well thanks guys for coming and in
giving me your lunch hour I know the
pizza was probably the draw more than I
was that's cool and so I'm Lisa I
graduated from the JD MBA program last
May and for the past year and change
I've been working at August Capital
which is a sand hill road venture
capital firm focusing on Series A
investments in technology and Greg told
me you know it'll really be a hit if you
come and talk about blockchain and
crypto and so I've done my best to put
together how we think about it from an
investment perspective and I hope that's
useful to you again feel free to
interrupt with questions a lot more fun
that way a little bit about me so I went
to Thomas Jefferson High School maybe
there are some TJ grads in the audience
then worked at Bane in New York for
three years did a brief stint at the
White House working at the National
Economic Council and that was the
inspiration to come back to grad school
and do a jd/mba
it was here that I first met David
Hornick who's featured in the photo
gallery over there he was here last year
giving a talk with me and as a partner
in August undergraduate at the law
school and that's how I got connected to
venture capital and thought that that
would be a really fun thing to do it
turns out it's a dream job because you
get to talk to super-smart people all
day and don't really have to make any
powerpoints or excels except for this
PowerPoint but that's cool so yeah so
that's that's a little bit about my
journey and earlier this year one of the
things that VC's do is we blog a lot and
earlier this year I decided I would join
the VC bandwagon and publish what I was
looking forward to investing in in 2018
and so we got published in TechCrunch
just pretty cool and these are the
things that I was excited about and one
of them relevant to this presentation
I said I'm searching for blockchains
killer distributed application and of
course the irony of that is 2018 but the
concepts around blockchain have been
around since ancient times this is
something called a rise stone turns out
there's a
Micronesian prehistoric culture
Micronesia an island of Yap
and this was their currency they are
limestone blocks they're about four
meters in diameter probably way on the
order of tons and obviously you can't
physically transact a 4-time limestone
block and so what the Islanders did was
they decentralized knowledge about the
ownership of the currency it became an
oral history that was decentralized and
when a rise stone transferred from one
person to another everyone in the island
simply you know moved their oral
understanding of who owned the stone and
you know I think that's a very beautiful
analogy for exactly what blockchain
enables today it's a distributed
understanding of who owns what who has
transacted in with with whom etc so
Google rhys-jones they're super cool how
do I think about investing in blockchain
there was a blog written by the team at
Union Square Ventures a couple years ago
which is where these charts came from
that I think explains this really well
and you think about the web and think
about the difference between protocols
and applications applications have taken
the lion's share of the value you know
protocol there HTTP TCP it's a utility
that's shared by all of the major
applications why have the applications
taken the lion's share of the value well
it's no surprise because there's siloed
data what's proprietary to Google and
Facebook and Twitter and Amazon is the
vast amount of data that they've
aggregated about each of us and our
browsing behavior and our friends and
our networks etc and that's where the
lion's share of the value has accrued
when you think about blockchain
it's very different in blockchain
there's a lot of reasons to believe that
the protocol layer is actually where the
value will accrue and the application
layer less so and that's because
blockchain by definition is a shared
data
landscape the protocols enable any
application on top of them to access all
of the data that that exists within the
protocol and so there's not that same
for piyah tere siloed data within a
distributed application moreover with a
protocol
there's economics of the tokens that
incentivize both development and
adoption of the protocol more quickly
than we saw with with the web and why is
that well network effects traditional
network effects say Facebook's getting
started the the overall utility of
Facebook when it was 10 people first
using it at Harvard pretty low and the
incremental value of one new person
joining the network helped to make it
more valuable until it reached a
critical density and then at that point
you get good viral effects the network
effects that take over and that period
of time from N equals 0 until n equals
density is called the bootstrapping
problem in network effects with tokens
because the first users of the
blockchain of the the blockchain utility
are compensated with tokens and they get
more token value for being early
adopters than people who join later you
actually have this financial utility
curve that's inverse to the application
utility curve and so there's reasons to
believe as you all know that token
network effects will actually be a lot
stronger than the network effects we saw
for the traditional web so that shows
that the protocol layer is actually
where a lot of the excitement was you'll
remember that I had written that I was
searching for block chains killer
distributed applications you're probably
like ok Lee so what's your point
and I think realistically I was probably
wrong I think that really what I mean by
searching for the killer application is
searching for that next great protocol
and if you look at the distributed
application landscape it's still pretty
nascent there there's an amazing website
called the state of the DAPs where you
can
