155. Principle at Polygon Ventures on Pitching to Web3 VCs, Crypto Investing Strategy & Australian Property with Nathan Gurr

I'm a four year cycle guy, like I mentioned. So I have been hodling, acquiring as many digital assets as I can, waiting for bitcoin to go over $100,000 per token and then I think that'll be a wonderful time to exit most of your tokens and wait for the next bear market. So that's probably my overarching longer term thesis. It's four years to four years. It's really two years of harvesting really well and then kind of going through two years of no gains which really normalizes your gains over a four year period because you've got to make outsized gains from making zero to negative gains during the two years that are of the BE market. So I've been acquiring digital assets, waiting for bitcoin to go above 100. That's kind of my overarching strategy.

Welcome back to another episode of the Bennebergs Podcast. I'm Ben, your favorite high school dropout and founder of Collective Shift. Alongside me is Bergs, your favorite MBA and CEO of Collective Shift. Join us as we bring you world class crypto research and strategies to help you dominate this crypto bull market as well as behind the scenes view of us scaling a fully remote subscription research business here in Australia. And if you love the podcast, we'd love for you to leave us a subscribe if you're on YouTube or one of the podcasting apps. We have around 700 unique weekly no unique episode listeners now, which is absolutely amazing. Thank you so much for tuning in. We've nearly clocked up two years on the podcast and today is going to be, I'm going to say top 1% podcast. We've got an epic guest, Nathan Gur, principal at Polygon Ventures. Polygon Ventures, a ecosystem fund that is investing in companies that are building on the Polygon blockchain. He also runs his own crypto cartography Alpha Discord channel.

You used to have a role as valuations in at Carter in the Web2 space. Came over to Web3. Nathan used to work at Collective Shift. That's how we got to know each other, which we'll talk about soon, no doubt. But this guy I would say is absolute world class in finding early stage projects, deploying capital on chain. I love that we should make T shirts out of that. That's a great saying, capital on chain. But Nathan, you've come in, you moved to the U.S. you're back this week for the ETH conference. Thanks for coming on, man.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, appreciate your time. I know you're a busy dude. You've come down for the eighth conference. Is that. Was that the only reason?

That's right. Came down to see family as well, show the wife Australia as well so that we can get more acclimated down here. Yeah, there's an eighth conference tomorrow. There was a meme conference. The world's first ever meme conference was in Sydney yesterday. So I was able to go to that as well.

Amazing. I'm keen to jump into all of that and we've got so much to to talk about. But I wanted to start off for the listeners that didn't know, you know, the story of how I met Nathan. Nathan was running a YouTube channel a little while ago. It was, I would say, very much an Alpha based YouTube channel. Very early stage projects. You know, this guy just has a knack of finding these early stage projects and we found Nathan somehow online. And I don't know who it was. It might have been, might have been myself or Matt or someone reached out and was like, man, we should have a conversation with this guy and you know, when was this?

Maybe 2021, I think so 2021, you found me when I was unemployed.

Yeah, yeah.

Collective Shift gave me my big break into Web three.

Oh, mate, I can't take too much credit for that. I think you would have.

I think we should mate. Collective Shift, changing lives, baby.

But no, I what really resonated with with me that you really fit the Collective Shift sort of ethos and values of no bullshit. You want to help other people, you do a lot of stuff for free. You weren't spruking stuff. You're just generally here to help the community. And I found you a best in class by far. You know, your analysis and strategy and everything. You were always built for bigger and better things and obviously, you know, moving on to Polygon Ventures has probably been a, an absolute epic journey, man, which I'm keen to get involved with. But yeah, so Nathan ended up working for Collective Shift a little bit as one of our senior analysts. And our claim to fame was Nathan, in the early, early stage of the NFT run, did a How to buy an NFT guide for our members and that guide was how to Buy at the time a bored ape. At point 1 ETH 0.18, this guy did a how to buy an NFT Scott.

That's how early is that video still exists on our YouTube channel.

Unbelievable. So Nathan, talk about us, man. Your, your journey from Web2 doing valuations at Carter into Web3. What's it been like Because I feel as though you just are the Web three guy.

Sure. Yeah. I was doing valuations at Carter and I really came into crypto kind of 2019. I would do my day job in the morning doing valuations of private early stage companies. So I was really on the VC side looking at kind of equity based companies. And then crypto came about. It was really a trinity here of you had Metamask come up, then you saw Uniswap come up and then you had Coingecko. So Metamask was your wallet, Uniswap was your exchange and Coin Coingecko is really where you found your tokens and track them. So once you had those three tools, a light bulb click for me that you could really become a solo venture capital. That had been my goal when I was at Carter doing valuations and I was like, great, I can just be my own solo venture capitalist before I try to actually join a venture capital firm. So then you found ways to find new tokens. Uniswap was and still is the best place or is where most tokens list their first liquidity pool. So if you're going to ape into a new token that's one week old, a day old, typically it'll be on uni swap on a given blockchain. So once I had those three things, I was off and running solo vc, just tracking the market. That led into Defi Summer, which led into the nft boom in 2021. And then I've kind of haven't really looked back to the equity markets ever since, so.

Fascinating. You just came in to the collective shift and our team and just had such a. I just remember such a fresh perspective and lens of really this idea of deploying capital on chain, being your own, being your own investment firm, whether whether you've got $100 to your name or 100 million. Like you wrote this amazing article, I'm not sure if you remember about the importance of owning one bitcoin and that being a goal of everybody is to be owning at least one bitcoin for your future financial state.

Yes.

Can you explain a little bit about like what is for you the importance of people getting into crypto and specifically bitcoin to begin with?

Sure. Bitcoin still the holy grail. It is still the most perfectly designed blockchain in my eyes. It's got. And obviously there's these issues with scalability, that's fine. But from a digital gold standpoint, which really what is what bitcoin is, it's still just a beautifully Designed blockchain. It's here to last a long time. It's wonderful that Satoshi was anonymous. That kind of really changed the whole lens into the digital.

Kind of digital markets rather than going from equity markets into kind of the digital revolution. And bitcoin still just controls the crypto markets. Our fund, Polygon Ventures and myself, we have a very strong belief in the four year cycle. Obviously it's diminishing over time. There will be de correlations of new cryptos that come out. But as of right now, altcoins and crypto and bitcoin are fairly, fairly correlated, which is a good thing as an investor because if you can mentally buy into that cycle, you have two years of harvesting and then you have two years of prepping and kind of downtime. I do think it's still very important that everybody owns one bitcoin. I believe it'll be a million dollar asset or million dollars per bitcoin in the next 10 to 20 years. So now with Bitcoin L2s coming out, which is a hot topic nowadays with runes and Bitcoin NFTs, there will be a way for us to stake our bitcoins in the future and earn more bitcoin, earn that 5%, 3% yield. So if everybody just has a bitcoin for themselves, I always tell older people, buy one for your children. If you don't want one for yourself, that's fine, but just buy a half, buy a tenth, or buy a one whole one for your kids or your grandkids, put it away until they're 18 and then that will be a wonderful nest egg for them to either put, purchase a home or you know, just to give them a bit of ease in the future. So I still do definitely buy in to that mindset.

Amazing. The the future, the future state of being your own, you know, in financial sovereignty with the bitcoin. You know, the idea of that is, is pretty exciting.

Yeah.

And what sort of responses do you get when you say that to people? Are they still like, you're mad?

The older people still kind of break off cryptocurrencies versus blockchain technology and they like, all right, I get blockchain technology. I understand that databases should be decentralized and I understand that, that we could put a lot more of human commerce onto a decentralized or a public ledger. They still don't understand cryptos. They're like, why do we need tokens? What's the point of releasing another token? And I kind of retort to them, what's the point of releasing another equity and, and raising money off another equity based business and trying to get to an ipo.

