financial services, like ETFs, to bear as they help institutionalize crypto and work with many RIAs, family offices, and institutional investors. Matt led the development of the index that underlies the Bitwise 10 Crypto Index Fund.

He's also been an educator and evangelist for the crypto space to more traditional investors and he couldn't have a better background to do this. He's able to share stories about how the ETF space evolved into an institutional investment product with over $4 trillion flowing into the asset class.

He was the CEO of ETF.com, initially starting as a freelance writer, and working his way up to CEO. As CEO, he helped build ETF.com into the information provider for the industry and helped guide the sale of ETF.com in three separate, highly successful transactions. He also helped create the world's first ETF ratings and analytics service which now powers FactSet's ETF ratings.

He also co-authored the CFA Institute's monograph on ETFs and appeared three times as a member of the Barron's ETF Round Table. In 2016, ETF.com was acquired by Informa, where Matt joined their team to extend Insight ETF's position as the largest ETF conference in the world. He's been a pioneer in both the ETF and crypto worlds and sees the exciting opportunity in all different alt asset classes.

It's always fun to talk with Matt. He's such a thoughtful and intellectual guy who can live in both worlds of traditional finance and crypto.

I hope you enjoy.

Today, we have a special guest from an industry leader in the wealth management space.

Ed Swenson is one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the wealth management space. Ed is the Co-Founder and COO of Dynasty Financial Partners, a leading RIA technology services platform.

Ed and I had a really interesting discussion about the future of the wealth management industry – and how alts will play a role in the evolution of the space. We discussed:

How and why the wealth management industry is changing.
How Dynasty is a champion of entrepreneurs in the wealth management space.
The democratization of access and advice in wealth management.
How and why wealth managers should have alternative investments in their portfolio.
How VCs will soon realize that the RIA space will be a great source of LP capital for them.
How advisors allocating to “alt alts” (like crypto, sports cards, collectibles, art) should be “on the table.”

Ed co-founded and is the COO Dynasty Financial Partners, a leading RIA technology services platform that enables wealth advisors to become entrepreneurs and run their own businesses using Dynasty’s platform and infrastructure across technology, operations, diligence, access to investments, and M&A capabilities.

Ed and his Co-Founder Shirl have grown Dynasty to over $50 billion in aggregate AUM across almost 50 advisor teams. Dynasty is a leader in the fast-growing RIA space. They uniquely understand the needs of advisor teams who break away from wirehouses like UBS and Merrill Lynch and they’ve built out a tech stack and platform that is state of the art. Ed spearheads their technology approach by partnering with best-in-class fintech companies in various aspects of wealth management to build a tech platform that advisors love.

Ed also recently co-founded the Envestnet Advisor Services Exchange by Dynasty, a platform that enables Envestnet clients to access the value-added services that Dynasty offers.

Ed comes from a wealth management background, so he’s in a unique position to understand the needs of independent advisors. Prior to Dynasty, he led the distribution network communications for Smith Barney’s Multiple Discipline Accounts division and was a Portfolio Manager for the Legg Mason Partners Large Cap Growth Fund.

I hope you enjoy.

Today, we have a guest who's democratizing access to private investing. Ken Nguyen is the co-founder and CEO of Republic, a multi-asset investment platform for private markets.

Ken is a pioneer in the private markets investing world and a serial operator who knows how to build businesses. He's helped grow Republic to hundreds of millions of dollars in gross transaction volume over the past three years after Republic spun out of AngelList.

After Ken was an instrumental part of building the investment and regulatory infrastructure at AngelList, as their General Counsel, Ken founded Republic to create a leading equity crowdfunding platform for both nonaccredited and accredited investors.

While their incredible progress on the retail crowdfunding side is remarkable, Republic's platform and vision is so much more than simply a retail crowdfunding platform. They also have an accredited investor platform and they enable investors to invest into everything from real estate to e-sports and gaming financing to small businesses.

Republic has done the hard things first. They built the investment infrastructure for private markets. And they combine that with a Robinhood-like investing experience for private markets, for both retail and high net worth investors alike. They've also been innovative in how they engage consumers by creating a Republic Note, a security token that has created network effects on their platform for users.

It's been really fun to watch this team execute at a blistering pace from the time that they started out with the idea of enabling investors to invest in startups at twenty dollar minimums, to building out a comprehensive private markets investment platform. Ken has been instrumental in that success with his infectious energy tireless work ethic and drive to create democratized access to investing for people around the world.

This was such a fascinating conversation. We talked about Ken’s drive for starting an investment platform that could enable everyone to participate in wealth creation in private markets, how investing and owning equity is part of the American Dream, how Republic has unlocked access to private markets for all investors, “Lean back vs lean forward” framework applied to investing (h/t Rishi Garg of Mayfield Fund for the “lean back vs lean forward” framework), and how community is such a big driver of Republic’s growth and success as a business.

I hope you enjoy.

Transcript

Note: This Transcript was created by an AI software package. It is not an exact translation of every word in the podcast.

Michael: [00:02:30] Ken, welcome to the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.

Ken: Michael, thank you so much for having me. It's such a pleasure to be here.

Michael: Oh, it's great to see you. I love that background of New York.

Ken: I am in New York. So, art mimics real life or the other way around.

THE FOUNDERS STORY

Michael: [00:02:46] Well, you've had a busy year, so congrats on everything. But before getting into Republic and all the things that you're doing, I'd love to hear your story. I mean, you've had such an incredible story of how you've gotten to Republic. So what is that story?

