NASA Engineer: Why Bitcoin’s Explosion Will Catch Everyone Off Guard - Get Ready Now! | Jeff Grant

All right, Jeff, welcome to Proof of Thought Podcast. I'm so excited to have you here with us today.

Hey, Charles. Excited to be here as well. And uh, happy October.

It's finally happy October. Happy October. All right, let's hop into it. All right, I want you to just give us a quick one-minute overview of your background. What did you study in school? Where did that take you professionally? And then tell us about this next new and audacious career pivot that you're making.

All right. Well, thanks. Yeah, I'm an inventor by nature, a design engineer by training, and an innovator by practice. So, I grew up, you know, tinkering in the garage as a kid, small town in Oregon. I ended up going to Stanford where I wrestled on the team and I was a team captain, also an NCAA qualifier. But uh, I thought I was going to study physics going into Stanford. And then I discovered uh ME 101, which was the first course for both the mechanical engineering tract as well as product design. And that's when I fell in love with this concept of product design. It was taught by both faculty engineers as well as uh, adjunct professors that are coming from industry. So people who were professional designers, inventors, innovators. And so it was there where I learned this sort of love for this fusion of like all things engineering, business, and design all at once. And um, I ended up winning um an award at graduation for my senior thesis project. I didn't know they gave out awards for that. But um, I've always been a person who thought that sleep was flexible. Um, I don't sleep a lot. Sometimes I just pull all-nighters for fun. And uh, I made it my mission my senior thesis year to, I just said, I'm just going to kind of outwork everybody. I'm just going to do at least uh, two all-nighters a week. And then no other night, I would sleep more than 3 hours. And just, I figured, you know, people say things like, well, you know, there's only so much time in a day. It's like 8 hours a day. It's like, no, no, you haven't done the math. There's 24 hours in a day. Like, you can actually get triple the output if you agree that sleep is somewhat flexible or at least, you know, you do need it some eventually, but you can adjust when you take it.

So anyway, um, it was at Stanford where I met um, one of my uh, professors had started a company. He had left a company called IDO to develop with this company called Skyline Products, and it was a toy and game invention product company. So it was a small startup. Um, I ended up joining him as a student because he liked my student project, and we actually went into a deal on an art activity toy that I developed in his class, and we actually went into some agreements on that. I made more money from that that summer, not even going to market, just having somebody pay us for the exclusive right to evaluate the idea for like a few months. I made more money from that than I expected to make in all my summer jobs during college. And that's when I also realized I kind of want to get out of school. I want to just work. I don't really want to do this. But I still had a couple more years. Um, but anyway, uh, while I was at Stanford, I worked at a NASA program called Gravity Probe B that was trying to test Einstein's theory of relativity uh, through these ultra-precise instruments. And so I was a mechanical engineer on that. Helped come up with some novel methodologies of how to uh, do prototyping and fixturizing and how to make some of the stuff that we were coming up with. So, one of my claims of fame is I do have some parts that I've designed that is literally orbiting the earth right now. Uh, once the experiment was done, you know, you don't ever recall that equipment. It just kind of floats in space forever. So, I tell my kids I've got some parts, you know, circling around the earth.

Um, but I was a toy inventor for about 10 years. Helped invent and license over 100 toy concepts, toys, games, juvenile products to companies like Hasbro, Mattel, Fisher-Price. And then um, 18 years ago, at the beginning of the birth of my first son, decided to move out to North Carolina for family reasons. I didn't know what I was going to do, but I, you know, I'm not going to bore you with the whole how it happened, but I ended up uh, getting recruited to work at Bank of America, which is headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. Um, somebody at the time, it was my mother-in-law who was a therapist, had a client who was at the bank, and they had a friend who was trying to redesign this whole kind of process around how the treasury management products got delivered and set up for um, commercial clients. And uh, this person was looking for someone who was a quote, creative problem solver with absolutely zero experience in financial services. And she said, "Oh, that's my son-in-law." So anyway, couple meetings later, I found myself getting an offer to come in and start up this transformation effort. I dubbed the project Project TBD, which stood for Transformation by Design. Did a whole bunch of cool things, but eventually, you know, effectively compressed time, the revenue for the bank's clients, made it a better onboarding experience by touching processes, technologies, tools, and, you know, kind of sitting by people, helping them understand how to onboard clients better.

I then um, got recruited by a company called Invue that was private at the time, as a product manager for one of the two product categories they had for retail security products. Again, didn't know anything about security, but came in as somebody to help uh, drive innovation. Uh, within my first 12 months, I actually created the company's third product category. Um, which ended up being around kind of smart locks. So this is 15 years ago. This is before there were a lot of smart locks that we all kind of take for granted today. Um, anyway, flash forward 15 years later. I've accumulated, I just got my 117th patent about two weeks ago or so. Most of that was uh, for retail security, data center security, point-of-sale products. Um, but anyway, the company got acquired at the beginning of this year by a bigger company that's public. Um, I knew about it basically last August. So this is kind of the entree into Black Pill Capital and my Bitcoin journey. And so basically it was last August 2024. I told my wife, I said, "Hey, Christine, in the next several months, we're going to have a new problem to solve. We're going to get a meaningful amount of money all at once due to the sale of this company. I don't really know what to do with that money. I've never focused on managing, growing, protecting money. It's just never been a thing for me." And she said, "How come you never got into investing? I feel like with the way your brain works, and if it's something you're interested in, I think you'd do pretty well." I did not have an answer for her. I did not have a good answer for that question because I never thought about it.

Luckily for both of us, one of my core operating principles and philosophies as an innovation practitioner is that it's a dereliction of duty to know that you don't know and be okay with it. Um, it's why she doesn't like watching movies with me, 'cause maybe seven, eight times throughout the movie, I'm going to pause it so I can look up the vocab word to make sure I understand what the word means. And she's like, "Can we unpause the movie?" Like, "Hold on, I'm looking at the origin of the word and how it's changed its use over time in different cultures." And so it's, I could see how it's very annoying for her, but that's just kind of how my brain works. So, um, kind of backing up, when I was at Invue as head of innovation, we had new hires coming in all the time and, um, cross-functionally from every department. And so, I would do this new hire training on the topic of innovation. And in probably a dozen years or so, I've done maybe 60 sessions. I always start off that with the word innovation on the screen. I just say, "What is it? Define it. What makes it innovation? What makes it not innovation? What's the metrics? How do you know if something's innovative or not?" Every single person has been able to give me examples and credible examples, and we all kind of have consensus agreement what's innovative or not. But not a single person in the 60 sessions over a dozen years has ever been able to define it or tell me what it is. And so here I am, the expert in innovation, talking to people who aren't, and that's how they behave. I then say, "Well, wait, money. I'm now the student. I have no idea. So if someone put a screen that says money, what is it? I would be fumbling just like them. I'd be kind of using the same kind of language 'cause I just don't know."

