EthCC 2: Kavita Gupta

just putting the slides up in the meanwhile I just have a couple of questions for you guys how many entrepreneurs do we have in the room oh damn are you guys still doing all blockchain Wow how many people in the room actually are still very early stages learning about blockchain you should be the only one listening to my presentation and how many people are entrepreneurs in France Oh Germany oh we have you are in France and Germany booth yes okay and how many people from the other parts of Europe apart from Germany and France so meet entrepreneurs from other places okay okay somebody wants to give a shout out to like what countries are you guys from I just want to get an idea of how the landscape is in Europe happening for blockchain Denmark of course what else that's all the innovation coming from Italy oh wow how is blockchain happening in Italy either is there any successful like big blockchain company we would know which has raised a fund or have already done an application no not yet there should be a good vine or food company coming out of Italy or fashion yeah so my name is Kavita Gupta I will get consensus ventures how many of you guys know about consensus ventures Oh Jerome great good to know awesome this is why we should not do PDF and we should do PPT my presentation is cut ok ok so we started consensus ventures almost two years back now it's a 50 million dollar fund which is the with only GP from consensus to invest into etherium ecosystem we invest across the whole stack from applications all the way to protocol and it all the infrastructure side chains scalability solutions anything and everything on etherium which we think is going to really move the needle we invest across it we consensus has more than 33 country offices by now but for ventures we have a team across San Francisco New York Berlin in London and with the help of the whole consensus ecosystem throughout the world also source deals with a local from a local country offices so far we have done the announced investments have been around 16 but today we also actually for the first time going to share with you before it goes public two more new investments which we are announcing today so very excited about that we invest globally our portfolio companies are from all over the world we have invested in France very recently UK we have companies out of Asia and of course us a sweet spot we invest anywhere between 250 K to 2 million but our sweet spot is somewhere 500 to $1,000,000 ok so these are the companies in 2017 and 18 which we invested into I'm gonna quickly go through some of them unlock protocol which basically lets you monetize your content think about your tweeting retweeting or your putting a content on medium or something you can actually monetize for that stock we're coming out of Israel is one of the really big scalability solution from the X founder of Z cache block Phi it's a crypto landing platform it's also has been one of our top success stories so far we were the first check-in at the very very early stage when it was Stella deck today block by very recently closed their Series A round along with 50 million dollar lending pool from galaxy and around 1.2 million users lenders around their true digital is one of the first derivative product market creating secondary liquidity out of us but now going global they are starting with ether futures and hopefully with the new announcement that the Bitcoin futures are going to be reality very soon I think places like true digital are really going to create that secondary liquidity big shout out to Dada we have one of the co-founder of Dada here Judy Dada is art collectible platform and the very unique thing which we got got us very excited like we always believed that blockchain is to take away the middle people but the thing which got us really excited about Dada is a platform where you can actually just as an artist you can just go and also paint at the same time or you can upload photos and you can then create a collectible out of it so anybody in the audience who just wants to go and create something doesn't have to be like a bonafide artist can basically go and be creative vault is vault is very interesting it one of those cases where it started as a mobile wallet for interoperability and then became one of the biggest open markets for non fungible tokens successfully and the first app which is available on Apple Store which also not only let the tokens non fungible tokens rotate but also let the crypto payment happen then we have rocket pool out of Australia which is the first syndicated platform over Casper for the for ether once Casper is going to be implemented they have already tested with the Casper team on the test net and then the subsys is the substance used to be crypto market if if somebody has heard about them from our portfolio earlier and they are out of Chile one of the biggest exchanges in South America which now they are operating out of Spain I think yeah they are operating out of Spain and that's actually one of the reason for us to go regionally in South America of all the places to start supporting the exchange at the early stage because we truly believe that in the fine decentralized financial services local regulations and compliances are going to change the game and they're going to really define how your crypto to crypto crypto to us your derivative products etc are going to be accepted by the by the local population so these were our equity investments very early on as if I haven't specifically mentioned when we started the fun we had the idea that we're going to invest both equity and tokens and we came up with a creative solution where we would go equity and token combination and the deals and sometimes we would only do tokens or sometimes only acquittee it was just like large array of things so the interesting thing is even though we were open to tokens we actually didn't do much of utility tokens because our theses were always instead of pump and dump which was very easy in 2017 lot of people in this room would remember that era but how do we really figure out what is the utilization of those tokens and with that in mind our first token investment was constant which is still around its automated security audits for smart contracts we did unicorn which recently became the first company to get licensed to do online casinos in u.s. territory prize is as an ad platform wherever people are coming up with new tokens they can advertise and give some tokens airdrop tokens and then in Krita call is an existing traditional company for over like six years less tia is the name of the parent company who decided to include incentive tokens for their shoppers known as being so these have been an array of investments in seventeen and eighteen which will give you an idea and overview of we move from scalability solutions to lot of FinTech products exchanges to staking protocols to crypto wallets and then something into the shopping incentives etc so we basically went anywhere all the way across the across the stack with one thing in common that it has to be either blockchain agnostic or aetherium Baldoni theorem so 2018 looking back I think most of the people in this room would agree with me that the whole dynamics shifted a lot last year we started the in january/february when everybody is like blockchain is the world to