More Money than God
In our first meeting, my mentor told me that most people's lives are driven by one of three desires: money, fame, and power. Acquiring the first of these is often the most challenging, as the other two tend to follow naturally. Money buys fame and power, fame attracts money and power, and power enables money and fame. The trifecta of life.
He then asked me which of the three I wanted to choose in my own life. I answered "money" because I didn't know what my true aspirations were at the time. Money appeared to offer the greatest range of possibilities and I reasoned that as long as I had enough, money would solve any problem that might arise down the road.
So I began searching for a career that offered the quickest path to money. For someone without rich parents or coding skills, Wall Street seemed to present the best option and I was eventually drawn to private equity, aka the Holy Grail of all aspiring finance monkeys. To be honest, I wasn't even sure what private equity exactly did. But the words "private" and "equity" sounded prestigious, and the vague image of investors rolling up their sleeves and buying companies gave an illusion that I too could make it if I got there.
Most private equity firms looked for investment banking experience. So even though I wasn't thrilled at the idea of slaving away at a mergers and acquisitions shop for a few years, I had to pay my dues. My courtship with Wall Street was a stereotypical finance recruiting story involving cold emails, elevator pitches, and unending rounds of interviews with practically every major investment bank in Manhattan. By the time I could recite the discounted cash flow analysis in my sleep, I was awarded a summer analyst position at one of the big banks, which led to a full-time offer that I quickly accepted.
Private equity recruiting began only a couple months into my new job. It was an annual ritual that always sent the entire Wall Street into a frenzy, with mega funds sounding the horns and the smaller funds following suit. Chaos ensued for weeks as each firm tried to beat its competition by pre-emptively locking in the top candidates. By the time I received an offer from a middle market private equity firm, I was more relieved than happy to have survived the brutal initiation.
The rest of the two-year stint in banking passed by quickly without much drama. Most of my analyst class lined up various fancy jobs and we celebrated our last day at a nearby steakhouse. Glowing from too much seared fat and wine, we walked back to the office to turn in the blackberries and rejoiced in our freedom. My long pursuit of private equity was finally over and I was ready to live the happy life that I thought awaited me.
I unfortunately could not have been more wrong.
A Start-up City
Shortly after I accepted the private equity offer, I stumbled upon an article about Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos at the time. Tony sold his online shoe business to Amazon in 2009, but remained as the CEO and moved the headquarter to the dying old downtown of Las Vegas.
After successfully building a billion dollar business, Tony wanted to take on a bigger challenge and "start up" the downtown from scratch. He invested sizable net worth into the area and created bars, cafes, and restaurants where the tech entrepreneurs and artists that he recruited could interact with one another. He believed these social sparks would increase economic activity, generate more tax revenue, and improve public services, which would ultimately create a self-sustaining loop that would revitalize the area.
The scale of Tony's thinking lit a fire in my heart. I spent hours reading everything about his Downtown Project and learned that similar revitalization movements were happening across many cities in America. Between my banking and private equity jobs, I visited a few to witness their transformation and find out why these cities were suddenly teeming with life again. While there was no simple explanation, every city had something in common: people were building new things, turning their ideas into new businesses, and most importantly, full of hope and optimism.
The trip truly opened my eyes and made me realize that I wasn’t chasing money to just solve my daily problems. Instead, I wanted to dream bigger and pursue something that had the potential to change the world. And Tony's crusade of reviving old cities certainly felt like a worthy cause that aligned with my aspiration. Up until this point, I had been hyper-focused on getting to Wall Street to make as much money as possible. But ironically, it was outside of New York City that I was able to find the true purpose of my financial pursuit. Money was simply a medium that would allow me to achieve these goals.
When I got back from the trip, I struggled to connect the dots between my newfound inspiration and the private equity job. How was acquiring companies using debt relevant to what I really wanted to do? Maybe capitalizing small companies would create new jobs, improve the local economy, and help revitalize the area. I knew it was a stretch, but I tried to convince myself that at worst, I would be adding valuable work experience on my resume.
Unfortunately, there was a big discrepancy between the reality and my perception of what a private equity job entailed. Like many other banking analysts, I strived to go beyond just putting together Excel models and Power Point slides, and focus on creating actual value. Private equity seemed to hold the keys to this promised land where investors leaned on corporate strategy and financial engineering to turnaround a company's operations and create tangible value for all of its constituents.
It didn't take long to realize how delusional I was. "Operational improvement" was certainly a part of every firm's investment strategy, but private equity was a deal business that made money by doing transactions. This meant as an associate, my job was to build financial models, update them, write memos, and conduct due diligence. While I monitored the performance of our portfolio companies, got on calls with the CEOs, and even traveled for board meetings, it wasn't my role (nor should it be) to dig into the operations or come up with a new go-to-market strategy.
