Like many others, I’ve discovered that listening to podcasts makes the time fly when I’m engaged in an otherwise monotonous activity like hiking, running, or driving.
My favorite podcasts are interviews with other founders, especially those where the founder describes their ups and downs with unvarnished truth. Like a good book, I feel like I can empathize with the main character and the rationale behind their decisions, regardless of how it all turned out. On the other hand, I can’t stand the ones that are just content marketing for their startups.
Two of my favorite podcasts are The Quest with Justin Kan, where he gets other founders to share their stories with incredible openness and vulnerability, and Acquired, in which Ben and David, who are clearly lifelong friends from their warm radio-like banter, tell deeply researched stories of the world’s top startups.
So I decided to try to create a similar podcast, focused on crypto founders: people building companies, funds, protocols, DAOs, or just some random code on the blockchain. While I want to highlight people working on cool projects, my main motivation is to help them tell their founder stories. In particular, I’m interested in speaking to people who’ve made the leap from finance to crypto.
For the first episode, I’m excited to welcome Evgeny Gokhberg, managing partner of Re7 Capital, a quant hedge fund that pursues liquid high-yield stablecoin strategies. After I talked to Evgeny, I felt honored and lucky that he was my first podcast guest, because Evgeny shared an amazing story of how he grew up in the old USSR, studied finance in London and joined the elite ranks of UBS private banking, but gave it all up to join a tiny crypto startup, which somehow led to him managing a quant crypto hedge fund today.
Watch the video above or check out the Youtube video to hear Evgeny’s story:
Growing up in Moscow and the differences between Communist finance and Western finance
How he applied to 200 hedge funds to get 2 job offers
Making his first angel investment
Quitting a cushy private banking job to join a tiny crypto startup
What unlocked the opportunity for him to launch a quant hedge fund
Unbeknownst to me, this entire conversation was accidentally live-streamed to Youtube. That could be either a feature or bug, so in the spirit of product-driven experimentation, I’m just making the raw, unedited video available!
P.S. I apologize in advance for my extreme overuse of filler words (um, ah, like). I’m working on it.
P.P.S. If there’s someone in particular that you’d like me to interview, please leave a comment below, and I’ll try to make it happen!
Episode 1: Evgeny Gokhberg, Re7 Capital