see in real time how many distributed
applications are being developed on top
of aetherium as of the time I put this
together there were 1500 of them you can
see the category as most of them are in
games in social I probably heard of
crypto kitties it's like one of the best
distributed apps out there but even
crypto kitties which was invested in by
Union Square Ventures and others back in
April is still today maybe a company
worth tens of millions of dollars
whereas Bitcoin aetherium etc are worth
tens of billions of dollars and so I
think it proves the point that the
protocols are where all the action is
the applications might develop in time
but they're still pretty early how we at
August capital invested in a really cool
company called spring labs and spring
labs is trying to build a protocol layer
for financial institutions today if you
walk into a bank and want to apply for a
loan you have to submit pay stubs and a
copy of your driver's license and
probably a letter from one of the credit
bureaus that tries to prove that you are
who you say you are and the credit
bureaus represent 40 billion dollar
businesses but as we know from the
Equifax hack they're not particularly
secure you the consumer have no access
to your own data no control over your
own data and they don't even really
provide all the services that financial
institutions need they don't do anything
with anti money laundering
anything besides just the basic no your
customer analysis and so what Spring
Labs is trying to do is take what today
is a really centralized process and
decentralized it and make it such that
Bank of America or Wells Fargo etc can
ping a network to find out hey has Lisa
been verified before if so I'm gonna
compensate the institution who verified
her and if not I'll do the work and then
be compensated in the future whenever
anybody else needs to verify her
identity and so I think it's it's a
really smart use of the this protocol
layer network effects
- to create a decentralized way of
storing data that today is very
centralized and if anybody is interested
in spring labs or wants to talk about
job opportunities there shameless plug
happy to chat as a law school graduate I
would be remiss if I didn't talk about
how is all this being regulated right
like as a venture investor when dealing
with something like blockchain one of
the things we think about aside from you
know where is the value accruing what
are interesting applications is what's
the regulatory risk here and crypto has
certainly been full of controversy in
the past couple months in regards to
will it be regulated as a federal
security or not and if you turn to the
federal security laws all securities
have to be registered with the SEC
that's the very basic thing you need to
know and then the question becomes
what's the security and is a token a
security so a security one of one of the
things that counts as a security is
what's called an investment contract and
that was defined in a really important
case called Howey as a contract
transaction or scheme whereby a person
invests his money in a common enterprise
and is led to expect a profit solely
from the efforts at the throat earth or
pretty a lot of legalese but it's been
boiled down to a four point test one was
there an investment - was there common
enterprise which just means a whole
bunch of people pooling together to work
jointly
three did the people who invested expect
to make money and four do they expect to
profit solely from other people's
efforts rather than from contributing to
the system themselves and so these
security laws are implicated in
different ways depending on how the
investment in blockchain is structured
you've probably all heard of the ICO
and another phrase for an ICO is the
dress
touken pre-sale and typically what
happens here is the developers of the
protocol put together a white paper that
white paper is distributed pretty
broadly to both accredited investors and
retail investors alike and the white
paper describes the network that will be
built but it's not yet built and it says
you know you can buy tokens directly in
that future developed Network and then
it raised a ton of money some of these I
CEOs have raised tens of millions of
dollars and then all of that money goes
towards the development of the network
and compensating the developers etc etc
everything that you need to start a
business contrast that to the saft which
was the brainchild of a law firm called
Cooley and modeled after a standard
document developed by YC for investments
often in the very first institutional
round of a company's creation that is
called the safe this is the saft the
simple agreement for future tokens and
it's very similar to what happens with
the ICO but importantly different in in
a couple of key ways same thing there's
a white paper that's developed before
usually before the network is existent
but importantly here accredited
investors invest in an equity in that
company rather than directly in the
tokens based on this shaft and then
money goes to the developers they
develop the network and is only once the
network is existent and there's actual
utility to those tokens so in the case
of Spring Labs it would be networks
created there's now tokens banks can
transact them then me Lisa a retail
investor could buy one of those tokens
and participate in the token economics
that way so on the left hand side the IC
o---- these tokens are probably
regulated as securities we've already
seen some action on the part of the SEC
that suggests that they believe that on
the right hand side it's still a little
ambiguous the SEC has not yet ruled but
the shaft itself that in
Buster's invest in is certainly a
security and then there's ambiguity as
to whether those tokens the utility
token is going to be regulated as a
security or not but it certainly seems a