So there is still that distinction from a lot of older people is blockchain tech has a bit of buy in, they still won't invest in it, but tokens have still have a bit of a negative connotation and don't have much buy in even from people our age. I'm 35 and I'm still trying to get my friends into it, all my relatives and I'm still looked at as just a bit of a gambler and it's still just too, a little too financialized at the moment. And then I also try to tell them about young kids and Minecraft and Roblox. Nowadays a lot of kids, they don't want pocket money in cash. They want Roblox or Minecraft dollars and they want to use that to then buy in game items or spend it to grow their characters within their games. And that kind of is a good light bulb moment for older people where it's like, all right, well if that 10 year old is using an in game currency to buy assets and grow that little character within their game, fast forward 20 years when they're 25, 30, you don't think that these digital, these digital assets are going to be innate in how they do commerce. And that is a bit of a light bulb for some of the older people.

This is the perfect topic. Just before the podcast you were saying that you and your employer, your firm believe that everything in the world is going to be tokenized and that is what you are going for. That is the thesis under which you operate. You can you give us an idea of how that is happening already and where you think things are going? That future state of tokenizing everything in the world?

Sure, yeah. When we ask, we share a lot of deal flow amongst other VCs in the space and they always ask what kind of companies do you look at? And we're agnostic across all industries in Web3. But we do say we're looking for token founders who want to launch a token, then want to incorporate that token into their product or service and flow revenues from the product or service back to token holders. If you do that, you've created a token economy. So our underlying thesis is we invest in token economies. A lot of those are blockchains. At the moment that's probably the best token economy where the asset can also be a gas token or it can be utilized in a lot of dapps on that given blockchain so there's actual utility and use case. So yeah, that's. Our underlying thesis is token economies from a defi standpoint. We've kind of already seen some really good ones. AAVE in lending is world class. I think institutions will buy into AAVE will get some of the first institutional contracts in the world with big banks and large financial institutions. Uni swap tokens kind of, kind of flail and it exists and it could have a use case if they just float fees back to it. So finance and tokens, they're kind of. That's great. We've got legitimate uses there on the finance side and then on the culture side, meme coins is where that's really kind of taken off in that we should be tokenizing a lot of culture through community tokens or meme coins. You can call them meme coins. A new term for them is scene coins because they're trying to tokenize a certain scene and a group and a group of community living in that scene. I call them culture coins. I hear them called reality token or reality coins. But at the end of the day it's just an easy way to. Tokens are really good at coordination of a group of people and value alignment of those people. If you, if you hold equity in an early stage company like my old company Carter, I hold stock options that, you know, I'm not really value aligned because I don't have any liquidity. So I don't really go out and pump my bags because I actually have no exit. But polygon where you get token options or restricted token units. Well, I'm getting paid in tokens on a periodic basis. Therefore I have on value aligned to go and pump that organization. So it coordinates me much more closely to them. The value aligns, the value alignment is there and then there's just a. So I've mentioned too like, you know, more legitimate finance use cases for tokens than also cultural uses. There's just across the board. I feel like all industries should be tokenized. You've seen it in events and media memberships. Memberships are just tokens. Token lights, like memberships or all should be tokenized.

Then it gets into artwork. Obviously that's a big, a big one. People are tokenizing a lot of artwork and then if you own that piece of artwork, you're part of a community already that then could have in real life events or additional perks.

So pretty much you name an industry and if you're clever enough, you can come up with a reason a token's needed.

That's fascinating, especially around.

Private companies. So if you're publicly listed, you work for Amazon, you get, you know, you, you have a vesting period, you're able to sell those shares, you can borrow against them. But private companies, like you said, you've got equity in a company you don't control where you know any of the, there's all these like, you know, drag along, tag along clauses or what is a liquidity event when it happens, what is the price? And you don't determine any, any of that. So you're like, what's the point? But the second that you have immediate liquidity and you can choose what you do and the effort that you put into that business to grow it, if that is then shown and you have a direct economic benefit, it changes the entire model.

It does. So many times I think employees go to their CEO and they say I have a buyer from my stock options and CEOs are allowed to essentially shut down the secondary transaction and they're able to just kind of stop it before it even happens. So now I see with private companies, tokens are a way for capital formation. And there's so many fun ways in crypto to do capital formation. You know, there's like party app or you could just airdrop something in this capital formation or you could have an ideo, an ico. Yeah, there's more fun ways to do capital formation. Then the token actually acts as your valuation instrument on the cap table. Carta does cap tables for equity, but it's really just fancy Excel databases that multiple parties have to keep where a token is kept on a public blockchain. That's a single source of truth that everybody can now go in and audit on a permissionless basis. So you have capital formation into running of the cap table as a valuation measurement and then all the other stuff of coordination and value alignment that I already touched on.

So fascinating. It makes so much sense. I feel as though do you think it's the user experience and like the, you know, the user interface that is lacking.

You know, which is I guess slowing down the ability for people to understand token formations, blockchain like because it all makes sense, right? But like as with a startup raising their, you know, their seed round at the moment, go and do that in a space that's not native to Web3.

Yeah, probably not the in there's just probably not the investor base to invest in a full token only business. Unless you're Uber Web 3. And so then you pretty much cut out 80% of the VCs in the world. And then it just becomes really hard to raise capital if you're token only and you're trying to attack a Web2 ecosystem.

Yeah.

So I think that's really tough. I do think for Web2 or Normies out there, it's still a lot of it is user experience. Ethereum with high gas fees didn't help there for the last two to three years. Thankfully we've got L2s and L3s now where if you are in crypto you can get $0.01 to $0.10 transactions, which in the last 12 months has been very fun. I've started branching out obviously from Ethereum Mainnet. I use Polygon, of course. The other big blockchain I use is Base. And a lot of people obviously love Solana because it's low fee meme coins. But the user experience on those L2s and L3s with low gas fees is so fun. You can drop in five bucks one day, you can drop in ten bucks the next day. So I do a lot of it is on the user side. It is a lot of bad user experience.

It's not as easy because 10 years ago we all had app ideas for the iPhone. That was about 10 or 15 years, everybody had app ideas. And now that's my job, obviously as a vc, to find those people that have app ideas for the blockchain. But it's just not as easy as getting on your phone, downloading an app, giving your email, boom, you're in. Now you have to go onto a desktop, download a Chrome extension, then get into the dap. Then there's some financial aspect to it where you have to deposit money before you do anything. So all those little barriers just make people roll their eyes 100%, man, I.

Want to dive into that. You're a VC at Polygon Ventures. You are seeing the best and the worst of projects come through. All of our collective Shift members love the stuff that used to put out. You know, Nathan used to do this, some amazing early stage altcoin analysis, found some amazing projects. What are you looking at right now for the sort of the next, you know, few months or even let's say the rest of 2024 into 2025. What is exciting you the most? What. What are the things that are coming across your desk? You're going, wow, this is, this is the space we want to be investing in at the moment.

Sure. It's been a. The last 12 months across the VC industry has been heavy infrastructure. So before we touch on infrastructure for defi, it's really just been restaking. Just like AMMs were the DeFi darling of the last cycle in DeFi Summer 2020. The DeFi Darling of this year is probably restaking. And it's timely because Eigen Layer just launched their token with some very questionable tokenomics.

Okay, you give us the lowdown on that. So I've seen on CT like everyone's just been going, oh yeah, this is just rubbish. Like what's going on? We're gonna have to go through seasons. So what's actually happening with Eigenlayer? Because we both staked as well and restaked so we'll be eligible.

