Jay:  Alright. So I’m sitting here today with James Giancotti once again. I think you are one of the… I think I’ve only had two or three guests that have come on my podcast twice, and so you’re amongst an elite few.

James:  I’m excited.

Jay:  You should be honored. You’re like a Hall of Famer. I’ll just give a quick introduction. For those in the audience that haven’t listened to episode 38, I suggest you go back and listen to that. That was when James first came on. James is a lawyer by training, a former investment banker at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan. He’s a successful angel investor and a venture capitalist, and he’s now tried to basically roll up his sleeves, and he’s working on a startup. So he’s the startup founder and CEO of Oddup, which is a rating system for startups.

Like I said, he’s one of the rare repeat guests on the podcast. So we’re excited to have you on, and I’m really excited to talk about your brand new business lines that you are building out as part of the Oddup ecosystem. So before we get into all that, give us some quick background for the audience listening in and lead us down a path of why you decided to actually roll your sleeves up and get your hands dirty and actually build a startup, which is actually much, much harder than being an investment banker.

James:  Yeah, I miss the days of where my biggest challenge was looking at my Blackberry at Goldman Sachs, because when I took a holiday, it was a holiday. Now, I have one day off, and that’s Christmas. Every other day I work, and I only take that day off because everyone else on the planet has that day off.

But to sort of give you a bit of overview of where I came from, where I started from, and where I got to, I studied law because my father thought it was a good idea. And so I got to law in intellectual property, but the first thing I wanted to do was to save Napster at the time. That’s where I got involved in tech.

So to cut a long story short, worked as a consultant, sort of never practiced law, but used it in my work, and then I came to Hong Kong for love — the love of JP Morgan and money. I’ll cut a long story short. Worked at JP Morgan for the 2008 crisis. That was a tough time to be. Moved to Goldman in the research department, but I was always actively in the startup space, investing in companies, making a good return out of them, and really being passionate about building a business. Launched a fund that did really well out of that first fund that we did. That had seven exits out of ten companies.

Jay:  Wow.

James:  And the last exit was just bought, which sold to Box.com. So we did okay. The three others are still going, so I may do that again one day, but at the moment… One of the things that always frustrated me as an investor was, like, “You could do this better,” “You could do this better,” “You could do—,“ “Why can’t I come and help?” I sort of got itching feet.

And that’s where Oddup was born, where I was writing research papers for myself on “maybe this is a good company to invest in. This is where I see the long-term growth.” Then our LPs and L Funds said, “Actually, this is a good report. Why don’t we do something with it?” And Oddup was born. That’s this sort of very quick journey of how I’ve got to here after all these years of studying.

Jay:  Yeah, it’s fantastic. It’s a great background, quite similar to mine, except for the high success rate that you’ve had on your startup investing. I think mine would’ve been the opposite or even worse.

James:  I just got lucky, Jay. I just got lucky.

Jay:  Well, luck has a lot to do with investing, but I’m sure that you’re a very skilled venture capital investor.

So give us a little bit of background on Oddup. Again, for audience listening in, I encourage you to go listen to episode 38. James was one of my first podcast guests when I first launched almost two years ago. So listen to that one, but give us the quick version of what Oddup is. And maybe you can give us a little bit of a company update of where you guys are.

James:  Sure. So Oddup started up out of a need to look at more due diligence in companies. So I come from a banking background where if we want to look at an asset, we’ll look at Moody’s, we’ll look at a stock analyst, we’ll see if it’s a buy-hold-sell on startups. But what we found in the marketplace at the time was there was just no startup information where people actually had a choice. You saw a lot of information, such as the angel lists, the Crunchbases of the world where you find data, but the data was very centralized to the US and not really to Asia. So I also saw Asia as a lacking market.

So Oddup started from that “Let’s get the data and let’s get a rating system in,” and that was very much similar to what I did at Goldman Sachs. What Oddup does now is, rather than rate startups, you rate startups and everything else. So we look at startups. We look at the sectors, the ecosystems. Every single company, every single country in the world wants to be the next Silicon Valley. Let’s put them to the test and ask how they really are ranked. We look at regions. We look at subsectors and investors, because as you talked previously about investors, we’re only as good as the children, and the children are the startups that we invest in. So we get accessed on all the ones that we do.

Now we’ve sort of gone from being that rating company to more of a data insights provider, so most of our work has gone from initially being the B2C mark, which was for the angel investors, very much to now the institutions. And we cover everything, and we’ve just ventured into ICO and crypto ratings late last year, which is good. And we found that the client base has changed dramatically, particularly in the last three or four years that we’ve been doing this.

An update on what we’re doing now…we’re just in the throes of finalizing our Series B, which is always a long and hard process. To all the entrepreneurs out there, start early, start hustling hard, and keep on going. We’ll make announcements shortly on that.

Jay:  Fantastic.

James:  But yeah, we’re launching multiple products lines as well.

