Dacxi Team

Music courtesy of BlackIrisFilms.com

INTRO

You’re listening to Unleashed with the Dacxi Chain, hosted by Andy Pickering.

Hi folks, it is Andy here. Welcome to Unleashed with the Dacxi Chain, a Dacxi podcast where we learn all about the Dacxi Chain and the incredible opportunities it unlocks. Let’s get on with the show.

Hey, folks. Andy here. Welcome to Unleashed with the Dacxi Chain, the podcast that features experts from within Dacxi and from across the global crowdfunding industry who are here to share their insights on developments shaping indeed the global crowdfunding economy. We have a fantastic guest on the show today. His name is Jonny Price. He is the VP of fundraising at WeFunder. And welcome to the show, Jonny. Just before we dive into the wonderful world of crowdfunding and WeFunder, let’s hear a little bit about yourself, Jonny. Just give us a quick introduction to yourself and your professional story in the lead-up to WeFunder.

GUEST INTRO

Yeah, for sure. I’m from England originally. You might be able to tell from the accent, even though I’m talking to you from Nashville, Tennessee in America. These days I live here, but from the UK, originally. Out of college, found my way into management consulting for my sins. Did that for six years. Partway through that I came to volunteer at a nonprofit called Kiva.org in San Francisco. And this was a crowdfunding platform for micro-loans, the micro-entrepreneurs around the world, mostly in the developing world. And so volunteered there for a few months in San Francisco, and met my wife, which is why I moved back to San Francisco permanently. And then in 2011, I joined Kiva full-time, left consulting, and joined Kiva full-time to launch their US lending program. So Kiva was known for lending to micro-entrepreneurs in Africa and South America, and I led the team to bring that model to support mom-and-pop shops in the US. A barber shop or a small-scale family farm, borrowing $5,000 from 200 people, lending $25 each. So grew that team for seven years and then in early 2018 joined WeFunder. And so I’ve been here now for five years. I lead our fundraising team. And yeah, basically our vision as I’m sure we’ll talk more about is helping more founders access capital and enabling ordinary people as well as millionaires and billionaires to invest in startups they love.

ANDY’S COMMENTS

Awesome. Thank you, Jonny. And yeah, let’s start to do that then. So WeFunder, of course, enables anyone really to invest in startups and of course, enables those startups to access capital. Give us a little bit of a sense of how WeFunder works, what the vision is, how long you’ve been going, and the kind of scale that you’ve achieved, Jonny.

PRICE’S COMMENTS

Yeah, sure. So we were founded back in 2012. 1st thing our founders had to do was to change the law. So for 80 years, the securities laws of the US didn’t allow unaccredited investors to invest in startups. The SEC said you had to be an accredited investor, kind of basically a millionaire to invest in startups. And so, yeah, in 2012, Congress passed the Jobs Act and the SEC rolled out regulation crowdfunding, which is part of the Jobs Act in May 2016. And so since May 2016, the last 60 years, everyone’s been able to invest in startups here in America. Not just the richest 5% of the population that is accredited investors. So it’s been a ten-year journey since we started the company to where we are today. We funded $500 million to about 1000 companies. So roughly half a million dollars per company that raise that half a billion dollars have been funded by hundreds of thousands of investors investing in companies through the platform. And our mission and kind of what we’re all about as a company, we are a public benefit corporation, so we’re a pretty mission-driven organization. We’re a B corp as well. And so we have kind of a two-sided mission. Right? So on the founder side, we want to get more capital flowing to startups. We think if we allow everyone to be an angel investor, not just the richest 5% of the population and if we empower more women to invest in startups and more angel investors of color. I live in Tennessee. 80% of venture capital dollars in America go to three states California, New York, and Massachusetts. And so again, if we can empower more people to be investing in states like Tennessee in the middle of the country, hopefully, we can get more capital flowing to founders, especially founders that might historically have been underrepresented. So that’s on the founder side of the equation and then on the investor side of the equation, the idea is let’s let everyone participate in the wealth that’s being created by startups, not just rich people, right? So what if at Uber’s IPO, instead of JasonCalicanus making $100 million and kind of some VCs and millionaires making money, thousands of drivers had become millionaires at Uber’s IPO? These days, more and more wealth is being created before the IPO rate. And if the only people that get to benefit from that wealth creation are rich people, then we believe that’s kind of another force for the concentration of wealth and kind of growing wealth and equality. So our vision is let’s let everyone participate in that wealth creation by investing in the early rounds of startups. So that’s kind of on the investor side, what we’re all about here at WeFunder.

ANDY’S COMMENTS

Yeah, I think that’s a really important point, Jonny, and very much agree with you. That is what the Dacxi Chain is all about as well. Really trying to lower the barriers to investing for all kinds of everyday people all around the world and give them access to those opportunities. The ability to invest in innovation. And there really is a potential kind of social good side to crowdfunding investing as well, right, Jonny?

PRICE’S COMMENTS

Yeah, totally. And I’ll kind of highlight two aspects of that, right? One is we think it’s really cool, especially for consumer-facing companies, if you can engage your customers as investors, they’re going to be more loyal customers, right? Their LTV goes up, their Net Promoter Score goes up, and they’re going to tell all their friends about it. And so there’s like a benefit that you get when you turn customers into owners from a revenue perspective and a growth perspective, as well as obviously being able to raise additional capital through WeFunder. And then the second point I was going to make escaped me. Hopefully, that will come back to me.

ANDY’S COMMENTS

All good. I’d love it if you could just give us a sense of how fast the global crowdfunding industry has moved, Jonny, because you will have been, even if not there from the beginning. You’ve been a participant for a long time and working inside the industry, of course, because crowdfunding really didn’t exist until, I don’t know, a decade ago, and now it is a big global movement.

PRICE’S COMMENTS

Yeah. So I think when you talk about crowdfunding, right, there are different varieties of crowdfunding. So when most people think about crowdfunding, they’re thinking of Kickstarter, right? Don’t know when Kickstarter came into being, maybe in 2005. What we’re doing at WeFunder it and there’s like, go fund me, right, which is like donations-based crowdfunding. And what we’re doing at WeFunder is investment-based crowdfunding, right? Most of it is equity. Probably 95% of the investment volume on the platform is equity. We actually do allow for debt-based crowdfunding as well. So, for example, there might be a brewery that’s raising a loan and can raise that from their customers, but most of what we do is equity. But yeah, so WeFunder is about investment crowdfunding. Our kind expectation is that investment crowdfunding becomes a much bigger industry than perks-based crowdfunding. I actually don’t know the stats. I believe we’ve already passed perks-based crowdfunding, but don’t quote me on that. But if you’re offering a rate of return, potential rate of return to investors, then our expectation is you’re going to be able to raise a lot more capital. And so hence the investment volume through investment crowdfunding, we think will be a lot higher than it is through Kickstarter. And you see that the average campaign on WeFunder raises half a million. The average Kickstarter campaign I believe is 25K. The average investment amount on WeFunder is $1,000 versus $80 for Kickstarter. So I think investment crowdfunding will be a much larger industry than perks-based crowdfunding or donations-based crowdfunding. In terms of the market size for investment crowdfunding, it’s still pretty small. So this year, I think regulation crowdfunding in the US will do about 500 million. Regulation Crowdfunding is the exemption where you can raise up to $5 million per year. It’s more for the kind of early-stage startups. And then there’s another exemption called regulation A+ for larger companies where you can raise up to 75 million. The market size there is a little fuzzier, and there’s a little less stage on it, but for Regulation crowdfunding this year, I think we’ll come in at about 500 million. And that’s a drop in the ocean of early-stage angel investing, you know, Early stage capital for either MainStreet businesses or tech startups. If you look at venture capital dollars, seed StageSeries AB which is really the sweet spot for WeFunder, the Friends and Family Round Capital, that 500 million, that’s the reg CF industry of which WeFunder is about 40% market share right now. So with the leading platform in terms of investment volume, but that’s still a really small market share, I would guess kind of 0.1%. Again, the data on the kind of angel investing in the VC market is pretty spotty but my guess would be 0.1% market share. And so that’s our vision over the coming decade, right, is how do we grow that 0.1% to 10%? How do we make it so that especially if you’re a consumer-facing company every round, as well as raising from VCs, right, this isn’t either or thing? Have a VC lead the round, price the rounds, but then open up an allocation of maybe 10%, or 20% of the rounds to let your customers invest. And whether that’s your Friends and family rounds, seed rounds, Series A-B-C-D-E-F-G every consumer-facing company should want to do this because it’s just becoming more and more the norm and expectation that why on earth would you not let your customers and community invest? That’s just going to basically increase their loyalty and increase their feeling like they’re a part of the team. They feel kind of tied to the brand, part of the community. And so the world we’re trying to build is somewhere in a few years’ time every B to C company is letting their customers participate in every round.

ANDY’S COMMENTS

I love it. Sounds fantastic. Jonny, talk us through the, I suppose investor journey. If the website for Wefunder is simply Wefunder.com and you can go along to the website and then you can see all the different kinds of startups or companies that are on there. There are categories just on the front page there are Moonshots, Y Combinator Startups, Entertainment, Main Street, Biotech, and then, of course, you can filter it down by female founders, minority founders, and virtual reality. So there’s a huge variety of different startups. There is something that would appeal to most people.

PRICE’S COMMENTS

Yeah, definitely. One of the cool things about WeFunder, one of the things I love about my job is that we’re working with bars and restaurants and soccer clubs and movies and Main Street businesses as well as tech companies flying cars, moonshots, as you say. And so yeah, there really is, whatever your passion, that’s our vision is that a startup in that space can invite their community and people that are passionate about what they’re building to be a part of the journey.

