WBD690 Audio Transcription

The Bitcoin Cheat Code with Marty Bent & Grant Gilliam

Release date: Monday 31st July

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Marty Bent & Grant Gilliam. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

Marty Bent is a Venture Partner at Ten31, founder of the Bitcoin-focused media company TFTC.io, and Director of Cathedra Bitcoin, and Grant Gilliam is a co-founder and Managing Partner at Ten31. In this interview, we discuss investing in Bitcoin and Bitcoin-associated ventures, including the specifics of investing in Bitcoin mining.

“We think that Bitcoin is an imperative as we transition into the digital age. We just talked about CBDS…it’s either that or Bitcoin succeeds; we get digital slavery or digital freedom in the form of Bitcoin.”

— Marty Bent

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Grant, how you doing?

Grant Gilliam: Good.

Peter McCormack: Welcome to the podcast finally. 

Grant Gilliam: Thanks for having me. 

Peter McCormack: A six-year-old would be a record young person on the show.

Grant Gilliam: Shall we try to get him in?

Peter McCormack: If he wants to come in.

Marty Bent: Say no.

Grant Gilliam: I think what we should do is ask him what --

Peter McCormack: Does he have a fee?

Grant Gilliam: -- ask him what Bitcoin is, or ask him --

Peter McCormack: Or, what Bitcoin did?!

Grant Gilliam: -- how many Bitcoin are there, just to see if I coached him well enough.

Peter McCormack: I don't think he wants in.

Grant Gilliam: No, I don't think he does; he's shy.

Peter McCormack: I think I'm going to have Ben de Waal's daughter on, because I was out at BTC Prague; did you hear about her presentation?

Marty Bent: No.

Peter McCormack: She's fucking 12 years old, right, and Saylor's on.  And they put her after Saylor, which I thought was particularly brutal.  Anyway she's 12 years old and she's backstage and I was like, "You okay?"  She said, "I'm a bit nervous".  I was thinking to myself, "You're going after Saylor, I would be nervous".  And she walked out, a 12-year-old, I'm not joking, she killed it, she absolutely killed it.  It was mind-blowing how good she was and how confident she was.

Grant Gilliam: That's incredible. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so we're going to get her on the show. 

Grant Gilliam: That's great. 

Peter McCormack: There are a few kids in Bitcoin Yeah.

Grant Gilliam: Yeah, that's for sure. 

Peter McCormack: Prince's daughter. 

Grant Gilliam: Prince's daughter, yeah. 

Peter McCormack: We forced my boy to be in a show with Saylor. 

Grant Gilliam: Yeah, that's one of the cool things.  I like seeing people bring their kids around.  Because I've been traveling non-stop for a couple years and I leave New York and my kids are like, "Oh, daddy, you going to Bitcoin work?  Can we come to Bitcoin work?  And I'm like, "Yes, I want to take you to Bitcoin work, I want you to just come.  You're going to sit on your Nintendo Switch the whole time", but it's cool to experience it and see the people and just, they're the future generation.  If it's normal to them, then that's how we can drive success in the future, I think.

Peter McCormack: When you embed them in it, they get it as well.  So, Connor, when he was born, we opened a bank account for him, him and my daughter, and I just put £50 pound in, which I've been doing since 2004, which by the way, if only at some point I'd switch that to Bitcoin, he'd probably be a billionaire if I'd started in 2009!  But just £50 a month.  So, that account has like £12,500 in.  And the rule was, when you finished school or university, it's yours.  

He quit uni a couple of months ago and he just came to me and said, "Dad, can I have my money now?"  I was like, "Sure, what do you want to do with it?"  And he said, "I want to buy Bitcoin".  And I was like, "Okay, deal".  And his mom wasn't too keen on it, but I've agreed with him, what I'll do is, "Whatever Bitcoin you get, I'll top it up to 1 Bitcoin so you can start a whole coin now.  But we're going to teach you self-custody.  You're going to go through all of that and you're going to do it all yourself".  He's opening an exchange account and he's ready to go. 

But yeah, I was quite proud of him, yeah.  I didn't know he was irresponsible yet, put all your money in Bitcoin!  But yeah, he did it.  So, you didn't bring the napkin?

Grant Gilliam: I wanted to, but I had a lot going on.  I've got a newborn, I'm freshly moved, I've got boxes in the garage, it's sitting in the garage, I wanted to bring it.  I think it's a very, I think it's going to be a very cool piece of history. 

Peter McCormack: Danny said you would bring the napkin. 

Danny Knowles: I was convinced you would.  I thought you'd bring it. 

Grant Gilliam: I mean that was the pretty much the only thing I thought of ahead of this discussion was, "All right I got to bring the napkin", but it's just been chaos at my house.

Peter McCormack: Marty's out of the loop here, by the way.  Have you got the photo of the napkin?

Grant Gilliam: I definitely have the photo.  I've got to figure out when we got together.

Peter McCormack: Let me have a look.  It's in Telegram.

Grant Gilliam: Well actually, yeah, it's in our Telegram chat, because I sent it to you saying, "Hey, check out what I've got here".

Peter McCormack: I've got it.  I wonder if I can make sense of it and if it's actually worked.  Was that it?  Was that the entire plan?

Grant Gilliam: Pretty much!  But yeah, when you look at the napkin, you're like, "Well, maybe it's not that impressive", but there was the narrative and the explanation behind it, and also I think there was stuff on the other side too.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think so.  We'll explain it in a minute, Marty.  There's also a stain on it. 

Grant Gilliam: Yeah. 

Peter McCormack: Was that your beer, or my Old Fashioned?

Grant Gilliam: I don't know, but I had to put -- I think I put the block height.  Did I put the block height or did I put the date?

Peter McCormack: You put the date.  So, 12 October 2021. 

Grant Gilliam: Yeah.  It was 2021?

Peter McCormack: 2021, yeah. 

Grant Gilliam: Jeez!  Time really does fly, because it feels like it was probably October of last year. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah. 

Grant Gilliam: It was actually October the year before. 

Peter McCormack: It was October the year before, that was before I'd acquired the club.  It was in that --

Grant Gilliam: It might have even been a different club you were talking about.

Peter McCormack: It was.  It was a different club I wanted to buy.

Grant Gilliam: It's still a cool piece of history.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it was, because it was December that I flipped to the other club.  The strategy was the same, but we were in that bar at the bottom of the hotel.  What was that hotel we used to stay in in New York?

Danny Knowles: I can't remember.  I know where you mean, the one in Midtown.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. 

Grant Gilliam: There's so many, but that one was cool. 

Peter McCormack: It's really cool.

Grant Gilliam: I remember that one, I'd never known about it.

Danny Knowles: Refinery. 

Peter McCormack: Refinery, yeah.  So, for Marty, Grant came to meet me.  He'd seen I'd put out tweets about this football club, and he's like, "I want to invest".  I said, "I don't want money yet", but I said, "I'll explain the strategy on a napkin".  So, I drew it out.  And the way UK football works, or British football works, is the team we've got is in non-league.  So, you have the professional leagues which is the Premier League, Championship, League One, League Two, and there's promotion and relegation.  So, US sport is socialist, a capitalist country has socialist sport, you always stay in the top division.  Well, we're more socialist as a country but we have capitalist sport, this promotion and relegation, it's brutal.  Clubs can fall down the leagues and go bankrupt.  But it does mean you can buy a team at the very bottom and get them to the very top.  And so, I met with Grant to tell him I was going to take this team from the bottom to the top. 

So what it is, these local non-league clubs, their money comes from anyone who comes to a game and any local sponsors they get.  So, you have 500 people to a game, they spend £20, okay, you're going to bring in £10,000, and that means that's the money you've got.  You have three games a month at home, you've got £30,000 to spend on your team, running, whatever.  Then you get national teams, so teams who are maybe in the professional leagues, there's top four leagues, but near the bottom, and they will have people travel a bit further to come and see them.  So, you might have somebody who supports, what's good, like a Brentford or a Norwich? 

Danny Knowles: Brentford are a big side though. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, people will travel a bit further for a national.  Someone might support Bristol but live in London and go and watch them.  And also, they'll get bigger sponsors, they might get a national utility sponsor, like gas or electric.  And then you get the teams who are international, so Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea, Tottenham, they've got fans all around the world, so a large group of fans maybe in Asia, and so that drives your revenue.  And I said, if we get this right, we can have a local non-league team to get all those audiences.  So, we get the local audience because we're new and interesting and they want to support us; because we're the Bitcoin team, the bitcoiners, if I can convince them to say, "This is our team, we do this together", we then have an international following.  And so that gives us a much better revenue model. 

So, we have Gemini, they've been brilliant for us, they're our shirt sponsors.  They've absolutely crushed it for us and that's given us the revenue to do what we want to do.  That's an international sponsor, sponsoring a little, tiny team.  I don't even know what these numbers mean.

Grant Gilliam: Well, every incremental amount of revenue is so meaningful at that stage because I remember when we were meeting, you were talking about, "Well, the players aren't really getting paid, or they get paid £20 a game, or whatever it is.  And payroll, that can be the difference between having a good player and having just someone who's there, a local person who likes to play, and that can be a tremendous driver of success.

Peter McCormack: Well, I would say 60% to 70% of your chance of getting promoted is your budget.  So, you can have no budget and the best manager in the world, and all the luck, you're not getting promoted.  You can have, did I say no budget then?  Yeah, you can have the best budget, but a bad manager, and you still might get promoted.  And so, we've got a great manager and a good budget and we won the league last year by nine points.

Marty Bent: Why would you get promoted if you have a big budget, bad manager?

