GRTiQ Podcast: 194 Mark Beylin

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Mark Beylin (00:00:17):

I basically make the argument in the blog post, that is basically unnecessary and probably backwards in crypto, and that you’re ultimately probably better off spending your energy in those beginning days, selling your token.

Nick (00:01:02):

Welcome to the GRTiQ Podcast. Today I’m speaking with Mark Beylin, an associate at Boost VC, an early stage venture capital firm with expertise in deep tech hardware and software. And as you will hear, Mark is no stranger to the world of web3 and blockchain. His journey includes founding roles and launching interesting tech, along with some amazing roles at Deloitte and Consensys. Recently, Mark has gained significant attention for some thought-provoking blogs, including one titled The Token is the Product, and another, The Hard Crypto Thesis, which have challenged conventional views and started industry-wide discussions. During this interview, we’ll explore both of these blogs and the arguments Mark makes, and along the way we’ll also unpack some of Mark’s professional experiences, his journey into web3, some of his entrepreneurial insights, his take on the evolving crypto and tech industries, and the principles guiding his work at Boost VC. I started the conversation with Mark by asking about his early years, growing up the child of Russian immigrants in Canada, and how this background shaped his views on life and career.

Mark Beylin (00:02:17):

Thanks so much for having me. I am originally from Toronto, Canada. My parents are originally from Russia, and I guess it was the Soviet Union and immigrated to Canada right before I was born. And so I’m very much a Canadian, but my background’s very much informed by Eastern European kind of origins, and growing up, a lot of my interests were very sort of skewed in that direction. Classical music and different types of arts and things like that. And I had a very multidimensional youth, and I was really into sports and different types of arts and various extracurriculars throughout high school. It was very kind of multifaceted. I don’t know how much more I could describe than that. But Toronto is a really amazing place to grow up. There’s such an amazing vibrant art scene and just historically different things going on. So it was a really nice mix. Certainly, I feel very appreciative having growing up here.

Nick (00:03:08):

I’ve had a lot of guests on the podcast and longtime listeners know this where they’re the children of immigrants, and I’m always curious to sort of ask a follow-up question. Now as you mentioned, you grew up in Canada, so it’s not necessarily some of the other stories we’ve heard about parents immigrating to the United States. But still, what was it like for you and how did it shape your approach to career and life being the son of immigrants and some of the responsibilities I guess, or pressures that might come with that?

Mark Beylin (00:03:34):

I feel really grateful in hindsight. I think when I was growing up, especially when I was in public school with classmates whose parents were native Canadians, my parents just seemed to always force me to do a lot more than theirs did, and they seemed to have a lot more pressure and energy going into my life than their lives seemed a little bit more lax. And at the time, I was really, I almost want to say resentful of my parents and certainly not too happy about it. But obviously in hindsight, I feel really grateful for all the pressure that they put on me growing up and all the, again, extracurricular activities they supported and also just extra credit classes, math classes, French, all that kind of stuff. Which again, at the time I thought was pure evil, but in hindsight was super helpful in making it through college level calc classes and stuff like that.

Nick (00:04:24):

Well, let’s talk about university. So you went on to study computer science at the University of Waterloo, and you did some work in business administration as well at Wilfrid Laurier. And you’ll have to correct me if I’m saying that wrong, because I am a stupid American when it comes to pronunciation. But talk to us about your university, what you studied and sort of how you came to the decision to study those fields.

Mark Beylin (00:04:43):

So yeah, I do have to correct you. It’s Wilfrid Laurier University. Wilfrid Laurier was actually one of our prime ministers in Canada. So Wilfrid Laurier is a university that’s just down the street from Waterloo, Waterloo being much more well known in the states in particular, for the various sort of engineering computer science programs that they offer. But Laurier sort of is a much more kind of liberal arts type focused school, and in particular much more focused on their business program, which is kind of their big offering. So several years ago they joined forces, the University of Waterloo and Laurier, and instead of offering individual bachelor programs in each of these directions, they came up with a dual degree program where students would take five years instead of four years, and would walk away with two bachelor’s degrees. They had a program for math and business and computer science and business.

(00:05:28):

In my year, they accepted 90 of us for my year, and I think something in the range of 25 to 30 of us ended up actually graduating after five years, most students end up dropping into either degree just because on its own, computer science at Waterloo is an extraordinarily challenging course load and just… Yeah, it’s like a fire hose of information, and so doing the business degree on top of that is really challenging for most folks. So doing both was a lot of fun. I made that decision largely just because I was really interested in startups in high school, watching movies like The Social Network, getting really just bit by the startup bug and realizing I would eventually want to build a technology company and that I would probably benefit from learning both how to build the technology side and also the company side.

(00:06:12):

So that ended up informing that decision, and I started getting my hands dirty in the startup side before I even graduated. But I’m certainly really grateful to both schools and I learned a ton. And there’s a lot of people these days who are very bearish on post-secondary education, but I still think that if you do it right, if you go to a great school and if you study right, you can learn a lot and it can be incredibly valuable.

Nick (00:06:33):

What do you think sort of compelled that early interest in startup land? You sort of fashioned a university degree and I guess informed the decisions you’d make related to career based on some early interest in startups. What was it that drew your interest?

Mark Beylin (00:06:47):

I always had kind of an interest in starting new things. I had done that kind of even in high school and through various sort of efforts over the years. So I always kind of enjoy starting new projects, that doesn’t scare me, and bringing things through to creation, that didn’t exist before has always been kind of exciting to me. When I was in high school, that was the 2010s, there was obviously this massive wealth creation event happening right on the internet. And witnessing that and knowing that I’d… I’d already sort of realized I wanted to be an engineer, but I think to me, I also realized I had this kind of creative side as well and living through this incredible wealth creation moment that I was obviously really lucky for that there was an opportunity to enter the entrepreneurship stream and pursue that and to be very blunt, just to be able to do well for myself and family and things like that.

Nick (00:07:39):

During your studies in computer science, did you come across any sort of early web3, blockchain distributed systems type of learnings that shaped a little bit of how you might approach something like web3 and blockchain?