ANDY’S COMMENTS

And I also appreciate that on the website you’re honest about the risks I suppose you describe a new kind of stock market unlike the Nasdaq, we’re meant for startups and small businesses and then you talk through some of the differences. So you can explain some of these differences, Jonny, but the first one, as we say, is it says it’s much riskier. Never invest more than you can afford to lose. Startups are hard. Even the best founders fail. So maybe talk us through I don’t know if you kind of track the success rates or not, but just talk about what the likelihoods are of each of these individual startups achieving and what happens to the ones that fail and so on.

PRICE’S COMMENTS

Yeah, we always like to try to flag the risk to investors. And it’s not just the riskiness of these investments, right? Like investing in early-stage startups, a lot of those are going to go to zero. Maybe most of those investing at the seed stage is going to go to zero. But also it’s the liquidity, right? So this isn’t the stock market where you can invest $1,000 today, and then if the share price drops 10%, you can sell it for $900 next week. You invest $1,000 in a stock, on WeFunder that might be locked up for ten years, and maybe you get 20 extra ten one day when the company IPO is acquired, but much more likely, that will go to zero. And so we always try to flag the risks. The SEC has put limits on how much investors can invest through WeFunder or through any regulated crowdfunding platform. So anyone can invest $2,200 per year and then that number goes up based on your income and wealth. There’s like a formula that determines how much people can invest. So the SEC is obviously nervous about people not investing kind of more than they should in these pretty risky early-stage startups, and we try to flag that as well. The vision for us we talk about on the website. You’ll see this in our brand. It’s not investing in startups to make a ton of money. It’s investing in startups you love. So our vision is like investing in a company that you love. Maybe you’re a customer of, you love the brand, you love the product. Maybe you know the founder. You believe in the founder. You want to show that you believe in the founder by investing in them. Maybe it’s a cause you care about. There’s a company, Leah Labs went through Y Combinator and then launched on WeFunder. They’re, they’re trying to cure cancer in dogs. And they had, you know, hundreds of investors. And there’s a place on WeFunder. One of my favorite things to do, you can read the notes that investors write and say so many of these investors were writing notes like, my dog died of cancer. If I can be a part of a solution, say that we eradicate canine cancer. I would love to do that. Right? We had this company, Atom Limbs, that’s making better prosthetic limbs. There are 5 million on the platform and so many of their investors, thousands of people writing messages like I was in the armed forces, my colleague lost a limb serving their country. Again, if I can kind of be a part of bringing a product to market that helps their quality of life, that’s something I want to be a part of. Lil Libros is a company founded by two Latino women, who raised a few million dollars on the platform. I think they had 6000 investors and thousands of them. Great comments. They were trying to allow for more representation of the Latino community and kids’ books. They were like, we’re fed up with our kids reading books with no Latino characters in them. And so they set up this kind of publishing company and all of the messages were Latino women saying, this is so awesome, I’m so glad to be a part of it. I really believe in your mission and we need more representation in the books that my kids are reading. That is what WeFunder is all about, right? People investing in causes they care about and people they believe in, as opposed to yeah, investing to make tons of money.

ANDY’S COMMENTS

Yeah. Very well said, Jonny. And you say it really nicely on the website. I think this is a nice way of saying it. You kind of say startups can win big or they can go bankrupt. A good way to consider investing in them is to think of them as similar to socially good lottery tickets. At Dacxi Chain, Jonny, we’re trying to pioneer a new model for global fundraising. And it’ll be a fully regulated global ecosystem where investors all around the world have access to these opportunities. And of course, founders with innovative ideas who need funding can access this global investor pool and we’re going to use blockchain to tokenize these equity shares. So one of the advantages of that, of course, is people can invest in smaller amounts or bigger amounts, whatever they wish, depending on the jurisdictions in their part of the world. And then another advantage of that tokenization system is it enables more liquidity and helps to solve that liquidity problem, Jonny, by launching a second specialist secondary market where people can sell their tokens. This is kind of the vision for the future of the Dacxi Chain. What do you think of that model?

PRICE’S COMMENTS

Yeah, I love the idea of the kind of internationalization. Obviously, there are a bunch of regulations that you guys need to work through, but I love the vision of this. WeFunder is actually expanding in the EU. And so the idea that EU investors get access to American investment opportunities and vice versa, love that idea. Obviously, again, need to kind of think through the regulatory kind of compliance aspects in every country and yeah, on the liquidity side we also kind of, I think to a degree, there’s kind of the ability to get liquidity in terms of secondary transactions with a regular boring old database. Which is what WeFunder currently uses, and suddenly don’t have any plans to move it to the blockchain, maybe down the line. And there are probably some functionality benefits that from a liquidity and secondary perspective that come with it being on the blockchain. But we definitely do have plans to build a secondary market. One of our competitors, Start Engine, actually has a secondary market for Rxcf. We don’t see much liquidity right now, or much kind of demand for secondary, which is why we haven’t kind of prioritized building that ourselves at this stage, but we definitely kind of see that in the future.

ANDY’S COMMENTS

Fantastic. All right, well, as we start to finish off Jonny, please tell the listeners where they can find you online. Perhaps you’re on Twitter, or perhaps you are on LinkedIn. Again, tell people where they can go to learn more about WeFunder and just if there are any thoughts you have on the future of where all this is going that you’re prepared to share. What do you see coming down the line across the next five years or so? Yeah, please take it away.

PRICE’S COMMENTS

Yeah. Jonny Price on LinkedIn. J-O-N-N-Y Price. And then Jonny C Price on Twitter. Obviously, feel free to check out WeFunder. If you go to Wefunder.com, you can browse 300 startups that are raising right now. If you’re a founder looking to raise capital and you want to let your community and customers invest as well as rich people, we’d love to hear from you. There’s an easy place where you can go and just start an application. We’re a pretty open platform. We don’t want to be another VC picking winners and losers. If there’s a coffee shop in rural Wyoming that wants to raise 50K from their customers, we want to let them. So, yeah, hopefully, we can help some of your listeners here, Andy, who might be looking at raising capital. Right now we’re just in the US, but we are expense the EU soon. So, yeah, if you’re listening from the EU and you’re looking at raising capital, we’d love to hear from you as well. And, yeah, in terms of the future, I think I would just kind of go back to what I said earlier. I mean, obviously, we want to grow this thing. We think there’s very much room for us to grow into. And the world, yeah, the world we’re trying to build is one where in a few years’ time, especially B to C founders, can work for B to B as well. Can work for Biotech Buglier lab. It doesn’t have to be B to C, but especially for consumer-facing companies. Like every round, let your customers invest alongside VCs. They can lead the round, but let your customers invest. That’s A, going to accelerate your growth by turning customers into supercharged fans, but also B, it’s the right thing to do. If you build a big company, if you succeed in your mission, you have a nice exit, and you make money for your investors. Wouldn’t it be cool to make some of your earliest supporters and champions and customers money as well as the VCs and angels that are lucky enough to invest in you? So that’s the vision. And, yeah, we’re all on the WeFunder team working hard to kind of bring that future into the present.

ANDY’S FINAL COMMENTS

Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts, Jonny, and thank you for coming on the show. Been a pleasure talking to you. All the best and bye for now.

That was Jonny Price from WeFunder. Very successful crowdfunding platform, of course, in the US. And as we’ve learned, they’re moving to establish in the EU as well. And yeah, so I hope you enjoyed that. I certainly enjoyed talking to Jonny. Love some of the phrases that we learned. Consider investing in startups more like socially good lottery tickets and like, that where your attention goes, your money flows. Or where your money flows, your attention goes. Yeah. Saying the same thing in different ways. Thank you for listening to today’s episode of Unleashed with the Dacxi Chain. Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast in whatever podcast app you are using. Give us a five-star rating on Spotify or Apple podcast. That would be excellent. We always appreciate it. But yeah, that’s today’s episode, team. Thanks for listening and bye for now.

Music courtesy of BlackIrisFilms.com

INTRO

Hey, folks, Andy here. Welcome to Unleashed with the Dacxi Chain, the podcast that features experts from within Dacxi and from across the industry who are here to share their insights on developments shaping the global technology scene, global crowdfunding, economy, blockchain, and much more. Today’s guest is Mr. James Wallace. He’s chair of Digital Markets, which is a platform that connects the world’s best assets with global investors through a network of digital securities exchanges, allowing issuers to quickly access the world’s capital at a fraction of the cost and providing investors, of course, with those exciting investment opportunities. Welcome to the show, James.

So I’d love it if you could maybe just expand on that, tell us a little bit about who you are and your professional journey, and the lead-up to getting involved with Digital Markets.

