What we talked about
Joseph Argiro shares how he accidentally found his way into product, finance, and go-to-market by building an “Uber/Airbnb for college tours" startup in college:an early trial-by-fire that taught him failure, distribution, and the realities of customer acquisition. He explains Iron Key Capital’s core approach as a venture studio: start with a clear thesis, validate it through customer discovery, iterate fast, and only then build:because "if you build it, they will come” doesn’t work anymore.
Show notes
Joseph Argiro started his career trying to build an Uber for college campus tours, a product that ran into legal issues around underage users and universities unwilling to give up control of prospective student visits. That early failure became the foundation for a career spent at the intersection of product, finance, and Web3, eventually landing him as Head of Crypto at UBS before founding his own venture ecosystem.
What we covered
- Iron Key Capital evolved from a crypto hedge fund into a venture studio after one pivotal early investment: a blockchain-enabled 3D printing platform that had raised only a few hundred thousand dollars in angel capital when Iron Key backed it at a $10 million valuation, it subsequently raised $9 million from top VCs and reached a $50 million-plus valuation.
- At UBS, the hardest part of shipping crypto products was not regulatory complexity but getting institutional investors comfortable with categorizing and tolerating crypto-native risks, smart contract risk, market risk, and counterparty risk, which are unavoidable if you actually want exposure to crypto markets.
- Argiro’s view on equity versus tokens is that they should almost never be blended in the same company, with Binance’s BNB being a rare exception; most Web3 companies being built today don’t need a token, and trying to do both creates fatal resource allocation problems for founders.
- The most common go-to-market mistake he sees in Web3 is founders relying on the traditional crypto playbook, build a Discord, grow Twitter, airdrop free stuff, while skipping the customer acquisition fundamentals that actually build a business; he argues a sales-led approach to get the first three customers is often more valuable than any community-building effort.
- Fish Network, Iron Key’s product, is designed to look and feel like Shark Tank but as a software platform for real emerging fund managers and their investor communities, allowing investment clubs to pool as little as $10,000 per person to get diversified exposure to a portfolio of startups, with compliance, voting rights, and transparency built in.
- The AIR (Angel in Residence) accelerator is a 12-week program not for founders but for aspiring investors: participants build an investment thesis, source a startup that meets it, and take a deal through the full lifecycle up to pitching an investment committee, graduates have gone on to start their own funds, join VC firms, and get hired at Iron Key.
About Joseph
Joseph Argiro is the founder of Iron Key Capital and a former VP of Product Management and Head of Crypto at UBS, where he focused on liquid crypto and venture capital alternative investing strategies. He previously led blockchain innovation work at Hewlett Packard.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joseph-argiro
- Website: http://ironkeycapital.com
Episode 86 of the PreVetted Podcast.
Full transcript
Federico Ramallo (00:01) Welcome back to the pre-vered podcast where we spotlight extraordinary people and remarkable talent reshaping our world. Today we’re joined by Joseph Argyro. He’s the founder of Iron Key Capital and former head of crypto at UBS. Joseph connects the dots between product, financial services and go-to-market operating at the intersection of Web3 plus AI. At Iron Key, he’s built a multi-vertical venture ecosystem
spanning a venture studio, investment fund, and an angel in resident accelerator with a mission to democratize access to venture-level opportunities and help build the next generation of financial infrastructure, bridging on chain rails with real-world capital markets. Before Iron Key, Joseph serves as VP of Product Management, Head of Crypto at UBS, focused on alternative investing strategies including
Liquid Crypto and Venture Capital, and previously led emerging tech products work in Blockchain Innovation Lab at Hewlett Packard. Joseph, welcome to the show.
Joseph Argiro (01:10) Federico, thanks for having me on. Super excited to be here.
Federico Ramallo (01:13) Great, great. Yeah, I’m honored to have you here today. So tell us what first pulled you into the intersection of product finance and go to market.
Joseph Argiro (01:21) It’s really by accident. About a decade ago, I went to Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and I was studying finance and engineering. And it was around the time that the marketplace business model was very hot. Uber and Airbnb were kind of just coming on the scene.