Jay:  Yeah, so I’m real excited to dig into those product lines. Before we do that, I know that you mentioned that there are a number of different firms and, I guess, users or subscribers to your data that use your insight on a daily basis, including some of the large service providers, such as Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters, which I think rebranded. They’re called Refinitiv or something like that now.

James:  They are. Yes.

Jay:  Can you explain your partnerships with them and maybe some of the other large media companies or service providers that you guys are working with?

James:  Sure. So I can talk a bit about effectively how these bigger institutions use us. There’s two main reasons why we’ve sort of gone into partnerships with Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters. First thing is the data. So a lot of their own applications need parts of our data to fill in. So it could be something like a late-stage company like an Uber. They’ve got high-level details, and we fill in the rest with the rating scores and insights.

The second part — and this is on both those platforms — is an app, so we have an app as part of the Eikon store or as part of AppsCo, which is the Bloomberg portal. And you can actually subscribe to those apps and use Oddup as you would on Oddup.com but actually on the Bloomberg Terminal and on Eikon.

And the reason why we help do this is it’s actually helped open up a lot of institutional doors, so a lot of customers that we never had before, like corporate innovation programs and MNA and advisories from big banks, can now use us without us going through a six-month process of due diligence to be a service provider. We just use ourselves as TR or Bloomberg, and that’s sort of grown. And we’ve been with TR since 2016 and Bloomberg since this year.

Jay:  That’s great. Yeah. And so is it an added subscription that the end-user has to pay for that will click it on and you can then access startup data just like the other data feeds that plug into Bloomberg, correct?

James:  Yeah. Correct. And so most of the work is… So there’s some components of Bloomberg and TR, which is just add the little bits of data. So we’re a data source provider. And the other part is people want specific startup insights and to integrate them within the portal product or the Eikon product where our app will talk to their other apps, i.e., let’s say they’re looking at eBay and potential competitors of eBay, and they can look at eBay on one of their apps within Eikon and then they can look at Oddup and see Carousell appear from Singapore.

So it’s one of those things where you can actually look at how the product will integrate with listed companies and ecosystems. If you look up Hong Kong tech stocks versus Hong Kong tech companies, you see how that integration works.

Jay:  Yeah, no, that’s fantastic. I know that I’m a Bloomberg Terminal user as well, and I use it mostly for public listed companies and instruments, but sometimes when I look up private companies, there’s very limited data that you can find. It’s basically whatever they can scrape off of the internet and this sort of thing. I think it’s going to be a good thing to have, particularly for startups, because that data field is very opaque, and it’s hard to find real data. And then you have to pay for Crunchbase to get further detail, and so I think opening it up is definitely a good thing for the ecosystem.

Okay, so let’s talk about some of your exciting business lines that you’re building out. I suppose that this is… Were these business lines, was it an idea that sort of came about or was it as part of this master plan when you were looking to scale Oddup up into…you’re doing your Series B, as you said. Was this something that your backing investors from your Series A, were they kind of pushing this as well? Or was it just all a stroke of genius? One night you had this idea — you know what? I want to build out these other business lines to make this a better, wider, more valuable offering.  

James:  I always use the analogy of Coca-Cola, and if you just sell Coca-Cola, you’re not going to sell much because you’ll get to the point of saturation. You may put a Diet Coke or a Coke Light or whatever you have, but what happens is all the other brands to build an ecosystem. So if you were to go to a 7-Eleven or a store, you can buy a Fanta, you can buy Sprite. And so the way we’ve always seen Oddup is that we’re one of those products that enables other systems.

But what we’ve seen and particularly the stroke… What happened was last year when a lot of our angel investors were looking at ICOs and crypto, and everyone was on this sort of bandwagon of, “Let’s make money on crypto,” but we saw it as we may lose a potential set of clients, but we were gaining more. So in fact, our business increased sizably by hedge funds joining and so forth.

But we found that actually different… The startup ecosystem is growing. It’s a growing market, but there’s also other things as part of that entire ecosystem that we could add, and I’ve always seen Oddup as multi facets of the business where we would go into multi lines to help build a product that people can go. It’s a one-stop shop, so similar to like a supermarket. You can get everything in a supermarket. That’s the way we want to see Oddup. And so if I was to look four or five years from now, even 10 years from now, Oddup to us is more of there are multiple product lines as part of Oddup to help different areas achieve what they want to achieve.

Jay:  Right. It definitely makes sense. Like I said, it’ll just enhance and make the overall offering much more valuable, right? So there’s two that you told me about that I’m super excited to talk about today. Unicorn Hunt…I mean, who doesn’t want to hunt for unicorns. And Alluva, which also is fascinating to me. So let’s talk about Unicorn Hunt real quick, and then we’ll dig into Alluva, because I know that’s the one that we’re very excited about.

