Stephen: Listen up. Those of you that want VC money, those of you that are interested in pitching investors, this is going to be one. Amazing episode from Around The Coin podcast. I'm your host, Stephen Sargeant. You know this by now, but we have Alice Li that is heading up North America for Foresight Ventures. They have basically one of the few, if not the only VC companies that are actually doing their investments in crypto from east to West, north America, to Asia, and she has all the insights.

All of the jurisdictional arbitrage that's happening between both these regions. She's talking about investment, AI, and blockchain payments. She's asking you to reach out to her with her ideas and pitch her. We have never seen that on this podcast or many other podcasts. She's an amazing, amazing person, but genuinely has some really great insights about what's happening in this industry, what VCs are looking for, and she gives the lay of the lamb of where we exactly are in the state of VC investment in crypto and ai.

We even talk about how some industries are going back and forth and some things that they stay completely away from, which will be great insights. For those that might be in the payment sector, gaming sector, or NFTs. This is by far one of the funnest episodes. You know, we had to record with her. We were able to pull her away.

She's on her phone. We're able to pull her away to enjoy this conversation for you, our dedicated listeners, and hopefully some of your ideas get through to her, and she responds, talk soon.

Stephen: This is your host, Stepen Sargeant the Around The Coin podcast. We're excited to have Alice Li, you're the investment partner and head of North America at Foresight Ventures. We're gonna go into your past, your background, what you've been working on, but give us, you know, your one minute elevator pitch. If you're at an, you know, at going up in the elevator, talking to other investors, what would be your, your pitch?

Alice: Well, hi everyone. My name is Alice and I'm the head of the US and also investment partner for Foresight Ventures. We are what the first and the only VC that can bridge East and West. And yeah, we are really bullish about crypto and we're backed by our LP is also a crypto fund crypto exchange.

Our LP is a crypto exchange. That's why we basically do all the investments in crypto Yeah. And have offices in Singapore and us.

Stephen: That's interesting. Why do you say that's a bold statement? You're the only VC that can bridge East and West. Like what makes your approach different than maybe the other VCs that have to be very jurisdictionally based?

Alice: So for us, we have a large ecosystem consisting, not just VCs. We do have media branches. So we own one of the largest crypto media in the western world. The block we.

And we also have one of the largest crypto outlets in Asia. It's called for news. We incubated the team and that's why we can have the viewpoint of both the eastern and western world. And it's kind of interesting to see the opinion. And also like the narratives shift that could be different from the western world and eastern world, where the.

In, in the Western side, it's more about stable coins, it's more about RWAs and then for the east, eastern retail users, they're more focused on, you know, sometimes moon coins or what other what are things that that can bring them 10 x or 30 x to return. So, so that's very interesting narrative and that that gives us like a very brand new. Like that gives us a very different approach when it comes to analyzing a project. When it comes to do more due diligence on the team, we could definitely rely on those media.

Stephen: Awesome. Sorry, I'm just pausing quickly. Just be careful when like, every time you move it's like it will catch that sound from the mic. It's, it's okay. It's okay. Like it's just the first two minutes I, I'll flag my team, but we'll take this part out obviously, but just be careful when you move, like, try to or position that so it's not like as soon as it rubs against your shirt, it'll make a sound. Yeah. So just kind of yeah. Position it so that nothing's, yeah. Perfect. Awesome. Awesome. That's amazing. So, you know, what's interesting about ya is looking, you know, based on what you've done in the past, you were at Amazon and TikTok from like, you know, pre pandemic, it seems like you're more on the project segment side. What were some of your tactics for helping to grow these organizations pre pandemic?

Alice: Well, I worked for Amazon for the product management team, and I also worked in TikTok in London for their product growth team. And actually during my time in Amazon, I was just building the Prime product to ask people to sign up for. That was a pretty standard job, honestly. That's why I decided to do something more challenging.

And I joined TikTok at a very early stage. But when I joined TikTok, that was actually already close to pandemic time. So, they decided to build something build a new TikTok version in, in Europe, especially targeting users in, in the uk. Right. And one of the tactic that we come up with is use token incentives to reward our users.

So the more you watch video, the more tokens you earn. Of course, it's not a real, real token, it's like a point system, but that strategy actually worked out very well. I helped design all the account system on all the. Redeem withdrawal functionalities and all the kind of KYC payment integrations and this incentive program alone bring us almost 1 million users within the first one week of launch.

So that was when I realized that, you know, having a economic incentive is very important to users and it's a very efficient tool. And after that you know, it didn't went that well, of course the app store started to see like what we're doing and they definitely notice us and they kind of give us a warning letter because it's their competition or something.

So they kind of stopped us from operation. So that since then we kind of stopped growing from, I guess the daily active user was around 400 million. And then everything start drop, other metrics starts to drop. And that's when I realized like, you know, in the centralized ecosystem you have to ask for App store, Google Store for permission, right?

