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So, let’s dig right into it. You just announced, Moe, you raised $50 million for this new venture fund. It’s going to focus on crypto companies. Now, there are there are a few such firms like this. What what’s going to make you all different, Moe?
First of all, thank you again for having me on the show. Um, when we look at crypto today, relative to where it was 10 years ago, you know, it’s a multi-trillion dollar asset class. You’re seeing large institutions starting to build, and you’re seeing large, um, and you’re seeing regulation kind of be a a proxy for giving comfort to to to these companies. When that happens, you’re going to see new companies being born.
And so, these new crypto companies that are out there need investors that understand how to operate and build for scale. Working at places like BlackRock or BCG, along with my uh my partners that have co-founded the fund, we felt that a $50 million fund was a perfect opportunity to bring operator-led capital to help these next generation of founders entering the space. We’re excited about maximum frequency ventures.
Now, Mo, are you guys all saying, listen, who a few more details, who you raise the money from, limited partners? What kind of details?
Yeah, we we haven’t shared the the LP list. uh but we have great family offices both here in the in in the US along with East Asia and Southeast Asia that have joined us in this journey and they’re all sort of excited about this next wave of founders that are coming into the space.
And have you deployed this any of this money yet, Mo?
We did. We did. So, we’ve been working on this for a little bit and we’ve found six amazing founders that we’ve already invested in companies that are building new forms of money, folks like stablecoin issuers that have are that are regulated and issuing out of UAE for example, or Singaporean juris Singapore jurisdictions. And then we have companies that are thinking about the new
form of IP management and how, you know, someone can actually get paid for sharing IP in a more open way versus the closed walls that have existed. So crypto provides all these new paradigm shifts for these different industries, whether it’s money or IP, and we’re investing in these founders and have made six investments already.
Those six investments, are those US-based? Are they international?
Great question. So, two of our partners are based in Asia. One is in Singapore, the other splits time between uh Korea and Hong Kong. Myself and my partner Neil are here in the US. And when we look at founders, we see founders coming from all over the world to your point. And so three of those investments are actually based out of Asia, Singapore, UAE as I mentioned, and uh and Korea and South Korea.
The other founders are here, right here in the United States. So, one in the West Coast and one uh two here in the uh in based out of the East Coast.
How do you decide just who to who to write checks to? I was once talking to Jeff Lewis, that’s another smart smart tech investor. And Jeff once told me, you know how in real estate, it’s location, location, location. He said, really, it’s just founder, founder, founder. Is it that simple?
Man, I I I couldn’t agree more with Jeff. I mean, and and I think you said it really well. When you think about who is really behind a company and the company’s vision, its strategy, it really ends up being founder driven. And you see that in some of the, you know, public companies that are founder-led today, all the way to, you know, some of the companies that are growing into being publicly listed tomorrow. And when we see these founders, they they need that help.
And so they have something special in them. We think from our perspective, we can coach them to get to where they need to be. And so there’s something special on a founder, but it takes a lot of the operational excellence that we bring to the table to really get them to that, to catapult them to that next level. So we focus on the founders.
We focus on what they know specifically about a problem set and a industry, and we bring our crypto expertise and our operational expertise to help them launch.
Given, you know, you have this inter- international kind of scope and vision, Moe. So I’m curious, when you look around the world, what’s the country, what’s the region that’s sort of, in your opinion, is leading in crypto in terms of creativity, innovation, dynamism? Is it the US or no, you give the gold someplace else?
Yeah, I mean, when when I, you know, we spend a lot of time with folks like uh A16Z and and and someone like Ben Horowiitz who talk about American dynamism. And for crypto specifically, historically over the last, you know, five years, we’ve seen a lot of founders building in places like Singapore and UAE because it was unclear in terms of how the US was really setting up.
Today, with things like the Genius Act being passed, actually, I think innovation is starting to lead here again in the US. It’s spent some time over the last nine months catching up, and we think it’s going to accelerate from here. A lot of that sort of stall uh stalling that took place was because regulation was not clear here in the US. So now that we have things like the Genius Act again as in place, I think that innovation and that creativity that’s six sits here within the United States is sort of unmatched globally.
With that being said, founders today are global. And so this is why we’re taking a both east and west approach. Founders in the West know they have a unique access and opportunity to tap into Eastern markets. Vice versa, founders that typically might come out of a certain place in in in in Asia may not typically get access to the Western markets. We see this and we see this crossover across borders, no pun intended, with all these amazing companies and founders today and we think crypto is going to be a benefit uh beneficiary as a part of this.
Quickly last question, Moe. You know, you launched this fund as cryptocurrencies have been sliding a bit here, Bitcoin, Ethereum. Just quickly, is that in your opinion macro worries? Is it just folks booking profit? What do you think?
Yeah, I mean, it’s it’s an excellent point to look at the macro. The macro is obviously depending on so many different factors that are out of the control for crypto. But historically, what we’ve seen is crypto being uh a little bit of a multiplier effect on what happens within macro. We saw some of that sort of play out last Friday as you probably saw, Bitcoin take a hit and other uh other alt altcoins take a hit as well. There are other systematic components that sit underneath that that drive some of this in addition to the macro factors. But, you know, we we don’t look at the macro. We look at what innovation is really fueling.
And if you, you know, kind of think about where technology is sort of headed within the space, along with all the uh uh incumbents and and and new entrants that are coming in, especially with things like stable coins and new world of payments, we think there’s so much more to build as part of the stack and maximum frequency ventures is really well positioned to support that.
Moe, great to have you today and congrats again on the new fund.
