CEOInterviews.AIThis Crypto Strategy Is So Simple You Won't Believe It Makes Money - Haseeb Qureshi

H

Haseeb Qureshi0:00

In my time in this industry, there have been these dark moments, these dark nights of the soul. You have to look inside. You have to ask yourself, why do I actually believe this? Because everything is moving against me. The entire universe is conspiring to say, 'See, you're an idiot.' You have to believe that something much bigger, much longer term is happening, of which this is one temporary snapshot.

I

Interviewer0:18

In hindsight, it looks obvious, right? But it was not. I mean, Haseeb Qureshi, the managing partner at Dragonfly, a leading crypto venture firm backing digital asset startups. He's a respected investor and technologist in the web3 ecosystem.

H

Haseeb Qureshi0:32

There's so many people I know who came into crypto at the same time that I did who didn't make money. How is that possible that you can enter the industry when Bitcoin and crypto and all this stuff is so low and still not make money? The answer is that you just didn't do the obvious thing which is stay in the market. Just stay in the market. As long as you stay in over a long enough time horizon, you will make money. It's basically guaranteed. But people don't do that.

I

Interviewer0:52

What does Bitcoin look like when it reaches equilibrium price?

H

Haseeb Qureshi0:55

Saturation looks like Bitcoin is very boring. It looks like young people don't talk about Bitcoin anymore. That's something their parents do. That's how you'll know it's saturated. When you are kind of cringe for telling your kids about Bitcoin and they don't even know about it, that is when you're like, 'Okay, we've now crossed the chasm to the point where Bitcoin no longer feels countercultural. It no longer feels like taking a risky bet. It actually feels like the thing you're supposed to do.'

I

Interviewer1:15

Why are you actively defending Ethereum and Solana, putting on your VC hat, and giving hope to people who lost it?

H

Haseeb Qureshi1:24

It's a good question.

I

Interviewer1:29

Hi everyone. This is the little bit that I know none of you like that can help us make a huge difference for this show and we want to take it next. 71% of the people who regularly watch When Shift Happens have not subscribed. And so all I'd ask you if you want to make a huge difference is the following. If you've seen this show before and you like it, help me, help my team, hit the subscribe button and we'll continue to build this show for you. Thank you.

H

Haseeb Qureshi1:55

So, I just do it this way. Very easy. I have contact. So, I don't know how many studios now.

I

Interviewer2:00

Yeah, pretty easy.

H

Haseeb Qureshi2:01

Yeah, much easier. You outsource everything.

I

Interviewer2:03

No, it's nice. I mean, when we're in New York, we always book the same studio for our chopping and block show.

H

Haseeb Qureshi2:08

Where do you go?

I

Interviewer2:09

Um there's this place, I don't even remember the name. It's on Canal Street. Um they're just super consistent. I don't remember their name, but they have nice studio, good lighting, very professional, and the main thing is just like it was called WTF Studios.

H

Haseeb Qureshi2:24

Oh, you know them?

I

Interviewer2:26

Nice. No.

H

Haseeb Qureshi2:26

Okay.

I

Interviewer2:27

I always go to this place called Melrose Podcast Studio in New York.

H

Haseeb Qureshi2:31

I've been there before. I know on what's that?

I

Interviewer2:34

Avenue B.

H

Haseeb Qureshi2:36

It's more like Lower East Manhattan, I think.

I

Interviewer2:39

Yeah, I think we have recorded there once. I think like if we do it on short notice, sometimes we just grab whatever we can grab. So it's much much better in real life.

H

Haseeb Qureshi2:47

Yeah. Way better in real life.

I

Interviewer2:49

So much better.

H

Haseeb Qureshi2:50

So much more energy.

I

Interviewer2:52

Yeah. Even when you don't have no energy like we don't have today.

H

Haseeb Qureshi2:55

Bam. It's there. It comes back. True. It's easy.

I

Interviewer2:57

Like or if the other one has more energy than you, you just like match the level and

H

Haseeb Qureshi3:00

That's right. That's right.

I

Interviewer3:01

Whereas online it's like

H

Haseeb Qureshi3:04

Yeah. Wait.

I

Interviewer3:05

Another Zoom meeting.

H

Haseeb Qureshi3:06

Yeah. I know. It's seriously a Wi-Fi problem.

I

Interviewer3:10

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Somebody drops in the middle of it.

H

Haseeb Qureshi3:15

So, what what are we talking about?

I

Interviewer3:18

Well, you going to surprise me.

H

Haseeb Qureshi3:19

Yeah. I mean, I'll surprise myself, too.

I

Interviewer3:21

Okay. All right.

H

Haseeb Qureshi3:24

More uh

I

Interviewer3:25

Okay.

H

Haseeb Qureshi3:26

More organic.

I

Interviewer3:27

I like that. Feel great.

H

Haseeb Qureshi3:29

I feel good now. How do you feel good? How do you feel in life?

I

Interviewer3:32

How do I feel in life? Uh tired, man. Very tired.