GUEST INTRO

I’m a serial tech entrepreneur. I’ve actually been building tech for actually almost 30 years now, and it was really a result of I opening a store when I was really young. I was 16 or 17, kind of bored in high school, and decided to bounce out and go do something and opened a store selling the only thing I knew at the time, which was video games, and then quickly realized that it was a horrifying experience being the retail environment because most humans turn into savages and realized that I just couldn’t persist. There was no path forward. There was no way for me to make this work. And so sitting there and sort of my quiet desperation, having sunk everything I had into this store, this would have been the early 90s. I started thinking about researching the internet, and effectively, you probably jumped ahead with me and tried to build an e-commerce platform. Frankly, unfortunately, about ten years before it was possible. There were no merchant payment providers, and there wasn’t even inventory management software, but I ended up with a glorified digital brochure for my physical inventory. But it really taught me the power of digital, of software, of what we call now Web2 and communications. And so I pushed everything I had, all my time and energy into trying to understand what it meant. Probably about two years later, I had to make a decision, a fork in the road. Do I want to become a programmer and focus on the technical side, or do I want to basically focus on the business side? And as an entrepreneur, I knew I identified as an entrepreneur when I was really young. I decided to focus on the business side and just hire and partner with really smart technological and technical people. And so, yeah, that’s really the genesis. And over the last 25 years have mostly had failures. I’ve had a couple of successes that have led to me having a bit of capital and a bit of advice as an executive and an angel and now VC, being able to put some capital and advice into other operations, other organizations, and startups that are looking to do big things in the world. And that really brings us to Digital, where we realize that obviously, the rise of crypto showed us that there’s an insatiable appetite for retail investment. And we think it’s more than just numbers. We actually think that people want to allocate their capital to things that matter. We think that people are seeing that the government is broken, their votes don’t matter at least as much as they did. And we think a lot of people are starved of meaning. This crypto sort of wave over the last seven or eight years has really been, I think, people trying to search for things that matter, and they found projects and people and they’ve allocated capital, which is what some people that’s all the sort of domain that they have is their money. And so Digital seeing that opportunity and wanting to bring what we call market rules, which is just fairness to that sort of growing ecosystem of innovators that are looking for capital, we realize that if we brought a little bit of sensibility, we could probably find innovators capital quicker. And so we think that the world’s biggest challenges can be solved through innovation. And moving the world forward positively really is just about getting capital to these people quicker. And on the other side, the buy side, the investor side, helping them to, again, as I said, feel domain and feel like they’re shaping the future.

ANDY’S COMMENTS 

Yeah, really exciting listening to your talk there, James. I can see there’s a lot of synergy between what Dacxi Chain is trying to do in the world and what you guys are doing at Digital as well. Dacxi Chain is all about building the world’s leading global crowdfunding ecosystem, but behind that, it’s all about connecting innovators with investors and empowering those innovators to bring their creative ideas to life. And of course, based on the premise, James, that innovation can come from anywhere, and while there are barriers to entry in various different markets and jurisdictions around the world, blockchain tokenization, is really beginning to enable that frictionless flow of finance and ultimately it’s just going to empower both innovators and investors all around the world. Right?

JAMES’S COMMENTS

That’s right. And what’s interesting is so early in this chat we got to something that we very rarely discuss and that is one of the core mandates of just driving capital to innovators. But as I said, it’s for that reason that we believe that a lot of the social good, the things that seem to want to become manifest and real in the world is going to be better, we think. Built and brought into the world by innovators in sort of a market scenario as opposed to maybe social programs and governments doing that work and also really addressing the reality, frankly. And again, I don’t ever try to be sensational for the purpose of being sensational but to make accurate statements. If they do sound a little bit salacious, it’s not my intention. But venture capital is predatory and investment banking is parasitic and venture capital really preys on the issuer side which beat them down. They’re the term sheets and sort of jump on the board and bully the founding team and replace the founders. And we know how that goes. So they’re extracting value from the issuer, from basically the seller of the security later in the market, and then on the buy side, we all know what the investment banks do. Ultimately, it dumps in the market after listing typically because most of the value has been extracted by them. But previous to that was the venture capital sort of a portion of that life cycle. And really a lot of founders and innovators, if you’re lucky enough to get venture capital, there’s this massive gap between your seed A, B, C, and then probably Series A-B and then the investment bank that’s going to take you public. Most people can’t cross that chasm. There’s no one there to navigate it. Why? Because it’s not profitable. And so it’s just really that sort of pitfall, that labyrinth that there’s no guidance, there’s no support. And at the same time, we’re demanding that these people go out and fix real-world problems. So they have to run a business full-time as founders, work 60, 70 hours a week, and then they have to spend 30-40 hours raising funds and managing investors and trying to navigate all of this. It really is not cleanly laid out by lawyers and accountants because frankly, they benefit from that predatory and parasitic nature. So again, obviously, we are wanting to drive capital into the innovator, but we’re also wanting them to focus on their business, to focus on solving those problems, and not spend time managing the extractors in that what we call capital markets lifecycle.

ANDY’S COMMENTS

So refreshing to hear you drop some truth bombs there, James. And I completely agree with your comments on the extractive and exploitation-based models, I suppose of both banking and VC. It really kind of reminds me of something I think you said at the beginning of the show, James. When it gets down to it, humans are savages. That’s kind of how the world works. But it’s up to us really to create models then that level the playing field, if you like, and are a bit fairer. So perhaps we can take some of that dark side of human nature out of the equation if that’s not getting too philosophical.

JAMES’S  COMMENTS

Not at all. I mean, actually, philosophy in my view is very practical because when we can align around core values and principles, we can actually move really fast. I can make assumptions about other people, I know what’s important, what their priorities are and their aversions, and frankly, what they don’t want around them and we can now formulate something very quickly. So I think philosophy is good for aligning interests and should we move forward together on this project? If I understand your priorities and they match mine, the answer is probably. And to that point, you make a very interesting point. I think there is a sociopath class in my view. I see it in finance, I see it in government. We work with governments all around the world, we work in a very highly regulated space. We are discussing lobbying, and modeling frameworks that require less onerous requirements, but there’s still going to be some regulation to make sure there are market rules. And we’re exposed to a lot of people that really are void in my view of not just morals and ethics, but sort of principles and the care, let’s just say care for other people, market participants, people around them. But I think a lot of people that are not that they probably are around, that they’re in venture capital firms and hedge funds and so on are operating and behaving badly probably because they don’t know the impact. And I talk a lot about this and have for years and I think it’s not to let anyone or anything off the hook. There’s something there to make known and to bring consequences to bad behavior. But it’s only fair I think, to sort of drive it through the filter of do they know what they’re doing, do they know the pain that they’re causing? And we talk a lot about looking in the crypto world and one of the reasons that we believe that there is no doubt that we need market rules is just looking at Terra Luna’s mirror, that implosion of $60 billion. Now obviously everyone’s talking about FTX. We do see that there’s a need for market rules and all that means is just fairness. When I enter the market, can I be assured that there isn’t market manipulation? Can I be assured that there aren’t people extracting value, not providing value, etc? We think that’s fair and that could probably be algorithmic and Oracle based in the future. I think humans are very bad analyzers and distributors of consequences. I think we need algorithms to do that. But setting that aside for a second, when we look at the amount of financial damage, money damage, a lot of people at venture capital firms and hedge funds are analysts, they are in spreadsheets, they’re looking at money, they’re looking at dollars, pardon me, they’re not looking at money in dollars, they’re looking at numbers. They’re forgetting that they’re dollars and they’re forgetting more importantly, what those dollars represent. These are people’s savings. Their kids’ university, the vacation fund, all those things that frankly bring joy into our lives. And when that is destroyed, that leads to belts of anxiety, depression, and some of the big issues in society like divorce, suicide, and homicide. These are real human consequences. So getting back to the point, and again, not to be overly philosophical, it’s not at all. That is an actual, very real consequence of bad actors in the global financial system, whether that’s banking or government use of taxpayer money or capital markets. We need to remove that bad actor component, which Blockchain does, incredibly, does it with money, does it with capital markets. You can do it with voting, obviously. You can do it with a registry and sort of supply chain stuff, but we can bring transparency and remove the bad actors. And again, we’re identifying, I think, that right now and paving a way to allow that removal of those things that is going to allow us to, I think, remake the world around us.

ANDY’S COMMENTS

Yes, wonderfully said, James and I very much agree. As we’ve said, Blockchain tokenization, we’re not quite there yet, but we’re heading in that direction. It’ll make capital markets more efficient, and more transparent, and that is really what Blockchain exists to do. Bitcoin was created to take trust out of the equation because I think, as we’ve kind of alluded to James, yeah, it’s difficult to trust humans that you don’t know. And well, blockchain exists to solve that problem. And just while we’re talking about those bad actors, refreshing to see that Sam Bankman Fried was arrested around 12 hours ago and does look like he is now going to face the full consequences of his actions, as he should.

JAMES’S COMMENTS

I was surprised it took them that long to do that, especially with all the fact that he testified in front of Congress and the political donations and so on. His involvement really in legacy and in governance is probably going to adversely affect him. And when we look and compare with a lot of other bad actors in crypto, how they still walk free as well, I think about Do Kwon and others actually. Really, actually to step back and connect what you just said just now and previous, and what I was saying is that excluding that sociopath class that really intends to extract, I think a lot of people are behaving slightly badly because they don’t know what they’re doing. And that idea of Blockchain, that pseudonymous transparency sort of, I think drives this nice sweet spot between privacy and activates awareness that when this happens, these other things happen and we don’t hide them behind this. If you look at capital markets, you have transfer agents and custodians and market makers, and then you have the exchange and you have all these various components that actually act to sort of remove people A from understanding and B from feeling any responsibility. Hey, I’m just doing that little thing over here. I extract that bit of money. I wasn’t really responsible for all this. Thinking about legacy HSBC banking, the Mexican cartel, and Lehman Brothers, the fraud that occurred there. Everyone can sort of has that plausible deniability of, oh, there’s a separation of concerns. I wasn’t the start and the end. I played a minor role and I did my job. Whereas I think, again, with blockchain we’re driving toward, there is incredibly this element of transparency that allows us, and again, when we drive and you talk about crowdfunding, that’s about disintermediating a pile of players, which is fantastic. And again, if it’s truly peer to peer and we talk in our world, because our world, which is full stock exchange listings, fully public, no restrictions on trading, we don’t see probably in the next five to ten years that there’s going to be a peer to peer possibility for at least global retail cross-jurisdictional trading. But we do see something close to it and we’re calling it near-peer. But the whole idea, again, is to drive the two people that create the value, the innovator and the capital contributor, to as close to direct as possible and remove all the other market participants that just frankly extract and distort, and to make sure that we have the cleanest transfer of value in both directions. And then we have this tiny layer of regulation just to make sure that the issuer and the seller of securities is a real person with a viable ongoing concern and is managing their operation responsibly. And again, on the buyer side, that this is a real person that’s not a terrorist or money-launderer, and then they should be able to transact. But again, to your point, I think that, or your last comment, I should say it is really good to see SBF brought in. I think there are a bunch of assumptions in all directions that are somewhere between wrong and right and probably a lot of stuff in the middle. And I think it’s just important for the entire world because now we’re driving crowdfunding platforms, crypto, and other sorts of direct participation. We have a lot of people in the world that can now directly participate in finance. And this is I think, we’ve underestimated the value of increasing people’s financial intelligence. Your attention goes where your money flows. If you put money into something, you’re going to start paying attention. People know so much about finance. They have a long way to go because we, I think, have been intentionally miseducated and non-educated on finance, so that we become sort of the liquidity, we become the spenders and the consumers and not sort of the capitalists. But I think there’s been a massive transformation. People are becoming educated and we’re very close with the Wall Street Bets team, the founders, and 17 million people that are calling out bad behavior. They’re informing themselves. They’re in dialogue all day long. Discussing different aspects of finance and so, yeah. We should have lots of conversations, he should provide all the evidence. And then a judge or a jury needs to determine if there’s criminal activity. But the entire world and those participants, especially direct FTX, deserve to know exactly what happened. And we as a community, a global community of probably tens of millions of retail investors, need to be able to harvest that learning and make sure that we don’t do it again.