Ken: [00:03:01] Yeah. Thank you, Michael. I definitely have a bit of an unusual founder story.

My family immigrated from Vietnam to the Bay Area in California. And so growing up in the late nineties, early 2000’s, you hear these stories of companies going IPO and tech and Google and Facebook. But just because you were smack in the middle of Silicon Valley, it doesn't mean that I or my family had anything to do with it.

We definitely weren't accredited, but that fascination early on, I think, ended up, staying with me. I ended up going to law school. Started out as a litigation attorney in New York and went into finance. And along the way, I think the story, the headline news that caught my attention the most was always tech companies. You know, you hear more and more of Facebook and then Airbnb.

I had the opportunity to go back to the Bay Area and academia. I spent two years as a Teaching Fellow at Stanford and studying corporate governance. But Stanford happens to be also a tech hub. And so more and more, the different stages in my life just inserted me more and closer into the tech ecosystem and then I had an opportunity to join AngelList when they first launched their first syndication product. So I joined. I think the first non-engineer hired as the General Counsel back in 2013, 2014.

Part of that work led to a change in the law, which is regulation crowdfunding in 2016. And I'm sure we're going to go into it. But in short, between the Great Depression in the 1930s, all the way to 2016, you had to be a millionaire to invest privately. In 2016, all of that changed. It's like opening up the flood gates. And that's when the team and I set out to found and launch Republic.

DEMOCRATIZING ACCESS TO INVESTING

Michael: [00:05:04] That's fascinating. And it seems like you really have a variety of experiences. Everything from the kind of legal and regulatory side to working in startups, to working in private companies. Was there really a specific moment in your life that has driven you to make it your mission to democratize access to investing?

Ken: [00:05:25] I think there were three moments. Thinking back, probably the first moment was when my oldest brother who was 15 years older than I am and was already very established by the time I graduated college and he was an accredited investor – the first one in the family to be accredited.

And he was like, Hey Ken, do you know how I can invest in this company called Facebook. And I was probably one of the earlier users, one of the earliest users of Facebook. And I'm like, great question. I'm an Associate at a law firm and I have no idea how you can do that. I asked around - no one knew how. Right in the middle of New York City, every law firm partner is a multi-millionaire and they're like, yeah, this is Silicon Valley stuff.

So I think that piqued my curiosity, but also I had a desire to be like, Hey, I want to be in. I use this product. I really like it. And wanting me as a stakeholder to be a shareholder. So, I would say that that was the first moment.

The second one was when, after two years of spending my time at AngelList, I realized that the accredited only model could only go so far. AngelList did open up the venture ecosystem to a lot more people, but you still have to be in the know, have to be accredited. And, I think that moment when AngelList shifted their attention to focus more on upstream institutional family offices, that's when I was like, wait, there is this law that's going to be effective very soon. And this is exactly what I, as a teenager growing up in Silicon Valley, wish that it was the case that I could get in. So, I think those two moments, rather than three in combination, probably culminated in the idea and the passion for retail investing.

Michael: [00:07:31] Well, you're bringing up a really interesting point, right. And it's been during a time where value creation in private markets has far outpaced value creation in public markets. And yet, so many people really up until the past few years with what you're doing with Republic and others have done opening up access to private companies, is enabling people to access some of this value creation. How do you think about that and why is it important for people to be equity owners in things.

Ken: [00:08:00] Well, investing has traditionally been dominated by large financial institutions and ultra-wealthy investors at the earlier stages. Right? And so, when a company matures from inception to raising more and more capital to the point of going IPO, much of the wealth generation, much of the upside is captured during those private stages.

And that world - private investing - traditionally has been dominated, if not exclusively, the purview of the ultra-wealthy leaving the vast majority of everyone else on the outside, looking in, and really limiting the diversity of ideas and founders that I think can shape our future generations.

So, being able to invest or allowing and encouraging and enabling people to invest earlier, I think that aligns passion with profit. It aligns power with profit. And I think particularly the next generations – Millennials and Gen Z - that's what they’re looking for. By the time a company is listed on the NASDAQ, your ten dollars, your hundred dollars, your thousand dollars matter almost nothing to the company. But, when a company is still growing with 10,000 investors or customers, and not a million or a billion, that thousand dollars of investment, of purchases that you make, matters a great deal. So, I think enabling people to align their passion with the desire to generate profit is at the heart of the retail revolution that we see.

Michael: [00:09:49] Passion and profit, power and profit. I love that. I love that way of describing this and I think we are seeing this groundswell of interest into private assets or investments where people feel they have some level of kind of interest or passion for them to your point.

THE WHAT AND WHY OF REPUBLIC?

Michael: [00:10:00] What you're really getting at is equity, right? People are now able to have a share in something that they might not have had a share in before. And that's kind of the underpinnings of Republic and it's really open to everybody. So, what is Republic and what's the vision for the business?

Ken: [00:10:24] It's funny that you mentioned, or that you pick up on, how we describe what we do in between power and profit and passion. Our tagline is profits to the people. And what we are is that we are hopefully the leading, or one day the leading, investment platform that empowers people to invest in the future that they believe in. Invest in startups, in real estate, in crypto, in music, in sports, and yes, one day, even public companies. If you are very passionate about Apple and Nike, we want you to be able to do that on Republic one day, as well. Right now, we are focusing on the more rarefied, the more difficult ones, which is early-stage private investing. But yes, our goal is enabling, powering people and catalyzing profits to the people.

Michael: [00:11:26] And why offer this comprehensive platform across private markets, across various assets, rather than just a single asset and private markets.