And so, you know, somebody in my situation, I think most people if they said, "Hey, I'm going to get a bunch of money all at once. What do I do?" I think most people would say their first Google search was "local financial advisor," right? Or "who can help me with this?" And I feel like that's very intellectually lazy in a way because you're basically just sort of going right to the top and you're like, "Let me go hire somebody. I'm not even qualified to know whether I could hire them or not because I don't know anything about the space." And you're just basically landing on the shoulders of all the shoulders of other shoulders of assumption beyond assumption beyond assumption. I do things the opposite. So I went on Google search and said, "What is money?" It sounds like the most basic, idiotic question you could ever ask, but I asked, "What is money?" That led me to this very long, marathon, long podcast series with Robert Breedlove and Michael Saylor talking about that same topic of "What is money?" They say it takes about 100 hours for a person to become aware and convicted in Bitcoin. I got there in like 35 hours. 35 hours that same week. I couldn't believe that I've been asleep at the wheel for 15 years with Bitcoin's existence. I knew that it existed. I just never cared. Um, you know, Michael Saylor says, "You get Bitcoin at the price you deserve." Well, I got it at the price I deserved. Um, but I went down that rabbit hole so deep, so hard. Studied all things money, monetary policy, you know, kind of got into fiscal things, tax considerations. Again, I think I put about 3,000 hours since then, just all things money became my new obsession.

And um, so while I followed my first principle, which is, you know, "Never let something go if you don't understand it. You got to go fill that gap." I then proceeded to violate one of my other core principles, which is when you're trying to present something to somebody new, never lead with a solution. Always set up the problem. Furthermore, define the problem in a way that makes sense to the person you're talking to. And you have to research like, where's this person's disposition? Are they likely or not likely to accept a new paradigm shift? You know, how might they react to what you're going to tell them? And do you have something in the back pocket to kind of help them get past it? I completely blew right past it. I went right to my wife. I said, "Hey, Christine, I've got the answer." So, and she's like, "Answer to what?" Like, "The question, remember that question you asked me a week ago?" You know, and I said, "It's Bitcoin." And um, my wife, her face went flat. She's like, "Jeff, you're going to lose every single dollar we're ever going to have." And like, and so it became this point of strife where like I was so convicted and she just didn't want to have the conversation. And uh, it was tough for a while. So, you know, it was a kind of a journey. And um, but I still had, you know, several months before the capital was going to come our way. So I had plenty of time to plan.

But um, one of the things I firmly believe in, and I've seen this happen in my career, is that creativity loves constraints. You know, it's better to have constraints that you have to overcome and navigate through because if you don't, then you again, you kind of get that intellectual laziness, and anything's possible, and therefore nothing happens. So I eventually got her to reluctantly agree to one Bitcoin, but that was it. And which then meant I had to search for other things. So even though it was Michael Saylor, who, you know, runs MicroStrategy, I didn't really think about that at the time. I was thinking more about Bitcoin. But because I wasn't allowed to buy more than one Bitcoin, it forced me, the constraint forced me to look at other things. So I really started to study MicroStrategy, you know, Bitcoin treasury company. Really got into it, and I really started to study the brilliance behind all the mechanisms of how he's able to um, leverage the local capital markets and the friction in it. It's solving different types of problems for different investor classes. And, you know, what's interesting, if you go out, you probably had this experience, you talk to anybody, everybody knows Bitcoin, like they know it as a brand name, you know, as a kind of a ground-up brand. But in my circle of people, every person I already previously knew, friends, family, colleagues, clients, 100% of the people I knew, not a single person had heard of the term MSTR, MicroStrategy, Michael Saylor. Not a single person. I'm like, "How is it that this is happening? It's all around the world. It's the best performing stock, you know, kind of in the space, and yet nobody has any clue about it, right?" And then I did finally start to find people when I got into this hedge fund business that did know about MSTR. But then I would quiz them and start to ask them what they know about it and why it works, blah. Their amount of knowledge started to taper off pretty quickly as well. And a lot of them didn't understand what was going on with the preferred stocks. Had no idea what that was all about. I feel like that the world's really asleep at the wheel in terms of what the potential is there.

So anyway, it was basically the middle of this year. I was getting ready for an innovation summit for my job at Invue. Uh, I was in Arkansas getting ready for a show, and I was on my phone that night. I had this epiphany. I was like, "Man, if I could just go back in time in a time machine five years, I would put every single dollar I could on MSTR because I know what happens next. It's five doubles in five years. It's about a 30x." And it's like, "Well, I can't do that. So, what's the next best thing?" Well, what if there's other MSTRs happening other places in the world that are just earlier in their cycle? And at this point in time, I had heard of Metaplanet, but I never really studied it, never paid attention. But it was that night in May of this year that I went down the rabbit hole of studying the Japanese market from an equity perspective, investment perspective, and I realized that, man, MSTR is already doing so well here in the US, and they've been doing it for five years. Metaplanet, structurally and what's going on, is going to do even better in a faster time frame. And so it was around that time that I started getting into Metaplanet and then Smarter Web and these other companies that were kind of building the whole, you know, this new ecosystem of Bitcoin treasury companies around the world.

Now, um, one of the guys I worked with at Invue had been with me for 15 years as an inventor on my team, and he was literally the only person I could "orange pill" out of this whole process. You know, and you probably saw this, like, it's really hard to "orange pill" somebody. Nobody wants to be "orange pilled." You have to "orange pill" yourself. It's sort of like, so you're religion X, let me tell you about religion Y, or you're a political affiliation A, let me tell you about B. Or even you're just agnostic. Nobody wants to hear about it. They don't want to talk about it. But what David and I both found is that nobody wanted to talk about Bitcoin, but if I said, "Hey, let me tell you about this company who's a publicly traded company in different global jurisdictions. They themselves have decided to make Bitcoin their treasury reserve asset, and here's why." All of a sudden, that barrier lifted, and everybody wanted to talk to us about that. And I think it was like an instant legitimizer of the fact that, hey, it's not Jeff and David talking about their Bitcoin journey. It's about these companies who are in heavily regulated spaces. And there's like, again, that intellectual laziness. I mean, kind of hate to say it, but like, I think they're like, "Oh, wow, here's a company doing it. They're heavily regulated, and it must be legitimate because if it wasn't, they'd be shut down by now." Again, it's not like first principles. That's just sort of like superficial. But I realized that, you know, it's just human nature. Like you can lean into that.

You know, we developed this Black Pill logo concept. If you look at it, it's actually an orange pill. You know, we are trying to "orange pill" people, but if you try to do it directly, you're going to be unsuccessful. You're always going to get resistance. But we say that we make the orange pill easier to swallow because if you look at it, it's actually an orange pill with a little half black wrapper, and the orange is coming through it. But it's also somewhat of an analogy to the companies that we're investing in because the companies we are investing in are publicly traded companies. They are equity-wrap Bitcoin. So just like the companies we're investing in, so is the logo. It's equity-wrap Bitcoin. And um, anyway, just kind of flash forward. Um, I was trying to help out my friends and family do this same journey I was going along. Um, I was on the phone, you know, all hours of the day, around the clock. David's like, "Hey, Jeff, you know, you can't just help out every single person one by one like this. Like, why don't we create a hedge fund? We could scale this thesis and we can do it for more people." I had no awareness. I had no idea I wanted to do that. I did not care about that at all. I wanted to keep doing what I was doing. Uh, he kept pressing me for about a month, and he kind of used my own words against me. So I said, "Well, Jeff, you know how it's a dereliction of duty to know you don't know and not do anything about it." Said, "Well, I think it's a dereliction of duty for us not to do this. Like, we have a responsibility to take this to the world." And he's like, "I'm going to do this with or without you. I really would want you to come with me. It'd be better with you." And I'm like, "Well, shoot. If I'm going to lose one of my best guys, I don't want to be stuck with this defunct team that I've, you know, built for 15 years." And I said, "Well, let's do it. Let's go do it together."

