 So what was your best investment in the crypto space so far, and why? Bitcoin by far, but I was also, again, fortunate to be early in Ethereum and Finance and Quantum and Block 1. Every blockchain is basically a vending machine that requires a token for a service. What's up, everyone? I'm your host Giovanni. Today I'm joined by Matthew Roszak, venture capitalist and technology entrepreneur. How are you doing, Matthew? Hey, Giovanni. Good to meet you. Thanks for having me. Cool. So talking about investing, you are known for having sponsored over 40 dinners in the crypto space, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in steaks and wine. Was that investment worth it? Well, I'm a foodie, so I love going to new restaurants, trying new food in whatever city I'm in. And so in the early days of crypto, we would go to conferences. That's where everybody hung out. And usually these conferences, they were the speakers that were on stage were the same people that were in the audience. So they were very small conferences. It was like a lot of the same people. And then we went out for dinner. And the dinners were pretty cool because, again, you got to learn. You built this network and you're like, how does Bitcoin work? Tell me what Bitcoin means to you and your words. And you start building this kind of mental model on how to look at things. But these dinners were pretty interesting in terms of who showed up. The first dinner was in 2013. The first dinner that I had was, I had CZ at it, Charlie Lee from Bitcoin, Jesse from Kraken, Bobby Lee from BTC China, Brock Pierce, just so many people back then that a lot of us had this compass in our heads that this is the right place, the right time, the right room to be in. And we're still figuring it out. Was it in San Francisco? It was all over. So San Francisco, Berlin, Las Vegas, Amsterdam, Miami, New York, Chicago. The Berlin one was interesting because it was the conference after Miami. And in Miami was the conference where Vitalik came out with the white paper. This was in 2015. He came out with the white paper. So he was walking around the conference with these photocopied papers. Everybody had Ethereum shirts. Everybody was like, you know, what's going on? And then like a week or two later in Berlin, I had a dinner. And there was like 20 people that showed up at the dinner. And then I think the Ethereum guy has heard about it. And like another 30 people showed up. And if you come to one of my dinners, you're always going to be fed. And it was going to be invited. So I begged the restaurant to make room and accommodate for Ali's early Ethereum enthusiasts. But again, it was fortuitous and fortunate because I was like, well, what's this Ethereum thing? And I got to learn about it and be kind of exposed to that early on. And so, so again, the dinners were a hack for me. It was a life hack to learn more to network war. And to really understand how this industry lived and breathed and worked and kind of developing again, those mental models on where this is all going. So it was, and there were a lot of fun too. So what was your best investment in the crypto space so far? And why? Great question. I mean, again, I was fortunate to be early in this space. And so Bitcoin certainly has been an amazing asset. And we all know it's been the best performing asset over the last 10 years. And so Bitcoin by far, but I was also, again, fortunate to be early in Ethereum and Binance and Quantum and Block One and a lot of these things. Not that at that moment, mind you, I thought that, oh, this is going to be the Ethereum killer or this is going to be the next XYZ. It was the people, the relationship, the friendship at that point and trying to help somebody build something was the premise at the time. And certainly looking back on it, there's a lot of missed opportunities as well that were out there because back in the 16, 17, 18 time frame, there was just a lot of deals. And a lot of deals were done quickly and almost defied venture instincts, you know, where one of the deals I invested in, they didn't even have a pitch deck. And it was literally the first time in my life I invested into a company without a pitch deck. Not that the pitch deck is everything, but I didn't even have that. And then, you know, it gets to a point where people are trying to do and close deals, not in weeks and months, but in hours and days. And that was also unique and kind of unsettling. And then it kind of turned normal, which was, it's kind of strange. And now in the markets, we've gone through a crypto winter, we've kind of gone through some machinations in the space. And, you know, the economic dynamics of where we all are sitting today. I think a lot of that diligence, a lot of those things to better align projects and teams and investors is improving, getting healthier. But back in the day, that was kind of surreal. But today I spent all my time, energy and money building and investing in block. Yeah, actually I wanted to ask you right now, what kind of projects are in your radar? Like in terms of projects your company would like to invest into? If you had to mention specific use cases of blockchain? Sure, talking about from the investment side and not the block building side. Now, yeah, I'm talking about the investment side. So I do like DeFi a lot and seeing how, I mean, fundamentally, you know, we all work hard for our money and money should now work hard for us. So if you have value, I think where DeFi will go is basically put your value, your assets on a treadmill. And that treadmill will optimize and get the best return for that moment in time. So having algorithms to say, well, you should lend it out. You should invest it in this and have software smarts do that for you versus, you know, listening to a human or some, you know, research report from somebody that's biased or what have you but having algorithms to really manage your money. And I think the Lego grips of DeFi, you know, lending investing and all the kind of fractional, tokenized ownership of things and being able to do that on a liquid basis, on a smart basis where, again, your money is always on a treadmill. You know, you work hard for your money. Your money should work hard for you. In a recent presentation, you said that mining is a street fight. It is about brute force. So what exactly do you mean by saying that mining is equivalent to brute force? And how do you plan or you think it can be improved? Well, I don't think it's a brute force relative to, you know, trying to crack Shaw 256, but it's the reality is mining has gotten very sophisticated. It is very difficult to be a hobbyist miner today, especially at the Bitcoin level. And so the sophistication is of consequence. People back in the day were saying, you know, the best way to figure out if you're making money is to look at your power bill and look at your Bitcoin balance and see if you're making money. Those days are long gone. A lot of these industrial miners have real challenges in