I did not. Just because I thought whales were gonna dominate that airdrop. So I was like, yeah, I'm not even gonna drop my Ethan there. I don't think I'll get a big air drop. Probably should have participated. But I think the three big qualms, or a couple of big qualms were 50% allocation to the team and insiders. Yep. Second one was your airdrops locked up. So you don't get all of your airdrops straight away and you can't go and spend it freely. I was trying to look at the Eigen Layer price yesterday. There really is no price feeds because everybody that got their airdrop, it's kind of a locked airdrop. So the non transferability is a big thing. That was a bit of a new mechanism that Eigen Layer brought in and wasn't received very well. If you give someone an airdrop they want liquidity today you just have to put up with a lot of people selling it. And that's why when we're looking for companies, we want companies that are the best. VC backed token based companies have central exchange listing from day one or and or market makers from day one to help with that trading volume. And help not help, it doesn't dump from all the airdrop holders. Yeah. And then I think the third one was VPN access where they didn't mention the US holders were excluded this whole time during the airdrop campaign. And then I think they just mentioned either yesterday or this week that oh yeah, by the way, if you're in the U.S. you know your airdrop's not eligible. And of course the people in the US just use a VPN to get around it. But there are some good people. I didn't start using a VPN until recently because yeah, I don't want that risk from. From my own government. So a lot of people would probably not not accepted it. Even though they lock Their eth up for months and months and months. So I think those were the three big qualms that bothers me because you.

See that list and it's like North Korea, like some South American countries, then it's like Canada, usa, and then they actually block vpn. So if you're just using a VPN for privacy and you're in Australia, you'll get shut out as well. Like weird mechanics like that.

Yep. Yeah.

So sorry before I interrupted, because I wanted to find out about Eigenlayer. Yeah. Ben was asking about.

Yeah.

What's coming across your desk. So what are you guys looking for and investing in? But also what's caught your eye and what are the things themes that you're seeing coming across your desk when you're doing your due diligence on these projects?

Sure. A couple of themes that all VCs have touched on in the last 12 months has been rollups as a service. So all these different layer ones and layer two blockchains are wanting to build layer threes on top of them or app chains on top of a blockchain that roll up. So Polygon has what we call our chain development kit, our CDK Build an app chain or a blockchain on top that rolls up to Polygon, Polygon rolls up to Ethereum. So everybody's still benefiting from the security of Ethereum, but we get more modular. We get a modular modular blockchain that is an app chain. So you can kind of choose who what your validator structure is, who your sequencer is, who your prover is, but it's still EVM compatible. So Polygon's got one base, has L3s is what they're calling them. So the Degen chain was the first L3 that came out. So to get all of these started, there have been independent companies called rollups. As a service, that's been one theme that are helping pretty much take on the technical burden of we'll launch your blockchain. You just pick and choose what ASPA or what type of blockchain you want, and then we'll get it started, spin up the validators, and then you're off and running. That was one theme. ZK Tech's been a big theme around privacy. That one's been around for a while. Net we've just had for the last probably three months, a ton of Bitcoin L2s come through every. Every VCs pipeline. They all want to replicate what stacks done, but actually do it correctly. This time. Stacks has really failed in Their narrative.

And the whole thought process there is Ethereum's given a roadmap now for Bitcoin to recreate. People want to use their Bitcoin, they want to keep it on the bitcoin blockchain, but then mint a stablecoin on a Bitcoin L2 and then use that stable coin in defi applications or create liquidity pools. So we will see the calling of Bitcoin defi and just Bitcoin L2s. That's probably been the most recent theme.

Now you're not obvious. So the Polygon Fund won't invest in those particular projects necessarily. Right. Because you're focusing on things built on Polygon. Is that one of the rules of the fund?

Thankfully, all ecosystem funds are different. Some ecosystem funds do have exclusivity.

Our fund, thankfully, we have a bit of a loose mandate that if you even build towards Polygon or Polygons in your roadmap, we can invest. So we did invest in Bitcoin L2 and I think they're going to build a bridge over to Polygon. So as long as Polygon's incorporated in the road map, we can invest. So we invested in one Bitcoin L2, we invested in Babylon, the restaking application for Bitcoin Restaking just Eigen later does it for Eth. Babylon's going to do it for Bitcoin. So yeah, we do have a. Thankfully we have a loose mandate.

Y and what about upcoming narratives that you're looking at? I think you were early on. I saw someone, I might have been Matt that saw that you were early in Djen on the layer three. Yes, yes. We. You're familiar with dmt, the Senko game. Yeah. So we, we recently invested in DMT Thinking layer 3 is kind of an exciting space. What, what narratives are you looking at? Are you. Are you seeing at the moment even for the. Through the fund or you personally through your own Stuff that you're seeing is those, those sort of future, future facing narratives that might become something a little bit more mainstream.

Sure. Probably the top, the big one right now is Farcaster and all the things that are come be built on top of Farcaster. So far Caster has Warpcast which is a client. So Farcast is a protocol. Warpcast is their Twitter competitor, their social client. It's kind of a hybrid between Twitter and Discord or Twitter and Reddit. Thankfully, Farcaster didn't launch a token, which is a really, really good move. Now people are going to build applications based on communities within Farcaster that will launch tokens. So how Degen came about was there was a Degen channel, that community got airdropped, a token and boom, through a channel, you've now got a community. And then that founder decided to build their own L3. So far, caster, I think, is definitely the social narrative. Finally. We used to chat about social web 3 back when I was at Collective Shifter and we've all been waiting for it and it seems like right now we finally got a little bit more buy in that. Yeah. Twitter is more fun when your wallet's connected. Twitter is a little bit more fun when you, because your wallet's connected, all of your actions on that social application can be tracked and you can be rewarded or included based on your participation or based on your, your, your casts or, or your posts. So far, cast is definitely one. I think VCs are still investing in blockchains. So speaking of the L2 L3 narrative.

I think a lot of VCs want different companies to run their own blockchain and the blockchain's not the product or service. They want to have a product or service that is unique, but then the transaction flow go through, goes through their own blockchain. Therefore, that gives reason to have a token because that token can be the gas token or the utility token for that blockchain.

But it's imperative that the blockchain is not the product. It's really. It's attached to a product or service and the blockchain does what it's supposed to do. It's a database.

So back to that infrastructure. Still, the value is at the infrastructure level is where people are thinking.

We think so. Yep. I think VCs are still shying away from consumer crypto. We have an analyst at Polygon Ventures who focuses on crypto and it's been hard yards just because there's just not been a lot of buy in from retail or the degens. So a lot of VCs investments are still at the infrastructure layer. Yep.

Mate, I have to ask, what are some absolute clangers that have come across your desk? It's like, you know that episode, like the movie Mean Girls were like, stop trying to make fetch happen. Fetch isn't going to be a thing. Are there any kind of those themes that come across your desk where you're just like, it's not going to happen. Stop trying to make it happen for people that are trying to get funded.

Oh, you mean ones that won't. That won't happen.

Yeah.

Or just shocking, shocking sort of ideas.

Repeat deals Or please, please tell me there's crazy crypto AI shit we like.

There is quite a bit of AI stuff. Probably the, the easiest one's asset management. How many different defi asset management platforms are out there that want to help you run your own portfolio? It's like, no, just stop it. Coinbase could do that in two seconds if they wanted to and come out with a suite of asset management projects because they want it to be automated. Delta Neutral will give you an institutional like feel to run your portfolio and it's like no one's going to pay you for that. At the moment. Everyone's just going to run their own portfolios, deen into what they want, come up with their own type of investing, whether it's being a lender, being a liquidity provider or just being an early stage investor. So yeah, the old defi asset management platform, they're, they're a dime a dozen.

They go everyone out, they trying to get funded but don't do it, do something else.