Because they set the rules. But what if we go to somewhere that doesn't have any role? What if we do the same thing in, you know, crypto where everything's permissionless? Then our app would definitely go viral. And that's when I started to find like maybe my, my passion is not just in, you know, traditional world.

And then I started to look for other opportunities in. Yeah. That's how I realized that that's, that's why I joined Foresight after I, you know, find out all of the kind of drawbacks of the traditional in institutions. Yeah.

Stephen: And we, we see it not just. In, like whether it's the app store, it's also in payments. You remember like early on, especially now with the emergence of OnlyFans before there were other, you know, you know, visions like OnlyFans in that kind of industry where you couldn't pay via, through via Visa or MasterCard, not because it was illegal, just because morally those companies did not want to stand up those industries.

So we saw the importance of crypto very early on when it's like, okay, these things are not banned or illegal, but because a certain government or a certain person doesn't like the activities that are payments are being made, and we saw this as well with the whole Ukraine and Russia invasion, is that you couldn't send funds to Ukraine via crowdsourcing or, you know, GoFundMe because they don't allow you to make payments towards military grade equipment.

So we've seen it multiple times the importance of having a decentralized way to process payments to, you know, run social media. I'm curious now, 'cause you're seeing both the east and west, a lot of your experience was when you were residing in China, you know, the discussion around terrorists between China and USA.

What do your own personal perspectives of this situation and maybe, you know, since you've come to the US do you see it a little bit differently from both sides?

Alice: Yeah, I guess, tariff is never a good thing for both sides because it makes our life harder and everything more expensive. But I think in, in a way that I see that more as a tactic or. To actually negotiate on certain things. Right. I think it's gonna be, it's gonna be a, a zero sum game in the end, but it's more about, you know, setting boundaries and learning about like, where each other's boundaries are.

And of course I think Trump is used to have their tactic to negotiate on terms as a very smart and successful businessman. And for me as a crypto investor, of course, I love Trump. But as also as a Chinese living here living in Asia, I will also concern that that. Strong impact in our economy.

Right. So it, it's very complicated, but, you know, nothing can stop this trend because, because like where, where we are right now, it's really hard to stop anything from happening. So, yeah. But in the end, I feel like crypto might be the resolution for everyone to have like a better store of value.

Hedge against in the time of this when it's uncertain and maybe the economy situation will go back for both for both party.

Stephen: Do you believe? Trump is net positive for crypto. You said, of course you like Trump and I feel the same way. You know, my phone's ringing a lot more today than it was maybe six months ago or a hundred days ago. Do you feel that Trump is net positive for crypto, but do you also think there will be challenges for individual companies or, you know, different nuances within the crypto industry versus like every, like everybody will rise with this kind of momentum tide that we're seeing in crypto?

Alice: Yeah, I think in general, Trump administrative I think in general, Trump. Good for crypto and we are looking for them to actually perform more policies and regulations for stable Coin and payments. But right. It's very hard to predict what they're due again, so long term, I think it's net positive for short term.

It's hard to tell, especially when they launched. Meme Coin and kind of suck all the liquidities from the market. Right? That's something like they basically ruined the whole meme Coin concept. Now that everyone think about it, they think about the meme Coin that that Trump and Millennia did and like it was really bad 'cause everyone got kind of lose some money, as far as I know, right.

Stephen: Yeah, like two people made a lot of money. nine, the 98,000. Other people probably lost a couple dollars here and there. I'm curious, what are your thoughts? Around how do you approach investing? And we're gonna get into, you know, your company and foresight as well. But how do you approach it knowing that, like, you know, when it was the Biden administration, it was pretty much anti crippled operation, choke point, and now it's like, oh, you know, crypto digital assets, stockpiles and procr.

But if they don't stay in power in the next four years, could we go back to, you know, where we were, you know, three or four months ago? How do you balance that when you're trying to make an investment or long-term investment that this pendulum is swinging to both extremes. It's not really kind of like hovering in the middle there.

Alice: I think in general, if we see the. Growth chart of Bitcoin when it was first invented. Nobody believes it when it gets a little bit bigger than people. Some people think it's scam, right? A lot of the regulation, the regulators still didn't like it. But it survived. So Bitcoin and crypto is a concept that can survive even when it's extreme.

In, in anti or even if it's in a very unfriendly environment, it's very resilient. So the baseline is we could definitely hold Bitcoin in long term. Whether the legislation environment is good or bad. I think right now we need to talk about ity. So how fast the crypto price the crypto market can grow.

Well, if it's Trump administration, of course, grow fast. This, despite all the fluctuations of course but with Biden or with other governments come to come to power, maybe it'll grow slower. Maybe it'll bounce, maybe it'll dip again, but eventually they'll bounce back because that's the history.

That's what we learned from history. Bitcoin are never gonna die. So for us to invest in long term, of course we don't really invest in Mims of course. That's rule number one. We wanna invest in something long term and we're gonna hold the asset long term as well. So it can kind of off, kind of offset a lot of fluctuation over time.

