Joseph Argiro - Founder @ Fish Network

Welcome to another Founder Wisdom pod. We have Joseph Argyro with us today. Joseph is a founder at Fish Network. It's trust infrastructure for private markets. So interesting company we're gonna think of, uh, talk about today. It's like Shark Tank but with real money, uh, stablecoins. He's also founder of a company called Iron Key, uh, was previously head of crypto at UBS. How interesting is that? Um, so Joseph, welcome to podcast. Tell us a bit more about yourself and what you're up to.

Hey Charles, yeah, thanks for having me on. Um, so I ultimately started Fish Network to, to solve a problem that I had, which is, uh, which I experienced when I founded Iron Key Capital, which was a, a small blockchain, uh, multi-family office, which we— and we evolved into a venture fund, and we basically took those learnings of, of, uh, not being able to scale and having a small amount of capital, and it really just didn't— wasn't really, you know, a scalable business model. So, uh, and I learned that the hard way. So I took all those learnings to, to build Fish Network, which is an all-in-one solution to launch an investment club or a fund to invest together collaboratively with your colleagues, friends,, and, um, as a way to democratize access to private markets in the U.S.

Interesting. Um, let's dive into your past though before we get to this. So you started, I think, your first company 2015, right? Beyond the Tour. Um, how was that as a first entrepreneurial experience? And then I think your first big position was at Vanguard, right? Tell us a bit more about your background.

Yeah, so I went to school for business and engineering and the program was designed to build stuff and ship it, engineer things and bring them to market. So at the time, 2016, Uber for X was a very hot business model. So I built essentially Uber and Airbnb for college tours, allowing people to circumvent the college touring system. I had a lot of problems with that. The edtech space is a little bit resistant to innovation. But it's really how I learned trial by fire of how to build stuff and ship them. So had some success, but ultimately decided to move on and start a career at Vanguard. And my co-founder went to go work at Microsoft. So it was really just like almost like an accelerated learning curve in entrepreneurship. That was about a decade ago. And then I started at Vanguard for about 2 years, right until the price of Bitcoin started going up in 2017. That's about 9 years ago. And I, um, and I decided to— yeah, I became obsessed with it. I caught what people call the crypto virus. I was reading about it all day, podcasts in the gym, and, um, and eventually just took a job at a startup during the first crypto bull run that had a lot of success for a short period of time. So, and I helped build that startup to 50 people, multi-million in revenue over the first crypto bull run in 2018. And that's That's really how I— like, the failed startup opportunity, uh, and being a first employee in a, in a hyperscaling tech company in crypto was how I kind of cut my teeth in building stuff, right?

ICO Alert, right? $50K a month to $1 million a month. That's pretty crazy. Did you get shares out of that one if you were second employee?

Yeah, uh, yeah, I had 1%, um, and we were negotiating term sheets and then the market crashed, so I didn't I didn't see much of a return on that equity, more of a return of, again, on just a collapsed learning experience of having to like kind of be the first hire and like running around with a chicken with your head cut off trying to do everything. But we had a lot of success. Yeah, we— if you Googled ICO in 2017, we were the top search result on Google.

So yeah, I think I know ICO Alert. Like, I mean, I wasn't part of that craze, but I studied it, right? Uh, must have been exciting though, right? Like, there was crazy success stories, there was a bunch of fucking scams as well, right? How crazy was it to witness all of that?

Exactly. And I was basically— my job was to sit at the front lines and evaluate. This is before AI, right? I, I was evaluating by hand all of these different startups. There would be 10 to 20 that would submit on our website a day, and our— oh man, and, uh, half maybe half of them were scams, and the scams would just get better and better. Oh shit, basically just a legal fund— illegal fundraising for a token with no equity, right? So, uh, but for whatever reason, you know, people wanted to get involved, right? So we built them a way for these retail investors to evaluate objectively with data to decide which scam to invest in. And, uh, and, uh, and that's just like, that's what 99% of the market was. And, and like, that is ultimately the initial driver for Fish Network, which is like the, let's say, the like the fourth iteration of the, the ICO that is compliant in the US. It just, it just took a decade for the market to like mature and to grow up and for this opportunity to present itself.