So, we went down the path of trying to figure out how do you start up a hedge fund. So, I also said, "David, two innovators is not a hedge fund make. We need somebody from the world of the space." Um, one thing I've learned in my career as an inventor and kind of innovator in general is that once you put it out into the universe, the universe will respond. So, I literally told my sister, um, it was June 21st. I said, "Alyssa, um, I'm starting this hedge fund with my partner, David, and it's around this thesis that I've been talking to you and everybody else in the family about for the past several months." And she's like, "Oh, you got to talk to my buddy Rob. He's been in the hedge fund business for 30 years. He retired last year, and he would, you know, love to talk to you. I'm sure, you know, pick his brain." Uh, two phone calls later and a third Zoom meeting later, Rob became our equal third partner, and he came out of retirement because he said this was the most exciting and interesting thing he's heard of from a hedge fund perspective in the past year. 7 weeks later or so, we launched the hedge fund on September 1st, and as of today, we've been operating for just over a month. And so here we are. So that's your one-minute intro.

Wow. Well, no, 17 minutes, but congratulations. Amazing story. I love the nuances and the journey there and so much of what you said, um, especially meeting people where they are and how Black Pill represents that. Um, this idea of, you know, putting it out there for the universe and they'll respond. Um, so much insight there. Um, but let's dive into these Bitcoin treasury companies a bit more. Um, it's obviously one of the hottest and most important topics um in Bitcoin over the past year or two. Um, and as you experienced through your journey, right, only a small fraction of people um actually understand Bitcoin, and I would say even a smaller um fraction have even heard of treasury companies, let alone understand them, right? And everything they're doing. Um, so can you tell us about your discovery of um, you know, sort of the opportunity with Bitcoin treasury companies, um, and how you really move from being just a believer in Bitcoin to a believer in what these treasury companies are doing, which is to over time get more Bitcoin per share? I think even when people hear that term, that's an idea that goes over their head. Um, you know, one might ask, you know, okay, I get that this, you know, these companies, these corporations are now doing it. It's all legal. They're growing, but why don't I just buy the Bitcoin myself?

That's a great question. In fact, that's the number one question and the number one area we spend the most time on when we talk to investors. It's this fundamental bewilderment behind the idea, the concept of a Bitcoin treasury company, especially when, if you take the US, we have like 11 ETFs for Bitcoin here today. We have a gluttony of options as investors and traders. Other countries don't have that. So actually, it's even better in terms of, you know, what the treasury companies are doing in those markets. But let's just stay in the US for now as a simple example. So the fundamental trade is you mentioned Bitcoin per share over time. So that, I think people understand that somewhat, but they're missing the big point, which is, I'll be blunt. When you buy a Bitcoin treasury company on day zero, you are overpaying for Bitcoin exposure compared to what you could have bought with just the Bitcoin itself or a Bitcoin ETF that trades at effectively one NAV. A Bitcoin ETF is basically just a paper version of the Bitcoin that that's underlying it. But it's always going to be, you know, valued at the NAV that it is. Now, you hear about Bitcoin treasury companies trading at a multiple of NAV, like 1.5, 2.5, 5, 3, whatever. That's a premium to their net asset value. And so immediately people are like, "Well, that's overpriced. Why are you paying more than it's worth on the Bitcoin that they have on their balance sheet?"

So, what I tell people is that, okay, so here's an example. Let's, I'm going to use super simple math. I'm going to simplify all the numbers just for illustrative purposes. So, let's just assume that Bitcoin is worth $100,000. So if today I have $100,000 and I want to invest, in my left hand, I could buy one whole Bitcoin if it's worth $100,000, and in my left hand, forever, I will always have the one Bitcoin. Now, if the price of Bitcoin goes to 200K in the future, or 500K, or a million, or whenever that happens, I'll still only ever have that one Bitcoin. Okay. So, but in my right hand, I have another option. I can take that same $100,000 and I can buy as many shares of Bitcoin Treasury X, whatever that company is. And let's say that that company is trading at a 2x NAV. So if I bought $100,000 worth of their shares of their stock, I would effectively have exposure to not one Bitcoin, but a half of a Bitcoin. So right there on day zero, I overpaid for that Bitcoin by double. I could have bought a whole Bitcoin here for $100,000. Instead, I bought effectively a half a Bitcoin exposure for that same $100,000. So people are like, "Well, that doesn't make sense. That's like me when, you know, when my kids were really young, I would try to do this trick. I said, 'Hey, would you like this whole dollar?'" And like, "Yeah." And it's like, "Yes, of course." I say, "Well, hold on. Before I offer that, you sure you want this only $1? Or would you rather have two quarters?" "Oh, I'll take the two quarters." "Two is better." "Well, hold on. You sure you want two quarters? Because I can give you like, you know, a lot more dimes. I can give you pennies." And you kind of keep going down the math. It's like, obviously you're getting a worse trade. So on day zero, you're basically overpaying. So why would you do that?

Well, there's another factor besides NAV, which is like "forward months to cover," which is how long does it take the Bitcoin treasury company to utilize their capital market, capital raising activities to basically have accretive Bitcoin per share in the shares that you bought. So, I bought X number of shares, they're worth today, I'll kind of use this cup as an example. I bought a cup worth of Bitcoin, but it was only filled up a half-full cup on day zero. But over time, you're adding little bits of Bitcoin content over time. That's that Bitcoin yield that you're talking about. And so, we won't get into all the details of how they raise capital, but just assume that they're using lots of mechanisms that make sense to then add Bitcoin to the balance sheet, which then is accretive to those shareholders. So, let's just say that the forward months to cover is a year for one of these companies, and they're trading at 2x NAV. What that means is that it takes a whole year before that cup is now a full Bitcoin worth. So you paid for a half a bit, you paid for a full Bitcoin on day zero, but you only received delivery of a half a Bitcoin of exposure. But a year later, you're finally at a full Bitcoin. So again, people are like, "Well, why would I do that? I could have bought the whole Bitcoin on day zero here. I still have the Bitcoin. You're telling me if I had bought a Bitcoin treasury company, I basically overpaid. It takes a whole year before I finally got my Bitcoin. Doesn't seem like a good trade."

