Our crypto, AI or decentralized apps and other black joint projects starting to break
through your decision selection. And I was really fascinated by what you said at the
beginning, you know, in the introduction about how what is starting here now has
actually been very calm, has the liquidity overseas has actually been a little easier
that way. Can you talk about that assignment again, or the kind of, Yeah, I mean
right that because it's someone who hasn't I mean looks at just these say the US
market I've had no idea about that. Yeah, I mean we um, I Came to Silicon Valley.
I don't know to do a speech in about 2008 2009 And I was talking about e -payment
systems and e -commerce and how shopping malls are gonna get wiped out and banks
would start losing money And everybody looked to me like I was crazy But to me
that was normal. I stopped carrying cash and credit cards in about 2005
cryptocurrency back in 2012 -2013 over in Asia and we were raising money via issuing
tokens from about 2015 so we've been doing fundraisings digitally now for nearly 10
years in a way that hasn't been allowed here because of the regulations always
significantly restricted and it's game -changer in terms of raising money for high
-risk projects in high -risk It's like the emerging markets where we operate. If
you're doing a $5 million fundraise for a small business in Southern Africa, that's
just not possible through conventional fundraising. But if you're issuing a token,
you're going out to Joe Public, to billions of people around the world through
social media, with a big caveat saying, "Look, we're gonna give technology for
farmers to be able to grow food. Chances are you're gonna But you know, do you
really care that much? This is a way of getting good stuff done It's it's an
incredible efficient way of doing things which I think ultimately will come here And
it'll change the way a lot of fundraising is done Appreciate that anyone else was
Okay, great the question is enter
Yes, Simon, can you tell Tell us about some of the token products that you're
working on.
Yeah, I mean, it varies from very small high risk to physical infrastructure.
So the US has already started with, sorry,
with token isolation of real estate. So you've seen REITs effectively getting
tokenized. But one of project we're doing on at the biggest scale now is building
power stations in places like Africa and warehouses where we build 50 to 100
warehouses issuing a token so that you've diversified the risk and given liquidity so
it was effectively securitizing in future cash flows. How much turnover,
I mean like let's say someone invested in that, I mean, sorry, just curiosity sake,
How does someone get out, how much turnover in the actual token or how much
liquidity is there really like overseas in that way? It's like doing a normal share
issue here. I mean, if you go out and you market it and you actually work hard,
you get an equity, you can sit on NASDAQ, but if you never do any PR and never
marketing and you've got a boring story, you don't have a equity. So it's all down
to the quality of the company. If you've got a company that's continually raising
money doing things, then it gets liquidity. If it's something like the tokenized real
estate, obviously there's less liquidity because people don't tend to turn over real
estate that much. Gary and I were talking earlier about the secondary market as a
liquidity source in the US. Do you mind? Yeah, it's growing and growing and growing
and we can look to none other than the federal government for encouraging a private
markets because public markets are over -regulated and too complicated. 10 years ago
when we started investing, later stage companies were marketing their securities to
people like Fidelity, Susquehanna, and those securities were so complicated nobody
could figure out what it was. So therefore you couldn't invest in a later stage
company because they were too complicated. You wouldn't have the information. Now
what's happened, you can see with companies like Epic Games, SpaceX, is they have a
very small or zero preference stack, so it opens up the market to anyone who has
dollars to spend. And not only that, there's a growing list of brokers now in the
dozens, where maybe 10 years ago there was a couple and you can go buy SpaceX
tomorrow, you call up a broker in Toronto and off you go. And that's something new
and that's one of the reasons why value continues to be grown in the private
markets and that's why it's important for family offices to participate in private
markets that's both on the debt side and equity.
- Oh, sure, Isaac. - Yeah, this quickly, obviously companies are staying private longer
and people want their money back. So it creates opportunity for secondaries,
but you know, again, I think it's gonna be an interesting few years just in terms
of who raises a second fund or a third fund, what valuations end up being on the
secondary market side, is there's a lot of integrated, interesting components going on
just from secondaries to new funds being raised and liquidity. So we'll see what
happens. - Great, just one further comment on that, 'cause I think the second resist
is very important, particularly if the markets do come off. But I think if you look
at what's happening in the digital space and then track back to the financial
markets history. So you used to have the stock exchange highly regulated, all the
securities laws, and then people came up and said, "Hey, why don't we do options
and futures because it's not regulated?" So you had then the options market getting
set up in the 90s and the liquidity started there. Now, it didn't replace the
conventional market, it was the new products alongside it. And I would see digital
as a I'll say, it's a new way of doing financial tools,
making money, trading stuff, which will run alongside the existing financial system.