It was kind of the beginning of start of startups that were positioning themselves as Uber for X, Uber for dog walking, Uber for, you know, fill in the blank. And, and when I was in, I was working on my capstone project. I, just decided to build a startup instead of working on my capstone project. And I built a product that looked like Uber and Airbnb, but for college tours.
So it allowed people to circumvent the college touring system. And I built a web application to match those people where you could log in with Facebook a decade ago and connect with a person with similar interests to set up a customizable tour. so some success had some problems with that business model around having underage kids.
parent issues, legal problems, universities didn’t really, some universities were not very receptive to the idea because they couldn’t control the experience of prospective students. but that’s how I learned how to go to market and build products, trial by fire, I would say. So that’s how I got into this stuff about a decade ago.
Federico Ramallo (02:46) wow, that’s amazing. I think that those, it’s through those experiences that we learn the most, right? You know, it’s easy to, I’ve seen people judge from outside. It’s like, you could do, you you could have done this, you could have done that, right? But in retrospect, it’s easy to judge, right? But at the moment, making those decisions, know, taking the risk, taking the chances, and then after that you learn a lot, right?
Joseph Argiro (03:09) Exactly, yeah. And I feel like having a, you know, a failure or a startup where you learned a lot is like an almost like a necessary part of the process. I feel like it would be a lot different if I didn’t know what failure felt like or looked like. So it definitely feels like a necessary part of this journey.
Federico Ramallo (03:31) Right, right, yeah. So you described connecting the dots to systematically manufacture innovation. What does that look like in practice?
Joseph Argiro (03:42) Yeah, Iron Key at its core is a venture studio. So what we do is we build theses. So we do research to build basically narratives that we can back with data to determine where the market is and where it’s likely to go in the future. And the same way that an investor builds an investment thesis of things kind of the way that we want to see the world and
what they’re, you know, the characteristics that they’re looking for in investments. We do the same thing, but on the founder side, because we believe every product needs, and founder needs a thesis to back up why that product should exist in the market, and also why now, right? And just, and so,
To answer your question more directly, well, we start there with a thesis and then…
It looks like going to do customer discovery and talk to people in that who are experts in that niche to figure out if it’s something that people want and if they’d be willing to pay for it. And then those insights ultimately create a flywheel to come back to say step one and refine the thesis, improve the market segmentation. So
One piece of it is actually identifying your individual customer profile so you know exactly the type of person that would be the customer of said product. it’s really kind of like going through the thesis and research work, identifying the customer, going to talk to the customer, and then making that a flywheel and coming back to step one and just improving it and iterating. So it’s an iterative process, not…
really linear, but those are the steps and it might take two, three, four of those iterations to get to the end product that you even end up launching with. So that’s the way that I think about it and the way that we operate.
Federico Ramallo (05:42) Right. I used to believe if you build it, they will come. But I realized that’s a fallacy, right? I’m on this. I’m a software engineer, so I’m on the technical side. That’s my background. And, you know, I’m I’ve been mostly focused on building software. Then I moved towards product ownership, where understanding why we’re building software. So I used to think that
If you build it, they will come. And further and further, go towards building products, and I realize that the importance of validating our assumptions and making sure that our thesis is backed on real data.
Joseph Argiro (06:20) Yep. yeah, it couldn’t be farther from the truth. It’s really customer acquisition and distribution is
really is a more important competitive advantage now than ever. So, being able to sell and acquire customers,
is the name of the game because building technology is becoming a lot easier.
Federico Ramallo (06:41) Right. Do you think that understanding the customer is more important than branding?
Joseph Argiro (06:48) Absolutely. Because you can understand the customer and build a business.
build a nice decent-sized business without really a brand. Right? It’s possible. It just depends at what level you want to play the game. When it went, if you want to, if you want to, if you want to, you know, level up and see kind of orders of magnitude.
growth in the long run, then building a brand becomes essential actually. So, and I just want to, you know, frame it that way because not every business needs to focus on their brand. For example, a solo entrepreneur wants to make $300K a year, and that’s what he wants to do. Well, is building a brand that important? Maybe not. Depending on what type of business it is, and I’m just kind of
speaking in broad strokes, maybe not even technology businesses, right? Like, so it just, depends. But ultimately, if you want to play the game at a high level, then building a brand is essential.
