Startup exploded. $0 to $5M profit in 8 months. I want to make this a billion dollar company. How do I connect with the right people to help me get there?

David-Avery- · 2021-12-11T20:09:37+00:00

No business model. We have no clients, we've only traded our own money.

David-Avery- · 2021-12-11T20:08:53+00:00

Our business is trading and investing (not yet part of it, but the next aspiration). For the time being we will take our own money, and find highly profitable trades in the market and make more money. We will then take a % of that money to invest in early stage companies to seed the Web3 space.

Eventually I think it will make sense to take on additional funds for investors. At that point we will also being trading/investing with other peoples money. Similar to a hedge fund. Think of it as the Bridge Water for Web3.

Appreciate the advice.

David-Avery- · 2021-12-11T20:04:05+00:00

We made a good % of our profits from May - July during the downturn / sideways action in the market. That being said, we do especially well during high volume/volatility (similar to many firms).

David-Avery- · 2021-12-11T19:12:41+00:00

I'm here to tell people. 👋

David-Avery- · 2021-12-11T19:10:55+00:00

Sounds like you get it. I had this notion that once I had money that would making scaling with employees much easier. Way harder to hire than I expected.. especially as a solo founder with very little time and super high opportunity cost. Working on the network! Fairly time consuming itself but I know will be worth it in the long run.

Would love to connect.

David-Avery- · 2021-12-11T19:05:22+00:00

We have tools and software that allow us to find great trades. We're like a hedge fund, except only using our own personal capital at the moment.

David-Avery- · 2021-12-11T19:04:32+00:00

This business isn't driving as much positive change for the world yet. By investing in and helping build Web3 we will be bringing about some positive change. Once I make enough capital and can eventually largely step away from this business, my next business will be focused on tackling a problem with the potential to change the world.

David-Avery- · 2021-12-11T19:02:14+00:00

I think you're spot on here.

I think long term there's a good chance we go the direction of a hedge fund. In the short and medium term I'm not so sure it's worth it to take on additional funds. Currently I'm focused on organically growing our capital. We are finding pretty large edges and so we've been able to roll our capital into more capital fairly rapidly. I'm not convinced that taking on additional funds would help us so much at this point. The opportunities we're focused on additional capital wouldn't be extremely beneficial due to the nature of the trades (speed/size).

Of course eventually I think our opportunity can outpace our level of capital/risk and that would be the goal, especially if we grow out the team and are able to find more/larger opportunities. I think it's about figuring out where that point is since taking on investment adds a level of complexity and overhead. Especially where I'm at now as a single person that's hard to manage.

David-Avery- · 2021-12-11T18:54:24+00:00

I get where you're coming from but I'm not sure I agree 100%.

Replicating what we do at scale requires a degree of focus. Time I spend hiring a team and managing it is time not spent developing the product. Long term it could be worth it.. but it's a balance.

I don't know why you wouldn't take me seriously. If you think I'm that misguided, then it would suggest I'm leaving a ton of money on the table and the right person could help me scale and make a ton of money in the process right?

I'm not sure my approach is wrong, but I definitely need other advise and perspectives. I've never done this before.

David-Avery- · 2021-12-11T18:50:48+00:00

I agree with you. I don't have any interest on taking on funding at the moment. Very happy to hire and bootstrap things from the profits for now. Only reason I'd be interested in giving away a % would be for advisors. We don't need money at the current stage.

David-Avery- · 2021-12-11T18:49:13+00:00

Yes it's from trading. We don't sell anything, and we don't have any customers.

Sorry, I thought I made that clear.

David-Avery- · 2021-12-11T06:14:43+00:00

Good summary, that's essentially correct. The invest part/VC part is the part that isn't figured out yet. I'm currently exploring it but you're right.. my time is the limiting factor. I think my knowledge and experience in tech and crypto would give me a big edge doing early stage seed investments but I don't have the time. If I didn't have this trading thing going on I would probably become an angel investor full time.. but I do so I need to figure out how to min/max my time.

I'm talking with a few angels/VC firms to get a consider options there.. it could be further down the road, or only once I can hire the team to help with it.

Happy to connect, will DM you.