H

Haseeb Qureshi3:35

Why? What happened?

I

Interviewer3:36

There's a lot of stuff going on. I mean, obviously the market itself, but that's honestly a small part of it. There's just been a lot of stuff going on internally. Um, there's been a lot all the [__] that people don't see.

H

Haseeb Qureshi3:47

Yeah, exactly.

I

Interviewer3:49

They think it's just fun job, fun job. But

H

Haseeb Qureshi3:52

no no it it's well the other thing too I was just chatting with somebody that like among so I think most people they think of VC as like a very gentle job that you take the summers off you know you like you do an investment and then you wait for 10 years right what it is

I

Interviewer4:08

yeah it's like it I mean there's some people do that and I think those people are bad VCs I think those people like they they they lose to us

H

Haseeb Qureshi4:16

because we outworked them

I

Interviewer4:17

and I think the you know somebody was just telling me that like relative to all the other VCs like I am super responsive. I like jump on the phone very easily. I I just I'm constantly doing stuff. I'm constantly out there and um that's just kind of the way it's kind of the way we work at Dragonfly. Um, and that's why we have the right to win in a lot of these cases is honestly because we outwork people

H

Haseeb Qureshi4:42

and not everybody does that, especially not for this many years,

I

Interviewer4:45

you know, and like there's all this quiet quitting stuff if people are that, you know, Kyle Samani quitting Multicoin and all these OGs are leaving crypto and

H

Haseeb Qureshi4:54

what's your take on that?

I

Interviewer4:56

What's my take on that? Um, I think a little bit of it is overstated. So, there's always people quitting crypto.

H

Haseeb Qureshi5:03

Like, I mean, I I just wrote this tweet that uh I've been told four or five times this week by different people that they think this sentiment is worse than the sentiment after FTX collapsed, which makes no sense.

I

Interviewer5:16

I think it's complete [__] Complete [__] It's just total recency bias because, yeah, it's happening right now, so therefore it's worse.

H

Haseeb Qureshi5:23

And it's like, no, you don't remember what that was like. And how many people do you think quit after FTX collapsed? You just don't remember them. You don't

I

Interviewer5:31

How many people had not even no choice because they lost everything. So they had to quit.

H

Haseeb Qureshi5:35

Exactly.

I

Interviewer5:37

Industry. Exactly. And like all the people who came in the industry for stuff that never came back anyway. They did not stick around and pivot into some new thing that continued to work in crypto. They did a lot of metaverse stuff. They did, you know, the web3 gaming. They did the consumer. They did all this other stuff that never came back. They all left the industry. Yeah,

H

Haseeb Qureshi5:54

you just don't remember them because you've written them off in your mind. Um, but so the idea that like, okay, this is unique that people are leaving the industry. No, people leave the industry every time prices go down. It's normal.

I

Interviewer6:05

But the other thing too is that, yeah, it there's also a normal tenure to people's careers is that somebody who's been in the space for 10 years, it's normal for them to move on, especially somebody, you know, like Kyle who's made, you know, god knows how much money. M

H

Haseeb Qureshi6:19

he's obviously very very successful VC built a huge multi-billion dollar platform for him to move on is just not crazy that happens in every industry you know there's a lot of VCs who built a VC firm and they leave after 10 years um so you can you can read into it and tell yourself a bigger story but it's also another point that I made is that there's a big difference between the pioneers and the settlers they're always different it's like a law of human nature the people who push their way out west to go find California and to go populate the new world are not the same people who will eventually build the towns.

I

Interviewer6:56

It's a very different psychology, very different mentality, right? Same thing of, you know, the first 10 employees at a startup are very different than the 50th employee and the 100th employee. It's a different kind of psychology that goes into that person, especially the thousandth employee. Totally different than that first or or 10th employee.

H

Haseeb Qureshi7:13

So that's normal. You should expect that. That's part of winning.

I

Interviewer7:18

You know, the the guys who were in the first uh batch at Google who helped build back when they had no idea what they were doing are not the same people who build, you know, uh you know, Google shopping or Google Drive, you know, it's just a very different kind of of of builder. And that's happening to us in crypto now. And that's normal.

H

Haseeb Qureshi7:38

How do you last?

I

Interviewer7:40

How do you last? Um I think you have to have more to prove. I think for somebody like Kyle, right? I mean, Kyle obviously very very successful, he doesn't need more money. I mean, I don't know, maybe he does. I don't know. I don't know what his lifestyle is like. Um, but I would suspect for Kyle that at a certain point, it's not really about the money. It's about having something to prove.

H

Haseeb Qureshi8:04

And if you're Kyle, um, I would assume that you felt like you've proved yourself. You felt like everybody doubted you. You know, Kyle, we were just talking about FTX. Multicoin is one of the biggest investors in FTX. That was their near-death experience was after FTX collapsed and their one of their biggest investments, most successful investments went to zero, became discovered as a generational fraud.