Even when I was involved in operational work, the bulk of my job was analyzing add-on acquisitions, which only meant doing more transaction work that I came to despite. I realized that I wasn't passionate enough about the deal business to be long-term successful in this industry. And as my two-year associate program came to an end, it became clear that I needed to move on.
The more I thought about my next move, the more vividly I remembered Tony's grand vision of rebuilding American cities. There seemed to be three paths to getting there: (1) become a successful entrepreneur like Tony, (2) run for a political office, or (3) go into real estate. Since I didn't have any billion dollar business ideas nor had any intention of jumping into politics, real estate was the only viable option. But given my lack of relevant experience, it was an uphill battle to find an opportunity that wouldn’t totally reset my career trajectory. To make things more complicated, I wanted a real estate job with a mission-driven angle as renovating buildings to simply increase rents felt too similar to my current role in private equity.
It certainly felt like searching for a unicorn. But I networked for months and finally connected with a firm in New York that invests in affordable housing in urban areas. Their mission of building stronger communities resonated with me and it was refreshing to meet people who were not just focused on generating profit, but also determined to make a positive impact on the local community. The team was initially puzzled by my unconventional resume, but my unique story into real estate and extensive background in finance convinced them to take a chance on me.
My path to Wall Street didn't pan out as I had originally envisioned. But life opened another door and I began the next phase of my life as an urban impact investor.
The Crypto Rabbit Hole
Everyone’s trip down the crypto rabbit hole often begins in a bull market and mine wasn't an exception. I was skeptical of Bitcoin's value when its bull run unfolded in 2017, but the media hype around it triggered my curiosity. To learn more, I reached out to a friend that was already deep into crypto and he happily organized a gathering for me and a few other crypto-curious friends.
The story began with the cyberpunks and their long dream of creating a trustless digital currency. The prophecy was fulfilled in 2008 when Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin whitepaper. Bitcoin solved the double-spend problem that plagued other distributed cash projects by using a proof-of-work consensus and recording payments in an open ledger of "blocks" connected by "chains" (hence, blockchain).
This revolutionary peer-to-peer technology drew libertarians and technocrats from all over the world and some began to imagine whether blocks on Bitcoin's network could represent more than just money. One of them was Vitalik Buterin, who envisioned creating a version of Bitcoin with a Turing-complete programming language that could support any digital transactions. This led to the creation of Ethereum in 2013, which opened the door for other crypto projects and eventually fueled the raging bull market that we were witnessing.
While I struggled to understand the technical terms, I immediately became drawn to this new technology. As if I took the red pill, I spent countless hours researching and learning everything about crypto and its sagas from the past decade. And my relentless hyperlink clicking eventually led me to a website that would forever change my perspective on crypto: Steemit.
Steemit was a decentralized social media application founded in 2016 that aimed to give power back to its users. It utilized a delegated-proof-of-stake consensus where users could stake the native token Steem and delegate the voting rights to witnesses that validated the blocks on their behalf. Unlike Bitcoin's miners that earned 100% of the new block rewards, Steemit's witnesses earned only a percentage with the majority being allocated to new posts based on the amount of upvotes they received. It was an exciting time to be on Steemit as the dollar value of these rewards increased significantly during the bull market, and the entire community was euphoric about the project's potential to revolutionize social media.
Unfortunately, the party didn't last long as Bitcoin started crashing in early 2018 and along with it took down the entire crypto market. The unexpected crypto winter was rough for the first timers and many couldn't stomach the soul crushing grind low that had no end in sight. As the fun bull market memes ended on Steemit, ideological differences between users resurfaced, and simple arguments over which posts deserved more rewards quickly devolved into a full-out downvoting war that annihilated what was once a bustling community. Users left in droves and dumped their staked tokens, which triggered a price capitulation for Steem and signaled the beginning of the Dark Ages instead of the promised new era.
While everyone was busy writing crypto's obituary in 2018 and 2019, those who stayed continued to build quietly for the next bull market. Steemit Inc., the owner of Steemit, retreated from the scene due to lack of funding, but the remaining community filled that void by picking up their shovels. Users developed new Dapps that utilized Steem and hosted real world events with the hopes of increasing its adoption. This grassroot movement was my first glimpse at the power of decentralization and taught me valuable lessons about governance, incentives, and community building.
Then in March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic sent the entire financial market to the brink of collapse. Crypto was not immune to the black swan event with Bitcoin falling over 50% and triggering liquidation cascades throughout the market. Just when everything seemed over, the Federal Reserve and other central banks joined hands and fired unprecedented amount of liquidity into the market, which stabilized pricing and led to the greatest recovery witnessed in modern financial history.
