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[Music] hello everyone and welcome back to um our series of web free and fundraising um and we look today we're looking at october numbers um so you're here with me anna from
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outlaw adventures so i've been in crypto vc for over two and a half years and the reason we're doing this is to bring more light on the fundraising themes and trends and
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what's happening with the crypto mark and web free market as it is growing um quite quickly um so let's dive into the october numbers now so
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what happened in october was actually solidifying um the trend that we have been experiencing throughout um the whole um third quarter of the year so
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we saw 76 deals and almost 270 million committed um in cash to multiple deals um this month so as i mentioned it confirms a trend
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there's definitely invest interest at all stages but the most popular stages of seed series and series b um in terms of equity and then we are seeing um some private sales and some public
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sales happening but not as much as we were used to in 2017-18 um also over half of the newly funded companies are within d5 and fintech
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but we're also seeing a ledger infrastructure middleware and governance holding holding up with two to three deals each again continuing a more long-term trend um
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when it comes to the metaverse and data privacy things are still pretty early um with me with the metaverse including nfts gaming music um waste still where we were with d5
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in probably mid to late 2018 so there's definitely a lot of room to grow and then when it comes to data privacy um things are going quite well the the the bigger trends to
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watch there are definitely around um consumer behavior and um and consumer sentiment now about four out of five people will say the boy called a brand
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just because um of a data leak so things are definitely improving although we're not quite seeing this um in the numbers just yet so when it comes to define fintech they are attracting half of the
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deal making um and we are seeing again a range of exchanges payments liquidity infrastructure derivatives and lending which is what we normally see every month what's happening
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now we're seeing less swaps less aggregators um and more infrastructure build which is quite positive as we've seen there's still loads of things to be hashed out with d5 we've been building for about two years
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and we're still um lacking on security but definitely improving on things like composability so um a very very positive trend um
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d5 attracted about 41 deals out of 72 in total this is basically uh 50 50 to 100 increase if we look at q2 and some months in q3 um so
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investors are definitely still placing their bets um in relatively crowded categories um but it's important to know that the pie is growing for everyone so um there's definitely room to grow
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for still for exchanges and payments as well as liquidity providers with automated market making when it comes to rounds
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so the most popular round is actually c it used to be public token sales for a bit in q3 over the summer but now the micro environment is reviving but investors are still
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staying shy of low market cap tokens and new token projects um most will be writing out the bitcoin and ethereum uh run as now a lot of people from 2017
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actually just just above reaching break even um so interest is definitely going to be there in the next couple of months private appetite is growing but we're still not
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quite there as as to 2017 levels um and this is confirmed by actually the most popular instrument was equity this month um so the median race is still sitting on one and a half million which is about
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half of what we've seen in the most active months um like august um and we are very we are getting set up for a very interesting
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first and second quarter of 2021 uh where we where are we expecting a more serious boom of token projects to come given how many seeds are being raised in equity right now
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um so in terms of locations north america did from europe this month um so europe was leading the way in terms of deal making and cash committed for about two or three months um but now north america is back and
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that includes the us and canada with 118 million committed and about 31 deals are being done um so in europe we've done only 17 deals
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at about 85 85 million dollars um the difference is quite big from the past couple of months um but that's expected after unusually active couple of months for europe so um
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it's definitely not something to be worried about and when it comes to our headquarters in the uk we're always tracking the uk so um we managed to capture about 17
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of the european funding um and the uk is sitting at six deals and 15 million um which appears to be actually the trend for the uk because normally the raises are between 10 and 25 million
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and we're doing about six for five to ten deals a month so um still within like the normal range um and what's actually interesting this month is asia is coming back
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in the game with over 18 deals and 41 million dollars committed which is again another very positive sign in the very beginning of a very interesting bull run so definitely
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next couple of quarters will be quite fun to watch and now um we have um efo watkins he's the co-founder of the board for tap my data and as well he's like quite prominent angel
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investor in the space um so we're going to be chatting about um what it is to raise in an environment like today's as a founder what and what it is like
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committing as an angel as well so um if i'm welcome hi thanks for uh thanks for having me yeah no worries well it's it's great to finally have like a founder on the series as well because
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the two perspectives are always quite interesting when you have a founder who's also investing this is basically the the silicon valley holy grail having founders reinvesting back into the um
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into the ecosystem so it's definitely very interesting um but i think we should start off with with your founding experience first i mean you've done quite a bit of work with double before and you've co-founded