I

Interviewer8:26

And Solana, which was their their darling went all the way from 200 plus to $8 and they wrote it out and they believed that they were right when everybody else is wrong and they got vindicated. That's got to be an incredible crowning career achievement, you know? I don't know what that feels like, but it must feel pretty [__] good to feel that level of I proved that I am the best investor in the space, you know? And to leave after that, I'm like, yeah, I get it. I get why you'd leave after that. You know, if you do if you if you get if you get a couple rings on your finger, like I don't think anybody can begrudge you deciding, hey, you know, I think I'm done with this game. The best drug is not uh the money made is I told you so.

H

Haseeb Qureshi9:12

Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And Kyle's had plenty of opportunities to um to feel that. So, and if he feels like, hey, he wants to go play a different game or a bigger game for that matter. Um I think that's totally fair. I don't think it's it's that meaningful of an indictment on crypto

I

Interviewer9:29

except in so far as crypto has grown up.

H

Haseeb Qureshi9:32

It's it's evolved. It's we're playing a bigger game now, but it's also a more mature game and it's just different.

I

Interviewer9:39

You mentioned recency bias. What are some other biases that for investors are trying to trick our brains but actually are not helpful at all?

H

Haseeb Qureshi9:53

Um, that's a good question. Um I mean I think as an investor the most insidious is status quo bias which is the preference or the expectation that the status quo is going to continue because you know if it if it wasn't resilient why is it not why is it the status quo uh today I think it's harder to find people who are very status quo aligned because the the the mood in all of technology is that everything's changing. You know like I think the AI revolution has really gotten people feeling like oh my god anything could change whereas I think just a few years ago there was a sense that you know maybe nothing ever changes

I

Interviewer10:38

that you know there was this all this talk about the great stagnation you know Peter Thiel very famously had this piece about how there's so much innovation in bits but no innovation in atoms I think we have broken through that malaise to some extent you know now there's all this sense about oh longevity and and um you know CRISPR gene editing and we've got AI now, we've got drones, we've got quantum, we've got um you know nuclear reactors. It does feel like all of a sudden there's this sense of movement again

H

Haseeb Qureshi11:07

in science and in technology. And that's really good. That's very very healthy for society. Um but still, I'd say the most common thing that you see that's a failure mode among investors is not believing that things can really change.

I

Interviewer11:19

Quick one. I want to thank our partners who help us make this show possible. Thank you, Trezor. my favorite cold wallet to store my Bitcoin and crypto and make sure I sleep well at night. If you want to sleep well at night, too, you can order your Trezor wallet with my promo code WH10 and get a 10% discount. Check out my Trezor link in the description down below. Big thanks to my good friends at Bitwise Asset Management for backing today's conversation. Bitwise is a global crypto asset manager with 11 billion in client assets and more than 70 crypto solutions. That includes ETFs, index funds, SMAs, custom option strategies, staking vaults, and more. However you want to invest in crypto, the experts at Bitwise have you covered.

You spent a lot of time in the Silicon Valley.

H

Haseeb Qureshi12:09

Mhm.

I

Interviewer12:11

What did you learn there that you could not have learned anywhere else?

H

Haseeb Qureshi12:14

Oh man, it's hard to even describe. It's like it's it's not propositional knowledge. It's not like this set of facts that you can't learn anywhere else. It's a way of operating, a way of thinking that Silicon Valley uniquely has. There's so many cities around the world that talk about we want to be the next Silicon Valley. And almost anytime I hear that, it's always a joke.

I

Interviewer12:35

Mhm.

H

Haseeb Qureshi12:36

Like, you know, I remember uh you know, in Germany, uh people tell how can Berlin become the next Silicon Valley? And it's like, dude, you're so not even like don't even start. Because the thing about Silicon Valley that's so unique and I think it's really only ever been replicated in probably two places. Um I think it's been replicated in China and it's been replicated in Israel.

I

Interviewer12:58

But very few other places can figure out how to build this. And the thing what is the this that we're referring to number one is celebration of failure is that failure is normal and it's not pathized in any way in Silicon Valley. Right? Right. In Silicon Valley, you can fail upwards. And in most places, this is unheard of.

H

Haseeb Qureshi13:19

In most places, they would tell you, 'Yeah, yeah, it's good. You can fail.' But actually, people are like, 'Uh, you're a failure.' Exactly.

I

Interviewer13:25

You're a failure. Right. Exactly.

H

Haseeb Qureshi13:26

That's right. People feel like, 'Yeah, we can kind of celebrate you, you know, we can create give grants and whatever all this stuff.' But the reality is you're taking a huge amount of career risk if you absolutely go do a startup. And especially if that startup fails is a pock. Why did you go leave your great job at, you know, Deutsche Bank or whatever or SK Telecom, right? Why did you leave this great job in order to go start a startup?

I

Interviewer13:53

Yeah.

