The Market Got This Bitcoin Trade Completely Wrong w/ Ben Werkman

**Ben Werkman** (0:00)
So one of the things that gives me a lot of confidence in the long-term success of Bitcoin is that this need for a completely sovereign asset, something that's a bare instrument that you can transact globally, that is for individuals, that is for corporations, that is for nations, right? Because of that, I can see a very significant bull case as we continue to see weaknesses in the fiat currencies, and particularly as we see more global conflicts where currency is used as a form of that warfare, right? Cutting people off, sanctioning, doing all those things. It highlights the need for an asset like this.

**John Gillen** (0:36)
Bitcoin treasury companies were riding high during the bull market, but now we are deep in bear country and everyone is wondering how will these companies survive and when will we get back to par on all of these preferred products? Hello and welcome to The Milk Road Show, the podcast that knows that bears are scary, but they will have to spend a long time in hibernation when the bulls come back. I'm your host John Gillen. Today is Tuesday, June 30th, and today we are joined by Ben Werkman. Ben is the Chief Investment Officer at Strive Incorporated, a Bitcoin focused asset management firm where he oversees investment strategy, capital deployment, risk management, and Bitcoin treasury initiatives. Ben is going to save Bitcoin today. So that all sounds good to you. Make sure you like and subscribe, share this episode with somebody who's going to enjoy it. Today's episode is brought to you by Bitget Stocks 2 with real liquidity, real dividends. Without further ado, welcome to The Milk Road Show, Ben Werkman. How are you, sir?

**Ben Werkman** (1:26)
I'm doing well. Thank you for having me, John.

**John Gillen** (1:28)
I'm glad to have you here. I think there's a lot of questions that I would like to get answered today.
But I thought a good place to just start the conversation would be with Strive overall. You're an asset management firm with over 15,000 Bitcoin. I believe you could update me on that if I'm out of date on that. But just talk to me about Strive. How did you get here and what makes you all unique as a digital asset treasury company?

**Ben Werkman** (1:47)
Yeah, absolutely. So Strive really began as an asset management company. We were founded by Vivek Ramaswamy back in 2022, and we really started with the foundation at the time of, we thought that some of the DEI initiatives that were going on and some of the ESG initiatives that were going on were effectively a breach of fiduciary duty. And so we were launching ETF products that were effectively stripping that narrative out of them because we thought that it was a breach of the fiduciary duty to the investors.
Over time, though, Vivek got orange-billed by our CEO, Matt Cole, and a few others. And it was back really about a year ago when this all really launched, where we decided to make a pivot as an organization. We decided to look for a path to becoming a public corporation. We did that through a reverse merger last September.
And we announced the intention to run a Bitcoin treasury, I believe it was back in May of last year, so just over a year ago. So we've been a little over 12 months into this journey so far. And it's been quite a journey, to say the least. And so, starting in September, we reverse merged into a company called Asset Entities that was a publicly listed corporation on NASDAQ. We closed a $750 million pipe, which was the seed capital effectively that built the first iteration of our treasury. And from that point on, we've really had a very active path throughout the spare market. If you think back to last summer, when a lot of the mania was going on around the treasury sector, is when you saw most of these companies coming out of the gate and really getting established. You know, for years before that, there were really, you know, three of them that you could really point to a strategy, MetaPlanet and similar scientific in the United States. But when everybody came out, you know, it was a time where capital was readily available. And there were several options for how you could take that initial seed capital. The one that you saw that was the most common was a combination of pipe capital, which is private investment and public equity, right? So that's equity capital that comes into the business. The other one was convertible bond capital. You know, convertible bonds have been made very popular by strategy. They had a lot of success in the early days, raising money through the convertible bond market. And so companies that were just launching did the same thing. The problem is that when you start to see the market turn, it can become very restricting on your balance sheet. It can really restrict the way that your company can operate. So we came out initially with no convertible bond debt on our balance sheet. We can talk a little bit more about that here in a little bit, which allowed us to have full optionality for how we were going to build ourselves as a treasury company. So when we first launched, we came out, we bought about 5,600 Bitcoin at the time. And within a matter of two weeks, we had announced the first M&A in the space where we acquired the second publicly traded Bitcoin treasury company in the United States, which was Semmler Scientific. And so we announced that agreement, within a couple of weeks of us becoming a public corporation. And then about a month after that, we IPO-ed our very first perpetual preferred equity, SATA, and that launched in November.