Peter McCormack: Because a bad manager can put out 11 players and not know how to manage them and they're still so good, they go out and win, they're just so talented.  You might have a guy who scores 40, 50 goals.  And so our strategy is, how do we make sure we have the best budget or a competitive budget in every league?  And that is by building up local support, you know, we went from 40 people a game to averaging 180 last year and three times we had over 300, and so that means your revenue goes up.  Can we get international supporters to buy our merch and come to games?  Yes, we've got that.  And can we get international sponsors?  Yes.

But the impact of that has been incredible because we are a team, a men's senior team, but now we have partnered with a ladies' team, called Bedford Girls and Ladies, we bought them all new kits.  This year, they became Real Bedford Ladies, so we now have 250, no it's more than that actually, it's 275 girls aged 7 to adult, playing in 22 teams, under our name.  We've now got a partnership with Bedford Park Rangers, which is the equivalent on the boys.  If they became Real Bedford, we'd have 700 to 800 people playing under our name in our community, and they're all behind us and they might come to the game.  So, that does our local work, and now we've just got to keep recruiting internationally as well, which is happening.  And lots of weird things, like Sting's son is a Real Bedford fan!

Grant Gilliam: That is interesting.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so I met him and gave him a jersey.  We've got lots of little weird things like that happening.  I still don't know what these numbers mean.

Danny Knowles: Send me the thing and I'll put it on the screen for the video.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, hold on.

Marty Bent: Where are you guys in relation to Wrexham?

Peter McCormack: So, there's four professional leagues, then you go into the non-league.  So, the First Division's step 1, which is the 5th tier.  We start in the 10th, so we're in step 6.  We won that, we've gone to step 5.  But they just won the step 1 and they're going into the professional league, so they're going to League Two.  Most teams, a lot of teams I'd say, when they come out of the national league and get into League Two, they immediately get promoted.  That's the entire business plan for Real Bedford they get immediately into League One!  I think Wrexham will be a Premier League team within a decade.

Grant Gilliam: Yeah, I don't know what these numbers actually...

Peter McCormack: £250, £500?

Grant Gilliam: I think maybe £150 million there was the market, like the end, addressable market of fans, maybe.

Peter McCormack: £150 million?

Grant Gilliam: But I think there's another side to this too, to the napkin that is.

Peter McCormack: It probably makes more sense!

Grant Gilliam: But we talked about it, you laid out the plan.

Peter McCormack: You tried to invest!

Grant Gilliam: Well, I don't know, was I the first person to say I think this is really interesting, I want to invest --

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Grant Gilliam: -- because I heard you on Pomp's podcast, and he's like, "Oh, I'm in, let me know".  You were like, "Oh, I've already got someone who told me that before".  I think that was me.

Peter McCormack: You were the first.

Grant Gilliam: But we had, as we've been getting to know each other over the years, just awesome spending time together.  And I think the grassroots movement of all of this is -- the impact you have on the communities is the most incredible to see.  And I think the idea which you mentioned last night, "Bitcoin has a cheat code", I think that is a really interesting theme that applies to this, that applies to all kinds of businesses.  And when we spent time together, I was just thinking, I love this idea and I'm rooting for you. 

I think that there's a there's a first-mover advantage in this ecosystem in a lot of different ways.  It's like, well, who's the first one to do something like this.  And I know there's like the baseball team as well, but you can only have so many initially because if we're honest, the market, the audience that you're going to draw from that are into Bitcoin, that want to support a Bitcoin team, it's only so big.  And so there are actually 10, 15 different clubs that were all doing this, I don't think they could do it in the same way.  So, I think there is a first-mover advantage to be that namesake. 

It's like people want to make the pilgrimage to Bitcoin Commons, people want to make the pilgrimage to Bitcoin Park or to Pubkey, and there's going to be more of these over time.  But I think the first one has got a big advantage.  And I was just thinking to myself, I'm a huge football fan, soccer fan, I've played, I've been playing myself for 36 years and I want to see it be successful.  I was like, "I'm going to grab that napkin after"!  And so we parted ways and you were going off to meet someone for dinner and I was going back home to deal with diapers or something.  I'm like, "I'm taking that napkin", and right away I messaged you. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, "Where is it?" 

Grant Gilliam: "Guess what I got?"  I'm like, once you make it to the Premier League in however many years, ten years, or is it going to be a little bit longer?

Peter McCormack: That's what I said that triggers people.

Grant Gilliam: I have to figure out a way to preserve it over that time.  I wanted to bring it in, but I'll hold it.  Once you make it, that napkin's going to be yours. 

Grant Gilliam: No, man, that actually stays as yours now, that's one of those things.  So, the interesting thing about it, it is definitely a cheat code, and it's a thing that I've been hammering to people because I'm telling you right now, there's people going to be listening to this podcast, they'll have seen Marty Bent, Grant, the title be like Investing in Bitcoin, or something or other, and then they'll go, "Fuck, he's talking about football again" and they get really pissed off.  And I keep trying to hammer home this message, stop thinking of this as football, think of this as a Bitcoin project.  A bit like when El Salvador announced they were going to adopt Bitcoin, suddenly everyone wanted to know about El Salvador.  But I think there are people who aren't into sports and football, so they have an aversion to it. 

I keep saying, "Forget that.  Look what's happening".  We have a team, which is known as the Bitcoin team in the UK.  So, whenever we have success, we get press towards Bitcoin.  We've had the BBC come, I mean the fucking BBC do not go to a 10th tier football team.  I mean, they care about the Premier League, Wrexham. 

Danny Knowles: Yeah, barely even the Championship. 

Peter McCormack: Barely even the Championship, and they've come down.  We've had CNN in touch, we've had Bloomberg in touch. 

Danny Knowles: You were on my favourite football podcast. 

Peter McCormack: Was I? 

Danny Knowles: Yeah. 

Peter McCormack: Which one was that?

Danny Knowles: The Football Weekly. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah I've done that. 

Danny Knowles: I listen to it every week and I have done for years, and then Pete was on it and I was like, "What the fuck's going on?" 

Peter McCormack: And, the Price of Tomorrow, right?  That's another podcast we're on.  And then we have a meetup before a game once a month.  The first one we had, it was standing room only.  There were over 100 people to a meet up in Bedford.  And we have Bitcoin stuff on our shirt, there's a big logo, people wear it.  And so I keep trying to say, you can hate Bitcoin all you want, but this is a project which is orange-pilling people.  And we do have the pilgrimage.  I was trying to find an email, some guy just messaged me yesterday.  He's like, "We're going to be in the UK in December, we want to come to a game".

For our final game of the season, this is the fascinating bit, I'm going to go on a bit here, but this is the fascinating bit, is that we had a local councillor there who came down, this guy called Jake Sampson and we had this meet up before the game.  We had James lavish there, Lawrence Lepard, Jeff Booth, and James Lavish said, "Who's travelled more than 100 --" what was it?  I'm trying to remember what he said.

Danny Knowles: I don't know, 60 miles, or something like that.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, "-- 60 miles to come to this?" and nearly every hand went up.  We'd had an event the night before, 150 people, and this local councillor was like, "What?  What is going on?"  I spoke to him.  He said, "This is unbelievable".  I was like, "Yes.  Nobody in Europe is owning Bitcoin.  We're trying to do that.  We had 150 people coming for an event.  The hotel, the Swan Hotel, is fully booked out.  They're spending money here, they care about this".  We've now reached out to the Mayor and we've got a response, we're going to be seeing the Mayor talking about our project.  Because bitcoiners are so generous and they give us so much money, we've got all these kids now playing in new outfits.  We're going to build a training ground somehow, which I'll need to talk to you about.  We will build a new ground as well. 

Danny Knowles: This is my favourite picture ever. 

Peter McCormack: Jeff Booth on a roller in a Real Bedford hoodie. 

Grant Gilliam: "A flattening thing"!

Peter McCormack: Ben Arc comes down all the time, he fucking hates football.  So with this, we are orange-pilling a town and we're telling a country about Bitcoin.  So, you can hate football, you can get pissed off every time I talk about it, but we're not going to stop talking about it because it's doing a job.  And that is the cheat code.  The cheat code is, we say we're the Bitcoin team, suddenly there's a swarm around us that wants us to win because they want their team to win.  If you bought a basketball team, Marty, and it became the Bitcoin team, everyone would swarm around it.  And so when people write to me, they're like, "Oh, I really want to get into Bitcoin".  It's like, "You don't need to get into Bitcoin, you need to just attach Bitcoin to what you do.  You like running?  Start a running club, make it a Bitcoin running club, whatever it is you do". 

So, since we've done this, in the last six months I've had two other football teams get in touch to say, "We need your help".  We've had a netball team get in touch, we've had a rugby league team get in touch, we've had two racing drivers get in touch and they're all like, "How do we do this?" because they want the cheat code.  The cheat code spreads it.

Grant Gilliam: Jonathan on our team, Co-founder of Ten31, he literally just wrote a piece called Bitcoin is a Cheat Code; I think that is the title of it.  And he basically used Strike and Fold as two examples of how are they leveraging the positive attributes of Bitcoin and the network effect of it as a cheat code to grow their business, and that's what we're talking about here.  I mean, it's the power of an open network, it's the power of enthusiastic supporters and followers.  I mean, we saw it when we started talking to prospective investors years ago. 

Bitcoin just captures people, right?  Something clicks in their mind, usually, and then they're just they're captured.  All they can do is read as much as they can, listen to as much as they can, learn as much as they can, and then they want to get involved, and then they want to contribute in some way.  And we were hearing this from prospective investors who, they met us, they saw that there was this fund that was going to support the ecosystem, and they're like, "Yeah, we want to support the ecosystem and invest".  But it was more than that.  They wanted to contribute their skills, their network, their experience. 