Mark Beylin (00:07:54):

So it’s actually really funny, it’s how I got into crypto actually. It’s not actually technically through my computer science degree, I was at a hackathon… So I’d been really interested in the hackathon scene that was kind of popping up through the university space in the 2010s as well, and that also coincided with when I was going through college, which was again, I felt really lucky for, I’m not sure that the hackathon space is quite what it was at that time. But going through that, I got really interested in… Apple had just released this framework. I don’t even remember what it was called, but the same actually framework that powers AirPlay and AirDrop between your phones, which is like a Bluetooth plus Wi-Fi connection between devices. Apple had just released a framework, there was an app called FireChat that had been built on top of that.

(00:08:32):

And so I was really interested in sort of applying that peer-to-peer framework tech with your phone and building different types of apps that could live on top of that kind of network. And so I built an app at a hackathon, that actually allowed you to check in a safe during natural disasters, if you remember the way that you could on Facebook, but imagining if you didn’t have a Facebook connection, the internet or your cell service, you could download this app if everyone had it, you would all sort of share these check-ins with each other and then whoever initially gets internet connection would be able to upload it.

(00:09:00):

So I actually just built that at a hackathon and got really into it, and that helped me get an internship in a crypto group at Deloitte. And I didn’t know anything about crypto at the time, I just knew a lot about distributed systems and was really interested in that space, wanted to go deep there. I don’t want to say they bait and switched me, but they kind of were like, “Oh, this is distributed systems.” And then I came in and they’re like, “Actually, this is blockchain.” That was actually how I fell down the rabbit hole, and obviously over the years have continued to be really interested in that side of crypto beyond just the sort of tokens and economic stuff, but didn’t end up continuing to build much at the node layer or a relay [inaudible 00:09:35].

Nick (00:10:41):

Let’s talk a little bit about then, the work you did at Deloitte. So if there was a little bit of a bait and hook there a little bit with the distributed systems to get you involved, but you fell down the rabbit hole, take us back in time. What drew your interest in the rabbit hole in the first place and what did you see or recognize at that time, that started you off in this direction?

Mark Beylin (00:11:02):

I mean, if you can imagine, it was January of 2016. I was an intern, I was a kid at the time. Deloitte had this group for exploring blockchains, cryptocurrencies and in developing that practice internally and that excellence internally within their Toronto office as part of a global effort. They threw me in where basically the first day they’re like, “Okay, read the Bitcoin Whitepaper top to bottom until you can understand it and Google anything you don’t understand, and then move on to the Yellow Paper, the Ethereum.” Which nobody reads, and really is a totally… It’s a different kind of document, it reads very differently. It doesn’t serve the same kind of function that the Bitcoin Whitepaper does in terms of being able to explain the protocol to a layman, it’s a much more rigorous computer science Whitepaper based on some decisions they made.

(00:11:50):

But imagine me just being thrown in there. I was like, “Okay, great, this is this new protocol.” So it was the early days of Ethereum, everything was still happening through things like this. We were doing a lot of forking and of things that were open source and putting them together. So I remember at one point I was working on some Frankenstein thing that was remix. It was a bunch of tabs, it was remix, it was a block explorer. It was like you could send transactions and interact with smart contracts. It was kind of like everything you could ever need to interact with a blockchain in one place because none of these things existed in separate websites, none of these things work, we kind of wanted our own. So anyways, that was some of the first stuff that I was building there and yeah, just fell down that crypto rabbit hole that way.

(00:12:33):

Eventually had realized that crypto was really interesting, Ethereum was really interesting. Watched sort of the DAO hack happen that summer and I had a summer sort of… I’d done the internship at the beginning of the year, had kind of continued to engage in the Ethereum space a little bit over the summer. And then in the fall I ended up actually going and doing internship at Consensys, at their Toronto office. And so that really kind of solidified, I don’t know, my entry into the crypto space, whereas in those Deloitte days I was kind of still dipping my toes in. It was kind of that second job that really solidified things for me.

Nick (00:13:07):

So Mark, how would you explain to somebody who looks at a guy like you and says he’s got a great education, he’s got some background in business, got some background in computer science, he’s got an interest in startups, entrepreneurship, he probably could go work anywhere, and yet here he is going sort of all in on this web3 emerging industry. How would you explain to somebody why that happened or where that sort of drive came from?

Mark Beylin (00:13:33):

I’m not too embarrassed to say that I did try to apply to the big fang companies and they just didn’t accept me. Whether that was just because I didn’t quite fit the mold that they were looking for or just didn’t quite fit, but I definitely tried and eventually kind of realized that it really wasn’t for me, I wasn’t really going to be a good fit. And even kind of working with some sort of web2 startups, I also quickly realized that it was not just quite as interesting for me, especially as the feeling I kind of felt when I entered the web3 space and started talking to folks in crypto, who were just very weird and were this very particular type of weird. And so that was a feeling that I had never really experienced before in the other tech spaces, and just that kind of counter-cultural ethos was really exciting to me and yeah, speaks to my interest a little bit.

(00:14:19):

But the other element of this I do want to underscore is that, okay, going back to 2016, I was at Deloitte. Once I had figured out how the blockchain worked, this was this era where nobody understood how blockchain. It was this giant mystery in the market. Even very smart people didn’t know how blockchain. As quickly, three weeks into my job at Deloitte, I was an intern and they just started pawning me off and I was explaining how blockchain, but nobody really understood it. And so even in 2016 I had figured out, okay, there is this thing called the market arbitrage. I don’t really know what that is, but I that I know this thing that nobody else knows and that that’s really valued.

(00:14:54):

By sort of tail end of 2016, 2017, it had become clear that Ethereum was really interesting and was really under appreciated and under valued, that there were a lot of folks in the Bitcoin space that were for a number of reasons sort of refusing to look at it. If you could understand Bitcoin, there were a lot of people refusing. And for anyone who couldn’t understand Bitcoin, good luck understanding Spark. And so I just sort of noticed there was this massive discrepancy between what I knew was true and what everyone else was seeing. And so I have to also be honest, that part of my interest was just being able to be a part of that and help sort of take advantage of this opportunity again, just kind of being in the right place. It felt a lot like just being at the right place at the right time, even though maybe from the outside it might not have looked that way.

Nick (00:15:40):

And so if you were in the right place at the right time and you’re understanding things at this point that a lot of people around you simply don’t understand, how are you viewing it? Are you viewing it as the emergence of new technology? Are you viewing it as the emergence of new monetary or economic mechanisms or something else? I mean, take us in your mind at the time, what are you seeing?

