Millionaire ex-poker pro explains journey to crypto | Haseeb Qureshi

I am absolutely convinced that crypto is going to have a say in what.

The future of money looks like.

What is the most exciting investment that you've made so far while being at Dragonfly?

You know, if I had to choose one, I think I would probably choose maker. If you believe that the core thing.

That makes crypto successful is that it's.

Permissionless, then a lot less of what is.

Working in crypto is mysterious.

What's up, everyone? My name is Jackson. I am your host and journalist at Cointelegraph. Today I have the pleasure of talking to Haseeb Qureshi, who is a managing partner at crypto investment firm Dragonfly Capital. How are you doing today, Haseeb?

I'm doing well, thanks for having me.

So a few fun facts that our audience might want to know about you. At the age of 19, you were a self made millionaire and a professional poker player. So how does someone go from having that early, illustrious career to getting involved in crypto? Could you just describe a little bit, you know, your life's journey and how you ended up at this point briefly, you know, and how you particularly, you know, how you made your way eventually to crypto and blockchain.

Yeah.

So that it's, it's a long story.

So I'll give you this super, super rich version. So I was a professional poker player from when I was 16 till I was 21. And I was quite successful. I was a high stakes poker player back then.

One of the things that I think.

Learned at a very young age was.

That, which is something, I think it.

Has taken people in crypto some time to learn themselves, is the really obvious disconnect between money and happiness.

In that you can't help but notice crypto is a place where you see.

Lots of, especially very young people who've made a lot of money very quickly.

And you can't help but notice that.

It'S not as though everybody in crypto crypto is incredibly happy all the time.

In fact, it's one of the places where you see people kind of the.

Most angry and shouty and kind of getting into fights.

I mean, it's incredibly stressful as well.

Right, right, right, exactly, exactly. And poker is the exact same way.

Poker is an incredibly stressful lifestyle.

And so after I quit poker, I.

Eventually decided that I wanted to get into the tech industry because I'd always had a lot of interest in entrepreneurship and a lot of the, you know, the big tech companies and all the innovation that happened out of Silicon Valley.

I was born in Texas So I.

Ended up moving out here to Silicon Valley. I live in San Francisco now, about six years ago, learned how to code, and eventually I was working as a software engineer at Airbnb. And that was where I first caught the crypto bug.

And that was.

That was early 2017, when I first got into crypto.

So I'd known about Bitcoin for a very long time.

You know, I bought some Bitcoin back a couple years before, but it never really clicked for me what the big idea was. It always seemed like kind of a technological curiosity thing that, you know, some of my friends were speculating on or using to buy drugs or whatever.

And the thing that I think really clicked it into place was that when I was working at Airbnb, I was.

Working on the payments fraud team.

And there Airbnb is a global business.

We have banking requirements and payments requirements all over the world, because, of course, travel is international.

And one of the things you realize.

When you're working on a global payment system is just how it's held together by duct tape.

Like, all these disparate systems that were.

Not built to interoperate with each other.

You have things like CSVs that get.

Emailed every midnight and people manually going through individual transactions and reconciling them.

And it became super obvious that this.

System that we're using today to pay.

People around the world is not designed.

For the 21st century with global digital first businesses that are operating all around the world 24 7.

And it occurred to me that, like, okay, as an engineer, you see a.

System like that that's so broken, and.

Your first instance is, oh, we should just. We should check this out and we should start over.

And that's what crypto is.

Crypto is a bunch of engineers and economists and game theorists and philosophers who came together and said, knowing everything that we know today, how would you do money differently? How would you design the system from the ground up? And maybe you would make it decentralized.

You make it use cryptography, and you make the monetary policy algorithmic.

All these ideas that have come together.

In all these different cryptocurrencies.

And look, I'm not convinced, and I.

Wasn'T convinced that we're all going to be paying each other with Bitcoin 50 years from now.

But I am absolutely convinced that crypto is going to have a say in.

What the future of money looks like. You know, we're not. We're not turning back the clock. We're not putting this back in the box. So the way that Money works in the future is going to be different.

And crypto is a part of how.

The world changes with respect to the technology behind money. And that's what got me on board to the crypto industry.

But coming from a background as a poker player, I think gives me a.

Lot of advantages in the crypto industry.

So for one, it's, you know, poker trains you one to be very, very clear minded about making, you know, fundamentally sound decisions and to not get distracted.

By results as opposed to engaging in the right process. That is a huge boon in crypto because crypto, of course, is full of.