Well, remember how it was accretive this whole time? Well, they don't stop. The whole point is that they're going to keep adding Bitcoin per share. So then if you keep holding those shares and they keep doing their strategy, they keep executing, then over time you might have more than one Bitcoin, maybe two, maybe four, maybe eight over time exposure. Now, nothing's for free, right? That is the risk. I mean, we believe that Bitcoin is the risk-free hurdle rate, right? For the monetary policy of the world. So that's the hurdle rate is Bitcoin. If you're going to overpay for the Bitcoin and it's trading at a premium, there is a risk that that company may trade, the market may decide they're not worth 2x NAV or 5x NAV. They may only be worth 1x NAV in the future. Well, once they get to that point, if you have not filled up your cup with that full Bitcoin, well then you've basically overpaid permanently for that Bitcoin. So maybe it gets to 67, 87, 9. You now have that amount of Bitcoin exposure sort of forever. It's still growing at the same rate as Bitcoin, but you basically kind of overpaid for it temporarily. Now, the trade, the risk premium is if you can get past that forward months to cover, at that point, you're sort of in the money, if you will, as a term. Then every amount of Bitcoin that's being added to your shares going forward is all bonus upside. And so, some of these companies, I say, are at about a year, four months, or like 12 months to cover. Some of these companies are stacking so fast that you're basically way overpaying on day zero. You're paying more than double. You might be paying 5x for the Bitcoin, but they're stacking so fast that you may be covered in like less than two months. And so we're investing along the spectrum continuum of all these different companies with various different NAVs and various different months to cover, various different track records, various different ways for them to kind of take advantage of their public markets.

Wonderful. So yeah, you're taking also a bet on, you know, whether the management team can actually execute on that strategy. And as you mentioned earlier, MicroStrategy over a five-year period, since they've been doing this, about a 33x or so on the stock, at the same time Bitcoin did about a 10x, which is phenomenal over that period. But that additional return comes from the, you know, growth in Bitcoin per share.

I'll give you another analogy just to simplify this. It's like, okay, if you're at the Charlotte airport, you can walk to your gate the whole way, or you might have three or four opportunities where they have these moving sidewalks, right? And you can get on a moving sidewalk and it's moving, you know, for you. You can decide, do you stand and basically go the same rate as the person walking on the ground, or do you also walk? I think of the Bitcoin treasury companies as getting on the moving sidewalks, continuing to walk, because when you get off in the future, you're now that much farther ahead. So the person on the other side is the Bitcoin growth. The es the moving sidewalk is basically the Bitcoin treasury company. You're basically accumulating or compounding your Bitcoin over time in terms of exposure through that mechanism because, you know, what's better than Bitcoin? It's more Bitcoin, right? So, the trade is basically Bitcoin treasury companies purport to execute their strategy so that you have the chance of getting more Bitcoin over time.

Yeah, love that analogy. Um, Warren Buffett, he has a saying, "I'm a better investor because I'm a businessman, and a better businessman because I'm an investor." Your trajectory is a bit different, but we could potentially draw some parallels here. You mentioned earlier, you have 117 issued utility patents, which puts you in like the 99.9 percentile in the US. How do you think your background as an innovation director, an engineer, and even a toy inventor, will support this next big step of yours as a hedge fund manager and investor?

That's a great question. Um, I think basically the space we find ourselves in, which is this frontier with Bitcoin treasury companies, it's so new, it requires the innovator's credo or mindset. Because if you think about what does an innovator do? I say that as an inventor and innovator, we always just take the next best first step. Like, you just have to take the next best first step with the information you have. You have to be willing to pivot with new information. You know, kind of like, you have a good plan, but once your plan meets the battlefield, you have to be willing to pivot. You have to kind of not stay too married to any one idea at any one time because it could be wrong because the landscape's moving so rapidly. And so I think unlike a lot of other things in finance which are much more known, this space has a lot of unknowns, but it also has a lot of unknown unknowns. And if you just look at like what Michael Saylor's done as a pioneer in this whole industry, his whole philosophy has changed over time. His mechanisms have changed over time. And I think he's not done. I think they're going to continue to innovate new methodologies. And then we're seeing these other international companies. People like to say that they're copying him. Well, they're emulating because nothing can be copied directly wholesale in any of these environments because they have to adapt the concept to work within the frameworks that they have, right? Like they don't have an ATM style or an ATM mechanism in Japan. So they had to kind of find their own way around these moving strike warrants. And in the UK, they use these book builds. So they're kind of similar in nature in terms of concept, but they had to innovate themselves locally.

So, one, I think the companies we're investing in are very innovative and they're trying to adapt. And I've talked to some people at the conference a couple weeks ago in New York around how they were being held to some weird scrutiny around the amount of cash they had on their balance sheet. And the more Bitcoin they accrued, the more it hurt them regulatory-wise. But then they realized that they could move to another country and re-domicile there, and all of a sudden it was much more appreciative of what they're doing, and now they can kind of pick up where they left off. So I think you find a lot of the spirit behind the people running these companies, that they are innovative themselves. And so as a fellow innovator, I'm able to kind of see what they're doing, how they're doing it, and also kind of ride along with them and help navigate this wild, wild west of the treasury company. So it's not really the domain of the analyst as much as it is the domain of the innovator.

Okay. And kind of sticking on this idea around innovation, engineering, design. Um, you know, your Google search was "What is money?" It led you to Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the best attempt at perfectly engineered money. So keeping this hat on as an inventor, as an innovation guru, can you talk us through that? What do you see as the most important features of Bitcoin that make it the best money and the best store of value? Like, what's the big creation here? And what are the individual components of that?

Yeah, I think, I mean, there's a lot to say on that topic. That could be a whole podcast by itself. But I think at the fundamental issue, it's the first time society, humanity, civilizations had a perfect money concept in structure, right? With the protocol, the way it's designed, there's absolute scarcity in this, in terms of like, there's only a finite amount. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin ever produced. You know, right now, we're at about 1.8% inflation if you consider new issuance per year. That's half as inflationary as gold. You know, globally, gold's about 1.5%. So, and then the next halving will be down to 1.4% and four years later, it'll be, you know, 1%. So, it gets more and more scarce over time. But, you know, I think at the end of this year, we're going to be at just shy of 95% issuance of the total 21 million coins. By 2030, we'll be at 98%, and then by 2035, so just 10 years from now, we'll be at 99%. And so, once you get past like 98%, you're effectively at 100%. And you know, Bitcoin is a commodity. And so it behaves economically like a commodity, right? There's only a couple factors when you think about a commodity. There's supply and the demand, and then there's price as a result. Well, if the supply is fixed and it's programmatic, and you nobody can change it, they cannot alter that or manipulate it. And if demand follows the typical S-curve demand that happens with any new technology that civilization, society evolves and adopts over time, like we've done with the internet, with computers, with smartphones, and electricity, and any other kind of breakthrough technology. We're so early in that. But as that demand grows through the S-curve, it puts buy-side pressure on a fixed supply, and the only thing that can move is price in the positive direction over time. Now, it'll be very volatile getting there, but the long-term trajectory is price goes up.

