Why I Left my FinTech Startup to Focus on Crypto Asset Management

In 2013, I left a successful 13-year career on Wall Street (investment banker → turned trader →  turned portfolio manager) to help start a FinTech company. I was no longer interested in being just another person executing someone else’s vision; I wanted to feel the passion of building something myself.  That move paid off, and I spent the next 5 years building an amazing FinTech company from the ground up.

But today, it’s time for me to leave that successful startup company in order to begin a new journey - I’m building a crypto-focused investment management platform.  Now that I’m back in asset management, I’ll have to get used to saying “Past performance does not necessarily indicate future results.”  But I do believe past startup success can and will indicate future startup success… and I’m excited to get going.

How did I get involved in Crypto-assets?

I first heard about Bitcoin in February 2014 when I stumbled upon a  fascinating analysis posted on Harvest Exchange by  Eric Gravengaard , a portfolio manager at Rock Trading who believed BTC would approach $50,000/BTC (vs current values around $500/BTC at the time).  I don’t know Eric. In fact, I’ve never even emailed or Tweeted Eric. But I want to publicly thank him for introducing me to Bitcoin (not surprisingly, it looks as if Eric is now  running his own Blockchain advisory business  - if you’re reading this, you can expect a call from me soon!).  

But this is NOT just another “overnight Bitcoin millionaire story”.  Let me make one thing clear. I’m not thanking Eric for making me money.  I didn’t invest a single penny into Bitcoin in 2014. In fact, I didn’t invest in Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrencies until early 2017.  

So why am I so grateful to Eric?  

Like many people, especially non-developers and non-gamers like myself, my first reaction to cryptocurrencies was that this was a fool’s game.  Or that this was a scam or a bubble. I couldn’t wrap my head around the technology, or the value. But at least I was aware of it, which in many cases throughout my investing career, might have at least warranted making a small speculative investment just to incentivize me to follow the progress.  Unfortunately in this case, even figuring out HOW to physically buy Bitcoin seemed too daunting and overwhelming to warrant even the smallest investment at the time.

So I remained a passive observer.  

Over the next 4 years, I continued to focus my energy on running what was now a very  successful FinTech company , but I found myself re-reading Eric’s 2014 post each time Bitcoin made headlines in the news or came up over beers with friends.  It was becoming impossible NOT to see the wide-reach of both Bitcoin and Blockchain technology. Slowly, I stopped worrying about the investment, and instead, started focusing on the long-lasting application of this transformative technology.  I had just spent 18 years of my life in Financial Services and Financial Technology questioning the many inefficiencies that seemed so easily primed for disruption. High fees, too many middlemen, no transparency, complicated products that served the creators better than the purchaser, poor discovery.  But with blockchain, I could finally see something that I perceived to be the  ultimate disrupter .

It didn’t take me long to go deep down the Blockchain rabbit hole … Twitter, Reddit, Medium, whitepapers, and discussions over slack with my own Development team.  It took me months to form my own opinions, and many more months to finally dip my toes in. But slowly, people I’d never heard of during my 15 years in the Financial Services industry (like  Kyle Samani  and  Ari Paul ) were now becoming important influencers in my investing and professional future.  Similarly, others that I’d known for years in more traditional investment capacities (like  Mark Yusko at Morgan Creek ,  Cathie Wood at Ark Invest , and  Greg Foss at 3iQ ), were taking outspoken stances on the future implications of blockchain technology to financial services. It was becoming impossible to sit idly by.

I hit a tipping point in early 2017, where I knew this could no longer be something that I casually pursued, and instead was the chance of a lifetime to reinvent my career one more time.  I knew I was going to get involved in this industry, it was just a matter of when and how. When my dad asked me what I was doing, I told him “I’m basically going to work for the ‘Internet’ in 1995”, which was another way of saying “It’s impossible to know exactly where we are headed, but it is going to be impactful and we’ll learn a lot along the way.”

Let me back up a second.

Before I started my career at Lehman Brothers in 2001, I read 2 financial books preparing me for what lay ahead.  The first, “Liar’s Poker”, was written by the now famous Michael Lewis. The second, “Monkey Business”, was written by former investment banker Peter Troob.  My two takeaways from these books were:
 

• Why am I getting into investment banking if it’s this inefficient and ridiculous - shouldn’t there be a better way?
   

• What would it have been like to be at the forefront of developing a new asset asset class (like Michael Milken did with High Yield bonds) rather than just transacting in an existing asset class?

Almost 20 years later, I now have the chance to answer both of these questions.

I moved to L.A. in August 2017, after spending 16 years in New York focused exclusively and myopically on what was directly in front of me. It didn’t take long to realize there was so much more out there beyond the traditional infrastructures I had been accustomed and wedded to.  Almost everyone I’ve met in L.A. is focused on either Cannabis, Augmented Reality or Blockchain. To me, all of these industries are growing, but only one has the chance to be so groundbreaking that it alters all parts of everyday life.

For a while, it was difficult to see how a non-Developer like myself could really get into Blockchain.  But I knew that I had the perfect skill-set for when the right opportunity presented itself:

• A deep understanding of the traditional financial ecosystem

• A history of using technology to improve and enhance inefficient, legacy systems

When I met Steven McClurg, Rayne Steinberg and Phil Liu, it became obvious to me that we could build a truly transformative Vertically Integrated Financial Technology company focused on Crypto Asset Management.  We’re not just going to invest in this space, we’re going to help build the pipes to allow EVERYONE to invest and participate in this space. I have the opportunity to work with seasoned veterans in the Financial and Technology industries, where we can become the industry instead of just working withinthe industry.

This is an opportunity I couldn’t pass up… and I’m very excited for the future!