H

Haseeb Qureshi13:53

And um this mentality obviously is the wrong thing. It's obviously the wrong way to create a vibrant startup ecosystem. Um the other thing about Silicon Valley that again a lot of people don't understand is that it's extremely high trust. M

I

Interviewer14:08

like it is not despite the fact that it's in America and America is a classically litigious society. Um there's not a lot of litigation that goes on in Silicon Valley. There's not a lot of people suing each other. There's a lot of people getting into big fights. And the reason why is that we kind of understand is that it's this bubbling cauldron of ideas and there's going to be people stepping on each other's toes. There's going to be people stealing each other's ideas and it's okay. M

H

Haseeb Qureshi14:32

it's okay because it's for the greater good that we all just face in the same direction and build stuff and not worry too much about the small details whereas a lot of other places you know like you want to you want to take a look at my startup you got to sign an NDA and if you do this thing I'm going to sue you and I'm going to do this I'm going to do that it's like people just get extremely myopic

I

Interviewer14:52

about the business of building the future

H

Haseeb Qureshi14:56

and very clearly if you want to build the future you have to move fast and you have to be very trust driven you have to believe the right thing is going to happen and that the people around you are not out to screw you. Um, and I think the last thing that Silicon Valley gets right that other people get wrong is that it's extremely incestuous and people people often ignore this part of Silicon Valley. So, one one thing about California is that non-competes are not enforceable in California. They're illegal. You cannot make somebody sign a non-compete in California. Now in New York, in Boston, in you know whatever, in certain any other country, non-competes are not just enforceable. They are the norm.

I

Interviewer15:37

Is that you leave this company, you sign this document and you cannot go work anywhere else for, you know, a year, two years, three years, whatever it is, right? Which basically just takes a lot of talent offline. It it it makes it people strongly disincentivized from leaving the companies that they're already at. And Silicon Valley understands from a global perspective it's actually better like you know why are they doing this the answer they're doing this because they don't want trade secrets to leak they don't want people to take information transfer from this company to that company and Silicon Valley understands it's better for all of us on the whole even if individually my company might get hurt if somebody takes knowledge from my company and goes and takes somewhere else it's better for society for that information transfer to be extremely efficient right look at the AI labs all the AI labs are in Silicon pretty much to the last one except for the ones that are in China. And we once upon a time thought, man, there's going to be one company that cracks AGI.

H

Haseeb Qureshi16:33

And when they do, they're going to have such a runaway advantage that nobody's ever going to be able to catch up with them and they're going to be this mega corp that oversees the world and only rich people are going to have access to their models and blah blah blah blah. And here we are three years later and all of the labs basically are at the same frontier, right? They all have the same capabilities and and the models are all free. Literally, you can use every single one of these models for free.

I

Interviewer16:59

And why is that happening? Why are these things not insanely expensive given how expensive they are to create and how incredibly valuable they are? Why aren't they why aren't they more expensive? The answer is competition.

H

Haseeb Qureshi17:11

Absolutely.

I

Interviewer17:11

And why is that competition happening? It's happening because all these labs leak like sieves. is that everywhere in Silicon Valley, engineers are getting together, coffee shops are going on walks, they're going to house parties and they're just telling each other exactly what they're doing. They're just telling each other all their trade secrets, which means that knowledge disseminates very quickly across Silicon Valley and everybody's doing the same stuff.

H

Haseeb Qureshi17:33

Everybody's immediately catching up to, oh, do you see that Google extended their context windows? Do you see these guys are doing this training technique? See these guys are doing that? And they all learn from each other and what do you know? You have multiple labs all with equivalently capable models. That is Silicon Valley in a nutshell. would not happen anywhere else in the world.

I

Interviewer17:51

You compare crypto to tech a lot because you have the Silicon Valley mindset and you're the guy who is always freaking bullish which

H

Haseeb Qureshi18:01

thinking long term, right? And big picture.

I

Interviewer18:04

That's right.

H

Haseeb Qureshi18:04

And I love those type of people.

I

Interviewer18:09

There's not many.

H

Haseeb Qureshi18:10

Yeah. And I was in Silicon Valley when I interviewed Aishal from Electric Capital and bunch of other people. Yeah.

I

Interviewer18:18

And they have this

H

Haseeb Qureshi18:19

what we try to do on this podcast.

I

Interviewer18:22

There's all these media platforms where that are very timely and this is the latest drama and all that stuff.

H

Haseeb Qureshi18:28

We don't do any of this.

I

Interviewer18:29

I try to filter the signal from the noise. And it's kind of hard because when crypto is doing well, there's so much noise on all the [__] that we should not look at.

H

Haseeb Qureshi18:42

And when crypto is not doing well, like now people are all angry and there's a lot of noise and and they kind of lose track of like where are we going and what are we doing here.

I

Interviewer18:54

But there's a few people like Abishal, like you who have like this greater picture. So I think uh it's uh it's great to explore like these kind of uh mental frameworks and mental mental models to understand better like to give hope to people.

H

Haseeb Qureshi19:14

Yeah.

I

Interviewer19:17

Why do you compare crypto to tech so much?