James:  Well, we’re very excited about both. I guess both of them work with us so one of the things we also looked at is we had Oddup as a ratings company and a media company as separate. And that sort of confused a bit of users. Are you a blog? Are you a rating company? But as the years have gone through, we’ve found that B2B for Oddup is really where our business is at, and so it’s more corporate. It’s more large-scale. But then we were losing B2C customers, because that media element wasn’t there.

And so Unicorn Hunt sort of started as, okay, let’s build ourselves a media blog, which is aimed at giving people headlines who, A, couldn’t afford the product, or B, just wanted to sort of keep themselves interested, because in six to 10 months’ time, they could be an investor or a startup founder. So Unicorn Hunt is really our media product that’s been growing day by day.

It’s been really a fascinating and wonderful success for us at the moment where we’re looking at multiple media lines. We’re starting as a blog. We’re looking at magazines that fall from this. Looking at a TV show that we’re looking in 2019 to launch. There’s a lot of things on our pipeline.

Jay:  Wow.

James:  There’s videos, YouTube channels…you name it. That is going to be more of everyone will be able to find that information on startups or crypto or so forth.

Then there’s Alluva, and Alluva’s really where it gets even more interesting. And so Alluva is our product that is going to serve more of the B2C retail crypto investors, because at the moment you can logon to Oddup, you can see every single ICO rated, but it’s very deep analysis.

But crypto is much different than the startup environment. Startups you’ve got usually 50 shareholders or less. There’s limited information. We do a very much specific way of having multiple analysts and data scientists solve that problem for startups, whereas crypto, there is thousands upon tens of thousands of investors in that space. So Alluva is our blockchain product that quantitively and qualitatively rates ICOs, STOs, and cryptocurrencies, but we’re giving more, and we’re looking at how the blockchain can actually enable this space and how we can reward customers and users by correct calls.

Jay:  So before we venture further down…I mean, basically we’ve opened up sort of Pandora’s box with this cryptocurrency thing, because if you look at what happened this year… I’ll just take my experience for an example. I mean, I know that you were harping on about cryptos last year, and I didn’t listen to you, stupidly. And I left a lot of money on the table because I was a stubborn—

James:  Zero-cost portfolio, Jay.

Jay:  I was extremely stubborn in my ways, but I subsequently spent the next six months doing a lot of research and just educating myself about the space. Obviously, it didn’t help seeing all my friends who knew nothing about anything making all this money on the side, so it incentivized me to actually spend a lot of time and research this.

Earlier this year, we saw all-time highs of cryptocurrencies — Bitcoin, 20,000. All the majors. Along with that tidal wave up, we saw a slew of ICOs. The majority of them are projects that… Some of them didn’t even launch, but a lot of them were just useless projects that were borderline scammy or some even very scammy. And that’s all kind of cooled off now. I think it was April, May, June, and we kind of saw the first correction in the market. Markets pulled back. `So it’s been quite volatile, up and down. We saw a little bit of a rally earlier in the fall. Now we’re back making new lows basically.

As someone that was just sort of looking at it from when it was at all-time highs to now, from that short amount of time, it’s kind of like, “Oh, crypto’s dead. This is it.” It’s only basically long-trended in one direction, and that’s been down.

Maybe you could give us a little bit of your insights on how you view cryptocurrencies. I don’t want to get too philosophical about the whole thing, but what do you think about it? Is it here to stay? Is it an actual investable asset class yet, or is it too earlier for that? And then we can tie in how you aim to help the ecosystem with Alluva.

James:  Okay. Lots of questions there, so let’s talk about firstly, the viable asset class. So when I looked at cryptocurrencies, I always thought it was a viable asset class. And to give you a bit of history about my BTC experience was when I first left Goldman and I actually helped in accelerators, someone was doing a startup which was about putting private keys for BTC in a Swiss vault, and I thought that was the stupidest idea in the world. I can sometimes be wrong.

But the guy said to me, “If you don’t invest in us, buy some Bitcoin.” So I did. It was ten grand or less, and it was actually a really good investment. But at the time, there was a crash afterwards, and I thought, “Oh, goodness. This is a… Crap, I lost money. Not the end of the world. It’s okay.” But I’ve seen panic happen multiple times in this market, but one thing that’s consistent is I’m actually looking at the asset classes of flight to safety.

Now I’ve never seen such volatility in the world in my lifetime than I’ve seen this year. There’s so much happening — recently in December, the riots in Paris, Venezuela, and all sorts of problems. You’re seeing a world where people are concerned ultimately with what’s happening in the world, and I personally believe the 2008 crisis has just been basically swept under the carpet until the real problem happens. So I’m actually expecting a much more worse thing happening. You’re seeing stock markets boom in the US. I’m very nervous. When things are high, sell, sell, sell. Get yourself cashed up and wait.