Manias, it's full of, you know, hype cycles, it's full of tokens that pump.

For no reason and then eventually going to come back down.

And if you can't sort of use.

Your third eye to really see like.

What is really happening here, ignore the noise, ignore the fanfare, what is really.

Going on with this token or with this project or with this technology?

Poker trains you day in and day out to really see clearly the truth.

And not just what you want to see. And I think that helps me a lot within crypto investing.

And then there are things like thinking.

Probabilistically, you know, being able to be.

Able to make high stakes decisions effectively and to not, not get too mired.

In your own emotions when you're, you know, of course you have super volatile markets, things are going up, going down. Poker trains you very, very well to think about how to, how to, how.

To sort of calm your mind and.

Your emotions so you can just make good decisions. And in crypto, that turns out to be also tremendously valuable.

Thank you, thank you for giving me those parallels. You know, I'm always, I'm always very curious to see how people's past life experience feed into their ability to work within crypto. It reminds me a bit of Steve Jobs Stanford commencement speech, connecting the dots, to see how all those things that you ended up doing in the past somehow come together in the future or in the present, I guess, to make sense. Thanks for giving that parallel there. But now I'd like to talk about, you're a managing partner at Dragonfly Investment, so I'd like to talk a little bit about what you're doing there. So first off, you know, what is the most exciting investment that you've made so far while being at Dragonfly? Yes, exciting is a broad word.

You know, exciting is a very broad word. So let me start with the first.

Part of your question of, you know, what I do at Dragonfly.

So I'm one of the two managing.

Partners and I lead our investment team and I also lead the office in San Francisco. So we have an office in Beijing and office in San Francisco ago.

And, you know, most of my day.

Is spent doing one of a few things, either topping entrepreneurs, talking to our portfolio companies and helping support them and, you know, helping them figure out, you know, what they're going to do with their project. Go to market, marketing, distribution, all that.

Stuff, and then just, you know, doing simple things that I think all of.

Us in the crypto industry do.

Just writing and reading and trying to.

Understand what's going on in the world.

Which is if anybody who's in crypto.

Needs to spend a lot of their time doing that because the world is just moving out from under us so rapidly.

You know, anyone investing.

That's right, that's right. I mean, even, even someone like you.

I imagine you spend a lot of your time just like keeping up for the fire hose.

It's your job, it's my job. We're all in this.

That's right.

That's right. It's all of our jobs.

So now my most exciting investment. That's tough for me to say. It's like asking me like, you know.

Who'S your, who's your favorite child out of your children?

You know, if I had to choose one, I think I would probably choose Maker, which ironically is kind of a. Has been relatively quiet in this defi.

Mania that's been going on for the last last month or so.

But it's, it's in the long run.

I think the investment that I'm. That I'm most excited about, because I.

Think, you know, we've seen stablecoins.

Those are not familiar. MakerDAO is a decentralized stablecoin. It's a. Well, it's a decentralized credit facility that produces a stable coin kind of as a side effect.

And the stable coin is called dai.

You know, it's maybe the fourth largest stablecoin by issuance or something like that. Third or fourth.

And it is, it is the largest.

Decentralized stablecoin by issuance.

And I'm convinced that decentralized stable coins.

Are going to become really, really important in the next three to five years.

As an investor, one of the advantages.

That I have over other people who are investing in the space is that.

Because we're venture capitalists, we can afford.

To invest over much longer time horizons than people who are trading in and out of these tokens and worried about things going up or down.

So we're investors in compound and we're.

Investors in a number of other defi projects that have been doing really well in this mania that's been going on these last few days.

But Maker, I think, is one of.

These projects that like the the story.

Of stable coins, stablecoins have grown dramatically.

Within the last year. You know, we now are, I think, up to almost $10 billion of stable coins issued and almost a trillion dollars of transaction volume.

And that trend is only going to grow. You know, it's already clear, I think, that pound for pound, the most product.

Market fit of anything in crypto is stablecoins. You know, one thing that we, one.

That we know we don't need to.

Fool ourselves on is that there's enormous demand for dollars all around the world.

And stable coins give people a better.

Way of getting access to those dollars.

But I don't think that the regulated.

Versions or the centralized versions of these stablecoins are going to be able to last forever.

And when the, when the clock runs.

Out on decentralized stablecoin plays, then I.

Think it will be will eventually get.

To that moment where it becomes clear.

That, you know, everything that these decentralized.

Stablecoins were doing was a dress rehearsal.

