My first real encounter with crypto was at the beginning of my freshman year of college in 2017. Someone in the common room of my dorm at the University of Michigan was pitching a bunch of us on Bitcoin and its potential to become society’s “digital gold.” This pitch revealed what I thought could be a significant financial opportunity given the exponential price increases at the time, showing Bitcoin’s increased acceptance in society as a modern store of value. While I didn’t yet take the full dive down the rabbit hole, the idea of digitally-native money and a store of value piqued my interest. I joined the University’s budding blockchain club and loosely followed the industry throughout the rest of college.
Upon graduating, I joined Moelis’s investment banking group, originally planning to go into private equity as most other analysts did. However, I quickly found that working within mature industries didn’t suit my interests, and I began to explore strong groups at the firm which catered to faster-growing, more tech-forward industries. This led me to join the fintech team, which made the crypto space one of its core focuses. My first project for the team was pitching a client on all the different things they could do with blockchain technology, including creating NFT collections, launching ERC20 tokens, and designing digital worlds.
The most important thing I learned on the project is what I believe to be crypto’s core unlock: consensus-based truth on the internet. This enables all of the less esoteric use cases that crypto produces, from digital ownership to stablecoins to DePIN to NFTs. Through crypto’s open sourcing, digital ownership, and decentralization powers, it also embodies perhaps the only way to wrest predatory economics, ownership, and control from currently-monopolistic industries such as social media, payments, or finance, and democratize them in a way entirely driven by economics.
After putting together that client presentation, I became convinced of crypto’s ability to fundamentally improve the world and knew I wanted to spend my career in web3. I also became convinced that crypto wasn’t just a business vertical like fintech. It is a method of completely transforming the way that humanity coordinates and incentivizes behavior, distributing platforms’ income and control over a decentralized network of people, and doing so in a non-intrusive, capitalistic way. I believe that it’s a powerful technology primitive that will leverage its ability to validate consensus-based truth online to spin out an infinite number of use cases that will touch nearly every industry and all of society, much like the internet did (to the point where calling the internet an “industry” sounds silly!)
Right after I built the client presentation, I told the director responsible for leading crypto at Moelis that I wanted to spend as much of my time as possible working on crypto deals. I then worked on a variety of transactions in the crypto space over the course of the following year, including the Voyager and BlockFi bankruptcies. These bankruptcies among others represented the fall of some of the largest centralized institutions in the space and were living proof of the importance of crypto and decentralization, underlined by the concurrent stability of DeFi alternatives like Compound, 1inch, and Uniswap. The culmination of these experiences made me sure that I wanted to spend my time investing in early-stage leaders in the space.
Why CoinFund?
Joining CoinFund represented the opportunity to “champion the leaders of the new internet”, as our founder and CEO Jake Brukhman eloquently puts it. Investing in, guiding, and generally being a part of the journeys of the companies that we hope will define the internet’s next age is exactly what I’ve wanted to do since my early Moelis days. And I think that CoinFund, where our partners combine deep institutional investing experience with a bottom-up understanding of crypto since the dawn of the industry’s existence, is the perfect place to do this.
While I will be open to diving into any vertical in crypto, I plan to spend the majority of my time in DePIN and consumer-facing applications. My goal is to find and invest in the companies that bring crypto’s value to currently-Web 2.0 consumers, whether directly or indirectly, and I hope to bring my combination of TradFi and crypto experience to partner with and provide a unique perspective to our portfolio companies. Though the infrastructure side is exciting, bringing a product to the mainstream that leverages blockchain technology, even if end users don’t realize it, is what cements mass adoption in the long run, and I would love to invest in and support founders building these products. If you or someone you know is building something along these lines (or building anything else you think I might be interested in), feel free to reach out!
Disclaimer: The views expressed here are those of the individual CoinFund Management LLC (“CoinFund”) personnel quoted and are not the views of CoinFund or its affiliates. Certain information contained herein has been obtained from third-party sources, which may include portfolio companies of funds managed by CoinFund. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, CoinFund has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation.
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