Raoul Pal: The Journey Man
00:22:54 · Raoul Pal, Micky Malka
[00:22:54] S0: And as part of, Ribbit, you also have a a crypto group as well that does straightforward crypto investing both in VC and liquid markets. Why did you have those two things running alongside each other, or is it just the thesis that they're merging into the same thing anyway? [00:23:11] S1: I think they're merging. So I I was... What I'm about to say is brand new way of explaining it, and we we are thinking about it right now. But I will say the the crypto economy... I think it's a mistake to talk about crypto anymore separate from from normal assets because we're going to a world where everything is getting tokenized, so it doesn't really matter. What I think has happened in the last year since the new administration and the new regulation coming around the world is that you formed you have given a stamp of approval to the layer ones that are building true infrastructure for the world, like Ethereum or Solana, you talk about Zooey and others. And so now I don't think of them as crypto, actually. They're just networks. [00:23:56] S0: That's right.
00:23:56 · Raoul Pal, Micky Malka
[00:23:56] S0: That's right. [00:23:57] S1: And and now they they happen to be priced through a token that's raised $24.07 on chain. But they're just now networks. So now it's much easier to think about them as what's the price of the network? How do you price it? What scale do you need? What volume? What revenue streams? What business modes? So I think we're past... I think Bitcoin is debugging from everything else because they're becoming truly two different categories of assets. And you've seen it in the price action of the last six months. They have different price actions, more or less. So I believe that that is the best example that this is just... There was a time when you had to have a token only vehicle because of SEC and regulations and how to think about it. But now it's all the same because in the next few years, as we tokenize every single stock in the world and it trades $24.07, an Ethereum or a Solana token, it will be the same as buying a Robinhood stock token. [00:24:54] S0: So we think the difference between equity and token just collapses over time? [00:24:58] S1: I think it does. I think for the bigger projects and the bigger things, I think it does. And I think we're still in early stage experimenting everything around meme coins and what what are they and AI agentic coins and what are they, and that's the whole new new thing. But everything on top of that is just... They're just tokens. What is Equity. Yeah.
00:24:58 · Micky Malka, Raoul Pal
[00:24:58] S1: I think it does. I think for the bigger projects and the bigger things, I think it does. And I think we're still in early stage experimenting everything around meme coins and what what are they and AI agentic coins and what are they, and that's the whole new new thing. But everything on top of that is just... They're just tokens. What is Equity. Yeah. [00:25:19] S0: One of my thesis has been, and I just wanted to bounce this off you, is that that, you know, I think of meme coins as just a speed test, you know, stress test of instant capital formation. And you can... Before, you'd have to build a business, go to a v... Go to a bunch of VCs or angel investors, you know, beg them and everything else. And now it's like, if it captures attention, you can coalesce capital in seconds globally through a distributed network. How are you thinking about how disruptive that all is to the VC industry or the investment industry overall?
00:25:19 · Raoul Pal, Micky Malka
[00:25:19] S0: One of my thesis has been, and I just wanted to bounce this off you, is that that, you know, I think of meme coins as just a speed test, you know, stress test of instant capital formation. And you can... Before, you'd have to build a business, go to a v... Go to a bunch of VCs or angel investors, you know, beg them and everything else. And now it's like, if it captures attention, you can coalesce capital in seconds globally through a distributed network. How are you thinking about how disruptive that all is to the VC industry or the investment industry overall? [00:25:54] S1: I think it's super disruptive. I I think most VCs don't understand what's coming. Even for us. We... I'm I'm not a 100% clear. We know exactly what it means. But I I am shocked on the velocity of capital formation and attention that you can get. It's... It has... It's it's never been faster. You and I have met people that are are doing this full time, and what they're building is insane and how they get attention. So I will say we're not there yet because we're not at scale. It's, there's not a great, the early projects have not been great communicators on what they're doing. They've been a lot more of giving attention but not knowing what to do with it. I think we're gonna start to see a generation of founders who are 22, 23 that actually are so crypto native and so AI native that they will take it to a whole new level. So I'm very bullish on what's coming there. Extremely bullish.
00:26:54 · Raoul Pal, Micky Malka
[00:26:54] S0: Yeah. I think I think it's gonna be super interesting. We could see it again. There was the market stand of ICOs. We kinda tested it there. It failed a bit, but we got some learnings. Now we're doing it at scale because Solana and stuff is able to, you know, to move at this kind of speed and scale. And out of this, I think, will come the final result, whether it's, you know, in two years or three years, but it's coming. And I think it's it's incredibly interesting. The other thing about the bet that you have is it's not just about fintech because the whole smart contract platform is basically the feature of the Internet itself, whether it's digital ID, all of that. So the bet is kind of twofold. It's the financial system bet, but really, there's the whole of web two to web three conversion. [00:27:39] S1: That's correct. And and the way we're about it is that if you ask me what's what's the what's a big one sentence way that we're investing for the next ten years is money until now was fine with no context, with no knowledge. But for the next decade, money without knowledge is not money. It's not valuable anymore. [00:28:02] S0: What do you mean by that?
00:28:02 · Raoul Pal, Micky Malka
[00:28:02] S0: What do you mean by that? [00:28:04] S1: I mean that if you don't attach, if money has no knowledge of what it's doing, it has no smart contract, it has no rules, it has no decision tree that was made to move from one place to another, it doesn't hold that information, it's not valuable. It's still money, but it's not as valuable as money that has knowledge. So what I'm saying is that the whole infrastructure grid that powers money, it's not designed to carry information packets with knowledge alongside money. It's being completely separated. And we think that in the next ten years, as we have more agentic experiences and computers and machines are doing much more of the work and the decision making, the knowledge part with the money part, they need to be combined. So we are spending a bunch of our time figuring out what that looks like. It's gonna be invisible for the user. Its infrastructure is not consumer facing yet, but you will see it in ways that, it may look to you as personalization. All of our founders for the last ten years promised personalization of of our money. They never deliver. Why? Because we have no way to attach knowledge to money. And in the next ten years, we will. Like, today, if you go to a great example is if you go to ChatGPT and you ask them, tell me a restaurant I should eat in Toledo, Ohio because of everything... That was [00:29:31] S0: a truly terrible experience, but we haven't talked about that.