H

Haseeb Qureshi19:21

Crypto is tech. It's literally technology. I mean Bitcoin is software that people run on their computers. Everything that we built in the space is software. So now it doesn't necessarily behave like software companies do. There's obviously a difference between something like a Microsoft and Bitcoin or Ethereum or or AI. Um, but at the end of the day, I think the there's an enormous amount of lessons that we can learn from the technology industry that are directly applicable to crypto.

I

Interviewer19:52

Things about learning what makes for effective teams, how technologies get adopted, what the uh, you know, growth curves, retention curves need to look like in order for stuff to be sustainable. That all comes directly from the tech industry. At the same time, crypto is not just tech. Crypto is also about money. It's also about society. It's also about governments. So, there's an enormous amount that one needs to learn from these other domains as well in order to really have a complete picture of crypto, right? So, it's not just about tech. You know, we've seen the dot-com bubble and dot-com crash, right? Dot-com bubble and dot-com crash was about inflated expectations, but it was also about finance, right? It was also about money and capital flows. And of course, we can see very clearly crypto is very deeply about money and capital. And if you don't understand the financial element, you're not going to see the whole elephant. So I think the answer is that yes, tech is extremely informative. And not everybody in crypto has that perspective, especially if you're a trader, especially if you have, you know, just kind of your pure financial markets player, you're not necessarily going to have that vantage point.

Go ahead.

H

Haseeb Qureshi20:56

Absolutely. No, no. And for me it's so frustrating to be in this industry where I mean because it's about money there's all these traders, right?

I

Interviewer21:08

Yeah.

H

Haseeb Qureshi21:08

But they don't understand, right? Like or or they're in it for the wrong reasons or they're in it for their own reasons. And I'm like, how can you how can you do all these kind of smaller thing and get angry all the time? Like I don't understand.

I

Interviewer21:28

Yeah. I look, there's a there's a great line by David Hoffman um that he says the point of crypto is not to make you rich. The point of crypto is to set you free. And that is a is a deep insight. At the same time, I also don't want to pathize the people who are in crypto because they want to make money. I mean, I want to make money. I don't think there's anything wrong with trying to make money. And if anything, the philosophy of crypto is this philosophy of freedom and liberty. And of course, liberty is the liberty to make money. It's a liberty to do what is in your own self-interest. It's completely fine. There is no industry and there is no market that has ever required people to act against their self-interest.

H

Haseeb Qureshi22:16

I don't think the, you know, very often when people see that things are going wrong in crypto, they claim that, oh, it's because someone got greedy, because Binance got greedy, because Winter got greedy, because the entrepreneurs got greedy, the VCs got greedy. Somebody out there is getting greedy, and that's why prices are down.

I

Interviewer22:32

And my response to that is that no, this is this is fil no market has ever required people to not be greedy, right? Do you think in the tech industry people are selfless and yet tech industry goes up you know like things go well it it it's if you are creating value and you're building the right thing and you're doing it in a sustainable way it's okay everybody can be greedy even you can be greedy traders can be greedy everybody involved can be greedy that doesn't mean they're all going to make money

H

Haseeb Qureshi23:00

they don't not everybody in the market can make money um but can everyone be greedy absolutely uh but there does still need to be an appeal to something bigger than just making money because if everybody in the space only cares about making money then that is how you drive an industry into the ground. There have to be some people who really do have their eye on the ball of what the long-term value in the space is that we are creating. So there's there's being greedy and then there's being extractive and those are two very different things

I

Interviewer23:34

and I don't think one needs to be extractive to be greedy. M um you know the the famous line from Goldman Sachs is long-term greedy

H

Haseeb Qureshi23:43

which is to say you know being short-term greedy looks like greed but actually it's stupidity to be short-term greedy basically means that you are you know uh uh you know like King Midas uh is that oh great you know if I touch anything it turns to gold and then you know you end up dying because you can't eat anything that's short-term greedy that's also stupid um the right answer is long-term greedy and long-term greedy means that you may make decisions in the short term that don't result immediately in you making money, but over the long run, you're going to make a lot more

I

Interviewer24:17

because that's what a reputation is.

H

Haseeb Qureshi24:19

That's what a career is, right? If you're going straight to I'm going to make as much money as soon as you can, um, then, you know, I don't know, sell drugs. That's probably the fastest way to make money as a career. But it's definitely not the long-term greedy approach. So, that's my perspective.

I

Interviewer24:34

You're long-term greedy and you're an investor. Yes, I mean the VC is the longest term greedy

H

Haseeb Qureshi24:41

of anything.

I

Interviewer24:42

Let's talk about being long-term greedy because most of the people who watch that are investors.

H

Haseeb Qureshi24:54

What do you mean when you say you just have to believe in the exponentials? M.

I

Interviewer25:03

And how does that

H

Haseeb Qureshi25:04

Yeah.

I

Interviewer25:05

relate to long-term greed. Greed.

H

Haseeb Qureshi25:07

Long-term greed. Yeah.

