Alt Goes Mainstream: The Latest on Alternative Investments, WealthTech, & Private Markets

Today on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast we have a special guest on an important topic that is core to why alts are going mainstream – community.We have community builder extraordinaire Max Rothery, the VP Community at Finimize. Max is responsible for engaging and serving Finimize’s 1 million global audience. Finimize is building the world’s largest finance community of investors globally – and building community are they doing.In 4 years, they reached over 1 million subscribers, 60 thousand per year attend member organized events, and Finimize was recently acquired by 197 year old Abrdn plc, formerly Standard Life Aberdeen, a FTSE 100 investment firm with over 464B pounds AUM that’s the UK’s largest active asset manager.Max brings a wealth of experience in community building and digital transformation to the table as he builds community. He previously led innovation and digital transformation for Societe Generale’s private bank. He also brings a unique perspective from the creative industry to bear as a founder of an independent production, publishing, and recording company.Max and I had an absolutely fascinating conversation on the underpinnings of community and how to build an engaged community in financial services businesses. His thoughtful views on how to build community serve as a playbook for how to successfully build a thriving and engaged community. We talk about everything from how community gives companies a way to scale trust and relationships to how to enable the community to self-regulate itself to taking me back to my days studying international relations as we discuss the parallels between nation-building and community building.Thanks Max for such a rich conversation that we can all learn from on how to build community.

Today on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast we have a guest who helps us bridge the gap between the past, the present, and the future.Ethan Kurzweil, a Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, who is leading BVP’s crypto efforts and the BessemerDAO, comes onto the show to help us make sense of the evolution from the Web2 to Web2.5 to Web3 world.Ethan and I had a fascinating discussion. We talked about: The evolution of venture capital and private markets. Bessemer’s thesis on Web3.Why Bessemer decided to start a DAO and how they are innovating on portfolio services by building out a community. How Web3 gives people the primitives to fulfill on the premise of decentralization and ownership.Bessemer is a storied venture fund that got its start back in 1975 after spinning out of Bessemer Trust. Fast forward to today, they are one of the best technology investors on the planet investing into industry defining companies like Shopify, Twilio, PagerDuty, DocuSign, LinkedIn, Twitch, Yelp, Wix, Sorare, and many more.Ethan brings a fascinating perspective to the world of Web3 and consumerization of private markets investing given that he spent the early days of his career at early metaverse company Linden Lab, the creator of Second Life, and working for Dow Jones, where he managed the turnaround of the international editions of the Wall Street Journal.Ethan then went on to join Bessemer, where he’s a Partner investing into developer platforms, data infrastructure, digital consumer applications, and consumer facing crypto. He’s invested in the likes of PagerDuty, Intercom, Twitch, LaunchDarkly and crypto companies like Sorare, TRM Labs, and Fold.Thanks Ethan for coming on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.

Today on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast we have a fascinating conversation about how soccer is a compelling alternative investment. We talk with Justin Papadakis, the COO & Chief Real Estate Officer of the United Soccer League. The USL is the largest and one of the fastest growing professional soccer organizations in the United States. Justin and I had a fascinating conversation about how sports and investing are emerging in large part because of the collision of culture and finance.We discussed:How soccer is such an underrated investment opportunity.How the USL has seen a rise in team valuations from the hundreds of thousands to some teams valued in the $60-70M range — with a big opportunity to increase revenues through various revenue streams that include media, player transfers, sports betting, stadium related revenue, real estate related revenue.How the intersection of sports and real estate factors into the investment thesis for sports teams.How the transition to OTT media can positively impact sports league and team revenue.How more more professional investors and funds are now becoming involved and investing into sports teams and what this means for the development of sports as an investable asset class.How women’s soccer is a sleeping giant and what the USL is doing to help make it an investable opportunity.How democratizing access to sports ownership through crowdfunding and DAOs — and the power of community — can play a role in the sports investment landscape in the future.In his current role, Justin oversees numerous departments that are critical to the league’s success, including expansion, stadium development, digital media, emerging technology, finance, and human resources.Justin combines a real estate background, having worked six years at a REIT, with his soccer playing and sports management experience as he navigates building a league that is expanding in leaps and bounds. He holds a JD from Cleveland Marshall College of Law and earned a dual degree in public policy and economics from Duke University, where he also served as a goalkeeper on the Blue Devils soccer team.Thanks Justin for coming on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast to talk about how the beautiful game is continuing to grow thanks to the world of investing.

