Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (1:36)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
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**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:01)
My guest today is Alok Vasudev.
Alok is an early stage investor who has been in the crypto space for a very long time. Before co-founding Standard Crypto, he was an investor at Benchmark and S28 Capital. Given Alok's experience and the prevailing mood right now in crypto, this is a particularly interesting discussion on the ecosystem writ large. We discussed whether the bubble can be thought of as productive speculation, his views on skeptics in the space and look at some big potentially underestimated ideas. Please enjoy my conversation with Alok Vasudev.
So Alok, I think the benefit of this conversation today is the very long experience and perspective that you bring to our topic. It's also a good time to be talking about crypto because it's finally in a season where there's a lot that's gone wrong. There's been some extremely epic meltdowns in different parts of the ecosystem. I think the general tenor is very bearish and very skeptical and a lot of worry out there. And so it's a good time to have a conversation like this. Maybe you could just tell your story a little bit. I want to give frame of reference for those listening, why you're sort of different and interesting voice, having come to this a lot earlier than most, and I think having a unique way of thinking about the ecosystem and its potential. So maybe just give us a little bit of history lesson on your own experience here, and then we'll go into 30 different topics.

**Alok Vasudev** (3:20)
I've been in venture for just about 10 years now. I started as a generalist venture guy. I was at Benchmark. It's where I started my investing career. Like any young person in venture, your job is to find white space.
And at the time, this was, SaaS was already big in early stage venture, consumer internet was raging, marketplace was raging. Part of it was hunting for what's new, what's on the horizon, where can I plant a flag and build the type of reputation that can set me up to compete at the highest level?
Open source was an interest of mine. Consumer was a big interest of mine because we did a lot of great work there at the firm.
And Bitcoin, when I first encountered it, was this hybrid of the two. In some sense, it's a community, it's a consumer facing product, it's money that you can hold and use, but it's built on an open source network, it's an open source protocol. I think those are probably the two veins that at least made me consider it as something I should decide to spend more time on or not, and it clicked. It was one of these things where you saw it, you understood it, and you realized that it was a disruption on so many dimensions. It was a monetary disruption, it was a technology breakthrough, it was a values disruption in terms of how we actually build organizations and the idea that decentralization could actually work in this configuration, whereas every other pressure in the world that you had was pushing towards centralization. And also there was a roadmap for how blockchains and the tech that underpinned it could become this fabric that you could do so much more on top of. If you understood what was happening, understood where it could be upgraded or changed or improved, you could see compute being built on these blockchains, you could see all sorts of mind bending stuff built with it. Part of it was right time, right place. I think part of it was also having a text and upbringing, where I think you have a default skepticism towards institutions that I think you get in a place like Texas that you wouldn't get in other places. It fit me like a glove and I never really looked back. I think that over time, you always go through your own moments where you question your beliefs, you question what's going on and crypto cyclicality certainly does that to an extreme degree.