So, you can look at our investors and it's a very diverse group.  It's family offices, it's university endowments, it's pension fund money, but it's also just high net worth individuals, it's entrepreneurs.  And regardless of what their background was, it could have been there's a physician who was an entrepreneur, founder of a healthcare company, very successful, raised lots of money, VC backed, and he's like, "I have to get involved, I have to contribute my network, my skills".  And so we kept feeling this energy that people wanted to be involved.  And so like, "Well, how do we harness that?"  Do we leverage Bitcoin as a cheat code for our own business?  And how can we open up the network of the people that we have who are supporting us as investors, and let them collaborate with the companies, or let them collaborate with each other, and drive these interactions to where maybe an idea pops from an interaction that they had at an event that we have. 

So, we created this thing, what we call the Ten31 Tribe, which is basically just that.  It started off as just our investors, but then it's sort of widened out to friends and the broader network that are connected to us.  We bring as many founders that we're backing as possible to events that we do, in person, try to do it quarterly, and just see what comes from it.  The old world was walled gardens with VC and we'll say VC, but we don't even like to describe ourselves as a VC fund.  We like to describe ourselves as an investment platform and an investment and support platform for the Bitcoin ecosystem.  And the old world, with traditional VC, was walled gardens and you had these LPs that give you money, and at the end of the year you'll get a tax statement and you'll get some financial reporting to say how the fund's doing.  But the interactions with the companies themselves, no, you're not going to interact with them. 

But what we found is such passionate, enthusiast supporters of what's happening in this space, why not unleash that and see what happens from it, even if it's a deal that happens outside of Ten31? We've had that, we've had some of our investors back companies in the space that had nothing to do with Ten31.  And we look at Bitcoin as a cheat code for that reason, so we see a lot of cool things happening.

Peter McCormack: But you get to rewrite the rules of how you want to do things, because that network effect you have with Bitcoin is great, but also there's that weird thing that you can attach to it, is the network effect of an increasing purchasing power.  And I find bitcoiners are very altruistic, very generous and every four years, they all get 10X richer and get more and more generous.  I mean, look, just a great example.  

Iris Energy are one of our sponsors.  I was chatting to Daniel, I was explaining the project, what's happening.  And I said, "Then one of the cool things is, we have this hardship fund.  So, it's £3,000 for the ladies and £3,000 pounds for the men".  And I said, "That is for any kid who cannot afford to play football", because they have to pay, and some parents just don't have the disposable income to buy them some new boots or for them to pay the fees.  So, that fund exists.  Any kid who wants to play football, their parents can't afford it, we've got that money covered".  He went, "All right, I'll double it", just like that.  That's Bitcoin money, it just seems to happen because I think everyone knows, there is a bit of luck.  We got in, we're glad we found it, and you suddenly got that jump in your net wealth.  Let's do some good, let's spread it forward.  And that's what's really happened with the football team.

I mean, our ladies now, we had a sponsor, Galaxy, get in touch and they said, "Look, we want to support your football team, what can we do?"  I said, "Sponsor the ladies".  They've sponsored us and that sponsorship is buying new kits for 270 kids and means we can pay our ladies.  We'll probably have the best-paid ladies' team in the league, it means we might win the league, but also respectfully, it means the ladies are getting paid, which they should, because they were having to pay to play football.  And so, we're getting to rewrite the script of football, but we're also getting to act entirely in our own way.  I mean, look at you, you're not in a suit, you've got your tribe.  Have you got a tunnel?  Have you seen our tunnel?

Grant Gilliam: No, I don't think so.

Peter McCormack: I mean, you know the whole, "fuck-you money" thing?  What's the point of having fuck-you money if you can't play fuck-you football?  And so, I mean I did kind of pinch the idea off -- that's our tunnel.  And so, when the players, the opposition players -- can you go to our Instagram; go to the Real Bedford Instagram?

Marty Bent: And to that point, Bitcoin allows you to do things differently.  It's been a lot of fun building Ten31.  Like Grant mentioned, the Tribe event, LPs, investors really like going to that, meeting the founders.  And then even within the portfolio, I think where we are in Bitcoin's growth phase, its monetisation phase, allows a lot of our portfolio companies to interact with each other.  There's a lot of symbiosis and a company like Unchained, building security products around multisig, they're able to collaborate with somebody like Coinkite providing the hardware wallets.  And I do think there's something unique.  Yes, we're an investment platform, but making venture investments, there's something unique about Bitcoin in the particular state that the industry's in right now that allows a lot of these companies to work with each other and really add value to each other.

Danny Knowles: I think, I mean I don't know, but I assume that's quite a unique thing as well, like the willingness to work with each other. 

Marty Bent: Very, yeah. 

Danny Knowles: I think in traditional industry, I don't imagine people are sharing secrets, but it feels like Bitcoin is very open. 

Grant Gilliam: Well, it's not too uncommon with institutional investing to try to draw out, use the word synergies, which we joke about all the time because it's just such corporate speak; but Peter says, well, I'm not in a suit, and look at me here, but I know my audience.  But I used to be in that world and I've got plenty of suits, and I used to work at a big-time investment platform.  And that was something that you saw, you saw portfolio retreat.  So, this is not necessarily a new idea that we're coming up with, but I think the value that can be driven from a portfolio of companies in this ecosystem is much more than people generally appreciate. 

We tend to put all of our thoughts and our strategy out in the open, and we've written about this.  I think most people haven't really paid attention to it, but I think in hindsight, what people will see is that actually the synergies, let's say, of a portfolio of companies in Bitcoin that can collaborate in interesting ways and drive value for each other and for other companies in your portfolio, is much different than what you would have seen in traditional investing.  You might have an example of a SaaS-focused, like Software-as-a-Service-focused investor that only does SaaS stuff.  And they look at this SaaS business in healthcare and this SaaS business in IT and this SaaS business in consumer retail.  And they can draw a lot of best practices and leverage a network of people that can provide value across the portfolio, and there's some synergies in that, but it's not the same as I think what we're going to see in this space, where you've got Strike collaborates with Bitnob and countless other examples that we're seeing.

Peter McCormack: I mean, we have that too.  I mean, we had OpenNode provide our payment rails for Bitcoin at the club, we've now gone to CoinCorner for that.  But we don't just find sponsors, we actually work with them.  We want we want Bitcoin companies to come down and build the infrastructure.  My ideal world is in the future, so one of the important things is undersoil heating at football clubs because during January, February the pitches can freeze.  I want to put miners there and use the excess heat to thaw the pitches for the game.  I mean, I don't know if the engineering is possible, but it must be.

Danny Knowles: If you can heat your pool, I'm sure you can heat your pitch.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Marty Bent: I imagine it's just water pipes under the field.

Peter McCormack: That's all it is, they heat them up.  This is our tunnel.  So, we play death metal in there.  So, they turn up and it just puts them into this weird environment.  And we keep getting these things like, "Oh, this isn't how it's done in football".  So I say, "Fuck off, we don't care!" 

Grant Gilliam: I imagine some people definitely get hyped from this.

Peter McCormack: Oh yeah, a lot.  So, our team love it, they love that this is who we are.  And I think some of the away team just turn up and they're all on Snapchat and just sharing it out.

Grant Gilliam: Does the away tunnel have classical music or something?

Peter McCormack: No, that's the one that everyone -- they both go through there.  So, I've been using AI to design the next tunnel for when we do the next stadium.  And so, that's the away dressing room.  So, they just go into this cold, black room that just says, "Know your enemy!"

Marty Bent: It looks like comfortable benches!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we'll leave it like that, even when we get a nice one.  But yeah, look, it's working as a project.  We got promoted, we won the cup as well.  I think I'm confident the men's and the ladies will both win the league this year.  I think we could win it the year after, then it gets progressively harder.  But you know, we've just got to keep growing some more sponsorship and the revenue model and we have Bitcoin.  We've got over 5 Bitcoin in our treasury now and right now that's worth £150,000.  In five years' time, that could be worth £0.5 million, maybe £1 million, you never know. 

Marty Bent: Maybe £10 million. 

Peter McCormack: Maybe £10 million.  So, yeah, it's working.  And I appreciate your...

Grant Gilliam: Yeah, I'm excited.  I'll definitely make it over for a match. 

Peter McCormack: We'll have you. 

Grant Gilliam: And I'll bring a ball boy with me if I can!

Peter McCormack: Definitely.  Well, we're trying to get people over between January and April.  I mean, the best one we'll come to is the last game of the season, because if we won the league...  Anyway, we should talk a bit more about Ten31.  Good name?

Grant Gilliam: Yeah, I think it's a fine name.  I mean, it rolls off the tongue but it's proven to be pretty confusing for most people who are like, "Ten31, is that like real estate, Ten31 Xchange?"  I wasn't a real estate guy, so I didn't know what Ten31 Xchange was.  But everything that we did in trying to think, how do we found an investment platform that supports the ecosystem; how can we align as much as possible with Bitcoin; we didn't name it our names, Andreesen Horowitz; it's not about us, it's about Bitcoin.  So, data of the whitepaper, Ten31.  So, once people hear it they're like, "Oh, I should have known", but most people don't realise it. 

Peter McCormack: It's my birthday, so I knew it straight off the bat. 

Marty Bent: Yeah, we'll know Bitcoin has made it when people associate Ten31 with the whitepaper day instead of the real estate exchange. 

Peter McCormack: There you go. 