Ken: [00:11:36] That’s a great question. When the decision of building a business ultimately, a founder or a team has to ask, what is the ultimate goal? Why are we doing what we are doing rather than just the profit or how we are generating revenue? So, if the goal is just to generate revenue and build the easiest business model, focus is easier than distraction from a diversified suite of products.

But Michael, our goal is, as I mentioned, to be the go-to investment platform where people can go and invest in whatever they're passionate about. So, how can you roll out any platform with that mission and interest. Enabling healthcare or sustainable companies, they're powerful missions to love, but many people are more passionate about blockchain technology.

I'm certain that many of the older generations, in particular, are more passionate about real estate. So, we want to make sure that people can come to Republic and find and match their passion with potentially profitable investment opportunities that speak to them.

Because of that, we have no choice. Our mission requires a multi-asset, diversified suite of products so that we can, hopefully, one day have billions and billions of people coming to cast their votes with their investment and their dollars.

Michael: [00:13:16] So, you talk about something which is really interesting and a strategic decision to some extent, which is, you want all sorts of people to be able to access different assets based on what they're interested in and passionate about wanting to invest in, and see returns potentially in.

When you think about that, how have you thought about constructing the platform in the context of, should this be completely self-directed where investors get to really choose what they want? Or should it be more structured? Because there's a real question, a philosophical question, in the Alt Space of whether or not investors should just access structured products. So, products that are manufactured by these platforms and diversified in and of themselves. And then investors just get exposure to a broad space or completely self-directed where somebody goes onto Republic and can invest in any startup they want to. So how do you think about that balance of self-directed, kind of choose your own adventure, versus a more structured or curated way of building investment products in the platform?

Ken: [00:14:19] Mike, when it comes to structuring investment product, rather than types of products or types of industries to offer, we also want to provide a range of options for people, because I think investing, the new world of investing, has three main elements. So, passion is one and experience has to be another one and the third one is convenience. Now everyone's time and attention span is so limited. So those three things are taken into consideration.

We all know that hardly anyone is passionate about mutual funds. If you put ten dollars into a mutual fund, you're not thrilled about it. You know that it's going to generate consistent returns over time. So, for those whose interest is low on passion and want upside exposure to a certain asset class, we definitely, we currently, and will build products that enable them to do so in a simple, maybe in a diversified basis.

But for some people like myself, getting to know a company, getting to know a technology, getting to know a founder, is much of the value and the fun of private investing. And so, that ability to invest directly and have a conversation with that company, with that team, I think that probably still is going to be the dominant part of Republic as an investment platform for the foreseeable future. But we also will have structured products as you describe, as we continue to grow.

LEANING BACK, LEANING FORWARD, AND LEANING DOWN

Michael: [00:16:25] What you're getting at is something so fascinating, which I'm going to give credit to Rishi Garg, who's a partner at Mayfield, who was talking about this with me in the context of consumer social apps, like Clubhouse and things like that.

He made the contrast between lean back and lean forward apps. Where lean back is totally passive, totally unengaged, but you can do it and maybe benefit from it. But lean forward is like an app where you actually have to spend time engaging on maybe it's Twitter, maybe it's even in-person.

I think there's actually a real interesting analogy there in the context of what you just said in investing. So how do you think about that kind of lean back versus lean forward mentality when it comes to private market investing?

Ken: [00:17:07] I love it, Mike, with that analogy. I have not heard that before except for I think Sheryl Sandberg's book called Lean In but in an entirely different context. One is about being more proactive, more intentional. And I think obviously intention and proactivity - another way of describing it is passion, right?

So, when people want to do something that they really care about, it's leaning forward and caring about maybe, you know, social issues. It may have nothing to do with the core reason why you invest, which is always return on capital. But if you can add on other things that speak to you, that makes you more intentional and proactive, that's leaning forward. Leaning backward is for, you know, let's say you are a retired lawyer or that you're a Goldman MD. And you're like, hey, I just want to have exposure to this asset class known as crypto. I don't understand it yet. I think it's a little crazy. So, I want to have some exposure into it. So, can I just basically invest in some major pieces with a small amount and lean back?

I would add a new category which is lean down. There again, you don't have to do anything. And, you know, we are thinking, not thinking, we have already integrated, but we'll definitely even push that product even more - retirement funds, illiquid. Currently, everyone, most people, have tens of thousands of dollars, most professionals, in their IRA deployed in some random mutual fund. So that's our lean down approach, which is you can use money, not from your checking account, not from your savings account, that you can't touch for another 30 years. Leave 5% of that or 2% of that and through Autopilot, diversify into real estate, crypto, female founders, whatever it may be, but you can just lean back and let it generate a return. So, between lean forward, lean back and lean down, we hope to capture them all over time.

Michael: [00:19:28] No, that's a really interesting point on the IRA assets because the self-directed IRAs are really a great fit for longer-dated assets, private equity, startups, which may take seven to 10 years to mature or have a liquidity event, so that seems to match really well with the timeframe of an IRA.

I do want to touch on one thing that you said around the lean forward part of really getting involved and engaging with the companies, the investments that people make. You've done some really interesting consumer things with Republic, in terms of having people create profiles, sharing with companies where people can help.

Talk about how and why you've done that and how the creation of community is maybe different than how we've been experiencing investing in the past.

Ken: [00:20:19] I would observe two trends, two technological and social trends in the past four or five years that I think have influenced our product ideation and creation. One trend is the digital community adoption. You even see Facebook now driving or focusing a lot more on Facebook groups. That's how people interact now. Clubhouse is a fantastic example of - we are just at the early days of - new iterations of communities. So that trend - humans by nature will work as community, social creatures, but technology has enabled the formation and the sharing of information in a way that wasn't possible just a half a decade ago.