Federico Ramallo (07:44) Right, right. But when you have a solo founder with a very small company, the founder is the brand, right? So it’s more about how that person understands the customers and how that person can articulate the value proposition rather than having a formal brand behind it, right?
Joseph Argiro (08:03) That’s a good point. I do believe that at an early stage, the founder is the brand. And it’s the founder’s job to transcend that.
beyond himself.
But maybe not necessarily, right? I just want to, you know, question myself there, right? You know, sometimes a founder being the brand is the answer.
But I would, if I had to choose, would say more, or I would probably be in the camp of saying, you want to make yourself redundant to the point where the business doesn’t rely on you, the founder? And you could go, yeah, and then, but if you were speaking about just the brand itself, I’d still agree. I’d still say that, you know,
Yeah, you, as a founder, the ultimate goal or at least mine is just to try and make yourself redundant so that you’re not needed inside of the business as much. You can start working on the business instead of in the business. But that’s just my opinion.
Federico Ramallo (09:01) Right, right. Yes, I think that that becomes important once you start looking to scale the company up, right? Yeah. You mentioned about building the thesis. Is that one of the first things you do with the founders that join your venture team?
Joseph Argiro (09:19) No, not necessarily, but it is the first thing that angel and residence participants do when they join the program is they build a thesis, and that’s essentially step one. And then they try to source startups that meet that thesis and take a deal through the full lifecycle.
all the way to investment is the purpose of our AIR program.
Federico Ramallo (09:47) Oh, okay, okay. I understand. Yes, we can talk about the Air program detail further down the road, but I think in order to give the program a little bit of context, I think we should talk first about Ironkey, the company that you founded. So let’s go over there first and then we can go over to the Air program. You founded this company in 2021. What problems do you want to solve?
at the time and what problems are you solving today?
Joseph Argiro (10:21) Yeah, it’s a good question because they are related. So, in 2021, it was very difficult for US investors to get exposure to the innovation in the crypto space, so really, the digital assets beyond the top 20 in market cap were basically impossible to get exposure to in a regulated way in traditional buy-side fund vehicles that
you know, are compliant with securities laws in the US. And so I built a multifamily office to address that need. So to get investors diversified exposure to the long tail of innovation in the crypto space, so not just really holding or trading Bitcoin, Ethereum, or, you know, fill in the blank, the top one, the top cryptos, we provided investors exposure to the
based on fundamental research, kind of like the more liquid venture opportunities that are more earlier stage. And a couple years ago, these were traded on different, you know, less than reputable exchanges all over the world. And there was no real easy way for US investors to get exposure. So that was the reason why I built the hedge fund.
as a first product to… And you could argue that it’s some… it’s a… it’s… there is some regulatory arbitrage there. But in the past couple years, that gap has effectively closed. Coinbase has tons of assets now. There’s plenty of other places to get them. And… But it… you know, everything seems to come full circle. The company that I’m working on now…
enables international investors to get exposure to US assets in the private markets, think venture capital and real estate and art and other alternative assets on chain. now I’m actually working on getting international investors exposure to US assets, both real estate and venture capital, in an easy and frictionless and while also being compliant.
Avenue. So in that, and that’s what it’s what fish network is, and we’ll come to that a little bit later, but it is important to understand, you know, like, and I almost didn’t connect these dots myself, but, you know, everything in the history kind of, you know, it doesn’t, they say, you know, history repeats itself, but I think more often than not, history rhymes. And this is another scenario where that’s true.
Federico Ramallo (12:55) Interesting, interesting. Yes, we will talk about the phish network for on the roads because that’s something that you mentioned anything would be interesting to discuss in more detail. So you mentioned that iron key evolved from multifamily offage head fund into a broader platform, right? What was the news credit situation?
that happening and how that evolution happened.