Stephen: I love that. Yeah. 'cause if you did call it 12 years, you'd have three or four cycles by that time anyway. So whether it was up or down and you know how it works, can you give me, you know, your modus operandi, your ethos for Foresight Ventures? You say that you make all your investments or maybe the majority of your investments in crypto, what is your approach when investing in not just crypto, but the entire technology space?

Alice: Yeah, so there are a few things that we look at to evaluate a company. Firstly is. Whether your business model makes sense, whether that creates value for our clients and at least we want this business to survive for the next three to five years. That's why we don't invest in very short term names or NFTs or games.

'cause we never find any games that can live for more than one year for. And long term strategy is we focus in two area. One is AI plus crypto, and the second one is payment plus crypto. So these are the sectors that we find really long find a lot of sustainability in and can actually have product market fit in the future.

But it's slow. It's slow to make any progress and to have the first clients. So we gotta be very confident and very patient to these companies. And we're also helping them a lot to kind of brand themselves in Asia and western world. And also like try to introduce. Our portfolio already. 'Cause we have around 150 portfolio companies, so there are a lot of chances for them to become partners with each other.

Yeah, so that's first approach is whether the business is long term. And then the second is whether the team is legit, if they have strong back backgrounds, if they have built a startup before, if they know crypto enough. Because building a startup in crypto is, I would say it's. It's more, it's more like, building a crypto startup might be a little bit more complicated than web two products because you need to know the community.

You need to know how to launch your token. You need to understand your relationship with the exchange, with the, with the liquidity providers, with your market makers. Even with VCs, if you wanted to do, you know, first, second, third round or even after tg, you wanted to do OTC rounds. So there are a lot of things to learn and we prefer the ones that really is trying to deliver value for everyone, including community, including your early supporters and your angel investors.

So it's very important to know the team. Ahead of time or for a long time to see if they're rigid because a lot of them would just a lot of them would just extract liquidity from VCs and then, or try to, second step is to extract liquidity from the retail market, and that's the least thing we wanna see for this industry.

Stephen: Can you explain, when you say something like, extract liquidity for someone that's listening, what does that mean? Like, can you give us like an example of like, how would they extract liquidity from VCs or extract liquidity from, you know, the broader community?

Alice: Yeah. So for example, there are a lot of projects that have, you know, a really good narrative and then tell their users that they're going to launch a token, right? If you, if you participate in my test that you're, participate in my demo, you might get more airdrop in the future. But and then they kind of use this story and this pitch to raise a lot of money from VCs and they have a really high valuation.

And when the token actually launched, they don't really want to share the benefit with, they don't really want to share a benefit with the community. So a lot of the qualified users didn't get the airdrop when you can. Feel a lot of dissatisfaction from the retail market. And then also when it comes to, you know, everyone's hoping that the token price will go up, but instead when, when, when everyone's buying.

The team could be secretly selling the token to access. And there are multiple ways to do that, of course. So, they're extracting value from the market and also extracting value from VCs as early supporters.

Stephen: So, let me see if I can break this down. So they say, Hey, we have this new token that's coming. Come participate. Pay sign up and then they go to you and say, look at all, and we'll give you you know, you'll, you'll benefit from the token raising and prices. Then they go to the VC and say, Hey, look at all these people as part of our community, like you should help us fund this and look at all the potential customers we're gonna have.

And you know, the, the largest ecosystem. And then when they actually finally launch the token, the price is still high. 'cause they receive funds from you. They have all this excitement from the users 'cause they've now received funding. And you know, I'm assuming a lot of these projects give it all these grants and get everyone to come participate.

And then in the background, they might be selling off their tokens that they hold to try and take some money off the table while not really putting their all into making sure that there's a long term or sustainable project for any everyone to benefit in the long term. Is that, is that a synopsis of what would happen?

Alice: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I think initially the why VCs and the retail investors want to buy your token. Definitely. Because we believe that you can build a future. You can fulfill the, fulfill the vision that you told us, right. A lot of them, when they get the money, things changed, right? You never, you can never bet on humanity.

And we've made that mistake before, but now we are very selective and very smart in, in like knowing the, the founder, who are the right ones that we should work with? Who are the right, who are the ones that.

Stephen: That yacht and Ibiza will change people, you know, that's what happens. They're like, Hey, we're getting invites. All these parties, you know, especially a lot of these guys are, you know, very technical in and they'll be able to be the first one to make. They're very nerdy and all of a sudden they have money and you know, women and attention and, you know, things can change.

If you had to give us the lay of the lamb as like, what's the VC market looking like right now? You know, every year it seems like it's either the people seeking money are not happy, or the VCs aren't happy with their returns. There's always this like tension between VCs and companies. Where are we right now?

Are there, do you feel like this is good terms, fair evaluations? Our company's still cut, you know, trying to get, you know, a billion dollars for an idea. What, where are we now in this kind of ecosystem?

Alice: So for us, I think right now the valuations are pretty low and. But the problem is we are not seeing many good assets in the market. So the, even though the price is low, it doesn't justify the why we should invest at this time, because if you invest in in Bitcoin or Ethereum, it'll probably give you a higher and quicker return already.