Mark Beylin (00:16:04):

All of the above. And I think it was also an era of a lot of people really kind of dreaming about what smart contract protocols could be, right? Now folks like Jacob Horn talked about hyperstructures, right? And they talk about smart contracts in this very dreamy way. But that actually is a reflection of the way that initially everybody talked about smart contracts, which was, every smart contract protocol was this gleaming city on a hill. They were all this perfect, beautiful, utopian thing.

(00:16:35):

And so there was a lot of that energy and ethos running through a lot of the kind of conversations about protocol design or about applications that would be built on a theory. It was a lot of the ideal version of a system that could eventually exist and could now exist. Again now several years later now much more jaded, I think there’s things that we’ve learned that are things that could be built in a utopian sense, especially in terms of free markets and really efficient markets, but that shouldn’t exist or won’t exist because of various specific contextual market conditions, despite the fact that we can dream them up and even build them now. So I think that’s kind of the biggest difference, is there was a ton of that kind of utopian, positive mindset at the time versus now I think folks are a little bit more jaded and aware of the pitfalls.

Nick (00:17:28):

Well, we’re going to turn our attention here in a moment to talking about your work at Boost VC and a couple articles that you’ve written, that have gained a lot of attention. I like to say one of them has sort of a cult following and a lot of people interested in the ideas shared. Before we do that though, I do want to ask you just quickly about your time at Consensys. You were working on Ethereum and doing work related to the Ethereum ecosystem. My question is if you’re at Deloitte and you sort of get introduced to Bitcoin and blockchain and you contrast that with your work at Consensys and doing work on Ethereum, how would you explain the different ah-has you had with relationship to working and exploring Bitcoin and then getting exposure and working on something like Ethereum?

Mark Beylin (00:18:10):

I had been introduced to the Ethereum ecosystem and in fact most of the work that we did at Deloitte was still very Ethereum focused, but it was not quite the same in that it was much more… At the time, I think it felt like much more we were outside the club, trying to take notes about what was happening inside the club and inside the party. We were peeking over the fences, trying to understand, but we weren’t really in the spaces. And I think the biggest difference for me, especially in 2016 and 2017 at Consensys in particular, they had a Slack where obviously folks who were working at Consensys were there, but even just people in the Ethereum community would hang out there. And so it felt like that was the actual center of the Ethereum ecosystem.

(00:18:56):

It wasn’t all of the Ethereum ecosystem, there was tons of really smart people working at that time, who weren’t affiliated with that project. But nonetheless, it felt that way, certainly to me, that I had entered the sort of middle of the pile or the orbit. I always think about communities as an orbit, different people in the center versus on the edges. And yeah, Consensys certainly at the time felt like much more in the center, Deloitte was a satellite on the edges.

Nick (00:19:21):

So let’s talk about the backstory of how you went from working at Consensys and landing at Boost VC. I am understanding it’s a little bit of a windy road, you did some stops along the way. But what can you tell us about that move?

Mark Beylin (00:19:34):

Yeah. So I mean, I had been an intern at Consensys, I’d gone back to school and started… My first project was just called The Bounties Network. We were a freelancing marketplace on Ethereum. We powered a bunch of different marketplaces, including very famously, Gitcoin. We grew that to a million TVL. We eventually sunsetted the project and put it on hold in terms of developing the smart contract protocol. We’d kind got to a point where everything had kind of breached its maturity there and we wanted to hand the baton over to Gitcoin, to continue sprinting specifically on code bounties, but we really didn’t see a lot of market potential and value in bounties at the time. Obviously bounties have grown since then and become this massive space kind of in two directions. One of which is around airdrop farming, which was just not a business I would’ve been or was particularly interested in building. And then you kind of get to the other side, which is more around the freelancing, which has continued to struggle.

(00:20:30):

And so that was the first thing we did, it was very interesting. And people continue to try and every kind of six months somebody knocks on my door and says, “Hey Mark, I’m thinking of starting a freelancing marketplace. Can you tell me everything you’ve learned?” Which is always great and I’m always happy to take those calls. But that was a really fun, interesting first to have done. And yeah, after that built a number of different other projects, something called Myco, which was like a DAO community platform, really focused on profit sharing rather than tokens. And I was really interested in that idea of not having a token which was tradable on a free market, but instead kind of taking the opposite approach from a regulatory perspective, which was having it not be traded but only earned, and then in doing so, have it be useful for profit sharing and rep sharing. So we did that for a couple of years, eventually spun down that project, couldn’t make that work. Have built a number of other projects over the years as well, some NFT projects, different things.

(00:21:22):

So yeah, over the years as you can kind of hear me talking about it, you can tell I’ve had a lot of different permutations of success and failure and crypto is weird like that, where you can do things that work but don’t make money. You could do things that don’t work and make money. You can do things that don’t work and don’t make money, and things that work and make money. And ideally you’re doing that last one, but very often, you end up doing the other three too. And so I’ve certainly been, I guess lucky enough to have experienced kind of all of the above. And yeah, it’s definitely been very interesting. Crypto is really complicated specifically for product builders in that way, but that’s informed a lot of my work at this point and getting to this point where now on the investing side, I was really lucky to be introduced to the folks at Boost a couple of years ago, and eventually after spinning down my last company, decided that they had a role that was a really great fit for me. And yeah, joined the team there about a year ago.

Nick (00:22:15):

I always like to ask this question to somebody with your background on the podcast, about entrepreneurship. So you’ve done some startups, you’ve tried your hand at some things, you just mentioned there that crypto is a unique environment to be this way. Now you’re working at Boost VC and I imagine a lot of your role is identifying good ideas and allocating investment opportunity there. My question is, given all that experience, what do you think makes a successful entrepreneur? What are the qualities, the two or three things that if a listener is listening to this interview and wants to be an entrepreneur, that they should sort of target or optimize? Do you have any theory or ideas around that?