Joseph Argiro (13:24) Yeah.
another accident, I would say. But so yeah, so when
So, in 2021, we decided to make a venture investment inside of the hedge fund, and we organized a syndicate that was really trying to build a blockchain-enabled 3D printing platform for real-world use cases of 3D printers and creating a blockchain-enabled software layer to connect all these physical 3D printers. So,
really putting manufacturing on chain. And we invested when we were one of the first earlier
Fund investors, they had only raised angel capital before that, a couple hundred grand. They went on to raise $9 million from all the top VCs over the last two years. And they’re now valued at 50 million plus when we invested at 10 million. So that was the first data point that really pushed us into the venture space in blockchain specifically. And that…
data point alone, coupled with the fact that in crypto, there’s a lot of social media influencers who either are or claim to be very competent traders in the crypto markets. And those are a dime a dozen. And what we decided to build at Iron Key is we hard pivoted to build thought leadership and a professional lens in venture capital.
specifically in the blockchain space because there really is no professional thought leadership in Web3 Venture Capital. On the other side, in the liquid markets, there’s plenty of people who are trying to educate or be, you know, very loud on social media about their trading abilities. And we just never really saw a professional lens in the private markets venture capital space, specifically in blockchain.
And that’s really what pushed us into this space.
Federico Ramallo (15:25) Interesting. Yeah, I think it’s amazing when you have these happy-ass accidents that led you to learn more about what’s going on. you know, it was not the initial intention, but then that becomes a whole thing, right? You start pulling the thread and then it becomes a big thing, right? So I think that’s amazing.
So.
Joseph Argiro (15:48) Yeah,
yeah, and well, action tends to create things, right? So momentum is real. everything that you try that doesn’t work, you learn something. And then you just keep, I guess, pulling on the thread. And then eventually it starts to unwind.
Federico Ramallo (16:05) Right, right. It’s an exploratory process. And then you discover and then you keep adding to it. And seeing how the world reacts to it. And then, yeah.
So you built a Ventury Studio, an investment fund, an angel in residence accelerator, which we’re going to talk a little bit further. So why that ecosystem model works instead of the traditional fund? What has been your experience on that?
Joseph Argiro (16:32) Yeah, that’s a loaded question. So the venture capital market is undergoing rapid change over the last 12 to 24 months, really driven by AI, because venture capital has way less power because startups need a lot less capital to achieve scale. And they can build with smaller teams. And it
it makes capital a commodity similar to the way software is becoming a commodity. And that alone is forcing VCs to change. Now, VCs are adapting, dying, industry ventures got bought out by Goldman Sachs. There’s a shift happening in the private markets. And
And what I realized firsthand by building the hedge fund is that management fees don’t really cut it. They don’t really allow you to scale unless you have a critical mass of assets, which is more like 25 to 50 million in AUM. So that 2 in 20 model doesn’t really work well for emerging managers anymore. It really was built to serve the general partners or the fund managers earning that
carried interest and also, you know, we’ve seen scenarios where fund managers get rich off large funds just because of the management fees, right? And they’re not even driving value, right, to the LP. So there’s been some alignment incentive problems that have been, you know, come to the forefront of the collective consciousness, right? But the world’s been doing it this way for now 20, 30, 40 years. So it’s not gonna happen overnight.
But for those reasons, that’s where we’ve evolved into this hybrid structure where we have a parent company, we have an investment club, and we have a venture capital fund that invests later stage. It’s a more traditional structure, but we’re not just a VC fund, we’re a venture ecosystem across.
Innovation, right? And our first product is Fish Network, which I talked about first. We just spun that out. And the parent company owns a piece of the investment club, a piece of the venture capital fund, and is where we do our services. So we do education advisory and &A opportunities in think like micro private equity deals in the blockchain space. And we focus on equity first.
as investors. So we’re not really token-led at all. And there’s been problems in Web3 Venture Capital for VCs that claim to be venture investors, but they’re really just, you know, dumping on retail and selling early and just like pumping projects and then dumping. That’s what we’ve seen in kind of Web3 Venture Capital over the last five, six years. So,
The ecosystem is maturing. And that’s kind of the reason for the structure that we have.
Federico Ramallo (19:20) Right, right. what you’re describing is more of a partnership than just an investment of funds and fund and forget kind of thing, right? What you’re describing is more of a… You have the… the fund is not the end, it’s the means, right? So you’re investing in the company, you’re helping the company to become successful, you’re…
you’re supporting the founders to make the company successful. And the fund is the means to get to make that happen. But it’s not the end of the final goal of your final mission of your company.
