Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:24:22 · Micky Malka
[00:24:22] S2: A lot of different aspects. Number one, you always forget because I was there for a long time in that seat, it's very lonely to be the CEO. And to be there when that happens, that call doesn't happen if you are not spending time for the previous seven or eight years since we're investors, getting to know him, getting to know his family, getting to know his team, getting to know the company. Because those solutions don't come out of the blue. And if they do, they're mercenary and they try to kill you. Number one. Number two is the mindset and the culture of being flexible, of taking asymmetric informed risk when you understand the variables. You sleep better at night and you're comfortable with your skin when you do it like that. When you truly deeply know what you're doing versus guessing. We truly understood what we were doing. We made one mistake in that day. We didn't spend enough time understanding the brand consequences that will be so long lasting for something that the entire market did wrong for one day. And Robinhood became the child star of the GameStop saga to the point of having movies. Now there's a saying that says, it doesn't matter what they say about you as long as they talk about you. So you could you could take that argument. But on the other hand, it took Vlad and Baiju and it took the team and it took the market almost two and a half years to get out of that PTSD. And I think the biggest lesson is not that day. The biggest lesson is being there for those next two and a half years as they navigate out of that cycle.
00:26:00 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:26:00] S0: I'd love to zoom to the present now. You focused a lot on money in the first chapter of Ribbit's existence, and I think the grid concept, sort of global digital grid is something that you're focused very carefully on today. Can you just describe how you came to this idea and what you mean by it?
00:26:17 · Micky Malka
[00:26:17] S2: The grid is our version of the matrix of that interconnectivity of different aspects that make us who we are and how we transact and live in this world. And you could think about the grid as if you think about the internet, it's a grid of itself. It's a grid full of data and knowledge. If you think about money and wealth, there's been grids for the last fifty years that allow you to move money in real time, in delay time, in slow times, you got Visa networks, MasterCard, Fedwire, ACH, UPI, PIX, they're all financial design grids. And then if you think about electricity, we think about the electric grid, and we think about towers and power meters and transformers and high voltage and all of those things. What will happen if you actually thought that they were all combined into one, they actually need each other. There is no knowledge grid without power, and there is no power without money. And if you combine them all together, and you think about them as just one single grid that has to connect all of these things at the same time, it's quite rare and unique because it hasn't happened in a long time. These grids have been independent forever. The financial grid has been independent for five, six hundred years. The internet, the data grid has been independent for twenty five years. The electric grid has been evolving for just one hundred and forty years. But now we hit a moment in time when the three of them are converging in a way that we have not seen in almost five hundred years. And the last time we've seen that was probably in the late fourteen, 1500s with the printing press. What people have to understand is that the printing press by itself was not the event. The printing press, what it did was it allow you to print all the knowledge that was written three, four hundred years, thousands of years before that. The same way AI right now is the printing press moment, but it's only possible because we have digitized every single piece of content for the last thirty years. So what took hundreds of years of human scriptures to write history and contents back then for the printing press to print has taken thirty five years now or forty years to digitize. So now the AI engines can actually work on it and tokenize. And so you have knowledge in ways that we've never have been tokenized.
00:28:39 · Micky Malka
You have money getting tokenized in ways that we've never think from crypto rails, token existing rails, to the way all of these aspects of smart contracts are working. And you have electrons, which are becoming more and more decentralized, which are powering all of those at the same time. So this moment is probably the most interesting moment of the last one hundred years, in terms of the opportunity sets that is going to come from it. So when you take those things and you put them all together, you say, okay, what does it mean? It means that knowledge, money and power are interconnected in ways that allows you to create use cases that we've never seen. AI agents are gonna need access to money. AI agents are gonna need access to the crypto rails to do that. So when we think about the grid as a concept, we look at it and say, Oh my God, how do we invest into this? How do we think about if you buy that vision of the world, which we have bought ourselves into, and then you start to ask a question, how do you deploy capital in it? How do you think about the opportunity sets? What needs to come first? What needs to come second? What are the use cases that we should expect to see in ten years, in five years, in one year, that will show that this is going the right direction? That's what we mean with the grid. It's probably the most exciting opportunity set that I've seen in my life.
00:30:05 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:30:05] S0: How do you dig into aspects of that? I mean, it seems correct that everything you just laid out means that the world is already different and changing so quickly around these dimensions. How do you go from that insight down to tangible opportunity?
00:30:22 · Micky Malka
[00:30:22] S2: So I don't have a great answer. There's no light bulb that I can tell you, hey, this is what we're doing. But there's always a but. First, you go from the macro and then you look at the micro. The most smaller aspect where I can see this happening, it's actually in art. So to me, artists are called artists because they are always ahead of society. In many ways, artists always tell you where the world is going. That's what they did. The best sci fi films when we were kids shape where we are going. Mars. The way we think about lens, I was talking to Matt Vaughn the other day with The Kingsman. He was saying, I have the meta lenses on my movies ten years ago. Like, all of these things, they'll tell you where these things are going. And if you follow art today and you see how they're using all of those aspects at the same time, you're seeing artists using AI in different ways than the Silicon Valley engineers are using it. You're seeing how they are using NFTs as a method of distribution, of ownership. People will read in the media, NFTs are dead. I think they're wrong. When you really look at how they use artists are using it, it's just different. It's... And the way they're using power and knowledge to express dynamic aspects of the world. So if they can do it in art and they can express it visually like that, where will it take off in businesses? So then we sort of peel that and say, okay, what next? What are the first variables that we need? Do we need to figure out identity? Is identity a big component of society solving a lot of these things? Because right now, we have ideas, but we don't have an identity that allows us to connect our knowledge to ourselves, ourselves to our money, ourselves to the grid. So can we go and find stuff happening there? Can we find the grid on financial services that will be decentralized? What will be the way it will operate? How will AI agents speak on your behalf and move money on your behalf behalf and sign contracts? Because a piece of NFT... A piece of art that lies on an NFT, it's a smart contract. Now imagine an AI agent using that on your behalf to do something. What would it look like? So when you start to go down that path, we try to figure it out. What are the use cases?