Although Bitcoin is still doing pretty well (it’s up 74% over the last year), it’s now doing well in the same kind of investment universe as other investments; the days when it went from $50 to $50,000 are long in the past and probably (although never say never) won’t ever come back. That means that we will no longer get stories of people becoming multimillionaires because they once bought a few to see how it worked and then forgot about them, or spending the equivalent of $1bn on a pizza. These days, the only sudden crypto bro success stories are from the people who managed to found companies or exchanges, and then successfully IPO them.
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The latest such story is of an exchange called Bullish, which launched on the stock market this month and is currently valued at $9.84bn. That means that Kokei Yuan (Guo to his friends), a former investment banker at CLSA, has ten figures on his wealth management statement, and it doesn’t begin with a 1.
Yuan seems to dislike publicity as much as his co-founder Brendan Blumer (who has been involved with previous startups and has already featured in the pages of Mansion Global magazine, the magazine for people with mansions), embraces it. He graduated from Tufts University with a degree in “Economics and Studio Art”, which looks like a double-major designed to keep your parents off your back while you do an art degree. He doesn’t seem to have spent all that much time at CLSA, but moved on to leadership roles at Block.one, a blockchain software and investment company, and ii5, an Indian online real estate startup.
In other words, he was in the right place, at the right time, and said “yes” to a lot of opportunities when his peers in the investment banking industry were saying “that sounds like an absolute waste of time” and trying to climb the greasy pole to vice president. And now he’s a billionaire while his former colleagues have spent a few years trying to survive the Hong Kong investment banking deal drought.
There’s not necessarily any real lesson to learn here – we only read about the successes, and there will be many more crypto founders who have instead crawled back to banking, having lost a few years of career progression if they get back into the industry at all. But it’s something which happens regularly in cycles – thirty years ago, it was dot com billionaires making the news, and two hundred years ago people were leaving New York banking jobs to take part in the gold rush. All you can say is good luck to the ones who make it work.
Elsewhere, are today’s computer science graduates just no good any more? Ben Hylak, the CTO of an AI startup, is complaining on X.com that although he is conducting around 15 interviews a day as he scales up, “most people are just… not good. So many CS graduates with 0 career experience, 0 side projects.” He is partly blaming a recruiter who isn’t passing on the best candidates, but seemingly there is also an element of “kids these days”.
In responses to the thread, people have been asking pointed questions like “how much are you paying?” and “why would you expect a new graduate to have experience?”, but the answers seem to suggest something about the state of the hype cycle. Hylak is offering packages of between $80k and $200k, justifying this by saying that some coders might want a high cash salary, but that others might be more financially secure or less risk-averse and want something more weighted toward stock options.
And it’s that throwaway remark about equity compensation that’s interesting. Even at the high end of the range, $200k is not necessarily particularly competitive with what Google or Meta might pay elite graduates (or indeed, what Citadel Securities pays teenagers). But not so long ago, the prospect of getting an equity stake in a seemingly credible and well-funded AI startup would have drawn interest from all over the coding world. The interesting fact here is not that recruitment in Silicon Valley is difficult – that’s always been the case. It’s that the story isn’t selling as well as it used to.
Meanwhile …
As the senior traders return from holiday in order to see what the summer skeleton crew has got up to, it’s likely that the air of calm that has prevailed in the markets will be disrupted. (Bloomberg)
If you have dropped your phone, credit card or Rolex into the sea off a boat in the Hamptons, Trebor Barry will find it. Charging $200 if he succeeds and $100 for his rare failures, he makes enough (including tips from grateful butterfingered hedge fund managers) from the summer season to take the rest of the year off. (NY Post)
Another great year for the workers’ cooperative at XTX markets – last year’s profits were £1.3bn, split roughly fifty/fifty between Alex Gerko and the other 30 traders. (FT)
Hong Kong is back, and the latest piece of evidence is that the flow of staff from international banks to domestic and Mainland players is reversing. Doris Jiang, previously the head of ECM execution at Huatai, has moved to BNP Paribas. (Bloomberg)
Even more than liquidity, buy side traders value the personal touch – “excellent customer service” was their most important criterion for judging brokers in a recent survey. And it’s becoming much more important, as many client trading desks are concentrating their flow with as few as five counterparties. (Traders Magazine)
“The court was told that Phillips thought following influencers on social media made him a properly qualified hedge fund manager when it did not”. Sentencing remarks for the perpetrator of a Ponzi scheme fraud in a small Cornish village. (Cornwall Live)
It was annoying when the pawnbroker sold his wife’s 20-carat pink diamond ring, but what Phil Falcone really regrets is having to sell the professional ice hockey team that he used to own. In an interview which he presumably hopes Lisa Marie Falcone will never read, he denies that he’s finished, or even particularly bothered by the run of bad luck that’s taken him from the hedge fund pinnacles. (NY Post)
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