So we haven't been that actively in investing in new projects because we already deployed a lot. One, one or two years ago. So what we're focusing on is more to help them help our portfolios to either TGE or build community or ship products. Yeah. But in terms of new investments, I think that a lot of VC will hesitate if it's the right time or the right moment to invest in.

To unlock the token, that means you are probably waiting for betting on the next cycle and betting on who's gonna survive the whole boom bull and their market, right? But and with that being said, if we see many, we, if we see any good projects in AI and payments, we definitely would love to double down on that.

But rest of them were really carefully evaluating the opportunities.

Stephen: And I know it's impossible to play favorites. Can you tell me about maybe some portfolio companies you have or some unique use cases that they're supplementing?

Alice: Yeah, sure. Recently we've done an investment with a z and a project. It's an AI project, so, it's called Pine ai. They're building a Web3 version of Siri in your phone. The, the, oh, sorry. Let me, lemme reframe that. So, the pro, the project that I like the most is Pine ai. We co, sorry we didn't call, we co-invested this project with a Z and it is a, is a AI project with a lot of really strong tech team behind it.

And it's building like a. Personalized AI model on your phone that can make your Siri more automated, more smart. So, it's like imagine that you have an AI assistant that can access to all of your data from your Google search, from your Uber history, from your takeout history. So he knows he knows anything, everything about you, and it can help you to, you know, order food again based on your preference and it can help you arrange meetings.

And call an Uber for you to move from one conference meeting to another meeting. So it's very, very cool project. And the thing is, I think it definitely has use the advantage of crypto because if you are talking about having this AI assistance. You cannot just assign it a, a banking cards because banks don't really like ai.

They don't see AI as an entity, right? So when you really want to have the AI assistant to do anything for you, they will need to have a non-custodial wallet where they can issue or they can finish small transactions. So, crypto is a very great, great setup in this scenario. And, recently they've launched a Telegram mini app to kind of have this first trial, and then they already have almost 2 million users in the first one month.

And of course, they're preparing to TG soon, so stay tuned.

Stephen: I love that. And we see it like little instances when you're, you know about to go somewhere, you're dropping your kids to soccer. It already, you open up your Google Maps, it already puts the kind of address that you probably are gonna go to. 'cause it's the same time every week. So I think we use it in like certain areas, but we would love if, you know, if it could pull elements.

From all areas. And to your point, you know, having to put in our credit card information for every transaction, if that's even possible, becomes a little bit cumbersome as well. So having the opportunity to make payments. You mentioned about crypto payments. I think there's no better crypto payment, you know, killer app than stable coins.

What are your thoughts? You know, the recent stablecoin legislation in the US got stalled but you've also seen regulation probably in places like Singapore. What are your thoughts around stablecoin legislation that's being proposed in the US and maybe just overall the stablecoin industry from your perspective?

From east to west?

Alice: I think if, if we start with Singapore Singapore is still quite strict, not just in crypto, but in general. The legislation environment, I. The the Singapore author is very strict in making any kind of laws and that they're very careful about everything when it comes to crypto legislation. It is friendly to crypto but you gotta obey a lot of rules.

Say I help, one of my portfolio is a crypto bank in Singapore, and then it has all the mp it has all the banking license. Singapore, but still under the monetary authority of Singapore, they could not do a lot of things including issue banking accounts to non Singaporean residents. Right. But like you can actually do that in Hong Kong if you're holding Hong Kong licenses.

So, the regionally speaking, it'll be quite different based on different government styles. But Asia in general is very friendly to crypto for sure. And here you could see some some shops that could just help you on and off brand BTC very quickly, just all online. Sorry, just, just the physical shop in Hong Kong.

And you can also have a couple of the payment companies that. Companies that are willing to try out crypto payments and they actually encourage people to pay with crypto. So it's, it's, it's getting started, but I think we're still far away from like having crypto to actually a mass adoption. Whereas in the US I actually feel like the legislation is getting better.

Maybe just not as quick as we expected, but in terms of the innovation. We're seeing a lot of innovations right now, including, you know, the for the banks. You don't really need to apply. You don't really need to submit any applications when you touch crypto, right? And there are a lot of major improvements coming.

So if it comes to the innovation, I think US is ahead of Asia, but if it comes to you know, real life adoption, maybe Asia is a little bit faster. Because we are, we already are quite friendly to crypto for years.

Stephen: That's interesting, and your team, you know, wrote research and prepped research on the top. Topic of stable coins, you know, stable coins, all the rage. B-V-N-K-I think raised even more money after they just raised $50 million worth of capital. We saw Ripple attempting to buy circle for multiple billions of dollars.

Are you surprised by the m and a happening in the stable Coin market, or was this this inevitable based on, you know, two thirds of every crypto transaction of staple coins? And it looks like they're loosening up a little bit of, you know, the leniency when it comes to m and a in the us, which has been stifled for at least the last four years.

