Who am I?

Just for some context:

• Young gen x or old millennial, depending on the source
• Husband to an amazing wife and father to two wonderful sons
• Lived in the United States my entire life. I’ve traveled an above average amount, but it’s safe to assume I’m a relatively stereotypical American…
• I generally feel more at home as a system 2 thinker, so don’t be alarmed if posts are longer than average
• Relatively early adopter, but try to catch technology transitions once the UX is only mildly abrasive and not brutal. Web3 is getting close to this stage, I think
• I’ve essentially been bankless since 2017 in the consumer retail TradFi bank context. I just don’t understand the value proposition of TradFi for retail banking clients, especially relative to the Web3 alternative
• Majority of my career so far has been spent in M&A consulting (financial and data & analytics diligence, primarily within TMT / SaaS / AdTech)
• Also experienced in private equity investing, PE portfolio company operations / support, and corporate side finance and operations
• I started to purchase some cryptocurrencies in December of 2020, but did not meaningfully lean into the ecosystem until November 2021 (currently wearing my top signal badge…)
• Positive vibes only. There is plenty of stress, anxiety, and confrontation IRL. I’m going to stay positive and productive out here. Thank you to all abrasive folks keeping everyone in check. I appreciate you, but that’s not me
• Although I’m loosely an anon, I plan to approach my mirror posts in a very authentic way. I won’t pretend to be someone I’m not or know more than I do. This makes me feel pretty vulnerable and exposed, but hopefully relatable
• I loath protection of legacy business models in all forms (regulatory driven, anti-competitive behavior, weaponization of the benefits of scale, etc.). Innovation suffers when too much emphasis is put on improving from 1 to n instead of finding the next 0 to 1 technologies that will shape the future.
• I support innovation by voting in the most powerful way I can, how I use money. For example:
  • I bought a Tesla Model X in 2018…and it’s still probably above what my household should spend for a vehicle on a prudent budget
  • But I chose to reward the innovators trying to build a better future instead of rewarding the boring Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) producers who call adding a 10th gear to the transmission in order to begrudgingly hit fuel efficiency standards (while simultaneously diluting user experience)…“innovation”
  • I personally think anons place too much emphasis on cost differential at the moment of purchase. I do my best to reward innovation even if it costs me meaningfully more as an early adopter as costs should come down over time with adoption and scale and I prefer to fund progress, not status quo
• This is not financial advice! I do wish the Web3 community would stop normalizing the disclaimer of all responsibility “DYOR”, stop telling people to expect everything to go to zero, and emphasize sharing of research for the good of the community…but Do Your Own Research!
• Lastly, I’m an #Mfer. We’re all Mfers.

The next major platform transition

After college, I developed a healthy obsession with understanding how companies were valued and how equity markets worked. I even fashioned myself a moonlighting stock picker for a brief period. However, I quickly realized that I was not going to produce alpha analyzing Amazon earnings reports...the 100+ Wall Street analysts already covering the asset as a full time job would only leave beta for me (best case).

So, I focused on what I thought Wall Street simply couldn’t get right due to lack of imagination and / or over discounting of uncertainty: transformational platform level transitions. This is a nebulous term, but a few examples I invested in with conviction are:

• ICE → EV: The size of the opportunity to transition from the ICE to Electric Vehicle (EV) platforms was / is massive. I Purchased $TSLA in 2016 and diamond handed until the end of 2020, then I took some gains. $TSLA remains a material hold and I’ll probably be in it to some extent forever.

• CPU → GPU: ML, AI, AR, VR, crypto PoW, and autonomous driving all require compute greater than what a CPU is efficiently capable of. I purchased $NVDA in 2016 and held until mid 2020. The one that got away…I had paper hands on this one as the runup continued post my exit. The amount of VC investments allocated to IPU start-ups started to concern me, though mass adoption of IPUs still has not materialized. The thesis has continued to play out and would have been an excellent hold up to date of drafting this post.

• Therapeutics → Genomic Therapeutics: The advent of CRISPR and gene editing is expected to revolutionize genetic therapeutics. The CRISPR technology essentially gives doctors the ability to write software for biological entities to heal themselves, relative to pre CRISPR therapeutics which were essentially mechanical repairs. COVID-19 put a number of CRISPR companies in hyper drive ($EDIT, $NTLA, $CRSP), though IP litigation, finding the next great application, and negative market sentiment towards long duration equities (due to inflation and interest rate expectations) have reversed performance materially. I’m still long-term optimistic about this platform changeover and will continue to monitor progress. I initially invested in the basket of three previously mentioned equities, but later switched to $ARKG to reduce single ticker risk.

Each of these investments have unique and different elements, but all are what I think of as major platform transitions with high risk and high reward profiles.

• I believe the key is to have high conviction that the transition will eventually happen and that there logically must be alpha to capture as Wall Street will heavily discount the probability of platform change success (it’s easy to bet on incumbents)
• Also, as I am not a full time investor, this investment profile is attractive to me as it is very low touch. I try to pay attention to the news cycle close enough to catch any bombshell updates, but primarily just challenge my “leap of faith” assumptions once every 4-6 months at most

I did also test a few lower conviction ideas like 3D printing ($DM), citizen data science transition to cloud ($AYX), and Space Exploration ($ARKX). All were exited in less than 12 months due to lack of conviction or timing (too early / too late). Consider this disclosure of my anti-portfolio.

Relevance to Web3

After identifying the previously mentioned opportunities (most recently in mid 2017), I focused on a career change, had two kids, and more recently started to immerse in Web3.

I think this type of platform transition is what will play out over the next 10+ years around Web3 in the centralized permissioned database → decentralized permissionless blockchain transition, and on a much more grand scale than the examples previously referenced given how pervasive the blockchain / smart contract use cases appear to be.

The industries, companies, and applications which I think will be disintermediated by trustless, permissionless, self sovereign payment and smart contract technologies will be wide ranging. I don’t know where the alpha is right now, but that’s what I’m here to find out.

Lastly, when I identified these first three platform transformations it was more of a hobby and not something that I leaned into meaningfully. Now that I have a couple of case studies that my thought process is not totally off base, I plan to lean in more to Web3 and hope to make it my full time job and obsession.

Twitter DM me @rasmuky if you think we should work together!