So as a cryptocurrency, I look at cryptocurrencies as I look at startups. Ninety percent will fail and maybe 10 percent will get your money back, and then two or three percent will just be superstars. So most of those cryptocurrencies that have launched in the last 12 to 18 months, most of them are crap. And I say this because if I put my startup rating hat on, I go, “Wow, I’ve never seen any major startups come out of Slovakia or Slovenia, but I know they’ve raised $40 million. Why?” But the technology is quite incredible. I think it’s a game-changer.

So as an asset class, what we’re seeing, particularly from a lot of investors, is actually, even though the headlines are negative, a lot of people are putting .5 to 1 percent of their net worth typically in the top three, so your Ether, your XRP, and your BTC. And that is actually not changing, and with this low price, as you know, if you’re going to put $30,000 in a startup or $50,000 in a startup, or you buy 10 BTC, you got a probably better chance of getting some liquidity from BTC than you have with the startup.

So this is actually quite an interesting scenario to be in. What I do see, though, is that the market has become more serious, and I look at who is joining the market. Some of the smartest people I worked with at Goldman and JP Morgan have gone into blockchain funds. They’ve gone into blockchain companies. This is where the technology’s going, and it’s just really where the future is actually holding. It’s also with what our customers are asking for.

So the apps that we’re launching on Bloomberg and Refinitiv Eikon, which are ICO apps, which are separate than startup apps, which is basically rating every cryptocurrency and every ICO and giving them a buy-hold-sell, and ultimately where we see a price prediction six to 12 months from now. One of the things that is clear is that institutions aren’t getting their hands dirty but very much dabbing their feet in the water, which is the top five, 10 currencies.

So once you hit IOTA or TRON, you’ve gone too far, so you’re looking at XRP and BTC is really where they’re putting their hands ready. Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV, people are going, “I don’t understand it. I’m not going to touch it.” Anything you can do on Coinbasis is probably a really good starting point.

And so that sort of leads us to where we’re going with Alluva, where we feel that…I come back from a research analysist’s point of view, and I’m very much aware that the way we do Oddup is very much like my time at Goldman, where every public company got a buy-hold-sell. Everyone got a future price target.

Crypto, we can’t do it that way. We can give our own view, but it’s so complicated. Good point… Tom Lee with the “25K, 15K, what’s the price? It’s 50K” price target. There’s bananas feeding bananas. What that does, though, is that a lot people can access this information and provide insight. So when we look at what we’re doing with Alluva, it’s very much aimed at the users actually have an experience and get rewarded with an Alluva currency over time, like we do with Starmind in the simple equity space, where if I’m an analyst, my bonus is determined on how many right calls I get.

Jay:  That’s right. Yes.

James:  So it works the same thing with Alluva, where rather than Oddup as being rated as “did we get it right or wrong?” we’re going to be part of that ecosystem, but anyone else, yourself, anyone else who’s listening to this podcast can be part of this and actually get tokens for this. So it’s very much like the Starmind type of ratings, and we don’t think that’s ultimately amazingly disruptive. It’s just that we’re moving something that’s been around for 30, 40 years into something where it needs to go. So we’re moving the technology along with it.

Jay:  I see. Okay, so Alluva, I just want to get a better understanding of Alluva. So what you’re saying is you’re taking the ICO ratings component of Oddup, and that’s going to lie under this Alluva brand. Is that right?

James:  Mm-hmm.

Jay:  Then Alluva then allows contributors to rate ICO projects. Is that right?

James:   Yeah. So if you put it in a more simplistic perspective, to put it in numbers, Alluva deals with millions of data points, and there’s so many people that could be involved in it, whereas Oddup looks at 10,000. So the scale to do that – we can’t do that at Oddup, unless we hire 100,000, 200,000 analysts. It’s just not going to work, whereas by putting the product to actually get a more distributed, decentralized viewpoint, it’s that we get rated as well as everyone else does.

So we can have Tom Lee on our platform. We can have John McAfee on our platform giving these ratings, and if they get it right, they’re getting rewarded for it, as I would do at my job at Goldman or at JP Morgan, getting rewarded based on the calls that I get right. This is super important going forward, because we feel that the way research departments are now looking at it, particularly in both private and mostly public spaces, is that there’s more visibility on how right and wrong you get it. But you should be rewarded for getting it right, but you should still be rewarded a little bit for participation. So that’s the way we’re building Alluva.

We will still include our ICO ratings and still include our cryptocurrency ratings, but we’re going to be judged like everyone else. And as we have such a great success rate, it’s going to be put to the test.

Jay:  Right. Sure.

James:  And we don’t see crypto at this point in time of being…EOS is different than BTC. We see BTC as the granddaddy of everything and that it’s a total asset class, so when one folds, everything else folds. But if you’re looking at macro sector and location analysis, you’ll be able to get potential rewards for getting these things right.

Jay:  Yeah, so this is a very interesting model. It kind of reminds me of the Forbes contributor model, where you have—

James:  You must know about that.