Oh man. So I remember when you're working with us for Collective Shift, you would go through and you'd have these kind of, it was NFT days, right? And you would go through, you would look at all these projects, you do due diligence on them and you're hilarious where you're like, oh, 20% goes to the team. That's just egregious. And it was just, it was amazing. And just the depth you would go to and the things you would be across, it was amazing. And you know, you're reviewing projects, you're doing your due diligence on those and reviewing them in, I'm guessing in a similar way. What does that kind of look like for you now? What process do you have? What's an average day like of you doing that? Talk us through.

Yeah, it's, it's really being connected into quite a number of communities. So I live on Telegram, so we'll, whenever we find a new company, we'll open up a new group with that, with that company between us and them so we can ask for all the information, ask them questions.

But then finding those companies, we find a lot of them through our VC network. So we do, and we have Telegram groups with all of our different VCs in our network so we can just share deal flow with them. They share companies back. And when we go kind of, when I go hunting for new companies myself, it's kind of just always keeping your eye out. So it's being, jumping into new discords and checking those out. It's being in discords that are alpha discords that are kind of research or investing and if somebody mentions something new, just keep an open mind and go and try it out. Pretty much if I see a new dap out there that I can connect my wallet to, I'm going to go connect my wallet to it. So now it's across Twitter.

Telegram, Discord and faster. I'm increasingly, I probably spend 50% of my time on faster nowadays just because it's so web3 native. Most things there's such buy in to dapps to connecting your wallet to launching a token toward the financialization and gamification of consumer things or non consumer things.

So kind of those are still the main mediums and then so it's those mediums and then it's being part of different communities that you can go in and chat with other people about alpha because you can't keep across it all. So you need, you need fellow people, fellow degens out there who are going to say hey, I found something new and then it's your job if you see something new to go and try it. I've abandoned the equity markets so thankfully that saves me a lot of time. I don't look at stocks anymore. I couldn't tell you what stocks are doing, don't care anymore. I'm all in on crypto. And then the other thing is there's so many blockchains out there that I've kind of mentally picked a couple to focus on. There's probably about 15 to 20 legit blockchains out there. You know nowadays you've got your mantles, Aptos, Suis, that's that that are all on like the move programming language which is competing with solidity programming language. So there's just too many blockchains. So I've kind of mentally said great, I'll have three to five. So for me it's Ethereum, Mainnet, Polygon base. I do a little bit of Solana and now I'm doing some Bitcoin NFTs as well. So that's five. I'll sometimes dabble on other blockchains just to see if anything novel or new is coming up, but it'll take a lot for me to actually then deploy capital over there and focus a lot of my time. So pick a couple of blockchains and then that's helped me kind of narrow down to what I'm doing on a personal level for investing.

That's a great way to do it. And I love how you just said if there's something new. I'm connecting my wallet to it. And mate, I've seen you post on Twitter. You know how sometimes they make you post like one of your addresses to receive something and prove that you're real and you own it?

The worst.

Yeah.

So I saw you do that a few times.

Yes.

And I looked at one of your addresses and there would have been at least 8 billion tokens in there. And since, since we last spoke, you've pretty much done everything under the sun and airdrop season has happened. So I want to ask you two questions. How's airdrop season going for you, mate? And how do you do wallet hygiene with connecting to all of those things?

Sure. Really quick on wallet hygiene. First, I guess I have three main wallets. I've got my main wallet that I do legitimate stuff on. I have a second wallet that's a hot wallet. Two hot wallets. The second one's for absolute degen stuff where I'm a little risky. Don't know. The founders have just learned about this thing 10 minutes ago. But I'm going to connect my wallet anyway and press that sign transaction that just, you know, says that you own this wallet. And then I've got a cold wallet. I own a ledger. So I do have a ledger and that's where I. That's where I store things. That's a whole other topic about ledger security as well. So I have three major wallets, two hot wallets and a cold wallet.

And I keep that main wallet because I am trying to build an on chain reputation. I do. There are another, another topic around companies trying to raise VC funds that haven't done too much yet is on chain reputation. It's a really good concept. You know, you can track this person's financial activity on a public database. You could categorize them to a certain type of person. You probably categorize me as early stage long term holder buys many things. So you could, you could give me labels. So it's a great idea. So I am still trying to keep an on chain reputation with that main wallet as an on chain resume. I actually, as part of my resume that I sent to Polygon when I was going through the process, I had my traditional CV that just had all text. They all look the same. I created a second page that was all my on chain history. I had wallet scores because there are a few wallet scores out there that tell you your djenness. I listed all of my PFPs and my NFTs I owned. I actually put pictures there I talked about the decentralized communities I was in, whether they were on Discord or on chain. I talked about tokens that I vote with. So I used to vote a lot with APE and uni and I think AAVE as well. They still do proposals on snapshot. And then I talked about blockchains. I use rugs I had. And I just kind of told them, hey, here's my pseudonymous identity on chain. Trust me, like, I do a lot of on chain stuff. So those are the three different wallets I have. And I still like that main one is kind of like an on chain resume.

That's. So that's just pure proof of work. It's amazing.

Yes, exactly. Proof of work from an individual level.

I love it. And then, okay, with that main wallet, where you go in, you'll interact with things and you may have a claim or an airdrop and you want to move that. How do you make sure that you don't hit a wallet drainer or a contract you don't trust or you don't claim the wrong thing?

Yeah, it's challenging.

Right.

Because also, like good wallet hygiene is you have thousands of addresses within the one wallet, but you want to roll those up because then you kind of miss out on airdrops and it's hard to prove like someone's not going to go to a thousand wallets to see what you've done. They just want one, like one address.

Yeah. I think in the future on chain reputation places will aggregate your wallets, thankfully, so you don't have to keep one wallet as your master. But to your point of how we avoid those drainer contracts, I go through Twitter. So Twitter thankfully has verified accounts. And before I log into a lot of dapps, actually sometimes even Uniswap, I'll go back through the Uniswap one. I will go to Twitter, check that it's verified or if it's unverified. It's very early stage. I'll check the holder count or follower count on Twitter. Then I'll click the website through Twitter and then I'll go to the DAP through the website. I don't use Google to look at or click on a website. In the Web3 world, it's far too easy to click on a scam website. Sometimes they're the ads at the top.

So that's my number one tip, is to pretty much go through a verified Twitter if they have one.

Yeah.

So Twitter is pretty much my search engine now. If I'm logging into a new dap Fantastic.

And mate, talk us through airdrop season. You've been interacting with everything I know you got the fattest pockets in the world, mate. Talk me, talk to me about all that happiness, all those drops that I've missed out on. Mate.

I think the only one really that recently that comes to mind is DYM Dimension. That was a good one. I didn't do Eigen.

The first one ever was Uni back in the day. That really opened my eyes that most companies should have a token and that just log your wallet into most things and do a couple of transactions because you will get rewarded in the future. But yeah, the recent one was, was DMY and then there was a few others and I'll bring them back up if I can remember them.

Did you get Arbitrum?

I did got Arbitrum and op. The other big one, but this was older, was ens. ENS was a solid one. APE was the biggest. Just from holding an nft which is alpha in and of itself. I believe most PFP collections will have fungible tokens in the future. One recently that just launched a token on base is MFers. MFers, they don't really have too much of a roadmap, but they've got a cultish following. You've got a lot of influencers and well known people in Web3 who have used their MFER and their PFP over time. Well that person, the. I forget his name, the, the founder of MFers, he's well known and you'd recognize him. But they launched a token and it's the official MFER token. It's sitting at about 50 million market cap at the moment. But post launch it shot up to 300. So actually it's actually a decent buy. I've been telling people to get into MFers. Another one is Nouns. Nouns is going to have a token. Just learned that yesterday at the Meme Coin conference if you hold a noun, if you wrap your noun, you're going to be given a certain amount of nouns token. So that's one that I don't own a noun. But the day that liquidity pool launches the first nouns holder, so let's say the team, typically the team will launch their own official liquidity pool.