ANDY’S COMMENTS

Absolutely. Thank you. James, so many threads I could pick up on there. I did love the quote. I don’t know if this is from you or something you’ve picked up along the way. I think you said something like, your attention goes where your money flows. I enjoyed that. You did explain it a little bit in there as well. But I think it’d be good just to give you the opportunity again, just to talk through how Digital works. Maybe explain a bit more, James, in terms of who the platform is really aimed at and who can access it, what the opportunities are, I suppose both on the innovator’s side, if you like, and of course, on the investor side.

JAMES’S COMMENTS

It took us about five years to build this. In the first three years, we focused strictly on compliance because we realized that if we didn’t have a platform that was safe and secure and not technologically from a regulatory and compliance standpoint, then ourselves, maybe especially because that’s very risky, as SBF is finding out, not operating a platform, it’s beyond compliance. But one of our predecessors, Exponential Ventures, was the Solicit investor in the world’s first federally approved digital security out of Bermuda in 2018. And that platform is fantastic. The Premier, Bert, the BMA, the Bermuda Monetary Authority, and the Ministry of Finance, they all want this equal access to digital assets, but also equity. Again, people, I think have the right to direct their money. And this notion of not of accredited, only getting access to frankly the most lucrative under the veil of investor protections we know is itself a fraud, in my view. I think that the intentions are good. Most people at regulators are good people and really, truly want to protect the investor. But what it’s created is, again, if I’m being somewhat sensational, effectively, what we have is a bunch of rich old white dudes as chairs at these venture capital funds that are directing tens of billions of dollars towards things that, if we’re just being not even honest about but objective about. There’s a worldview of this type of person and it doesn’t represent the world. And so these people are shaping the world as they see the world, and we need more people to participate in shaping the world. I’d rather have 3 billion people shape the world than 300 people. Bermuda opened up its platform and said, come on in and let’s talk let’s figure it out. It had never been done before. It took us a lot longer and it cost us a lot more than we thought, but it was very valuable and it led us to about three years of just talking to other regulators, talking to a lot of lawyers, Canada, the US, UK. BBI, Seychelles, etc, Bermuda, and knitting together a cross-jurisdictional securities trading framework. And our outrageous demand was that it must be retail, meaning every single person in the world, nonaccredited, other than OECD Band, which would be, say, Venezuela and Iran, must be able to access the platform with no restrictions and trade their securities. And everyone said it couldn’t be done, you shouldn’t try it, you’re going to kill yourself, it’s going to be awful, you’re going to hate everything and everyone. And there were times when we did, but the bottom line is where we ended up was that we now have via Commercial Partners, which is a network of digital securities exchanges, as you said in the intro, and they have stock exchange licenses and clearing and settlement facilities and registries. And maybe that doesn’t mean much to a lot of the listeners, but these are essential components to capital markets and without them, you must rely on a third party. And a lot of third parties that are not blockchain-based claim that they don’t understand the technology and claim that there’s a risk, but it’s actually most often anti-competition. They know that blockchain in many cases disintermediates them, not a little bit, but entirely and permanently. And so they’ve held out. We’ve been able to, through our capital markets exchange partners, put together an end capital market system. They can’t be interrupted, which is essential. And then we’ve laid on a few registrations like we have a transfer agent in the US. Money services business in Canada, a trusted company in Europe, and effectively what that’s allowed us to do, it’s a very long way for those that are interested in actually how it works, which is the hard part and the painful part that’s allowed us to get to the point today where we can list on a national stock exchange with the ability to clear and settle and register on a blockchain. We can list any asset type, fund, debt, equity, or whatever, from any issuer located anywhere in the world. So that’s the sell side. And then on the buy side, we can make that available to any investor type, credited or not, located anywhere in the world, including the US. And so we’ve been able to stitch together an entire marketplace that has no restrictions. Now, there’s a lot of work still that goes into the investment bankers putting together prospectuses, and often we have to bring in introducing brokers and they’re still market participants. But it’s getting us through this part right now and we continue to look at ways to bring in retail and issuers from all over the world without unnecessary intermediaries.

ANDY’S COMMENTS

Very nice. Thank you, James. And, of course, listeners, if you’re intrigued by the sound of Digital and what James is describing there, do suggest that you check out the website, which is Digtl.co. But Digital, of course, is spelled D-I-G-T-L in this case. But of course, a link will be in the show notes as well. As we start to wrap up James, maybe it’d be good. I just love to get your kind of perspectives, if you feel free to kind of speculate away, but just kind of cast your forecasting mind forward. Approach this any way you like. Maybe just to describe the world 5-10 years from now, if we talk again about this idea that you mentioned, your attention goes where your money flows. And how investors can begin to impact the world, how they can shape the world with their money even more than, say, their votes. And what change can we really make around the world as this sort of global, equity-based, equality-based, crowdfunding ecosystem enables all these new opportunities? Again, just any way you want to approach that, please go for gold.

JAMES’S COMMENTS

Well, you said it so well there, I hardly want to add anything to it. I mean, I think you really described that as a grassroots, community-based network of people that are talking about what’s important in life, in contrast, frankly, probably around what’s wrong in our society. A lot of the time when we bring in extraordinary innovations and we shift positively, it’s in reaction to something very negative in our world. And so even on our platform, if we look at it today, and I don’t know if this is doable or reasonable, but if there’s a way to provide a gift card link, we’ll do that. So maybe you and I can talk via email after. But I would love to invite people to the platform, not to self-promote, but really to make it available. And we can provide some USDC to play like real USDC to play with the site and look around because we have things like block streams, and mining. We have a bunch of Wall Street bets products, an insider portfolio, and El Sal, which is a basket of El Salvador funds bonds, you can’t easily get access to. And that’s just a really like, these are really good examples of, I think, products that people want from brands that people trust. And that feels good when you engage a brand that you trust. Again, going back to philosophy, hey, our core values are the same. Let’s go. I don’t need to sit here and verify and argue and debate. I already know what you stand for. I already know what you want. I think the shorthand and the short form, frankly, in crypto and specifically with Bitcoin and Blockchain, I think is spectacular. Being able to lurch forward and launch forward three years and not have to try to get the basics set. I think that the framework is built on is meant to be community driven. And I think a lot of the governance tokens were scams, frankly, and the consolidation of power. ICO 2.0 really was that innovation there was to try to bring the community and kind of like Web 2.0, right? Which that innovation from static websites now people and participants communicating with each other. I think we got that in Crypto 2.0, and ICO 2.0. But again, it was to benefit a few people, just like it benefited a few people. Web 2.0 benefited a few participants. I think that the future is truly about community-driven projects, and I’m not just talking about a couple. We talk a lot about it. There are 50 IPOs in the US, every year. There should be 500 minimum. There are 2200 in Canada. It’s because we have a different sort of approach to it. We want to see more innovation. We make markets for e-gaming and crypto and cannabis, and now we’re doing it for psychedelics. Why not let’s drive capital into these innovators? So that’s the micro IPO, they call it up here. Why not have a nano IPO?I don’t know why we can’t have like a kiva for capital markets. Why, if we bring down the cost and we just lightly wrap it, make sure there are investor protections, things are going to go bankrupt, founders are going to die, things will go badly, but it’ll be a small portion, no more than necessary. And what would kind of naturally happen in life? And if we just have people that are able to sit on a platform and talk about what’s important, find people that want and need capital, that are committed to that solution and productizing it and driving it into the market, in my view. So answering the question of 5-10 years, the people that are truly activated intellectually, emotionally, mentally, even energetically, are the ones that have actually connected to meaning, are the ones that are working every day. I use that word, interestingly, working, come home from work, and then I jump on this platform and it could be Digital or it could be something similar. We don’t have any thoughts of competition or exclusion. We want everyone to come in. But I think it is people that are working on things that matter, exclusive of family, society, politicians, governance, religion, school, whatever. These are individuals that are finding like-minded individuals and collaborating on things. And part of that is not just capital, but it’s applying knowledge and connections and so on. So, yeah, I think that that’s the future. I think that we’re going to see things revert. We’ve had a top-down system, frankly, for millennia, and I think probably the intelligence of the lower class and middle class and the technology just wasn’t there. And now we have a very educated lower middle class and we have networking technology that can bring us together. And I think we’ve, frankly, really screwed up Web 2.0. We have a lot of disinformation and misinformation, and a lot of division as a result. But I’m hopeful, and I think this is rooted in reality, I’m hopeful that we learn those lessons and we’re able to move into what they call Web3. I don’t mean that in the crypto sense, but I do mean that in a decentralized network that is actually being operated on behalf of the people, instead of in Web 2.0, being operated collectively on behalf of a handful of people.

