 great to have you here. Thank you so much, thank you for having me. This is no pressure, but I think this is the biggest stage and it's pretty full and I think a lot of people are really excited to hear about this topic and you. Why don't we start with a quick overview of what you've done in your life because I love your career, right? You're now the managing partner of Consensus Ventures where you've been for how long now? Almost gonna be two years. Coming to two years, so honeymoon phase is coming to an end, hopefully it's still working out. And before that, you were managing Eric Schmidt's family office for about 15 years, is that right? No, almost around two and for that World Bank and ISC for the longest, yeah. Right, so you've really been at the forefront of seeing how capital can get societal change into motion, right? And I'm really dying to hear kind of what brought you to Consensus and what is, why are you there and what is your ambition? Yeah, I think first of all, I'm super excited that even today the rooms are full for blockchain and crypto. The newspaper keeps on saying the trend is changing but it's good to see, not exactly. I think going to a question, first of all, technology. Even when I was working at Eric's office, I started really seeing what is a decentralized ledger because we were investing a lot into like next generation technology like drones and automation, a lot of SaaS things with AI, deep AI driven things. And I started looking at how is the data and how is the decentralized databases, storage and fork computing is going to affect everything which we are investing in today. Is it going to change how my return's going to come 10 years down the road? Is it like some of the companies have to upgrade? So the conversations initially started with our current portfolio companies, do they need to start experimenting with Ethereum distributed ledger? And during the same time, I was very fortunate to actually meet Joe and sit next to him at one of the next generation technology leader conference and three hours of conversation with him and two and a half months of talking to him every other week. I was like, this is the place where I need to make a jump. My current role at that time wasn't really ready to do a lot of focus in the space. And I'm like, if I don't do it now, I would be either completely an outsider or too late to follow. Right, and as a more of a traditional VC, we've been around for 23 years backing some of the category defining companies of this stage of technology and the disruption cycle. But we're very new to the blockchain side of things. We haven't announced this but we have actually done our first investment in this space and we're super excited to get in there. But I'd love to know what is your perspective, right? We have 10 year funds, so we need to show our LPs returns within those 10 years, right? What is your perspective, time cycles? Yeah, so I think the risk, liquidity, and the return put for profiles are very, very different. So our fund is only four years old. So not old, sorry. So it's four year long plus two year of liquidation. So the reason is, if you are investing in tokens, you have liquidity right there. If you are investing in equity, that is still mapped to tokens, any type of tokens. It could be utility, it could be security. And even if they don't do tokens at all, and it's just the equity, you always want to keep an option if you want to have the liquidity by the CDC, CDC Round, because it's a pre-seed stage fund, you may not gonna do follow-up for too long, right? And we do want all our companies to be in that situation. Right, right. So it's a four year fund. Our risk is, you're good. That's gonna fall. Yeah. Our risk is primarily focused on how is, like the other layer of volatility is cryptocurrency, because all the tokens have underlining your C20, which is on Ether or Bitcoin. So apart from Fiat, you always have to see how the markets are doing like nowadays, and how is that affecting? So for an example, for a couple of my portfolio companies, I was sitting at like really good X, really good returns as of January or February, and without doing anything or like any company movement or management movement, like the typical things which could change the valuation of an equity round in a company, things change just because of crypto prices. Right, and let's talk about that elephant in the room, right? We've seen a tremendous swing of capital shifting in and out of that market, pretty much overnight one could say for a couple of nights at least. For a while it was just so difficult to follow the whole ICO game night, like day after day. And one of the things that we discussed backstage was how have these shifts changed your thesis on investing? And also let's talk about the founders later on as well. So our thesis has been like completely changing, like I would say three or four times now, not the basic principle of investing, like the type of people we are investing in or the sectors like a lot of infrastructure, security, et cetera, but the method of investing. For an example, like initially when we got in, there was a huge token uprising happening when I would say like 2017, I'm talking about like January to like December, like the whole year was all about, let's do like 30 token sales and this and that. Even at that point we created a very customized term sheet to say let's go through a balance of equity and tokens because what is long-term? Let's try to get a long-term value system into even the token sale. What is long-term