And that's when you start buying. I like to front run the official liquidity pools if I can. Typically in this example a nouns holder will get their airdrop. They'll immediately pair it with eth and put it into a uni swap v2 or uniswap v3 liquidity pool. That's just a unofficial community run liquidity pool. But if you can tell the contracts legit and it's the official contract you're able to buy and sell and there's a market cap for it. So oftentimes I try to find those buy it from the unofficial liquidity pool because the team will launch that official liquidity pool in like a week or a month or whenever. And you've kind of front run everybody else that's waiting for the official liquidity pool.

This is the thing with decentralized tokens. This is why a lot of people, well, don't like them, especially companies, because you have no control. People can take them, they can do whatever they want with them.

Exactly. And that initial person obviously is trying to get fees. They're trying to get all the trading volume from all the people that want to buy nouns token in the first day, first week and they're earning great fees. Sometimes like a really, really good liquidity pool at an early stage will be 30k to 50k in liquidity, but it'll do 500k in volume or a million dollars in volume. So you got million dollars going on 50k or 100k of liquidity pool assets. He's making really good fees.

That's amazing. And you're the kind of guy where you literally put your money where your mouth is. Like you hold some really amazing PFPs. You've got a board ape, you've got a punk, plus a bunch of other stuff. And you believe in this space. And I want to ask you, so you've mentioned like Token drops for NFTs. Where do you see NFTs going in the future? Or what are some mechanics that you're seeing out there in the wild at.

The moment I still look at them as communities that are going to continually creep into real life. So Bored Ape's the best example. They do their Ape Fest every year. That's a, that's a time. Ben, you and I went a couple of years ago. That's a space that once a year I can actually meet with my fellow ape holders who are all emotionally invested in a new culture. So I'm still waiting and I've been waiting a long time and it hasn't really manifested yet. But I'm a believer in PFPs. I think we'll have another cycle of PFPs. There should be some new ones that come out. They'll probably, they'll probably look more like avatars. I think avatars might be a new theme in maybe this cycle or next. Cycle. But with these new PFPs or old ones, I think they'll continually creep into our in real life.

You know, daily activities. I'm thinking that, you know, airlines and restaurants and sports teams will partner with certain NFT collections based on their ethos. I'm hoping for lounge access for certain NFT collections at different airports.

Experiences. I think Ape Fest will turn into a music festival in the future. I know apes are trying to get them to build a swamp in Miami. They want a clubhouse. They want an in real life physical clubhouse in Miami in the swamp that if you're an ape holder or a mutant holder, you can go and visit. And I think that provides people real value for let me be part of a digital community that's experiencing in real life perks that I can go and dabble in whenever I want to.

That's awesome. And just before the episode you mentioned that you believe every membership should be a token.

Yeah, it just makes sense that you know, for like for rugby league, they've all got their different communities that have memberships and everybody's a member of their given rugby league, professional rugby league team and there's just no reason that that shouldn't be tokenized at the moment. Whenever a rugby league team needs to give something to their members, they've send out an email. You've got to claim something. You've got to use a third party app, whatever the attraction's about. When really everybody could just hold a token and be airdrop stuff or be included because your wallet, when you show up an event, you can just scan and say oh yep, it's proved you own the membership token. That's wonderful. And I think people forget the power of third party builders at the moment. If we continue this example of a sports team, whoever is going to build things for the members, it's really just the professional club themselves and they've got a limited capacity to build events, experiences for those members. Now if you give all your members a token and a couple of them are software developers or even not, they're just entrepreneurs, then you have third party people building experiences, apps, events, not who are not connected to the sports club, they're just fans among you. But because now going back to value alignment and coordination now because they're token holders, they sometimes obviously all most tokens have a, have a price to them. So they want to see their token pump or their membership increase in value. So if they say hey, we're just going to do this without the sports team's permission and let's just do this ourselves. And then you've got third party people who are your fellow membership holders building things in an unofficial manner that increase the experience and the value of the membership. So sports teams is an easy example. But we could think about restaurants and you know, all of the, all of the point systems that already exist out there for Starbucks and airlines. I think giving a token to them, letting the third party builders build for them would be a really good company strategy for most companies going forward.

The whole world just opens up because it becomes permissionless. Like we just had WWE in Perth a couple of months ago. All of those ticket holders, I would not know who they are if Those tickets were NFTs or a token. I could go to that contract. I could filter by dates and addresses and I could contact all those people. I could drop them something. I can build something for them. That is phenomenal.

Yeah. Because we don't really have wallet to wallet messaging yet. There's a company xmtp who's trying to do it and it'll happen in the future. Farcaster is probably kind of the closest thing where you could query that list of WWE attendees.

Message on podcast.

Yep. Cross reference it with Farcaster accounts and boom, message them in an anonymous basis on a Web3 social platform.

So cool.

I think that's literally going to be an Internet protocol like messaging between wallets. Like it is going to be one of the strongest things. It'll be akin to email, like one of the open protocols.

Yep. And I think crypto still hasn't kind of overcome the mobile burden. I don't have crypto on my mobile. Just it's too risky. I'm going to lose my mobile. Someone get access to my wallet, make a trade really quickly. So crypto's got to figure that out. Where I don't, there's no real takeoff mobile application. You know, friend tech was a bit of a decent one, but still way too financialized. Yeah. Crypto hasn't overcome the mobile user experience yet.

It's fascinating because I think the centralized exchanges are all going mobile first.

Yep.

You know, we, we work with a couple of major exchanges here in Australia and knowing that they are diving headfirst into mobile. So from the centralized perspective of buying crypto mobile, but the decentralized aspect, I agree. It's like, man, I don't want to download Metamask myself phone. Like I just get sweaty pants thinking about it. I want to switch gears a little bit, man. One of the biggest questions we get asked at Collective Shift from our members is exit strategy.

Sure.

When to sell, how to sell, what timing, percentages, all that sort of thing. How do you think about selling crypto? Are you in the boat of I'm never selling? Are you in the boat of I'm going to take profits, I'm going to rotate them into other assets? How do you think about portfolio allocation? Is that even a thing for you? How do you, how do you think about all that?

Sure. Exits. On the one hand, I'm a four year cycle guy, like I mentioned, so I have been hodling, acquiring as many digital assets as I can, waiting for bitcoin to go over $100,000 per token and then I think that'll be a wonderful time to exit most of your tokens and wait for the next bear market. So that's probably my overarching longer term thesis. It's four years to four years. It's really two years of harvesting really well and then kind of going through two years of no gains, which really normalizes your gains over a four year period because you got to make outsized gains from making zero to negative gains during the two years that are of the bear market.

So I've been acquiring digital assets, waiting for bitcoin to go above 100. That's kind of my overarching strategy. Oftentimes I will. If I do have. I'm a big believer in the J curve, the crypto J curve, where tokens do pump in exponential cycles, then they fall and find in equilibrium for months and months and months. If you do experience a J curve hit and you're like, wow, this return is kind of outside my wildest dreams, take 25% off the table, get or get back what you invested. So at least the rest of it is house money. So those kind of short term things I do do, especially with airdrops, some air drops I sell airdrops are on a case by case basis. Most recently I've sold them all just for personal use for, for cash and in personal life.

