Nico Lechuga: Berkshire Hathaway for Main Street Bitcoiners

**Natalie Brunell** (0:00)
I think as a result of broken money, PE has almost become a little parasitic.

**Nico Lechuga** (0:04)
I think that that's the connotation that exists in the market today. Certain private equity funds, if you're able to load a company up at debt and the company has free cash flow, they can decide to take that free cash flow, bankrupt the company and they don't care. And the entrepreneur is in a tough place because they really have not had other options. And the alternative should be a permanent capital vehicle. And so we came up with Orange Juice. Orange Juice is a permanent capital vehicle that acquires, improves and holds companies into perpetuity.

**Natalie Brunell** (0:30)
It almost reminds some folks of like the Berkshire Hathaway model, right?

**Nico Lechuga** (0:33)
If Warren was a Bitcoiner, within the first seven days, we had over 100 businesses reach out.

**Natalie Brunell** (0:45)
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the show. Joining me here is Nico Lechuga. He is a Bitcoin entrepreneur, a founding member of Ego Death Capital, which is a Bitcoin only venture firm, and a co-founder of Orange Juice, a holding company we're going to be learning all about. You guys just announced it, so I'm so excited to learn more. Nico, thanks for joining me.

**Nico Lechuga** (1:04)
Thank you so much for having me, Natalie.

**Natalie Brunell** (1:06)
Well, for folks that may be not as familiar with you, give us your Coin Story. Tell us your background.

**Nico Lechuga** (1:11)
Okay. So coming into the space, I would say a number of years ago, I was at a conference. It was a conference called Summit Series, actually in Southern California, and Summit would have these conferences. They do them now to after COVID, but they'd have these conferences around the world over a multi-day period, and they bring around entrepreneurs from around the world there.
And they do a lot of programming that's around it. So there's dinners, there's speaking engagements. The dinners and the meals are kind of planned, and they want you to be sitting with people that you would interact with. And so my wife and I miss the dinner time that we're supposed to be at. Say 6.30, we end up showing up at 8.30, we sit down at a different table.
And lo and behold, at the end of the table, who I end up meeting at the end of the night, was Jeff Booth.

**Natalie Brunell** (1:54)
Oh, nice.

**Nico Lechuga** (1:56)
And so I slid down to the table, and I had probably had one too many tequilas at that time period. And Jeff's talking to me about this theory that he has in his head that he wants to put down on paper about how we live in an inflationary environment, and technology is deflationary, and these forces don't go together. And he wants to write this book for his kids.

**Natalie Brunell** (2:17)
Oh my gosh. And that was Price of Tomorrow.

**Nico Lechuga** (2:19)
Yeah, so Jeff and I and my wife Lauren ended up spending a lot of time over the next three days together. And we developed a very, very close relationship. I got an advance copy of the book.
At that point, I think like we talked and it made a lot of sense from a portfolio allocation of like having Bitcoin as an exposure from an asset. And Jeff and I would go back on this. And then I think what became more and more interesting to me was certain network upgrades that allowed you to program on top of Bitcoin. And that was the birth of like Ego Death Capital.

**Natalie Brunell** (2:54)
Wow. But before that, you were in what, private equity?

**Nico Lechuga** (2:57)
I started my career in private equity. Yeah. So I left, I went to NYU for college. And then after college, I was at a boutique shop. One of the partners with Ghanian, which was like super, super interesting because you had this guy that was educated in the UK but had exposure to Western Africa. And with 50 discrete nations, you have all this broken money that exists in that continent. It was really my first exposure to currency being broken, nations manipulating currency.
I think about it a lot now of like you're almost ready to listen to Bitcoin. And so for me at the time period, we're looking at a cocoa deal in Ghana. So Ghana is like one of the bigger cocoa producers in the world. And how it works is there are licensed buying companies. I figure there's like three dozen of them that then buy from farmers and they sell to Ghana's like cocoa board. And the margin is set by the government, but you're buying from the farmers in Ghanaian CDs and you're selling to the government in US dollars. And so you have this super inefficient transaction where you have to have this currency hedge that's in place and like a foreign trading desk to like make that happen.