Joseph Argiro (19:56) Yeah, that’s correct. It’s very difficult to build a venture ecosystem, and there’s a lot of components, so it’s not the advantage that we have is that it’s not one company, right? We have different companies that serve different needs that are synergistic that work together.
Federico Ramallo (20:12) Right, right. Yeah, but my intention is to convey that having multiple, even if there are multiple companies, they’re in coordination towards the success of the founder, right? Whether it’s through money, advice, and you’re supporting the founders throughout the whole life cycle of the company.
I think that’s a differentiation that I haven’t seen other investment firms doing.
Joseph Argiro (20:38) Yep. And what’s also changing is that there’s more emphasis on actually this venture studio model, which is a company that actually builds companies. Right. And that’s a cost center, but we offset that with some of our services like advisory and education. We offset some of those costs. so the systematically manufacturing innovation is not just
A tagline, right? We’re actually trying to do that. We build companies internally and then put founders in place and spin them out. And then the parent company ends up owning about 10 to 15 % acting as, I don’t want to say a co-founder, but helping from ideation to…
building the MVP to getting the first handful of customers and then bringing in outside investors.
Federico Ramallo (21:30) Right, right. Yeah, I I’ve seen investing firms playing the hype game and just, you know, growing the valuation and then just dumping the shares or whatever. So, you know, what you’re describing is actually innovation and actually adding value to the founder and the customers, right, and building real, real, real businesses. I think that’s amazing.
Joseph Argiro (21:57) Yeah, and you’ll see a lot of companies out there that say they’re venture studios, but they’re not. They’re really just services companies. And it’s an important distinction because a venture studio is not an incubator, not an accelerator. takes a company through the full lifecycle, right? From entrepreneur to operator to investor and completing that full lifecycle. And that’s what makes venture studios unique.
rather than
just one of the roles that you can play is, yeah, between the three. As an entrepreneur, an operator, and an investor. So the Venture Studio plays all three.
Federico Ramallo (22:35) Right, right, interesting, So can you describe a little bit more about how the equity plus token structure models work? How do you decide which structure fits for which companies?
Joseph Argiro (22:50) Yeah, that’s a great question, and I don’t think it’s talked about enough, actually, from the investment perspective, because the reality is that 99 % of the time, value will not occur to both the equity and the token.
So what we’re seeing now is that there’s a lot of real businesses being built.
in the crypto space that don’t have a token and don’t need a token. And that’s really been our view from the beginning. And, but there, so my, so my initial kind of stance would be that,
A lot of the times it doesn’t make sense to blend the two. And the only company who’s been successful doing that is Binance BNB coin, which is an exchange, which is, I would say, an exception to the rule, quite honestly. that’s just how we view the market.
Federico Ramallo (23:39) Right. So how does the equity and the token works?
Joseph Argiro (23:42) So what we’re seeing in crypto now is that there’s a lot of…
traditional equity provisions that investors like to see, like voting rights and information rights. A lot of that same type of governance is now coming to the forefront of the collective consciousness in the Web3 space. And it’s this concept of futarky, which is proposing a
a more involved governance structure where essentially taking voting to the next level, where it enables the token holders to actually have some say over governing the future direction and how resources are used and almost mimicking like a board of directors from a traditional company in the blockchain space. So the worlds are converging, certainly.
Anything that can really sustain value through network effects, I would argue should be built as a token model. And anything that still requires a traditional go-to-market approach is best being pursued as an equity play. And I guess the important thing is just to…
It’s just, as a founder or an investor, just to know what business you’re in and, you know, commit to that model, right? I’ve seen things fall apart when people try to do both. So, that’s my two cents.
Federico Ramallo (25:11) Right, right. So, founder should know which model would apply best for them.
Having that clarity, I think, is the most important thing.
Joseph Argiro (25:19) Exactly. Yes. Yeah. The clarity is what investors look for, and it’s also necessary to allocate resources correctly, right? And as a founder, trying to do too many things at once is a-
extremely challenging if not a futile or a critical mistake.