So yeah, on the short end, on the short term cycle, I like to find those J curves, sell a portion of it, whether it's 25 to half, let the rest ride. And then something I'm trying to do more is pick out my multiples. If you can be really diligent about, hey, this token I think's a 2x or a 5x or even just a 1.5. Take your money, walk away, be happy. You know, unfollow the token in your portfolio so you don't get any FOMO about, hey, if it Keeps running up. So that's something that I've also tried to do is, is once you hit your multiple of of gain, just exit and be happy with it and then don't reinvest right away. I always try to kind of respect the crypto gods or just the money gods out there where once you make a big gain, just hold it in USDC for a bit. You don't need to go back into another token tomorrow. Just wait and know that there's going to be so much token creation this cycle and the next cycle in 2028 that there's going to be more opportunity out there. So hold your USDC for a little while, put it on Coinbase. I think they're giving out 5%. It's a wonderful yield. So that's kind of a little bit of my thoughts around exit. And then what was the other part.

Just around portfolio allocation?

Yes.

Do you think about your wallets as a whole when you're looking to get X percent, BTC and altcoins or are you just trying to accumulate as many good assets as you can?

Probably the latter. I'm probably, I try to just accumulate as many good assets as I can and last cycle, probably most of My portfolio was NFTs during 2021. This cycle it's actually probably more fungible tokens. So it's really accumulating the tokens of the best communities that I find and the communities that I think are going to do well in this four year cycle.

I'm out of the equity markets. That's not even part of the portfolio. That makes it a little more simple. The other part is.

People always ask me what's crypto's hedge? And I think crypto's hedge is real estate is if you make gains in crypto and you're able to save up enough to get into the real estate market. That's your ability to have a bit of really, really safe money in real estate. Depending on obviously where you purchase, we won't get into that. But that risk portfolio or that that asset class is kind of your safe money and then you can continue to invest in crypto and you've, you've leveled yourself out of it.

I like that we talk about property a lot. You know Bergs own some property and we've been talking about property as a hedge against, you know, your crypto portfolio. I'm 99% in crypto right now and to pick at this four year cycle I'll be looking at diversify.

Yes.

We spoke to a stocks guy Today, Josh, at Etoro, now we're talking property. Like, I think, I definitely think that sort of a bit more stability in your wealth is.

You hear it from the crypto founders too. You always hear these crypto founders who make the millions, the tens of millions. And you hear, oh, they bought a house in here, they bought a house there. And it's like that's what they're doing too. If you get too much crypto, you need to put it somewhere. Buy real estate.

Yeah, I think you've just increased my learning there quite a lot. Because we talk about barbell strategies in the way we think about things, but real estate and crypto is almost the perfect barbell strategy for guys like us, where we're not super risk averse. We invest in crypto, we work in crypto, and you have your safe real estate on one end of the bar, nothing in between, and on the other side you've got your crypto.

Yes.

That is an amazing way to look at it because we, we think, when we think safety, we think like bonds or something else or I have to have equities or I have to have something else. Actually, I'm really liking like the hard assets of real estate and crypto.

Yes.

And my partner and I were dreaming of like in the future of like, are we investment property kind of people. Do you want five properties? It's like, what's the headache with that? And like managing that on the real estate side, I hear it's a nightmare. And obviously you can hire property managers and whatnot. But then we were kind of like, why not just buy bitcoin? We kind of look like bitcoin and real estate as having a similar risk profile and a similar return profile in the long run as you normalize the four year cycles. So now we're kind of thinking that, all right, to your barbell point.

You can actually put bitcoin on the real estate side and you can, you can be pretty heavy in bitcoin and real estate and quite safe. And then you can have a lot of your risky assets on the other side that try to get you more bitcoin and more real estate. So we've kind of dropped bitcoin in there and being like, okay, that's our safe asset now we understand the cycles, we're good. I do think that bitcoin, my price target in U.S. dollars is about 140 this cycle. That's a little over 3 trillion. So I think we'll hit a bit above 3 trillion. So like 140, 150 U.S. so it's. I think that's almost touching 200 Aussie per token. But then I do think that bitcoin will go back below 100American, $100,000 per token in American dollars in the bear market. And kind of my partner and I, or my wife and I, we're, we're fine with that. We just know that over the long run, it'll normalize out into a. Into a pretty reasonable return.

Once you make that shift and understand bitcoin as property, your world changes. And I faced exactly the same thing. I have a primary, primary place of residence that I live in, and I was looking at getting an investment property. So I'll have something for my daughter when she's older. Because the prices are going to be ridiculous.

Yep.

And then I'm like, do I want the headache? Do I want to manage that for X amount of years? Do I want to worry about, you know, there's this issue I have to pay, you know, property people. I have to worry about rates, fixing things, depreciation, all this sort of nonsense. I was like, why don't I just buy bitcoin? And that is where I'm living at the moment.

This.

The kind of disadvantage is for some people is the bank will lend you a lot of money in order to go and buy a property. They won't lend you a lot of money to buy bitcoin. But if you have a primary place of residence, you can redraw your equity as a debt facility and use that as a loan to buy your bitcoin. So once you start to look at it as that, and I like that you've not put all the crypto on one side of the bar, like bitcoin has been significantly de. Risked that it is now safer property. That's honestly the way I look at it as well.

Yeah, agreed.

And your partner is crypto native, right? She works in crypto.

She is. She's. She works for a VC firm as a chief of staff over on the near blockchain. So she's on the near blockchain side. I'm on the polygon blockchain side.

What are the dinners like, mate?

We're both at VC funds.

Take us inside.

You recently, you know, I have to ask this. Are you two like the vegan couple? Whenever you go out with other people where you guys just talk crypto, like, oh, God, they're the crypto guys.

Sometimes, Sometimes we'll get into it and then like 20 minutes will go by and it'll just be her and I Just like bashing them with crypto. Crypto, Crypto. And then they're kind of like, all right, we got it, we gotta stop. They enjoy it, but not that much.

I was gonna say, how do you split that up at home? And is it like right after, you know, 9pm it's, it's crypto down or is it.

Nah, it's really a lifestyle for me. So kind of keeping up with the market which, which is crypto's a lot to keep up with. It really is a lifestyle.

I think. On the weekends we do a really good job of laptops down. Let's get 8, 10 hours of no screen time, no crypto, no discussion outside of, you know, dreaming about the future. So we do a good job on the weekends of that. But no it at night, times of a night time, it's, it's quite a bit of degen talk. She's a DJ too. She likes to know where the alpha is coming from.

So yeah, thankfully we do chat quite a bit about it.

Amazing. I love it. You're sharing alpha across the kitchen table.

Unbelievable.

I love it.

Talk us through a day to day for you man. As a, as a full time investor analyst, like what do you, what is it like? You're living in California now. What time are you getting up? What time are you doing stuff? Are you working out? Are you meditating? How do you stay across everything? How do you not go crazy? You spoke about, you know, screen time. No screen time on the weekend. But what does a day to day look like for you?

Day to day? We're up pretty early because we go to bed early. So we're up early and probably starting at like 6:30. Log into the laptop. I like to do about one hour of independent research just to slowly wake up, have a bit of coffee. So with my first coffee and a bit of breakfast for about an hour, I'll just do independent research. Well, I won't schedule calls at that time if I can. And I'll hit all the major social sites and all of my communities. I've got my own community so I got to catch up with them and what they're talking about. I'll hit two or three or four other communities that has investment or research information. I'll hit Twitter, Farcaster, Telegram, Discord.

And I'll just consume as much as I can. I'll make a few notes on the side. If there's new dapps to try, I'll try them out on the spot in that first hour of research. So then by the time that first hour is done. I know what the major trend is of the day. What's Twitter talking about? Are there any new dapps that my, my sphere, my network has found or new tokens? I'll check the prices and I really enjoy that first independent hour of just me time. A lot of people do that with newspaper or they read the sports section or they'll watch YouTube videos or play a game. I just, I dig in for about an hour and I really like it. Then I'm call heavy with founders in the morning. So I'll try to have three to four founder calls a day.