Yeah, I describe it like as a bunch of degenerates, right? But you're like an educated guy, right? You came sort of from banking. You have that degenerate in you, but you're like educated, right? So you wouldn't blow your full money. How fine is the line between being a fucking degenerate gambler that just keeps losing all its money and making, I don't know, one day making like 10x, but that's your only win. You're like net in the hole, which is most— crypto investors, I think. And a guy like you that's more educated, right, like, how would you define that line?

Yeah, that's such a great question. Um, well, let me, let me say this. So, uh, and I'll let, I'll let the audience, or maybe you can decide what, what's where the line of gambling and, um, and trusting your gut and intuition is. But it's certainly a fine line. But in 2017, when I was working at Vanguard, I was taking out personal loans to buy Bitcoin and Ethereum and BNB in 2018, like $25K. I would just pay them back with my paycheck. And that was how I got started. I started with zero and was paying— just, yeah, took my paychecks, paid off the loans, and bought crypto, just BNB, Ethereum, and Bitcoin. And you could consider that gambling, right? I mean, that's kind of like—

And what's BNB? I never— oh, Binance. Okay, yeah, okay, go ahead.

Sorry, which was, which was a great investment. I wouldn't— I don't know if it— I, I would definitely not invest in it today, but you know, timing's everything, right? It was a really— it was— they, they were the first creator of DeFi, so they were like the pioneer of what— when before DeFi existed, BNB was the trade. And, um, and so, uh, well, so that one, um, so Uh, that is, uh, kind of the mindset that I'm coming from. So like, when I see an opportunity, I tend to jump on it, and I tend to jump on it big. Um, so I did that. And then, um, and then, uh, in, uh, in 2019, I was setting up, uh, Helium hotspots all over the US to, um, and, um, that, that was another, you know, good, good trade, uh, basically minting those HNT tokens. They're, they're now, uh, partnered with T-Mobile and as an IO, a data center play of just making connectivity in low, low connectivity areas.

Interesting.

And, um, but just to answer your question, uh, but really where, where you draw the line is that is, uh, is, yeah, is, is, is, I don't know if, if you— it really depends on who, on who's, on who's drawing the line, right? Some might consider it gambling, some might consider it trusting your gut and intuition. But, you know, I left Vanguard for the startup job with no real guarantees, and it worked for a short period of time, but then the market collapsed a year later, and then it all fell apart, right?

But so, you know, it's like doing your homework, right? I think degenerates is just, they hang out way too much in hype groups. You know, and they just get fucking hyped up, you know, just seeing like all these, these bro messages via someone doing the work and being technical and researching white papers. Back then you didn't have AI to chat with and do deep research, but like you said, the virus grew on you. So I guess it's like long-form reading, it's talking to other smart people, right? And just not being emotionally hyped up. I think that's the main difference, right?

And, and, uh, and I think it's also just learning from other smart people is super, super important. But you get a lot of people who have this herd mentality and just want to chase the next hot thing. And, um, and, you know, I think we're definitely seeing that with, with, with AI right now because there's some physical constraints that are taking place. But ultimately, I think the ones who succeed across market cycles are the ones who actually take the road less traveled and have conviction and build in a category where people are scared to build in rather than just competing in hypercompetitive spaces. And I guess that's just my take on choosing where to spend my energy as a founder.

Right, but then after ICO Alert, you got a job at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, basically. Yeah, product manager again, but Blockchain Innovation Lab, uh, and then UBS head of crypto. Like, these seems to be very odd jobs. I didn't even know that blockchain jobs existed there. Um, how did you got these?

