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Investment in Blockchain, Crypto, Metaverse or NFT Companies by Brian Mac Mahon
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Nov 6, 2023
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0:00
And look, my objective here for everybody is just over the next 25 minutes or so is to give you as deep an understanding from an investor perspective as to what we invest into and what's hot and what's not in blockchain
0:13
I'm not going to do presentation slides. I'm not going to. That's not my thing
0:18
I'd much rather just talk about this and talk about kind of where we do, how we do it
0:23
and maybe give you some bullets that you can take away afterwards and use when either you're investing in blockchain or you're looking at everything else
0:30
So let me create some context around this before we dig too deep into this
0:36
I have been involved in, let's call it, fractionalized and liquidity within equity for about 10 or 15 years
0:46
Ever since the JOBS Act came in and long before that, when people were talking about the JOBS Act and the JOBS Act pretty much was the first major move that allowed for unaccredited investors, which is the vast majority of Americans, to actually be able to invest into private companies in a in a stock regulated way
1:09
And it came out very strong and it led in for equity crowdfunding
1:14
And there were many platforms that came out, WeFunder, StartEngine, Republic and a bunch of others
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And I was involved in that both through investing, through facilitating, engaging, consulting and on multiple other areas as well
1:27
And it was wonderful news in a time when really there was tremendous unfairness between the different types of investors who are able to invest within the space
1:36
Then probably around, let's say, seven years or so ago, then tokenization came out hot and heavy
1:48
We had already been doing fractionalization and liquidity by bringing in equity crowdfunding and Reg CF and Reg A and Reg A+
1:57
But now a new thing came out and it came out of the gates really strong
2:02
And there were huge advocates in that space, like the folks like Brock Pierce's and Michael Turpins and all those other people in Santa Monica who came out evangelizing digital currency, which was a wonderful thing
2:15
And I'm massively behind. If we talk about the generalization of digitalization and immersive within digitalization, I believe it's not just something that's going to happen in the future
2:27
It was something that was predestined to happen for the last 10 years or so
2:31
So I'm a huge fan of it. So when talks suddenly started coming out about creating tokens and creating ICOs around those tokens and then making sure that you could actually then build blockchain and transferability and transparency and all the other wonderful things that Bitcoin was built on top of
2:52
I was a huge fan and I knew that this was going to be something for the future. However, here's the problem with life in general. And you realize this as you get a little bit older and you start to see it happen over and over and over again, is that within everything of absolute beauty will be some idiot or some bunch of idiots who are absolutely prepared to destroy it, to get as much as they possibly can for themselves
3:21
I personally felt that entire wave of ICOs that happened back in those days were frauds. I won't call them Bernie Madoffs, but they were certainly extremely close. And this is something that any investors and people who are looking at NFTs need to be tremendously careful of today
3:40
when you are not in control of what happens within whatever investment that you make
3:48
So, for example, you invest in a house. It's OK. You're in control of most of it. Right
3:54
You're in control of the termites. You're in control of the decoration
3:58
You're in control in some ways on how nice the street is kept
4:02
You're in control of how nice you make your garden look. you have an element of control, including the probability of how your district is going to go
4:12
over the future period of time, right? When it came to ICOs, none of the people investing in ICOs
4:17
had any control whatsoever in anything that was going to happen after that. They lost their shirts
4:23
They were sold a beautiful dream of a world yet to come where everybody collaborated and they were
4:31
nice to each other and money became this beautiful, fluffy thing that we didn't have to keep in our
4:36
mattress anymore. And instead, it hugged us every night before we went to sleep. And it was an
4:42
absolute predictable transparent lie Unfortunately the vast majority of people who invested in ICOs and put all the money in there they didn realize it They were duped by the fact that nice things were said
5:00
They weren't smart enough in the investment space within crypto to understand how bad of what they
5:07
were actually investing in. Are they just generally weren't that smart in general? Right
5:11
That was pretty much the criteria of the three groups of people that invested in there. And then what's happened since then, this is why when I look at the US government and I look at their hesitancy about bringing any type of regulation, I agree entirely with them. Why would they do it when everything that's beautiful that we're trying to build is absolutely destroyed by a bunch of scammers and idiots who just want to make quick, fast cash for themselves
5:34
Now, over the past five to seven years, the ICOs have disappeared. The names have been replaced. Now we have SAFs, which are coming out, which look almost like the loan agreements that are given when you invest in equity. And we're starting to see some utility within some of the tokens, but only some
5:55
The vast majority of tokens I see there are absolute unadulterated trash
6:02
They wouldn't get $20,000 raised from someone like me or somebody like me because there's no real utility built in there
6:11
It's just a beautiful flow. I have two conflicting opinions of this
6:20
Number one, crypto, blockchain, digitalization, immersion, digital images are beautiful things that will exist in the world and will do incredibly well and they will take over our society
6:34
No question. It was always coming. It's always going to come. My other opinion is there's so many idiots still out there who see you as a mark
6:44
They see you the same way as the people on the telephone who call you up from some country or in some foreign land and tell you that a prince has left you $10 million
6:57
And if you only give them $100,000, you can get a ton of money and become rich tomorrow
7:02
There is no prince, right? You don't understand the token. The utility is not going to survive going past a difficult time
7:09
And just be really, really, really careful. Don't just follow the hype of some Hollywood A-list actor who has no frigging clue anything about tokenization
7:21