Grant Gilliam: If you ever open a UK branch, you have to call it 31Ten! 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, you know that?

Grant Gilliam: Yes.

Peter McCormack: You know we do days properly?

Grant Gilliam: Yes, I'm aware.  I lived in London for a year. 

Peter McCormack: Okay.  Was that part of the revolution that you had to change the dates, change the month and years round when you got rid of us?

Grant Gilliam: Yeah, I don't know.

Peter McCormack: So, what's the investment thesis then?  Because it's known that investing in Bitcoin is hard, right, there's a high failure rate of companies.  There's a lot of companies, I think, have created ideas that were right but too early.  It's hard, so what's the investment thesis?

Grant Gilliam: The investment thesis, I mean we're big believers in Bitcoin and we think Bitcoin is the future.  It's a paradigm-shifting technology that will be the basis of economic value.  When we say the world reserve asset, will it completely displace fiat currencies?  Obviously, we think there's that potential.  And if it's going to increase in adoption over time, then there's going to require infrastructure to be built around it for holders of Bitcoin.  So, it's products and services for people who come into the ecosystem and want to hold it, use it, companies that are bringing utility to the network.  And so, our plan is to support those exciting technology companies. 

Peter McCormack: What's it been like for you getting involved, Marty?

Marty Bent: I mean, it's been incredibly fun.  I mean, I love working with Grant, Jonathan, Matt.  Obviously, Matt and I have a long history with each other with Rabbit Hole Recap (RHR), he's become a brother.  It's something we discussed a lot throughout the years on Rabbit Hole Recap, was juxtaposing what was going on in the Bitcoin space.  Week in and week out, we'd cover all the developments in the open-source projects and within the companies, and then for some reason or another, all the crypto companies were taking a lot of the shine.  And that's something over the five years we've been doing the podcast we've talked a lot about, is how are all these crypto funds raising hundreds of millions, billions of dollars and allocating it towards absolute scams while Bitcoin companies, building actual utility on the only network that matters, can't seem to get funding? 

So, it was a natural progression of what we were doing at RHR, highlighting these good projects, and then individually on TFTC and Citadel Dispatch, talking with these founders and people building out the space and when the opportunity came to join Ten31 and actually go out and support these companies financially, it was number one, a no brainer; number two, a dream come true, because it's literally all we talked about and wrote about for over six years now for me.  And it's extremely important.  We think that Bitcoin is an imperative as we transition into the digital age.  I mean, we just talked about the CBDCs on the interview we just did with each other.  It's either that or Bitcoin succeeds.  We get digital slavery or digital freedom in the form of Bitcoin. 

So, being able to support the companies that are making it more accessible, adding more utility to the network is, like I said, I don't feel like I work a day in my life.  Every day is extremely exciting and I think the work we're doing is extremely important, so it's been great. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but you can see how those crypto funds raise so much money, and why it's hard for bitcoin companies, because the crypto funds or the crypto projects will get in to raise their seed fund and do their IPO at the same time without any product market fit, deliver huge returns for these investors, because they got their allocation early, they could dump on retail, it was the same cycle every time; but with a Bitcoin company, there's no token, you're buying equity in a company that has to deliver a return.  You can see the maths of both and why the VCs were attracted to crypto.  They're struggling now though, right?  There's not much being raised in crypto at all.

Marty Bent: Yeah, it's a pretty big drawdown in money being raised right now.  But to that point too, that's why we intentionally name our funds low-time preference funds, because we go out there and we pitch to investors, "Okay, we believe the quick gains that happen in the crypto market in this first decade are ephemeral, I don't think they're going to repeat over time.  You want to be investing in companies are going to be providing long-term value for decades and that's going to force you to lower your time preference, and really invest in critical infrastructure that's providing individuals utility and access".  And yeah, it's a hard pitch because it's easy.

The crypto VCs, like you said, what LPs want to see is quick liquidity.  So, being able to spin up a token, dump it on retail and return those profits to investors is a good pitch for them.  But again, at the end of the day, I don't think that the crypto industry at large has much to show for it.

Peter McCormack: No, I mean I remember the peak moment for me was when we were looking at, do you remember the Multicoin thing, where their investment in Solana at one point was the most profitable investment by any fund ever.  Was it something like they put $20 million in and turned it to $2 billion?  I don't think they exited, so they're probably massively down again.  It's attractive.

Grant Gilliam: I think that they did exit.  I think they sold a lot, at least some of the founders personally.  So, I mean I think they realised quite a significant amount of carry from that investment.

Peter McCormack: I thought Multicoin were massively down on that one. 

Grant Gilliam: I'm not sure.  But you definitely have seen an exodus of capital that's looking to get into crypto, like broader crypto right now, not surprisingly.  But we used to have this Twitter thread where I would just add to it every time you saw a new fund announcement that said, "Such-and-such raises $1 billion dollars for crypto", or DeFi, or $2 billion dollars or $500 million.  And I would just keep seeing, "Capital misallocation in crypto intensifies".  And you would see just one deal, one NFT platform deal raise $500 million, and that's more capital that's been raised for Bitcoin exclusive venture capital funds combined.  I mean, obviously, there's been a lot of capital that's gone into Bitcoin miners and gone into individual deals, like a NYDIG raising $1 billion dollars.  But the funds that are focusing only on Bitcoin, less than $500 million have been raised, and you were seeing individual deals every other day that was like that. 

So, it has been an uphill battle, but we think everything that you've seen over the last 12 months, 18 months is validation of the strategy of the focus on Bitcoin.  And time will sort of prove that out because the investments that we've made, we feel very optimistic about the outlook, but it's still early.  You got to let those mature and let the companies grow into it.  And as the next wave of adoption comes, we think you'll see a lot of success stories.

Peter McCormack: And in terms of raising, your LPs, do they tend to be bitcoiners already, or is it people who want to get into Bitcoin, who've got capital?

Grant Gilliam: Predominantly, they already were interested in Bitcoin.  We talked to lots, lots of different groups that were broadly interested in crypto and failed pretty consistently with those groups, trying to convince them Bitcoin-only was an interesting strategy.  And it's not surprising because someone who, they're not deep, they don't live and breathe this stuff like we do, they used to diversification, like you diversify in the stock market, you diversify across asset classes; and coming into this new emerging crypto world they think, "Well, let's diversify.  We want to be crypto agnostic and who knows what will be the winner; we should hedge our bets".  And that's often one reason. 

Another reason is they just start to hear the marketing of some of the other things being newer and faster and more innovative and they get drawn to that.  So, most of the time it's rejections.  Like a lot of the, the investors that we have already were interested, we didn't have to convince them about it.

Peter McCormack: So, okay, and did you find, when you were looking at those crypto deals, that will happen, did that kind of spur you on?  Did that give you more motivation?  Were you like, "Fuck these guys?"

Marty Bent: Definitely, I think so.  Because it's incredibly frustrating, and again, like Grant said, we've been validated.  Like the blowup of BlockFi, Celsius, FTX, many of the portfolio companies in our funds benefited from that.  You have FTX blow up.  People realise they need to take self-custody seriously, so they start buying cold cards and they start setting up vaults with Unchained.  And again, this goes back to low time preference as a part of the thesis.  You can look at a Celsius and their model of taking people's Bitcoin and lending it out to the Three Arrows Capitals of the world.  And if you understand Bitcoin as a scarce asset that it is, you understand that that's a terrible business practice to be doing, it's very risky. 

The Three Arrows Capital goes bust on that trade, Celsius is screwed, and that's what happened.  And we made, again, using Unchained, I've said them three times, but comparing, I think they're a direct comparison to a Celsius, where they're doing something very similar.  But since we understand how all this stuff works and understand how Unchained is differentiated from the Celsius or BlockFi via the way they set up the multisig escrow wallet and the collateralisation rates, and the fact that they don't re-hypothecate, we made that bet early, we made it a few times, and it was having that conviction early on, that like, "No, we understand that, yes, BlockFi may be worth --" what was it, $4 billion?

Peter McCormack: $5 billion on their final round.

Marty Bent: Yeah, $5 billion dollars.  Unchained is relatively small compared to that, that peak valuation for them, but Unchained did the same product the right way.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's going back to that low time preference and building companies in the right way, building companies in the right way for a future on Bitcoin.

Marty Bent: Yeah, and while the bull markets are ripping and BlockFi and Celsius are raising rounds of multi-billion dollar valuations, people are looking at us being like, "Oh, you guys are idiots, why don't you get on this?"  We would tell people, "Just wait, something is going to blow up here", yeah.

Peter McCormack: It's the hare and the tortoise.

Grant Gilliam: The other interesting thing about having the type of backers that we do is during all of that chaos last year, I got zero, absolutely zero calls or zero emails from the investors saying like, "Hey, what's going on?  Are we okay?  How's the portfolio doing?  Is our money safe?" which I thought was really interesting.  I mean, I wouldn't hold it against anyone in such a turbulent time to just want to feel like things are okay.  But to me, that was just a signal that they get it, that this is a volatile space.  And by the way, all this carnage happening outside of Bitcoin, seems relatively protected, resilient in our space.  So, that was interesting.

Peter McCormack: Do you think, though, you are or you're becoming more of a Freedom tech fund, I'm taking what Odell keeps saying to me, "freedom tech", than a Bitcoin investment fund, because you are looking at kind of Nostr-style investments, right?

