Dacxi Team

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 Andrew@7bc.vc. 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.