But I think, you know, to your question, like what makes it so great is that it is sort of incorruptible. It's decentralized. The more people use it, the more people want to get into it, the stronger the system gets because of all the different nodes and all the different miners. And, you know, I didn't really appreciate this back in the day when I heard about Bitcoin. I thought, like, I kind of scoffed at it. I was like, "Well, that seems weird. Like, what an arbitrary way to kind of create like virtual mining and utilizing all this energy." I just sort of missed the mark. I didn't study it. But really, it's that thermodynamically based creation, that proof of work, that makes it valuable because nobody can make it out of thin air. If it was easy, if everybody can go just collect sand at the beach and call that money, then there would be no value because that sand is like, you know, so ubiquitous. But the amount of Bitcoin that's being produced per day is so low today, and people don't realize it. And these treasury companies are buying up like all of the supply. So we're about to hit a massive supply shock. But, um, yeah, it's great because of all the fundamental parameters of how it's been designed. It's kind of this perfectly engineered concept that, you know, people can't break, and the more we use it, the stronger it gets.

Yeah, that scarcity and proof of work. Are there any features you think Bitcoin is missing that could further augment its use case as either money or even just a store of value?

I don't know if I thought about it enough, but I don't think that's what it's trying to do. That's sort of like asking the question in like the early '90s, "Is there anything that TCP/IP could do better as the base protocol of the internet to add more value?" Well, you didn't need it to do that. I mean, Google can do that. Facebook can do that. You know, all these other companies built trillion-dollar businesses based on the fact that those rails existed, and those rails were like ubiquitous across the whole world, and they connected everybody. So, I think Bitcoin is already doing that job. You know, all these other things can be accomplished with level one, level two types of capabilities built on level zero, which is Bitcoin. So I think it's already doing its job. I think what it has to do is maintain doing its job in a very secure, decentralized way so it can continue to do that for millennia.

Yeah, no, great response there. And yeah, in that case, it's probably best that it's not really tinkered with, right?

Yeah, the extra features would be a bug.

Right, because those are the things that can be themselves obsolete over time because society and users will put different premiums on those feature sets over time. And what might seem like a good deal in the next five years might be completely irrelevant five years after that. But I think the parts that Bitcoin's really hung its hat on is really around security, right? And decentralization.

They make it very anti-fragile and resistant to tinkering with, right? So the fact that nobody, not even China. I mean, even if any nation-state decided to attack it, they don't have enough wherewithal to get to that 51% attack. Or if they did, they would be way better off just investing in Bitcoin, like, versus wasting all that money. Like, it's just the more they try, and you'd see it from a mile away coming, like you would be able to defend against it. You know, the whole network wouldn't let it happen.

Can't join them, beat them. Um, yeah, let's talk about the current state of the Bitcoin treasury market, especially you're, because you're going to be investing there, or you are investing there, with Blackpill Capital. There are investors as well. So just curious to see how you think about this. But because of the leverage, the dilution, and the fast Bitcoin NAV growth of these companies, they're effectively experiencing a four-year traditional Bitcoin cycle in about four months. Do you think these accelerated market cycles in the Bitcoin treasury industry, which is consisting of these significant booms and busts in a relatively short window, are a feature or are they a bug? And how are you thinking about navigating that in terms of your investing?

Yeah, great question. So, I think if you have the right mindset, it's a feature, not a bug. In fact, you know, when I, you say like, "Everybody gets Bitcoin at the price they deserve." Well, I missed 15 years of Bitcoin. I missed 27 doubles. If you put it in terms of that, most people can't even wrap their head around what 27 doubles means. But let me make it very simple. That's a 100 million X appreciation, 100 million times in 15 years. So in the 15 years I was developing 117 patents, I could have also just taken 3% of the bonus I never collected on my last job before joining Invue. And that 3% today would be worth almost a billion dollars if I would have just parked it in Bitcoin. And that's such a small amount. So, 100 million X. Okay. And so I missed that because I got it at the price I deserve. Well, guess what? I and everybody else who are coming online with Bitcoin treasury companies, because of that phenomenon you mentioned, it's almost like a second chance at getting in on the ground floor of Bitcoin. I mean, MicroStrategy's only done five doubles in five years, not 27. They've only done five. So they're early. Metaplanet's about the same realm, but they did it in like 15 months. Smarter Web, four months, same level. So, like you said, they're all getting compressed, but we have a chance to do this.

And, you know, like if you look at Bitcoin, you know, almost 16 years of existence, even though it's super volatile, and people will claim that volatility is the bug, when in fact, I think it's the feature. What we try to have people focus on is just measure the bottoms. If you look at the bottoms, ignore all the volatility. Just measure the bottoms. It's going up exponentially. That's why it's done 27 doubles in 15 and a half years. And so these other companies are doing the exact same thing. They're just, you just follow the bottoms. They're growing exponentially. You just have to kind of have patience because if you measured anywhere along the 16, almost 16 year existence of Bitcoin, no matter how volatile it is, there is not a single, if you had a four-year-wide ruler, there's no point in the future that's lower than it was four years past. Like that's just the nature of it. So sort of like, familiar with like quantum mechanics, like the concept behind Schrödinger's cat. It's like the cat is both dead and alive in the cabinet, but you don't know until you open the door. Well, Bitcoin is both up.

And down and you have no idea, but just don't open the door for four years and you'll be fine. Just open it up later and just ignore it. Like, just, just kind of huddle through it.

And so the Bitcoin treasury companies are kind of doing the same thing, but like you said, in a much more compressed cycle. It is more inherently volatile because of the amplification leverage effect. Um, but yeah, I think it's it's a feature and, you know, how we're going to handle it is, um, our fund construction. You know, partly what we're doing is we're trying to bridge between the Bitcoin world and the TradFi world that largely doesn't know this exists, right? Like I said, most people have no idea these companies, but we're looking at people who are Bitcoin curious, Bitcoin open-minded, but they don't really know what to do. They're looking for somebody to trust to help guide and figure this out for them.

And so, if you look at a typical hedge fund, you know, there's like 40,000 plus hedge funds in the world, but you know, the average hedge fund underperforms the market. It's less than 10%. But people get into them because they, you know, as a hedge or and a way to maybe beat the market. But, you know, if you're getting 15 to 25% net of fees in a hedge fund, you're killing it. You're doing really great. But I tell people, well, if you wanted to beat a hedge fund, you didn't need a hedge fund. Just buy Bitcoin. It's been doing 55% a year for the past four years. In fact, if you want to if you wanted to pay somebody money to manage that for you, um, don't pay a hedge fund. Just, um, ask your buddy to do one single job, pay him $10 a week, and his only job is to say no. And no, what's the question? Can I sell? And he just says no. Well, that'd be the best $10 a week you'd ever spent in your life. And so, four years later, you would have been averaging 55% CAGR, um, and you'd be doing great. And so, you don't need a a hedge fund to beat a hedge fund. Bitcoin can do it already by itself.