Grant Gilliam: We are; I would maybe just phrase it differently.  I mean, one of the core parts of our investment thesis is that just like every company back in the 1990s became an internet company eventually, right, like the interface in some way, every company will become a Bitcoin company.  That's something that we say.  Now, we definitely want to lean into Bitcoin as this freedom tool, same thing with Nostr, so we are backing companies that are in that space.  But we're also backing companies that originally were neither Bitcoin nor Nostr, they're coming from just different parts of the technology space.  There's one that we're backing called StatMuse. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, Molly was telling me about them earlier. 

Grant Gilliam: That's originally an AI and natural language processing business, but they're coming into Bitcoin.  And so that's another theme that we think is really interesting, is the tech companies that will be the early leaders moving into Bitcoin.  And so, what does that mean?  That means it's hard to define what we are and what we invest in, but the Foundation for sure is Bitcoin, but Nostr is relevant, other technology companies that want to get interested in these categories are also relevant.

Marty Bent: Yeah, and homing in on Nostr as an example, we view it as, again, synergistic with Bitcoin.  So, you go back to the crypto bull market of last cycle and the big theme was Web 3.0, where you create a token for all these different use cases that doesn't make sense.  You just try to thrust a token and say, "Hey, it's just going to work.  The tokenomics make sense here", when really we think the people pushing the Web 3.0 during the last cycle were coming at it completely wrong, where you don't need a token for everything, what you need to do is combine open-source money, Bitcoin, with other open-source protocols. 

Nostr is a great example of that.  It's an open-source communications protocol, and by combining it with the open-source monetary protocol, Bitcoin, you're supercharging both of them.  You're creating more avenues for people to get exposure to Bitcoin, and alternatively, you are supercharging Nostr by creating this monetisation effect.  And this can be applied to RSS feeds, podcasting, podcasting 2.0, like all of our podcasts are on, your podcast as well.  Like RSS, open-source content distribution; Bitcoin, open-source money.  You combine those, that's true Web 3.0.  We are being monetised in a peer-to-peer fashion from our listeners over the Bitcoin Network that is combined with the RSS feed that we send our podcasts out on. 

LSAT now, L402, it's another example, fitting that in the HTTP stack.  Vida, what they're doing with SIP and VoIP, they're putting Bitcoin into these open-source telecommunication protocols.  And so, like Grant said, we think all these incumbent industries are going to become Bitcoin companies or have Bitcoin integrated into their stack, and in the case of Nostr and things like podcasting 2.0, we think that's particularly pronounced when you combine Bitcoin with other open-source protocols.

Peter McCormack: So, there's probably going to be deals out there that you're going to take a look at and they're not Bitcoin companies, they're not using Bitcoin, you're going to recognise that if they were, that could turbocharge or change their business, and you might approach them and say, "Look, we want to invest, but you don't realise it, but you could be a Bitcoin company, and if you did this, here's your new --" it might be a payment service that hasn't adopted Bitcoin, or some kind of app, and you could go to them.

Marty Bent: I mean, I think the convergence of Bitcoin and AI, we're just at the beginning of that trend.  I think, interestingly enough, AI is just blowing up within the last eight months.  And Bitcoin, particularly over the Lightning Network, we were talking about this earlier, we both had Balaji on recently.  One of Balaji's first ideas in the Bitcoin space, when he was at 21.co, was the idea of the machine-payable web back in 2015, 2016.  And back then, Lightning didn't exist, and so the machine-payable web didn't materialise, not only because Lightning didn't exist, but there wasn't really a lot of infrastructure that could plug Bitcoin in. 

But now, fast-forward eight years, not only does Lightning exist, it's matured to a point where there's robust infrastructure, development kits and industry built around the second layer protocol that can actually provide utility to an industry like AI.  So, AI can benefit from Bitcoin over the Lightning Network with gated API calls that really solve a lot of the problems that these AI companies have, and they're particularly capital intensive due to all the energy that they use as well with GPUs, which is interesting that they haven't been called out for that yet.  But if you can prevent chargeback risk by settling these API calls over the Lightning Network, that's a massive increase in the margin for them.

Peter McCormack: Okay, talk me through that.  What's actually happening there?  API calls over the Lightning Network, how does that work?  What's going on?

Marty Bent: So, you essentially basically make an API call to something like Midjourney.  Midjourney says, "All right, ping the API, I'll go do this task".  Now with L402 and LangChain, I believe, is the AI dev kit that people are building on, you basically put in LangChain, "Hey, if you want access to this compute, you have to pay the sats paywall, and then we'll go do the compute and give you the image", and that's much more efficient than paying a monthly fee using a credit card or debit card that come with chargeback risk.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, because I think for Midjourney, I'm paying $70, that sound right?

Marty Bent: Yeah, I think it might be $30.

Peter McCormack: I might have gone for the...

Grant Gilliam: I mean, you used to see, right when some of these generative AI tools were getting released, DALI and DALI 2, and there were these Telegram bots where you could DM the Telegram bot to say, "Create this picture for me", and then the Telegram bot would spit a Lightning invoice to you, and you could pay that.  Someone else was paying for the service, and then they were sort of monetising it.  But it's micropayments for the compute, and the compute is very capital intensive.  And with the Lightning Network now, you can create these new models, which are pretty interesting. 

Obviously, it's very early to see where this is all going to go.  And even talking about how AI is exciting, I feel weird talking about it because that's the hot new narrative.  And all the DeFi bros and the crypto people, you don't hear about Web3 anymore, you now hear about AI.  And so, we have to be careful with that. 

Peter McCormack: I'm all in though.

Grant Gilliam: But I think it's, we noticed a while ago that there's something happening in this AI ecosystem and we started following some of the key figureheads in that space, at least on social media, some of the real innovators that are building some of these applications or tools or companies, and it felt like the way that they were talking about what was now going to be possible and all the activity that was happening in their ecosystem, it felt very similar to this echo chamber that we're all in with Bitcoin.  But it felt like the people, people in Bitcoin weren't necessarily -- it wasn't a narrative that people were following.  It was sort of siloed, like everyone was getting excited about AI in the AI space, this was a while back, and everyone in Bitcoin's not really paying attention to AI.  We just started thinking more about it, and we wrote a piece that talks about some of these implications.  But I think it's going to be really interesting to see how it all plays out. 

Peter McCormack: Well, it delivers value, that's the big difference.  If you think about, I mean I think I'm a bit older than both of you but hopefully not too much older, but if you look at the technologies in our lifetime, I remember pre-internet, I don't know if you guys do, but do you remember pre-internet?

Danny Knowles: I mean, I remember it, I was very young though.

Peter McCormack: My kids don't, my kids don't know a world of no internet.  I remember that.  I remember pre-mobile phones.  You know, when I was at school, no one had a mobile phone.  And so I've gone through internet and seen how it's changed the game on everything; I've seen that with a mobile phone; we've seen it with Bitcoin.  The problem with crypto, the point I went Bitcoin-only, is when I realised I don't use any of it because none of it's delivering any value.  I'll defend that slightly.

I'm out in Argentina next week making a film.  The driver we're going to see, he wants Tether.  That Tether is going over a crypto network, it's not going over the Bitcoin protocol.  He wants Tether, he needs Tether, he doesn't want Bitcoin, it's too volatile.  He needs dollars, it's the best way to get dollars, I accept that.  But outside of digital dollars, crypto hasn't delivered anything.  AI's delivering something.  I'm all in, I talk about it a lot.  I use AI on a daily basis for writing and now design concepts.  I saw a tweet, it was a list of services if you want to build a business, all the different AI tools, Microsoft Designer and another one that builds websites.  It's delivering value, it's making people more efficient, it's making us more efficient.  I mean, we'll get to a point where it can edit the show for us; that's going to happen.  It can write our show descriptions, it can do our timestamps, it can do a lot for us.  That is real value.  That means we become more efficient, so I'm all in on AI.  Scared of it, but…

Marty Bent: I use it every day too.  I use Midjourney for the thumbnails, we use Descript for podcasting.  We put our files in there, it gives us transcripts, it gives us clips, and this is only the beginning.  This is like a bit, we're still at the manual phase, it sounds weird, of AI, I believe.  Going back to the machine-payable web, that idea that Balaji had back in 2015, with AI agents, so the concept of AI agents, you basically give an AI a task and you set it wild on the internet and it can go scrape data, sign into websites, order pizzas, whatever.  Again going back to adding Lightning to this, that is what's missing for AI agents to make them as efficient as possible.  As you load them up, you give them a Bitcoin wallet with an allowance and you send them out on the internet, it's like, "Hey, I want you to get this done, here's your allowance, just go spend the Bitcoin where you need to complete this task". 

Obviously, we're a bit of a way from that end state, but you can see it, it's there, it's clear.  Bitcoin, particularly over the Lightning Network, is the only way that that becomes efficient and scalable at the end of the day, because you can't give an AI your credit card number and have it go wild on the internet.

Peter McCormack: Well, but we're definitely going to go through a period of grifters who are going to have tokens to pay AI bots.  The problem is those tokens --

Marty Bent: Raoul Pal's already pitching it to the bank!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I saw that video!  But the problem with that is there won't be, I know we hate this intrinsic value word, but these tokens won't have some pegged intrinsic value that appreciates.  It will be some token that has a premine distributed, they'll dump, and it will do the same as every other token, go to zero.  Whereas the Bitcoin ones, you know that Bitcoin has a true pegged value which will over time increase.

Marty Bent: Yeah, well I agree that we're definitely going to try that, but I do think we're at a unique point in Bitcoin's development, particularly on the Lightning Network, going back to L402; they built that spec and that codebase to integrate tightly with the HTTP stack, with the internet stack, and from a development tool perspective, I think Bitcoin over the Lightning Network actually has a head start there.  It's going to be much easier to implement something like L402 into an AI project instead of just some random shitcoin that was spun up, some token that doesn't have a developer community around it, libraries around it. 