Mark Beylin (00:22:52):

The first thing that I’ll say is a really great entrepreneur lives in truth. And what I mean by that is really, really militantly committed to figuring out what is actually true and really hates lying to themselves. And I think that’s a really important quality to have in particular in those early days looking for product market fit, trying to validate your assumptions, test your hypotheses. You want to actually be really committed to figuring that out in a way that’s almost scientific and you need to have that constant commitment to what is actually true around me and how can I readjust based on that? Because I think that’s constantly required of a leader, of a founder and of an entrepreneur. I think grit is another big one that’s really needed, is just being able to make it through really tough times and just survive.

(00:23:39):

And then I think the final one is the quality of a winner and the reality that nobody succeeds… And this is especially over the years and now sitting on this side in venture, I see this even more. Nobody succeeds accidentally. The people who win, win very intentionally because they want to win and because they’re hunting the buck. And business is a hunt in that way, and you are ultimately competing for territory with other people in the market if whatever you’re doing is in any way valuable. Or if you discover something that ends up being valuable, you’ll eventually have [inaudible 00:24:11]

(00:24:11):

So having not just grit, which is I think the ability to withstand pain or difficult times, but also the desire to win. This desire to say, I want to be the best, I want to do the best thing to deliver the best work or product or whatever service it is. I think you have to have that winning mindset. And I almost think of Olympians in that regard, where the best founders are Olympians in whatever field they are in. They’re exceptional humans, they work really hard, they take really good care of themselves in the way that Olympians do. They’re really serious humans. And when you meet really impressive entrepreneurs, you kind of [inaudible 00:24:46] that.

Nick (00:24:46):

So now I want to turn our attention to some of the things you’ve written, and we will talk about your role at Boost VC and relationship to these things in a moment. But one of the articles that you’ve written, it’s a blog titled The Token is the Product, it was published in March 2024. And as I’ve said to you, I’ve asked other guests on the podcast about that thesis and I’m always surprised that people have read it and know about it. So as I said, it is got a little bit of a cult following there. And then the other one that you recently published in August 2024 called The Hard Crypto Thesis. I want to start with the blog called The Token is the Product. For any listeners that haven’t taken the time to kind of click into the link or go read that blog post, do you mind just telling us what the core argument you were making there in that blog and yeah, the central thesis.

Mark Beylin (00:25:30):

I made a somewhat controversial take. That was meant to be the intention of the blog post, it was meant to be a sort of wake up call, especially for founders who had been approaching entrepreneurship in a way really quite frankly that I had over many years, which was disregarding a lot of the speculative behavior and token related activities, and focusing on just building a great product or building a great community or doing all these things that traditional startup building tells us are valuable activities, or the right thing to do at the beginning of building your company. And I basically make the argument in the blog post, that that is basically unnecessary and probably backwards in crypto, and that you’re ultimately probably better off spending your energy in those beginning days, selling your token and then focusing on taking the energy that is accumulated via selling your token, and then using that to sell your product and build your product and deliver it sometimes.

(00:26:28):

And that’s a very complicated thing. Obviously for legal regulatory reasons, it’s very, very complicated because this isn’t a trivial thing for entrepreneur. There is an ideal way an entrepreneur might want to do that based in the US, but there’s a way that they have to, and those are two very misaligned directions. But nonetheless, the evidence, I kind of point to a number of pieces of evidence and moments in time where we can look back and say, you know what? This is actually how this has played out. The evidence speaks for itself. The token evidently is the product in enough of these cases where you don’t need another product and people have succeeded, the best products have not succeeded and the best tokens have won.

(00:27:05):

And so I’m not as prescriptive about what makes a great token or how to sell a great token, I think those are independent blog posts. I think that remains to be seen. But I think if there’s one thing I can commit to and write in a way that I really want to emphasize for anyone who knows me or who I’ve worked with or who I might be able to help on their journeys, I wanted to wake them up and say, “Hey, you’re probably under appreciating this activity and it’s actually way more important to your business than you’ve probably realized.” But that’s kind of my high level description. My advice is if any of that’s interesting, just read the whole thing. I spent a lot of time rewriting that blog post, so it’s been very refined and it’s much more refined than certainly this verbal description of it was.

Nick (00:27:49):

Sure, and I’ll put a link in the show notes for anybody who wants to, and I’ll reference maybe some of the prior podcast guests I’ve had on, where I’ve sort of posed this question of, is it actually true that the token is the product? One of the examples that you bring up in your blog is the Helium network. And so is that then sort of the gold standard for a project that you think got this relationship right between product and token?

Mark Beylin (00:28:13):

Yeah, I think Helium is a really, really prime example. And there was a moment in time and I remember it because I actually was again, a participant in the Helium network. Again, I felt lucky to be there in that moment where I was like, “Wait a minute, this thing is actually going online right now and I know how to run this thing, let me try to do it.” But I think it was around 2020, they were going live with their network. And they had already launched their token, right? They’d already sold their token, they’d already had this massive plan to take on really, what are these glorified incumbents. It’s like an oligopoly of these telecom companies. And they get to continue to persist in this way, because this massive capital requirement to take them on to compete, so nobody does. And so there’s basically no way to compete with these telecom companies to provide alternative services.

(00:28:59):

These guys at Helium said, wait a minute, actually, if we can gather enough interest and energy around this token and get people to all realize that we can all coordinate around this sort of unified economic system that we create ourselves, that could be its own independent valuable system that we don’t need to ask for permission from these large telecom companies to use their towers, we can build our own towers. And so what they did is they actually allowed people to buy these miners, these little rack miners that were essentially little internet nodes. They talked to each other and could challenge each other, and could do all this stuff to keep the network alive. But also in doing so were the setup for what would eventually become the Helium network. And he was like, “I don’t actually think…”

(00:29:40):

Again, I have the best information on this, I’m not as well researched on Helium’s early days as I’d perhaps even like to be. So I don’t know specifically how many users were actually on the network compared to the token rewards and what that balance was like, but I certainly know that miners were being rewarded for running those nodes and participating in the network regardless of the traffic that they were receiving. And I think in that regard, it’s important to sort of recognize that the economic system was being bootstrapped despite the fact that the demand side of this marketplace hadn’t been brought into the market yet. There were not really that many users who were actually buying, so to speak, broadband from the Helium network, but they had a ton of people who were selling by running these nodes and in particular they were subsidizing that using their token.