ANDY’S COMMENTS

Again. Very nicely said, James. Thank you so much for that. Nothing else to say, really, except, I suppose please, James, tell the listeners where you can be found online if you like to hang out on Twitter or perhaps you’re a LinkedIn person. Some people do both even. What a crazy old world. And again, just tell people where they can go to learn more about what you guys are building at Digital.

JAMES’S COMMENTS

That’s funny, I’ve been too busy building things to mess around with LinkedIn or Twitter. I have profiles there, but I rarely use them. I’d encourage a lot more people, especially crypto Twitter. Stop tweeting, stop being an antagonist, and go build stuff, please. The world needs you to do things and not talk. But as I said, I’m hopeful that we can provide a link in the description that can help people get to where I think I’m available and I’m happy to make myself available with a personal link in the description. But I think joining the community is the key. That’s what I would want everyone to do. We are building right now through a framework that we’re re-architecting after some of these exchange tokens have failed and governance tokens have failed. But we really want to be able to measure and allow people to apply their views. We want them to literally vote on these things. And so anyway, the people will be able to come to the platform and tell us what they want and we will list it on a national stock exchange and you’ll be able to provide capital to activate getting connected. And yeah, we’ll make those links available in the description. We’re here to serve.

ANDY’S FINAL COMMENTS

That was James from Digital. Man, I really enjoyed that James. He was great. Great guest, an excellent talker, very opinionated, and very smart, really enjoyed talking to James. So James has kindly provided us with a link that will be or is in the show notes, which will get you access to have a little look around Digital. Please feel free to check that out. Also thought it was interesting to hear what James and the team are doing at Digital. And as I said in the show, I think the very clear synergies between what platforms like Digital are doing and what platforms like the Dacxi Chain doing. Everyone is really focused on unlocking this global tidal wave of innovation that becomes possible when you connect everyday global investors all around the world with everyday global innovators all around the world and just unleash the power of new, creative, innovative ideas. And that can only be a net good for the planet. Really exciting to see how all this plays out over the years to come. And don’t forget, of course, we’ll be tracking it all the way. We’ll be talking to all the movers and shakers leading this movement all around the world right here on Unleashed with the Dacxi Chain, the podcast that you’re listening to. So please make sure, listeners, that you subscribe to the podcast in whatever podcast app you are using. Give us a five-star rating and give us a review. We’d really appreciate it as a new podcast, but mostly we just appreciate you listening. Thanks again, team.

This was Unleashed with the Dacxi Chain. See you next time. Bye for now.

Music courtesy of BlackIrisFilms.com

Music courtesy of BlackIrisFilms.com

INTRO

You’re listening to Unleashed with the Dacxi Chain, hosted by Andy Pickering. Hi folks, it is Andy here. Welcome to Unleashed with the Dacxi Chain, a Dacxi podcast where we learn all about the Dacxi Chain and the incredible opportunities it unlocks. Let’s get on with the show.

Hey, folks, Andy here. Welcome to Unleashed with the Dacxi Chain, the podcast that features experts from within Dacxi and from across the industry. Experts who are here to share their insights on developments shaping the global crowdfunding economy. Today we have a very special guest. I’m joined again by Mr. Ian Lowe. Of course, Ian is the CEO of Dacxi Global and well, the reason we’re talking to Ian today is Ian is on the ground in LA. I think he’s been there all this week. He’s at the 2022 Equity Crowdfunding Conference, I think it is. Ian, welcome to the show. So, yeah, as I say, I thought it’d be really good to catch up with you as you are at this conference called the 2022 Equity Crowdfunding Conference. Give us a little bit of an idea of what the conference is. 

GUEST INTRO

Yeah, of course. Look, it’s a three-day event with all of the leading crowdfunding platform providers here talking about their businesses in-depth sharing experiences and insights. I think more importantly, there have been quite a few panel sessions where they talk about where they believe the industry is going, and those sessions have been particularly interesting and they’ve looked at that from a couple of different angles. But as well as the crowdfunding platforms themselves, there’s a small representation from the VC community here. There are some early-stage businesses where they’re running live pitches and getting feedback on those pitches and a variety of other sorts of solutions providers within the crowdfunding ecosystem. So it’s a real melting pot of different stakeholders, all with common experiences, but slightly different views on the market opportunity, which has been great.

ANDY’S COMMENTS

Fantastic. Well, I’m sure it’s been an exciting week. Can you perhaps pull out one or two key takeaways that you’ve taken from your time at the conference? Anything that’s got you really fired up?

IAN’S COMMENTS

Yeah, look, there are a couple of things that are really worth sharing that I was really struck by, particularly on day one of the conference. So in one particular session, they had a good representation of the CEOs of all the big US-based crowdfunding providers, and platform providers. And I asked a question to wrap up this panel session. Where do you see this industry being in five years from now? And there were three very strong themes that came through in the sort of half dozen or so responses. A number of them essentially reinforced what others had said. The three things that they said they believed in most strongly in terms of what would happen over the course of the next five years. The first point was five years from now, the industry believes that for a retail investor, investing in a private company will be as easy as investing in a public company. There will be no difference in terms of friction, the time it takes, and the convenience with which it can be done. And if you think about what that truly means, it’s revolutionary because investing in public companies through equities or share apps is an incredibly simple task. And so really what we’re saying is that the crowdfunding technology, the feature sets, all of the things that are in and around that experience for the retail investor are going to continue to improve and be refined. And the technology will improve to the point where it’s going to be just as easy for that retail investor to participate in the private company investment opportunity as it is in the public company sector. So that was the first thing, and I thought a really strong statement about the direction of travel. And of course, it doesn’t speak just to the technology and the convenience, it speaks to the scale. Okay, in terms of the trajectory that the industry is on. The second thing was that there was a very strong view held by a few of the CEOs in particular, that the tokenization revolution will transform this investing in private companies to becoming a universal standard across all retail investors. In other words, the blockchain innovation that is tokenization will actually drive a universal standard in the way that retail investors have access to private company investing. And look, just in terms of the language of this, many would call it investing in private companies. In truth, it’s actually investing in the innovation economy. Investing in the enterprise economy, right? This is the structural change that crowdfunding as it’s now gathering real momentum. And clearly, this is across the world, the structural change that it’s bringing to capital markets and more importantly, to companies that require funding to further innovate or to grow. So I think that in a world that is theoretically, at least, disconnected from the world of Blockchain, it was very interesting to me that a number of these CEOs said, look, the tokenization revolution is transforming this whole market, and the blockchain method of access will become the standard path for all retail investors five years from now. The one final thing is that the view was that it’s completely inevitable that the crowdfunding opportunity will become genuinely global over the next five years. And there is a whole range of different reasons that were shared as to why that was the view. But the view is that this is heading down a global path. And so you can imagine how compelling those three things are for a business like Dacxi Chain because these are the things that we’ve believed for a long period of time as we’ve been building out this technology. And now it’s very clear from the largest companies in the industry and the leaders of those companies that this is absolutely the direction of travel. And so that’s obviously enormously exciting. 

ANDY’S COMMENTS

It’s enormously exciting. Indeed, Ian and look, it’s exciting just hearing you talk about that and fascinating to hear those three key takeaways. Essentially you’re talking about how investing in private companies will become very simple and very accessible to retail investors everywhere. Tokenization will help make all this possible and transform investing in private companies. And of course, this is going to take place all around the world. It’s going to go global. The friction will just slowly or quickly melt away. And you’re exactly right, Ian. This is what the team at the Dacxi Chain has been talking about for some time. So it must be tremendously exciting to see the rest of the kind of the crowdfunding industry now agreeing essentially with Dacxi Chain that this is the path forward, right?

IAN’S COMMENTS

Yeah, that’s absolutely right. And look, what’s probably most exciting for us is the chance for me to meet with CEOs of crowdfunding companies from different parts of the world all in one place together, and help them understand the Dacxi Chain vision. And the level of interest that we’re getting from these companies is absolutely staggering and in some respects not surprising, but certainly incredibly exciting for us. And look, I think there’s one other insight that really has come through Andy, that’s worth sharing very quickly and that is that I think there’s been a view that crowdfunding, in its different sort of flavors, is somehow competing with VC investment. And to the extent that they all want a position in a really great company, then that is true. But where it’s not the case is unlocking the enormous power of the retail investor in their many, many millions around the world. What it does is drastically reshapes the capital opportunity. And so what it’s really doing is vastly growing the amount of capital that’s available to those early-stage businesses that seek it. It’s not like there’s a finite amount of money and suddenly crowdfunding is just going to take more of that off the table. So I think that’s a point that’s really well understood. And the evidence of that is that anecdotally there are clearly a lot of VCs that are actually doing tag-alongs on capital raising, being done through a crowdfunding platform. They’re doing tag-alongs as a top-up or as a sidecar to a crowdfunding round, and they’re working together with the crowdfunding platform providers, in some cases, to make that possible. So there’s a very complementary dynamic to that. And so, whilst I think crowdfunding in some respects is a response to the limitations in the VC world around, there are actually not thousands of these companies and they’re located in very few places, and it’s very, very competitive to beat a path to their door. And then if you do get them onboard, they want influence, they want control, they want all sorts of special rights. Whilst crowdfunding is a response to that, what’s starting to emerge is that early-stage businesses, in some cases, will bring both to the table in one line and use crowdfunding as the primary capital raise and then potentially do a sidecar with a VC as well. So that’s a very interesting dynamic I think we’ll see more of.