Jay:  Exactly. Let’s walk through a very simple case. Let’s just take Bitcoin for example. You’re on Alluva’s platform. Oddup obviously has its house view of Bitcoin. What’s the cadence? Is it three-month, six-month, 12-month views? I don’t know how you guys split it up.

James:  Yeah. We look at a 3-6-12 point, but 6 to 12 is the sweet spot, so over time you’ll get more rewards is essentially it.

Jay:  So let’s say Bitcoin’s on the platform, Alluva. Walk us through the user experience. Let’s say I wanted to sign up and login to Alluva, because I know a thing or two about cryptocurrency, as it seems like everyone in that space does. Everyone’s an expert. And so I want to put it to the test. I want to see if I actually know what I’m talking about. Is there a sign-up fee? How do you join the platform? And then what does that process look like for me to actually go in and submit my ratings? Do I have to do a write-up? Do I have to justify it? What’s the whole procedure look like for an end user?

James:  So effectively a lot of that stuff is actually gone, because a lot of the stuff in crypto is free. So you can search from a number of sources and get that information. In Alluva, that information is available to you. What you’re doing is in assessing that information and saying, “This is what I think.” So similar to Etherscan can give you all the data about any ICO, we’re not charging for that. Absolutely not. But what you do from our system is actually going, “Okay, I’m looking at this token. I’m seeing the available tokens. I’m looking at the available supply.” All that information is available. “This is my best call.” Then that’s where your name will appear and say, “In six months, I think this price is 10 cents, and in 12 months, I think it’s 12 cents.”

Then you’ll get a reward fee. Okay, I’ve done some work, so it’s a small reward fee. But then as you get your calls right and people use those calls and say, “Okay, you got it right,” you’re getting rewarded as part of ratings mining. So we’re calling it ratings mining, so it’s a proof of work. Basically, you do the work, the work comes through, and away you go. And you get those rewards as you’re right, as opposed to I’m 25K, it’s 15K, it’s 2K, and so forth and just sort of willy-nilly doing it. Sorry. It’s a terrible Australian saying.

Jay:  I thought you were Italian.

James:  I’m Italian, but I spend too much time in Australia. But I love it to bits. I still call Australia home, just say that to all the podcast viewers. But getting back to that, people are not just getting rewarded, but they’re effectively getting like a pat on the back.

Jay:  Sure.

James:  If I’ve already got tokens and I go, “You know what? I’m following Jay Kim. His calls have been really good.” Then I’m going to actually contribute more because he’s giving me some information. Similar to what we do doing in research bank where you go, “I want to speak to an analyst.” Actually, it’s $150 for your time for an hour or $1,000 or whatever banks charge.

Jay:  That’s right. Yes. Yes.

James:  I’m going to pay you for that. Same thing applies. So what we’re doing is sort of looking at something that works in the public markets and seeing cryptocurrency very much as a public market and working with that and really pushing that mechanism out to everyone. So everyone can join. It’s going to be free to join. If you want to see ratings from people, of course you would need to pay via BTC, Ether, Alluva, what have you, to see what everyone else has done, but if you want to contribute, it’s free.

Jay:  I see. So this is actually a very…this is very novel. Fascinating. I haven’t seen this. You’ve basically gamified this whole thing, because I think it’s going to incentivize people to come on the platform, because, hey, you can earn Alluva token, I guess, at the end of the day, right? So let’s say Jay Kim comes on, and I think I know a bit or two about crypto, and so let’s say I get my call right on Bitcoin. Let’s say I get it spot-on, even better than Oddup’s score or ICO score. So how do I get rewarded, and then what can I use then with that reward? Does it just add up in the bank? How can I spend that reward?

James:  Okay. That’s a great question. Well, look, the beautiful thing about what we’re doing, by the time we go live, is that Alluva will be on multiple exchanges outside of the Oddup ecosystem, so you can actually exchange it to BTC. You can use it in whatever form you want to use it, but the one other part of the Oddup ecosystem is that you can use it for Unicorn Hunt.

So let’s say you want to advertise on one of our media platforms. You can use it. If you want to buy a subscription to Oddup, or if you want to use it just to see what everyone else is doing in Alluva and want to buy the premium package, you can use that. But we’re working with multiple big partners that we’ll make the announcement shortly where you can actually use it for other things, because I’m a big believer that a lot of the projects that have built tokens have built the tokens with a very singular method of reward and a very singular method of how to use it. It’s sort of I can only use it one way.

But I’m an airline guru, so I spend most of my time on Cathay Pacific flying everywhere, and I use my Asia Miles everywhere. And if I can use it to get a flight, that’s usually the main thing I’ll do, but if I can use it to buy hotels or maybe a laptop or an iPad or something like that, that’s also good. So we see the same thing with that Alluva token where it can be used on multiple occasions, as opposed to just the Oddup ecosystem. So we’ve grown it out, and as we launch more products in the ecosystem, you’ll be able to use it on that and that and that. We want to make sure that the token has value for the people who use it.