(00:30:28):

That example, that sort of playbook, is going to I assume, end up being a very similar playbook, at least at a high level for disrupting a lot of very high capital intensive businesses that otherwise, when you can distribute this cost of spinning that network up or taking on this incumbent, if you could split that among a large number of participants who can bear their own burden, their own small sort of fraction of the cost, you can actually take on these very large incumbent.

(00:30:56):

And so the key is to do that, they had to sell people on this token and on this vision. You had to want to buy a rackbiter so you could earn their token, which means upstream of that you had to believe in their token, you had to believe in this vision, you had to believe in [inaudible 00:31:10]. And they executed I think really, really well. Now the network is live. You can now buy a plan through Helium and I think from what I hear, get pretty great service. And that’s really exciting. It starts to become a backbone for a new kind of internet and a new sort of class of applications that can live on Helium instead of having to live on some of the other kinds of internet networks that users might be accustomed to. I know protocols like Devo are starting to do that where they’re using and they offer an alternative on Helium versus existing cell networks.

Nick (00:31:43):

Is part of the nuance, and maybe it’s not as nuanced as I’m making it sound, of your argument that lifecycle sort of matters here, that the early days of the project, it really needs to get that vision or buy-in on the token, but over time as things mature, there needs to be a shift or a gravitation away from that and more towards the actual tech or product, or do you maintain that that’s sort of equilibrium exists from early days through the maturity of the project? How do you think about that?

Mark Beylin (00:32:14):

The short answer is it totally depends on how forgiving your specific market is, right? And I think that just depends on whoever the project is. They might attract market participants that are particularly forgiving or be willing to hold their token despite many, many long years of inactivity. And so versus you might be sort of required to ship on a more regular basis. I think Elon Musk is actually a really prime example of this, where he is constantly… With his work, you see the way that he sort of presents his work. He’s constantly shipping on a regular cadence and the shipping he does actually helps him sell more of his token, which is Tesla shares or SpaceX shares, or the debt that they issue. But by constantly shipping product and selling future vision at the same time, he is able to then fund that future vision, and so it’s actually a self-reinforcing cycle.

(00:33:08):

I think there’s very few people who can go for long periods of time without fulfilling a feedback loop and sort of delivering to the market what you promised or at least a version of it. And so I think in that regard, there is a feedback loop that happens with really amazing projects over many years. I think Ethereum is a great example where despite many bear cycles and downturns and hacks and all these different awful things that have happened, it’s continued to bounce back, the community has a lot of resiliency. And so that’s I think, a great example there too.

Nick (00:33:36):

How has your view of this topic or the position that you sort of articulated in March of this year evolved since you published it? As I said, a lot of people read it, a lot of people reference this and it is a slight paradigm shift to traditional models, let alone the way I think some projects are approaching this question of token value versus the product or service value. Has your view on the topic evolved since then?

Mark Beylin (00:34:04):

Not particularly. I think that now that there are a lot of people thinking in this way, which I’m really delighted about, I think it’s better for the whole market to live in recognition of this fact, that this is a good thing. But downstream of that sort of the next subsequent question is well, what’s the right way to sell a token? I think that’s been maybe the question of the year. There was a lot of people writing a lot of really interesting threads earlier in the year in particular about token launches and high FTV launches or low FTV launches, and these different alternatives. There’s I think, many open questions. But I think we’re all sort of a lie that they need to be asked and that exploration needs to be done. The market is still obviously tricky and so people are timid about doing token launches, in particular before the election. Hopefully after the election with more clarity, there can be a clear path towards more exploration of different types of models. But I think it’s just going to take some more time.

(00:35:05):

And this is maybe a segue into the other article, is I actually think the people who need that article the most are not yet even in crypto. And so I don’t know what it will read like in a year, but my hope is that in a year I can still send it to folks in my network who are still getting into crypto and who still haven’t realized this sort of universal truth, that I do think is a kind of universal crypto truth, and I think is part of the way that crypto is going to disrupt all business models even outside of businesses that touch crypto specifically or use smart contracts specifically, that tokens, they just change business models in a way that everyone’s going to have to pay attention.

Nick (00:35:38):

I do want to turn our attention to The Hard Crypto Thesis. Before I do, I do want to give sort of the devil’s advocate who might be listening or who has read the article and is interested in hearing maybe a question like this, but how do you respond to maybe criticism of the position you took in that blog post, The Token is the Product, for people that say you’re just making a very academic sort of high-minded argument in favor of hype and hype around just tokens. Do you have a response for something or a criticism like that?

Mark Beylin (00:36:09):

I think that Criticism is generally speaking true. I made an argument that is hopefully an intellectual argument about why hype has worked. And I think the problem is that there are so many of us who are really focused on using our logical brains and that information has not made its way into our brains, we’ve filtered it out in every other capacity. Certainly over many years I managed to filter out this fad that many other people in the crypto space already had figured out, which is the tokens. But I had lived in ignorance for years and I’d hoped that by writing in this, I don’t want to say high-minded, but in a way that was very… I was trying to be very evidence driven. I was trying to be very specific and highlight very tangible examples of why the hype works and what seems to be… What is the dynamic at play here, looking at it through maybe a scientific lens? And so that was definitely my intention.

(00:37:04):

I think it’s definitely hype, right? That’s a maybe great way to think about it. But I do think that ultimately the best tokenized systems are not just hype. Again, Elon Musk. You can look at the work that Elon Musk does and the way that he raises capital for himself as like, “Oh, he’s just a hype man.” Sure, but he’s also really talented at having his products cycles driven in a way that they actually reinforce his capital structure and his ability to raise capital is really interesting and actually not that common. Most people do product development driven by customers, they don’t really think quite as much about product development driven by the people who are actually funding this. The reality is in crypto sometimes all of those three people are the same person. Your customer is your investor, is your user, and might also maybe run a node in some other context. And so things get so blurry in the crypto space, that I think everyone needs to pay attention.

(00:37:55):

Like I said, my goal was to kind of shake people and wake them up to the value of hype and to emphasize in the article, that just doing that alone is obviously still scamming and just selling people tokens and never delivering anything, I mean, good luck doing it for very long. But that’s not what we’re talking about. And we are not talking about building a successful tokenized system in that way, you’re just talking about that’s a different kind of activity. And my hope is that anyone reading the article sort of understood that that was not my intention or really what I was trying.

