Village Global Podcast

Today’s guest is Jimmy Song (@jimmysong), crypto developer and teacher. He is a venture partner at Blockchain Capital and creator of the Programming Blockchain course. Jimmy has been a crypto developer for a long time now (in crypto terms), teaches programming blockchain, and has written a number of influential posts on crypto. He talks about how he got into crypto and what about it was so appealing to him. He explains how an economic lens, rather than a technical lens, is what brought him to blockchain.Jimmy and Erik discuss the merits of Bitcoin versus other coins, why Jimmy believes Bitcoin will win, and what misconceptions VCs have about blockchain. They discuss what makes a good store of value, the biological impulse humans have to hoard that which is scarce and the potential impact of Bitcoin 30 years from now. They also discuss a good amount of economic history, what makes a true “hard money” as well as why war led to the gold standard going away. To apply for a scholarship for Jimmy’s Programming Blockchain course, visit www.programmingblockchain.com.Quotable lines from this episode:“Money is strengthened when it doesn’t change whereas tech is strengthened when you iterate and try different things and see what works for the market.”“The big thing that Bitcoin brings to the market is hard money, which is what disappeared when Roosevelt seized gold and all that other stuff.”“It’s not just armies against armies, it’s entire countries against entire countries now, very literally speaking, because the government can take away all the money and wealth away from the populace and use that for their war effort.”“You don’t have to believe that it has value, it’s enough that other people value it. I might not value Bitcoin but as long as other people value Bitcoin I will value Bitcoin.”“The things that make it a good medium of exchange are totally different than what makes it a store of value.”-Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg. Shawn Xu is our researcher, Colin Campbell is our audio engineer, and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

In a first-ever two-hour episode for Venture Stories by Village Global, Erik talks to two of the most interesting crypto thinkers around: Arjun Balaji (@arjunblj), crypto investor, trader and incubator, and Murad Mahmudov (@MustStopMurad), crypto analyst and angel investor.In this wide-ranging and mind-expanding interview, the three discuss a number of topics relating to cryptocurrencies, effects on government, economic history, and predictions for the future, among many other things including:- The arguments for Bitcoin over other cryptocurrencies and whether Bitcoin can be toppled- Why Bitcoin is less like digital gold and more like “digital nuclear weapons”- Whether Bitcoin will be “the MySpace of money”- A history of the Austrian school of economics- The impacts of hard forks on a community- How competition between monies accelerates capitalism- Whether blockchain as a technology is overrated or underrated- The parallels between cryptocurrency and the Asian construction bubble- Institutional movement into cryptocurrencies- The psyche of crypto hedge fund managers- How crypto changes how countries compete for tax revenuesQuotable lines from this episode:“The creation of a non-sovereign sound money system has the potential to be one of the most significant events in our lifetime.” - AB“I view money as a good, just like anything else, and I don’t believe we have pure capitalism until we have competition among currencies.” - MM“Cryptocurrencies in general and in particular Bitcoin are a higher quality form of money.” - MM“Through the fat money lens, all tokens are cryptocurrencies.” - AB“The whole market is like a prediction market for which one or few coins will be the long term money winner.” - MM“Bitcoin is the Schelling point of the market”. - MM“Despite all the fancy bells and whistles that blockchains enable, the fact that nobody can print more Bitcoin is the greatest innovation here.” - MM“The idea that money has to be continuously in circulation is completely non-sensical.” -MM“We’re not trying to build another PayPal here, we’re trying to disrupt central banking.” -MM“Miners don’t control Bitcoin, businesses don’t control bitcoin, users and full nodes control Bitcoin.” - AB“As time goes on, everyone is going to become a Bitcoin maximalist whether they like it or not.” - MM“The number one thing that we can learn from economic history is that if there is an actor that can create more money, they will.” - AB“If there’s free competition around money then the market would never naturally converge around something [the US Dollar] that is expanding at 6% a year. It’s totally irrational.”“Just as we witnessed the separation of church and state, in the next 20-30 years we are going to witness the separation of money and state.” - MM“People who say capitalism is dead or that we are entering the end of capitalism don’t know what they are talking about, because capitalism is going to go into overdrive.” -AB“What previously took a 200-person team in 2000, took a 100-person team in 2007 and takes a 5- or 10-person team now.” - AB“We’re entering an era where businesses will be able to be built and run on the internet by one person.” - AB“These tokens suck as money or are absolutely and utterly useless.” -MM“Almost all of these tokens were unethical fundraising scams by the founders.” - MM“This whole thing [the ICO boom] was a form of IQ arbitrage, where people took advantage of these overvalued shit tokens… Do you want to walk around New York and use a different form of currency at each store?” - MM“Erik, if you’re looking to hold your wealth in the equivalent of gift cards to the Gap, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.” - AB“The hype around blockchain is nothing more than an indicator that Silicon Valley is largely oriented less around the original counterculture movement and much moreso positioned as a form of opportunistic greed behaviours.” - AB“The monetary premium that