their business between sourcing miners, getting capital from miners. That's a very capital intensive business and a treadmill that you need to stay on for a while. And so, you know, the capital to be a miner, the devices, and then the management to effectively manage that mining farm. It's hard to do that with homegrown software. Back in the day, early days of mining, people would just say, you know, Giovanni stand in the middle of this facility. If you see a red light call me, you know, it was like that. And so it's gotten very sophisticated in terms of procurement, financing, operations. And then there's the whole treasury management piece to say, well, I got the money. I got the miners. I burnished a Bitcoin. Now what do I do with it? OTC traded London, you know, custody it, and the whole financial services around mining have gotten more sophisticated as well. So it is a much more brutal business. It's gotten to a point where you need to be more sophisticated and how you operate as a miner. So I would just want to mention one of the core mission that the block has, which is creating a world where there are multiple blockchains, multiple tokens, and all of them are interacting with each other. I think the right term would be interoperability. So why do you think the world needs multiple blockchain and multiple tokens? I would love for there just to be one blockchain, one protocol, and how the TCPIP get birthed from this sector. I think the reality is there will be multiple blockchains and different railroads that have to integrate. We're not starting with interoperability. We're understanding that there's going to be this internet of blockchains, this forest of chains. And so for a user or developer, et cetera, you need to kind of simplify that. So another way to look at it, Giovanni, is every blockchain is basically a vending machine that requires a token for a service. If I want storage, I go to Filecoin. To get the Filecoin service, I need to deposit a token to get that service. And so these vending machines, for whether it's DeFi and you're looking at lending, investing, and yield, and all these other legal blocks of DeFi, you need to create a provisioning engine that will determine what to do. Same thing with Web 3 and kind of the new internet, where you're looking at storage and access database, compute, all these different things that compose what AWS is today, the crypto industry is building. And it's a lot bigger opportunity because you're just assembling and provisioning resources. And so Block's thesis is to build that provisioning engine for all these different vending machines that need that service. And one of the first use cases where targeting is Web 3, where it's not Amazon Web Services, it's decentralized Web Services. So if I need a decentralized Web Server, I'll just say I need compute and storage. Well, for compute, am I going to go to Gollum for storage? Am I going to go to Ciel, Filecoin, Gnaro, Storage, what have you? As a developer or as a machine, because at some point, machines are going to be provisioning this. I don't want to go through all those different protocols and determine which one. I want an engine, a smart engine that will say provision compute for me based on these parameters of security, cost, and time, or whatever else I program in there and say Go. That's a lot better experience against this forest of blockchains that are out there. And so we're trying to simplify that. And what Amazon did for the internet 20 years ago, and they did that out of just a need for themselves, because they didn't find the experience very good in terms of scaling their data centers. And they did that in the old-fashioned way. We have to lease space, we have to buy servers, we have to connect it, we have to manage it, etc. The Amazon of the future is going to be software where Amazon is the biggest. They're three times bigger than Google, Azure, and IBM's public cloud. But then look at all the other compute resources or storage resources that are out there in the world, and that's a bigger provisioning game. It's not a real estate game or a procurement of Dell servers. It is a provisioning game to say, how do I incentivize, you know, if I'm FilePoint C, etc., how do I incentivize people to give me some of their storage or some of their compute? And then to assemble all that, because I don't only need storage, I also need storage compute and all these other things, Block wants to be the assembly piece for that. And so that provisioning and the smarts to provision is very hard, but it's also going to be very useful and will help this industry scale. It's what AWS did. In many ways, it's what Twilio did for a lot of the kind of notifications in the kind of internet experience. So there's a lot of those commonalities from the early internet that we saw to the early kind of blockchain space that we're currently in. Can you maybe just shortly simplify a little bit this analogy that you made with Amazon? Because that sounded interesting, but I'm not sure I quite understand it. You talked about an Amazon of the future. So how do you see this Amazon of the future and how that Amazon of the future is related to the offer that Block offers? So I view the Amazon of the future to be Block. That's where I think what, again, Amazon did for the internet and getting a developer to literally with AWS. I'm talking about Amazon Web Services, not the books and grocery marketplace. But Amazon Web Services, 20 years ago, it was a huge friction and huge pain to provision your own and host your own servers and configure your servers. And all that complexity was compressed to say, well, just get that service in the cloud by Amazon. And Amazon will provide you all the redundancy, all the provisioning of those services on a monthly basis. And so they made this complex thing to say, Giovanni, let's build this software. Geez, we need to have a DevOps person that's going to manage the servers and host this and kind of figure out what the database has got to be and all these complexities and now it's basically a service. And so they did a good job of compressing all that complexity into one service on one platform. Block sees the same thing where there's all this complexity and blockchain. And to get all that put together, it's really hard. Even for the best developers, it's really difficult in this space. And there's a lot of friction there unnecessarily. And so we want to take a lot of those and whether, and you can do this and compose these Lego blocks in a certain way, whether it's for DeFi or Web 3 or other areas in crypto, we're focused on Web 3, which basically means Amazon Web Services. And so being able to provide that one service, many networks, is very powerful and is even more powerful in crypto because of the way in which it all works. But that's the vision for what we're trying to build towards. That was Venture Capitalist Matthew Roszak. I'm Giovanni, your host. If you enjoyed the interview, smash the like button and subscribe.