Alice: Yeah, I think it's a very good trend to see that so many m and as are happening in the stablecoin area because that's where we actually see product market fit for crypto, right. And with more money coming into this area than we'll have more builders. They have more money to apply for license that can make crypto more regulated and more legit.

So I think it's a progress for the whole industry that we started to shift our focus from purely me more NFT or any kind of really volatile assets to something that actually can bring us real long-term value and can actually make an impact to our real life. So I'd be happy to see that. At the same time, I'm a little bit worried as well because, you know, there are so many stable Coin payment companies.

There are so many stable coins and people are still trying to issue more not, not even let alone exchanges, centralized exchange. They're also trying to share, share the pie from here. So maybe it's getting crowded, but for users it's actually a good thing because it brings the. Let alone the fees of crypto transactions already very low.

So we could expect that maybe in the future we could just have this international ance through crypto with zero fees. So that's when we actually have like more advantage when it comes to crypto payments versus traditional payments.

Stephen: Yeah, you might see them remove fees altogether and figure out other ways to monetize. 'cause now they have millions of customers transacting within their institution or. Protocol. They don't have to charge a small transaction fee. They can, you know, go with the fact that they have mass adoption. Are there any other, you know, key highlights from the report that you know, or concepts especially around stable coins, things like non crypto user adoption, innovative business models?

We kind of touched on regulatory challenges or like Yeah, I'd love to know your thoughts about that and have a follow up question from about, you know, trending jurisdictions.

Alice: Yeah. Yeah. I like to share a, a very interesting trend. After years of you know, development for, for, for the, sorry. I like to, I like to share a very interesting trend that we see recently is the development of all the payment chains. So if we, if we look at payment chains a few years ago, we see Ripple, we see Stella, and what, what are they doing is they're trying to bridge the gap between the underbanked areas like Africa and Latin America, and help those users to get access to US dollars or get access to digital local currencies, right? Because they don't have the banking infrastructure. Maybe some of them don't even have a bank bank accounts for the entire of their life.

So they've been doing very well in that, in those developing countries. Those, I would call them the generation, the first generation of payment chains. And then right now we're seeing is the second generation of payment chains coming out with, you know, stable backed by tether codex backed by dragonfly for, for example.

We also invested in Codex. And also one money, right, backed by, I, I'm not quite sure who's their investor, but I one money is definitely also in another very cool payment chain. So what they're doing is trying to bridge the gap between actually the enterprise and the, the payment reels for crypto.

They can provide a lot of the. Kind of one stop solution for them to for, for merchants to acquire the payments from companies. And after that they could provide a lot of on and off-ramp solutions for the merchants to kind of change their to exchange their crypto that they receive to change their.

It's changing a lot. And I think one of the pro, one of the reasons that definitely the, the impact is brought by bridge. After Bridge got acquired by strep, everyone started to discover that, you know, having this having the enterprise. Enterprise side of merchant acquiring is very important.

Having stable Coin orchestration layer is very important. So everyone's trying to benchmark that narrative. And to dive deeper into that, I think it's not just about bridge acquisition. It's also about that we have the, it's also about that the company that we're looking at these days are. More friendly and are willing to try out crypto.

One is because that the user crypto users is growing bigger and people are willing to pay with crypto, so they have to accept crypto payment. Second part is they also want to avoid the traditional banking reels because for every transaction they make they have to pay two, 3%. To visa our MasterCard, but with crypto you can pay 0%.

Right? So they're willing to try out crypto. Some of them even are willing to try their own stable coins. Maybe you pay with their stable coins and everything will be settled with, with their internal bookkeeping system. That, that's very cool. I think. I think that's a very cool trend that we're seeing.

And right now. I think the third thing that we are seeing right now is the circle is is circle payment network. That what they're trying to build is one step ahead of those payment chains. They're building like a off chain payment orchestration layer where you know you have all the OTC providers, you have all the financial institutions joining this, this network and then they could provide like a all in one solutions for you to O TC for anywhere in the world.

You can own RAMP from us. Off ramp in Mexico, just leave it to circular payment network. They could find you their best O TC providers. You don't even worry about that. Right? And yeah, it's, it, it's very competitive space. But we're very happy to see that everyone is trying to propose their new ideas and trying to actually make an impact to the progress of having crypto in real life.

Stephen: And I think you brought up a couple interesting things. First, I think the circle payment network didn't get as much attention as it probably should. Like that's a huge deal. It's a huge undertaking. It's huge infrastructure layer. I don't think it got as much attention as I thought it would. And to your point about bridge, it's almost like the Joe Rogan effect, right?

Like if you're a podcaster, once you find out have Joe Rogan making a hundred million dollars in a podcast with this many views. That's kind of like your benchmark. You can say, Hey, I don't get as much as Joe Rogan, but hey, if Joe Rogan's getting paid this amount, then we, you know, that do maybe one 10th of what he does.

We should get kind of paid that amount. So I think that bridge deal kind of sets the benchmark of what the industry's willing to pay, almost like the top price of willing industry's willing to pay. And I think if you're an investor or if you're a project like BV and K approaching investors, you can say, well, this, you know, market is huge.