Nick (00:38:23):

Agreed. And I also think that point is very clearly articulated in the blog, and as I said, I’ll put a link in the show notes for anyone that wants to read or reread that. Let’s now talk about what you recently published in August 2024. It’s called The Hard Crypto Thesis. Another very interesting blog that really relates I think, to your work at Boost VC and articulate some of the investment thesis there. But if you don’t mind, can you also just take us through the core argument you’re making in this blog post and some of the thinking behind it?

Mark Beylin (00:38:51):

Totally, yeah. And this one is a very different kind of blog post, I think this one’s much more hypothetical and much more kind of future focused. But you’re right, is based on the position that I’m in right now at Boost and the kind of experience that I’ve had over the years in crypto, having worked in these projects that have tried to build for real world systems, that was some of the first tech that I did at Consensys or at Deloitte. There were all these proof of concepts, there were these POCs. But they were all tried to eventually build towards the school of how do we build systems for supply chain tracking or all these different tangible real world systems on crypto systems, on crypto rail. So that’s been a really old problem I’ve been interested in for a while.

(00:39:31):

And over this kind of year based on my position at Boost, I’ve been able to witness a number of things. One, we have this massive explosion happening in the hard tech fields, in particular in biotech and in robotics. In biotech, driven by sort of decreasing costs around genomics and lab sequencing and just in general skyrocketing design space compared to costs. And then again, looking at the hardware space, robotics, we see falling costs of off the shelf hardware, making it really easy, open source robotics. Making it just generally speaking, way easier than ever before for people to free to predict, making it easy for anybody to build whatever they want. So there’s just basically these massive design spaces opening up in hardware, in biotech right now.

(00:40:17):

And then simultaneously, we see that crypto is ready for a more mainstream audience, ready for a more sort of non crypto native use cases. We can start to point to use cases like Helium and examples like Helium. And this is I think one of the poignant statements I make in the blog post is look, any reasonable high IQ individual up until the year 2024, could have made an argument that blockchains are a scam, tokens are all a scam, and that would’ve been a reasonably defensible argument for them to make. I imagine at a party in San Francisco. And my claim is that in the year 2024, that’s no longer a defensible position. There is simply too much evidence on the contrary that tokens, not only are they useful for allocating capital, but that allocation of capital and that sort of concentration of value can be used to achieve very real goals in the real world outside of crypto systems, outside of deep fire or [inaudible 00:41:11] or any of that.

(00:41:11):

And so I think examples that are paving the way for really, I think a new generation of crypto companies to be born. I kind of point to it as right now we have Desai, we have RWAs and we have DeepHid. I don’t really like any of those three spaces specifically, each of them are focused on this kind of very overarching problem in their own ways. But I think ultimately crypto is such a valuable tool for capital formation, that it’s inevitable to me that crypto business models are going to continue to invade hard tech spaces. And I think practically speaking, what that means is we’re going to see more and more hard tech founders pivoting into crypto.

(00:41:53):

And I know there was a huge movement several years ago of oh, if your business isn’t working, pivot into crypto. Long Island crypto, whatever Long Island blog. And I think the reality is we actually are going to see people whose business models are not able to be sustained via traditional venture funding or traditional paths in particular, based on the long time it takes to get your drug through different trials and through the FDA, whatever. Based on that business model, it simply is not working, the math isn’t mathing. And so if there is alternatives in the crypto space that can offer funding for these kinds of projects, yeah, smart people are going to look for funding elsewhere. And so just increasingly over the next couple of years, especially with funding environments king of very dynamic, we’re going to see more people building tokenized and network oriented versions of businesses that might otherwise have been revenue based. And I think that’s also really interesting and really exciting.

(00:42:42):

But yeah, that’s kind of the ultimate thesis there, it’s just that we live in this really interesting time. I think this is about to play out over the next couple of years. I don’t think it’s going to happen overnight. But I think it’s already starting, and just for me being based in SF now and talking to a lot of hard tech founders, I love to pick their brains about this and almost troll them about it because I know they’re all super allergic to crypto. And I have to say that more than ever before, once you start to talk through kind of token models with them, they start to realize very quickly the value there. So I think it’s coming, but I think it’ll just take a couple of years.

Nick (00:43:11):

A follow-up to all of that is, again, I won’t summarize the blog as well as you can. But I’m reading it and seeing it sort of as an argument of favor of why the time is now to start exploring this thesis. And you do a good job obviously, defining hard crypto and talking about the sort of sectors and technology that this is at play. You talk about these token business models, but another thing you talk about is this trustless coordination at scale. Can you double click on why something like that coordination sort of enabled through token business models is novel and could do something new or fresh to these existing models?

Mark Beylin (00:43:52):

I don’t even think of it like business model, I think of it like economic model, right? Because what we’re talking about is… And in fact most of these businesses, most businesses in the world have entire economies built around them. Salesforce is a great example where Salesforce is Salesforce, and then there’s a bunch of tiny small fish swimming alongside Salesforce, building their businesses in this sort of ecosystem around it. So that’s a pretty common thing that already happens.

(00:44:13):

And so I think getting to this world where instead of these kind of companies building a business model, but instead thinking of building this economic model around themselves, around their token, I think that is where basically the thesis is. Things are moving in the direction of these broader economic models that basically allow for large numbers of participants to intermediate with each other.

(00:44:35):

Going back to the helium example. Whereas before, internet broadband is like a two-sided marketplace connection between me, the purchaser and my internet provider, the seller, now, all of these many different small tiny participants can come together and together they sort of… It’s like the Ant-Man, they sort form this massive thing and that is the service provider that I interact with, but it’s actually made up of a giant number of small participants that we’re all able to coordinate with each other via this protocol, that protocol being the glue that help them stick together.

(00:45:10):

So that I think is the vision for what a lot of these protocols will look like, at least again, at a rough level. And I don’t think it will be a lot of these sort of DAOs administered in the way that we think about them right now, I think it will be, again, a lot more trustless protocols where the marketplace and the token really, is this kind of bridge between different groups of people and acts as this sort of economic bucket for value flowing in and out of an ecosystem. Again, what that looks like is not totally clear yet, but I do think it’s coming and I think that trustless coordination powered by smart contracts is going to be kind of a key part.