Federico Ramallo (25:36) Right, right. I’ve seen founders spending too much time on either by distraction, lack of focus, or focusing on the wrong things, that they spend a lot of effort that doesn’t yield the results that they’re expecting for different reasons. And I think that’s one of the major issues that makes, at least in the initial phases, the startups fail.
Joseph Argiro (26:00) Got it.
Federico Ramallo (26:00) So for a founder building with AI, Web3, private markets, what are the most common GTM mistakes you see and how do you fix them early?
Joseph Argiro (26:12) I would say the mistakes that I see most companies making
in Web3 is really just relying on the traditional crypto playbook, which is grow a Discord, grow a Telegram community.
give out a bunch of free stuff, you know, just kind of like, that’s kind of the traditional crypto playbook is kind of build up a Twitter, try to create community and kind of do whatever is necessary to kind of do that. But I think that the, like, I think what’s missing is a more traditional go-to-market approach applied to the blockchain space. So,
And a lot of companies try or have product-led growth motions where, and typically this is because a lot of the founders are technical and they are very focused on the underlying technology, but a lot of what gets missed is the customer acquisition side where it’s how do you plan to repeatedly attract customers?
beyond just making noise on social media. And that’s where I think the missing pieces are and the opportunity is for Web3 businesses to take a more traditional go-to-market approach, whether that’s even a sales-led approach at first to get those initial customers in order to ground the product in clear use cases.
Rather than trying to be everything to everyone, think that’s a lot of mistake that…
that founders make even specifically in the blockchain space. that would be, that’s my take on, you know, go to market and…
how go-to-market has evolved in emerging technology over the last couple years.
Federico Ramallo (27:50) So your opinion is that lack of specialization is one of the issues that founders are having, that they’re trying to become everything for everyone, or either they are trying to become or they haven’t found their niche yet.
Joseph Argiro (28:05) Right. And I would say that, yeah, I see founders trying to skip steps. They try to go and trying to be, you know, well, a platform for XYZ, but they never got customer 1, 2, and 3. Right? And that’s typically a recipe for disaster because the first three customers
Federico Ramallo (28:22) Right.
Joseph Argiro (28:30) could be your best allies and advocates to help you get the next 10. Through case studies or really adding value and giving a testimonial or whatever the case may be. So I guess there’s just some things need to be done in order. And I think the order of operations that a founder takes
is a critical almost like life or death decision, and I think it’s that, deserves that level of importance in planning.
Federico Ramallo (29:00) Right. Right. Interesting.
So, changing topics a little bit, you talk about building rails for a billion users on chain. What does that mean and what kind of companies would fit on that thesis?
Joseph Argiro (29:20) Yeah, so building a billion users on-chain really comes back to the idea of real-world solutions with blockchain. So,
What we’re looking for is companies that can enable the masses, not just the crypto nerds in their basement, the masses to be able to use this technology and in a way that makes sense for them. And so,
We’ve seen institutions now come into crypto. think next year, in 2026, we’re going to start seeing retail coming to crypto because these institutions now have products to sell to retail. And so they’re going to enable retail to actually use these things easily and seamless. So that would, that’s what I mean by a billion users is really making crypto easy and simple and mainstream.
Federico Ramallo (30:13) Right, because we’ve seen some of the benefits of crypto, but it has been more on specific niche and more technical people. But we haven’t seen crypto developed on a massive implementation of crypto, right? We’ve seen some…
experiments, like Estonia implemented blockchain on all their government infrastructure. I’m not very familiar with that implementation, but I understand that it made some, they tried to make some innovation towards that, right, but I don’t know the latest update on that, right, but the idea is they use the ledger as a way to
have the information of all the records of all the citizens documents, right? But I haven’t seen anybody else building a massive implementation as you’re discussing.
Joseph Argiro (31:02) Yeah, and I think, well, I think if you want to use that Estonia government project as an example,
those pieces become the foundation to create the future, what’s possible in the future. So you could think about a company that’s tapping into that data, right? That Estonia is putting on chain and making that a lot more valuable and useful for both companies and individuals to actually access that, right? Maybe it has something to do with attracting foreign investment into Estonia, for example, right? Like,
Federico Ramallo (31:30) Right.