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this new great great new startup so what how would you approach angel investing if you're just starting out now as a new founder what what is one advice you'd give to
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you as a first-time founder wow um well i think it's what's really interesting right now which is different than when we um you know launched ovu uh a number of years ago is the range of options that are there
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you know the access to the sort of breadth of opportunity you know um so i think that the the as a founder the you know the the the rules don't change
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you know first of all find a reason to start a company second is you know prove that that reason you know is valid um and third you know um go for the lowest hanging fruit so
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people that you trust or know or you can get connected to that actually i believe and trust in you as an individual and you as a team when all of that is done you know then you're you're ready to sort of
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uh show it and expose it to uh to a wider audience and i think that's a it's an age-old model whether it's in crypto or whether it's in equity you know and uh it it doesn't change
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you know it only changes if you really want to you know d5 has been a slight change in that where actually you can you can make something happen very very quickly and sort of short circuit those uh
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those um those processes but um but that's you know that's a little like catch enlightenment in a bottle really as a founder to try to sort of say hey i'm gonna start something up i'm gonna put something up on uni swap
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or i create some sort of bonding curve i haven't built anything i haven't got any credibility anywhere but suddenly it's going to be you know we're going to have a billion dollars of uh of sort of value sitting on that uh on that startup that is lighting in a
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bottle stuff and certainly wouldn't advise any sort of founder or first-time founder to uh to hope for that hope is not a strategy yeah definitely i mean it's it's a very
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it's very difficult to build a very successful d5 protocol especially when it comes from the community side of things i know you're currently also building a community with your telegram channel so everybody we have the link in the comments below so join
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up my data's channel but i know you're building a community and it is quite difficult and i think that's what most people regardless if they define or not they're actually experiencing um
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so what would you say that could is the like the the main difference between building a community right now and building a community back from back in like 2017 well back in 2017 there wasn't i don't
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think there really was a community there was a community of people who wanted to know how quickly they could get in and out of a token it's it was speculation you know pure speculation and
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um and you know there were elements you know of of people who were who were you know committed to a project but really the community was it was a feed-in frenzy of token
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speculation now that's not a bad thing you know because it because without speculators there's no innovation regardless of whether that's building the railways back in the day or whether that's uh building sort of uh dot-com
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back in the day as well you know you need speculators you need that calculators in order to create innovation um so the communities were very different i think right now what you need to build a community you
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really need a reason for the community to exist which isn't just about the shilling of a token it isn't just about the sort of token price it is you know that people can can sort of um
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like any other type of community something that they can feel part of and actually they see their project grow and they like to be involved in it and participate in it and obviously you know that's that's fostered the rise
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of the the sort of governance model and the dives this whole idea that you can be you know involved in the project and uh and and help have an influence over the over the direction of it so i think that's the big big change that's happened really
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between what was going on in 2017 and what's happening now and i think it's all the better for it yeah definitely i mean the communities you're building now sound a lot more sophisticated as well they're a lot more interesting the
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product they actually use this and not necessarily pure speculators just dumping on the markets and trying and hoping for a very very pop very um good swing trade so that's that's
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very positive to hear about about the market because as we saw we've seen as with the october trend there's right now there's so many c c stage companies raising capital
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that i would assume that the next quarter like q1 q2 they will see quite a few um token raises because i assume like a lot of people it's going for equity
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small range rounds and doing the pre-sales then converting equity to tokens and all that stuff but i want to see what what because you have very very recent experience with this um i want to see
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like what's um what do you actually see as a founder how how easy it is to do this what is the appetite out there for especially on the non-defy side of things
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i think the you know i think what we're seeing is without a doubt the data that you've just shown back set up is the sort of um first of all that's a risk-free approach to a token sort of business which is our
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equity some sort of safe soft sort of structure you know with a view that at some point you know there will be a uh a token event especially you know but not especially if the token is
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inherent and actually an important integral part of the business itself and at some point it makes sense to have a token event you're then going down the you've then got a sort of range of choices from a regulatory perspective
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and i think this drives the the the process as well in 2017 you'd have a white paper you right there you'd launch a token right now you're going to sit down as a founder and you and go what is the
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governance structure look like you know what's the jurisdiction that i want to run it out of you know is it is it robust enough to be self-governing sooner rather than later do i need to have some centralization
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around it before i can migrate to a self-governing sort of model because the community isn't sort of robust enough and if i'm going to do that i need to consult with my lawyers and decide what is the regulatory framework and