I

Interviewer25:08

And making a lot of money.

H

Haseeb Qureshi25:10

Yeah.

I

Interviewer25:10

Making much more money than all these people who are caught in this short-term noise

H

Haseeb Qureshi25:15

and is I'll try to buy low and sell high. Yeah. Yeah,

I

Interviewer25:19

but I'm going to do the opposite and I'm going to tell that this guy is an [__] and this influencer told me to buy, but I lost money and so on and so forth.

H

Haseeb Qureshi25:31

Yeah. So, look, I came into the industry full-time in 2017, like late 2017. And if you remember, that was the heyday of the ICO bubble. Mhm.

I

Interviewer25:42

And uh I started in VC early 2018 which is right when the collapse of the ICO bubble began. And so when I started making investments, everything just started deflating. And 2018 was maybe the worst sentiment in crypto that I have ever seen. um pro possibly even worse than FTX because at least when FTX collapsed there was some sense that there was some reason some person did this to us you know like Sam lied you know he defrauded he did all these terrible things whereas in 2018 there was nobody to point a finger at it was literally that we were just all collectively idiots and nothing that we had built was valuable you know Bitcoin went from you know 19k down to 4,000 and Ethereum just, you know, pancaked below 100 bucks. And there was this very strong sense at the time that maybe we all fooled ourselves,

H

Haseeb Qureshi26:41

that this was all a collective delusion. And the the question is, okay, what would have gotten you to make the right decision in 2018? The right decision was stay in the market, hold on to these assets, and bet on things you believe in for the long run. And there was a good period of 2018 to 2020 until COVID that nothing was happening.

I

Interviewer27:04

There was no price action. There was no recovery. There was no like oh everything's going to be okay. It was just darkness. Right now in that darkness there was a little bit of light. You could see DeFi was just starting, you know, MakerDAO was getting a compound was starting to form. Like you could see things were happening but they were all small. They were all tiny. Everything was subscale. Um, it was all just, you know, these kind of weirdos in their proverbial garages making, you know, little knick-knacks to show each other. Um, but crypto was a place where you had to believe. You had to have a long-term belief that there was something much bigger that was coming than what you could see then, right? That required you to believe in the exponential. to believe that this technology was going to affect more than just you know 100 thousand people which is maybe you know who was using the blockchain at that time. Now in retrospect you look back at that and you're like oh it shouldn't have been it wasn't obvious. No it wasn't obvious. None of this stuff was obvious at the time and if you go then to 2022 after FTX collapse same thing. What would have caused you to step in and to buy these assets after this enormous wipeout that we saw from the FTX collapse? you know, Bitcoin going all the way down below 20K again. Um, and the answer is again the same thing is that you had to have believed in the exponential that all this stuff was going to become much bigger. At that time it was unthinkable to tell somebody that I think the US government is going to be buying Bitcoin.

H

Haseeb Qureshi28:33

Right. You said that after Sam drove the entire industry into the ground. Like at the time we were literally wondering is the US going to ban crypto because of how egregious this collapses, right? Like when you are as connected and powerful as SBF was and you turn out to be a generational charlatan like there's going to be hell to pay and we didn't know what was going to happen. And so from that like what what is going to get you to believe in this stuff and to do the right thing was to just stay in the market is to just hold on to these assets and keep going. Right? Again and again and again in my time in this industry there have been these dark moments these dark nights of the soul. You have to look inside. You have to ask yourself why why do I actually believe this?

I

Interviewer29:21

Why do I actually believe this? Because everything is moving against me. The entire universe is conspiring to say hib you're an idiot. get get the hell out of these assets. This was a mistake and you have to believe that something much bigger much longer term is happening of which this is one temporary snapshot. If you don't believe that, then you would have made the wrong decision in every single one of those moments.

H

Haseeb Qureshi29:47

And so, you know, one thing uh I used to be a professional poker player. One thing you learn in poker is that it's not about how you play every hand. You can't win every hand. Doesn't matter if you're the best player in the world against the worst player in the world, you're still not going to win every hand. You can't make these decisions on a hand-by-hand basis. You have to think in terms of strategies.

I

Interviewer30:06

How is my strategy going to win against his strategy? In the same way, you can't choose to make the right decision to always buy high or sorry, always buy low and always sell high. You can try, but you you're not going to nail it every single time, right? All you can choose is the strategy.

H

Haseeb Qureshi30:21

And the strategy to me in my mind is to believe in the exponential and to understand that crypto is going to be much much bigger in 10 years than it is today. In the same way 10 years ago it was much bigger than it was when Bitcoin was first created in 2008. So that's why I think it's so important to believe in the exponential and to frame what's happening as much bigger than what it looks like in any given time. M

I

Interviewer30:50

quick shout outs to our legendary long-term Windshifts partners without whom none of this would be possible. Thank you to Cast my go-to global money app to store, earn, move, and spend stablecoins across 170 plus countries directly with Apple Pay or a physical card. On top of that, I can also get paid in USD and euro with my Cast virtual account. Use my promo code shift and my link below to get 10% off your membership. Earn up to 3% instant USD cash back on every card spend and get up to $250 in cash for referring your friends. No banks, no borders, just money that moves with you with stable cash rewards.