So, we're leaning into that fact. So we have about a 35% allocation in Bitcoin itself for our fund. And so what that means is the other 65% are varying levels of maturities of Bitcoin treasury companies, anywhere from, you know, the most established, which is strategy MSTR, to companies like Metaplanet, which are we call, you know, established in the sense that they're they've been around for over a year. Then after that, it falls down very quickly into like, you know, several months old, several weeks old. That's our, uh, emerging. And then we have this final layer we call next or yet to exist. So these are companies that, uh, haven't even existed yet. They could either be a publicly traded company but have not decided to go into their Bitcoin treasury strategy, like, you know, MSTR did 5 years ago, or it could be a company like The Smarter Web, who was a private company. They they were interacting with Bitcoin, but then they decided to either go IPO or do some sort of like reverse merger into a public entity, like through a SPAC or something like that, or it could be a completely brand new company coming online. But, um, we're interacting with those companies, um, doing that in a much more smaller allocation because they're more unproven, because they're they haven't started yet, but that's where you have lots of asymmetrical upside getting very early with these new companies who are basically emulating the same playbook. And as long as structurally they're in the right kind of capital market where this can be absorbed and there's something they're solving for their local investors by, um, having some advantage over, like, let's say, um, either spot Bitcoin or or other, you know, Bitcoin, uh, mechanism, then they're likely, you know, and and if we trust the management team and in kind of the who's who's involved, then they could be a very good, um, allocation for us, but they'll be pretty small.

Um, but yeah, so we're kind of hedging it with Bitcoin itself as a a fairly big weight because even if 100% of that 65% of Bitcoin treasury companies goes to zero, which would be the absolute worst case, like this, let's just say this thesis is completely wrong and it all goes to zero. Well, then the 35% that's Bitcoin is going to keep doing its Bitcoin thing. And if if it keeps doing its Bitcoin thing like it's been doing, then that means that that whole fund, even if all the Bitcoin treasury companies collapse, uh, to zero, Bitcoin itself can basically carry the weight of the fund and still return around 18% a year, which would be better than most hedge funds. Now, you would have been better off just buying Bitcoin than that fund if that's what happens. But, you know, what we're offering to accredited investors is if you want to try to beat Bitcoin's hurdle rate, we have a mechanism and an opportunity to do that. But we're protecting the downside by saying, well, worst case, we're just going to get what Bitcoin gets, but at a reduced allocation of the fund, in which case that final reduction nets out about, you know, 18% return a year. Um, if again, assuming Bitcoin keeps doing its thing at its current rate.

Wow. Yeah. Love what you guys are doing. Um, and it reminds me of, uh, Panta Capital. Um, you were mentioning like, you know, you know, if you miss Bitcoin, Bitcoin treasury companies, this is kind of another opportunity to get in, um, in the beginning. And Panta, um, investment firms to go all in, I think, first on Bitcoin and then maybe crypto a little bit more broadly and have done tremendously, uh, well. So, um, this is it's really exciting, uh, where where you guys are at on this journey.

Um, and, you know, just to, um, to kind of pivot a little bit, I'm curious, uh, so you, you, you put on this investor hat. If you were to put on like, um, and maybe this is still the investor hat, but I'm just wondering if there, um, you know, like what do you think Bitcoin treasury companies can do in any way to improve the playbook? Uh, we started talking a little bit earlier about some of the tools that they have available to them, uh, whether it's, you know, the debt, convertible notes, free cash flow, the ATM, um, and all these fixed income securities to purchase Bitcoin, um, and increase that Bitcoin per share over time. Uh, what would you like to see, if anything, um, what would you like to see them do differently to improve on or add to, uh, the current model?

Yeah, it's a great question. And I think what I'd say to that is, um, a lot of people in the space, the companies themselves will say things like, the operating business doesn't really matter so much. It's all about the Bitcoin accumulation strategy. And, you know, I think even Michael Saylor's talked about, you know, zombie companies and whatnot. I I think I don't think that's the best way to market this for more people because it, it sounds scary when you say, "Oh, there's a zombie company that was like not doing well, but like as a Hail Mary, they got into Bitcoin that saved them." It, it doesn't sound sophisticated. It sounds lucky. And and in fact, what I think all these companies are doing is actually very profoundly smart, but if if you don't talk about it right, I think you may turn off a lot of people. Um, and so I don't think you could really sell somebody like, "Hey, here's a zombie company that was about to collapse, but luckily for Bitcoin, it saved them." I don't think that goes very far. It doesn't sound, well, when does that end? Um, and so I think these companies need to spend a little bit more time talking about their operating business and and the synergies that the Bitcoin treasury strategy augments and complements that, because I feel like it is and it can be synergistic, um, you know, in its best case. And so, you know, a couple of these companies have have publicly stated that their intent because people say will ask like, okay, fine, you're accumulating Bitcoin, it sounds great, but like, what's the endgame? Why? Now, the high-level answer is if it is the best most pristine asset, of course you want it because at the end of the day, all businesses want are ultimate optionality. Like you don't even need to know what you're going to do with it. You just need to have the best possible option so that you can exploit any future opportunity. You just want to be best positioned. But again, that's also kind of an intellectually lazy answer because like you basically say, well, we can do anything with it. Like, who knows? The sky's the limit. That's it's it's a true statement, but it's not a very satisfying statement for an investor. I think a better one would be to say, here's what we plan to do to put that Bitcoin to productive use and actually start to articulate that plan. So, for example, some of them have said, hey, we intend to at a certain point use that Bitcoin as collateral to buy and acquire other operating businesses with positive cash flow. They may be, um, similar businesses so they can kind of aggregate and have shared cost structure and kind of amplify that way. It could be complimentary businesses that kind of help grow an ecosystem. But I think I do think that the best use of their time right now is accumulation because it is a digital gold rush. So you should be laser focused on that job, but part of that job is getting the capital and the investors need to know they need to know the endgame, otherwise they don't want to, um, share the capital. Like, so I think you have to help share the vision of where does this, where does this go? Because I think if you can't do that, you're going to get the people who are the early true believers, but there's like a whole group of people who are like the the late adopters who are just sitting on the sideline because they don't know where that where this leads to and they don't want to be they're not the innovators. I mean, it's just you have the innovators, you have early adopters, then you have early majority, then you have late, you know, like if you want to get to every next group of people in the in the in the realm of any sort of adoption, you need to speak the language that resonates with them. You cannot speak the language that you're in today. I cannot speak the innovator language because only people who can understand that and hear it are innovators. You need to speak the language of the people who are next that and what do they care about? And they I think they care more about the tell me about the productive use of the Bitcoin that you're accumulating. What are you going to do with it?

Yeah. Um, what do you think about these companies? So, also just thinking about, you know, potential ways or, you know, different things they can do here. What do you think about these companies instead of just, you know, raising money the way they traditionally do and turning around and buying Bitcoin? Um, continuing to raise money the way they do, but instead waiting for more opportune times to actually make those Bitcoin purchases. Now, of course, there's some risk because, you know, there's a lag there. The price could run up. But I think history shows that that's not actually the case. And usually, you know, if you're using the ATM, for example, you're typically selling as Bitcoin is moving up and as the underlying stock is, you know, maybe moving up by 2x or 2.5x. And so, does it make the most sense to just turn around and buy the Bitcoin or wait? And I think with, uh, Bitmine Immersion, which is an Ethereum treasury company run by Tom Lee, I think they they don't do this, uh, they don't do this fully, but I think they always have some cash on hand to buy during the dips. Um, and I I saw that about a week or two ago as you know, you know, September was happening and crypto prices were falling. They had cash and they were buying at like the $3,800 price relative to where I think Ethereum is today for $4,500. So, what what's your view on that? Because I don't think any of the Bitcoin treasury companies have, um, adopted that. That's something you'd be interested in seeing as an investor in these companies.