The second trend is the intentionality of generation after generation that Millennial moreso than the generation ahead, in Gen Z even moreso, on wanting impact on and caring about the consequences of their actions to the larger society. My parent's generation, as an example, when they were in their twenties or thirties, recycling wasn't a thing. Buying products that would help the world to be greener was not in anyone's psyche.

So over time, in the Seventies and Eighties, people started seeing the impact of what they buy - their purchasing power. And I think when it got to our generation, and now the newer generation, is the shifting of everything that you do, even the clothes that you buy, but more than that, investment, even in public companies, I think the need for, or how much people care about the consequences, the social consequences of their activities are definitely amplifying over time. And that's a great thing. It’s really amazing.

So the two of the trends in combination, I think led us to focus a lot on building products that have community potential and that can enable people to learn not from a single source of truth, not from a long newsletter or blog that we send out about the value of the Black Swan Theory or the Black-Scholes Model or Black Swan events, but about normal everyday folks sharing maybe even 20 video clips on Twitter and TicTok explaining why they're passionate or why they think an investment opportunity is good for them and learning from that.

So I think those two trends definitely dictate or play a heavy role in our product and ideation process.

FUNDING ON REPUBLIC

Michael: [00:23:21] And are companies that come to your platform to raise from the community of Republic investors - Are they finding this valuable or is that one reason why they're actually coming to the platform to raise capital?

Ken: [00:23:32] That's a very interesting question, Michael. It goes to the question, it relates to another question that I often get - Are people looking to community funding, retail funding as the last resort and you can't get VC capital. Then you come to us. And that question is related to yours in this way.

Any company that is consumer-focused, obviously wants to engage their customer, even more. If you can get a customer who loved you so much to part ways with their $50 that he won't see anything back for a while, why would that be a bad signal ever for any institutional investor or sophisticated investor?

That's an excellent signal. So, the type of companies that I think in the early phase of the retail revolution definitely lean heavily on B to C. These are consumer-focused companies and because of that, the customers, their consumers, matter a great deal. So, Republic managed to attract not only companies that have large customer bases, but we get rave reviews for the product and how easy it is to use.

And, hopefully, we're going to grow it and maintain that reputation. But I think that's a key part. Republic has two sets of customers - founders, but also investors on our platform. Companies are not going to be happy unless their customers are having an amazing experience on our platform and because of that we focus on building products that seem to be targeting or emphasizing engagement and education or an interaction, just to give everyone a very good inclusive experience.

But Michael, if I may make an observation about what you said earlier about how, if you are a shareholder of Apple or Starbucks, that statistics show that you are more likely to buy Apple over Samsung or Starbucks over Pete's coffee.

And I think it is so true, but it's even more true when you're an early investor. Let's say there's a small coffee shop owned by a couple down the block from everyone. And it’s down the block from where we live. And you're able to invest a hundred dollars into that couple’s coffee shop business.

And whenever you go back there, you have a little table for investors. I imagine whether you are a student or retiree, whether you're a lawyer or a carpenter, when you go and buy that cup of coffee or a glass of water and hang out with your friend, you’re naturally going to go to that coffee shop, right? The same with an early investor in a beer brand, in a vodka brand, in anything that, that we consume.

So that psychological alignment is a remarkably powerful value. That's why a lot of companies look at retail fundraising, not for money, not for a source of capital as the primary motive, but as a marketing and engagement force.

Michael: [00:27:04] You've now built the infrastructure to enable people to invest into startups, crypto tokens, real estate, even venture funds. So, talk us through both of those things. So, one, quality control and curation, which is key to any marketplace, and then two, the infrastructure that underpins that.

Ken: [00:27:23] We are an investment platform, first and foremost, and return on capital is ultimately our customer's number one objective. They can add passion and impact to their investment decisions, but if they don't make money in the long run, we are going to have zero customers. So, because of that we focus heavily on curating what we believe to be credible, high-quality investment products, but venture by one area of return, is just one type.

A coffee shop in the example that I just gave you earlier is unlikely to ever be acquired or raise venture financing and go public, but it very likely can generate robust revenue. And, if you enable customers to invest under the form of revenue sharing, out of one hundred dollars the coffee shop generates, it passes back ten dollars to early investors. It is very aligned and still can be a very attractive, compelling investment product, for many. Real estate in the same way. You are never going to see a 10X return, rarely ever. And you very rarely see a one hundred percent loss.

In an early-stage tech company, doesn't matter if it's YC or backed by Sequoia, if you invest in one deal in the seed stage, the probability of losing all of your money - doesn't matter if it's on Republic or anywhere else - is exceedingly high. So, all of these things we have to deliver in terms of information, but we want to make sure that what we bring on and curate and present to our community are credible and are, in our best judgment, of high quality. In the long run, I very much believe that there's a thesis as to what we do here, which is the crowd of retail investors. You will have case studies I think in a few years out that show that companies, backed by the retail investor in the earliest of stages that were outside of the venture lens, just in tech, may be just as competitive in terms of viability and how robust of an investment opportunity they are. So, this is a notion of wisdom of the crowd. And I just want to focus in on tech as a vertical first, because that's still the main dominant vertical on Republic.

