Brian Wong: I Solved the AI Investment Playbook

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
We are live here with Brian Wong, is a venture capitalist and an entrepreneur. We are in New York City.

**Brian Wong** (0:08)
Yes, we are.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:08)
We are in the Empire State Building. Welcome to the Tokenization Tower, Brian.

**Brian Wong** (0:11)
Thanks for having me.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:12)
Brian, you have a interesting background, a co-founder of several companies, raised a ton of money for your consumer brands. What are you doing in New York? I also saw that you're a digital nomad. I'm a digital nomad. I've been living in Brazil, Asia, Europe, all these other places for the longest. What are you doing in the city, man?

**Brian Wong** (0:29)
I live here now, actually.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:30)
Okay, cool.

**Brian Wong** (0:31)
Yeah, I love it here. I've been here now technically 10 years, but on and off between San Francisco and New York.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:37)
So your nomad careers came to an end?

**Brian Wong** (0:40)
Nomadding has now ended. Yes.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:42)
What was your top spots, man?

**Brian Wong** (0:45)
I've always been all over, but I still love Mexico City, Vancouver, which is where my family is from, where I was born, San Francisco, where I spent a lot of time building my last company, and then, of course, here in New York. Nice. New York is still the best city on earth.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:00)
Yeah, 100%. Tell us about your fund. Is it Ascii Ventures?

**Brian Wong** (1:05)
Ascii Ventures.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:07)
What's your thesis? How did you get this started? And yeah, man, welcome to the show.

**Brian Wong** (1:11)
Thank you. Well, Ascii, for those who are nerdy enough to remember, is the precursor to Unicode. It was American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It's meant to be a filter for the nerds that come in and pitch or that we work with. But Ascii is a fund.
It's a boring tech fund, is what we call it. It focuses on behind the scenes technologies, things that are powering other things, but aren't really seen and are meant to be used daily, but you just have no idea that it's being used daily, like those kinds of things. So obviously, a plaid or what was a stripe, obviously wish we would have been a part of those companies, but no one would have even known those were businesses and they're behind the scenes most of the time. You don't really see them. They've built consumer brands on purpose to enact trust, but most of it is behind the scenes. So we focus on those kinds of technologies, picks and shovels. We have a unique strategy. We're doing primarily early stage, some things that are before revenue, mainly that's the goal. And then we're also, so anything under 15 million evaluation and anything over 15 billion is what we say. So we will kind of pause for a second, like what do you mean by that? We're doing bifurcated funds. So we're focusing on two different asset classes that are on the way end of the spectrum, but it's designed to create a shorter timeline as a fund. You know, most funds, as you know, right now, traditional VC has been returning 10 plus years, a lot of criticism. I'm 35 in a few days. I don't want to wait until I'm 50 before I have any kind of return. This fund is designed to return around five to seven years, which is super, super, super short. The one thing we're highlighting, though, in crypto and in blockchain, so we do look at different categories, crypto and blockchain is one of them, is really exclusively in stable coins and the boring tech layer stable coins, which is actually the app layer. So when you think about it, there's really no innovation needed. There's a lot of trad fi things are just being mimicked in stable coin. So think payday loans, forex, business lending, even a neo banks for people who are historically not able to get bank accounts. Those kinds of things we love. And they're just app layer. People like to criticize the app layer, but I think the app layer is where the exits are going to happen, because you have a lot of incumbents like the big banks, that are not going to build a payday loan service on chain, and are going to be able to do this by just buying a company that's been building this for the last couple of years maybe. So those kinds of quick flips, those base hits, those are the types of companies we're going after.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:33)
Yeah, so it's like a barbell approach, right? Where it's like you've got the extremely early kind of pre-seed seed companies, and then these large kind of proven Goliaths looking to have one more fundraise before they really...