nationalization, liquidity or anything else. Follow real live metrics of how good this product is and how long you believe it's going to last in the community
7:33
Now, we have invested in tons of great companies. Almost all infrastructural are massively
7:42
experiential. One of my favorites, Solid Block, doing incredible things within the real estate
7:48
space. They want to fractionalize and create liquidity for small investors in real estate
7:53
everywhere in the world. Imagine that I can have a fractionalized ownership in the Ritz Hotel
7:58
Imagine that I can have fractionalized ownership in my golf club, in anything, right? It is a pure
8:02
awesome, phenomenal utility whereby a token can be built into being able to track all of the people
8:09
who have been members and owners of that. So I love those guys. Cosmic Wire, another great company
8:14
building IP derivatives on the blockchain so they can actually look down and see what does the
8:20
ownership look like. Again, another really strong utility in there as well. Tunedly have built the
8:26
same thing within music. GeoJam, so they can track the IP and the money that should be made
8:33
based on that IP. GeoJam, building incredible experiences online. Nuarsis, looking at cybersecurity
8:42
and building infrastructure within cybersecurity. Zeeve, another company which is based on the
8:50
infrastructure that are building communication nodes. So my advice to you as an investor
8:55
who has invested in a ton of these companies and incredibly happy with the investments we made into them
9:01
just be super careful about the people you're investing into. Don't just do it because you went to a networking event
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and you met someone who happens to have 2 million followers and they're like, hey man, our woman
9:12
you should invest in this company. Chances are it's a piece of crap
9:16
like the other 99% of the crappy tokens that these people are putting out there
9:22
Okay, so that's my thing about tokens. Now I want to jump into the metaverse and I want to look at NFTs as well By the way I classify NFTs in exactly the same place as I classifies the ICOs before The vast majority of you first of all is the idea of an NFT awesome It great I love it You know my kid was brought up in the digital world I was brought up in the og
9:46
world. I liked og stuff. My kid likes digital stuff. My kid's going to take over the world
9:52
along with every other kid his age out there. I'm not going to exist in the future. Digital's
9:57
going to win. Okay? No question. It's a good thing. NFTs are really good. And being able to
10:03
keep your NFT images, especially if you have unique ownership, of course, which you do because
10:07
they're not fungible, then it is a great thing. And it's going to go forward in the future and
10:11
it's going to be fine. But like everything else, what happened was there was initial hype, which
10:16
was thrown around a certain amount of NFTs that came out. And then that hype suddenly made them
10:21
really good, but didn't make them really good. It was just because they did it. And literally
10:26
because I'm in this business, I watch every scam that is out there. I watch all of the people
10:32
with multiple IP addresses, spending a ton of money, buying multiple NFTs so that they can show
10:38
that there's demand. That demand then goes out to the market. Everybody's like, oh my gosh
10:43
this NFT is great. It's so hot. It's like the next board eight. They then buy it. Of course
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there's no hype. There's just a scammer doing the prints from wherever the prince is from
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So be really careful on the NFTs that you buy. If you're a novice and you're coming in and you
11:01
spend a hundred bucks or 200 bucks and you can afford it, then do it. What the hell? What are
11:05
you going to lose? Right. But if you are someone who believes like all of these idiotic podcasts
11:13
that you hear all the time talking about get rich schemes, that this is going to make you a
11:18
billionaire and you don't have to work at Walmart anymore or you don't need to have a job as an
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investment yst and actually you can buy that nice island based on your NFT selling, then I'm
11:28
sorry, you're an idiot and you deserve to lose the money that you're going to lose
11:32
OK, for those for the rest of you, please don't buy it
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So but NFTs in general, watch them, look for utility, look at the people that are building
11:42
them, look and see how the NFTs will actually be around for scarcity in the future and just
11:47
decide if you like it. But don't buy them because you're trying to make money
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Step away from the greed cycle that is in the world right now, where everybody sees that
11:57
as their ticket to freedom. It is not. But as a thing of beauty
12:03
that you can adorn your virtual world with, I think it's an incredible thing
12:08
And it's going to be really wonderful to watch. Okay, that is blockchain
12:13
because blockchain pretty much is the underlying tracks that actually speak to all of this
12:18
I love investing in blockchain. That's why the companies like Zeev and the companies like Noirsis and Cypress
12:25
I love those. Give me communication notes through a company that's building them properly to invest in any day of the week
12:32
Why? Because it's the same as the train tracks when they were laid down in the US X amount of years ago
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You know, everything has to travel on the tracks. You don't want the train. You don't even want the bullion in the train
12:48
You want the tracks because that controls everything. So I love blockchain. I love the way it's built out. I love what it can do. And I believe that blockchain, amongst many other infrastructures that are being built today, will be the future infrastructure of the web, which has become everything for the vast majority of people who are out there
13:11
tokens. You know how I feel about tokens when it comes to crypto and NFTs. You know how I feel
13:18
about cryptos. I'll actually, I'll add maybe an extra clarification around tokens because I think
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it's kind of interesting from an investor's perspective. So most investors like myself
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we invest in equity. Why do we invest in equity? Because it's tangible, right? Why do you buy a
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house? You buy a house because it's tangible. You know, if the house sells in the future
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you own a little piece of that house. We know that if we invest in a startup and that startup
13:43