lot more likely that because those
tokens have a value people aren't buying
them because they expect that they will
increase in value they're buying them
because the network exists and it each
token represents some sliver of utility
to participating in that network so
probably more likely to be regulated not
as a security and so our investment in
in Spring Labs was done via a saft and
that's been our view at august there are
certainly tons of investors who are
participating directly not just in
crypto currencies themselves but also in
icos
and that's a super interesting thing to
observe as a VC because it's it it
almost poses an existential risk to what
venture capital is because it's
decentralizing what we do so if I were
you and I were thinking about you know
are there black teen projects out there
that I'm interested in joining you know
how do I triage this regulatory risk for
myself and there's a couple things that
I would clearly avoid you know no matter
what make sure that the project you're
joining is is motivated to at least try
to comply with regulations right so like
there should at least be a good faith
effort to try to try to be aboveboard
and there's a whole host of financial
regulations having to do with money
transmitter licenses you have to
register with FINRA all this stuff and
then a lot of there's a ton of projects
that are trying to register offshore and
it attempt to save on taxes it's
probably the case that blockchain tokens
are going to be regulated as property
rather than as capital gains and but
from everything I've read doesn't seem
like there's actually not much to be
gained by registering offshore so it's
probably more of a red flag than
anything else and then look for
companies that are raising money off of
this soft structure like I said
proactively trying to comply it's always
always a good thing
if you want to learn more these are a
bunch of the leading lights both in both
from a technology perspective and also
from a regulatory perspective so Brian
Armstrong founder of coinbase Linda G it
puts together some really wonderful
content on medium about about different
crypto currencies and also about
different events that pull together some
of the smartest people in the space
Elizabeth Stark is creating a layer on
top of the etherium network that slows
that sorry increases the transaction
time Kathryn Hahn is a fascinating
example of someone who's transitioned
from the legal world she was I think a
federal prosecutor for a while a Supreme
Court Clerk and now is leading
Andreessen Horowitz is crypto fund and
so she's a really deep thinker and how
all of this will be regulated and then
Matt Wong along with Fred aresome just
launched a crypto focused fund called
paradigm and they're both very smart and
that's it please ask questions yes
returns from these things do you know
super following market yep
how do you know and to sell out
especially because it's the Pradas head
it's what come to market yet on
exchanges
yeah we have not yet invested directly
in tokens like we haven't invested in
Bitcoin aetherium or any of the altcoins
and I think for precisely that reason
it's way too volatile and we don't view
ourselves as experts we don't view
ourselves as public public equity
investors in the blockchain equivalent
what we do via this shaft mechanism is
treat it just like we treat equity and
in any other company so we're investing
now we know the companies really nascent
it's got maybe 15 employees and they're
going to build over the course of years
and probably our investment in them will
last a decade and at that point in time
you know what we hope that it will be a
build big business that happens to be
built upon blockchain technology but
it's not really exposed to the
volatility of crypto currencies
themselves you know obviously it will
have to be successful their tokens will
need to develop some value and actually
be used and things like that and that's
a bet that we're making we don't know
yet how it will turn out but but but if
those tokens accrue and value it's
because the business fundamentals of
that business are good and strong no
probably not
which is true of any of our investments
right like we invest in let's say Warby
Parker or we have a company called
gitlab that's growing really fast you
don't really get a cruising value in
that we invest at the series be someone
else invests at the series see and you
see an uptick in valuation you hope it's
a really large uptick because the
company is growing fast but we as the
investors don't get liquid so to speak
until it either goes public or gets
bought and here you know I guess you
could ask the question when investigate
watching what's the exit going to be is
it is a company built on blockchain
gonna go public just like any other or
you know like will we go public by
eventually selling what what sliver of
the token pool we have to others and
more of a secondary transaction it's
possible
but we don't really are our capital
doesn't demand that we exit on the order
of years the way our funda structure
what cooked oh okay crypto crimes it's
it that's a really interesting question
uh it turns out if you look at the
history of just a convey it tech
innovation generally often the boundary
of innovation happens at this border
between illegal and legal and in some of
the earliest adopters of the web we're
using it for illicit means some of the
earliest adopters of crypto obviously
using it for illicit means I think you
know I think that policing of crypto
crimes will require some interesting
coordination as between public and
private sectors we're increasingly
seeing you know the folks from Silicon
Valley kind of do short stints in DC and
then come back and I think that that's
what's going to be required for
government to get up the curve quickly
to be able to even know what they're