ANDY’S COMMENTS

Yeah, got it. Thank you, Ian. And look, you used the word innovation earlier on when we were talking, and this is a word that we use a lot, obviously, at the Dacxi Chain. And I was just looking through the agenda for this conference, Ian, and if listeners, if anyone wants to see it, the website for this conference is Startupstarter.co. But what struck me, Ian is that really kind of the breadth of innovation available, or the panels and people speaking. So just to give listeners a sense of this, there’s everything from the future of Healthcare, fire, and smoke, and the future of Cannabis,  To the moon – Investing in space, clean tech solutions for the future, the future of Housing, the founder of Tomorrow autonomous technology disruptive Robotic Innovation, the State and Future of Web3, and digital assets, the future of Arts, and it just goes on and on. I get really excited by all this kind of talk of the future and how human innovation and imagination can take us there, Ian.

IAN’S COMMENTS

Yeah, look, so much the case. And what’s exciting for me, Andy, is realizing that Dacxi Chain may actually, in the end, play quite an important role in bringing the growth capital to the table, to the innovation economy, to unlock the potential of a lot of these amazing businesses with great ideas that require funding. It truly is a supply-and-demand opportunity that is being redefined before our eyes. And it’s just terrific to have a front-row seat.

ANDY’S COMMENTS

Fantastic. All right, well, hey, thank you for talking to us today, Ian. I know you’ve got a busy schedule and you’re kind of just in a breakaway room at the conference in LA. So thank you for taking the time to jump on a quick call for us. What’s next for you this week?

IAN’S COMMENTS

Well, we’ve got another day to run tomorrow and then I’m back to Sydney after that. So looking forward to tomorrow.

ANDY’S FINAL COMMENTS

Awesome. All right. Well, thanks, Ian. We’ll let you go. All the best and we’ll talk again soon.

There you go. Hey, that was Dacxi CEO Ian Lowe on the ground in LA, reporting live, and direct for the Unleashed with the Dacxi Chain podcast. Fantastic to talk to Ian. Always good to catch up with Ian. And yeah, I mean, I hope you got a sense of the excitement involved in that conference. And again, look, if you wanted to just take a look at that agenda that I was talking about, it is indeed startupstarter.co. But, yeah, fascinating to hear Ian’s takeaways from his time at the conference this week. Just running through them again. Number one, he said that there’s a general sense that going forward, it’s just going to become easier and easier for everyday investors everywhere to invest in private companies as the friction falls away. Number two, tokenization, the blockchain again, is just going to transform investing in these companies. That is going to be a no-brainer, of course. And number three, crowdfunding is just going to continue to evolve and become more and more global. Simple as that. So couldn’t agree more. Great to see that this kind of crowdfunding industry all around the world is on exactly the same page as the team at the Dacxi Chain as we all look forward to a bigger, brighter, and bolder future. All right, well, hey, just a quick one today. I hope you enjoyed that. Always good to catch up with Ian. As I say, we’ll see you real soon. Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast in whatever podcast app you are using, but that’s today’s episode. Thanks, team. This was unleashed with the Dacxi Chain.

Music courtesy of BlackIrisFilms.com

INTRO

You’re listening to Unleashed with the Dacxi Chain, hosted by Andy Pickering.

Hi, folks. It is Andy here. Welcome to Unleashed with the Dacxi Chain, a Dacxi podcast where we learn all about the Dacxi Chain and the incredible opportunities it unlocks. Let’s get on with the show. 

Hey, folks, Andy here. Welcome to Unleashed with the Dacxi Chain, the podcast that features experts from within Dacxi and also from across the industry. Experts who are here to share their insights on developments shaping everything from the global crowdfunding economy to the venture capital scene, to exponential technology trends, all that good stuff. Today we have a very special guest. His name is Andrew Romans. Andrew is CEO and general partner at 7BCVC or 7BC Venture Capital. He’s the author of several books on venture capital and also on blockchain. He’s described as a Distinguished Professor of the practice of entrepreneurship and venture capital at Chapman University. Welcome to the show, Andrew. Great to have you here. So I’ve given you a little bit of an introduction there, Andrew, but I’d love it if you could expand on that a little bit, just fill in some blanks for us just really quickly. Give us a little bit of your personal story. What led you on the path to becoming a VC?

GUEST INTRO

Yeah, so it was startups. So my favorite startups really were the ones in high school since there were no investors in it. So even though I’m a venture capitalist, when I see somebody start a company and sell it or just enjoy owning it and it makes the money, I think that’s a good thing. But some startups do need money. My first big startup, I was buying these $5 million telecom switches and so there was no way we were going to bootstrap that thing. And so I managed to get Lucent Technologies, which at the time was the biggest telecom vendor in the world, to put up $27 million. And I had 15 million from cash from VCs and then after that, this stuff is a little bit addictive. You watch your valuation go up year to year and you think, well, this beats working at Microsoft, although not everybody makes it. So it’s a combat high casualty business. But I’ll say really fast. There were three startups, with over 300 million in VC funding. There was an IPO, there was an M&A, and there was a colossal shipwreck. I was just talking to a portfolio company this week or over the weekend about firing people, and I was like, you know, man, you think they’re going to hit you, but they actually don’t. They like, hug you and thank you and cry maybe. And it’s a little exhausting. So I’ve had the ups and downs and then I moved over to investing.

ANDY’S COMMENTS

Yeah, well, look, Andrew, anyone who has dipped their toes into either VC or startups or early-stage technology companies either working on the inside or even investing in these kinds of companies. Ups and downs as part of the game, isn’t it?

ROMANS ‘ COMMENTS

Yeah. I was talking to that same CEO and he said there was one VC who got a bit upset and I was thinking, why do they even do this? Do they think they were taking no risk and then everything was going to go exactly according to year three of the Excel spreadsheet? There are going to be failures even if you’re investing late. If you were investing in the pre IPO late stage, you probably bought the stock at a higher price than it’s going to go IPO at. That’s a casualty.

ANDY’S COMMENTS

Absolutely. So I’d love to understand a little bit more about how you guys at BCVC. I assume that’s how you say BCVC, but what your approach is, I suppose what your thesis is in terms of the kind of startups or companies or founders that you look for? And am I right in saying you do focus on what we can broadly call the digital economy? I suppose. Andrew but yeah. What do you guys think about all this? Sure.

ROMANS ‘ COMMENTS

So we invest right now, we are pulling back from getting too international, although the next investment we’re making it into a crowdfunding platform out of Singapore that focuses on emerging markets. So it’s kind of like Angelist for emerging markets. So that’s really everywhere from Southeast Asia Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. And I’m a big believer in that and I’ve been kind of helping the team since inception, I knew them before they started this company and they’re doing really well. I probably should have put cash in along with my advice in the beginning because the valuation is moving quickly, but it’s still under control. I still think we can make a 100x return on that one. I have an international background. I grew up in New York and then my last two years of high school were at a bilingual school in Paris with 40 nationalities. That was a government state school. And then I’ve lived 16 years outside the United States, mostly in different places in Europe and the UK. So limited partners are the people or institutions that invest in our VC fund. So you’re not much of a venture capitalist without some capital. And one of the things that make us a bit different is that we actually have investors from six continents and I don’t think anyone really lives in the 7th one and nobody in New Zealand. But we do have a few LPs from Australia, which is cool. So we like to help our startups grow internationally as well as domestically here in the United States. And the long term, we would like to have specific buckets of money designed for specific regions and populate those funds with local GPS. So I kind of have more of the multi-domestic view. Is the winning formula that the International sent George H. W. Bush to figure out Mexico? Kind of disaster to be predicted there. But right now, we invest about 30% of our money into startups that we call pre-Series A. Most of those companies actually have $100,000 of monthly recurring revenue, so annualized they’re at about a 1.2, maybe five or seven of them will be preproduct, so naturally, pre-revenue is where we commit to investing before they set up the company. Those people we typically knew at their previous startup, if not their last two or three startups. So I’m getting kind of old, and so being old starts to pay back a little bit now, because I knew the guy’s last company, I knew her last company, we either invested or we didn’t. But we’re invited to do so now and we’re happy to do that. About 70% of our money is designed to go into the Series A round, which is a bit more growth than the 90s when I was an entrepreneur in the early 2000s. These funds have gotten bigger, and so a Series A is often not that early stage of a company, but there’s still room to make a big 50x, 100x on a good hit. If you’re investing really later than that, the multiples start to compress really rapidly. So if you invest a million dollars, 10 million is the max you’re going to get. And you’re probably if you and I had a billion dollar fund and all we do is 2x the fund, so we return 2 billion. These people are tied up for years in that, but you and I get to carve up 20% of the 1 billion profit. So you can see how some of these bigger funds people are just happy investing in Series C, D, E, writing $70 million checks, $100 million, $50 million, and $25 million checks. And if it’s 5xs, fantastic. If it goes sideways, and if they end up walking out with a 2x, 3x fund, that’ll pay for a lift ticket somewhere for your kids. Our funds are making like 15x returns. 

