Arianna Simpson – The Crypto Landscape

My guest today is Arianna Simpson, who has spent her career in an around the world of technology working at startups, Facebook, and now in venture capital as an investor focused on the world of cryptocurrencies. I met Arianna when I hosted a panel at a big investing conference in New York City and she was one of the panelists. On the panel, I found her style to be very straightforward and compelling. It is clear that she loves to learn and that the best manifestation of her style of learning is investing in technology. In our conversation we discuss broad trends in crypto that we haven’t spent much time on before: decentralized versus centralized exchanges, privacy coins, and evaluating a found or early team. We build a framework for learning about this new asset class, discuss the importance of travel, and the value of pushing oneself outside of comfort zones. Hash Power is presented by Fidelity Investments Please enjoy our conversation For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag   Show Notes 2:12 – (First question) – How to teach someone else to build an investing philosophy around crypto 4:00 – The major risk factors to investing in crypto 6:28 – best practices for mitigating risk 7:39 – What factors to think about when it comes to whether a token will lose all value or not 8:39 -  Taking a pulse of the investment community on crypto 11:36 – How she heard about and became interested in crypto currencies 12:34 – Are people really using crypto currency as a hedge against rampant inflation 13:52 – Investing thesis in the space 14:07 – Arianna’s systems for learning about cryptocurrencies and staying up to date on them 15:19 – Arianna’s take on the issue of increasing transactional through put 16:49 – Layer 1 solutions and making it all scalable on a blockchain 17:56 – her take on the fat protocol thesis 20:32 – Defining utility vs security tokens 21:54 – evaluating different coins 21:02 – Why cross currency swaps are important and how they work 26:17 – What are the chances of a scenario where there’s just one token and everything is built off of that one 28:02 -  Comparing centralized and decentralized exchanges 29:47 – How the traditional investing world is going to regulate transaction involving cryptocurrencies and view security around those transactions 31:54– Impact this will have on capital formation 33:44 – Evaluating teams behind crypto companies 35:48 – The importance of gut when evaluating people 38:47 – How Arianna’s global upbringing impacts her thinking on the technology 39:51 – What countries or regions have had the largest impact on Arianna’s investing philosophy 42:41 – Doing things you’re not qualified for 43:59 – Gender imbalance in crypto and what can be done to shift that 45:28 – Most recent thing that has gotten Arianna excited in the crypto space 46:15 – Explaining Zero X 47:33 – How her views on reading have evolved 48:54 - Kindest thing anyone has done for Arianna Learn More For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast.  Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub Follow Patrick on twitter at @patrick_oshag