For the really, really big moment when.

Eventually tether is going to have to go. I think these regulated stablecoins will have to significantly clamp down on the activity that they allow on top of them because they're centralized and totally regulated.

And then you'll see like, look, the.

Affordance that people have of tether that you can just send it anywhere, that.

It effectively is permissionless, it sort of.

Just feels no different than bitcoin.

The only way you're going to get.

That in the long run is through a decentralized stablecoin.

And I think that process might take a few years before the A to.

B to C to D plays out.

But eventually we'll get to a place.

Where the decentralized stablecoins become the only game in town.

And for that reason, I'm very excited.

About what Maker is building is a.

Very slow and steady path to being.

Ready to pick up the baton when it finally shows up.

I like that. And Maker's really interesting because it's essentially like a decentralized bank, which poses a very distinct threat to a lot lot of legacy financial institutions. So it's an interesting one to keep an eye on for sure. I also like to ask you, you've been managing this portfolio at Dragonfly for I think, three years. Now, right?

No, no, no. So the fund was founded two years.

Ago, and I joined one year ago.

Okay, one year. So what has been your biggest learning experience so far? Managing the portfolio at Dragonfly.

Biggest learning experience. That's a great question.

I would say one of my biggest.

Learning experiences is just getting smarter on China. So I, you know, I.

Since I've joined Dragonfly, I have massively.

Increased my understanding of what's going on and the differences between the east and west when it comes to crypto, you know, so before I was at Dragonfly, I was at another firm called Metastable Capital, which is one of the largest Silicon Valley crypto funds.

And, you know, at Metisable, we never.

Really did any Asia deals.

And the reason why we didn't do them is that we just knew there.

Was a ton of adverse selection. Like we just didn't really know what we were doing.

It was very difficult for us to diligence these deals.

They look so different than the Silicon Valley, you know, sort of traditional Western deals that you see that they might not all come out of Silicon Valley, but they come out of, you know, Berlin or Tel Aviv or New York or Toronto or whatever.

The deals that you see coming out of China are incredibly different. The types of entrepreneurs, the type of businesses they're tackling, the dynamics behind the.

Companies at scale, they're very, very different.

And it took me a while to.

Really understand that and getting connected with more of these entrepreneurs and coming to understand the way they think about the space.

The interesting thing is that most of.

The technological innovation thus far in crypto has come from the West. It's come from those relatively few places that I mentioned, but most of the trading volume, most of the adoption, and most of the really large unicorns, if you think of mining companies and the lending companies and so on, they come from Asia.

And so you have this, like this.

Kind of import export thing going on, right? This sort of flow between the east and the West.

And one of the things that I've come to realize, you know, that was.

That was the extent of my understanding back when I was at Metastable.

And I think since joining Dragonfly and.

Spending more time in China and with some of these Chinese entrepreneurs is one.

Realizing how quick they're catching up. So the, you know, especially since, if.

You guys Remember, in late 2018, 2019, Xi Jinping announced this blockchain plus initiative in China.

This big thing, relatively unprecedented.

Last time they did this was with AI saying that blockchain is strategic importance for China.

And this basically turned blockchain in China overnight from being a taboo into being, like, a patriotic duty, Right. To go, and advance China's position in blockchain technology. And all of a sudden, a generation of young people who saw blockchain as this weird thing, kind of like we.

Were talking with, you know, earlier in discussion about poker.

It's like, weird thing to bet their.

Careers on that their, you know, their.

Parents and their peers would kind of look at them odd. Like, you know, you're getting into, like.

Marijuana sales or something.

You know, it's like this, you know, kind of vaguely disreputable thing that you're up to, and suddenly now it's like, oh, no, this is great. Like, you know, all the top universities are, like, teaching blockchain classes, and suddenly.

It'S cool to be doing crypto.

And I've realized what a big shift it's been in just the status, the.

Relationships, and the quality of entrepreneurs that are going in China.

That has been a huge learning for.

Me, is just kind of seeing how quickly something like that can change and watching that transformation happen in real time.

Yeah. China has an immense amount of power, and given their recent product or their advancements with their cbdc, it'll be really interesting to see how that whole side of the world develops. And I think you're totally accurate there. China just works differently from the West. So it's really important to understand because, you know, at the end of the day, crypto is global, bitcoin is global, and you got to understand all areas of the world. If you want to be able to make sense of this thing as you were talking about before, making sense of it all is really important. And you tweeted recently something that caught my eye. You said that people are increasingly convinced that the core thing about crypto is not that it's decentralized, but that it's permissionless. So what exactly is convincing you of this idea?