is embedded inside [altcoins] is purely psychosocial, it’s purely cognitive. It’s almost like an ongoing hallucination of our collective unconsciousness.” - MM“The recurring selling of narratives that Murad mentioned is the core business of most crypto hedge funds. They’re not active traders, they’re just early investors that then sell the dream and then sell their bags on many retail investors.” - AB“One of my favourite things that Murad has ever said is that blockchains don’t create revenues, they destroy revenues.” - AB“If your product is open source and your rent is too high, you risk getting forked or re-architected by someone else charging less, and it becomes a race to the bottom.” - MM“Let’s be honest, on-chain governance is essentially the rule of the rich.” - MM“No governance is the best governance, or at least for neo-gold.” - MM-Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg. Shawn Xu is our researcher, Colin Campbell is our audio engineer, and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Joining Erik for this episode are Felix Feng (‪@felix2feng)‬, founder of Set Protocol and Nadav Hollander (@NadavAHollander), founder of Dharma Protocol.Felix and Nadav explain their respective companies and what they are looking to do for the open financial system. They talk about how the coming wave of decentralization in financial services will bring the same accessibility and ease of use that individuals are accustomed to with Web 2.0 services to financial services as well.They discuss the opportunities for blockchain and cryptocurrency to scale given that as big as it has gotten over the past few years, they still account for only a minuscule portion of the value of the entire financial system. A lot of attention is focused on venture capital and how that could be disrupted by blockchain, but they talk about how debt financing is many orders of magnitude larger than VC.Felix and Nadav explore what the implications of everything being tokenized might be and Erik also asks about what they are excited about in terms of products and protocols in the space as well as what they would love to see built in the future.Quotable lines from this episode:“If the cost of issuing an asset goes to zero, what happens when everything is traded? Then things get really interesting when you add derivatives and loans on top of that.”“Imagine you’re in a virtual reality world and you’ve made a virtual piece of art that’s hanging in a digital museum and you get revenue from people visiting it every so often. Now imagine you tokenize it or draw a loan against it, and pay off your mortgage in the real world.”“If you look back on this podcast in 20 years, it’s probably not going to age well because everything [that will be tokenized] is going to be even weirder because we have had no idea what these things are going to look like.”“I think that blockchain is going to create new asset classes that will be tremendously more valuable and will look like almost nothing we’ve seen in the traditional world.”“If there are going to be monoliths that emerge from this in some capacity, they’re going to have to capitalize on some irredeemably scarce resource that can’t be traded or commoditized, and I think it’s likely that resource will be trust.”“The high end estimate for the value of all derivative contracts is 1.2 quadrillion. I didn’t even know that was the number after a trillion.”-Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg. Shawn Xu is our researcher, Colin Campbell is our audio engineer, and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Alan Curtis of Radar Relay, a Village portfolio company, joins Erik to talk about what Radar Relay is working on and to discuss what is needed to get bring the world into the token economy. Alan explains the four main categories of tokens: utility, security, collectible and currency. He then compares and contrasts centralized and decentralized exchanges for those tokens.Alan gets into what a relay is, why it matters, and what the future of Radar Relay will be. He explains market makers in crypto, why he decided to build on top of 0x and discusses the pros and cons of a business built on another company’s platform. They also discuss what the bottlenecks to widespread adoption of crypto are, what kinds of moats he hopes to build as well as what kinds of moats the incumbents in the traditional finance have.Quotable lines from this episode:“The ethos around blockchain is about self-agency — it’s about efficacy.”“Talent is evenly distributed but opportunity is not.”“For any cool project online there will always be those 1000 true fans, but if you’re not thinking deeply about how this crosses the chasm and how you get your next users, your project is probably going nowhere fast.”“I think most people underestimate the power of brand in the long term and overestimate it in the short term.”“A decentralized exchange is an imprecise term that people have been using as a noun when in fact it is a verb.”“We’re moving a world where the centralized exchanges become fiat brokerages.”-Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg. Shawn Xu is our researcher, Colin Campbell is our audio engineer, and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Amitt Mahajan (@amittm), co-founder and CTO of Rare Bits and investor at Presence Capital, joins Erik and his guest co-host Tony Sheng of Decentraland for this episode.They dive into all things non-fungible tokens, explaining how they work, why they matter, and why they have so much potential. They explain why you you really only have tenuous ownership of the virtual goods that you purchase online and how the company that sold it to you can unilaterally take it back. Amitt and Tony get you to imagine the potential use cases if you could take virtual goods purchased in one game and take them to another game, re-sell them, or tokenize them. The three carry on to discuss the issues around the discussion of crypto more generally and how to get a broader audience to use crypto by ending the fixation on the technology itself and instead focusing on the value to the end-user. They talk about how to solve the supply and distribution problems when it comes to digital goods and discuss how marketing of crypto projects might evolve in the future.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg. Shawn Xu is our researcher, Colin Campbell is our audio engineer, and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