There's a narrative here that you only want to onboard companies that are either already backed by VC or that are venture backable, because those are deemed to be of high quality. There's definitely truth to that. A company backed by you, Michael, or by Alfred Lin at Sequoia is more likely going to succeed. But what about the founders and companies that don't have access to you, don't have access to Alfred Lin. And statistics very much show that mostly female, older, or founders who aren't in Silicon Valley or the two coasts, have very little access to venture capital. So, we do present investment opportunities that we find to be credible and hope that if they speak to a larger retail public, that they may get the capital they need to grow and grow to be of a stage where they can be appealing to you and to Alfred.

So we view venture retail investing as additive, contributive in the long run to the ecosystem rather than being competitive, so to speak. It's a long-winded way of answering your question, Michael, but we value very much on traditional indications of quality, as well as testing out models that can speak to people's passion, even if they fall outside of the traditional VC lens of credibility.

Michael: [00:31:42] Well, you're hitting on something that I think is so important, which is that early-stage investing, in many respects, is about finding outliers. But in some cases, finding outliers means going outside of the mainstream or what's more traditional or even going outside of different networks.

We've talked about community in one sense, which is having people and investors, consumers support companies. But you've also built community around creating a diverse set of people who can help you find the right companies, funds, and assets to put on your platform that may be overlooked by others. So, I'd love to talk about community in that respect because that's something that's so core to what you're doing and so different from what many others have done.

Ken: [00:32:29] The notion of inclusion and access I think has to be looked at under both lenses, which is the founder's access to capital, customers, and businesses. You know, it's a crazy statistic, but even when it comes to business loans by the government, apparently female founders representing fifty percent, give or take, of all small businesses comprise less than fifteen percent of small business loans, which are supposed to be pretty much, if you have revenue, you get the loan. So, this lack of information and access permeates all throughout the different forms of capital sources and businesses. But then you also have the customer, the investor base on the lack of opportunities. You know, it's funny, but we noticed, and we hope, that as Republic continues to grow, that we make it easy and comfortable for that high school student, perhaps in Detroit, whose parents are not sophisticated investors, but in a classroom, instead of Fidelity or Apple donating computers, maybe they donate a thousand dollars in grants to the entire high school class.

And each student gets a chance to invest ten dollars for fun on a platform like Republic as financial education. I imagine if you do that, even with any sense of life skill, you're going to have a whole new generation that are much more financially sophisticated. Certainly would be more than me. My niece and nephew now are more financially sophisticated than me when I was in college or law school even.

And I think that financial equity is very much a solution to social inequities, the many inequities that we see. So, our focus on access and inclusion applies on both sides of our customer base.

Michael: [00:34:30] I love that - financial equity is a solution to social inequity. I mean, that really gets to what you're saying here, which is that talent may be evenly distributed, but the opportunity is not so you have to help find that - help people find those opportunities. So, what have you done in terms of building out this community of venture partners and this network of people who've helped you find investments in different places where others may not have been able to look?

Ken: [00:35:00] Michael, I can't really take credit on my own because I've been - one of the most fortunate thing about my journey building Republic has been able to convince such a committed, talented, and most importantly, diverse team of colleagues to join. So, my colleague, Cheryl Campos, who heads Venture Growth and Venture Partnerships for Republic, through her work she has launched a Venture Program and now does a Venture Fellow Program for those still in MBA programs.

And soon she will do a Venture Associates Program that's meant to go even deeper to undergrad. But the notion here is that in order to attract diverse founders, and to improve access inclusion in the space, you also have to incubate and support diverse venture capitalists as well. And I think that, as when I first started out at a law firm, I may have been the only Asian American law associate in a class of approximately 60. Now, across the board, some 15 years later, it's much more diverse.

And I think that with the proliferation of venture capital as a business model, you now have diverse talent in venture as a percentage, much higher than what you saw 10 years ago. So, the Venture Partner Program is to build a community to support, and to also get them to help evangelize for what we are building because the notion of access and inclusion certainly applies to venture as well.

I would not be able to do that myself because I'm just one voice, one lens and one experience. And I think that to build a community, you need people with the same mission, but all different backgrounds so that we all can communicate and understand and a different lens and get more to join the mission and the journey.

THE REGULATORY ENVIRONMENT

Michael: [00:37:12] Interesting. Interesting. And then to some extent, the regulatory environment, which you've actually been leading the charge on - you've been in DC, helping legislators, regulators figure this out. What's been going on from a regulatory perspective that's enabled you to unlock access to private markets to retail non-accredited investors?

Ken: [00:37:36] Well, since the great depression in the 1930s, in the infinite wisdom of Congress, someone decided, hey, if you're not a millionaire, you should not invest privately because it's too high risk.

I mean, it makes no sense. It stopped making sense a long while ago. In 2010, for example, private investing was legal for most people. Gambling wasn't but buying lottery tickets was highly promoted. So, it obviously is not making sense. But I think that people are truly waking up to the power of that false narrative - this is the example of the Reddit and Game Stop saga that we saw very recently. It used to be that people thought that the public markets were much more low risk or safer for the individual retail investor and it's decidedly not so. Market timing, insider trading, and predatory behavior can result in very, very risky and just pitfalls that you don't see in the private markets. So, I think both in Congress as well as at the SEC regulatory level, people understand that, people see that, and they are taking a close look.

And there's no question in my mind, that you're going to see more and more easing of the rules and regulations around allowing retail investors to invest in more asset classes. At the end of the day, you have to make sure, and that’s the goal and the rule, and the reason why the SEC exists is to protect investors, first and foremost, but what it means to do so, and how to do so, changes with time. Technology and society change faster than the law, just by the construct of it.