Look at what, you know, companies or VCs are willing to give this organization or companies are willing to buy these organizations for. That kind of sets a price element. Could I be right or wrong? It kind of sets a benchmark for pricing around these companies. Or do you guys not look at it like that?

Alice: Yeah, so for the bridge question, I think it's a very common comparison that we make when it comes to evaluating the, the, the value of a company. We do compare the comps of, in this we do compare the comps of other companies and then we kind of evaluate that in the same term. Of course, not everyone is bridge.

The quality of your clients is not as high profile as Bridge would definitely give you a discount. But if you're higher, definitely come to me. Would definitely give you a higher multiple than bridge. Yeah. So for the Circle Payment network, I think you're right. It's not that it's not, it's not like getting as much attention as it should.

I talked to the Circle team, I feel like they, they are a large team and everyone has different KPIs and different things to work with, even if they got a lot of inbound interest for the Circle payment network. The problem is that they don't have enough people to walk around and then, you know, to, to try to ship the product to market because what they're trying to build is huge.

It's a very big narrative and. Full circle. They probably don't have enough people to do that, and that definitely gives a lot of small company and startups a chance to maybe just have the same idea but build a like an Asian version of Circle payment network. So I would say it's a good thing for all the startups that's listening to this podcast.

Stephen: You, you know, you really just raised a great point about like, Hey, an Asian base or an Asian version, or APAC version, or European version. We talked about that a couple times. What are the trends that you're seeing? Is it more APAC or Asian based companies looking to get into the US market, or is it like, and vice versa.

The US market's like, Hey, this is working perfectly here. We can, you know, address a huge TAM out there in Asia. Let's try and see if we can make some connections there. You're kind of that connection point to east to west. Where do you see the flow of interest in capital or even just collaboration going, is it east to west, west to east?

A little bit of both.

Alice: I think it's always been a little bit of both, but it depends. Depends on what kind of sector you're talking about. If it's payment, it could be really segmented because payment, you need to have license all around the world. If you. Build a network effect. So what they usually do is, if I am a payment company in the us I have my MTL license in different states, but I want to wire my money to Singapore, I will find a Singaporean partner that has the Singapore license, right?

And vice versa, if any Singapore company wants to go to the US you've gotta find a local partner as well. So, so it's, it, it kind of depends. If it's just normal operations, like the one, the, like AI and like, like trading, I would say like we see a lot of retail activities happening in Asia happening from, you know, telegram mini apps.

And but for institutional activities, definitely the market is very active in the us.

Stephen: That makes a lot of sense, I think for a lot of people. You had touched on earlier about, you know, being one of the few VCs and organizations in Web3 that pay in crypto. What crypto are you using? Are you using stable coins? Are you using maybe the, the actual tokens of the company? Like, I would love to know how you're making these payments in crypto.

Alice: Well, so for us, we are also using and. When we invest in companies, right. Because it's one-on-one back by US dollar. So it's easier to you know, send over the funds and then, you know, set the terms and negotiate on the price. But before that, you know, when Ethereum was at a is prime time, we did a few deals investment in Ethereum.

Well that was, that was like a few years back.

Stephen: What happens when it fluctuates? Does it, is it just like, Hey, if you're paying in Bitcoin, you accept, you accept that fluctuation? Like, you know, I bought NFTs when Ethereum I think was at 5,000, whether it was Canadian or us, I can't remember. And you know, that same, the same NFT prices has gone down, but that amount I paid for Ethereum is a lot more expensive than it is today.

So how does that impact your investments with the fluctuation of something like Ethereum?

Alice: Yeah, I, I think at that time we definitely record that investment as the, the real value at that time. Like how much is there, how much of that Ethereum worth? So that's how much we invest. But whether the founders will withdraw or change exchange that to fiat, that's their choice, right? We only keep the book value at that current time point.

Stephen: That's interesting. Talk to me about the media side. 'cause you don't see, you know, a 16 Z. They have a, you know, a podcast and they put out a lot of thought leadership. You don't see too many VCs in the crypto space. You know, buying up the block is huge. We saw though recently, like CoinDesk, I think abandoned their kind of media aspirations and they've kind of scaled back.

We've worked with companies like Block Works who has, you know, a really great hold. How hard is it to have a media arm to what you're doing? Because obviously you don't wanna talk negatively about your companies that are in your portfolio or, you know, there's that almost conflict of interest. Sometimes, like I have clients like Chainy, it doesn't mean I don't talk about other companies.

But I'm not gonna talk about them as much as I do my clients, just because I'm working with them so much. So I have a lot more insight. How do you bridge that gap or walk that balance between wanting to put out good media, but realizing that there might be conflict behind the scenes?

Alice: I think from the very beginning, the reason why we wanted to acquire the block is not just about to give not just about the business view of it, but we see the quality of research that the block can provide to the whole industry. And we don't really want this media analyst to shut down.

