MODERNIZE EARNINGS

“You know who's leading the charge on this is Vlad Tenev, who's got a great clip. I can link it in the show notes, but his he's like, you know, I'm listening to my own, earnings release, and I'm bored. And if you look, Robinhood just had their q one earnings release, and he's modeling it right now after, like, a post NBA game interview. Like, he gets asked questions. They're doing it outside. It's like, why am I only bringing sell side analysts? I'd like some buy side analysts here. Two, conditions have changed. Basically, I think once the data becomes more live and also in this new environment of investing, think about this proactively. Like, your quarterly earnings shouldn't be some b s, you know, box checking compliance exercise. This is a touch point you have with investors. You should start the year looking. This is how many investors I have. You should end the year saying, I've got four scheduled touch points. I'm gonna convert x amount of investors per touch point.”

“The other thing that I would say is it's an advantage for token projects. Right? Like, if you disclose this stuff once, then your data can be right. Right now, if you're a token project, you have to go to BlockWorks and DeFi Llama and Token Terminal and talk to all of those teams who each have their own methodologies for how to calculate data or, like, you know, fundamental metrics. If you disclose it once and you attest that it's accurate and honest and you're not committing fraud by, you know, putting fraudulent numbers out there, everyone can just have your data with far lower overhead for you. So I actually think it's a it's a friendly thing for token projects to do because once you disclose this stuff, you don't have to interface with a bunch of different teams to make sure data requests are right. There's, like, individual data team leads of protocols who are vigorously nodding their heads because they're talking like, I they talk to us. I know they talk to all the other data providers too. And this this is the fix for that. Until you have the disclosure foundation layer, you you're, you know, your lives are gonna continue to be extremely difficult.”

“Whenever we talk about this framework, people just say, well, what we actually need are products and services that people want and revenue. And my answer to that is you need both. Imagine if you had a great company and it was, you know, getting ready to get listed, and they're like, well, why do you need an s one? I'm producing all this revenue. You need both. And the way that I would the way that that's gonna show up is in the multiples on revenue or EBITDA that projects get. Look at, there are great companies that operate in Russia or actually South Korea or Japan. They get discounted. You can you can buy you can buy, like, amazing oil companies or, you know, conglomerates in South Korea for, like, a three x multiple, you know, 25% or a third of what you do in The US. Why is that? Because there are these weird structural governance problems around the revenue that make it less valuable. And that's that's exactly what's happening here. Like, you can generate all the revenue you want, but your multiple is not gonna go up until people are assured that they own some slice of the revenue or they understand what their rights are.”

“And one which hasn't been thought about in a super sophisticated way in crypto yet, but I think is now people are thinking about much more deeply is, what is the right stage of development to launch my token? And I think, historically, there was pressure both from honestly, probably from a lot of investors in the space to get liquid sooner. And I think projects mostly just thought about, well, I'll get my token out as soon as I can. And the I think instead, the operating philosophy should be you in the beginning stages of your project, you are only doing product market fit. Like, you should only be focused on finding product market fit for your business, your company, or protocol, or whatever. As soon as you launch a liquid token, you now have two products, and you need to do two things. You need to continue to make the business and your demand for your product and service grow, and you need to treat the token as its own product, its own thing. You need to sell it. Talk about it. Get it into people's hands. You just need to do both. The problem is so in a in an ideal world, what should happen is you should be you should not have a liquid a publicly traded instrument. You should find PMF. You should wait a couple years and grow, and then launch.”

“The average cost for a public company is, like, $2,000,000 just to do audited financials reports and all that kind of stuff. It's just a huge pain in the ass. No one likes doing it. In this world of where you have a combination of LLMs and live data on public chains, think about what you could do. There's a super simple claud hookup where it shouldn't take very much effort. It should take no effort actually to just who are the officers of the public company, what are their publicly disclosed wallets, and what is the current org structure and ownership rights look like. That should take honestly a couple hours to set up once, and then it should be done in the future. Then you also have data which streams live. Live and is on chain. Crypto companies should get and by the way, you should be able to ask an LLM or some kind of AI chatbot any single way that you wanna slice and dice this data that should be available to you. That is so, so, so much that is a step function change better than what currently exists.”

“Dave, I remember, I think my first, like, product role at Fidelity was building what when we were trying to make the Bloomberg for crypto, just like every other data company that's been started in crypto for the last, like, five or ten years. The data was so scattered all over the place with these different specialized providers. It was really, really hard to consolidate. And we didn't frankly even know what the shape of these projects were really gonna look like. Right? And we didn't even know all the things that we should be disclosing. So we kinda had to, like, go through the pain of learning what should be disclosed because it wasn't, and every you know, people got hurt because of that to now finally, like, get everybody rowing in the same direction, in in terms of, like, I don't know, tokens had an existential moment, and everybody, I think, is now try realizes, like, oh, shit. We need to rally behind these things. And, yeah, if there's only, like, 40 or 50 tokens now that have this stamp of approval of transparency, like, that's an opportunity.”