looking for in terms of you know the the
forensics of crypto crimes which are
much harder to detect than you know web
web 2.0 crimes and but I don't know much
more than that unfortunately
you ever think about anything like a
great you yeah and then is there concern
or like risk analysis that like
government would broadly have regulation
that would inadvertently affect you know
technology or companies are trying to
fill broadly up blockchain and attempt
to sort of respond you know respond to
what they feel like her yeah totally and
that's how yeah totally we've we've seen
many SEC actions brought against
companies that decided to do an IC o----
and you know why is that dangerous to a
start-up well it takes a ton of time and
resources to defend yourself against an
SEC action not to mention the scrutiny
and the negative publicity effects
whether a consumer might want to use
your product and so we spent we do think
about that we think a lot about trying
to proactively partner with the
regulators to make sure that at every
step in spring labs as development they
know exactly where they stand via via
the regulator's yeah I think I think
that that's a really important point if
certainly if you're the CEO of one of
these companies you want to make sure
that you're thinking strategically about
the regulatory angle of it yeah
so I guess my broader question is is
your investment assist that finances
probably the first viable segment or
would you guys be open to
yes definitely open to investing in
other verticals I think that I think
that the core of what's interesting in
Spring Labs isn't actually the financial
services component it's that they're
using blockchain to help solve an
identity verification problem and when
you abstract that out of FinTech to all
sorts of other segments it applies the
exact same way so our thesis was hey
look we think that blockchain the
technology is perfectly suited to
solving what web 2.0 has really
struggled to solve which is identity we
expected Facebook to do it
we thought maybe Amazon would do it no
one did it maybe Facebook's working on
it now but they have other issues and so
Spring Labs is doing it for you're right
they're very focused vertical and you
can imagine it takes supply chain is
another great example there it's not the
identity of an individual human but it's
the identity of an individual pallet an
individual piece of fruit look how do
you verify that this is a thing that
came from this place and I think that
there are all sorts of other myriad ways
that identity is going to be tracked
like we were just talking about
educational institutions and like how
does Harvard verify that each of you
actually took cs50 and passed it how
does Harvard verify that you in fact
graduated and over the course of your
life like do you really own that data
not really and so each time you apply
for a job or apply to grad school you're
gonna have to go back to our vered pay
some money for them to print a form and
mail a letter and and wouldn't it be a
lot more powerful if that existed in a
decentralized Network yeah
you see any other like common areas that
oh great great question one area that I
think is really interesting and still
incredibly nascent is watching for
health care there you have the added
complexity of you know not just
regulation of of tokens and the
financial repercussions of that but
HIPAA and all the regulations that come
into play when you have personal health
care information but you think about
medical records I think that's a variant
of the identity problem we were just
talking about and then like compliance
with medical billing is another area
that could be really interesting so I
think health care is an interesting
example supply chain certainly financial
identity what else the the core idea
within crypto kitty's of digital assets
is also really interesting there's I
think going to there there already is
within gaming a whole economy of digital
assets and you can imagine in the future
that we're all going to own a basket of
things some of which are physical world
items and some of which are digital
items and so using blockchain as the
record of transaction for those digital
items will be another use case
totally question was how do we think
about the energy implications of
building upon blockchain I think that
it's a great point we definitely think
about it we think about it from the lens
of okay you look at blockchain as the
technology as a technology what is it
good at and what is it bad at what is it
good at it's a fancier database it's a
distributed database what is it bad at
it's actually kind of slow and it's very
energy intensive and so it's good for
applications that can't be solved by a
centralized database like identity and
it's bad for things where you have to
ping the database really quickly really
frequently so that's why like a spring
labs where maybe you ping the database
once on the order of a year for per
customer and it's probably bad for a
marketplace or financial exchange and
things like that and that's why you're
seeing folks like Elizabeth starkness
try to develop the lightening layer on
top of etherium to help help accelerate
development of applications on top of it
yeah so we definitely think about it as
as part of the why now like is is this
actually the right time to be investing
where is this still maybe a year or two
too early in the development of the
technology before things really start to
take off it's you know it's a tough
thing as an investor because you want to
you don't want to wait until it's too
late but you you we've invested in tons
of companies that were a year or two
ahead of their time and just didn't work
out because adoption wasn't ready to
take off
the opportunity value and application of
the technology of each other
so earlier this year to conceive a user