Jay:  That’s a great analogy with the airline miles. And then of course, if you wanted to cash out, you could just go to an exchange and convert it to fiat and be done with it, right?

James:  Yep. Yeah. We’d rather you not and be part of the ecosystem.

Jay:  Of course.

James:  We understand that people… We want to build the Alluva platform as similar to what YouTube is doing where people can have professional jobs being an analyst. Having worked as an analyst at a bank, I can tell you that, yes, it’s a great job, but if you can do the same thing and work your own hours and sort of build a presence about it, that would be wonderful for us to build that platform around that.

Jay:  I’m excited to see this project launch, because I think that the way you’re going about it is audacious, and it’s clever. But it’s also audacious, given what’s happened in the last 12 months. Using that as sort of a pivot point, what are your views on the market going forward? There’s a number of things that are happening behind the scenes right now, in addition to this weak-ish price action that we’re seeing across cryptocurrencies.

There’s all this talk. There’s so many rumors. It’s funny. When we talk from day to day, you’ve told me before that you just don’t pay attention to a lot of those news sources anymore because a lot of them are just garbage anyway. And it seems like all the crypto news that used to pump coins and stuff like that, they’ve lost their effect, as well.

2019…how do you see the market playing out? There is allegedly institutional investors on the sidelines waiting to put their money in. There’s Bakkt that’s getting ready to launch. The SCC is looking at potentially approving one or a handful of ETFs. I feel like from different conversations that I’ve had with different people that that is going to happen, but it’s a matter of who wants to take the reputational risk first from the big boys, whether it’s Fidelity or what have you. And that could potentially be a source of the next bull run for cryptos. What do you think about that? And of course, you know I’m going to ask you what your Bitcoin price prediction is for the end of next year, so…

James:  Yes. Okay, let’s take the price prediction towards the end of that question. So where I’m seeing things happening is pretty much what… I’m talking to the OTC providers. I’m talking to the people in the know, and I’m spending a lot of time with people who’ve been there, done that. Not the people that have sort of built a YouTube channel last year, sold Bitconnect, and tried to make a lot of money and good luck to them, and then it all failed. And that’s where the major retails that were getting their analysis from YouTube. So I’m looking at it really from the people that have been there, done that, and were part of the real hard slog to get to where they are.

And without question, we’re seeing institutions buy BTC, because they’re buying it from OTC, so you’re not seeing it from the standard response from your standard Coinbases of the world or your binancers. People are buying, and they’re buying big. In Hong Kong I’ve seen some incredible amounts of transactions happening on OTC. People are buying and they’re holding and not worrying about it, because most people see it as just sort of a property scenario, where they buy it now, everyone’s panicked in the streets, there’s capitulations, everyone’s worried – they’re buying it, going, “What’s $30,000? Let’s just sit there and hold it.” And they will sell it and have a zero-cost portfolio soon enough.

So when I’m looking at the industry, I’m actually nervous that the industry gets moved by these backed announcements or the SEC announcements. It’s a very US-centric thing, whereas I feel that blockchain is very much an Asia thing, and the US is sort of dragging itself behind. The adoption is happening here. I was asked this question recently. It’s QR codes are so interesting, and I said, “Well, if you’ve been to China for the past five, 10 years, you would’ve seen it.”

Jay:  Hello.

James:  Every time you use WeChat or Alipay. And so this is not a major thing for us. Where I’m seeing the massive changes now is that there’s a lot of money in the infrastructure and a lot of money in the way banking’s going to change. So when I look going forward, I think that we’re at that bottom of that market. Maybe there’s still a bit of more blood on the streets to happen. I think the Bitcoin Cash SV was a bit of a disaster, but more people have been buying lots of it now. So we may see sort of lows in February, Chinese New Year, around that time, but I think next year’s going to be a slow growth. It’s the long road up.

I do not think — and maybe I’ll be quoted on this — I do not think we’ll hit a high in 2019. 2020, I do. But as we’ve spoken privately about this, I do think Bitcoin is Yahoo of 1990s, and so it may get to 100,000, it may get to 250,000, but if there’s another thing that comes that’s better, that will come and people will jump on that. And people are trying to do that. But BTC, for now, we’re 1995, and Yahoo’s king, and that’s what BTC is.

Jay:  Yeah. Yeah.

James:  It may hit 250. It may hit more than that, but it’s still Yahoo, and we’re still in the ‘90s.

Jay:  Sure. Sure. That’s a good analogy. The one thing I do appreciate, James, about when I ask you privately for crypto advice is that you always tend to give a very conservative estimate. Because I think that a lot of people… You know the phrase “talking up your own book,” because you used to be in finance. I mean, all these pundits that we see, they all are long, massive amounts of Bitcoin, so it’s like, of course you’re going to go out there and say, “It’s worth 250 in five years.” So I always have to laugh about that.