And are these portfolio companies or are these potential new investments?

New investments, yeah. So that's probably a busy week. 3 to 4, 3 to 5 a day so that you could have 10 to 15 calls per week with brand new companies and that. And then with each with those are 30 minute calls. As a VC, I try to keep them at 30 minutes because 45 is too long and if you need to have another call, you can just always do another call. But with that 30 minutes for every 30 minute call, you need about at least 30 minutes of prep time. Go through the deck, go through all the public information out there. Make sure you come into the call. Actually being educated, you know, you don't. No one wants a VC that comes in there and asks the basic questions when that's the answer is already in the deck. So I do try to do all my morning calls from about nine to two with founders. Then we will have team meetings. So I try to meet with my team a couple of times a week just to chat alpha and chat the market.

Then from 2 o' clock onwards, 2 to 5, it's really back into personal time. So then it's writing investment memos of the companies I've been talking about. It's doing due diligence on calls I've had from the product prior weeks. That because once you have a call with a company, you kind of bucket them into okay, that one's most likely a pass. And you, you may take another pass at it or may take another look at it, but most likely it's just a pass. You can kind of forget about it. But then you do bucket the good companies into due diligence companies and you say okay, I need to look at that two or three more times over the coming two weeks to make sure I sleep on things. I look at it from a couple of different angles and then we write our investment memos. So for every call that we have with a founder, we'll write an investment memo. And ultimately we present that investment memo at investment committee. So most all VC firms have investment committee. Some have it on a weekly basis or a monthly basis. We have it every two weeks. So every two weeks, I have an opportunity to present my top investments. We have a zoom call. I share my screen, and I'll run them through my memoir. A lot of times, I'll actually just flip over to the DAP and say, here's the actual dap. Here's how it works. Here's the user experience, here's what it looks like. And then in the investment committee, our director and our committee votes on whether we allocate the capital and we discuss how much.

That's pretty much a typical day. It starts independent, we hit, I got to talk to founders, got to talk to the team, and then it ends independently as well.

That's fascinating, man. It's great to hear your side. I remember when I was raising money for Collective Shift, and for the listeners that don't know, we raised. What do we raise? About 1.5 million Aussie maybe two years ago. And, man, I reckon I had a hundred to 200 VC calls, and they are just. They are excruciatingly painful. I remember the worst was rocking up with some dude in his bedroom in Miami, smoking on a vape, you know, feet up on the table going, you know, basically, who, who the are you? You know, what are you. What are you doing? Yeah, idea, don't like it. You know, rip. Rip sheds off you. And then. And then basically, it's like, it's. It's brutal. But also on your side, like, you know, call after call after call, you know, trying to find the right projects and getting enough information and doing dd, like, you know, I'd imagine that's pretty, pretty, pretty tough as well to try and make sure you don't make any mistakes as well.

Yeah, I think it's harder on your side. I do. It's much easier on the VC side. You guys the founders, that's one of the hardest jobs in the world. To your point. On the founder side, never like to see a founder sitting in a car. You know, you're some that do the pitch in the back of an Uber or like in their car seat being like, oh, yeah, I'm just about to pop in somewhere, and I thought I'd just bust out this, this call while I'm sitting in my driver's seat, like, park somewhere. And it's just like, oh, mate. Yeah, you're not really respecting anybody's time here?

Yeah, for sure.

Well, that's good, actually.

What.

What tips can you give to founders that are pitching to VCs? What would you expect as a standard from them? What do they need to deliver and how do they need to show up?

Yep, I think show up in. In. Show up in a quiet place, you know, and show up in a place that you're comfortable with. I know sometimes if you're traveling, you have to take them, you know, in hotel rooms and whatnot. That's fine. Show up with a really concise pitch over the first five to ten minutes. Control the call for at the start, really control the call. You know, force your narrative onto me. Initially, some founders open with like, hey, do you got any questions? You've seen the deck. Like, what can I answer? Where it's like, no, I want you as a founder. You have a new vision of the world that you're trying to tell the whole world about. Tell it to me first. You're the biggest salesperson of your company. Force that vision down my throat. Come in here, aggressive with high energy and say, hey, the world's wrong at the moment and I've got a better vision and here's why. That's probably like the first 10 minutes of the call. Then it's time for, hey, questions. What type of VC is this? What do they care about if it's on my end, I lost a lot of questions about the token because from answering question about the token and its use cases and its utility within the product or service, I can extrapolate back out to how the product works and what the business model is. If it's a super infra heavy company, there is some calls that take 10 or 15 minutes of hey, how does the product work? Because you do have a new novel idea out there. So how does it work? And then you do got to save time for how the VC is going to help you. So certainly get them to say, hey, what's your value add outside of the check? How are you going to help me? And how can you start to help me? Even though the round's not closed? Can you help me before you've written a check as well?

And.

That'S probably about it.

And what are you marking them on in your investment memo? Like, what are the things that you tracking? Is there a checklist? Is it just your general thoughts? What are you taking back to your team?

So our investment memo has a section about the team. So we do do a lot of due diligence on the team, their backgrounds, how they Spoke on the call. Kind of pedigree, and I wouldn't say pedigree from a university degree of or from a company, but just like is this person a leader? Is this person going to be able to lead? Are they going to be able to deal with the Twitter bashing or you know, are they going to be the next Hayden Adams? You know, are they, what, what, what kind of level of leadership do they have? The founding team is big. Who they have.

Roadmaps of a very clear understanding of where they are in their roadmap related to mainnet launch, testnet launch, token launch, some hard dates there. On the token side they should be starting. Hopefully they can get access to market makers and central exchanges. That's a big deal because once you launch your token, you need someone to support it from a trading volume standpoint. We do have this whole section on how the product works, the tech stack. So being able to concise, especially with crypto being so digital, what's the tech stack look like, which blockchains are using? You know, do you have who your partners on the wallet side? Just kind of, yeah.

Kind of explaining the tech stack in a very concise manner to show that you, even if you're not a technical founder, but you know the infrastructure that you're working with go to market is a big thing. So we do look at go to market.

Quite detailed when it comes to strategic partnerships. A lot of times in crypto the team knows how to build something, but then they need customers to say what to build. And then there's this beautiful marrying of the minds of my customer. I call them design partners. My design partner, who's going to be my first customer, knows how or what to build based on their needs and what they're going to pay for. And your team knows how to build it. So you got to work together with those design partners.

So you're basically taking all that information, synthesizing it, running it through your own mental model to figure out if this is something that will be valuable to the world. If it's not or if it's already out there, yep, ditch it. If it's something that you think passes your models and it's worth discussing at a, at a committee level, you take it to the committee level. Then is it at that point every fortnight you're voting or is it directors call on the investment, how does it then once you've taken some of the committee, how does that then work? Is it like vote to yes or is it directors in charge?

All VC firms are different Ours has a bit of both. Sometimes the director comes in and says, I know this will do well. I've talked to people.

That know the founders, other VCs, they're going to get a lot of support and this, this should do well on the short term or long term. Then other times it does go to vote and then it's up to three to five people on our team who get a vote.

Amazing.

Yep. And then we do do financial models as well, which I, which I like as a part of the job. Coming up with some sort of revenue model. And the crypto is kind of all different. So they're all simplistic where it either comes back to some sort of transaction fee. Actually a lot of it really comes back to transaction fee because we actually, we shy away from SaaS businesses. SaaS businesses we attribute to equity based businesses and they've been popular for the last 15, 20 years out of San Francisco, out of Silicon Valley. We don't think SaaS business models work too well in the crypto world. We think it really, a lot of it comes back to transaction based business models. So then we can see what their transaction fee is.

Multiply it by an estimated transaction volume and come up with some sort of revenue estimate.

Amazing. Such a good insight to hear from both sides.

