Alts

This week, Horacio sat down with Evan Vandenberg Co-founder & CEO of Dibbs, the world's only 24-7 fractional trading card marketplace.

Discussion topics include:

• The model behind fractional ownership and blockchain-based tokenization with sports cards

• Using tokenized ownership from Dibbs for future utility in different ecosystems and platforms that already exist

• Amazon as an investor in Dibbs and the opportunities it provides for future business opportunities, particularly in the multimedia space

• Expanding Dibbs offerings to include non-sport cards, other collectibles, international markets, NHL and Formula One offerings

• The ‘Sell with Dibbs’ initiative that allows collectors to fractionalize their own cards

• Using the Dibbs 24/7 platform as a de facto stock market for sports cards

• The feature of buying parts of every card of any athlete on the Dibbs platform and the potential for buying into broader categories

• The emergence of Formula 1 in the trading card industry and in the sports scene

• The differences between Formula One and NASCAR and NASCAR’s failure to catch on in the card industry

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This week, Horacio sat down with Justin Truong, Co-founder & CEO of PUSHAS, a sneaker marketplace (and sneaker fund!) based in Australia which is on the heels of global expansion.

Discussion topics include:

• Building PUSHAS from the ground up by trading on sneaker groups on Facebook

• The Ultra Boost Yeezy as his first true immersion into sneaker culture

• How the sneaker industry is more accessible for women than typical asset classes

• Using consignment to build the business and making a decision to go into the sneaker business full-time in 2019

• Finding a niche by dealing with high-end, high-volume resellers by managing the entire sales process

• Managing a limited supply problem by starting a sneaker fund overnight to provide more liquidity

• How the PUSHAS sneaker fund encompasses 6,000 pairs of sneakers and produced a 60% return

• The advantages of working full-time in the sneaker industry to spot trends

• Australia as a smaller sneaker market compared to other countries and the importance of a secondary market

• The advantages of the PUSHAS model of authenticating bulk sellers

• The prevalence of counterfeit sneakers and the importance of having a great eye and a system for spotting fakes

• PUSHAS expanding into the US with headquarters in Los Angeles

• Building the PUSHAS brand around community

• PUSHAS strategy to work with Stock X and GOAT rather than competing against them

• Sneakers as a stable alternative asset class

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This week, Horacio sat down with Anthony Zhang, Founder & CEO of Vinovest.

It was a short chat but a good one. Discussion topics include:

• What it took to build his first business as a 19-year old, a food delivery service called EnvoyNow

• His decision to drop out of college to build his business

• The advice he gives to young, aspiring entrepreneurs

• The spinal cord injury that changed his life

• Recovering and having the motivation to return to being a CEO to resurrect his EnvoyNow

• After selling EnvoyNow, Anthony creates his second company; Know Your VC

• The genesis of Vinovest and the importance of gifting high quality wines in Asian culture

• VinoVest as a platform to help give more accessibility to retail investors

• His process in building Vinovest from scratch with his co-founder

• Vinovest’s strategy in tweaking its investing algorithm, offering investment tiers, risk-weighted options, and owning the physical bottle

• How investors can profit from their investments on VinoVest

• Why Vinovest is expanding into whiskey

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Horacio sat down with Bruce Pascal, the world's largest collector of Hot Wheels.

They discuss:

• How he acquires collections, including his most recent acquisition of 6,000 cars from California

• The advantages of acquiring new cars and having distribution channels through other collectors on eBay

• The best way to get involved in the hobby (conducting research through Facebook groups, books, and websites)

• The most valuable cars (Sweet 16 cars based on real cars, or cars shown at car shows)

• His other collections (including Preston Tucker memorabilia) and how that led him to start collecting Hot Wheels.

• How he purchased the rarest Hot Wheels car in the world

• How one noted collector called Bruce’s purchase a fake, and what he did to prove it was real

• How he tracked down 400 former Hot Wheels employees and associated partners

• How his collection has gained increased acceptance among collectors and hobbyists

• The history of the famous Pink Rear Loading Beach Bomb

• Strategies and potential inefficiencies in the current market

• His personal museum

• The future of his collection and his thoughts on Hot Wheels NFTs

This podcast was originally featured as part of the Alts newsletter issue: Hot Wheels Collecting with Bruce Pascal

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Stefan sat down with Jason Prado from The Drivers Cooperative: a driver-owned ridehailing alternative to Uber & Lyft that is 100% worker-owned.

In the chat, we discuss:

• The history of ridesharing in the US

• The problem with Uber & Lyft

• What a worker-owned cooperative is, exactly

• How The Drivers Cooperative formed

• How owner voting works in the cooperative

• How profits are distributed among owners

• Marketplace dynamics: How they manage supply & demand

• The challenges of going up against Uber & Lyft

• The mechanics of investing in their crowdfunding campaign

This episode was originally featured in the Alts newsletter issue: The Drivers Co-Op Ridehailing App

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This week Horacio sat down with Billy Galanko from Vint, the popular & growing fractional wine investment platform. He is a professional sommelier who now has an (awesome) role as Vint's Head of Wine.

In the chat, we discuss:

• How Billy parlayed an Upwork ad into an investment into Vint, and later Vint's first full-time role

• The ins & outs of high quality wine acquisition from merchant partners,

• Why whiskey is more difficult to source than wine, but more impervious to damage

• The possibility of professional grading of bottles

• How Vint is exploring NFTs with utility — including potential ownership of not just wine but other cool benefits

• Thoughts on opening up a liquid secondary market

• What Billy is personally investing in

• Upcoming offerings, including the Napa Collection w/ Screaming Eagle, some Northern Rhone varieties, and a unique whiskey collection with 36 bottles of Japanese whiskey, all with with beautiful, unique artwork.