But yeah, I think going forward, it’s going to be really, really interesting to see how the crypto ecosystem evolves. I tend to agree with you. I think that Bitcoin now has evolved into being sort of the digital gold use case more than anything else. But yeah, I mean, it could eventually just become a relic. It could be like that one friend that still has an AOL.com email address.

James:  What’s AOL, I hear on the podcast…

Jay:  Yeah. Exactly. So yeah, I’m excited. I’m excited to see how everything plays out. One more question on Alluva. I think there’s — I don’t know — there’s 200 or so ICOs that are sort of active and live and somewhat legitimate that are being listed on CoinMarketCap and these sorts of those. How many of those are you actually going to have on your platform that can be rated?

James:  Every single one.

Jay:  Okay.

James: We know that there’s going to be some people who use our platform and get good tokens because their price target action’s going to be good. When they look at a — people use “scam coin.” I would call it as a startup that’s never going to work. They’re going to do quite well out of it, but over time, I’ve been looking at charts of where CoinMarketCap has gone for the past five, six years, and I’ve seen XRP still there, BTC. There was weird ones in 2015 or ’16 where that was MaidSafeCoin up in the top ten, but you see the standard ones still there at the top.

So we’re going to list every single coin, and there will thousands and thousands more in the future, but hopefully over time, a lot of those thousands will die. Same thing happens with Oddup where we have — let’s just use Hong Kong, because that’s where we are now — we have a thousand, two thousand, three thousand startups active at this point in time, where most people just concentrate in the top 30, and they’re your big names.

Jay:  Yeah. Absolutely. With Unicorn Hunt and Alluva, can you give us any guidance on timing  and when you’re going to roll out those two parts of your business?

James:  So Unicorn Hunt is live in a beta format. You can go to UnicornHunt.com. The media elements outside that, that’s going to happen throughout 2019, where we’ll be looking at…the TV show is interesting. It’s actually a lot of work. It’s scary at the same time. That’s why I’ve been spending most of my time at the gym every morning just to make sure I don’t look so big on camera.

Jay:  Can you tell us a little bit about the TV show?

James:  Yeah, I can. We’re looking at ultimately looking around the world of how startups work and operate in each part of the world, meeting founders and sort of making it a bit like a travel lifestyle type of show. Now we’re have interesting segments in that, because ultimately, we’re unicorn hunting. we’re looking for the best companies. But one of things that the idea came around and the name came around from being in the Valley on and off and a lot of people being very siloed around Sand Hill Road and 20 miles up and 20 miles south of that space. And going in, there are things happening in China we don’t know about, whereas we want to look outside of China where we see huge growth markets like South America, Africa, Middle East, where there’s some huge opportunities out there where you can find a unicorn hunt and no one will know about it. In two or three years, people are going, what’s that Grab? Or what’s DiDi?

Jay:  Yeah.

James:  And one of those things that was inspired was we wrote a report when we first started Oddup of why we thought DiDi would kill Uber. And I remember in the Valley, people going, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Uber’s number one. It’s going to be. The only problem it has is Lyft.” But they didn’t understand China, and so of course, DiDi became number one and Uber’s sort of… That was a merry Christmas that they had for that one. But one of the things that I think people want to know is actually now being in a decentralized world, there’s lots of opportunities around the world. And the world is growing at a rapid pace. And so that’s where Unicorn Hunt’s going to come out.

So that TV show’s going to be interesting. We’re going to have not just my ugly face in front of you. There’s going to be lots of other beautiful faces, more importantly. But we’re excited about that, and we wanted to make it really good.

Jay:  So you’re probably like the third or fourth person that — and I’m glad you’re actually doing this because… And my business partner, we even talked about this two years ago. We were like, “You know what would be really cool is to do the Anthony Bourdain of startup.” That’s the analogy.

James:  It’s a very nice way to say it. Yeah.

Jay:  Yeah, exactly. Right. It’s funny. We talked about it, and then when I launched this podcast, I was approached by some people that wanted to do a video thing, the same sort of thing. And of course, talk is cheap, obviously, first of all. Video’s expensive.

James:  Yep. Oh, yes, it is.

Jay:  Which I’m sure you’re intimately aware of now, but for someone to actually go out and do this, I think it’s awesome. So I’m really looking forward to seeing the show.

James:  So are we. I mean, one of the things…we always saw Oddup as a bigger company than just a rating tool. It was always a conglomerate of multiple facets of it, and TV was always something that we looked at. And we’ve now gone to TV ads, and you’ll see them in India. You’ll see us on papers and so forth, and one of the things we looked at is ultimately how can we build a brand that appeals to multiple people but it also is something that people can get educated in?

Because my mom asks this question all the time: What do you do? I say, “I work with technologies. I work with computers.” And her response is, “Can you fix my laptop?”

Jay:  Yeah.