So this is a yes. So this goes to a much larger.

Conversation that I've been having with myself.

So I wrote a piece that I.

Shared on Laura Shin's podcast Unchained, where I talked about basically how I think there's been this narrative within crypto that decentralization is the primary and most important thing about crypto and about what makes it so compelling and so interesting.

And it is the buzzword.

It's the buzzword that's at the center of crypto. And if.

If there's one thing that somebody who's.

Coming new into this, you know, for lack of a better Term this, this culture of crypto.

The one thing that they learned is that the prime value of crypto and.

Crypto people and crypto culture is decentralization.

And I think this is, I think this is wrong. I think decentralization is a means to an end. There's nothing intrinsically valuable about decentralization, but decentralization gives us more of other things.

That we want and that we care about.

And so those. Another way of putting this is that.

There are terminal things that we actually want, right?

So some things that we actually want.

Is we want censorship, resistance, we want.

Security, we want value, we want usability, we want low transaction fees, we want.

Having it being cheap to use these systems.

And decentralization, sometimes making the system more decentralized is sometimes a way of giving.

Us those properties that we care about.

But sort of mindlessly worshiping decentralization as though it is in and of itself the primary thing is just wrong. It's sort of getting lost within this, mistaking the, you know, an original instrumental.

Goal for the final goal.

So what is the final goal?

Right, well, there are a lot of final goals. There's not just one.

There are a lot of different things.

That you want to optimize for in building a robust crypto network.

But I think what I'm pointing to when I say that the primary thing.

Is being permissionless, not decentralized, is that.

You know, look at tether.

Tether, I think is an obvious example here because it's, you know, it's incredibly dominant crypto. It does more trading volume than bitcoin on most days.

And tether is not decentralized at all. But as I alluded to earlier, you could argue quite well that tether is basically permissionless. You can go buy tether from anywhere.

You can transfer $30 million in a single transaction.

You don't need to tell anybody who.

You are and what you're doing, right?

Like you never need to ask permission.

From tether to acquire tether to use tether to sell tether, whatever.

Only thing that you need to acquire.

Permission for is to participate in an on ramp or an off ramp.

But for the most part, like that is not really what we need tether for, right?

Like most tether is a stand in for dollars, not a way to get dollars.

So, and you know, another, of course, we just saw WBTC go from almost.

Nothing to now, you know, over $100 million in issuance. And I suspect that that's only going to grow as a way of bringing bitcoin onto defi And I remember having conversations with this about people or about.

This with folks six months ago, before.

Any of this happened, that I thought WBTC was going to grow like crazy. This is when it had like, you know, a million dollars in deposits for the.

For the same reason that I think.

The core thing that people really care about is permissionlessness.

They want the ability to do what.

They want to do at any given time.

And, you know, I remember Naval made.

A very good point about this that.

You know, he said, if you remember back in 2018, you know, DEXS weren't.

Really doing a whole lot. And it was a very quiet time for Dex as compared to centralized exchanges. You know, Binance grew up from seemingly out of nowhere and sort of taking over the world.

And, you know, what Naval pointed out.

Which I thought was very prescient, was.

That, you know, when people talk about Dexs, they sort of have this idea in their head that, you know, Dex is. It's, you know, it's like this. It's this exchange that anybody can use. You know, it's not totally unregulated. It lists any asset that you want. You can trade anything. And there's no kyc, there's no aml.

There'S none of that.

It's just like this total wild west, right?

And that's what's so awesome about Dexs.

Well, that's exactly what Binance was like. Binance was sort of everything that you wanted that you said that you wanted from a Dex, but it's a centralized exchange. But it sort of doesn't matter, right? To the extent that you trust finance.

And you sort of expect them not to. Not to exit, scam you, which ostensibly a lot of people do.

It gave people most of the properties.

That they said they wanted from a.

Dex, and that is the extent to which it succeeded. Now, I think that's not to say.

That I don't think Dexs are valuable.

But I think that it all sort of. If you believe that the core thing.

That makes crypto successful is that it's.

Permissionless, then a lot less of what.

Is working in crypto is mysterious.

Thank you everyone for watching. That was Haseeb Qureshi, who is a managing partner at Dragonfly Capital. My name is Jackson. And if you enjoyed the video, please hit that like button and subscribe to our channel Cointelegraph. Like subscribe and Hodl.

Sam.