Yeah, well, uh, the, uh, the, the Hewlett Packard opportunity was when they were just starting to explore blockchain at the enterprise level. So think HP, Intel, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, and they had just spun up a small innovation team to focus on enterprise blockchain. And they, you know, the startup, the early-stage crypto experience was relevant at the time, essentially just like flipping that on its head and thinking top-down instead of bottom-up. So I did some enterprise pilots at Hewlett-Packard, but ultimately, the, the, the enterprises during that era, um, really just didn't— weren't able to wrap their heads around the implications of blockchain. And they were trying to make it as a permissioned network with the Hyperledger Fabric that IBM created, which, um, is interesting because, um, it's like the same thing of in 2000, people thought the intranet was going to be the big thing where people could communicate in one company and have, you a centralized place to communicate, but really what ended up being the innovation was the open internet, not the intranet. And seems like the big enterprises kind of made that mistake the same, the, you know, history doesn't always repeat itself, but oftentimes it rhymes. And that was a similar situation where they were focused on permission blockchains, which was wrong, which was directionally wrong at the time. But interestingly enough, you know, now 6, 7 years later, actually what's in what's hot in the market in this space is not crypto. It's actually real-world use cases with blockchain. So the market has caught up and has now smartened up to realize that, well, it's not permissioned blockchains, but it's really like a hybrid approach of being public and having credible neutrality and being decentralized has value because so that one company can't just, you know, write the rules and that has some value, but You also need to make it fair and decentralized to serve the individual people, which is kind of why we got into crypto in the first place. But the space has evolved into really just instead of everyone got into the space for the ideology as a missionary. But over the past decade, we've just seen more and more, less missionaries and more mercenaries. Just people just coming in for a dollar, right? What you see with the gambling, the meme coins, and all that. And what Fish Network is trying to do is just bring that above board, to put real assets like art, real estate, M&A activity, venture capital, and just create a transparent collaborative framework for people to invest together. Um, and that's what we're trying to build.

Yeah, we're gonna talk about it, but before, we need to talk about what happened at UBS. Like, how can we ignore that? Yeah, what happened?

So, uh, so, um, well, uh, so let me back up a little bit. So Hewlett-Packard, uh, spent a couple years there. Uh, I ended up— I mentioned the Helium network, so I ended up pitching the Helium network as an integration to Hewlett-Packard, which I was unable to win funding for, which, uh, was a shame, and then ended up being a billion-dollar network. And so that's what— after that happened, I realized, well, I need to do something on my own. So that's when I started building Iron Key Capital about 5 years ago. But then another opportunity fell into my lap where working at UBS Wealth Management, where I was helping build the products that these high net worth individuals in wealth management were— these financial advisors were giving products and portfolio systems to to allow their clients to get exposure to crypto and venture capital. And so I was working on product, on just like product strategies to help them, these high net worth investors, get exposure to the space. And, and, and that was interesting to see, like how the institutional finance, you know, how that area, you know, how people, investors were thinking about that, which are typically a lot more risk averse, right? Like these people have, have lots of money, like they don't need to gamble it in crypto. And, um, so, you know, the mark— so I say UBS was, I would say, behind, but they've definitely caught up into, into, into thinking around investing into tokenized funds and things like that.

So, um, that was my brain confused UBS with Credit Suisse. Uh, actually it's UBS that acquired Credit Suisse, right? Like, uh, when they failed. Um, but yes, if they acquired all the Credit Suisse investors, right, or people that had their banking there, I'm guessing some people that still wanted their banking to become— to be private had an interest for crypto, right? Because that was the full pitch of Credit Suisse. It was, it was private banking, right? No one's gonna have their eyes on on what we— on what happens at Credit Suisse. And that started evaporating, right? Like the, the, the Switzerland mode started evaporating itself, right? So was it like an alternative investment for like ultra-high-net-worth people to like park their money in private spaces? Right.

It was essentially building diversified portfolio, uh, indexes for the high net worth individuals to get exposure in a safe way to some of the innovation in venture and crypto at the time. But like you mentioned, so UBS bought Credit Suisse and part of my job was integrating some of the systems together. And that ended up being a nightmare. They spent billions of dollars trying to integrate the systems and ultimately, just couldn't do it. Um, so it ended up being a bit of a fiasco.

Uh, and in that time you started Iron Key, right? Like while working at UBS. Uh, how did that go and what was the thesis behind that one? It's just like, I know a bunch of rich people and they would like to park their money there. Um, let me start like a family office-like type of fund. Was that the thesis?

