Panic with Friends – Investing for Profit and Joy
I haven’t met today’s guest in person, yet I consider him a close friend. We have spent a lot of time brainstorming. He’s a master of business development. He’s a master at brand. Sina has seen inside the belly of the growth beast a few times first as Robinhood’s first head of crypto. Prior to that, he co-founded one of the earliest crypto fund of funds. But he started his career on the dark side with Morgan Stanley, and later Credit Suisse. Now Sina is performing magic in the fast-paced world of crypto on behalf of FTX. He got his BA from UC Berkeley and an MBA from USC. Needless to say, Sina will be a regular on Panic with Friends.
You can listen to the podcast here on Spotify or Apple podcast and now all the episodes are on my YouTube channel as well.
You can also listen right here on the blog:
Guest: Sina Nader
Profile: Head of Partnerships at FTX
Where to Find Him: Twitter
What’s Sina Panicked About?: Finding the technology that can regrow his hair.
The Big Ideas:
With crypto, the lightbulb moment for Sina was seeing the fundamental improvement in the way people could communicate value. Running a fund of funds was how he got his education. He had to figure out the legal and regulatory stuff and understand the market microstructures within crypto. How do funds do custody? How can you poke holes in a fund’s thesis? Learn by doing. We’re in the dial-up modem days of crypto. And like the backbone of the internet today, there’s a point in time where crypto is ultimately invisible. But it’s all still kind of a mess and not very user friendly; yet there’s so much more room to grow. 96 percent of the world still hasn’t onboarded crypto/web3.
The key to landing Larry David and stadium naming rights is partnerships, partnerships, partnerships. Your job is to get your brand out there and celebrate the people who have climbed the network. There’s so much noise out there it can be really hard to get the signal. You need to listen really, really close to what the market is telling you and look for people with the unique ability to see through the noise. Pick up the phone. Network. Share ideas. Podcasts, Twitter, and Stocktwits make all these things possible. At the end of the day, how can you bring more value to more people?
Show Notes:
- (00:48) – Intro
- (05:39) – Welcome Sina
- (07:42) – Crypto Fund of Funds
- (12:17) – 96 percent of the world still isn’t in Crypto
- (14:37) – Bitcoin as a seat at the table (Carl Icahn)
- (16:45) – Genesis of a Super Bowl Commercial
- (22:51) – Pitching Larry David
- (25:20) – A “spreadsheet in the sky”
- (38:04) – Connecting with SBF
- (41:54) – Keeping the momentum going
- (50:37) – The importance of compliance and regulation
- (55:45) – Wrapping it up
- (56:38) – Closing thoughts