That's so good. And so, okay, so we're a subscription business, Collective Shift.

Yes.

You know a bit about our business. We've actually we did with a partnership with AO Art Balls where token holders could connect to our site and get a membership. Do you think Collective Shift should tokenize or do you think it'll just naturally happen in the future because it's a membership based business?

Well, actually just quickly before we answer that, we remember we were having meetings with a potential VC token. I can't remember Architect back in the day. I think we're having some meetings. I'd love to hear because we're having a discussion. We just end up being like, holy, this is very hard to pull off in the.

As we had.

Knowing what you know now about the, the world and the token space and our business model, like Aaron said. Yeah. Where do you think the opportunity is for us? Do you think it suits us? How do you think about that?

I think you guys should definitely tokenize. There's multiple ways you can do it through an NFT membership token which wouldn't change your business model very much at all. Or you could go over to the fungible token side and then that's where it does get a little bit more complicated and we're trying to figure out business best practice business models as an industry. What does that look like on the fungible side? Do you have to own enough of a CS token and stake it to get access to all the information and that that would equate to essentially an nft.

Or do you guys have transactions within your own platform? But then you're looking a little too more defi. So it's not quite on your business model. So the fungible token side I can understand like people are still figuring out business models.

And that's where I think kind of meme coins come into it a little bit as well. You know, I think a lot of companies could benefit from just launching their own meme coins, like a collective shift meme coin that is separate to your membership but is an added perk for holding your membership. You know, and then you guys have a currency that is kind of tertiary or just on the side of the actual business model that VCs are investing in. But it is an added differentiator for your holders who can either earn them depending on what type of type of business you want to be, receive them or buy them themselves. But I think, yes, I do think you guys should tokenize in some manner, slowly over time because I think you will alienate some of the holder base, especially the older holder base, into membership NFTs or just launching your own fungible.

Token, something like a rewards program for being a member, like, you know, for sticking around for this period of time. You know, we reward you with this token or non fungible token.

And a lot of it is one of the themes going back to themes coming through crypto at the moment is point systems. We all know that points is everything before you launch a token. Most companies have a point system and you accumulate your points by doing something and then you expect an airdrop where I think point systems kind of should carry on throughout the life of the business so that you can do things to earn an off chain point that could eventually be an on chain reward.

It's like with eigenlayer, like Matt's telling me to do this crazy stuff. I'm like oh fine, I'll do it. Whatever login do there, stake it, restake it. And then it starts accruing pearls and you get bonus pearls. I'm like what apparels? Why do I need pearls? What do they do?

Blast the blast blockchain. Are you guys part of the blast ecosystem?

I'm not, but yeah, I heard about it.

I'm not either. It's just been a Little too.

I don't know what it is about blast, but yeah, they've got gold out there right now and gold is all the rage amongst these blast holders. They want to earn blood, earn for an event, for that to be converted eventually into a blast token.

Got your future airdrop.

So yes.

So bergs, it could be like a, you know, based on your length of membership and how long you've been around or the dollars spent. A collective shift. You could earn points.

Yes.

For a potential future airdrop or potential perks of different things we could experience as we could.

Different perks, different one offs.

Yeah. And then I kind of think companies may have a legitimate coin and a meme coin in the future at the same time.

And that a meme coin might be a way for third party builders because how do we access the third party builders of collective shift? You guys want your members to not only be consumers but to be producers in your business as well. That benefits everybody. And right now with just a membership where they're paying Aussie dollars, there's no real incentive for them to actually, hey, I've got some alpha that I could share in the community. Why would I do that? But then once we add a token to the, to. To the equation, even if it's, even if it's a meme coin or let's call it a scene coin, then it's like great. There's a little bit of value alignment and coordination here where collective shifts got a program that they're giving out more of their meme coin to people that participate and build as a third party and grow the whole piece.

There's incentives there.

Yes.

I like that. Reframing it as a scene coin because it's really just Internet culture, something you can use that doesn't have a heap of value attached to it, but it's still available and you can target the people that you want to.

Yep.

But then it may become like a huge thing.

It could. And then obviously everybody's dealing with the volatility of those tokens and for some reason that volatility has a negative connotation these days because people get burnt and they lose money. Maybe the world is going to change their view on volatility in the future. I think the equity markets made volatility seem like such a bad thing. And you know, 2 to 5 to 10% swings in the equity markets are crazy. Where, you know, that's just how global commerce works. If the whole world is speculating on these assets and participating in a certain market, that's the new norm for volatility. Kind of get over it. If you're a long term holder.

Absolutely. And mate, I gotta ask you one more question before we wrap up. Mate, you're thinking of bringing it home? So you live in California, you've come back to Australia for a little conference and I heard that you're looking for some real estate. Mate, did you get a bit of a shock at the prices out there on the east coast?

Yes, yes. I learned all about stamp duty.

The added barrier to not only taking out a mortgage and putting down a down payment, you got that extra stamp duty on top.

You look in Sydney too.

Looking in Sydney.

Oh, Jesus.

Yeah, Sydney and my wife, like we thought Californians were obsessed with real estate, but she's realizing like Aussies are just absurdly obsessed with real estate. It's just talked about everywhere. It's a little annoying that house prices aren't shown on the Internet. You can't just go and ask for or you can't just go and look up what previous homes were bought at or what they're listing at. It's always like contact the agent. So it's a big secret game over here.

So it's been fun learning this market but yeah, it's hard to tell if it's justified anymore.

And why Sydney, not California?

Probably we're going to do both. I'm half American, half Australian. My dad's side's Australian, my mum's side's American. So it's only, it's a non stop fly. Thankfully it's, it's not too far away. It's a long flight but it's non stop. You know, there's no layovers. So that, that would be the goal, is that to live that hybrid lifestyle. Yeah, yeah.

Awesome.

I do have one tip for you. Go and get yourself a CoreLogic subscription. So within that you can see what houses previously sold for as well as a report on them and also like area reports. So if you want a house that's for sale, you can see what the nearest ones have sold for and actually get the price. That's what all the agents have access to. All my mates that are investing in property have a subscription to CoreLogic. Go and do that. And it's a really good tool because otherwise it's just smoke and mirrors out there, mate.

Yeah, I was going to say someone else mentioned RP data.

Yeah, it's the same thing.

Yeah, same thing. Good. I'll do CoreLogic. I'm in.

Amazing. Nathan, man, that's been absolutely unbelievable. You know and now it's flown by, man. Thank you so much. Where can our listeners find you online, engage with you, get a part of your community?

Sure, yeah. On Twitter, I'm Mr. Cartographer. Underscore. On Farcaster, I'm Mr. Cartographer. Telegram. The same thing, Mr. Cartographer. So those are probably the three places my DMs are open. So anybody that's an entrepreneur that just wants to get into Web3 vesting on a personal level, fellow VCs, and pretty much anyone in the space, if you hit me up, I'm pretty wide open to say hello and have a chat. So those are probably three best places.

Amazing, man. Legendary. Thank you so much again, man, for coming on. I know you're a busy dude and enjoy the ETH conference next couple of days.

Thank you.

Yeah, it's. It's valuable. And listeners, thank you so much for tuning in. Collector Shift members, those that remember Nathan, I think we'd all agree that that was just. It was just. It was awesome. I remember the good days when you were creating content, man, I missed that. You know, it was really exciting. So thank you so much, listeners. We'd love for you to share this episode around. If you've got anyone do you think will find value in this, please share it with a friend, a fellow crypto investor, a fellow Degen. That's how we grow the podcast and come to you each and every week. No advertising, no affiliates, no commissions, no nonsense. We want to keep growing the podcast and helping you out. So thank you so much for listening and we'll see you on the next episode.

Thanks. Championship.