in blockchain? So it may not be- It's actually a serious question. It may not, your long-term could be 50 or 60. For our long-term if you take an example, people would buy tokens and how long are they gonna keep it, so let's at least ask them to put a one year lock-in period to give founders the space to actually build the product. Have some things out and then judge whether you should hold the token so you don't want to hold the tokens. That's how we started early last year. Then we started seeing and also regulations played a big role because consensus has been at the forefront of working with SECs and the lawyers and everyone to say that the utility token is probably not gonna be a long-term thing for investors or investors shouldn't like very early on. So we then said let's not do utility tokens, let's start looking into non-fungible tokens, let's look at security token, et cetera. And then the duration changes for them because there is no pump and dump you can really do with them, right? Thank God. So- How much pumping and dumping has there been actually? I think I got in, even like you were saying, like we were the, I probably got one of the early people together and I did not enjoy the pump and dump for my own portfolio. No, right? First of all, of course I have to give like a big shout out, our legal team was very strong and never let us do anything like that. But I know so many funds in 2016 and 17 who turned around like returns unheard of in the VC world, I would say double digits, like very serious 30 plus double digits just because of pump and dump. Now, SEC is going back to tons of those companies and asking them to return money to the investor. So I'm not sure how is that gonna affect those returns overall, but we haven't sold a single token from our whole portfolio. And how many companies is that? Overall from the VC side, we have around 12 companies, we have officially announced, but overall we have around 18 portfolio companies and we also have an accelerator program which is within the VC to get like very early stage in and then we do big follow-ons in them. So another 16 from there. Right, you guys have had I think a fascinating approach to really enabling thousands of people to work on exciting projects, right? And this next phase I think in terms of the maturity of the market, what are you most excited about? What can we expect in the next two years? I think we're gonna expect a lot of applications especially in the fintech side to start hitting the mainnet where it's like people, anybody can use it without actually knowing it's on blockchain. So for me, the mass adoption is gonna come and I can still use my Visa card and everything happens on the back end of it's converting into Ether, paying for the gas price or like getting into currency for me to buy something. I have no idea, I don't have to create a wallet, I don't have to like go through the whole process and it still gives me the data security, the privacy and the ownership of data as an infrastructure layer without me going through difficult, difficult steps. Right. Yeah, good. And when it comes to, you know, we talked a little bit about the themes and what's happening but the profile of the founders, I feel has been changing as well, certainly from what I see, what do you see? In terms of who's going into it? Founders of concern, oh. Coming into the building companies. Oh my God. When I initially started and coming from traditional investment background, you are used to people coming and they start like, I have, I like worked at Google or Uber for these many number of years, this is what I was working on, now this is doing and this is my co-founder, the serial entrepreneur or VC or something. Now you have like 20, 21, 18 year old kids coming and they're really good with technology, they really understand but they have never really built anything, right? So, but you start with them because you know that they know what they're building and let's try to get some sort of an extra help to see where they're gonna go. And then slowly I started seeing a lot of traders coming in and building fintech. So I realized that, okay, so fintech is gonna be a low-hanging fruit or supply chain, et cetera, where the consultants were coming, realizing the gap and building products but they were nothing like a serial entrepreneur or somebody coming with a domain expertise with respect to technology and then putting it in. But now in last eight months to nine months, I think it's amazing you get to cherry pick because you have entrepreneurs working with lots of experience with already a lot of VCs talking to them coming and saying, this is the product, this is the UX UI, this is the adoption plan, this is the marketing plan, this is how the product gonna go from one phase to another, which I think in one and a half year I really, really missed hearing those decks. I was like, I don't want white paper anymore. Right, yeah, exactly. I mean, in our world, we see about 2,000 to 3,000 companies each year and that only generates about 1% conversion to an actual investment. What does that look like where you are and what are the numbers, deal flow, conversion and all this stuff? So I think first of all, you guys do really big deals on the follow-on side or series A beyond. We do precedency as much as I understand. So we do precedency, so we do anywhere between 250K to million as our sweet spot, 500K is usually where we are. So earlier it was if the entrepreneur has experience, they know the tech part, especially coming from consensus