Today, we have a guest on Alt Goes Mainstream who lives at the intersection of culture and finance as sports is increasingly becoming an investable asset class.Angel City FC Co-Founder & President Julie Uhrman and I had a fascinating conversation about how sports and investing are merging together – and how that’s informed how she’s building Angel City FC.Julie and team have been innovative in the way that they’ve engaged fans, players, and investors. We discuss: How ACFC has used entertainment to have an impact.How athletes are building their own platforms on and off the field - and what that means for player, fans, and teams.How new types of investors — both professional funds and celebrities — are leveraging their platforms for impact to help sports teams build a differentiated brand and business.How ACFC is taking lessons learned from innovations in technology, community-building, and Web3 to engage fans and create new revenues for sports clubs.How mission and capital can co-exist together as sports becomes a compelling alternative investment.Julie is a serial entrepreneur and force of nature who is bringing her deep expertise in gaming, media, and entertainment to build our her most ambitious project yet – Angel City FC, the expansion professional women’s soccer team in her native Los Angeles.And build is what she and the team have done.In a mere two years, Julie and team have built one of the most recognizable and successful brands in women’s football — without yet having a team on the field.They’ve done an incredible job of creating purpose driven content and engaging fans across various social media channels.They’ve secured a top tier front of kit sponsor in DoorDash and have achieved record season ticket sales in the NWSL.They’ve built a true fan community to the point where ACFC has passed the "tattoo test" – some fans have gotten inked!And they’ve brought on a diverse, talented group of investors whose life and work aligns with Angel City’s mission as the club looks to make a positive impact in the community and on women’s soccer.It’s no surprise that Julie has been able to build up ACFC in such a short time.She was most recently the President of Media for PEI, where she oversaw the company’s media offerings across all verticals. Prior to PEI, she served as the EVP & GM of Over-The-Top Ventures for Lionsgate, building and managing the company’s multiple streaming franchises. She also founded and was CEO of OUYA, a pioneering Android-based game console for the living room which raised a record-breaking $8.6M in crowdfunded capital on Kickstarter and VC funding from Kleiner Perkins and Alibaba before selling to Razer in 2015.She’s deservedly been given a number of awards for her work, including being named to the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company and one of the most Creative 50 by Ad Age.Thanks Julie for coming on the AGM podcast to share the story of your pioneering work at Angel City FC. We look forward to watching ACFC continue to grow on and off the pitch.

Nicolas Julia, Co-Founder & CEO of Sorare, discusses building the next entertainment giant through NFT collectibles, merging culture and finance, on-ramping users to crypto, ownership of in-game assets, market infrastructure for NFTs, sports leagues embracing NFTs, potential for women's sports, and the transformative value of NFTs in the digital realm.