While rest of the world was in turmoil, Steemit was going through a crisis of its own. Justin Sun, the CEO of Tron Foundation, saw the value of the platform and bought Steemit Inc.'s tokens to bring the social network and its community to his Tron ecosystem. It's a complicated story that deserves its own post, but debates arose within the Steemit community about the legitimacy of Steemit Inc.'s pre-mined tokens that Sun acquired. Community members and witnesses feared that Sun was taking over with the intention of dissolving Steem and to protect the network, they pre-emptively froze Sun's tokens. Agitated Sun formed an alliance with some of the largest crypto exchanges and quickly retaliated to regain control of his money.
The Steem Wars went on for several weeks until the rebellion decided to escape Sun's new imperial order through a hard fork and created a clone copy of Steem that excluded the controversial pre-mined stake. Both Steem and Hive, its new copy, still co-exist to this date. But the community was once again split with a small minority supporting Sun and the majority vehemently against him. Many others like myself, were confused and trying to comprehend everything that had unfolded. The uncertainty prompted a second mass exodus of users, and this time I also left to find a new crypto social platform. It was a bittersweet decision as Steemit was the first project that truly crystalized for me what crypto could be.
After a few months of social media hiatus, I discovered Twitter, which to my surprise had a much larger crypto community than Steemit. On Twitter, I found out about the DeFi summer that was full in force. Uniswap had just air-dropped its new UNI tokens and launched the mining pools to increase liquidity on its DEX. I initially had a hard time understanding the complexities of DeFi, but things began to click once I successfully figured out how to farm yields by myself. I ventured deeper into DeFi and explored the new financial world that was being built by the brightest minds in crypto. The products were still rudimentary compared to their tradfi counterparts, but between the power of tokenomics and the value accrued to the end user, I began to see DeFi's potential to disrupt the traditional financial markets.
Then out of nowhere, Bitcoin started surging at the end of 2020 and began its meteoric rise. The king's revival was an emotional moment for me as it proved the skeptics wrong and validated my long-standing faith in crypto. When the GameStop saga unfolded later in January, it further confirmed my belief that the world was in the process of transforming itself. The ongoing digital revolution was indeed returning the power to the players and crypto was only going to level this playing field. As the market reached new highs, I began to imagine a parallel universe where traditional financial rules didn't apply: a world of banking without banks, tokenized digital monkeys, self-organizing communities without CEOs, and magicians using lines of code to make these dreams a reality.
To echo Ryan Selkis, crypto presented a legitimate challenge to all monopolies and offered a compelling alternative to our decaying legacy institutions, checking the incumbent powers in tech, finance, and government. DeFi offered savers a much higher interest rate than Wall Street. NFTs provided creators with monetization opportunities without having to go through Hollywood's gatekeepers. Open games and social networks removed tech oligarchs and eliminated de-platforming risks. The possibilities were endless as crypto moved us from an internet controlled by the feudal overlords to infinite frontier of new possibilities.
Maybe we were all going to make it.
The Unknown Journey
Just as I became certain that crypto's success was inevitable, the entire market took another nosedive in late 2021. The crash was triggered by the Federal Reserve's implementation of quantitative tightening, and it was a bitter reminder that centralized institutions still held massive power over the decentralized world that we were building. As the market continued its free fall, uncertainty and doubt grew within the crypto community and caused even the most ardent advocates to question the foundations of their beliefs.
While the bear market shattered my hope, it also gave me a chance to step back and seriously contemplate my future in crypto. Things were going well at my real estate job, but two things gave me a pause from making a long-term commitment to further advance my career. First, I realized that while I found the mission-driven aspect of the job rewarding, I didn't have a genuine passion for the product (real estate). Secondly, collaborating with the public sector was often frustrating as government agencies were not designed to make quick decisions. This clashed with my personal desire to create greater impact as I felt like fighting with one hand tied behind my back.
After long contemplation, I came to the conclusion that the best way to maximize impact is not by following the existing rules, but by changing them through disruptive technology. And to me that represented crypto. Despite the crash revealing ugly aspects of the industry, I still held firmly onto my belief in the decentralized future. I had faith in the purity of Satoshi's original vision and wanted to take part in the revolution that was sparked by Bitcoin and now further amplified by Ethereum and other projects. Open, transparent, and permission-less systems could re-write the rules and lead to a more equitable world where contributions could be measured, fairly compensated, and shared in a decentralized manner. Of course crypto wasn't going to solve every problem. But I truly believed it held the power to make our society better tomorrow than it is today.
With this new determination, I reached out to my professional network and connected with people that were already working in crypto. Many of them were happy to hear my confession and encouraged me to take the leap. But, they also stressed the importance of finding a niche as the industry was now too large for a new entrant like me to succeed as a generalist. After reflecting deeply on the intersection between my interests and strengths, I decided on the following three parameters to serve as my guide.