James:  We’re still at that stage where a lot of people, particularly the Bitcoin is so far ahead, startups in themselves is they’re just using Uber and Airbnb for the first time, and they’re lucky enough to use Amazon. And so there’s so much education to do. And so I think part of what we do is we see crypto as now we see startups. It’s all education, and people will start using it over the next few years. So rather than a new asset class, it’s just a way of life, and if we can educate people, we will.

Jay:  Absolutely. So Unicorn Hunt is rolling out in 2019. Alluva, what’s your plan with that?

James:  Well, we want to have a huge product launch. I think that’s the key thing. We’re all about the product, and one thing I’ve learned, particularly as I’m watching a lot of other crypto projects, is that they’ve been very big on hype, not enough on action, and we always made the ecosystem about product, building a product. And if the product’s not good, make it better, make it better, make it better. And so one of the things we’ll be looking at is sort of how we can change the investment landscape, how we can make it very easy, sort of the UXs better, but ultimately getting the community as part of that and being a integral part of what our goals are for Alluva.

We’ll launch, we’ll go live early in Q1 2019. People will be able to rate and mine very quickly after that, and ultimately, when we look forward, we want to be very interesting and ultimately people having access to the companies that they rate. What else can they do with that? So I’ll stop there, because there’s lots of exciting things that we want to go to, but we want to find a way that we can make that ecosystem not just about rating but also about participating and being part of a startup’s journey or a blockchain company’s journey.

Jay:  It’s a very, very clever way to pull people into the ecosystem initially, and then if you have that – like you said, the analogy you gave of the airline miles being able to use in different parts – I think it’s brilliant. I think it’s going to be very successful.

James, thanks so much for your time.

James:  Thank you.

Jay:  For coming and sitting with me and talking about your businesses. I have two final questions for you. The second to last one is a bit of advice. I think that there’s a lot of…you mentioned there’s a lot of talent that’s being brought over from traditional banking and finance and this sort of thing are now being pulled into the crypto space, which is a bullish signal for me, because I think that the smart people are making that transition over.

If you had a piece of advice for someone that is trying to get into the space, maybe is allured by an ICO project that they found that is building a decentralized team, what’s some advice that you could give them, maybe some red flags of certain projects they shouldn’t join? Or in general, maybe someone’s worked at Goldman for 15 years and sees the writing on the wall, because I think that everyone has a consensus that that industry’s only going in one direction, and crypto has a much higher trajectory, I think, if you believe in blockchain technology. So a couple of pieces of advice would be great, James.

James:  Sure. If I look at crypto and blockchain projects as I look at startup projects, the first thing I always say to founders is build something people want. They may not want it yet and you may be so focused on it, but look at a problem and solve it. And if the blockchain solution is what’s going to solve that problem, do it.

And the same thing as like when we always give advice about being building an iOS app. Is mobile the right way or should they have a website? And the same thing applies for a blockchain project. But I’ve seen heaps of people getting into this space for the wrong reasons versus the right reasons, and I think the wrong reasons are that it’s all about the money. And that’s when price becomes the issue, and it becomes crypto versus blockchain.

But all the successful companies I’ve seen in the blockchain space, as well as the startup space, have built a product, and people have joined a team and a company where they see a great future with. It’s not going to be easy. Startups are never easy, but over time, they’re going to build something, and at the end of the day, they can look back and go, “I built something.” And that’s one of the things I give advice from. I loved Goldman and JP Morgan and the people I met, but if I look back at one of the worst things, I think, about my time was those meetings that meant nothing now.

Jay:  Right.

James:  And so I spent a lot of hours in meetings that meant nothing, but every single thing for a startup, if you make one small decision, that can ultimately change the game of a company, which could be life-changing. So that’s where I always say that you can make difference. But for young people who are there, I like to say get beaten around by corporate first, because then you’ll appreciate how good a startup is.

Jay:  Great advice. Great advice. Last question is where’s the best place people can find you, follow you, learn about Oddup, Unicorn Hunt, Alluva, James Giancotti?

James:  Well, all those @ symbols on Twitter, so @JamesGiancotti, @Alluva, @Oddupratings. I’m active on LinkedIn and also active on other mediums, as well. Core, as well. People can find it. Don’t be shy to ask a question. I’m happy to help founders, and please, we love feedback from people, and I love also helping founders. You know why? Because I’ve been there, done that, and I don’t want them to make the same silly mistakes I made.

Jay:  Awesome. Well, thanks again for your time, James, and we’re really, really excited to see how you guys grow. We’re definitely going to keep you guys on the radar, and we’ll probably do a follow-up podcast. You could be the first three-peat guest—

James:  Oh, I’m excited.

Jay: —on the Jay Kim Show in a year’s time, because I think that 2019’s going to be a huge year for you guys. So best of luck, and we look forward to seeing how you guys grow.

James: Always a pleasure, Jay.

Jay:  All right.

James: Take care.