And we want it because like the whole industry needs more education. It needs a voice to tell people that what we're doing and even tell the traditional audiences that what's the innovation, what's their viewpoint? So, we do want to keep this research team very lean and very neutral. And we'd be very careful about that even after the acquisition.

The, the direction that they should research and what kind of media that they should release. We keep everything pretty separate. I would say like the value add that we can bring to the block is that we could give them a lot of the Asian clients. And also they could actually learn some, you know, learn some of the ideas that we have and.

Maybe if they like the idea, they could definitely publish that. Right? As, as far as I know, they published my payment report. They published our report about Solana. So, and ai of course. And rest of them, I think we'll see, we'll see. I don't think that it's a must that if it will require a company, they have to publish everything and help us to help us to advertise our

Stephen: But it's encouraged like, Hey, we're not gonna stop you from, you know, promoting this highly researched document, but we would love for.

Alice: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I would say it's important to keep a balance, but if, if, if it's our portfolio, of course we'll encourage you to take a look at it and we'll also encourage our portfolios to become their clients, right, so that both, both could benefit with each other.

Stephen: The benefit of that is like you're investing in these portfolio companies. So if they're doing some research and they're finding things like, Hey, this doesn't make sense, or, Hey, what's going on in here, it could actually benefit your portfolio company as well, that they're getting some insights that might, they might have been blinded to from having this independent research.

Alice: Yeah, exactly, because the block has very amazing research team. And then they can provide a lot of the insights from US institution and US retail markets. So they actually can help a lot of my Asian portfolio companies to know the market better when they try to enter the company enter the market, and that's why their advisory business is doing pretty well as well.

After we acquired a company, I think the revenue number and the average viewer also has paid. Since 20.

Stephen: How do you measure the media side? 'cause you know, I see a lot of these media reports working with PR companies as a content marketing agency ourselves. How do you view, is it most views? Is it the engagement? Is it the click through rates? Is it the like, Hey, the advisory portfolios growing, even though our usership might not be, which means more people are being focused about the research, more engagement, but maybe less views?

How do you approach with so many different metrics? To to understand and so many different business aspects to what you're doing. How do you strategically approach the growth on that side?

Alice: I'm not an expert on that for sure, so I cannot give you like the most exact answer. I cannot answer the question

operation here.

Stephen: Completely understand. You did mention the AI report that your team built. Can you take out some key concept you mentioned? I believe it was pine ai. That's huge in what they're doing along with micropayments and you know, using like the kind of Siri model I. Is there anything else in ai and what are your thoughts?

We're seeing a lot of builders jump, you know, to ai. Then the price of Crip, Bitcoin goes up and they come back to crypto, you know, where, what are you seeing right now from your side?

Alice: Yeah, I would say like, it, it's really interesting to see that people jumping from AI to crypto and come back and back and forth. But what we are actually looking for is the long-term builders. So whether you are an AI builder or a crypto builder, or you do AI and crypto at the same time, right?

Just choose your path and then try to build. Stuff that actually can make sense in each of these directions. If you're jumping on and off, it's gonna be pretty bad for your in, in the eye of VCs. But you know, people are, a lot of them are optimistic, so you cannot actually judge them for doing that. But we, we, so for us, our investment, this is definitely to invest in some, someone.

In one industry.

Stephen: You know, you've probably researched this space a lot, even though you've only been in, well, not only, but you know, you've been in a fair amount of time. We've seen kind of like this trajectory back to like hardware. Investments from VCs of course, you know, with Nvidia and all these other hardware and, you know, chip providers.

What are your thoughts about hardware versus software? Web3, decentralized versus like tangible, you know, companies that are building tangible or manufacturing tangible assets.

Alice: I would say in terms of the hardware versus the software, hardware is a business that's firstly very costly and has a very strong technology mode and. It's really hard to disrupt the current market share. That's why we see media is definitely taking out and nobody's gonna challenge this position.

There's not much room for new players for software. It's easier. And that's why when I was like entering into crypto, we are especially interested in those businesses. Because it's, it has a lot of VC opportunity that's in early stage opportunities to invest. And you know, it's all about user experience.

It's all about retention. It's all about a RR. It's all about whether you have strong client profile and the competition spheres. But if you have a great idea, you could steal customers from bigger companies. So that's. That's a, that's a segment that's more exciting for, for VC of course, for investors.

And if, if it comes to Web3, and if it comes to Web3 startup to web two startups, I would say like, so for web two startups, it's like what they're building, it's what, like for web two systems, it's always efficiency, right? It's always centralized systems. So. Higher, higher efficiencies to finish anything.

But if it's Web3, it's decentralized, it's permissionless. So we can never compete web two systems in terms of the efficiency. But what we can do is accessibility is the is the privacy aspect of it. So that's why I would say. The AI plus crypto would be a very nice scenario because with crypto, AI could pay like, like a small transaction and can pay anytime 24 hours without border.

It's gonna be a very interesting combination and a real use case for crypto and also for payment as well banking system, but it's expensive. And it's fragmented. So crypto can bring us more benefit, as in it's 24 hours. It's permissionless. You could definitely swap tokens, swap all kinds of local digital currencies anytime with very low fees.