But there's no question that laws and regulations will follow. They have been following and I have no doubt that they will continue to follow. So, you are going to see this retail revolution, is really driven in part by a more relaxed regulatory framework around investing.

THE REPUBLIC NOTE TOKEN

Michael: [00:39:51] Well, so retail revolution - I want to extend that point that you're talking about. So, one part of that is fractionalization of assets, which you are in part, along with some others in the Alts Space, kind of a pioneer on, and it's really unlocking opportunities in all sorts of alternative assets. You've done this in a few different ways, but one way you've kind of extended this even further is with the Republic Note. So tell us about this Note, because it's really an innovation in private capital markets.

Ken: [00:40:23] Michael, if I may first share a view about blockchain or distributed ledger technology and how it relates to FinTech and to Republic and how it is so core, instrumental to our mission of global adoption of private investing.

My ultimate goal, and I think right now we have a community of over a million members, it's not a success until we have a community of like a billion members, but I think it would make me happy, and I definitely would smile when my distant cousin in a small village in Vietnam can invest five dollars into a startup or some investment products on Republic. Currently, that is not possible. To make that investment cross-border, the fee is like 30 bucks and they don't have bank accounts. And most banks in Vietnam don't synch so easily with JP Morgan and Bank of America. Now Vietnam happens to be a very crypto friendly country. Surprisingly, enough people, even in small villages do own a fraction of Bitcoin or Ether. So, the ability to enable global participation at a tiny scale, five dollars may not be a lot for a college student in the US at Columbia or at the University of Michigan, but it's a lot of money for a single mom, middle-class woman living in Hanoi, Vietnam even today. Right?

So, how do we enable more investment, more activities, more transactions at scale globally? You cannot do that without blockchain, without this technology. And it has already enabled, to accept investment globally at a far smaller minimum amount than we did before.

So the ability to factionalize and automate, factionalize any assets to tiny, tiny pieces, therefore lowering the minimum amount and the ability to automate and streamline the process of confirmation payment settlements are key parts of FinTech and retail adoption. The Republic Note Token, we do have our own token as you mentioned, this currently is the only, as far as I know, revenue sharing digital token in the US and it happens to be available to our entire community.

So, the theory behind that, Michael, is that we want it so that even people with just a dollar can somehow share in Republic's success, as we are still a very private company. We have a million members plus. If they want, or they used to be able to, buy or earn some tokens, some Republic Note Tokens. And, as we continue to grow, they're going to earn a little bit of payout potential and dividends.

So the goal, the ultimate goal, is this: In the year 2030 or 2028, a company that had raised on Republic in 2017 and now is as large as Uber or Coinbase is going public. And this is the headline news across the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal about company ABC’s IPO. You know what Uber did then? About a thousand early investors had a big smile on their faces and about 200,000 Uber users and drivers had a big frown because they got nothing – it was not relevant. We hope that when company ABC that raised on Republic a few years ago, and in eight years goes IPO, that you can have, not only the early investors in that company but 5,000 investors in that company, being very happy, but every Noteholder, hopefully, at that point a hundred million. They may get five dollars back. It's not going to make anyone rich. They may get three dollars per Note, but for once they feel like a part of the story on that front page, in that newspaper. And I think that's what people ultimately want and care about. Money and making profit and investing is not just making money for money’s sake. It's about buying happiness and security. And you know what, being a part of something, feeling like you matter in a larger society. Two dollars payback, but yes, you are a part of this narrative. I think that part of our mission of what we are building is that we hope to contribute a little bit to a societal sense of fairness and hopefully, more societal stability, especially compared to the year that we just went through in 2020 and earlier this year.

Michael: [00:45:29] And it also sounds like they get access to everything that's on the Republic platform. So, they're getting this diversified access to private markets, which as you continue to build that flywheel of private companies of crypto assets, of real estate projects, of video game financing projects, they're going to get access to everything.

Ken: [00:45:46] Yes. I'll give another shot at defining the Republic Note Token a little bit more succinctly. So, the Note is a revenue-sharing digital token. We can share a portion of that upside back to the token holders. So, in many ways, it's like a perpetual bet into this growing basket of companies. And even if a thousand companies fail, if one company succeeds, a little bit will go back to each and every single token. And that's what I meant earlier by saying that we hope that by doing that, and if we truly made sure and become the go-to platform for every and any company that looked to raise and grow, that the Noteholders have broad exposure and would be linked to the success of literally tens of thousands of companies and more down the road.

Michael: [00:46:58] That's really cool. Because it just gives people access to all sorts of assets in the private markets that some of which may be very successful, others which may not work out as well. But by having diversified access, then they can benefit from everything on the platform, which I think is such an interesting innovation.

Ken: [00:47:18] Michael, it just occurred to me that the Note Token may be the ultimate example of the lie down and lie back example.

Michael: [00:47:25] Yes it is.

Ken: [00:47:27] You can earn the Notes if you don't want to buy the Note and then have broad exposure to the entire ecosystem and be part of this story without having to do anything.

Michael: [00:47:38] Yes, that’s fascinating. So that maybe that is the right definition of the lie down part of the lean back-lie down lean-forward, and you can participate in any of those ways. If you want, to your point, to get engaged in and help some of these companies on the Republic platform, you may be able to earn tokens for that.

Ken: [00:47:56] I am going to have to give credit to you when we file that lie down-lean back investing trademark application as a description of Republic.