where we can really help them with deep tech. We are like, if we feel like this person can actually build the product and get customers, let's go with it. So our conversion was still, I would say, three to percent to five percent. Okay, that's fine. I would say that, but the deal flow is really crazy because consensus is present in 33 countries, had so many people around the world and anybody who would ever think they're building on Ethereum consensus just became that one place, let's just go and talk. Right, and one of the things that really excited me about this chat in particular was your view on the geographic split of innovation that we're coming into. We've had the value in many ways kind of dominating where innovation was happening that we've in Europe and Asia started to develop our own hubs, but this is really a fundamental change in terms of where value is being built. Can we talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I think individually I learned that there is so much talent just outside the valley, like it's just not there because I spent a lot of my years in Africa and the Middle East with the World Bank and IFC doing investments in technology out there, especially in fintech and all. And then with from the family office, there was a lot going on in Israel and Europe which we were paying attention to. And when I come to blockchain, it's just completely, completely like shock me down because most of the companies, most of the great ideas which I was like going crazy about was like literally there was nothing which was coming out of SF. We had a company from Chile, we have a company from Australia, we have a company in Asia, we have two companies in India, we have lots of them in New York. There's just finally like the complete portfolio, there's like four or five companies out of SF. And the reason is this is one technology where Silicon Valley is still trying to understand, still trying to get on board and they're still behind. Right, and one thing that I've noticed when reading pitch decks and talking to entrepreneurs is that is how decentralized even the companies are in terms of where the teams are? Like I don't think I've met many companies in this space where people sit together in like an old school class, I don't know, traditional office. What does it look like in your portfolio and how is this affecting work culture? So like, let's start from our team. We have three people in New York, two in SF, one person in London, one person in Berlin and then one in Singapore. Like we are still- And one person in a plane constantly. That's me. So I think it's just the deals are mostly coming from outside US or they end up in New York or SF only when early investment is done abroad. So like if you wanna go early in this particular technology, you just cannot really sit in your office in SF and like, oh, whenever people wanna raise money, they will just come here. It's just not happening. Asia started very, very big and very strong in blockchain technology. And also like hiring engineers are cheap there and blockchain tech is very, very deep. Already they have classes in it, they have university courses in it. Two universities in China have undergrad degrees in it. So the talent is really big out there. And if you are an engineer and if you have access to Reddit and Quora, that's all you need for blockchain along with GitHub. Like to be a blockchain engineer to start, contribute and create your company. Do you guys have requirements in terms of where you need the companies to be? Like for example, for us, we started off as a Nordic fund and then we said we'll invest into Nordic entrepreneurs. So we took, we invested into two Swedish entrepreneurs to build this significant company in Russia called Avito. And we still called it, it's a Russian market, Russian company, but it was registered in Sweden, right? What is, do you have any requirements like that? Or what is your view here? Cause you are taking a political risk, right, as well. Yeah, I mean, if you're investing in a company in Australia, it's not that much of a political risk. If you're doing it in Egypt, probably. But the thing is it's not infrastructure companies, right? So if there is some political mess, the people are so smart that they can just literally move to Berlin and then start building it from there. And most of them ultimately end up registering out of Berlin, London or US anyways, because of technology or like some of the co-founders or something. So we are very open in investing. Of course we haven't invested anything which is coming out of Sudan, let's say, or something like that, then political risk become big. But everything which we have invested have all over geography. Right, yeah. And going back to the whole diversification of value creation, right? Or distribution, rather, distribution of value creation. Where do you see, what is the societal impact that you see coming? I know you're particularly excited about this part. Impact for the founders or just the whole diversity of the currency? Both. Both. I would just say that for me personally, I feel that all the speculation with this currency price is going down is so good for the technology because suddenly like 95% of those fluffy coins, dock coins, and I don't know, poop coins, somebody actually did pitch me idea of a poop coin by the way. What? Poop coin. Basically dogs poop. And then you have an IoT device which can tell how good or bad your dog's poop is and if the dog has to be taken to the hospital. I'm like, why do you need a coin for