be in everybody should move here all the traditional VC's were calling in and they were like oh my god we have to create a billion dollar fund we have to create a five hundred million dollar fund and then we ended two thousand we ended two thousand eighty which everybody is saying most of the traditional VC is saying blockchain is dead so this year has been a very interesting one but as a continued big ardent fan of this technology what has been our learning lessons for us to invest in 2019 the first one is tokenization I mean it would look very obvious talking that utility tokens are probably not going to be the future or as a mass future as it looked like in 2017 would like everybody would be like yeah of course but if you look at our portfolio we were not really very bullish a bullish on them even in 16 and 17 but we do believe that different ways of tokenization is still gonna exist and gonna still really revolutionize this space with the ethos of crowdsourcing as it started but yes a lot of pump-and-dump and moving your money and not having any real case behind it as not going to exist and thank God for it because I remember the days when people would come and like really pitch anything and anything and everything and would raise 30 million dollars in two days and I would be like who are these people investing I I should be creating some random white paper and really picking up this 30 million dollar instead of actually investing in projects so I'm really happy those days are pretty much behind me the second one is understanding of sustainable business models Vetri is great but it's also at a very very early stage and there are a lot of bottlenecks around this technology around adoption around around adoption around how we are really taking the platform and thinking that everything is ready and tomorrow we can have five million users on the platform in case anyone has forgotten at heyday time for crypto kitties it was when the whole main had broke down 13,000 110 users and that's the type of like the big spike which we are talking about with respect to adoption and not able to support it and and the third and the most important thing which we realize is decentralized finance and gaming industry these two were the fastest growing platforms over last two-and-a-half years and continues to be and that is and those are the two places which also got the most adoption with respect to number of people out there going through international country international all over the world globally and also being fastest adopted either by government or talked about public authorities private banks etc so we realized that decentralized finance is actually going to be the key for a lot of other adoptions to come in just to give you a quick overview when we talk about decentralized finance and how this market was moving this is still basically 2018 the number of crypto funds which continued to grow and continue to invest in the space I would be very excited to see the 2019 number and my prediction is there is going to be a big line down when the 2019 numbers come but the amount and the crypto assets in billion of dollars continued to grow and that was very exciting and this but this number does include slot of crypto trading volume just in ether too so very important thing current bottlenecks because we can't talk about investing in any of the technologies or looking at the project without actually as an investor acknowledging the bottlenecks and then going with the expectation whether it's from the antha preneur or it's from us like the time horizon on which we are expecting a return when we initially started any fund when they started in 16 and 17 they talked about that o our liquidity is like four months away these tokens are going to come out they're going to get listed or we basically second market can bite from us so our liquidities for month away I think everybody has come together to say our liquidity is not four months away and if our liquidity is not four months away and we are really now building the products what are the bottlenecks and how long is it going to take so scalability design interoperability these three have been the key and biggest bottlenecks in the space now do we expect an application layer protocol layer products or somebody individual to solve it no I think this is an effort which is in the combination at the protocol layer in at the infrastructure layer coming together like loon network is helping out a lot of side chains are coming out and a lot of scalability solutions are figuring out plasma stock where a stock where is working on it but UX and UI is something which we do expect individual entrepreneurs to give us a way that how do they think there's going to be a mass adoption with or without people really knowing that they are on blockchain interoperability is another one because we are seeing that a lot of different block chains are coming and really changing the game how are we going to make sure that average user doesn't have to go through 16 wallets and figuring out different ways of moving into the system tools developers tools training projects building is still very cranky and very complex yet crypto speculations I think people don't want to spend the gas money because that ether could still be go up to like fifteen hundred dollars or five thousand dollars and they better use it for speculation instead of using Bitcoin and ether for the real reason why it was originally created for actually paying regulations are still unclear they're getting better but whenever we invest and we feel like oh somebody is making an amazing application in the legal space but that could actually also get lot of from sec so do we really want to be taking that risk when it's going to be unclear even if the product is ready for three years so that has been one the biggest one worried as an investor specially at their space privacy I think private blockchains our great public blockchains are great based on what sector and what area to our building but how do you really make a decision which part of the data goes on public blockchain and whether it's going in hash whether it's going in a different form of data and which one goes on the privacy layer and how do you maintain the balance between privacy and transparency and owning the ethos of blockchain I think that has become a very big question for us when we talk to a lot of entrepreneurs and yes anything in everything specially if you are building the application layer protocol which has any interaction with wallets how how are you managing the people's wallet keys and custodianship even if it's just a referral point going back to someone's wallet and you don't want to take ownership of custody that's great but like how do you still manage that you are not leaving any sort of breadcrumbs for people to come in hack so 2019 outlook so from last two years I think we decided that let's go and start figuring out the places we want to prioritize looking at said that if there is an entrepreneur who's amazing and building something we did we literally decided not going to invest but the team is so great we are of course open to invest but I think we came up with some of these focus areas and realized that we are actually very passionate about this as a team so stable coins lending platforms security tokens I for me personally I think being have been