“What I’ve come to realize is that investing literally shapes the world that we have. It is effectively at the highest of levels, allocating resources, whether financial or human capital, to things and teams that build the future that we all live in. Investing builds the world.” - Ian Lee, Syndicate.Today we discuss the topic of a revolutionary new construct – DAOs – and how it can change investing for the better.Today’s guest is Ian Lee, the Co-Founder of Syndicate.Ian combines a background in financial services with a prescient view on the future with what he's building at Syndicate.We discuss: How Syndicate is doing to investing what YouTube did to film and media.How Web3 enables community ownership where Web2 didn’t and how investing will become more community driven.How DAOs are a social financial technology coordinating social and financial capital seamlessly and natively on the internet.How DAOs are unlocking participation from all sorts of communities who historically haven’t had access to investing.Why Crypto Covens is one of his favorite NFT projects because it’s changing the face of investing. And how we are in the middle of a multi generational shift of decentralizing and democratizing - and how Syndicate’s Web3 Investment Clubs enable that to happen.Ian has been a serial founder, he's worked in the Office of the Global Chief Innovation Officer at Deloitte, he's run the Lab Network and Acceleration Fund at Citi Ventures and was Head of Bitcoin & Blockchain at Citi before co-founding IDEO's CoLab Venture fund, where he led their crypto efforts and made over 80 investments in the crypto space.Most recently, he's founded a ground-breaking company, Syndicate, which is a decentralized investing protocol and social network that is creating the infrastructure for DAOs to run efficiently and effectively. Syndicate is creating the infrastructure and mechanisms for much more efficient, digitally native human coordination.DAOs have similar properties as corporations, but they are significantly faster and cheaper to set up and run because code governs the decisions and actions taken.It's hard to put into a short paragraph how profound the creation of Syndicate could be for the formation and governance of organizations and Ian's background lends itself incredibly well to both understanding how things worked in a Web2 (and financial services) world and how they can work better in a Web3 world.Ian and I had a fascinating conversation about his desire to make investing more inclusive and impactful – and how DAO structures can enable that.Thanks Ian for coming on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast. It was a pleasure to have you help us peer into the future of investing. 

Today on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast we have Web3’s wizard with words. Jarrod Dicker, Partner at TCG, where he focuses on crypto investments that are enabling the consumerization of crypto.Jarrod is an expert at the intersection of crypto / NFTs and the media world. He was both an entrepreneur and investor in the media world prior to joining TCG.We had a fascinating discussion about the transition to the Web3 world.We covered:Whether or not everyone is now an investor and everything is now investable.How social credentialism and the idea of time as an investment – is key to Web3.We ended the podcast with some of Jarrod’s famed Web2 // Web3 tweets because he truly is a wizard with words and is a translator for the world of Web3.There are few people in the crypto space whose content I enjoy reading than Jarrod's. His Tweets and writing (on Mirror.xyz, where he's an investor) are incredibly prescient and speaks to his knowledge of the crypto space.He joined TCG, the famed consumer investor (Twitter, Barstool, Crunchyroll, Hodinkee, Headspace, Dapper Labs), to invest into companies and protocols that create the onramps for consumers to the cryptoeconomy.They've invested in the likes of Zed Run and Dapper and Jarrod's thought leadership and experience in the media and content worlds should help them continue to access the best.Prior to TCG Crypto, he was the CEO of Po.et, a decentralized media tech company, where he was a pioneer in bringing blockchain to the media and advertising space. He formerly led innovation at The Washington Post, where he was responsible for building out their research, experimentation, and development team and running all of their innovation / commercialization efforts as VP of Commercial.He also held similar roles at RebelMouse, Time, and HuffPo. Jarrod is one of the most thoughtful thinkers on how Web3 will change content, content creation, and creators relationships with their community.I’m excited to see how he builds out TCG and the types of investments they make into the infrastructure building out Web3 so that crypto truly goes mainstream.Thanks Jarrod for coming on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast. 