1. Early-Stage Projects vs. VC
Given my investing background, VC was the first career path in crypto that came to my mind. Early-stage investing, however, required different skill sets than the ones I developed in private equity and real estate. While financial analysis and deal structuring were still important, successful venture capitalists relied heavily on their proprietary relationships (built over long time) to source deals and raise capital. This meant that if I transitioned to a VC, I probably had to reboot my career (once again). I weighed the pros and cons, but ultimately decided I needed a change of scenery after being an investor for nearly 10 years. I have always had an itch to build new products on the business side and to fulfill this dream, I'm exploring opportunities in early-stage and pre-IPO crypto projects.
2. Infrastructure vs. Application
Crypto projects can be broadly divided into infrastructure and applications. As Etham noted in his post, infrastructure refers to services or protocols on top of which applications are built, and applications refer to products built around specific use cases. While applications are generally easier to understand and has a higher upside if successful, it is difficult to determine which ones will succeed. Infrastructure, on the other hand, is technically more complex, but a lower beta play as it is relatively agnostic to any particular use case.
One of the things I enjoy in crypto is following the changing infrastructure landscape as they tend to reveal the broad strokes of where the industry is headed next. I also believe being able to understand the technical complexities will provide a more fundamental skill set that could be utilized regardless of what I choose to pursue next. So for now, I am focused on infrastructure projects that are solving the scalability and interoperability issues, and laying the ground work for crypto's eventual mass adoption.
3. Decentralized Identity
In my opinion, crypto's fundamental value lies in its ability to bridge the trust gap between participants on a network. While data stored on blockchain cannot be tempered and smart contracts enable two parties to transact in a trustless manner, crypto scams continue to proliferate due to counterparty risks that exist when dealing with unknown parties. Users try to reduce this risk by adhering to the "don't trust, verify" mantra, but one can only verify so much with limited time and information.
A potential solution might be the development of a crypto-powered identity system. While Steemit didn't have native smart contract functionality, developers were still able to raise funds based on factors like posting history, the amount of tokens staked to the network (skin in the game), and on-chain reputation scores. The system wasn't without its flaws, but it showcased the power and utility of decentralized identity. Vitalik has also highlighted the importance of identity modules, and I'm eager to see if there are any interesting projects in this vertical.
As I embark on this new journey, one of the challenges that I'm facing is demonstrating my knowledge and passion for crypto in a credible way. I've been closely following the industry for a while, but anyone can make that claim and I lacked relevant crypto or tech experience to back it up. I tried searching for a part-time crypto opportunity, but it was difficult to find an interesting project that could accommodate my already demanding schedule.
While reading through blogs in search of inspiration, the idea of starting my own crypto blog suddenly came to me. It didn't need to be a sophisticated blog that provides thought provoking insights. Instead, I wanted to use it to share my personal journey into crypto, organize my thoughts on various topics, and delve deeper into projects that captured my interest. Writing, also a passion of mine, seemed like the perfect medium to express my enthusiasm for crypto while providing me the flexibility to work at my own pace. Without hesitation, I began writing this inaugural piece. I'm both nervous and excited to see how the blog will be received and look forward to witnessing its growth in the days ahead.
From time to time, I reminisce about that first meeting with my mentor. There are moments when I can't help but wonder how my life would have unfolded had I answered his question differently that day. Choosing money has undoubtedly served me well. I was able to pursue a hot career on Wall Street, live comfortably in New York throughout my 20s, and interact with some of the most brilliant minds, for which I'm forever grateful.
Yet, the irony of life becomes apparent as everything veered away from my meticulously crafted plan once I reached the long-awaited destination of private equity. The whole experience served as a profound reminder that life is inherently uncertain. And in the face of this uncertainty, the only thing I can truly control is embracing the present and focusing on what is truly important. For me, that is neither money, fame, nor power, but my desire to seek extraordinary challenges and inspire others to envision a brighter future through my actions. All these other things will naturally follow if I pursue my true aspirations.
Just as I faced skepticism when I departed from private equity, I anticipate similar reactions about my leap into crypto. The decision certainly deviates from conventional norm and I may very well encounter setbacks. Nevertheless, I still believe crypto represents an optimistic bet on our future, presenting a unique opportunity to rebuild our society and provide new hope. And I will gladly embrace the possibility of personal failure in exchange for the chance to be part of something that is truly revolutionary.
Only time will unveil whether this was the right choice. But for now, my unknown journey will continue.
Special thanks to Ryan Selkis (2022 Crypto Thesis), Elena Burger (Is This Public?), Etham Frankel (How a Traditional VC Could Approach Crypto / Web 3), and Equity Private (Going Private) for inspiring me to write this essay. I am grateful to be standing on the shoulders of these giants.