Again, going back to low time preference, the Lightning community has been building out these primitives for the last five, six years now.  And we're finally getting to the point of maturation where developers outside of Bitcoin can begin to plug into that.  I mean, we talk about a lot how long will we have these cycles where tokens blow up and then explode?  I think this is a bit contrarian in the space and Matt always yells at me, he says, "Shitcoins are going to be spun up forever".  But I do think the maturation of the development tools that are available to people building in the space is at a point where the opportunity cost of going and trying to force a token into something in the open internet is just going to be too much, when you have all these tools that can do it pretty easily today.

Danny Knowles: And if there's thousands of different AI tools that specialise in all different things, you need the network effect of a money that's accepted everywhere.

Marty Bent: You need a standard, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think there's another problem the crypto bros have got as well, which is the crypto token cycle, the pump and dump is getting shorter and shorter, and so you've seen it now where it just became meme coins.  It's like, "Here's Pepe coin, quick pump dump, done".  And so, previously in a previous cycle, you could be convinced like, "Oh, they've invented some new idea, this token's useful", you could hold it for a few months and it can go up in value.  But the cycle's so short now, so many people got rekt,  I just think that model alongside SEC pressure is just making it almost unviable.

Marty Bent: Yeah, and again, we're almost 15 years in, Bitcoin's becoming a brand name, crypto, like it or not, is a brand name, everybody knows what crypto is.  There's going to be pattern recognition that comes in eventually; I mean, it happened to all of us individually.  I started in 2013.  It took me a couple of cycles to realise this is BS.  As we move forward in time, the people that realise that it's BS is going to be larger and larger to the point where it's like everybody realises off the bat this doesn't make any sense.

Peter McCormack: Does the AI stuff worry you at all because there are obviously a lot of conversations around the ethics of AI, consideration for what is going to happen to the jobs market?  The two things on my mind is firstly, my daughter's 13 and we've got your boy here, am I all right to mention that?

Grant Gilliam: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: You know, whatever he's learning at school, the jobs market in 12-15 years is going to be very different.  I don't think we can even imagine what it's going to be like.  So I think about that, I think about hopefully AI doesn't find CRISPR and decide to fuck around with us!  I also think about just the massive change to the jobs market.  We had Jeff Ross in earlier, we were talking about medical use of AI, and he said they're already using it for radiology exams and they're good, they're not there yet, but you'll get to the point where AI will be doing all the consultancy work for radiology.  And so you can see a wave of jobs being lost now with efficiency. 

There are two theses, right?  One thesis is that this is going to lead us towards a more productive, happier society; and there's a thesis that it's going to concentrate wealth into smaller and smaller hands.  You as an investor as well, Marty, I'd be interested in what you both think of that.

Grant Gilliam: Yeah, I try to be optimistic about it.  For sure, significant disruption, right?  You have to think about that as an investor of, where can businesses be disrupted; but these are very powerful tools that businesses can use, individuals, kids can use.  I mean, with mine, we found some pretty cool tutoring things that are AI-enabled tutoring with maths and my son's loving that.

Peter McCormack: Dude, my daughter said they had a chat at school, the teachers sit them down and say they cannot use AI at school, it's banned as a tool for doing their homework.  And I turned around to my daughter and I said, "If you want to use AI, you can use AI.  If that's going to make you more productive and get your homework done quicker so you can do other things, great.  But my rules are as follows.  You cannot use it for solving maths problems because you need to learn the maths your brain needs to be trained", you know, I think a lot of maths is about actually training your brain more than learning how to answer the results, "and also for English, you have to learn to read and write well.  But if you've got to find something in history, you've got to put together an essay, I'm using it for work now, so you go ahead".  So, I've given her permission to break the rules!

Grant Gilliam: Yeah, but you know, job displacement, people were worried about that when the computers were coming out, and there's always doomsdayers, but humans have found ways to reinvent themselves, I think that we will again.  I mean, the really doomsday threat model that people are scared about of eliminating humanity, we sort of alluded to that in the piece that we wrote on Bitcoin and AI, is that maybe one way to think about it is that Bitcoin is the limiting factor on AI, and in this world of digital infinity, where just infinite computing power, what serves as the throttle to the bottleneck, it's Bitcoin's absolute scarcity.  So, there's I think reason for hope in that regard. 

But from an investor standpoint, no doubt I think there's going to cause a massive disruption in value to legacy players that don't figure out how to leverage the technology.  And there's massive opportunity for those that do, which is why we're very excited about the company we mentioned earlier, StatMuse, because they're doing some really interesting things.  And just like what you've seen in leveraging in your life, you can do so much more with less, and you can build companies with much less resources.  And what does that mean?  It probably means you can get to profitability much sooner, which is a big thing, a theme that we think about at Ten31 as well, how can you invest in businesses that can become sats-flowing businesses?  And we talk about a lot the old world of fiat, VC and growth at all cost.  You've got to throw that out the window and now start thinking about actually sustainable business models, and AI is going to be a big tool that we think most of our companies are going to be using.

Marty Bent: Yeah, and I don't buy into the doomerism of AI at all, I'm very optimistic about it.

Peter McCormack: Have you not watched Terminator 3?

Marty Bent: No, but I did recently watch Terminator 2. 

Peter McCormack: You've never seen it? 

Marty Bent: I have seen Terminator 3, but I can't remember exactly what goes on in Terminator 3.  Terminator 2, though, at the end, it's sort of an optimistic note on AI.  But, broadly speaking, not talking about Terminator.

Peter McCormack: You just need Terminator 3!  Terminator 3, the end is when the robots take over.

Marty Bent:  Yeah, but in this context, I talk about it in the context of Bitcoin UTXOs, but I think it applies to AI too, which is Jevons paradox, which is the more efficient you become with the resource, in this case, compute, it's Jevons paradox, it's a paradox because you think you'll use less and won't need as much of it, but I think as we become more efficient with compute, we'll be able to do so much more, and that's the question.  Replacement versus making an individual employee more efficient is the question that's yet to be answered, but I have a feeling instead of replacing jobs, that certainly will replace jobs, and there will be a period of disruption, but I do think it's going to turn people, like your average developer, into a 10X developer.  And then, once you have the average developer turn into a 10X developer, how much more can be built on top of that?  I think we're just on the cusp of, we don't even know where this is going to go.

Peter McCormack: I mean it's always been exciting being at the forefront doing a podcast.  You get to talk to the innovators, the most interesting people.  I guess you accelerate that by being at the forefront of a fund and seeing what people are actually building and getting to invest in it.

Grant Gilliam: Yeah, that's a theme that I've been thinking a lot about recently is just seeing the activity that's happening right now in the ecosystem.  People say, "Well, when was the best time to buy Bitcoin?"  Well, that was yesterday, but the second best time, conceptually speaking, the second best time is today.  But I've been thinking, well, the best time to be investing in the network, actually it wasn't yesterday, I think it is today. 

I think five years ago, six, seven years ago, most of these businesses could not have existed.  You know, Lightning Network wasn't around.  Now the infrastructure that's been built around that, the tooling, there's now more investible opportunities now that we've seen a lot of the flush happen last year with crypto, the liquidity has exited the system, so there's a scarcity of capital, valuations have come down.  We've seen the signalling from BlackRock with the ETF, so the ETF seems like it's going to be coming, whether it's them or someone else.  At some point, that's going to be on the horizon soon, the halving is coming up. 

We go to all of these meetups locally, all over the US, and it's not like a typical bear market that we've seen in the past, where 10, 15 people are showing up.  There's a lot of people showing up.  There's a lot of people building, a lot of really cool companies building stuff.  And I think right now is the absolute best time to invest behind that because more people are coming, more institutions are coming, more capital is going to come in.  And as that happens, valuations will reset, they'll likely come up again.  But the fact that you can build so much more now and there's an interesting time to do it, this to me is an interesting theme to think about.

Marty Bent: Yeah, from a risk-adjusted perspective, having been in the space for 10 years, I don't think there's ever been a better time.  The infrastructure's more robust than it's ever been, there's more developers than there's ever been.  We talk a lot about the order of operations necessary to make Bitcoin successful.  Early days, you need no distribution, you need hashrate distribution, you need custody products, you need good, boring financial products like collateralised lending. 

Now, with the maturation of the Lightning Network, the emergence of other second layers like Fedimint, I think we're finally getting to the order of operations where it's like, okay, we're ready for consumer products, maybe even, and we were joking about this earlier, like what if merchant adoption is driven by AI agents, it just forces everybody, like the meme of merchant adoption that Roger Ver was pushing in 2013, 2014.  Maybe it was a good thing to go after, but the timing wasn't right.  Maybe now, with the culmination of things coming together with the Lightning Network and AI, you can actually force merchant adoption because again, it will drive higher profit margins for these AI businesses.

Peter McCormack: There's an analogy, well, comparison to the internet boom and the dotcom bust, in that there were so many companies that came up with great ideas that weren't ready.  I remember there was one specifically, Boo.com, do you remember them?  They were a fashion retailer and they used, remember Flash, remember the websites built on Flash?  They used that so you could rotate the outfits and check them all out.  But the problem was, a lot of people were still on dial-up or ISDN, so you just had to wait ages for it, and people just gave up.  Pets.com was another one.  All these ideas that seemed interesting at the time, but the infrastructure wasn't there.  The internet was too slow, and so we had the big boom and then the big bust and then the real companies came out of the back of that.  It almost feels like Bitcoin's at that almost similar time, similar kind of epoch within its era. 