exits in the future, we invest in a valuation of 5 million, the startup exits at a valuation of
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5 billion. We make a very tidy profit. Thank you very much. And we walk away happy, happy, happy
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We own a piece of that company, technically. Tokens is entirely different. Tokens, you own a
14:02
piece of nothing, right? Because it is a utility. However, you still get to benefit financially
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So it's like these two uneasy partners in a relationship. Actually, let me give you a better
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one. It's like a husband and a wife or a husband or husband or our partners who hate each other's
14:20
guts but they stay together for the kids right That exactly the relationship that they have because there is absolutely no reason in the world why there should be two mechanisms to drive value for investors And yes I believe the vast majority of people who buy tokens are
14:41
buying them for future investments. You can use any caveat you want to, to say why you are not
14:45
doing that. But we all know that if the making money was taken out of it, the vast majority of
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you would step away from it. So if you like a token and you want to buy into it and you like
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the tokenomics and you think it's a lot of fun, my advice is exactly the same, with the exception
15:00
of the top tokens, which a lot of people are already in and institutions are in as well
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So you're not going to be the sucker at the poker table. You want to be really careful of those
15:10
And if you put money into it, put money in that you can afford to lose. OK, metaverse last five
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or six minutes. I want to focus on that. I love the meta. Look, the metaverse for me is just a
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more immersive web. It's like the web hasn't been upgraded in 20 years. We got the same crappy web
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that we got 20 years ago when Steve Jobs was talking about the web taking over the entire
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world. One, Steve Jobs was right. Two, the web is now shitty because nothing has happened to
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upgrade it since that time. So what's happened about 10 years ago with virtual reality in trying
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to create that first immersion with Oculus, that was a false start. It didn't work. Why? Because
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We don't want to put these damn things on our head. And since that time, everybody has known two inalienable truths
15:57
The first one is we want immersion. We want to feel like we're in a world that we can control, that we can like, that we can enjoy
16:05
But it has to feel like this world. It can't feel like something weird that I have a thing on my head that there's nobody around me anywhere else
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So will virtual reality be a part of it? Absolutely. Will a bunch of it skip to augmented reality
16:19
Absolutely. Will a bunch of it skip to metaverse where it's slightly more immersive, but maybe it doesn't have to be on headsets or something else? Absolutely. Anybody who is betting on the infrastructure moving to a more immersive world is a very smart investor. And we are one of those very smart investors, which is why we're looking at everything metaverse
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and we're investing in companies that can sell in the metaverse. We're investing in companies that
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can live in the metaverse. We're investing in influencers that can create metaverses for the
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influencers' houses. We're investing in the metaverse structure, infrastructure, and technology itself. All of it. We do it. Why? Because they're the train tracks of the future. So as a fund
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I would say, look, we've invested in around 170 companies, makes us one of the most prolific
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investors in the US right now. We'll invest checks of up to about a million dollars
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So we're not afraid to put a decent amount of money in if we need to. And the company, which I haven't even explained because this talk isn't really about that
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but the company is Expert Dojo. And I would just finally say, some people will say that I have opinions about things
17:32
I don't really think so. I think I just state what is already out there and what everybody already realizes
17:38
You know, when you're not the smartest person at the poker table, be careful, right? Just look around the poker table and make sure you're not the dumbest person at the poker table
17:45
When there's a technology which is coming through, step in, lean into that technology and make sure that you're a part of what's in the future and not in the past
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But be careful that you're with the people that are going to make sure that you're going to be OK while you're going through that journey
18:00
And from our perspective, what we always say to our startups is be a beast, like build great growth, build great utility
18:10
The vast majority of what's in the metaverse, what's in tokens, what's in NFTs is absolute BS, useless crap that I would put no time into whatsoever
18:22
So if you're going to build something, if you're going to put it out there, if you're going to take this beautiful, new, shiny technology, then make sure that you're putting something into it that is worthy of what it brings
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So I wanted to try and catch us back on time rather than, you know, exasperate everybody running over
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So I'm pretty much back on time, maybe a little bit over. I'm happy if there's a question or two or if Simon wants to put anything to us
18:47
And but in summary, NFTs, metaverse tokens, big thumbs up. I like them. Part of the future. Absolutely
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You should look at them and be a part of it. And most of the scams that are going on right now around it, absolute thumbs down
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You need to be very careful about what you're investing in and surround yourself with the best expertise in the space
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That's all right
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