H

Haseeb Qureshi31:39

In hindsight, it looks obvious, right? But it was not. It was not obvious.

I

Interviewer31:44

Now we have another kind of feeling that is probably similar to that.

H

Haseeb Qureshi31:52

We feel like I would say the much people think like what's the juice left?

I

Interviewer32:01

All these people they made all this money who believed but actually it's very only a few because most people didn't stay right. Yep.

H

Haseeb Qureshi32:12

And then we have Trump and US government and institutions and all that stuff. So you you might think, 'Oh [__] I missed it.' And what's like it's kind of a similar feel. It's different, but it's a similar feeling as I don't believe in this thing eight 10 years ago, right? It's not possible. Now it's like it's too late.

I

Interviewer32:35

Yeah. Yeah. How do you what's the juice left? How do you see much bigger than where we're at now, which is so much bigger?

H

Haseeb Qureshi32:46

Yeah.

I

Interviewer32:46

Than where we were at 4, 8, 10 years ago.

H

Haseeb Qureshi32:50

Yeah. I mean, just look at how how few institutions actually own any of this stuff, you know? like look we we are we're a we're a big VC fund we manage a lot of assets we have a lot of institutional LPs they invest in our funds so we talk to them we get to know them we understand what is their crypto exposure what are they actually doing in the space and the answer for most of them is nothing they have zero exposure now for the ones who invest in us they have some exposure they get their exposure through us or through some of the other managers that they invest into um and for them it's maybe 1% less than 1% of their portfolios that they in crypto. Um, if you look at the wealth managers, right, I think it was uh recently Morgan Stanley announced that they were starting to approve their wealth management division recommending digital assets to consumers, not consumers, sorry, their their uh high high net worth clients. And there their recommendation again was like, you know, multiple percents of your portfolio should be in digital assets. And up until basically 10 minutes ago, the advice from every single wealth manager is this is not investable. Don't touch this. If you are going out and buying crypto, you're on your own. We're not going to help you do that because we we you know, we don't we haven't approved it. Our management has not said that this is okay. Um we are still in the early innings of how institutions and how the institutional um asset management universe embraces crypto, right? It was just u what was it like November December that Vanguard which is the largest ETF provider in the US just approved the Bitcoin ETFs

I

Interviewer34:32

you know that's the that's the Bitcoin ETF that's that's IBIT that's BlackRock literally a BlackRock product Vanguard said they're not ready to approve it yet

H

Haseeb Qureshi34:39

so all this stuff is still early

Much of crypto adoption is generational. The biggest predictor of support for crypto regulation in Congress is age, not party. Older members don't know what crypto is and find it scary, while younger generations are more familiar. This generational handover will drive institutional adoption over time.

I

Interviewer35:22

The age.

H

Haseeb Qureshi35:23

Exactly. Age is the number one predictor. Old people don't know what crypto is, and they find it scary. As younger generations take over, crypto will become more mainstream. I remember being in college when Bitcoin was still new; now college students don't remember a time before it existed. Ethereum was created when today's 20-year-olds were 10. So for them, smart contracts and stablecoins are just part of the world. This change takes time because money is deeply personal.

I

Interviewer37:09

I think a decent analogy would be the cloud shift, especially for enterprises. In Silicon Valley, everything happened faster. I'm Swiss, and when I built my first company in 2015, Microsoft was pushing cloud, but in London and Switzerland, people were still scared. It took 5–10 years for the new generation of CEOs to make it obvious that cloud was better.

H

Haseeb Qureshi38:44

Yeah, and the same is true for crypto. Gold has a deep attachment, but young people's sense of value is already digital. Why is a rock from the earth more valuable than something digital? And with asteroid mining, one asteroid could double the world's gold supply. Bitcoin is software, and for a software civilization, our money should be software-based.

I

Interviewer40:57

Do you ever sell some major tokens you believe in? Personally?

H

Haseeb Qureshi41:02

I have at different times, but most of my assets I hold. I sell for taxes or donations. My personal finances are very simple—mostly invested in our funds, some crypto, some ETFs, and angel investments outside crypto. It's buy and hold.

I

Interviewer42:03

I want to take this exponential thesis. I've done this exercise with Avish from Electric Capital and Matt from Bitwise. They talk to institutions every day and see them going from 1% to 5–10% allocation. So the potential for Bitcoin, ETH, Solana is huge. I want to hear your Bitcoin thesis in the context of exponential growth.