just like home the roof and then now is
really though how does that affect the
application that's built it and also
what a business
yeah the question was how does the value
of the protocol tokens affect the
applications being built on top of the
protocol a cryptic crypto Kitty's a
great example there back at its peak I
believe that there were 120 thousand
daily active users of crypto Kitty's
this was like November 2017 and then
they got 12 million dollars invested
from Union Square Ventures and another
really top to your firm now if you look
at the daily active users it's down in
the 1200 source oh really it's taken a
dip in large part because the value of
the etherium token underneath is is a
lot lower than it was back in the peak
of November 2017 so I do think that
there is a strong correlation as between
the protocol value and application value
probably part of the reason why the a
player is still as nascent as it is and
an interesting question to ponder of
like how do you as the application try
to mitigate yourself from that
volatility I don't know the answer to
that but it's interesting
well we've seen a lot of VC's to choose
to do that and I think I mean so you
know our investment in spring labs
because it's a agreement for future
tokens eventually we will get spring lab
coin there are plenty of you seeds that
are directly invested in Bitcoin
aetherium you know Ripple etc and you
know most of done exceedingly well
because they have recruited in value so
dramatically and I think if you really
believe that the protocol layer is where
the value is that actually might be the
right answer
yes it's a great question because an
important point to remember that when
investing in blockchain there's kind of
a two level analysis first it's ignoring
the blockchain part of the business is
it a good business does it have good
fundamentals if it's a marketplace does
it function as a marketplace and then
looking at the tech stack and making
sure that that's all solid it makes
sense so if you take Spring Labs its
marketplace you're right
it requires importantly the financial
institutions to want to use it because
unless Bank of America is willing to
ping Wells Fargo and get compensated in
spring labs token it's never going to
take off and there I think that
certainly our diligence was in large
part talking to financial institutions
with whom spring lapse had already
partnered to better understand why their
work cited about using it and it was
they they view this kyc process as a
cost center and so being able to partner
with with an entity that wants to help
reduce that cost they viewed as a
win-win but still you're right that the
earliest adopters are gonna have to
believe in the value of that token
because they're gonna accrue a higher
amount of token before it's values
really demonstrated
[Music]
technologies and there's gonna be some
need to be some technology to talk to
chain two chain and all that kind of
wondering how much research you guys
done into that to figure out you know I
mean he's gonna be spring labs reveal if
you only keep all doing doing this kind
of stuff and secondly just to comment on
something else that was said was its
release to energy consumption in
addition to power prevent work there's
proof uh state there's other consensus
algorithms and you guys yeah the the
mining side of things it has also been
an area ripe for VC investment analogy
much more to the server infrastructure
layer of the web we've not played there
I don't know if I have a really
satisfying answer for you as to why we
haven't played there aside from no
particular domain expertise on our end
but I think it's fascinating because
some of the biggest companies existent
within the space were at large or
actually huge mining operations and so
just intellectually it's interesting
continue to be the problem that that is
now unless they can find that it's just
not it's just not a secure
trustworthy have a validation scheme you
know to make sure that everything you
know that you can sync up in yep yeah
your your your point about in the future
there's going to be a ton a you know a
whole slew of protocols is absolutely
true unrealistic to believe that because
Spring Labs has taken financial
institutions as its vertical that
they're gonna somehow have a monopoly
over all transactions there I think it's
gonna be just like what we see for the
web you know there's gonna be healthy
competition by vertical and then
someone's gonna build a really
interesting business trying to be the
interoperability layer as between all of
these different tokens that might be
coinbase
technology um tended to the point
earlier about in crypto crimes I think
that entrepreneurs are incredible humans
and are always pushing the boundary kind
of regulation be damned and so I haven't
seen so much reticence to develop for
fear of regulation I think what we're
seeing is now a little bit more
enthusiasm for proactively partnering
with regulators okay the the legal
standards are kind of becoming
well-known enough and there's also
lawyers who are now decently expert in
the law as it pertains to crypto that
even a really fledgling startup can get
pretty high-quality advice about how to
navigate the regulatory landscape and I
think that investors are kind of voting
with their dollars as to investing in
those companies rather than companies
that are being a little shady er and so
I think I think all of those things are
forces for good in the development of
the technology because the more examples
we have of amazing companies amazing
investments that are built upon
blockchain the better will be for folks
like you to be in this room thinking
like okay I want to start a company in
the space yeah
yeah yep
correct correct so the question was
about the shaft and how it it works
technically so set aside the staff for a