So I think, I think it's not that web, Web3 is gonna disrupt web two, it's more like Web3 is gonna compliment web two in a lot of ways. That, especially when what two systems are not working very well.

Stephen: I love it. I love it. Can you talk, as we, you know, end this session, can you talk to me, gimme some insights, you know, are there certain companies that you have your eye on? And if you don't feel comfortable about companies, maybe some areas that people aren't talking about now that people should have their eyes on.

We're seeing like Doodle launch their own tokens, NFT project. You know, is the metaverse gonna make a comeback? I haven't heard anything about world Coin or Soul bound tokens this year at any conferences. Where, where are some niche areas that you're like, we still keep on our eye on that and we're still building or investing in this space, even though it's not part of this recent hype cycle.

Alice: Right. I think something that I'm personally very interested in is how AI can actually replace human and future workflow. For example for our interview today, can we just be like a AI version of Alice and AI version of right. And then we don't even need to be here late night or early in the morning.

We just have our AI agent to present us to finish the call. It's the same as, you know, when we, when we as investors, we interview a team, maybe everyone could be an AI agent, and then we could have delegate our AI agent to sort out the most useful information, to sort out the most useful leads so that we can make.

I think that'll be a very interesting scenario. And apart from that I will say like there are a lot of ways that AI can help us to live a better life. As in, say we are going to conferences, right? Crypto people love to go to conferences but you don't know who are the ones that you should talk to.

Maybe an AI could give you, like a AI assistant can help you sort out the most useful leads. Before you attend this conference, and maybe they could even send out an email or a cold call to the person that you should be talking with and arrange meetings for you. So probably you don't even need an internal assistant anymore.

So that's something that I'm very excited, excited about. So that, that could definitely cut off. You know, 50% of the person they are in the crypto industry so far, but we haven't seen any really cool agents. Building out especially for what, three sales and, and networking scenario. That's something

Stephen: we have the technology. I would love a little bit of like, you know, Pokemon Go, you know, where if I'm walking by somebody, the AI will be able to pick up on my phone. This might be interesting. Here's a person that you might want to connect with, and I can go over to their booth or see them in, you know, to get getting food.

I would love just like an instant connection point and be like, Hey, this person's interesting. They're close by you. Why don't you go walk? It's like you walk by people that could be your next business partner, your next client, your next friend. But you have no idea. 'cause you, you know, you don't wanna be like staring at their name tag or

Alice: Yeah, exactly. That's kind of crunch.

Stephen: I love it Alice.

Alice: of awkward. Yeah. Yeah.

Stephen: Yeah, it's super awkward when you're like, oh, and then it's like, oh, I don't really need think. I need to talk to you. So should I walk away now? Do I have to have a 15 minute conversation so I don't seem like you know this complete jerk? It's always very tough. I like conferences that have like a hundred and less or 150 unless people, we have consensus coming here in Toronto next week.

It's gonna be massive, like tens of thousands of people. And you know, I'm hoping my team's just gonna go around and talk to people and videotape it and then that will be easier afterwards. I could sit down and be like, oh, this sounds like an interesting person. Might be someone to connect with. Tell us anything about that's happening with Foresight Ventures in 2025.

Anything that you're about launches, premieres, let us know that. And the best way to get in touch with you.

Alice: Yeah, so before that, we'll definitely continue to build our brand globally and we'll host a lot of events, startup meeting startup founder meetings, hacker houses in a US office. We'll be at ma all the major conferences including to 2049 including hcc. So if you have any good ideas, especially about AI and stable coins feel free to reach out to us through our Twitter channel or you can email us as well.

My email is Alice@foresightventures.com. Just send us your good ideas. We'll definitely be in touch.

Stephen: What really happens when you get these ideas? Do you guys kind of just sit there? Do you run. Through an AI and say, pass me back the ones that sound interesting. If it meets this criteria, are you a weird person that'll just jump on the phone and call somebody, like, Hey, you have this idea. What are you actually doing?

What are your numbers? Like? How does it actually work behind the scenes?

Alice: Well, we're actually very traditional. It's just me taking a look at my mailbox and then see if that's a good fit. Then we'll follow up with emails. I hope, I was hoping that we can have a AI agent some days to deal with all of my cores, daily cores. If not, I'll probably have a portfolio or have my, have, have any technology sorry, I, I'll find a CTO to build a portfolio.

We have a CTO to build up the agent for internal use because I really need.

Stephen: I love it. I love that you're still, you know, that's like Jensen, you know, he is still, you know, checking his emails, sending quick responses, so you're still keeping your ear to the street, which probably makes you effective working. For a vc. Alice, thank you so much today for tuning in and letting us know all the insights, especially what's happening from east to west.

It was really insightful to see some of these trends and to hear what actual VCs are looking for.

Alice: Thank you for all the inspiring questions.

Stephen: This was a great convo. Thank you so much.

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