H

Haseeb Qureshi42:46

I'm a VC, I don't invest in Bitcoin outside personal holdings. Bitcoin is about shelling points and consensus—society building consensus that Bitcoin will be the way we denominate non-sovereign wealth. I think that's inevitable. People complain that Bitcoin doesn't act like gold or a hedge—that's stupid. Bitcoin is protean; it changes correlation regimes. Sometimes it's correlated with gold, sometimes with NASDAQ, sometimes nothing. It has its own cycles. People want it to go up—if it does, all is forgiven. Over the long term, it will reach saturation, but that will take time. Until then, it will never feel good because of volatility. But if you stay in the market over a long horizon, you'll make money. Venture capital forces you to hold, which overcomes human instincts. A VC is never a forced seller.

I

Interviewer48:28

What does Bitcoin look like when it's reached this saturation state or equilibrium price?

H

Haseeb Qureshi48:39

I don't give price targets, but something well above $100K, probably south of $1M. Saturation looks like Bitcoin being boring—young people don't talk about it, it's just what old institutional people do. That's when you'll see Bitcoin behave like gold, but before then, why would it? Bitcoin is a bet on becoming gold in the future. Until then, it will be volatile on the time horizon. If it takes 10 or 15 years, you apply a discount rate. So even if the terminal value is the same, the present value changes. It's a fallacy to say it should trade like gold now.

I

Interviewer51:10

Quick shout out to the legendary team at Jupiter, the DeFi super app. Anything you want to do on chain from trading to earning yield—just use Jupiter. I recommend the Jupiter wallet on your phone or laptop. 10 times faster and 10 times cheaper than the competition. Thank you to the awesome team at Athena for backing today's conversation. Athena has over $7 billion in stable coin supply and an average 11% APY on sUSDe, with zero depeg since launch. Go check them out.

You said before you're a VC guy, so you just own BTC as part of your personal portfolio. If you're a VC, there are other big crypto assets that make more sense for the VC brain. You've been actively defending some of these assets—ETH and Sol—when lots of people lost faith. Why are you actively defending ETH or Sol, putting on your VC hat and giving hope to people who lost it?

H

Haseeb Qureshi52:39

I'm called to defend things that are indefensible. It's easy to say Bitcoin is great or AI is amazing. What energizes me are the ideological orphans—ideas no one is defending. Ether and Solana are valuable—they have tens of billions in market cap. But the prevailing narrative on Twitter is that they're just memes. I argued against that. People think these assets are valuable only because suckers buy them. But the market reflects a deeper wisdom: it believes these things are valuable and will grow. The market is treating Ethereum as a growth story, not a cash-flow story. It reacts to expectations of growth, not fees. That's the second regime. And while the market can be wrong on individual stocks, getting an entire trend wrong is rare. Crypto has boomed and busted multiple times—that resilience is unique. The speculation is endemic because it's money. The only analogous trend was the dot-com boom. Crypto is a massive trend, and the top assets within it are likely to continue.

I

Interviewer58:06

How often has the market been wrong on this growth story for an extended period of time? What's the likelihood that the growth story for ETH or Sol is wrong?

H

Haseeb Qureshi58:21

Markets get stuff wrong all the time—individual stocks, sure. But getting the entire trend wrong? We've seen that with COVID work-from-home and the metaverse. But crypto is different; it keeps coming back. The fact that it has boomed and busted repeatedly tells you something deeper is happening. The speculation is part of the product. So the likelihood that top assets within this trend continue is high.

I

Interviewer1:02:31

You mentioned these two categories: revenue and growth. Where do you put an ecosystem like Hyperliquid or HYPE in this bucket?

H

Haseeb Qureshi1:02:51

Hyperliquid is rare because it's both. It has a credible growth story—expanding market share and new verticals like commodities and stock derivatives via TradeXYZ. And it has enormous cash flow from buy-and-burn of the token. Having both makes it explosive, but that's not the norm.

I

Interviewer1:04:06

Last one for today. Why should people stay in crypto when there is an AI brain and capital drain?

H

Haseeb Qureshi1:04:19

I don't know that they should. AI is the most important technology of the 21st century. If you can't see your value in crypto, maybe it's time to go. That's healthy reallocation. The pioneers attracted to the Wild West—crypto is no longer the Wild West. It's now about building and execution, like social media after 2010. The ideas are set; the rest is execution. If you need the craziness, go to AI. But that doesn't mean crypto is over—there are still massive potential gains, just like social media 10–30xed after 2010 while being recognizable. We're in the buildout phase now.

I

Interviewer1:08:30

Thank you so much, Haseeb, for doing this. About a year and a half since the last one. That was great. Loved it. Thank you.

H

Haseeb Qureshi1:08:36

I know. That's right.

I

Interviewer1:08:43

As you probably know, I host some of the biggest names in Bitcoin and crypto on my podcast. But a lot of the best stuff never makes it on air. The Shift newsletter is where I share that raw behind-the-scenes alpha, insights, stories, and lessons straight from my guests. If you want the real inside take on Bitcoin and crypto, join my newsletter, The Shift, in the description below.

This Crypto Strategy Is So Simple You Won't Believe It Makes Money - Haseeb Qureshi | E177

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