Yeah, I don't know if I have a strong point of view about that. I think it's up to each management team to figure out what makes the most sense for because they have different levers, different tools that they can deploy to to raise capital and they some of them may have better advantages to to wait for the dip or not. But, you know, I think the ATM machine is a flywheel effect in the sense that, you know, you're you're always buying, it's called full price Bitcoin, whether you call it a dip or not. You're buying it at the market price with the capital you have. The question is, how did you get the capital? Well, if you sold your shares or diluted your shares at a higher MNAV, then that's very efficient because, you know, you added, let's say, 10% dilution, but all those shares effectively have the same price on that same day. And if you're trading at like 3 MNAV, you're basically buying full price bit. And if you turn around right then and buy Bitcoin, you bought Bitcoin at full price, but you bought it with, you know, you know, instead of $100,000 of Bitcoin, you bought it with like $33,000 worth of cash effectively because you got that that at a 3x premium. And so it makes sense to keep using that ATM. Now, I think the question maybe goes back to what happens when the ATM is or when the, um, multiple low is it still makes sense to hit the ATM? That's a whole another can of worms. But I do feel like, you know, we're in October now. We're coming up the back half, back quarter of this year. Regardless if you believe in cycle theory or grind up or melt up or, you know, blowoff tops, whatever, I think you have a bigger risk of sitting on the capital versus deploying it because you spend all money to raise the money and then all of a sudden if Bitcoin does go to 200, you're buying half as much. So it's like it's an accumulation game right now. And so I think you really want to deploy as you as you have access to it. Also, it shows conviction to your investors because that's the game. That's what they've hired you to do is to accumulate Bitcoin per share for them, right? And so, I think you have to just find the best most optimal path to do that. I think a lot of times that means you got to buy it at relatively, you know, high points on on the Bitcoin price chart.

Yeah, makes sense. Yeah, especially in October, Moonvember this period, probably don't want to be doing with that. Too much risk. Um, maybe, um, you know, in other periods where the price was chopping a little bit more, um, you know, that that could be a potential option. Um, thought of something else actually I wanted to bring back up. You were saying earlier in terms of how you guys are not just investing in these treasury companies but also have Bitcoin. You're holding Bitcoin and, you know, even if the other investments don't do well, which anticipate they will, you're just using that as like a tail case. The Bitcoin would pretty much, um, still, uh, drive significant returns to the portfolio and it reminded me of this one investor, Monry, that says, you know, heads I win, tails I don't lose much, right? So, I I really like how you guys have structured that and are thinking about that strategy.

And I'll add another layer to that is, you know, we're not going to We're not looking to be selling at like high MNAV peaks, you know, um, because we don't want to be creating taxable events for our investors if we don't need to, because it's by definition, those will be short-term gains. Um, what we we'll do is just not buy it at the high MNAV. So, we'll have our, um, you know, tickers and our portfolio allocation targets, but if at any one time we get new capital coming in each month as an open subscription and we're trying to figure out where we want to deploy that capital for best use, we're going to be buying the ones that are relatively, you know, compressed MNAV at that point in time and we may over-allocate temporarily because it's a good deal and it will under-allocate on some of the other tickers that we want in a bigger position, but they're just they're too hot at the moment. So, instead of selling, it's not so much about buying and selling rapid trading. It's more about actively deploying capital at good better entry points. And if for some reason we're in a month where there aren't any we deem are good entry points, like everything's overheated, that's fine. We have a great place to park it. It's strategy stretch. It's the money market account. So that our default position will be stretch, um, you know, as preservation of capital, but also the chance to earn like a variable yield on top of that. So, you know, I think we even even our cash management position has a a decent chance of of producing, uh, you know, great returns.

Gotcha. Um, if you could invest in only two treasury companies for the next four years, which two would you choose and and why? And if you if you don't feel comfortable disclosing that, that's fine, too. Uh, we can just say you'll invest in Bitcoin generally, but

Two, um, it gets easier if you gave me three, but

What's that? I know. Um, if it was just two, I would I would split it between MSTR and Smarter Web.

Ah, okay. Okay. Interesting. I I feel like most people would say MSTR, that's very likely to be in there, and then maybe Metaplanet, but can you share more about why the Smarter Web bit? So, if you if you said I only had one, I would say Metaplanet. But since you gave me two and only two, not three, I said. So, here's how I look at it. Um, MSTR is very correlated to Bitcoin. They're the biggest. They own almost two-thirds of all the Bitcoin across the fund, as of today, I checked. There's 199, by the way, uh, publicly traded Bitcoin treasury companies in the world. I mean, there's only 160 something, you know, a month and a half ago. So it's it's a lot more, but they're the biggest. They're very correlated to Bitcoin, but they're amplified returns, but they're they're the safest bet in the industry in the Bitcoin treasury companies because of their longevity of doing this, uh, pioneering the system, being in the biggest capital market. So because you gave me two, I put them as the anchor, and then I would pick Smarter Web because I feel like they're so early and they have so much runway, they could be that outsized asymmetrical upside. Those two paired. Now, if you said, "Jeff, you're only allowed one." Well, then I would actually take those two extremes and collapse it to the middle, which is Metaplanet, which I think is the best risk-adjusted return of one company globally. They're 15 months old versus 5 years with MSTR. They're not quite maybe as the same potential as Smarter Web, who started, you know, more recently, has much more runway, but again, Smarter Web is still relatively new. So I feel like Metaplanet's like the, you know, if I had one, it'd be Metaplanet.

Yeah. Full circle there. That's another, I guess, example of, uh, you know, having constraints, uh, you know, add creativity to the situation. Um, so, okay. Um, and as we look to wrap up here, I'm just curious, what are your thoughts on Michael Saylor? Like you said, a lot of people still have not heard about this guy. He's much creating a brand new industry. I I was watching him speak on Wall Street a couple weeks ago and I literally felt like I was like listening and watching like Henry Ford talk to a room about how he was just going to go create this whole new industry that you know was pretty much going to change change the world in a significant way. And I I think arguably with what they're doing at MicroStrategy and Bitcoin, that's going to have a huge impact on the financial structure, um, that exists today. So, yeah, what are what are your thoughts on on Michael Phillip?