In this episode, Erik talks to Ryan King (@frothcity), co-founder of FOAM protocol, and Jehan Tremback (@jtremback), founder of Althea Mesh. They explain how the blockchain makes it possible to know for certain where exactly somebody is at a given time and how that enables new technologies. For example, in the area of smart contracts, if someone bought a train ticket and the train is late, they can prove where they are to request a refund. Ryan has been working at FOAM protocol to make things like this a reality. Jehan’s work at Althea Mesh allows individuals to create their own decentralized access to the internet, which is also newly enabled by the blockchain. He explains how he hopes to create a platform in the spirit of Airbnb to enable people to become suppliers of internet to others.Ryan and Jehan discuss how their companies are complimentary to each other and how their respective technologies might work together in the future. They also cover the positive impacts of decentralization, the effects of incumbents, and what they would like to see happen in the space in the future.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg. Shawn Xu is our researcher, Colin Campbell is our audio engineer, and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

With Erik for this episode are:- Aaron Batalion (@abatalion), formerly partner at Lightspeed and founder of LivingSocial - Vinny Lingham (@VinnyLingham), CEO of Civic and GP at Multicoin Capital and Newtown Partners- David King (@dksf), angel investor and crypto curatorThey have a wide-ranging and lively discussion about a number of topics around the state of crypto in 2018 and make some bold predictions for the future. The three cover the geopolitics of cryptocurrency, talk about how digital currency interacts with governments around the world, and the impact of large platforms like Facebook on cryptocurrency.They debate the merits of various cryptocurrencies and predict which might be able to achieve scale first. They also talk about privacycoins, stablecoins, and the hurdles that each of those forms face. The trio also cover the recent wave of ICOs and speculate on how many of those companies will still be viable years from now.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg. Shawn Xu is our researcher, Colin Campbell is our audio engineer, and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Erik is joined by Josh Stein, CEO of Harbor, Stephen McKeon (@sbmckeon), finance professor at the University of Oregon, and Parker Thompson (@pt), seed-stage investor, partner at AngelList and token skeptic. The guests give an overview of all things tokenized securities. Josh tells us why he’s so enthusiastic about the rise of the blockchain and recounts the origin story of Harbor. They talk about why it can be so complex to manage compliance with securities rules and regulations that vary around the world and how the blockchain can solve a big part of that problem.They discuss why liquidity is so important when it comes to any type of security and how the blockchain can turn illiquid assets into liquid ones. For example, in the future, you might be able to own part of a sports team or part of a famous Monet if the owner decides to tokenize those assets.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg. Shawn Xu is our researcher, Colin Campbell is our audio engineer, and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Erik and guest co-host Tony Sheng (@tonysheng) of Decentraland interview managing partners of Multicoin Capital Tushar Jain (@TusharJain_) and Kyle Samani (@KyleSamani). They explain why many people are underestimating the potential impact of blockchain on the web and on the world in general. In their words, “tokenizing shares of Apple stock and putting it on the blockchain will be akin to PDF’ing a newspaper and putting it online in 1995 — and thinking this is how the internet will change news as an industry.”They discuss a number of other topics within the crypto universe and cover some of the more interesting recent developments in the crypto world. Tushar and Kyle also break down their recent blog post about the Web3 Stack and discuss the obstacles that crypto and the blockchain are facing and how they can be overcome.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg. Shawn Xu is our researcher, Colin Campbell is our audio engineer, and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Erik is joined by Tim Swift and Ariel Poler on this episode of the podcast. Tim Swift is founder and CEO of Roam Robotics and Ariel Poler (@ariel) is an angel investor.They discuss how the human body could be engineered for the better and discuss a number of ways to do that, including exoskeletons, brain-computer interfaces and nootropics. They fill us in on who the founders and companies are who are currently working on those difficult problems. Erik asks what those companies promise to do and what obstacles they are facing. Ethics is an important topic when it comes to bioengineering and the trio discuss some of the more important ethical considerations around these issues and how society’s view of what is ethical or not has evolved over time as new inventions have come about.They also discuss some of the unique challenges when it comes to building a business in an area where it might take ten years for one’s work to come to fruition. They talk about the type of investor who is interested in the space, plans to invest for the long-term and is willing to be patient to see a return.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc/podcast or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.