MoneyNeverSleeps

078: Money Talks #9: David Chreng | Blockchain & Sustainability

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David Chreng from LeadBlock Partners joins the show to talk about how his time as an energy equity analyst influenced his view of the world, investing in blockchain and distributed ledger technologies for sustainability-themed ventures, the development of blockchain and DLT in general over the past 5 years....and using quantum mechanics to model DNA!

This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland’s fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment.  If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here.


This week we’re catching up with David Chreng, a partner with LeadBlock Partners, a London-based venture capital fund investing in early stage B2B blockchain startups. David and Pete Townsend connected at the Securities Token Realised Summit conference last month in London.  After hearing about Connecting Food, David’s first investment with LeadBlock, Pete was interested in learning more, especially given that LeadBlock venture outside of financial services with their blockchain-themed investments.  Given we've spent so much time talking about blockchain-inspired propositions in financial services on this podcast, we wanted to provide a fresh perspective. As Pete wrote last week in our first MoneyNeverSleeps blogpost on Medium, "We’ll know that blockchain has gone mainstream when we stop talking about blockchain".  David and Pete touched on this point, as well as a number of others on this episode:

  • The origins of David's interest in blockchain/DLT stemming from an investment in a company making sensors for the food industry, and using DLT as a means to collect, secure and create value from that data.
  • Pairing DLT with other technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and IoT to automate processes and create efficiencies as a response to pressure on corporate margins.
  • On there being no silver bullet - "DLT for the industries outside of financial services is only a piece of the equation for corporates trying to automate and optimize some of their processes - DLT by itself is just a sophisticated database."
  • On the differences between financial services and other industries - "DLT in financial services is about reshaping how the financial services industry is run. But when we're looking at enterprise DLT solutions across other industries, they're not going to reshape how the industry is run, they're about optimizing and improving processes to make them more efficient, allow them to reduce costs, bring more security, trust and audit-ability."
  • On B2B vs. B2C founders - "This is for me, a new class of entrepreneurs which are not coming out of school with a great idea, which is fine on the B2C side. But on the B2B side, it's always more powerful to have somebody that's lived through the experience of working in large corporates on the operational side, has experienced a lot of difficulties there and then comes up with a great idea".

    • To listen to more, please visit https://www.moneyneversleeps.ie/ for all of our other episodes.  Also, follow us on Twitter @MNSShow for updates and more information.

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    MoneyNeverSleepsBy Pete Townsend | GP at Norio Ventures
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