Strategic Investing in Blockchain Technology
Hamiz focuses on operations, risk management, and overall strategy, the growth of his firm called Plutus21, and he’s focused on all things, investing in, especially alternative strategies across multiple, multiple asset types, he has been involved as a principal investor in deals totaling over $50 million on behalf of us as partners and family capital.
Growing up in Pakistan, he saw the effects of economic and political instability firsthand, and given this experience, he has motivated him to understand the many problems faced by the developing world and is confident that blockchain technology will be an important part of the solutions.
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Brett:
I’m excited about our next guest. He focuses on operations, risk management, and overall strategy, the growth of his firm, by the way, it’s called Plutus21, and he’s focused on all things, investing in, especially alternative strategies across multiple, multiple asset types, and in fact, he has been involved as a principal investor in deals totaling over $50 million on behalf of us as partners and family capital. Growing up in Pakistan, he saw the effects of economic and political instability firsthand, and given this experience, he has motivated him to understand the many problems faced by the developing world and is confident that blockchain technology will be an important part of the solutions. Please welcome to share with me, Hamiz Awan. Hamiz, how are you doing, sir?
Hamiz:
I’m great. I’m great. Thank you for having me.
Brett:
For our listeners getting to know for the first time, would you give us a little bit more about your background and your current focus?
Hamiz:
Born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan. Now living in Dallas, Texas, we’re trying our best to make sense of the alternative asset landscape and invest on behalf of our partners in alternative strategies such as blockchain assets and other venture capital strategies.
Brett:
Excellent, by the way, you can learn more about him, Hamiz Awan, at Plutus21Capital.com, that’s P L U T U S 21.com, and before we dive into our topic today, which is strategic investing in blockchain, blockchain technology, I want to take one other step back and help our listeners to get to know a little bit better. When you’re growing up back in your, grade school days, or high school days, I want you to go back to those days. I believe we’ve all been given certain gifts, be given to us to be a blessing help to others. Some people call these strengths and superpowers. I believe in their gifts, and they’re here to be helpless to help poor people. I’m curious, what are those one or two gifts that you believe you were given? And how does that help, how do you help and bless people today?
Hamiz:
I think I got entrepreneurship back early on. I started my first small business and my brother, we were 1012 years old, and we never looked back since then, and we really think that a lot of the problems in the world can really be solved by putting people behind, really tough problems and getting them to think about that every day and work towards those solutions, and most of the times these solutions are coming from startups. I’m a big believer in the social change that startups can bring to entire countries, entire societies, and I’ve been a big, startup founder, myself a big supporter of startups, and now an investor in startups.
Brett:
Being an entrepreneur in belief in the spirit of someone starting something from scratch and solving the world’s problems. Is that a fair summary? Absolutely, absolutely. Now let’s dive right into the kind of the secret behind Plutus21 Capital and strategic investing in blockchain technology. Here’s what’s the biggest secret or the first step to understanding how to strategically invest in blockchain technology.
Hamiz:
Nothing we talk about is investment advice. But we see the blockchain space from a very different lens than most people do. I believe, and I think a lot of the conversation that happens around dinner tables or even around Investment Committee, workrooms, is all focused on the price of different budget assets, and I think that’s the wrong approach. The conversations you’ll have are whether bitcoins $40,000, today are $20,000 today, and that really doesn’t make a difference. Because if you’re in a secular trend, if you’re in a long-term adoption trend, then short-term price movements are quite irrelevant to the long-term story. I believe that either you understand the long-term adoption trend of blockchain technology or you don’t, and if you don’t understand it, and don’t appreciate it, then you should not be participating in the market. It’s highly volatile, very dangerous if you don’t understand what you’re doing, and so you should only do it because you understand the long-term disruption that the technology can have.
Brett:
Let me see if I encapsulate that. The first thing is shifting the conversation in the mindset from a price versus trends and versus understanding the business are the value behind the blockchain technology. Is that a fair summary?
Hamiz:
Yes.
Brett:
Let me ask you the second question. We’ll let’s just go to the second secret. What’s the next step? Once you shift from focusing on price to understand the value in business and what it’s going to do now with the second part to investing and blockchain technology.
Hamiz:
We believe that the number one, thing that we’ve learned over the last few years of doing this is that adoption is everything. It that’s true, even from, traditional technology companies. The reason Uber has value is that because they have the best application or the best technology, it’s because they have the most users and the most drivers using their platform. That kind of competitive advantage is even more pronounced on a blockchain network. Because the technology is open source. Anybody can copy-paste the technology and use it as their own. But what is your main durable competitive advantage? Is not how great your technology is, but how many users you have and how many sticky users keep coming back.
Brett:
It’s the adoption, and what is Uber been able to do to attract more users and more people use their platform?
Hamiz:
Uber has done a great job at sort of going across the world going against regulation in many spaces and showing users the value of their platform. They’ve created jobs and times when countries needed jobs, like the COVID. The pandemic, they have given users access to services that they never thought was possible, and one of the important things to understand about companies like Uber is, people usually underestimate them throughout their lives. When people started thinking about Uber as an investment, they probably thought, the total addressable market here is the size of the taxi market. But what ended up happening was because Uber made that transportation easier, cheaper, and more accessible, they actually expanded the market for taxis, people that never took taxis before takeovers now, and so a lot of times, it’s very easy to sort of forgetting that these markets are not just the traditional markets. But a lot of times, when you add technologies to it, you actually expand the market far beyond the traditional competition.
Brett:
That makes sense. I think of something even like a blockbuster versus Netflix. I imagine there are more people watching consuming content today, because of the ease of access and how friendly it is. That’s growing the pie versus just taking from the first summary so far?
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