ANDY’S COMMENTS

Sure, got it. Thank you, Andrew. And look, you mentioned a crowdfunding startup that you are quite excited, quite intrigued by, Andrew, and here at Dacxi, that is really what we’re focused on. So the idea with the Dacxi Chain, which is a blockchain protocol, is to create the world’s leading global tokenized crowdfunding ecosystem. The idea is to connect innovators, entrepreneurs, and investors. And I’d love to dig into this just a little bit with you, Andrew because as you’ll be aware, innovation can come from anywhere around the world. There are lots of people with innovative ideas with the potential to change the world. But sometimes the road for them, being able to access capital, is much harder than, say, in the west, shall we say. And conversely, there are a lot of people that sometimes would want access to being able to invest in these kinds of ideas or back these kinds of founders who invest in these kinds of startups but depending on where you are in the world, there are different investor rules. You’ll be aware of that as well. What do you think of this idea of making, shall we just call it crowdfunding, more accessible both from the entrepreneur’s point of view and from the potential everyday investors’ point of view?

ROMANS’ COMMENTS

Well, of course, what you’re describing is a good thing. And it’s somewhat inevitable for things to evolve from the absolute caveman world that I was born into. The pretty bad scratching it out in the streets where we are now and where it should go in the future. I think that entrepreneurs are everywhere. So entrepreneurs are born everywhere. They see the necessity of how to solve their unique problems in Nigeria or the Philippines or Silicon Valley or New York City. And so that’s going to be different, I think, that funders so investors, a culture of angel investing is not everywhere. I think that Silicon Valley took off early because you had exits, so you had many employees working at a company like one of mine, and then it gets acquired by Google and it’s like a firework went off. And every little light that you see in the fireworks is a newly minted and born angel investor who said, oh my God, I just made $30 million. And half the team is leaving after the acquisition and starting new startups. I’m happy to put 250K behind this one person that we all worked with, and half the team is funding that woman entrepreneur now. Well, you don’t have that as much in Hamburg, Germany. Even though the average income in Hamburg is 5x out of Frankfurt. Most people don’t know that. That’s really old money. It’s like I own a shipping company money, and they’re not investing in anything. Whereas all of a sudden, Berlin gives birth. And those guys are so nationalistic about Berlin, they refuse to invest in Cologne, Hamburger, and Munich. It depends on the location and the year. What vintage are we in in this evolution of where things are? Entrepreneurs are everywhere. The angels were certainly not everywhere. And it’s only recently that cultural things evolve. Then you have the evolution of VCs and where are they are and what stage do they invest in. We now have seed VC funds almost everywhere in the world. There’s more critical mass in certain parts than others, so there’s a serious imbalance of that. And what is easier to manufacture overnight is to ge ta huge ecosystem of VCs to exceed in series A. It’s not so easy to get a big ecosystem overnight with government intervention in taxes. BPI France will give you 50% on anything you raise. So if I said I want to have a fund for $50 million, they’ll say, we will do you euro to euro, dollar for dollar, matching you for anything you raise with French taxpayer money. Because we need VCs because the founders are here, but there are no VCs. So overnight you get a bunch of VCs, they give tax breaks to anyone investing in a startup or a fund that invests in startups. But what you don’t have is the growth money. Who’s going to fund series B? The Series C, Series D, and Series E that gives them the capital to get on the stock market and then become a big balance sheet buyer that has a culture of buying startups?! And so you’ve seen Europe get flooded with VCs. You can even argue there’s too much money chasing not enough good deals in Europe. But I know Europe well, but there’s no money for growth. So when the offer comes along, they sell kind of early. And if you want to upset French people, hit them with this statistic that says 82% of all venture-backed exits in Europe are acquired by American Domicile buyers. And how many companies other than SAP can you name that buy technology startups in Europe that is not Healthcare Life Science? Like the Internet, was really born in the big software companies in the US. Europe does have healthcare. So what is really hard to manufacture is the big balance sheet buyers that buy these companies, and that drives the need for your crypto vision of we got to digitize everything and create liquidity without going through Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley who destroyed the Four Horsemen investment banks that were IPOing everybody like crazy. And you see a pretty robust economy, I would argue in China, although they have alienated a lot of the world now that China has this culture of IPOing companies long before they would ever get away with an IPO in the US or Europe. And that gives the early company a currency to buy with cash and stock a bit more effectively. And we’ve seen the evolution of the secondary market in the US European venture world, privately held startups that stay private forever, and it gives even more need to advance and accelerate the speed to which we get to digitizing everything. So you really get to crypto exchange and you have a democratization of someone who can sit in the middle of nowhere by a Silicon Valley snob’s standards and access the same quality of deals. But you want to be careful. If you look back at 2016, 2017, first two and a half months of 2018, that experiment proved that if you let unsophisticated people invest in venture financing without any professional VCs conducting due diligence, you will see people scamming other people and ultimately zero value being delivered to customers that pay for some sort of product or service offering that could somehow be understood in a discounted cash flow or comparable pricing of stock to say this is worth something. We did run an experiment. It proved that there’s demand, but it also proved you don’t want to just repeat that repeatedly.

ANDY’S COMMENTS

No, certainly not, Andrew. And look, you’re exactly right and you are, of course, referring to the short-lived well, not short-lived, but let’s say the short-lived ICO bubble of early 2017. Early 2018. And you’re right, it was an incredible and fascinating time. It was an experiment. Look, a lot of people did extremely well. A lot of money was made. A lot of those early crypto startups were capitalized and there are a few that remain today. But conversely, there were also a lot of scams, and a lot of fast-money activities, and a lot of people did, unfortunately, get burnt. So I suppose you’re right, Andrew, and that there needs to be some kind of due diligence, of course. And just retail investors sometimes aren’t capable of doing that for themselves, not for any particular reason. They have other day jobs, they have families, and they have responsibilities. And it can be hard if you are not deep into the industry already, to be able to do the deep research that is necessary. But that is part of what Dacxi will do as the Dacxi Chain rolls out, that will all simply be part of the process. You actually wrote a book, Andrew, around this time, I can see it was published in 2018. It was called Masters of blockchain digital assets and the new capital markets – The rise of cryptocurrency token economies and what that means for startups corporations and investors, and look, in crypto years, 2018 is a long time ago. And I’m sure some of the books focus on ICOs that have kind of passed us by. We’ve kind of evolved since then. But the core efficiencies and advantages that particularly smart contract platforms are able to unlock, all of that is probably more relevant today than ever as the rise of Ethereum and now kind of the next wave of these smart contract platforms start to deploy. How do you begin to think about all this today?

ROMANS’ COMMENTS

Well, I think I’m not like a Bitcoin absolutist whose claim to fame is they bought Bitcoin as a speculator and now they’re jumping up and down about that. That’s meaningless to me. What makes sense to me is this natural evolution of digitizing things and automating human workflows in this massive leap forward for humankind of preventing nefarious, lying and cheating. In the United States, we had a hanging chat in Florida with AlGore versus George Bush, and the US Supreme Court decided who would be the President because America didn’t have the competency to run an election. And then this comes again. I was surprised to see there was no dispute over the election in Brazil. So I don’t have to tell you how easy it is to have people verify their identities and synchronize with some data sets, like hospitals and morgues and police, and actually figure out how to never double count a vote. In the same way, if you pay me bitcoin, you can’t pay that same bitcoin to anyone else. If you put the T account of debits and credits to my bank account or my credit card onto many, many computers through open source and have some kind of consensus algorithm, you can literally make it impossible to have the hanging chad. And as a publisher of a bunch of books and in a bunch of languages, I remember McGraw Hill from New York telling me, oh, Andrew, this is how many books you sold in Japan, China, Russia, and Italy. But you’re probably bigger in Japan than you think because these Japanese are probably lying to us, right? I said, what about you? Nice New Yorkers? How do I know you’re not lying to me? Why don’t you put the API to Amazon and Barnes and Nobles and all the bookstores that you have access to onto a blockchain that I can key in, making it impossible for you to lie to me? Of course, McGraw Hill will never do that. And I threaten to publish a blog listing all the horrible things they did, like, I’m Kanye West. I can’t stand my exploiting manager here. And that stuff starts to go away if you put it on the blockchain. So this notion of the most fault-tolerant computer in the world that’s designed to make it impossible for any south of Rome cooking the books nonsense is truly amazing. And then add to its smart contract. So if you and I have a deal that if you introduce me to someone and she invests in our fund, I pay you 20% of my management fee. Well, my word is, my bond is an Englishman. Shut up. It’s like Grandpa said. Why didn’t you get this in writing? Well, why the hell why is it not on the blockchain? Oh, there’s only one reason our legal agreements are not on a blockchain. Someone’s trying to roger someone else, and that’s not cool. So the big thing is, beyond getting it in writing, make it impossible for them to not pay you for your widgets, and then remove free will of when they pay you or don’t pay you. And that’s the smart contracts you’re talking about. So that’s just a natural evolution for the world. And that’s where things really have to go. There’s only so long Kanye West is going to tolerate, or Yay is going to tolerate, a bad music record label completely screwing him. And then, of course, with that industry, his record label should be his fans, obviously. And then you start to see the direction of do you think the Grateful Dead would want Harvey Weinstein involved with their projects? They would have all the Deadheads doing everything, doing all the things with Tokens and Airdrops and it’s its own currency within that camping ground or whatever the hell they do. The irony, and I’ll let you speak because I know I’m going off here. The irony is that instead of this being the truth machine that I was excited about, it became a magnet for crowdfunding scammers. And everyone’s from Russia, and these people, their idea of going from communism failed Soviet-style stuff to capitalism was it’s not stealing. It’s just if you let me hack you and steal from you, that’s on you. You can’t bring your morality police of all these Russian scammers in the crypto world. They’re just brought up to say, hey, I’m doing the best I can, and I don’t see a problem if I can hack into Andrew’s phone and steal his crypto while he’s on an airplane. So it was like a magnet that attracted the worst of people and grifters to what is and still is the truth machine and what should make everyone honest.

