Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
01:06:55 · Micky Malka
[01:06:55] S2: It's the topic that I've been spending the most time the last two years outside of these trends and what we need to do here. You have some of the greatest podcasts on brand stories too. I think at the end, brand is to under promise and over deliver on anything that you do. And that's how great brands get built. So if you can do that and you can be a great storyteller that under promise and over deliver, in no matter what area you are, you will win. Now, what I find interesting is that most people are not trained to think about brand. No one taught them about this concept. They didn't study it in college. They didn't grow up in an environment even though America's brands around the world are some of the best in everything. When we were building Ribbit, I always said, why are we not doing active speaking or marketing or Twitter? Because our brand needed to come from the founders. Our brand needed to come is when you ask any founder, who is the first person you call, will they say Ribbit? And if we win that battle, that's our brand. So what I've learned about it is that when you talk to entrepreneurs in our space, any space in around e commerce or digital financial services or crypto. Crypto has a terrible brand for the record. The crypto brands such as this... Who came up with the Bitcoin logo? There's no brand story there. And despite all of those things, look at what he has done. Imagine if he had a grip. One day that will happen, but not yet. When you look at the best companies around the world, you took Samir from PhonePe or David from Nubank, you talked to Nikolay at Revolut, how they built it, they never spent a lot of money on marketing. All they did was over deliver on what they promised. And that's what it takes.
01:08:52 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[01:08:52] S0: Such a simple and incredibly elegant concept. Thinking about visual parts of brands, making me think about art. And your commitment to how art is changing is certainly the most interesting of anyone that I've met. You clearly love it. You mentioned it earlier as a way to see the future, that artists see the future so you can piggyback on their experience. How have you approached this part of your life? And again, we're sitting around some of the most incredible, beautiful art, but art that's very different from what you would see in a normal home or fancy art collection. It's new, it's interactive, it's unique. Why are you so interested in this and how have you approached this world?
01:09:36 · Micky Malka
[01:09:36] S2: Growing up in Venezuela, my wife and I are both from there. Venezuela had some of the most amazing artists in the world when we were kids. So in the fifties and sixties, Venezuela had the highest GDP per capita in the world. It was Saudi Arabia before we were even born. But... And the Venezuelan artists were leading some of the best art movements worldwide. And it was present everywhere. It was present in the highways, in the universities, in the shopping centers, in the museums. You saw it everywhere. So we grew up seeing modern, beautiful artists and their concepts. And when we started on this journey, she's the one that got us back to that journey together in the last number of years. But then during the 2022 downturn, when things started to cool down a bit and we had more bandwidth and I had more free time, I had missed completely the NFT craziness of the first vintage of nineteen to twenty. Completely missed it. Like, we were so busy with other stuff. I hadn't seen anything. I was like, what are these things? People are trading these tokens. I felt like it was like GameStop kind of meme stuff. But then in two thousand and eight, twenty two, stumbled upon, as I had more even more free time, a art piece that suddenly looked like something from the nineteen fifties that we knew. But it was completely different. It was the same, but it was different. It was dynamic. It moved. It was the same kind of concept. And I was like, what is this? This looks like real... This doesn't look like a meme, Manila. This looks like something completely different. We went down that rabbit hole and then said, what are the CryptoPunks? And, oh, wow. There's only 10,000 of them, and they're the first ever generative art ever put on chain. And what does it mean? And the community of Cryptopunks is stronger than any other community, literally. I think it's even stronger than the community of people that own a Ferrari around the world on how they speak, how they relate, how they identify themselves. These are truly aspects that I have not seen. You're seeing network states. There's a lot of talk about network states. There are network states getting built around some of these movements, And you can see their movements now. They're not just one artist doing one thing. So we slowly started to get into this, and then we started to meet these artists. And guess what?
01:12:03 · Micky Malka
These artists are the most amazing people to go hang out with. There's no prima donas. There's no language I gotta maintain or way of speaking that I gotta say about DI or some other... They're just genuinely people that were artists all their life, so they had to study computer science because they had to get a job and they could never express themselves and suddenly they can. So you just go, you meet people or you go meet Sam Sprat or you go meet MP Cos, which is a piece that you liked here, or Scott from The Dream Machine. And there are just amazing human beings and artists. And you can see what art looked like in Paris in the nineteen twenties when they gathered over coffees. And it felt like going back to Bitcoin conference in 2013 when the first people were starting it. It's just that kind of energy that you cannot see. And then my wife and I start to look at the museums of today, the MoMA and others, and they feel like bank branches feel. Like, why would you go to a bank branch anymore? Really? A teller, a window? What is this? And the museums feel like that. They're white, they're sterile. They have these big walls with one piece of art and a little plaque that you gotta just bend over and read, or you listen on your headphones. The two things you can do is either take a photo. Good luck seeing it again in your phone. You will never again see it on your phone. Or take a selfie of yourself. There's no immersive. There's no ownership. How would it feel if you go to a digital art museum that is born to be digital with physical. But the walls are digital, there's physical in the middle, you're immersed in the piece, in the way it was built, in the story that I was trying to say. It talks to you, it lives through you, and you can tap somewhere and live with some a piece of that art. How will that feel in your story, your life? It definitely feels a lot more richer, talking back to where people are heading. And so that to me is a proxy of where the world is going on everything. And art is just ahead. But that's how we're gonna feel about a lot of our things. And all the podcasts that you've done around IoT, AI engines, and where money's flowing and how people are invest investing. All those things will show in these things in the next couple decades.
01:14:24 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[01:14:24] S0: I wanna ask a little bit more about what you said earlier that this deep dream and passion of yours is that every time money gets better, the world gets better. Can you just say a little bit more about the dimensions of that that you've learned? What are the mechanics of that? Like, why is that true? Why is that the foundational belief? Because I also wanna ask a little bit more again about this grid of which money is a part and the way the world is shifting around. But what's behind this foundational observation of yours that if you improve money, everything else improves? Why is that necessarily true?
01:14:57 · Micky Malka
[01:14:57] S2: Because if you're sitting in Karachi or Bangalore or London or Caracas or Riyadh, and all of us have access to investing our money in the same product, the level of transparency on opportunities of investing are unique. Why does a customer only need to be at a private bank, super high end to get the best products? So if you can save the same way anywhere in the world, and that's the promise of crypto in many ways, the crypto rails, the grid, giving you access to the same product anywhere in the world, then people will have better risk return adjusted income, which will probably allow them to buy a better home or get their kids to go to a better college or pay for tuition or have less debt. And the same on the debt side. If you have to take a loan to expand yourself, to bet on yourself, to buy a car because you need to get a better job so you can drive there or buy a home closer to whatever kind of loan, you wanna make sure they're not paying high out of market rates. You wanna make sure they're not thinking about getting their knees broken with a bat because they cannot pay the tug on their neighborhood, but they're getting it from somewhere institutional that has a process, an underwriting, a credit score system, a discipline of losses and gains. That's why money makes life better when you can access those things. Because suddenly, if you can barely get a loan to pay for... Until the next payroll, but now you can get a loan to buy a car, a mortgage, or build your own company, it will make life better.