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what is the what is the process of getting this sort of token product there so i think what we're what i'm seeing and uh is is a lot of projects like you say that have taken that sort of equity money taking that soft
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safe sort of money and then now doing that exploratory process just to to discover you know what is needed in order to get to where they want to go you know and um i'm not a big fan of
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immediate self-governance on a community i think that's a bit of an abdication of responsibility i think that you know you really need to be think carefully through what that governance of a
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of a project needs to be and then move towards it in a methodical structured approach um and um you know and we've seen you know examples of course in d5 of that of the complete
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opposite which is sort of uh you know immediate governance and then and a few potential issues so i think that's what yeah i agree with you and i think what we're going to have is a is a raft of sort of token events token
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sales happening in queue end of q1 probably q2 actually of next year um when they figured out the the regulatory sort of structure they want for their for their um
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token issuing company yeah definitely dealing with regulators and the legal the legal side of actual token sales is much more robust these days from what i've seen with with our own projects i
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mean your portfolio company as well um is it's it's crazy like so many things can go can go wrong but you do need somebody very experienced to to deal with this because otherwise
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some very expensive mistakes can be made and it'll be difficult to rectify i kind of like that i quite like the defy approach where people just build and don't care about regulators um just
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because that's with they're just coming with a retrospective view but at the same time if you'd have to do like a billion dollar business and run it as a business up until a point where it can be sustained by the community then
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you can't really take that approach it's good for testing and exploration um but if you're going out with with a clear goal instead of more of like a like let's let's test my new innovation
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um kind of approach it's it's a slightly different thing and you do need to figure things out yeah i think it's that sort of you know if you're setting out with a plan in mind that you're executing against it and your your plan is to build a billion
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dollar business then you're not going to just um push it up and uh and allow you yourself but i think some of these projects have taken the the creators i won't say
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founders but the creators of the code by surprise really and uh and then it's like oh actually we've got a tiger by the tail here you know we built something of an enormous value um
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and how is this going to be treated in a year from now or 18 months from now by by a regulator how is this going to be treated how do i do does this project need a bank account at some point you know
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don't forget it's crypto it's d5 hopefully not but you know there's a load of there's a load of questions that you know and like i say if you if you're a founder and the founded team and you
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have a plan and you sort of have the end in mind in terms of what it is that you're trying to to create then you need to go through that method quickly you know um and and the great thing about it is that there are so many
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we've learned so much over the last three four years or certainly last three years it's the the amount of advice out there you know if you want advice there's plenty of advice if you want advisors there are a load of advisors that have you know
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got the scars and been through this sort of process and from a legal position from a tax position you know it's not difficult to get access to some uh some sort of quality sort of uh knowledge so i think it's a
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lot easier right now for founders to navigate that um complexity than than it was back in 2017 when everybody was was just trying to figure what the hell you know was going on
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yeah definitely i totally agree with you um especially with base camp now we're seeing some like more and more people signing up as mentors and being up for this and they they can actually provide very
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tailored advice and they they do have skin in the game so it's not an advice that's like very very academic it's just they've been dead on that now they've made the mistakes now they they come back and then
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they fix things and they try they're actually trying to help new founders avoid these mistakes um so it's definitely a very positive thing to see the community as i'm graduating as a whole like and
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maturing as a whole it's it's quite nice um both on the invest i'm seeing this on the investors side as well and i'm seeing it's on the mental side which is quite quite good to help new founders because most of people most of the
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people entering crypto right now are first-time founders so definitely that that it's definitely great and then i wanted to ask you because you mentioned you're actually andrew investing as well so
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what what's your advice for people aspiring to be angel investors or perhaps institutional investors looking into um crypto like private data privacy data economy or d file like basically
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doubling with the centralized stack in any in any way what's what's your advice about about not just sourcing the projects but evaluating the teams and um yeah well
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i think that you invest in you know i did angel invest in pre-crypto and i've been you know sort of uh i'm doing a little bit in into crypto it comes to the same thing really team
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um idea um and you're sort of investing really you're getting involved pre sometimes the minimum viable product you sort of uh you know you really are you know the the the key point you're trying to do when
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you're sort of starting something up or helping companies start up through some angel money is to get there before anyone else to get there before so you're back in the team you're back in the idea but most of the team so um for me what i what i'd sort of
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look for would be one some not necessary experience but the ability of the founder of that company to attract experience they don't need to be experienced but they need to be able that's they need to
