Bitcoin Accelerator on Mirissa Beach | James of Ârc SLP774

Stephan Livera (0:00)

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Stephan Livera Podcast. Today, we're going to be chatting with James of Ârc. James is building an accelerator in Sri Lanka. It's called Ârc. As listeners who might not know, I'm actually born in Sri Lanka, although I am Australian. But obviously, I met James, and I was interested in this for obvious reasons.

So James, welcome to the show.

James (0:22)

Thank you so much for having me here. I really appreciate it, and I'm looking forward to talking about all of this and bringing it back to your roots.

Stephan Livera (0:29)

Yeah, sure. For people who don't know, you give a bit of a background on yourself. Who are you?

James (0:35)

Yeah, sure. I think there's a smaller professional story, and I think there's my Bitcoin story, and I think these things collide with exactly where we are here. But more quickly, perhaps, my professional story, I'm a child and accountant, non-practicing, but I began my career. Well, first, Accenture, just as an internship, then Ernst & Young, and my whole job for the years that I spent there was moving the world's largest companies and richest families to the places in the world that they were treated best. It's like a day-to-day thing. We'd be waking up, working with the board of a Fortune 500 company and helping them relocate their company or their operations to countries and places where they would be treated better and have a more favorable business. I did that for a while, which was good fun. I was then coding and developing, and I was lucky to get my first role in Venture Capital at a fun called Playfair Capital in 2013 in London, which was very early in the London venture scene. I had an amazing time there, investing in all sorts of stuff, but the same trends that we invest today. We were looking at AI, robotics, crypto back then. Actually, even as a fund, we looked at Bitcoin. We didn't place an investment back then. I, as an individual, was looking at it and around the asset, and very lucky to be around some very early believers in the asset. I was a poor, not quite student, but just an analyst at this fund, and unfortunately, don't have a great story of buying Bitcoin right then. But then after leaving Playfair Capital, I've continued to always have a role at a fund since, but I started building my own companies. Actually one, I was building with a close friend, Alexander Mann, who's now the general partner at Fulgur Ventures, which is the funding and the main partner for the Accelerator we're running now. But we ran a food delivery company together back in the day, this is 10 years ago. That didn't work so well, but I've been fortunate to have other companies that I founded that were more successful. I sold more recently a company called Consequence, which was effectively applying early LLMs to databases to help create, enrich and query them for enterprises.

I sold that a few years ago and since then, I've been very focused on how we can accelerate the trajectory of people and places. I've been working around the world, working at some of these more frontier locations and looking for a place where I think that we can build more permanently and develop a technology sector. In between this story I painted out there, after the food delivery company went bust with Alex, I went full time into Bitcoin and into the space.

I guess a short version of that story would be that, come the height of the monkey JPEGs, I was just completely fed up of all this nonsense and all of this noise. It wasn't what I got involved with the space for. It's like when that food delivery company died, I was sat there and I was looking at the future. It seemed to me that all the most important things that mattered, starting with the money, are going to be built in this industry. I wanted to go and help and try to help Bitcoin win and solve this source underlying problem underneath all of these other problems. By the time monkey JPEGs were around, honestly, I just got way too fed up and that's why I built the AI company. But I guess after selling that, I started to look at what had been achieved in the space. For me, all the same reasons that Bitcoin mattered when I first heard about it still matter today. They probably matter even more today and actually, we haven't finished solving this problem and there's still a ton of work to do. I think to finally connect it to what we're doing here, so I think that we think that Bitcoin is a representation of our values. It is in a digital form and we're trying to help it win digitally. I think I'm very, very interested in helping us bridge that into the physical world, which is why I'm doing a lot of stuff in the real world. But tying this all together and about talking too much about Sri Lanka, and we're leading that to the next point. Like I'm here in Sri Lanka and I'm super bullish on Sri Lanka as a country that's already on its own independent path and trajectory to a much more positive future for the country and for every Sri Lankan that is here. And we're here building, exploring, learning, listening to Sri Lankans and understanding how we can help. Part of that, we're very lucky to be partnering with Fulgur Ventures to deliver Bitcoin Accelerator here in Sri Lanka, where right now, if you are listening to this and you are building an early stage Bitcoin company, particularly in Asia, and maybe you're in your town or your village somewhere on your own, not surrounded by Bitcoiners, or at least maybe not surrounded by Bitcoiners that are actively working on still helping Bitcoin adoption, particularly across Asia. Then this is a call to action to come and join us here in Sri Lanka. It's not just the people that are building stuff for or in Sri Lanka. Not at all.