Joseph Argiro (31:36) these things start to transcend laws and borders and that’s what is possible here. And so, there’s a, you know, there’s a, there’s a, and I think most of the world is waking up to the fact that there’s, there will be a compliant way to go do this. Otherwise the world will be overrun by privacy centric systems where, and there’s kind of that, this whole dystopian kind of argument around is this good or is this bad, but.
I guess that’s a conversation for another time, but it seems like there’s, like these foundational building blocks will ultimately unlock.
the future that we hope, I hope we want to live in.
Federico Ramallo (32:11) Right, right, so you’re, we’re talking about is the concept of the distribution, right? Where no one entity or one person owns the chain and then that distribution or distributed ownership, if you like, will be a much better feature for everybody, right?
Joseph Argiro (32:31) Yep. Yeah, exactly. Well, there’s a
There’s economies of scale in being able to have a trustless infrastructure that everyone can leverage and no one controls. There’s tremendous power in that thought alone, which was really pioneered by Bitcoin.
Federico Ramallo (32:50) Right, right. It’s one of the best benefits I’ve seen on blockchain, technology that you can have a level playing field for everybody to play and participate in with the same rules for everybody. And because no one person owns the thing, if you like, then it’s a much fair play and it’s hard and hard to tamper with, right?
Joseph Argiro (33:17) Yep, exactly.
Federico Ramallo (33:19) So, topics, going back to your UBS role, what was uniquely hard about shipping crypto products inside a large financial institution?
Joseph Argiro (33:28) I would say overwhelmingly just getting them comfortable with the helping to separate the different risk into different buckets like smart contract risk, market risk, counterparty risk, and so on. even, and it’s almost, it’s a little ironic, but.
A lot of the times I saw there was a lot of enthusiasm about getting investors exposure to the crypto markets. But then when it comes time to really stomach the risk and understanding like
what a smart contract is and the risk there and then all of sudden it becomes uncomfortable, but it’s almost like this is what you asked for, right? You kind of asked for the crypto native products. The crypto native products obviously come with crypto risk. that, but, and however, over the past couple of years, we’ve been seeing a maturation of that space where you can get
crypto exposure without a lot of the crypto inherent risks. And that’s certainly been getting better. But it’s just been a challenge. It’s a mindset shift and challenge to for, you know, investors who like to minimize risk and they like to have control over the things that they can control.
And a lot of the time, and some of the times when it comes to crypto and emerging technologies, you’re kind of giving control to the machines at a certain point. And that’s even more true with AI. And it’s true with trusting open source software. So I would say that is the…
the catch 22 around trying to bring traditional investors and get them to see it the way that kind of more, the more.
self-sovereign individualists think about it who maybe are a little bit younger and have a little bit more, you know
crypto native experience kind of growing up in this space. So that is definitely the challenge.
Federico Ramallo (35:32) Right, right, I can see how that could affect. mean, for traditional institutions, financial institutions, any change becomes a risk, right? And they’re risk adverse. So here we have a new paradigm shift.
getting the transition towards understanding the benefits and the risks and just by the unknown there’s a risk, right? So understanding the risk, then they will feel more comfortable towards going to this new technology. Yeah, I can see that happening.
Joseph Argiro (36:03) Yeah, exactly.
Federico Ramallo (36:04) So let’s talk a little bit about the Air Accelerator program. I was reading that it’s 12 weeks. The program is 12 weeks. So how do you design the program that actually change outcomes for founders? And can you tell us a little bit more about the Air Accelerator program as well?