that? First of all, maybe there's a market that maybe pet owners who wants to do it but why do you need an ICO for that? Okay, okay, but you might be a little bit biased towards, you know, Ether, right? Yes, a little bit. What other blockchains are you looking at? Who's keeping you at the edge of your chair? I would say there are, so let's be honest, like our founder of Consensus, our co-founder of Ethereum, so not a little bit biased, we are very much, we are a big supporter and maximalist about Ether. But Ethereum is the only blockchain so far which has such the big developer community supporting it. Ethereum has been the only one which has so many applications running or about to hit the main net. That doesn't mean there are other competitive blockchains not there. It should be there because there is always a way where you can actually maximize either the decentralized or privacy or something like Ripple is doing on the financial side, there's differenties coming up. So there are a lot of things which we are looking to but I won't say we are on the edge or we are at least when I'm looking at companies who are coming and building in any competition because there is just not enough developers to actually put products out on it for the adoption but going three years, five years in blockchain space I think there is going to be a lot of them, there's going to be very specialized one for different, different sectors and interoperability will be big. And is, I mean, to that extent, is it a winner-take-soul, right? We're talking about, we're talking about distribution but at the same time it kind of feels like value and power is building around a couple of epicenters, right? Where Ethereum is arguably one of those. How do you feel about that? I think Ethereum is definitely right now and I do think for next two years it will continue to be one of the biggest dominant blockchain and apps but you know this technology is moving so fast. Whomserver is going to work out the next biggest scalability solution without compromising with any of the blockchain for ethics, traceability, transparency or accountability, decentralized privacy. That's going to be the next biggest dominant factor. Right, so. And you know the final topic I'd like to discuss a little bit is on the ethics side of things. You know I came into technology because I wanted to affect change. I wanted to make the world a better place hopefully over the longer term and I feel as though, you know, your area certainly has a perspective on the ethics but what is the legacy you'd like to leave behind in terms of ethics and where technology is? I think we, this is a topic which everyone in the space at least when they started as you can say a cryptonarchist or somebody wanted to change the world of technology always is worried about because I personally feel everything which a technology can do can be used by humans in a good way or a bad way. So ethics on AI is a very big thing. Like where are you taking your data who's reading that data and how you can use it. Right, similarly like ethics for crypto has been on hacking or using the cross-border transaction which can help the remittance to come in 30 seconds and pay someone's food can also be used for terrorism. So where do you take those ethics and where do you draw line? I really honestly don't have an answer for it. I do believe that technology like blockchain is used for like liquid democracy where you have transparency by the government something which I'm super passionate about where I can actually ask my government and say, what is your balance sheet? You know, you're taking taxes from me I'm a very high taxpayer. Like where is your balance sheet? Do you say that these many number of policies and subsidies are given to these many people? How many of them really claimed? And where did the money go? So I think providing the technology is something which we want to be part of now where the governments actually take it and use it or somebody figure out how to use the corrupted model of it is not really in your hand. Right, and if we're sitting here three to five years from now what area of the world do you think will have adopted liquid democracy most at that point in time? What should we be expecting? I really wish India but I'm not very sure being my home country. I think a lot of it is gonna be driven by Europe. I have a feeling, yeah. I think Europe is gonna be very big with respect to using technology at the government level and also having a very different type of movement by the people which is way more transparent and very digitized. And yeah, I think Europe is gonna be a front runner for that. Oh, we certainly have a need for it. Let's put it that way. I have one question for you before we run out of time completely, Martha. Oh, yeah, okay. So you just said that you recently invested into a blockchain company. Yes. So coming as a traditional investor what made you guys think that this is a technology you guys have to start looking into investing into? I mean the only thing that's constant is change, right? And if we don't understand how our industry is being disrupted, how can we possibly at the forefront, right? We've been around for 23 years. We aim to be here for another at least 23 years. So we just, we need to be part of what's happening. Yep. So I think that's one of the things. Blockchain has become a technology with a lot of traditional investors coming in. Yeah, that's exciting times. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Kavita. Thank you so much. Thank you.