Marty Bent: Could be.

Peter McCormack: We'll see. 

Marty Bent: I mean, we'll only know in retrospect, but it does feel like it.  Again, having been around the space for a decade…  And that's the other thing, another massive theme that's going on right now, is that Bitcoin is drawing in a lot of talent from incumbent tech firms and finance firms.  That's one thing I've noticed In this bear market, unlike any that I've seen before, is the amount of people that get Bitcoin, are extremely talented, have built successful businesses, have built successful careers, are jumping ship to come work in the Bitcoin industry, in the bear market, because I think they recognise the risk adjusted, risk profile that exists right now.  And they're recognising that, all right, this is a great time to get into Bitcoin. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and I think, I don't know if you've noticed this, just making a podcast, but I've noticed like four years ago, it was libertarians and Bitcoin maxis, but now it's philosophers, it's macroeconomists, it's lawyers, there's all these kinds of subsectors of people who are coming into Bitcoin to talk about Bitcoin.  Somebody who I would have on the podcast in maybe 2019, who would be a huge show, now has been superseded by a Lyn Alden or you talk about Whitney Webb or these newer voices coming in.  And you can compare that, then there's other people you see, someone like is it George Gammon constantly fighting against it.  And it's all these people fighting against it; they kind of look odd.  I don't know, maybe I have an intrinsic bias.

Grant Gilliam: Yeah, you are seeing people come in to it from all different walks of life.  And, proof of work is just this other theme that I'm just obsessed with, and I think about all the different ways to apply the concepts of proof of work and what interesting findings can you have just observing different things.  And to me, I've thought through this idea of proof of work, of just people coming into the space and contributing their own skills, their own experience, their own network, and how do you maximise the value that you can achieve from contributing your experiences?  And that's doing something that is unique to you, something where you're the best, your skills and experiences. 

My contention is that providing proof of work to the network, we normally just think of that as Bitcoin mining and you're contributing computing power and in exchange, you're receiving Bitcoin as rewards and it's pretty predictable, it's pretty low risk.  You know, based on the market hashrate, the Bitcoin price, these factors, what are you going to get in exchange for contributing that proof of work; but I think you can apply it to anything, to any business or any individual, where it's like, "Well, where do I come from?  I come from the institutional investing world.  Well, how can I leverage my skills and experiences to try to provide value to the network?"  And I think in investing, there's kind of an investment utility curve, where based on the level of risk you're taking, you should be expecting a return to be commensurate for the amount of risk you're taking.  And with Bitcoin mining, as we say, it's predictable, it's relatively low risk because you get your payout pretty quickly. 

But say you're working for a Bitcoin company, maybe that's how you're contributing your proof of work to the ecosystem.  How is that benefiting you?  Well, you're building a network of people in the space.  Or maybe you're getting paid, so that's lower risk because you're already getting paid.  But maybe you're a developer and you're not getting paid, but you're just contributing to the open-source movement, you're still building skills, relationships that I think over time, you will be able to monetise in some way.  It's the same thing if you're investing in a business, that's one way to contribute proof of work.  Maybe you're an advocate to policymakers, maybe you're helping build a community. 

You can start to think through this that there's lots of ways to contribute to the network with varying degrees of risk, varying time periods over which you might actually receive the rewards from doing that, but I think Bitcoin is this network that will provide you value over time based on the work that you contribute.  And so, how do you maximise the rewards that you're going to get for whatever work you can do, or you want to contribute something that's unique to you, because that's where you can deliver, you can achieve the best pricing for what you're delivering.

Peter McCormack: What about your old finance friends?  When they saw you flip to do this Bitcoin thing, how did they react?  And are they starting to tap on the door again and say, "Yeah, maybe I..."?

Grant Gilliam: I'd say it was mixed.  One of the more memorable moments, it was early 2020 and everyone was locked down with COVID, and I was working on a team that was mainly based out of Europe.  I was in the US helping lead the efforts of this longer-duration fund that we had, but the rest of our team was in Europe, and I was in New York, and we were trying to figure out how do we maintain a culture when everyone's working remotely?  Well, let's do a book club.  And everyone got to submit their request for what book should we read, and I was like, "Should I suggest The Bitcoin standard?  Is there some career risk?  How are people going to perceive me suggesting something like this?" because in the private equity world, which is where I came from, people weren't really thinking about Bitcoin.  It's unlike say a hedge fund, for example. 

If you're at a hedge fund, you might actually be looking at, how do you allocate capital across different asset classes?  Should we be investing in stocks and bonds and real estate?  And you're weighing different asset classes off another.  In the private equity world, we had a private equity fund, we were buying companies, we were investing in companies, we were holding them for five to seven years or ten years, and then we were looking to exit.  And it didn't matter what macro environment were we in, we were in LPs, pension funds, allocation into owning private equity into companies, and we were expected to invest over good times and bad.  And people in that space didn't really think about, "Well, what's happening in these other asset classes?" 

But I was interested in it.  I suggested, I decided, you know what, I'm just going to suggest The Bitcoin standard.  In the end, no one was interested in it, so we read a great guy, The Great Gatsby instead.  And at the time, Bitcoin was at like $4,000, and I just was thinking to myself, "Man, these guys, they lost a huge opportunity to just read it".  But when I started investing in Bitcoin companies right around that same time, early 2020, after having just been completely intrigued by Bitcoin for a few years.  But it just was opportunistic that there was a couple of opportunities to invest in some companies.  And then for me, it was a light bulb moment.  I want to just keep doing this and keep supporting these companies while I was still working this job. 

So, that was how we were getting Ten31 off the ground, was we were making some investments, but I still had my gig at this investment platform.  But then fast-forward a year-and-a-half, late 2021, when I finally told them, "I'm going all in on this", it felt like we had struck a nerve and there was the opportunity that we thought there was going to be, and the time to go is now, a lot of them thought that makes a lot of sense, that seems really exciting.  I've kept up with them, and they're definitely cheering me on, but most people, I find it interesting because they're still not really paying attention to it, and that tells me that it's still very early.  We continue to be in this echo chamber, but most people aren't really paying attention.  Even though Bitcoin is the best performing asset this year, and of course it's down from the highs, but relatively speaking, you would think that more would be paying attention, but I don't think that --

Peter McCormack: When it hits $100,000, they'll be back.

Grant Gilliam: Yeah.

Marty Bent: But even the ones that are paying attention, like BlackRock, perfect example, you have Larry Fink on Fox Business News or CNBC last week like, "Bitcoin's digital gold, we're going to provide a fund that gives people access to digital gold", he's completely ignorant to the discussion we just had about AI and combining open protocols.  Many people in traditional finance just view it as digital gold, as this asset that will just sit there and do nothing.  For many people, it will, they'll just use it as a savings account, but on the other side of the asset is the peer-to-peer network and the layers above it that enables so many things that were literally impossible before Bitcoin existed, and people still haven't grokked that yet.  Even the TradFi guys that are coming into the space right now, like Blackrock, don't understand what's going on. 

Peter McCormack: It's interesting how every cycle, there's a driver in it, like Saylor was of the last cycle with his billions invested in Bitcoin, and I did not have BlackRock down as coming in and being this narrative lead, which it could be.  And look, I think we all agree, fuck BlackRock and don't buy BlackRock and buy Bitcoin and self-custody, because we all agree that it's going to happen anyway and they're going to buy a fuck ton of Bitcoin on behalf of other people and issue their shares.  But that narrative shift that it's giving, it's given that approval to anyone who's involved in the investment space to go and buy Bitcoin and it could be a massive driver over the next two, three, four years.  Good for you. 

Grant Gilliam: Yeah, 100%.  I felt like when I left, it was the perfect time.  There was an opportunity to try to build something that I thought was lacking in the space but also, not just could I not have done it several years earlier because the interest wouldn't have been there from capital allocators, but at that time in my career, I wouldn't have had the credibility with institutional investors to be able to do that.  So, I always had this itch, and it was something that my dad told me, "Be your own boss".  He was his own boss, and that has stuck with me for, who knows, when did he first tell me that?  I don't know, 30 years ago, 35 years ago maybe, but it stuck with me, and I always felt like I loved investing, I loved building the relationships with the companies.  And especially after you've invested, because we would invest in a company and own it for seven years, and I would build the relationships with the management team, and then you'd sit on the board and you'd work with them. 

Most of the time, you thought you knew what you were investing in, but it wasn't until afterwards that you really knew, because you'd go through a diligence period.  But afterwards you find out, "Okay, what if we just buy?  And then, how do we succeed as a team, this partnership?"  And I just loved it.  I loved the relationship aspect, but I felt like I didn't fit in perfectly to the culture that we had there.  And I always had this inkling that there was something else out there for me, and then the timing was good to go launch it after having 15 years under my belt at one of the blue-chip investment platforms.  So, I don't regret having been in that world for as long as I did, or being a suit for that long. 

Peter McCormack: In terms of raising capital, I would be tempted to be an LP in a Bitcoin fund, but there is always that kind of, will the fund outperform Bitcoin?  You know what questions come.  But there is that altruistic side that exists where I'm like, part of me doesn't give a fuck because you want to be part of this, you want to help, and if the fund's successful, it's driving your other Bitcoin stack anyway.  How do you approach that side of things?  Because there is a chance if you just put the entire fund in Bitcoin, it would outperform.  But does it feel like you're there for more of a mission, or have you just got a very good argument against what I said anyway?