second let's think about the safe when
when YC invests in a company via a safe
what they're investing in is us in a
sliver of the company that will convert
upon the first priced round so it's
basically saying like we don't really
know yet how much you company is worth
we're willing to wait until say in
August capital steps in and says that
series a okay you're worth twenty four
million dollars and then that note
converts in at the twenty four million
dollar valuation here with the saft
we're saying we're going to invest now
we don't yet know what the tokens are
gonna be worth but we're gonna give you
you know some money up front that's
going to be worth a certain percent of
your company and at some future date
when we know what the tokens are worth
via the pricing of the token economics
our sliver will convert into whatever
number of tokens it's worth it so so
you're right that from an investment now
perspective it's just like buying equity
in a company nothing to do with the
tokens and that's why it's very clearly
it it's an it's a nice legal form
because it's so clearly a security as
governed by the SEC and you don't really
have to worry about the ambiguity of
what's what a token is
each token now representative of equity
and spring as a whole
yeah you're right it's blending utility
and security upon that conversion are
it's a good question I don't know
exactly whether there is still any
equity remaining outside of the tokens
but certainly some sliver of our equity
converts into token and I think at that
point you can wonder ok are we as August
capital really holding those tokens for
their utility or are we expecting that
they will accrue value if so that's an
investment not a utility right and maybe
there's a provision in there about
cashing out at some set date I don't
know
where folks are less concerned about the
passing
okay
we're block to you because we're
kind of model where you know you're
solving real problems that exert a
friction an economy and the speculation
part
I I would love to live in that world the
question was can you imagine a post
speculative watching world yeah I think
we think often about trying to look at
the companies we invest in as companies
not necessarily as blockchain companies
kind of pre imagining that
commoditization in a way because if
you're an investor there's certainly a
lot of utility to investing solely for
speculation and a lot of people have
made a lot of money in that way and in
fact speculation is how a lot of this
technology is gonna get adopted because
there's just you know economic motive
there but yes I think 10 years from now
20 years from now a blockchain will be a
layer and a host of applications with
which we interface daily and isn't
necessarily the driver value in those
applications just enabling yep
yeah yeah question was about ICS as the
existential threat to VC it's a great
question you know I think that from the
perspective of an entrepreneur if you
had a choice of hey like I can broadcast
to the entire market what I want to
build and just sit back and wait and
people can kind of come to me and decide
to write checks or not I would take that
all day every day rather than having to
drive up and down Sand Hill pitching
people like me trying to get them to be
like yes I will give you ten million
dollars right so I totally get it from
the entrepreneurs perspective what I
think that what I think it does from an
incentive to build perspective is a
little perverse like if you if you raise
eighty million dollars before you have a
business model in product market fit I
worry about whether the company that
will be born of that initial upfront
investment will be as healthy as what
the traditional venture capital model
allows but you know of course I'm biased
by the position I have within a VC firm
to think that my model is the better
model I think that firms have taken all
sorts of different positions on this
August probably being among the more
conservative you see andreessen horowitz
dedicating a separate crypto fund there
are tons of emerging crypto funds like
paradigm Yale University just announced
its investing someone been in debt some
of its endowment dollars in paradigm
which probably means it's now directly
invested in some cryptocurrency assets
so yeah I mean I think if you're if
you're an investor who wants to hedge
your bets like yeah should probably be
treating ICO seriously accounting for
that big u Latorre risk
yeah the question was how do we
diversify our blockchain portfolio we
think about diversifying our portfolio
across a whole host of dimensions
certainly one is by sector so if you
look at our portfolio it's about half
consumer-facing half enterprise facing
and within those probably the bulk of
our investments fall in one of four
pillars ones enterprise infrastructure
ones application layer ones financial
technology and ones like consumer
e-commerce and marketplaces and so I
think we wouldn't expect our blockchain
investments to be spread across that
those four pillars just as as as any
other investment that we make that's
incremental we don't tend to invest into
companies that are going after the exact
same space just because you know work
but you share is on the board and and
can't invest in two companies that are
directly competitive that said you know
financial services obviously a massive
market could I quite easily imagine two
companies both based on watching going
after different parts of of the
financial services infrastructure that
we would both invest in totally so I
think it's very much an ad hoc
opportunistic thing based on the quality
of the team that's pitching the quality
of the business model that they're
pitching and the size of the idea behind
it
guessing that this marks the end of
lunch hour in the return of class any
final questions
thank you guys this is fun