• What Vint's roadmap looks like, including potentially investing in pieces of vineyards themselves.

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This week Horacio and Stefan sat down with Chase Chamberlin and Brian Doxtator, CMO and CEO at Commonwealth, which allows anyone to buy shares in world-class racehorses.

In the chat, we discuss:

• How Rally inspired Brian to think about fractionalized horses

• What each founder brings to the table (Chase = horses, Brian = business & finance)

• How horse racing can be intimidating, and how they've worked hard to make everything so easy to understand

• How they spend their day-to-day (visiting their horses, talking to lawyers, keeping up with SEC regulations)

• Their bloodstock team, and the difficulty of selecting quality colts

• How they drive community and make everything feel personal (they have customers from 49 states and 16 countries)

• How they have aligned incentives by tying their business model to customer success

• How they think about racehorse valuations (there is tons of public auction data available)

• What goes into racehorse acquisition costs (horse itself, and 2 years worth of training costs, expenses & legal fees)

• Unicorn returns aside, what a good return actually looks like in this industry

• The excitement of watching their horse, Country Grammer, win a close race

• Where Commonwealth sits in the "investing vs gambling" spectrum

• What's next for Commonwealth (trading, secondary markets, gamification, and education)

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This week Stefan sat down with Michael Wenner, VP of Marketing at Masterworks; the world's largest (and arguably only) platform dedicated to buying fractional shares of high-quality contemporary artwork.

In the chat, Stefan and Michael discuss:

• Artwork as the oldest "newest" asset class

• How Masterworks digitized decades of sales data; including activity, research, and other data points

• How Masterworks has published their database for anyone to see, and parallels with what Case-Schiller did for real estate

• Why effectively 0% of institutional capital is directed toward art — and why that will change

• What attributes Masterworks looks for when buying artwork (cultural significance + momentum)

• Living artists vs dead artists: Why living artists have a greater appreciation rate, but also a higher risk/loss rate

• Why selling artwork to a museum is the ultimate exit.

• The future of fractionalized artwork investing; including thoughts on the NFT artwork (spoiler: he thinks it's a fad)

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This week Stefan sat down with Alex Drew, co-founder of ODYS, a platform for buying high-quality aged domain names.

The first half of the chat covers the world of domain investing in general, and the second half dives aged domains, which is Alex's specialty.

In the chat, Stefan and Alex discuss:

• How Alex got started in domain investing

• What makes domain names such a great digital asset?

• Why .com's have stood the test of time, and remain the bitcoin of domains

• Why emotion and scarcity makes valuing domains so tricky

• What are the biggest marketplaces for buying & selling domain names

• What is a "domain drop", and how does it work? (Including redemption periods, grace periods, and expiry)

• How Dropcatch and similar companies are hired to help catch prized domains from hundreds of thousands of drops each day.

• How companies like Sedo, Afternic, and Dan.com obtain domains for their own marketplaces

• Why domain investing is like venture capital: you need a large portfolio with a few big winners to survive

• How domain investing has changed over the years

• What aged domains are, exactly, and what makes them so valuable?

• The value of a good backlink profile, and how aged domains fast-forward the painstaking process of building backlinks

• The risks of buying a domain with a poor backlink profile

• ODYS's plans for opening their own marketplace

• How their typical customer has changed over time

• How domain names are the original NFTs

• What factors help determine the "ODYS value", including traffic, backlink profile, and other trust signals

• How 301 redirects are an amazing way to harness a domain's power

• How ODYS is using logos to add even more value to their pre-owned domains

• What the future holds for the world of domain investing

This episode is coupled with a newsletter issue: Investing in Domain Names

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This week Stefan sat down with Travis Winn from ZED RUN, the blockchain game where you buy, sell, breed, raise, and race digital racehorses.

In the chat, Stefan and Travis discuss:

• How the lack of accessibility in Australian horse race culture led to the idea of digital horse ownership

• The otherwordly design of the game & creating the digital sport of the future

• Navigating the financial and legal considerations in getting ZED RUN off the ground

• Why ZED RUN is a fundamentally a skill & strategy game, not gambling

• How they maintain team synergy while having a remote, global team

• How integral ZED RUN's community is to the entire operation

• The disconnect between how active the community is and how the company has been relatively ignored by the mainstream media

• How NBA Top Shot kicked the NFT movement into high gear

• How ZED RUN treats the blockchain like an empowering mechanism to avoid becoming a game for "Crytpo Gods," and makes this confusing world easily accessible to the public

• The game mechanics, including horse rarity, and the simulation algorithm that determines the winner of each race

• How to buy "Genesis" horses during the drops, and the secondary markets

• How ZED RUN thinks about supply & demand in terms of ecosystem longevity

• Recent changes to breeding rules, and why they introduced the concept of "puberty" into the ecosystem to stop market flooding

• How ZED RUN fosters serendipity, compared to social media

• Why owning a ZED RUN racehorse is an active investment, and is sort of the ultimate digital asset

• The tightrope balancing act between treating ZED RUN as a game, vs treating it as a valuable, yield-producing digital asset

• The future of ZED RUN, including sub-economy opportunities, and, most excitingly, metaverse land ownership

This episode was originally featured in the Alternative Assets newsletter issue: Investing in Digital Racehorses with Zed Run

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