Nick (00:45:45):

In your role at Boost VC, you get exposure to a lot of really interesting opportunities. I read a little bit that you’ve been able to study and develop some understanding, maybe expertise on the intersection of crypto and AI. You’re clearly making some great arguments in The Hard Crypto Thesis blog post. But if you don’t mind just pulling back the curtain a little bit, what are some of the stories or use cases, or investment opportunities that you’re tracking, that have you most excited including AI?

Mark Beylin (00:46:17):

Oh, that’s a great question. I love the non-crypto side of the investments we get to make and companies that we work with or founders in our network. We’re investors in a company for instance, called Radiant Nuclear and context there is like they’re building shipping containers that are also… Nuclear reactors basically the size of shipping containers. And they’ve been on this journey for many, many years, they’ve still got many years to go. They’re doing really, really well. That’s one example where it’s very, very cutting edge tech, very long development cycles. Nobody else is willing to invest. But when we see an incredible founder and a model that makes sense, the energy model there makes a ton of sense, and more and more people are sort of waking up to this distributed energy world that we live in and the sort of necessity of creating energy at the source, or excuse me, at the moment and the location where it’s actually being used. There’s a number of benefits there, Radiant is obviously exploring that. So that’s kind of one example of a company I’m very excited about.

(00:47:16):

The canonical example that I tell people when I joined, one of the first investments we made is into a company called Dognosis. And so when I tell people what we do, it’s like, “Oh, we do crypto, AI, VR, biorobotic, space, climate. And by the way, we also do cancer sniffing dog.” So Dognosis, they work with dogs actually, which sniff human masks that have been breathed on and contain traces of various sorts of hormones and different things in their breath, the dogs could actually use to detect cancer early on, at a much lower cost and a higher rate than would otherwise be available, certainly in India, which is one of the [inaudible 00:47:53]. So that’s one example where I don’t want to go too deep into how they’re doing it. They’re an incredible team and they’re doing really great stuff. It’s not crypto native, but it’s just a really awesome deep tech.

(00:48:02):

So that’s a lot of what it’s at Boost, where we just talk to amazing founders building at the edges of the map. And then that does also get to include crypto too, and we’re really lucky to be able to connect all of these different types of founders to each other, and they oftentimes realize, wait a minute, actually, there’s a ton of overlap between us because it takes a certain type of person to build a deep tech company. That’s kind of what we’re looking for, is that type of person. There’s obviously a number of different types of archetypes and it doesn’t always look the same and we try not to pattern match too hard in that regard, but we do find there’s a lot of cross industry benefit there as well, just purely by osmosis.

Nick (00:48:38):

Mark, a question I regularly ask on this podcast is related to mass adoption. I think in your blog post, The Hard Crypto Thesis, you sort of accepted some premises about the state of the industry now and that it’s easier than ever before for people to get involved and activated in crypto, to begin using blockchain and these types of things. But if we lean into this argument that we haven’t quite reached mass adoption yet, are you watching or tracking any sort of specific mileposts or any sort of particular activity that sort of unlocks this great allure that we all talk about, of gaining mass adoption?

Mark Beylin (00:49:15):

Yeah, totally. Again, I think Helium is a great example here, where they achieved this level of crypto adoption of spinning up their network because they had this broad network of users actually running the nodes. And so I think that’s kind of a quality that we’ve forgotabout, especially with a lot of the tokens that have launched, recently being these L1 or L2 networks where all the nodes are validating, the networks are very centralized or for sake whenever, they aren’t really quite as worried about onboarding nodes in the same way. But I think that kind of an approach is ultimately what a real crypto system looks like. That’s really the final goal that I think we need to be chasing and really going after in terms of what does a real tokenized network look like? So practically speaking for me, when I think about mass adoption, that looks like the adoption of crypto systems throughout a variety of our live interactions and the use cases that we interact with various businesses around us.

(00:50:14):

Yeah, when there are more node oriented projects and I think we’ll start to be able to track how many of those different types of users are there who participate, whether it’s… In The Hard Crypto Thesis, I give a bunch of examples like people sharing eggs in their local communities and creating some kind of local network around that. But if it’s a crypto network and there’s real life value being interacted with or transacted or created, whatever, that to me is a check mark, that’s that’s a win. And so RWAs here are a little bit complicated because a lot of times you’re just talking about trading a facsimile for something that’s happening in the real world, you’re not actually influencing the real world. And I think that’s the element you need to sort of mutate the real world around you. Nodes kind are my vague approximation for that, but that sort of mutation, that changing the world around you is the sort of gateway to actually protocols that can make the world a better place, which if your protocol doesn’t have some goal towards in that regard, you’re probably not going to make it.

Nick (00:51:13):

Mark, actually, I have one final follow up with you before we get to the GRTiQ 10 actually, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you. But given the fact that you have this really great view of the industry, you’re working at Boost VC, you’re evaluating investment opportunities and you’re exploring and doing deep research on where the opportunities are, you’ve writthese great blog posts that have, as I said, really developed a following and changed the way people are thinking about things. If you don’t mind, I’d love to just get your quick take on something like The Graph. A lot of my listeners are extremely enthusiastic about The Graph and web3 data. As you look at the web3 industry, do you have an opinion on something like The Graph and how it fits into web3 and the problem it aims to solve?

Mark Beylin (00:51:59):

Totally, yeah. Again, I have to confess, my disclaimer here is my sister Eva, is the director at The Graph Foundation, so I’m slightly biased. But I’ll try to answer in a truly unbiased way, which is that I was around Consensys in those early days and Infura was being built, and before the variety of Infura competitors and Graph competitors and all that stuff, before all those were launched. And even back then, we sort of all I think knew deep down that it probably made sense for some version of this to be decentralized even though nobody really knew how to do that and what that would look like. And over the years, obviously The Graph was born. It’s been so many… It’s been such a sort of long process of developing the product, launching everything, going live with the various elements of it and kind of moving through the various phases.

(00:52:51):

And I think if there’s one quality that I love about The Graph, it’s I feel like The Graph is in my head, one of the cockroach protocols of crypto, and in my head… We have Boost say be the cockroach in an endearing way, as a compliment of we want to back founders who were cockroaches, who will survive at all costs and who are unkillable. And I think there’s a few crypto protocols where we see the founders are still grinding, the team is still grinding, they’re still in it. There’s just a lot of commitment to achieve that goal that they originally set out to do. They’re really trying to bring that vision forward and to spin up this decentralized protocol, I think of The Graph as one of those great cockroach protocols.