ANDY’S COMMENTS

Yes. That’s wonderfully said, Andrew. I enjoyed that. And it occurs to me and my family, we’re watching Game of Thrones at the moment, my partner and I, with our twelve-year-old. So we feel he’s old enough now to enjoy Game of Thrones. So we’re watching season one, and I think what they talk about a lot in Game of Thrones is they have these agreements between the different clans or different houses. If we go to war, we will back your banner. We will be bannerman behind House Stark or whatever it was. And so those were early forms of contracts and really the only way to enforce them was through the sword and who had the better army, really. And then, of course, we transitioned into legal documents. And how are they enforced? Well, they’re enforced with, I’ve got a better high-powered lawyer than you do, and so hopefully we can come to some agreement over who’s got the better contract. But of course, it has to go to court and there are problems with that system, as you know. And now, of course, we have these smart contracts which they take that kind of human unpredictability out of the equation, which is the beauty of a smart contract. And it is simple code enforced by code. So that’s one point that occurred to me, listening to you there, Andrew, I love that. Just as we start to finish off, what I’d like to do, Andrew, is maybe just to get a sense from you, it’s a pretty funny time in the world. It’s a pretty crazy time in the world. Where do you see good investment opportunities at the moment? Or perhaps more accurately, over the next ten years? What do you kind of see coming up on the horizon? What is your firm looking at? Is anything coming down the pipe? What do you expect to happen over the next ten years? Look, it’s just speculation, but love to hear your thoughts.

ROMANS’ COMMENTS

Well, I think it’s technology. Technology and data. And then there’s also maybe markets. Did you ever read the book Lyrus Poker? And then the guy wrote Moneyball and then they made a movie with Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill? Okay, so in that movie then, these guys were the worst in their league of baseball. The Oakland A’s. It’s kind of home to me from Silicon Valley, and by just saying, hey, we’re not going to look at these tattoos that David Beckham has now mixing metaphors into football, but we’re just going to go on the data. So is David Beckham really a great soccer player? I think people I know would say yes, but it doesn’t matter what his wife’s haircut looks like or anything like that. Let’s just go with pure data. And they rose from the very bottom to winning the World Series. So they won the World Cup of baseball by just focusing on data. And then this is all a true story. Boston hired him to the Red Sox and they won two more World Series in a row. So it was a three-time total success. Ongoing data only. I think that you also look at Palantir, Joel Lonsdale’s company with Alex Moore, which I was involved with, they basically said, if this, then that, if this, then that. So if you ever received a phone call from anyone from Somalia and you’ve been spotted in a hot mosque in London and you’ve been caught saying this word now that we’re using deep-packet inspection and wiretapping everything, there’s going to be men in black following you in a van within 5 seconds. And they found Osama bin Laden. And after nobody else could find them. And then they figured, well, if we can find Osama bin Laden, maybe we can figure out when a bunch of high school guys meet up years later in Las Vegas for a weekend. And the following week they all filed insurance claims that their pickup trucks were in car accidents and this was fraud. And the same Palantir was saving insurance. So if Data can win baseball, it can win insurance, it can win health care, it can win financial services. And those are big markets. So if you can save a big insurance company a little bit of money, you’ve probably got yourself a deck of corn on your hands worth more than $10 billion. So we think software companies that are automating human workflows, that’s beginning to save the day right away. Humans shouldn’t be doing really stupid things with their minds and they’re not good at that and they make mistakes and so automate that stuff. So going to get your Visa to travel to some country, going to the Department of Motor Vehicles, seeing your primary care physician in a different country, all these things should just be automated with software and they end up saving money and increasing revenues and making everyone happier and lowering churn and blah, blah, blah. But it’s important to not just have point solutions and tap into more and more data sets like Moneyball that give you a total edge over your competitors. And if large corporates are not buying these companies, they will go bankrupt and if you’re the only insurance company that literally just says, well, these guys all were in Vegas, they all went home to their different parts of the country, and then they all filed these claims and they’re not using technology for this. Well, that’s the idiot insurance company that’s going to go bust, literally, or it’s going to just be a slow Japanese burn into nothing where someone else will be actually buying those companies. And that’ll be the Cisco Systems that was buying every startup in the 90s in Silicon Valley, investing in every VC fund and using corporate venture capital as a weapon to drive their M and A program, and became the biggest market capitalized company on the stock exchange in the year 2000. So I think that software automating human workflows and tapping into data sets is kind of what we like to see the most. But look, I met this Canadian guy and an Italian guy that said we want to be Angelist for emerging markets. And I said, well, somebody’s going to do that. The question I have is, are you guys the right ones to do that? And they have a high-velocity culture that’s proliferating into everyone they touch and I really think that that’s a winner and we want to get behind it. Are they automating human workflows? Well, I think that they’re going to do maybe I don’t know a lot about anything about your company other than what you said today, but you need issuance, you need due diligence, and you also need a secondary trading system for liquidity. And so what you end up in you can ultimately have atomic swaps without going into Fiat and things. And so this stuff won’t be built overnight. And dealing with all of your mentioned regulatory compliance and all the different jurisdictions. Have you ever seen these people interviewing Mark Zuckerberg in the US? They don’t understand what is advertising, what is data is, or what is anything. So these are the blind leading the people that can see. So our governments are just so bad, it’s your fault for supporting this campaign finance. If whoever had money will give them money and they do whatever the money tells them to do, we’re just so lost with our governments that it’s exciting to think of all this stuff turning digitized. 

ANDY’S COMMENTS

Yeah. Thank you, Andrew. I completely agree. And you’re right. You’re talking about, of course, when Mark Zuckerberg would have to go in front of the various different US political cabinets or tables or whatever they were, the councils, and it was a little bit painful to watch at times. Andrew, I’ve really enjoyed talking to you. Thank you so much for sharing your insights today. Just a good way to finish off is to look if you could please tell us where people can find you. I don’t know if you like to hang out on Twitter, but anywhere else you like to hang out online and of course where people can go to see what you guys are up to at 7BC Venture Capital.

ROMANS’ COMMENTS

Yeah, sure. I’m open to email so people can email me. It’s [email protected]. BC originally stood for Blockchain, and we were kind of inspired there. You can also find me on LinkedIn if you just search Andrew Romans or if you search on YouTube, a lot of stuff comes up. And we’re excited about partnering with large corporations, with big high-velocity startups, with angel investors, with family offices, about funding startups in the US. And then setting up specific funds around the world with dedicated local teams that can connect the dots. So I think, for example, a Latin American VC fund might be more interested in the deal flow coming out from Africa and Southeast Asia than what’s being built in New York and Silicon Valley these days. On the other hand, when you start to cross-pollinate all these things, I think good things happen. It removes a little ignorance. Absolutely.

ANDY’S FINAL COMMENTS

Thank you again, Andrew. Fantastic talking to you. All the best and bye for now.

All right, folks, there you go. How good was that? That was Andrew Romans, CEO and general partner at 7BC Venture Capital. It was fascinating speaking to Andrew. I very much enjoyed that conversation and I hope you did too. I thought it was very interesting that Andrew could see the promise and potential of a global crowdfunding ecosystem that is more accessible and global than what we’ve seen to date. But he’s quite right to say that things can go wrong with a system that is unfettered crowd-raising with no one to look over the process, no regulatory oversight, and no other investor protections. And the ICO bubble of 2017 is probably the number one example of what can happen in terms of what can go right in terms of access to new capital for those early-stage businesses and the ability to fund new technology or new innovation startups. But of course, what can go wrong also what can go wrong when some of those turn out to be scams, of course, then the bubble pops and people get burnt. So I thought it’d be worth reiterating that and pointing out that what the Dacxi Chain is trying to do is create a new, fully regulated ecosystem where everyday investors all around the world have access to new investment opportunities. And for those founders who have innovative ideas, innovation ideas, but need funding for those ideas, well, they can access this new global investor pool. And of course, it’s all done in a safe, sophisticated, and mature way. So one point is that this will all be done at scale. So the tokenization of those equity shares means that anyone can invest almost whatever amount they wish, subject to the regulations in whatever country they are in. And then, of course, that unlocks a massive global pool of investors for those entrepreneurs to tap into. Now, as Andrew mentioned, for all of this to work, you need a secondary market, you need liquidity. And that is a big part of what the Dacxi Chain will help enable here because traditional early-stage unlisted company investing always involves locking up your investments for years and years, sometimes until the company founders decide to exit or sell or list on a stock market. So the Dacxi Chain is going to solve this liquidity issue through tokenization on or at a local level, through a network of locally owned crowdfunding platforms. And then Dacxi will launch a specialist secondary market so people can offer their tokens for sale. And if everything can be put on chain, of course, that offers investors and entrepreneurs an unprecedented level of transparency and security. And this network of locally owned crowdfunding platforms will lead a unique due diligence process, offering investors confidence in the growth potential of the companies they are considering investing in so that they can make better and more informed investment decisions. So I just thought it was worth going over that, trying to give a very concise overview of how the Dacxi Chain is going to build out this tokenized global crowdfunding ecosystem and try and solve some of the issues that we’ve seen in the crowdfunding model to date. We’ll learn much more about the detail of how this all works in future episodes of the podcast, so do look forward to that. Please make sure you are subscribed to the podcast so you can see when those episodes drop. But really, that is today’s episode, folks, so I do hope you enjoyed it, I hope you found some value in it. As I mentioned, please subscribe to the podcast in whatever podcast app you use. Would also love it if you could give us a five-star rating. You can do that in the Apple podcast app. I think you can do it on Spotify now as well. So if you can leave us a rating, and even write us a nice review, we’d certainly appreciate it.

All right, well, thank you for listening. That is the end of today’s show. This was Unleashed with the Dacxi Chain. See you next time, and bye for now.