Arianna Simpson – The Crypto Landscape

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:23)
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.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions and the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (1:58)
My guest today is Arianna Simpson, who has spent her career in and around the world of technology, working at startups, Facebook, and now in venture capital, as an investor focused on the world of cryptocurrencies. I met Arianna when I hosted a panel at a big investing conference in New York City, and she was one of the panelists. On the panel, I found her style to be very straightforward and compelling. It is clear that she loves to learn and that the best manifestation of her style of learning is investing in technology. In our conversation, we discussed broad trends in crypto that we haven't spent much time on before, decentralized versus centralized exchanges, privacy coins, and evaluating a founder or early team. We built a framework for learning about this new asset class, discussed the importance of travel, and the value of pushing oneself outside of comfort zones. Like the Hashpower documentary, this episode and other Hashpower singles are brought to you by Fidelity Investments, a company that is constantly researching and experimenting with emerging technologies like crypto assets and blockchain to improve the lives of their customers. Fidelity provides a comprehensive set of products and services to individual investors, employers and financial advisory firms. For more information, please visit fidelity.com.
Please enjoy our conversation.
I'm wondering if we could, on the fly, almost build a framework for someone out there that's interested in building their own investment philosophy within crypto. Because you've done this through a lot of different means, we've talked a lot about your knowledge formation and how you've learned in the space, the question that I probably get the most often is, it's just too daunting and intimidating, and I just don't know what to do, so I'm just not gonna do anything. So if you were doing a workshop on a build your own investment thesis or build your own investment philosophy specifically within this asset class, what would be the stages of that process?

**Arianna Simpson** (3:44)
I think the first thing I would do is challenge the notion that it's too hard, because I remember sitting, again, back when I was first digging into the space, and I would have like 50 tabs open, and I would be like three hours into it and reading about encryption, algorithms.
Yeah, literally, yeah. And so I was like, this is super weird, why am I doing this? And then I kind of got myself out of the mindset that I needed to learn something for a specific immediate application.
And if you approach it as more like, well, I know more now than I did before, and view it as a continuum rather than like a yes, I know about it or no, I don't know about it, then I think that can really help reframe it. Because ultimately, you know, I talk to people who have been in the space for years, myself included, and you feel like, oh, there's so much more that you could always know. And so I think a lot of it is just being okay with not knowing everything and realizing that it's a perpetual journey. But more specifically, I would say, just allow yourself to go down the rabbit hole. So if you start reading one thing and that requires you to go look into a different area, that's okay. You can use it as kind of a branching out. And again, I think knowledge is not like a linear map. It's much more of a tree that goes off in a bunch of different directions. And so if you can allow yourself to go down some of those branches, I think that's really helpful.