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Description

Today’s episode is from a 2018 conversation with Ari Nazir, founder and managing partner at Neural Capital, a hedge fund focused on cryptoassets. We discuss how he manages his portfolio in a space that is still marked by speculation and dishonesty. For the full conversation, check out Flippening episode 13.

Links Relevant To This Episode

• Nomics.com
• Nomics on Twitter
• Clay Collins
• Flippening.com
• Nexo
• Nomics API
• Nomics’ Fully Customizable Daily Crypto Newsletter
• Ari Nazir
• Neural Capital
• Ethereum (ETH)
• Stellar (XLM)
• EOS (EOS)
• Centra (CTR)
• Bitconnect (BCC)

Transcript

Clay: Welcome to Daily Wisdom from the Flippening Podcast. These episodes feature short, to the point clips from our full-length interviews. We talk to the men and women behind the trades, crypto exchanges, and regulations with the goal of helping you become a better, more informed investor. 

Michael: Hi, I’m Michael Kaplan, editor of the Flippening Podcast. Today’s episode is from a 2018 conversation with Ari Nazir, founder and managing partner at Neural Capital, a hedge fund focused on cryptoassets.  We discuss how he manages his portfolio in a space that is still marked by speculation and dishonesty. For the full conversation, [00:00:30 ] check out Flippening episode 13.

Without further ado, here’s our conversation with Ari Nazir, founder and managing partner at Neural Capital. Enjoy.

Ari: As we start seeing a flight to quality, not just in terms of capital, that’s the first thing anybody thinks of. More importantly, flight to capital of developers. Once you start seeing more talent around platforms, you start seeing the winners emerge, whether it’s Ethereum, Stellar, EOS, a number of them combined, the taking [00:01:00 ] of specific market share for specific activities, I think you’ll start seeing more and more developers. But to answer your question, I see myself still today in the financial services, venture capital space, but I like to think of myself as a wealth generator and not necessarily a wealth manager.

Clay: Most people would rather have wealth generated for them rather than managed.

Ari: That’s our pitch.

Clay: There’s actually an interesting transition point here. You talked about being on what sounded like a VC [00:01:30 ] track trajectory, but Neural Capital, from my understanding, takes a sentiment or a momentum investing based approach which in a lot of ways sounds antithetical or an alternative way of doing things, compared to what VCs do. VCs get on planes, they talk to teams, it’s really about like you know what’s the TAM, SAM, SOM? What’s the market size? Maybe looks [00:02:00 ] a little bit more like value investing than sentiment, but in a lot of ways is about front-running what large groups of people are likely to do in the future based on current indicators. 

How do you think about the juxtaposition between maybe the track you were on and what you are doing now? Or are they more similar than one might think?

Ari: You’re directionally correct. This is a really good question and not one I get asked often enough. What I’m doing is venture capital [00:02:30 ] with additional liquidity and the ability to not have to commit to a project for five to seven years at a time. If you talk to the average venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, off the record I’m sure over half of them would tell you, “Yeah I wish I could have sold my chunk in that company two years in when they had that acquisition offer,” or, “I wish I could have sold it when they raised their next round.” A lot of people don’t have an opportunity to do that or they can’t do that for signaling risk to the entreprene