Exclusive Interview with 1KX Founding Partner Lasse Clausen | KBW2023

[Music] I think the first one is you are really solving a problem um it is very easy and I've done this my first daughter as well uh it's very easy to fall in love with an idea with the solution you know very cool technology very sophisticated algorithm uh you know prove to everyone that you can build this really complex smart thing um but really to be very very focused on what is a problem that people really have uh that makes our life you know difficult and then do you have a a way a product that actually solves that problem that makes it easier I think that's really um the first one I think the second one is the team very obvious everyone says that is very difficult because great Founders come in many different shapes and and forms so there's no pattern that you can say you know this is exactly these are the characteristics and then they're great founder um but it's really I think the Common Thread is Obsession you could really say the founders are obsessed with what they're doing and they don't want to do anything else they don't care about anything else uh they don't want to go to parties they don't want to go to the Formula 1 they really just want to work and continue building what they're building and then I think more specifically to um crypto projects is really the evangelism part that is very very important you are building a technology but more importantly you're building a network your technology is open source which means eventually anyone can copy it right so your defensibility doesn't come from your technology your defensibility comes from the network of people that agreed that this is the technology standard that we all agree upon using it and right if I if you ask me now to send you some money I'm pretty sure you'll be fine if I send you some stable coin in ethereum right we're not going to argue a lot about that um and so what that defensibility is that we all implicitly agree agree that ethereum is a valid technology standard and we can use it now if I want to say I want to send it to you on ZK sync but you might be on arbitr that's a different story right and ZK syc is not there yet but that's also the work for the team is really to build a network and to be understood as a technology standard that everybody agrees upon and so that's why the evangelism part and the storytelling part of crypto project is equally [Music] important it's still zero knowledge based rollups just it's been for a long time we invested the first time in 2018 in ZK sync but why there still exciting is because they are finally sort of been coming to the market and they're actually going to see um you know consumer adoption and now the next step for them is to really also scale themselves um so with uh ZK s you will have hyper chains and that's going to be very very interesting to see how they you know they've already managed to scale ethereum massively and now how do they scale themselves sort of to the next orders of magnitude um I think a different space uh that is interesting just for overall the entire industry is what is called account abstraction you don't have this private key that sits on The Ledger that controls the assets anymore um you know your assets are controlled by smart contracts by other smart contracts uh Etc so you don't have this problem that users who want to get into crypto need to buy a ledger set it up write down their key phrase and all these sort of things you can sign up maybe with an email address and a password and you still have a wallet that is secure that is uh trustless that is decentralized um and that you can't just lose because you lost your Ledger I think the most valuable function for us and our view is really building open-source technology networks and really key focus on open source um if you there's very very uh you know there's a few very exciting companies that are still typical normal companies coinbase great company does a great service to the industry but coinbase really is just a normal company it's a close Source technology stack if I sent my coins to coinbase I really don't know what's going on under the hood how are they controlled Etc it's the same as a bank account right I sent money to a bank account I we don't know what happens on the server we don't know what codebase they running we don't really know anything and that's why I can't trust it because I don't know what what's happening and the big difference with um you know with crypto is that it's open source meaning that I don't have to trust a great brand or a regulator I can actually just verify myself and not just me anyone in the world can actually verify so I still think the most important thing that blockchains company do is actually build open source infrastructure oh definitely most investors are holding back a lot uh right now um massively um it surprises me every bare Market because this is really it's it's very simp simple you buy low you sell High you don't buy high and then sell low and so really what you have to do is you have to invest now you shouldn't have invested in 21 you should invest now and so all of these people that were very excited about investing in the space in 2021 that are now not excited about investing in the space um blows my mind to be honest um because either understand if your fundamental conviction isn't there that's fine but from technology standpoint everything is better now than it was in 2021 if you look at the engineering talent in the space if you look at the infrastructure uh that's being built that's in place zero knowledge based rollups for scalability account abstraction for user experience so everything is better now and the prices are you know sometimes 90% down so um yes a lot of investors are sitting on the sidelines now um I can relate to it a little bit because you know if you have an investment committee where three people they read and believe that the financial times in Bloomberg you know those media Outlets they just tend to create stories that confirm an existing sentiment right and right now the sentiment is bad because the prices are bad so most people that are not really in industry in the industry feel bad about crypto so the media creat stories that make people feel bad about crypto so I understand that sometimes these investment committees um they get to that point but um yeah um lots of people sitting on the sidelines whereas we are investing more aggressively than we've ever done before that's a good one I think usually the team see what they did before if they uh you know raised money two three times already never really delivered especially with some like EOS you know like it was you had a lot of opportunistic entrepreneurs that were raising money on something EOS um or other chains uh that really kind of went nowhere um I think if you know obvious very big red flag is if it promise you returns if it overpromises you could see the language is just very hyp this solves all the problems this is the perfect solution for everything uh unlimited scalability uh you know zero cost etc etc that is uh usually a scam sign I think also if more than a quarter of the people on the team page are wearing a suit in a tie it's probably a scam um and uh I think that's a especially if yeah especially if there is profit and oh we're going to list the token and and things like that then yeah