a traditional investors for 11 years before I started consensus ventures I'm excited about how security tokens are really gonna change the game not only on fixed income derivative products and REITs and everything I think my colleague Corbin already talked about that yesterday but I'm really excited about how the Series B and C DC is gonna come on security tokens and lot of these companies like Airbnb Zoar of the world don't have to go through IPOs how's that gonna look like how's the governance transparency cetera gonna look like in those spaces and the liquidity specially p2p networking I think the networking layers changing the scalability game is going to be very exciting state channel site channels of chain computations verification simulators etc I tell protocols like aetherium and other places work out the scalability I think those side chains etc are going to be our life life keys then within security token different infrastructure layers to it I think it will be very interesting to see if the custody part how's the custody part gonna play out for individual companies in the security token space very excited about that and then institutional investors I think this market is going to go back to big legitimate veil again once we have those institutional investors having their faith back and they have applications which they can use without the bottlenecks whether on private chain whether in public chain but some sort of a system where your institutional investors feel comfortable with their custody their Asset Management's not sure how am i doing on time okay very quickly these are couple of more areas as I talked about gaming and collectibles we feel that they are continue to rise developers tools and infrastructure privacy preservation technologies I do feel like snark stocks etc the confidential transaction methods set like layers of cryptography on top of it it's going to be a big one specially if you connect them back to the institutional investors payment system I really hope a payment system comes where I can still use my Visa card and like have no idea what's happening on the back end but gets the best deal with my data privacy on blockchain that going to be super exciting and then I think decentralized databases has been a dream for quite some time a search engine on the decentralized database which does not take ten minutes to search out something and have a really good craft protocol on top of it so so with that lay of the land in 2019 I think a month back we announced two companies recently first two investments from 2019 the first one is tenta which is a VPN browser going on the line of data privacy and and they already have partnership with expressvpn now so very excited the team is out of Seattle and Asia the second one is actually from France Winehouse very excited to do a first actually the second French investment because a first French investment was in our tachyon company and I want to give a shout out to our founder from Quigley hi Justin so that was our first from Ventures but second overall and I put folio coin house coming out from the ledger family they are doing an exchange out here very excited about them but I'm more excited about announcing our two new investments which was recently closed I think the first article went up announcing them this morning in French newspaper PDX and Leggero so PDX is an exchange coming out of Philippines continuing our journey to invest into regional exchanges which we really believe in the team and think they work with the local regulatory body to create creative products for the market and Leggero is another scalability solution very strong team coming out of Israel us Berlin coming together to create and their first product is going to be for the auction houses and hedge funds to take away the scale abilities transaction scalability issue out there so very excited to conduct a sickle II work with them and I quickly want to take five minutes to talk about very interesting power of ventures we started tachyon of first accelerator program last year and we basically had teams all from all over the world came to San Francisco last year and we had a demo day and 16 companies all over the place and that's basically gives us a sort of an insight into how teams are really building or what's the new trends coming because there are a lot of companies a lot of entrepreneurs we meet where we feel like either they are not ready or we are not ready to make that commitment from the venture arm of consensus but we do feel that these are the projects and the teams we really want to be engaged and to see how they grow and how can we be part of it over time and I think tachyon is the solution for us where we go very early in the projects these projects are usually at this deck level or have their MVP or just got some initial users it could range anywhere but they are still very early and we believe that for the long time journey we need to go early and start working with them and also provide them an ecosystem if they are the international companies have a lot of mentoring session from both ecosystem of consensus blockchain and the web 2.0 world so this this was just to give an overview this is our inaugural tachyon Kahoot the projects range from everywhere pulse was the marketplace Boulevard el chrome is an IOT space ground hook was another payment system in the marketplace using crypto and subscription model globalexplorer was on our social impact track which is taking antiquities over blockchain neo actually have went on main net have over 60,000 users it's a payment it's basically a mobile app for your hedge fund management and you can actually trade not only your crypto but also tokens Quigley which we just gave a shout-out to you if you are an entrepreneur and you are just starting your cap table you can start doing it on blockchain on Quigley we have D company out there Wallet connect fast X is the first coming out of China the first transaction layered on plasma super successful netherstorm is a gaming platform where you can have like thousand of gains across one platform piccolo it just came out of the stealth mode is doing the decentralized database search to Google engineers left Google and started the company fishing etc so just to give an overview of our tachyon companies and now we are in the process of just starting our second cohort in April and we decided to come to Europe to kick-start it so we're gonna kick start on April 1st actually add the German parliament which I cannot pronounce the name of and so we are very excited we are gonna by the end of this week are actually going to announce the cohort and going to start working with them so the first two weeks we gonna spend with the whole team in Germany and the last two weeks back in has served with the demo day there and very excited that we are working with AWS Google cloud who are basically working with us on the tachyon this time so excited to be partnered with them too and I have a small video which our PR team made for our tachyon which I would love to show you guys it's a one minute video and I'm happy to take questions [Music] thank you and I think I'm pretty much done thank you so much for all your patience can I have another big round of applause for the HCC team for hosting such an amazing conference please do we have time for questions or should we skip it I'm sorry