That was the original thesis in 2021. And, uh, and it was the right— it was the right thesis at the time. But really, what didn't exist is there wasn't— there wasn't really a good way for, uh, institutional investors in the US or professional investors in the US to get diversified exposure to the long tail of innovation in the liquid crypto markets in 2021. Because you could— but nowadays, you can just get all the assets on Coinbase, basically. And that That opportunity has since evaporated, but there was a window for that opportunity where people didn't want to dive off the deep end into the crypto and manage their own keys and things like that. So a hedge fund kind of made sense. And that was the original thesis, but I raised a couple million bucks and just realized, oh, the management fees don't cut it. Like, this is more of a headache than a business. And that's when I pivoted to venture. When FTX collapsed in 2022, and I was working in venture because— and this was where I really learned about crypto venture was at ICO Alert years ago, but I didn't really know what venture capital was back then, but I was doing it anyway, right? Just evaluating early-stage crypto startups. And that was really what captivated me, and I developed a serious passion for crypto venture starting in 2022. So I pivoted the whole business, Iron Key Capital, to the venture space. We built a syndicate and an education program teaching people how to write their first angel check. And through that trial and error of building a syndicate, I just realized there's got to be a better way than just running SPVs and paying $10K, $15K for every SPV, which— and I was only raising $100K roughly for each deal. So the economics didn't really make sense. I was just doing it to build track record, and I wasn't really making it. I was doing all this work and not really making any money. And so I realized, well, there's got to be a better way. So I pivoted to an investment club model. And after a couple of years of R&D, I've realized, well, there is a better way. It's called an investment club in the US. And it's a lot more lightweight compliance, but is also non-standardized and kind of a pain in the ass to structure. So I launched an investment club at IronKey. It was called IronKey Venture Partners. And, you know, we were— it was a proof of concept, right? We were thinking this was our— my unique opinionated take on retail venture capital. Like, how could that look? So we just rounded up $10K checks from about 10 to 15 people and then deployed into some deals to learn how to operate as an investment club where people are sharing ownership over sourcing, diligence, and just kind of doing it together. That's basically the opposite of a fund where you have a GP and an LP and the LPs are passive, right? Like they don't, they don't want to be involved. They're trading money for time because they don't, they don't care to be involved. Investment clubs are effectively the opposite. You want active investors that are domain experts in certain verticals and they pool their capital and they vote and invest together because they know what they're investing in. So it's like micro communities structured as investment clubs and, and, and through that process of building the investment club at IronKey is where we just real, uh, figured out like all the operational compliance best practice workflows that we need to build to do this at scale. And that's what kind of created Fish Network, was this idea of community-driven investing.

So if I, if I invest in Fish Network, what's the difference if I invest in an AngelList syndicate? Give me the difference between both me if I invest in you as an investor.

Right, so AngelList, uh, productized the SPV so you can invest with, uh, lower minimums.

The—

but, um, what the difference is with Fish Network is that AngelList owns your data and they take a chunk, about 5%, so 25% of the carried interest. For any investor that finds your syndicate on AngelList. And the real problem is that you just don't own the relationship with the LP. So if you want to move off AngelList, you effectively can't. AngelList owns your LP relationship, not you. So what, what, what I— what we built at Iron Key was effectively in a— we built our own operational system to run our syndicate in a very cheap way where you just really just need like, you know, Gmail and maybe a Zoom account and And the other, everything else you can cut, you can, uh, you can, uh, stitch together with, you know, lightweight automation. And, um, and that— and so, so with those, those two key reasons are why we decided to, to, um, to, to build Fish Network, because it's more transparent, we accept stablecoins as investment, and it's lower costs. And, and, and the key value driver is that you'll pay anywhere from $8K to $15K on AngelList And on Fish Network, you pay $6K in annual SaaS, but you can do as many deals as you want. So it's effectively a multi-asset SPV for the price of a single asset SPV. So you're not paying deal by deal. So it's more like persistent investor community infrastructure if you're deploying into more than one deal. And that's just how we're differentiating the market today compared to AngelList.

Got it. So you figured out the full compliance and backend, and is it only flat fees that fully how you you make your money? Why not a percentage?