(00:53:29):

There’s a few others examples, Live Peer is another great example that comes to my mind of, where are we? Where these guys are just cockroaches and they are just grinding. And even though you can’t point to them and say the work is done, they’ve succeeded, it’s still an evolving… We’re still moving. I think The Graph is still moving towards it and the ecosystem still sort of watching and waiting to see how this all plays out. But nonetheless, The Graph ecosystem continues to remain very strong, and that’s been awesome to see.

Nick (00:53:56):

I’ll put links in the show notes if you want to learn a little bit more about Eva’s background. And of course, I interviewed Sam Williams, the founder over at Arweave, and I’ve had several Life Peer members on including Yand and one of the founders over there, so definitely check out the show notes. As I said, Mark, I’m now going to ask you the GRTiQ 10. These are 10 questions I ask each week. I ask them because I want to inspire listeners to learn something new, try something different or achieve more in their own life. And as I said, it allows us to get to know you a little bit more on the personal side. So Mark, are you ready for the GRTiQ ten?

Mark Beylin (00:54:28):

I hope so, yeah.

Nick (00:54:41):

What book or article has had the most impact on your life?

Mark Beylin (00:54:46):

It’s a book called Human Accomplishment, by Charles Murray, which I love. I don’t want to say it’s necessarily my favorite book, but it had an immense impact on me and it kind of studies human accomplishment and excellence over, I think it’s 2000 BC all the way to 1950, and across a number of different domains. But it’s really interesting and I was just particularly kind of interested in this idea of excellence as a concept and what does it take for humans to be excellent? Why do these pockets of excellence come up? And it, I think just got me really excited about communities, community building and what is really possible when you bring a lot of really talented or really high caliber people in the same room or [inaudible 00:55:23].

Nick (00:55:24):

And how about this, Mark? Is there a movie or a TV show that you would recommend everybody should watch?

Mark Beylin (00:55:29):

I have a favorite movie, which is Cloud Atlas, by the Wachowski siblings and the sisters. I don’t know if everyone would make it through that movie or if it’s necessarily for everyone, but I wish everyone could watch it and could love it. I think it’s the best movie ever made. I think it’s one of the most interesting movies ever made, and one of the best uses of the craft in terms of expressing a story using film. What they do with kind of characters and actors is very interesting. I don’t want to get into it and spoil it, but that’s definitely the movie I would recommend. Very poetic, very beautiful, very, very kind of thought-provoking.

Nick (00:56:00):

Mark, if you could only listen to one music album for the rest of your life, which one do you choose?

Mark Beylin (00:56:06):

It’s an album of Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone. Ennio Morricone was an Italian composer from the 20th century, and there’s an album of Yo-Yo Ma playing some of his selected tracks, that I really love and I could spend the rest of my life listening to just that album and I’d be happy.

Nick (00:56:23):

What’s the best advice someone’s ever given to you?

Mark Beylin (00:56:26):

It’s actually a piece of advice my father has told me my whole life, which is the difference between medicine and poison is dosage.

Nick (00:56:34):

What’s one thing you’ve learned in your life, that you don’t think most other people have learned or know quite yet?

Mark Beylin (00:56:40):

I mean, is it a cop out to say how the blockchain works?

Nick (00:56:45):

Not at all. Not at all, and I believe it.

Mark Beylin (00:56:48):

I’m going to say that, yeah. And how smart contracts [inaudible 00:56:51]

Nick (00:56:52):

What’s the best life hack you’ve discovered for yourself?

Mark Beylin (00:56:57):

Learning by doing or throwing myself in the deep end, and learning to be really comfortable there. And in that experience, you can learn just way faster if you are okay at improvs.

Nick (00:57:09):

And then Mark, based on your own life experiences and observations, what’s the one habit or characteristic that you think best explains how or why people find success in life?

Mark Beylin (00:57:19):

I think it’s probably the ability to learn. Learning is a key quality in life and the most successful people… And I think actually, I’m going to even double down and say in our lifetimes this will be more evidently true as our society becomes more meritocratic and as we have AI now, the separation between people who are interested in learning, and I kind of said at the beginning around entrepreneurs who want to live in truth, people who are really interested in that with an AI, with a large language model, will learn anything they want as quickly as they can. People who are not interested in learning will sort of wither on the vine.

(00:57:53):

And so the ability to learn, the interest in learning, knowing how to learn quickly is incredibly important. Everybody learns differently, knowing your own kind of methods. But learning to learn, it is a skill, I think it is like a muscle. I don’t think people are just born… But I do think people are born with a curiosity, and I do think people are born with a desire to learn. I think most people just wear it away and it goes away, and they get bored.

Nick (00:58:19):

And then Mark, the final three questions of the GRTiQ 10 are complete the sentence type questions. So the first one is, the thing that most excites me about the future of web3 is?

Mark Beylin (00:58:30):

It is restaking.

Nick (00:58:33):

And how about this one? If you’re on X, I still call it Twitter, you should be following?

Mark Beylin (00:58:38):

Vitalik, because he started tweeting again.

Nick (00:58:43):

And finally, Mark, how about this one? I’m happiest when?

Mark Beylin (00:58:48):

I am happiest when I am grounded, I would say. That’s probably the best way I would put it. What that looks like is always different, but yeah, grounded.

Nick (00:59:06):

Mark, thank you so much for taking the time to join the GRTiQ Podcast. It was a lot of fun to explore not only your career and your backstory of how you got involved in the industry, but the blog posts you’ve written, that have shaped a lot of people’s thinking on some important topics. It was a lot of fun. If listeners want to follow you, stay in touch with the work that you are doing, maybe catch the next blog post, what’s the best way for them to stay in touch?

Mark Beylin (00:59:29):

Yeah, definitely on Twitter or X, as some people call it. That’s definitely the best way to reach me. My DMs are open. I generally try to be pretty responsive, in particular to founders and entrepreneurs. If you’re ever building anything or need any help or feedback from someone who’s been on the investing side as well as the founder side, folks should always feel free to reach out. And yeah, in general, I’m always around, always tweeting. Just don’t take anything I say too seriously.