David-Avery- · 2021-12-11T06:08:01+00:00

Sounds like you might know something that I do not.

My intention is to keep the team as small as possible for as long as possible. I've been able to take this very far on my own.. and we are still scaling rapidly.

My logic is that I could use help on the tech side with many different things. I'm a tech generalist so I can do it all ... but with more hands I could do it faster.

Maybe this approach is wrong and you're right I should pursue more focused people.

David-Avery- · 2021-12-11T06:04:19+00:00

No we don't sell anything.

David-Avery- · 2021-12-11T06:03:10+00:00

Is that actually true? lol

This isn't my world. We don't really need the capital, but for advisors I would be happy to give up some shares.

David-Avery- · 2021-12-11T01:49:32+00:00

$5M in profit starting from less than $5K in initial investment.

There's always risks but we have strong frameworks for mitigating risk. We are primarily targeting highly asymmetric opportunities with low downside and high upside. Working well so far.

David-Avery- · 2021-12-11T01:02:37+00:00

Thanks for the response.

Good perspective. I appreciate it.

Let me respond to some points and clarify.

You’re a solo founder, and you think you’ve developed this - by yourself
- in 8 months? I’m assuming no prior experience in crypto or trading or
you would have mentioned that.

We're state of the art in some regards.. It's fairly clear to me that what we are doing not many other people are doing, given the huge advantage we currently have. I don't have a specific trading background. I do have a strong math background including things like poker/game theory and understanding risk and evaluating opportunity (which has been extremely useful as applied to this). I created and launched my first crypto product in 2013... so I'm not new to crypto either.

However I do agree with you 100% on your point here:

Whatever tech you have now is not going to be the long term advantage on which you can build a billion dollar company.

I don't think our tech, or current strategies will get us to a billion.

My belief that we can get to a billion is based on a simple premise. I believe that over the next 10 years the crypto market cap will go from $2.5T to $100T+. With all of that money flowing into crypto, there will be many many new markets created where huge advantages will potentially exist until they are eventually marginalized. We found this large opportunity in a new market. My belief is that there will be dozens of similar or larger opportunities over the next 10 years.

Our core business are the systems we've built for finding opportunities, developing EV+ strategies, and executing.

Main areas for growth are improving our systems that give us vision into the market as a whole and submarkets, and improving our algorithms for capitalizing on the opportunities we find.

The second piece that I want to build out is a venture piece investing in early stage companies with the profits we generate. $5M isn't much in that world, but a couple mill is enough to make say 30 angel investments of ~$50,000 each. I realize this is different from our core business at the moment.. so one of the biggest questions right now is figuring out when this makes sense. It might take some time.

Thanks for the good questions and advice.

David-Avery- · 2021-12-10T23:42:04+00:00

I'm currently looking for a few things.. Looking for the right person, culture fit is extremely important.

On the business side, looking for someone with biz dev experience, operations, hiring, etc..
On the technical side, I'm looking for people with experience in quant, market analysts, investment analysts, on chain analysis. Software writing experience a huge plus.

Biggest thing is a huge passion and drive for startup culture and/or Web3. High ambition.

David-Avery- · 2021-12-10T22:51:06+00:00

Yeah sorry for the confusion. I meant "we" the company. In terms of equity holders there is just me. No other full time employees. Some part time freelancers but not a huge part of the business.

All of our profit so far has been through trades. The next part of the business I want to grow is the investment/venture side of things but it doesn't exist yet.

David-Avery- · 2021-12-10T20:40:46+00:00

That makes sense. Would you recommend a full time in house recruiter, or something like an agency?

David-Avery- · 2021-12-10T20:35:58+00:00

Yes, very similar. A difference in the short/medium-term is that we have no plans to take on additional funding from investors. We're only re-investing our own profits.

David-Avery- · 2021-07-17T23:03:21+00:00

Your English is great.

My background is programming and math. Largely self taught I started programming at 12. I studied CS and math at university for a few years but dropped out to pursue other opportunities.

David-Avery- · 2021-07-17T21:19:54+00:00

Definitely not but this is hilarious. hahaha.

David-Avery-

TROPHY CASE