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be able to tell a story whether that story is told by a telegram whether that story is told via you know discord or reddit the story has to be told and then somebody has to believe it
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you know and it's uh you know starting a company it's just a belief system you know you you tell a story that something you know and it's totally irrational because the chances of you succeeding are so small on a percentage-wise it's so it's a
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rational belief in someone else so you need as a founder to instill a rational belief in someone else that what you're going to do is going to be successful and then you think if you can fire one
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person up and that person has adds value to your project and then they then fire one other person up that adds value to your project you can see then there's some momentum there that actually and that story
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starts to have life you know you can buy experience you can buy resource you can purchase all of the other bits but you can't purchase the belief in a story that has to come you know from from from
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the the sort of essence of that sort of founding team so that's what i what i look for and i look for that in anyone really is that sort of ability to tell a story that is totally irrational but believable
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yeah that's definitely it's it's a skill definitely um like being an early stage founder trying to figure out everything from hiring to actually the positioning of the business to the go-to-market strategies
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it's a lot to do for one or two people most of the time um so i always always admire people who can actually do this from the get-go it's definitely true but yeah we're also investing in a very early stage and i
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can see like backing teams is especially when you're trying to enter like the at the south stage where you have some product but there's very early validation but there's not that it's
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it's not clear product market fit it's definitely the team's uh most important so when you know when when went up my data started off this idea that we could sort of monetize your personal data that you should own it yeah you should do something you know
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and it's it's your data so you should be able to ask anybody to told you your data to either get rid of it it's you know delete it send it to you because it's yours or license it
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you know you can license it under an agreement and pay pay me for it that was really early when we started that you know a few years ago and uh you know but we built that sort of built the product built it up and
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uh and and gaining momentum and i think right now plug in that sort of model into web3 into um and enabling and and then leveraging other work that's been done
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with the likes of ocean you know and with the likes streamer and so on and look to see these decentralized sort of web 3 marketplaces so you've got this ability to
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as i say own your data um and then you've got mechanisms to monetize it so i think that the the key you know going i'm raising that in regards of you know when you're found in something right now on you know when you're a
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founding team there are communities that you can plug into there are that will actually build and enhance your offering you know and that's what to me that's what's exciting about web3 right now is that you can
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you know we can reach out to um we can reach out to trent and his team at sort of ocean you know we can reach out to the guys that sort of scream and we them pretty immediately really um and then our token event is going to be on
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balancers so we can talk to fernando and the tablet balance and create you know a price discovery mechanism for a public sale that's really exciting which we couldn't have done back in 2017 it was a very
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first come first served you know but to to launch a public sale with a price discovery mechanism through a credible audited company like balance i think that's really exciting and that opportunity is open to every founder
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you know this isn't exciting about it as well it isn't who you know these products exist so if you're a founder and you want to plug into these things they're there you know and um you know and that's the that's
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that to me is is why i'm very excited and bullish about the space yeah definitely you no longer pay these um crazy token listing prices as well like you you create a price mechanism the
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community is much better off with the with them as well um and it's a lot of a lot as you said with governance a lot is driven by the community even though the founders are driving the project
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um you are still listening to the community the community still ha is weighing in very heavily um and over time i guess you will be like it will be taken over by community but it just needs a scale for this
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rather than just doing this from the get-go so yeah i think it's yeah it's that defining what uh what what we mean by governance you know and it's uh and there's a lot of you know i'm thinking needs to go into
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that really [Music] and then you've got to prepare your business ready for governance yeah that's right to accept it actually be prepared to accept it not some fake governance where you need
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like 20 million of tokens in order to to have any meaningful vote you know i don't see that as as real governance yeah absolutely um yeah well thank thanks for chatting today um as you
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mentioned you have some great things coming from tap my data so uh we'll definitely be uh following you and your journey because it's very exciting
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um and yeah so thanks thanks for this um as you as we can see like the data confirmed what people on the ground are actually seeing um it's investors are still betting on teams very early on
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people are still going for equity and then we we are definitely expecting a very um interesting first and second port of 2021 and when it comes to to being
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to being a good founder and building a community is it's much but you're much better position as a first time founder now than it used to be in 2017 it's much less backed up bad actors much
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much more possibilities for good actors to try so um definitely some some great things so thank you fun that was a that was an amazing chat um yeah so link to your telegram and um our
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um other social channels down in the comments so please follow us um and track the progress both with
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outlier and tap my data thank you [Music] you
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