Grant Gilliam: Well, I think an overarching point I would make is that investing in companies is inherently more risky than buying Bitcoin.  And so, if you price the investments in the companies the right way, they should outperform because they should be priced to compensate you for that risk.  And for sure, if you're investing in an early-stage company that's a $5 million valuation and they go on to be a billion-dollar company or $500 million company and you make 100 times your money or 200 times your money, will that outperform Bitcoin, that individual investment?  Probably over the time period that we're talking about with an investment in a company.  The trick will be, can you do it across portfolio?  Undoubtedly, you're going to invest in some companies that will be wipeouts. 

I think that in the Bitcoin ecosystem, relative to your traditional venture capital portfolio, traditional venture capital portfolio, you might have, say there's 30 companies, you might have two or three that are just absolute home runs that make a fund.  And then the rest, maybe they're split.  I don't know what you might say, but let's just say they're split 50/50, like some are middle of the road and then another 50% of those remaining just are complete wipeouts.  I think in this space, you might actually have a higher percentage of absolute home runs just because of the tailwinds that we're riding, being so early in the space.  And I also think that you're likely to have a lower percentage of complete wipeouts.  Undoubtedly, there will be some and it won't be because they chose the wrong market, it'll be because they didn't execute the right way or team dynamics or whatever. 

I certainly think that you can outperform Bitcoin.  Certainly, if you're investing really early stage, you should be able to outperform Bitcoin on a company-by-company basis.  Every investment that we do, we have a pretty sophisticated approach to how we construct the portfolio and how we make our decisions.  As we go through the diligence process and trying to figure out, well, which opportunities are we really excited by, and what is our plan right now, at least as of today, for that investment?  And we document it.  We create our own investment memos that outline how we view the opportunity, what are the risks, what are the attractions, evaluation, expected returns.  And that's important because then we can look in hindsight, how was our investment judgment at the time?  What did we get right; what did we get wrong? 

But part of those investment memos, every single one is, "Here's what we think the expected return is going to be, and here's how we think it will perform relative to Bitcoin".  And we have to believe that there is that opportunity.  Will you do it?  That will be how we prove that we make money for people and why they should pay us to invest capital for them.

Peter McCormack: Do you think there will come a time where you're raising funds in sats, investing in sats, valuing the companies in sats and the fund closes in sats?

Marty Bent: I mean, certainly at some point in the future.

Peter McCormack: Because then that kind of changes the whole thesis anyway in that you're not having to think about the dollars.

Marty Bent: Well, I mean that's something we focus on and really try to home in on with prospective portfolio companies, is do you have a sats flow strategy?  Are you actually building Bitcoin on your balance sheet?  Because again, we do think we're in the beginning of a transitionary phase from a fiat standard to a Bitcoin standard.  If Bitcoin is going to be the monetary standard of the world, you should be figuring out how to acquire and hold that as an individual and as a company as well.  So, in terms of finding companies that can outperform Bitcoin, if they're providing utility for bitcoiners and getting compensated in sats that they're able to hold on their balance sheet over time, we think that is an attractive levered play.

Grant Gilliam: I mean, sats are part of the cheat code, right?  That's part of the cheat code for any business, is actually holding sets on their balance sheet.

Peter McCormack: Well, we do that.  I mean, the podcast, we have a sats flow on the podcast.  Any sponsor who pays in Bitcoin, we just leave that in Bitcoin.  The football team, any sponsor or any shirts we sell or burgers, we leave that in Bitcoin and we don't touch that.  And like I said, the football club's up to 5 Bitcoin now from zero.  So, yeah, I get it. 

Grant Gilliam: Well, that's part of as we talk about this idea of generating some sort of sustainable, sats-flowing business model, it's because of the inherent deflationary nature of Bitcoin.  Over a long enough time period, of course there's volatility along the way, but the purchasing power of Bitcoin increases, so what are the implications of that?  That means that in the future, let's just say to earn the same amount of Bitcoin, we all experience it buying an amount of Bitcoin.  It used to be for $1 you could get 5,000 sats; now it's $1, you can get 3,000 sats or 3,333 sats.  Over time, to earn the same amount of Bitcoin, because let's think about it in company terms, it's harder, right?  It's going to require more dollars or more work, and so there's a trade-off there. 

Think of it another way.  For the same amount of work, you're going to earn less Bitcoin in the future.  So, if you're trying to earn the same amount of Bitcoin, it's going to be harder to earn in the future than it is today; or for the same amount of work that you might contribute today versus in the future, in the future you're actually going to earn less Bitcoin.  So, what does that mean?  Well, that means that it really highlights the opportunity cost of foregoing Bitcoin that you could have earned today.  If you decide you wanted to pour it into marketing dollars, well, why would you do that?  Well, you think you're going to earn a return on it.  And so, I'm going to forego a certain amount of Bitcoin that I could earn today to hopefully earn more Bitcoin than I'm giving up today.  Well, that's actually, if we know to earn more Bitcoin in the future is going to be harder, it's really going to highlight the opportunity cost of the deflationary nature of Bitcoin. 

So, I think the implications are that it forces companies to think a lot more about cash flow and generating profits and generating the sustainable business models.  Out of the gate, companies in this space, startup companies, most of them are not profitable, obviously.  We have a couple in our portfolio that are, and it points to a future where you have more of these companies that generate profits, and then what do they do with the profits?  They could reinvest them back into the business, or maybe it's Bitcoin dividends.  We have some that are doing that as well, which is really interesting.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  The way I think about it in the sats that we hold, especially the football club is a great example, is that does there come a time in the future, maybe two cycles' time, where that 5 Bitcoin is worth £1 million, £10 million; can I leverage that for the infrastructure projects I want to do without selling it?  Can I go to Unchained and borrow pounds and do what I need and still hold that?  And if I can, well, that essentially becomes another cheat code for the growth of what we're doing.  That's just my hope with it, but I don't want to give out the dividends. 

So, yeah, the final thing, so your sectors, Lightning companies, Nostr, some Freedom Tech, AI, and British non-league football clubs, what other?  Like if someone's listening and they're like, "Fuck, I want to pitch to you guys", who do you want to hear from? 

Grant Gilliam: Another big category we haven't talked at all about that we invest behind, which I think is unique, is the mining stuff.  I think we may have seven or eight different mining-oriented investments.  Marty's front and centre on a lot of those, whether it's proprietary mining companies that are doing off-grid mining with stranded gas, or it's energy infrastructure for companies that are in the oil and gas fields interested in mining Bitcoin, so some of the picks and shovels around that, but we've done a lot in mining and that's an area that we think is really interesting.

Marty Bent: Yeah, again, going back to the order of operations of mining, being on the early end of that order of operations, I think Ten31 has been one of the few funds, if not the only fund, that hasn't been afraid of the mining industry.  I think that's because we realise that this intersection of the energy sector and the Bitcoin mining industry is happening in real time now.  Once that happens, the value that's going to accrue to Bitcoin miners, whether that's Prop miners or people building on infrastructure, is going to be pretty insane. 

Right now, in the mining sector, infrastructure companies that can actually build rack space and build out electrical infrastructure to actually plug the ASICs in are really attractive, especially in the middle of the bear market with a bunch of distressed assets out there.  ASICs, prices being where they are, we think it's a great opportunity to be deploying into mining, particularly behind operators who've been in the space for a long time, because that's the one thing with the mining industry, we saw that last cycle very particularly, was that a lot of people see Bitcoin mining and are like, oh, we just plug in these computers and we make a shit ton of money.  That's not how it works.  I've been in the mining industry for five years now, and there's a lot of hard lessons that I've had to learn over the five years.  And when we're allocating into the mining space, that's what we're looking for, is people who have been through it, they understand the cycles, they understand mining. 

Talk about timing, in the mining industry, timing is particularly pronounced where you really need to be deploying capital and building in the bear markets and being conservative in the rip or roaring bull markets and --

Peter McCormack: Not taking stupid risks. 

Marty Bent: Yes.  And so understanding, my experience having been in it for a while, I think that suits us pretty well to be able to look at the mining landscape and allocate accordingly.

Peter McCormack: Love it. 

Grant Gilliam: Mining is the lowest barrier to entry, I would say, of any of these types of businesses.  Anyone can go buy a machine and plug it in.  So, the number of pitches that we would get saying, "Hey, we've got great relationships with the ASIC manufacturers and we've got low-cost energy.  And here, by the way, our team, we've got finance people and energy people", there's a lot of those because it's just low barrier to entry.  We did some stats on the number of opportunities we looked at.  I mean, round numbers, we've invested in about 30 companies.  We've reviewed probably 500 to get to that 30, so it's actually, relative to venture outside of Bitcoin, that's, I'd say a pretty high hit rate on the number of companies that made it into our portfolio relative to what we reviewed. 

But then if you broke that down by industry, say mining, the percentage that we did was much lower.  We got seven or eight in there, we probably looked at, I don't know, 100 mining-oriented investments, so much lower percentage that we've done.  And oftentimes, it really is just about the people.

Peter McCormack: And if companies are listening, though, because they might be like, "Damn, I want to be a Ten31 portfolio company", how do they get in touch?  Who do you want to hear from?

Grant Gilliam: Well, we're pretty easy to get a hold of because we're all on social media.  We've got a website, you can find us there.  Feel free to reach out. 

Peter McCormack: Man, honestly, Grant, Marty, I love what you're doing with this.  You built a great team, very cool people, great investors.  I'm aware of obviously some of your investments, very cool.  I love it, man, I just hope you continue to crush in.  If, in our little humble way, we can do anything to help, always reach out because we would always do anything we can to help.

Grant Gilliam: Sounds good.  Looking forward to Real Bedford adding to our list.

Peter McCormack: Maybe yeah, fingers crossed.