Michael: [00:48:06] Oh no. Give credit to Rishi. He was the one who shared that with me. But yes, I'm sure he'll appreciate that as somebody who's worked at Twitter and Square, so he's seen it, he's seen things from kind of the financial services perspective and the consumer social perspective. But, no, that's fascinating.

THE ROUND ANNOUNCEMENT

Michael: [00:48:22] I think we have to touch on some of the big news that just broke. So, you raised a substantial round to grow your business. People are very excited about what's going on with Republic. Why did you decide to raise capital and what are you going to do with this additional capital?

Ken: [00:48:40] Okay. Thank you so much, Michael. It's been four-plus years. And part of the reason why we raised this financing round was to show to the world, and ourselves, that what we are building now is of institutional-grade - is no longer like a fringe, quirky business model. So, we're first of all, so honored and Broadhaven, of course, has been an early supporter and we're delighted to be a portfolio company of Broadhaven, but Galaxy Digital, Nomura, and Naspers are in the round together with Motley Fool Ventures.

So these are traditional brands. Nomura, it doesn't get more traditional and institutional than that. Naspers is one of the largest, I think they go by Prosus now, is one of the largest venture firms in the world, and they've never backed a crypto project before. The Republic Note Token is Naspers’ very first crypto investment.

So, all of these institutional investors involvement, I think not only validates what we do at Republic, but also the industry. That is the retail industry, the blockchain industry as an ecosystem, and this notion of the future of why adoption of retail investing is a model.

Michael: [00:50:08] That’s fascinating to see the traditional financial services worlds blending with the next gen version of financial services, which is the democratization of access. But that's both in terms of traditional company equity and also the crypto world and the DeFi world, which it seems like you're really with your investor base, but also with what you're building kind of the blending of all of those things as you institutionalize and bring more institutions onto the platform like a Nomura which is fascinating.

Finale: Favorite Investment

MICHAEL: [00:50:39] So to wrap up, I always ask everyone what is their favorite or best investment idea?

Ken: [00:50:47] I'm going to share my investment idea that I came up with when I was in college, no first year of law school. I don't think I was of an age to invest in college. Once a week, my recommendation now to my sibling’s kids, my nieces and nephews, is that vice that you spend money on once a week, or at least once a month, just cut back on that vice, that one vice. Use that dollar to invest. Buy stock, public stock back then, and now invest in whatever it is that you care about. But be consistent. So, don't one day put it in shoes on StockX and on another day put it in wine. Just pick one thing and be consistent with it. Literally, one cocktail in Manhattan is like eighteen dollars, in a college town maybe like six dollars. These things add up. And if you do that, it's going to be a really fun learning experience. In my case, I can't tell you what I've been reliably putting my money in, but it has done very well for me over the years, but I'm old.

MICHAEL: [00:51:59] Well, no, I mean, I think what you're getting at is something really fascinating, which is, and it's ironic that you're drinking a Starbucks right now while we're having this interview. But basically if people, and I saw a statistic on this the other day, that if people had the three or four dollars they're spending a day on coffee, if they had put some of that money into crypto or Bitcoin, or it could be in startups or the Republic Note Token, that capital has the chance to appreciate in a way that those three, four dollars spent on a Starbucks coffee every day may not. So, I think that that's fantastic, fantastic advice. Even as you drink your Starbucks.

Ken: [00:52:37] Michael, you asked me a question that you ask everyone. What is their investment idea? May I ask you a question that I've been meaning to ask people that I know, but I have yet to, which is, I think the future is no longer about investing in a given range of options, but the question is what would you want to invest in that you currently are not able to. Because that desire for people to want to invest in new things, I think necessarily will make that happen.

So, I would love to hear what is one thing that you have not been able to invest in. For any reason that you really want.

MICHAEL: [00:53:22] That's a great question. You know, I think it's actually starting to become true already with some of the infrastructure that's being built. We're just starting to see the early days of this. But I think so many people in the world love sports, me included. I played soccer. I collected football cards, basketball cards, growing up as a kid. And I think the ability to marry - exactly what you said - passion with the ability to invest, is so powerful. Right? And there's so much to learn. For people who've never learned or understood investing in a more traditional sense, because maybe they find it really boring or hard to and inaccessible to learn about stocks. They may be able to do that with something like sports cards if they love LeBron James and they could learn all about LeBron James. So, I think we're starting to see this. Some of the infrastructure is being built in the sports card space, where people are now able to invest in sports cards in either fractional ways or in more, or in larger ways and invest into cards.

But I think, I would love to see that happen because, for me, I love sports, but the ability to marry that and combine that with investing, I think is just the kind of perfect collision of those two things. So, it's not something that's not totally possible. It is starting to become possible, but I'm super excited to see that become more of a reality and financialize itself as an asset.

Ken: [00:54:52] Michael, I promise you, I will do my very best to bring sports investing to Republic within this year.

MICHAEL: [00:54:59] Well, the other one is, is not just cards, but sports teams, as well. I think talk about the kind of combination of community and fandom with the ability to invest in something. And I mean, sports teams are, whether it's English, you know, English football teams, and it doesn't have to be the Premiership teams, it could be the local town teams where people grow up as fans and they love those teams with a passion. They pass that down to their kids and their kids' kids. Imagine if they had the ability to invest in that as well, not just be a spectator on the sidelines, but have the chance to be in the game with the team and the owners and the players.

I think that would actually be a really, really cool thesis. Cards are a financial asset or representation of players, but sports teams themselves are proving to be potential good investments as well. I mean, you look at the value of MLS teams have gone up massively. I think we'll see the same in women's soccer with the NWSL.