That's a really good question. So, uh, uh, we, we can't take a percentage of the capital raised because that trips up broker-dealer regulation. And, and I learned firsthand that management fees don't really cut it unless you have $25-50 million in AUM. Then the management fees start to be, be material. But if you're a micro fund manager, it doesn't, doesn't work. So, okay, so what do you do? Well, what we built on Fish Network is that you can charge a flat organizer fee. So it's pre-disclosed to the investors up front. And when the fundraising is successful, the Fish School organizer gets that flat fee in USDC right to their wallet upon, upon the successful fundraising, because it's a lot of work to set up a syndicate and you really don't get paid that very well. So this was really our workaround is that, well, a flat fee is totally kosher when it comes to kind of SEC regulations, right? It's not a percentage of the capital, it's just a flat fee. So that's how the organizer gets paid. So if the organizer pays $6K and they can, they set their, they pay $6K to use Fish Network, they set their organizer fee to $6K, well, they effectively just did it for free, right? They don't, so they're not going out of pocket, right? So, and, and, and so you can, and you can structure it so that you actually do make a little bit of money, right? And, and, um, and, and the, the main value prop is that you can spread that across multiple deals. So it's like shared infrastructure, shared SPV infrastructure, rather than just like doing the same thing over and over again for each deal. Um, yeah, so that's, so that's a little bit about the dynamics of the fees.

And your ICP is mostly crypto people, or do you go outside of that as well?

So our go-to-market right now is crypto investment clubs and M&A is where we're starting. And we also have a hybrid liquid illiquid solution where most fund administrators only support, well, venture or hedge funds. We can support both. And what makes us unique is supporting the illiquid assets. So we're starting with crypto investment clubs, very narrow-focused ICP. But, uh, and then our— we're— then we're expanding into the M&A space. But this technology is sector and asset agnostic. So if it works here, it'll work in real estate, art, precious metals— really the long tail of alternative assets.

How successful is it right now? How many folks do you have on the platform and currently paying?

So, uh, we're, we're live with 3 customers, uh, and we're in, we're in private beta. So right now we're, uh, we're just, we're, we're delivering the software as an operational and administrative tool for these emerging managers who want to— who are effectively power users, right? They, they can launch a Fish School alongside their fund, um, and they— people, these, these, these, uh, firms have ran a syndicate in the past and I was able to convince them to go with the investment club structure. So right now, really, it's just, uh, it's 3 clubs of about 50 people in each group. So really, really just testing it out and making sure that the foundation is solid before I open it up. But, uh, open it up. But really, the vision is that, you know, we can— anyone can start a fund for $6K. So it does—

it—

the goal is to democratize access to private capital. But, uh, We just take a phased approach just to not, not get, not get, um, you know, not put ourselves into any, uh, unnecessary legal risk up front.

And what's a Fish School? Is that like a fund? I see here $250 USD cash down, and then I see here, uh, $6K a year. Can you explain more about these two products?

Yeah, so the Fish School is a pooled capital vehicle. So it could be an investment club or a private fund. And this is the main value prop, like I said, is that you set it up once and you can do as many deals as you want to provide investors diversified exposure. So everyone— but it's a collaborative investing platform. So people are expected to be active. So there's no— we actually bind in our fund structure, we bind the GP-LP relationship together so that everyone is supposed to be sophisticated and have domain expertise in what their investment thesis is at the Fish School. So that's the product, right? Really is $6K in annual SaaS. And we take a distribution fee when assets get liquidated on the platform. The idea is that it's cheaper than any fund admin on the market. And with our— with Fish Network, you don't need a fund admin. You can just raise a couple hundred grand or even less, or a couple million bucks, and you have a turnkey solution to run your fund. And you don't need to quit your day job, and you don't need to spend $50K on legal fees to get it done.

I love it, dude. Um, where can people find out more about you?

Uh, you can find me on Twitter at Joseph Argyro. Uh, our Fish Network socials are Fish Network Co, um, because our website is fishnetwork.co, and, um, you can find me on, on LinkedIn at Joseph Argyro. And, um, yeah, mostly on LinkedIn.

That was Joe and Charles Cormier, founder