Well, I'm obviously a big fan. It's funny. Um, I align with him mentally, spiritually in a lot of ways because, um, I think we have a lot of similarities. So actually, I was going home from work, I don't know, last September about a year ago, listening to one of his podcasts, and I remember just having this thought pop in my head. I was like, "God, the way he talks about this stuff, the way he explains it, it it reminds me of the way I kind of frame these complicated systems and try to tell people about it, his use of metaphors and analogies." And I remember it hit me. I was like, I wonder if we have the same birthday. And so I pulled over, I was driving home, I looked up on Wikipedia and, uh, his birthday is February 3rd and my birthday is February 2nd. So we're both Aquarius. I don't put too much stock in this, but I have seen some interesting connections with people with around, you know, their signs and, um, if you study signs at all, Aquarius, there's not that many Aquarius in the population. There's like a very small percentage of of people are Aquarius, but the Aquarius, um, ethos is one of humanitarianism, actually, and so a lot of creativity behind it, but a lot of it is around doing well for humanity. Um, I've always felt like that was my kind of ethos is trying to be helpful with people, always want to lend a hand, solve problems. I think Michael Saylor is doing that on a very grand level, which is awesome. Maybe he doesn't even realize that that's part of his side, but that is kind of part of his DNA. Um, but yeah, there's a lot of similarities. Like he went to MIT, studied, you know, aeronautical engineering. I went to Stanford, studied, you know, engineering. He's got like, I think 70 patents, you know, I've got like 117 patents. We're both engineers. Neither of us were in in the money game until we became in the money game. You know, there's a lot of, you know, now he's a lot more wealthy than I am. So, um, but there's a lot of similar kind of ethos, but yeah, I think what he's doing is great. I think, um, what he's doing with his like educational foundation and just sort of these big ideas and helping people out. I mean, think about what he's doing with his educational foundation, like providing free level of college-level education to the to the world. That's That's about the most humanitarian thing you could do for this planet.

Yeah. And I like the term engineered.

Engineered. Yeah.

Uh, what will success over the next four years look like for you and Black?

Uh, that's a great question. I mean, obviously, you know, growing the business, getting, um, and and producing and performing for our investors, you know, as that as that goes, we obviously right along with that and we we get our performance fees and, you know, we become profitable, which is great. Um, I think what would be awesome for me and in Blackpill Capital would be to get to a position where we get to do even bigger humanitarian things. Like, you know, you think about what does sovereignty mean? Like just ability to kind of be completely in control of your time and your efforts, your thoughts, your actions. That's what I want for myself. That's what I want my family. That's what I want for this company. It's what I want for anybody I meet, right? And so I think about Blackpill Capital as this economic engine where we can, you know, do good while doing well. Like obviously we want to do well, but I want to do good. Like I have I'm an inventor, right? So, I've already started talking about some concepts like, can we create like some sort of incubator, um, final feeder for like, you know, college, um, sports fundraising? I don't know. Like, can we just say, hey, if you have donors trying to donate money directly to say, say Stanford for, uh, for wrestling, can you instead of do it that way, you partially divert some of it through Blackpill Capital? Maybe we create a different fund where we don't take, you know, performance fees out of it, but that's like our charitable contribution is to take the knowledge that we're learning in the space and then it's very incremental to then say, we'll have a separate fund with a different legal structure that helps with, you know, um, with different, you know, groups and we could just use that know-how and our expertise to then create, you know, value and help amplify, you know, people's donations. Like, so instead of just donating $100,000 to, you know, $10,000 to a fan, could we take half of it and amplify it to double or triple or quadruple before it goes to the end, you know, place? I mean, again, that's not a fully formed thought, but like I can't wait to have all the conversations we're going to have. It's that ultimate optionality idea. Once we're doing well, I want to do good and we'll figure out what that looks like. That's that's the intent.

Wonderful. And what's your I'm curious what's your how how's your your wife's, uh, sort of view on of Bitcoin and these Bitcoin treasury companies? How has her view sort of evolved over time as you know, obviously your passion and involvement has, uh, grown and, you know, she's probably had a chance to learn more about the space, um, over that time.

Yeah, I think you if you asked her, you know, you'd have to ask her to get the full answer. But I think, you know, what she's told me is like, "Listen, Geoff, I don't I still don't fully understand this, but nor do I feel like I need to, and it's not the most important thing in my life. She's got other things that she's focused on." What she said is, "Listen, I trust you. I trust that you've done the work. I trust that you're going to make something great out of this, and it's all going to work out." And so, that's kind of where we're at. Like, I think that's about the most honest answer, which is like she's not a believer. She's not like, "I'm all in." and she's like, "But I am all in on you like me." So, I think that's kind of where we're at. I think over time she'll become a believer just by by seeing results over time. But that's kind of how like everybody, right?

And generally, how are you seeing people sort of take the the black pill, um, and receive that?

I think it's been good. I mean, our biggest challenge is that we're a brand new fund. I mean, you know, like I said, David and I, you know, did not come from the space. Rob, our third partner, did, but not from a a Bitcoin space, right? So, we're kind of like merging that together. I think everybody we talk to are very intrigued and it a lot of times they're surprised like, "I had no idea this is happening. This makes a lot of sense the way you guys are talking about it." But there's a lot of wait and see. I mean, there's a lot of like, "I want to start seeing the performance and tracking it." It's easier for people who know us personally. But then, you know, as you go to the next level of sphere of like influence of like friends of friends or people who are strangers, you know, it, it's, you know, we're asking for a significant amount of money up front. So that's, you know, people aren't really easy to part with their money. They want to trust where it's going. Um, even though I think we come off very well in terms of our our knowledge and our expertise, you know, evolving expertise in the space, the space itself is very new. And so I think a lot of people kind of wait and see. And again, like you said, you know, coming into this podcast, the industry has seen sort of a, you know, kind of a multi-, you know, several week, multi-month, uh, correction, right? And that's enough to make people have some pause. You have to be truly convicted to, you know, do it. In fact, you know, I left my job to do this right when this is all happening. So, obviously, I'm very convicted in it. Um, I believe in the future. Um, but I think a lot of people are still kind of wait and see, you know, so it's up to us to just, uh, put the points on the board and develop that track record and and, you know, I think the the success will breed interest and the interest will breed activation and the whole thing will be its own flywheel effect.

Awesome. Awesome. All right. So, where can people find you to continue to learn more about what you're doing with Blackpill Capital, um, and keep up with your journey?

So, we have our website. It's blackpillap.com. Um, I'm on X. It's Blackpill Cap21. Um, our CIO, David Berglin's also on Blackpill, sorry, on X and he's, uh, Blackpill CIO. Um, we're also all all three of us, the three partners are on LinkedIn. You can find us there. We have a a LinkedIn, um, company page, which is also just type in Blackpill Capital, U, Black, Space, Pill, Space, Capital on LinkedIn, you'll find us. Then you'll also find the three partners. Um, and then we also have a YouTube channel. So it's if you look up Blackpill Capital, um, you'll find us on YouTube.

Wonderful. All right, Jeff, this is, uh, this has been great. Very informative. Love your love your takes and kind of the way you see the world and, um, you know, the the background that you're, you're bringing into this space. Thanks for doing this. I really enjoyed it.

Pleasure, Charles. Thanks for having me and, uh, look forward to seeing what what we do together.

Wonderful. All right, take care.

Take care.