So, that's actually one where if the Republic platform could give the crowd and fans the ability to invest into sports teams, I think that would be super cool as well.

Ken: [00:56:10] Maybe we give every investor an NFT that is issued by the sports team. If they hold onto the investment they have that NFT. If they sell the investment the NFT goes with it.

Michael: [00:56:25] All the leagues are going to have to contact you because I think there's absolutely something here that they should be thinking about.

Ken: [00:56:32] Send it my way. But yeah, anything that anyone is a distinct holder in - fan of a sports team or a fan of a movie, I think they definitely should, and hopefully one day you can become a shareholder or stakeholder.

Michael: [00:56:52] That's a great way to end this podcast because I think you've touched on community, you've touched on passion, you've touched on profit, and it's just also so exciting to see, having known you for the past four years and seeing you when you were just starting out Republic, just to see you build this business into something that really is based on the passion that is associated with investing, the community that's associated with investing.

I mean, you're truly democratizing access to financial services, which is such an important piece of what the next wave of financial services looks like.

Ken: [00:57:24] Thank you so much, Michael. And thank you for all your encouragement and support along the way, even during days and months, that that was so new and early and no one believed in us just yet and you did.

Michael: [00:57:37] Hey, the one thing I've learned is never doubt Ken Nguyen. So …

Ken: Thank you, sir.

Michael: Awesome. Well, thanks for having you on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.

Ken: Thanks for having me.

Michael: [01:08:34] Thanks for listening to this episode of Alt Goes Mainstream. I hope you enjoyed it. You can find more episodes of the podcast at any of your favorite podcast sites. And you can read more about Alts on my Substack AltGoesMainstream.substack.com and follow me on Twitter at @MichaelSidgmore and @GoesAlt

[01:08:52] Thanks a lot. Have a great day.

Republic Disclaimer: With regard to any reference to an issuer reference in this notice that is gauging interest in a potential securities offering pursuant to the Regulation A exemption from the registration requirements of the Securities Act, including opportunities to “reserve” securities as indications of interest in the potential offering, please note that pursuant to SEC Rule 252 (i) no money or other consideration is being solicited thereby, and if sent in response, will not be accepted, (ii) no sales will be made or commitments to purchase accepted until the offering statement for the potential offering is qualified by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, (iii) any such offer may be withdrawn or revoked, without obligation or commitment of any kind, at any time before notice of its acceptance is given after the qualification date, and (iv) an indication of interest is non-binding and involves no obligation or commitment of any kind.

Today we have a guest who is building the infrastructure for a new asset class – sports cards.

Leore Avidar is a visionary founder who is building a ground-breaking company, Alt, which is backed by Alexis Ohanian and Seven Seven Six, as well as First Round Capital, Addition, SV Angel, Box Group, and Kevin Durant’s Thirty Five Ventures.

Alt is on its way to changing how we think about investing.

This was such a fun conversation. We talked about:

How Leore’s experience and excitement for building infrastructure has dovetailed with his passion and love for sports and collecting cards.
How he’s building the future of the sports card market with Alt by creating the tools and infrastructure enable people to value, trade, and store their investments
How cards can be a tool to connect different generations through financial literacy.
How culture can become a financial asset.

Alt is the culmination of his experiences working on Wall Street as a trader to working on the API economy at Amazon Web Services to making direct mail programmable at Lob.

He's building the infrastructure - much like Coinbase has done in crypto - for the world of alternative investments and specifically trading cards.

As we've seen the development of market structure in other asset classes like public equities, fixed income, crypto, etc, it will only be a matter of time before we have a similar evolution in the alternatives and collectibles spaces and Leore is right at the forefront of this curve.

Card collecting and investing is on a tear - 2020 and early into 2021 saw sales of sports cards at public auction reach all-time highs.

Leore has built out an incredible team and vision to build the platform at the epicenter of this market - and he's also built out a fund, Alt Fund, to invest into top cards.

He's leveraging his deep background in the space, having invested in sports cards for 5 years and generated returns that best many hedge fund and VC managers over the same time period.

And most of all, he's a company builder who combines the best of a visionary founder who sees markets before they develop with the ability to execute and ship product.

He's also the founder and CEO of Lob, a highly successful Y Combinator-backed company.

Today’s podcast felt like we were peering into the future of what financial markets will look like. Thanks Leore for giving a glimpse of what’s to come.

I hope you enjoy.

I’m thrilled to kick off the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast with a special guest - one of the leaders in the alts industry, Lawrence Calcano of iCapital Network.

Lawrence has built iCapital into one of the category defining companies in the alts space. They have democratized access to high quality alternative investment products for the wealth management industry.

Lawrence and the iCapital team have built the de facto operating system for the wealth management community to invest in and access leading institutional quality alternative investment fund managers.

They’ve grown to almost $70 billion of AUM across 740 funds and 125,000 underlying accounts in less than 7 years.

In the past year alone, iCapital grew their platform assets by over $20 billion and raised $162 million from top growth and strategic investors including Ping An, BlackRock, Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, Hamilton Lane, and WestCap.

Lawrence has had an an illustrious career as a banker and operator. Prior to iCapital, he was a Partner and Co-Head of the Global Tech Banking Group at Goldman Sachs, where he spent over 17 years advising tech companies on many landmark M&A deals and IPOs. He was named to the Forbes Midas List of influential people in venture capital for 5 out of 6 years from 2001-2006.

And now his second act as an entrepreneur at iCapital may top his first act as a Partner at Goldman.

I hope you enjoy.

Welcome to Alt Goes Mainstream!