Today, we have a unique episode on Alt Goes Mainstream. We have our first episode with a founder and their lead investor from their Series B. We have the founder of leading alts fund investment platform, Moonfare, and their Series B lead investor, Fidelity International Strategic Ventures, on the podcast to talk about why both of them believe in the future of retail distribution in alts and the anatomy of their deal.Steffen Pauls, the founder of Moonfare, has had an illustrious career in the private equity world. Prior to founding Moonfare in 2016, Steffen was a MD at KKR where he was responsible for the firm’s coverage of the German market. Prior to joining KKR, he was the CEO of firstfive AG. He also served on the Advisory Board of Versatel, Serbia Broadband, and Hertha BSC.Alokik Advani, who runs Fidelity International Strategic Ventures, is an expert in the financial market structure. He’s been right in the middle of investing in many of the core technology solutions that have powered market structure evolutions across equities, fixed income, commodities, and now alternative assets. At Fidelity, Alokik invests into category defining FinTech companies. They’ve made a number of FinTech investments that have helped shape the alts space, including DriveWealth, Moonfare, Capdesk, PrimaryBid, and others. Prior to Fidelity, Alokik was a Managing Director at Goldman Sachs, where he invested out of the Principal Strategic Investments team into many companies that have shaped market structure evolutions across asset classes.It was fascinating to have the perspective from both founder and investor on the evolution of the world of alts. We discussed how investor demand has evolved from institutional investor to the retail and private wealth communities. Steffen and Alokik provided fascinating views on how the alts market structure has changed and how Moonfare and Fidelity are helping to shape the market.Thanks Steffen and Alokik for coming on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.

Today we have a guest who is an expert from both the traditional financial services world and the crypto world, which has equipped him with the ability to bridge the two worlds and build onramps into the crypteconomy.Tom Jessop, who heads Fidelity Digital Assets, is an expert in market structure, capital markets, and crypto.There are few who have seen as much as him when it comes to the evolution of market structure.He’s an OG FinTech investor, investing into FinTech before it even had that moniker.He has a knack for finding trends before they are big. He did it with FinTech – and more recently he’s been on the forefront of another major trend: crypto.He’s the President of Fidelity Digital Assets, where he’s responsible for helping one of the world’s largest asset managers build out a full-service enterprise-grade platform for digital assets.Fidelity has long been a pioneer amongst financial institutions in crypto. They started R&D efforts on crypto in 2014, started mining bitcoin in 2015, and tested their first wallet and storage solution with employees in 2016.With over $11 trillion in client assets under administration and over 2.4 million trades processed per day, Fidelity’s participation in the cryptoeconomy is critical to onramp large financial institutions and wealth managers into the space. Tom leads a team that is in large part responsible for making this happen.He was previously the Head of Corporate Business Development at Fidelity, where he was responsible for identifying and executing strategic opportunities.Tom joined Fidelity from Chain, a leading provider of enterprise blockchain solutions to global financial institutions.Tom previously had an illustrious career at Goldman Sachs, which culminated with a role as Global Head of Technology Business Development, where he was responsible for investing in and partnering with early-stage tech companies across blockchain, AI, and cybersecurity. Tom was also a founding member and senior leader at Goldman’s Principal Strategic Investments team, investing in the likes of Circle Financial, Kensho, Digital Reasoning, and DataFox.Tom and I had a fascinating conversation about how we can take experiences from the evolution in traditional market structure and apply those learnings to crypto market structure and DeFi.Tom is such a smart, thoughtful, savvy investor and company builder. And he’s an even better person who treats everyone incredibly well.Thanks Tom for coming on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.

Today we have a guest who is transforming the private debt markets.Nelson Chu is the Founder & CEO of Percent (formerly known as Cadence), a leading digital securitization and investment platform for private credit.Nelson has built a marketplace to revolutionize private credit by leveraging technology and data to enable efficient price discovery and funding for originators so they can lower their cost of capital. The business has started to take off in the past year, with Percent recently completing their largest securitization ever - $144 million for FAT Brands – and raising a $12.5M Series A led by White Star and B Capital. To date, Percent has issued over $400 million in private credit transactions.Nelson has the Wall Street background to understand the private credit world and the startup background to understand how to build companies.Prior to founding Percent, he founded Lumenary, a strategy consulting firm that specialized in helping companies build products and raise capital for growth. He worked at BlackRock in their Fixed Income Portfolio Management’s Strategy Group and in the Global Wealth and Investment Management Division at Bank of America.Nelson is also an active startup advisor and angel investor, investing into companies like BlockFi, Cadre, Care/of, Clover Health, dv01, Tala, and Uala. Nelson and I had a fascinating conversation about the future of debt capital markets and how Percent is changing the game for originators and investors as they leverage technology and data to bring transparency and speed to the market.