Joseph Argiro (36:22) Yeah, so the AIR program is focused on serving the needs of investors, not founders. And what we do is investors who haven’t written their first angel check or want to learn the skill set to whether they want to start their own fund one day or they want to an investment portfolio or
maybe they want to get a job in venture capital. We see people with like slightly those three or more than one of those three motivations. And we put a real world tactical training exercise rather than education. We put these AIR participants through this 12 week accelerator where they source a startup that meets their investment criteria or their thesis.
and then bring that through the whole life cycle and actually pitch that investment to our investment committee. So it’s really for anyone, for someone who wants to sharpen their skillset in private markets, venture capital, and really the startup space in general and start either deploying capital or learning how they can play in this space and kind of removing the…
the time, energy, and money it takes to figure out how to best approach this space, whether it’s to deploy your own capital or to build a career, we can kind of eliminate some of that guesswork for people. so that’s the AIR program. And after the AIR program, people, the successful participants get an opportunity to join our investment club.
which is where we actually practice and deploy capital together using this investment club model in the US where we pool capital together so that by writing, let’s say one 10K check, you can get exposure to a diversified portfolio of high quality startups rather than just one in a traditional syndicate structure. that’s our investment club, which is called Iron Key Venture Partners.
This leads into, think, the next topic, which is that we are building a software platform for these investment clubs and are the first customers, our own investment club. but to take a step back, so we have the AIR program, the education program, and that leads into joining the investment club, which is where you actually put capital to work and you can get exposure to…
5, 10, 15, even 15 companies with one 10k check rather than having to write a check to every company. This is a more streamlined and way to also deploy capital with other smart people who you start to get that wisdom of the crowd effect and can, you know, think of it more like a community-driven effort rather than one person running the show. And this is our
This is really what we’ve been working on to kind of level the playing field in venture capital. And this evolved into the FISH Network product, which is a software platform to enable real emerging managers to deploy real capital with their investor communities on chain in the private markets.
Federico Ramallo (39:14) Right, right. Yeah, I was going to ask you about the fish network. But going back to the accelerator, what you’re describing is more of a first, you’re educating the investors. And second, you are allowing investors to diversify multiple higher quality startups. And third, kind of what I’m taking for what you’re discussing is your, you know, like
When you’re doing crowdfunding, you’re allowing smaller investors to invest more amount of money, but here you’re having a higher quality of crowd, if you like, right? Because crowdfunding is more of a general audience. It’s open to the general audience, right? Whereas if you go to the traditional investing, you need these accretor investors, they need a high net worth before they can actually…
be they’re able to invest, right? So, you between these, you’re building something in the middle where through crypto, right? Where you’re allowing, you know, people with more education that they pass the initial program, being able to invest on multiple startups. Is that what you’re doing?
Joseph Argiro (40:17) Exactly. Yeah. And you can see, maybe you’re starting to see how all these pieces kind of fit together to bring someone and hold their hand from step zero through the education into the investment club to actually practice and apply what they learned, right? And then that can either lead into starting your own fund. It’s a meritocracy for venture partners joining the Iron Key VC fund.
And or, you know, even find a job at a portfolio company, right? Like these are the types of things that becomes possible when you build relationships in the venture in the early stage startup space is you happen to stumble on your next big thing. Whether that’s, know, an early employee job because founders don’t need that many employees now so you can scale with bit with smaller teams. So and and this is what we’re trying to create as a
as an ecosystem where that is not as reliant on, let’s say, applying to jobs and interviewing. And this is more a way to create trust so that people can move faster. Because typically these early stage jobs, they’re getting through referral, right? They’re getting through someone they trust and know and then has helped them in the past.
and someone who already has validation of like their background, right? And you’re able to move faster that way. that’s just, I think, part of the kind of the evolution given that AI has taken everyone’s jobs anyway. So this is kind of, you know, how is one way to gain a competitive advantage.
in the space and I think through building trust and networking is one of those ways and I would argue a pretty important one.
Federico Ramallo (42:05) Right, right. Yeah, I started to see how all the parts, you know, merge together. Yeah, and I can understand how this is helping companies now that with AI, first AI products, they don’t need as much capital as they used to, So what are the benefits for an investor?
to join the air accelerator program. You mentioned a few, but in terms of yields or return of their investment, what results have you seen happen through people go through this program?
Joseph Argiro (42:47) yeah, we’ve had, we’ve had people, go on to work at BC funds. We’ve had some start their own fund.
We’ve had members get hired at Iron Key. We have an unconventional hiring model. And we use the education as a way to weed people out for our internship program. Actually, we have a 90 day internship program. And so those are some of the outcomes of the AIR program. And I think
Just like anything else in life. It’s something you know if you put energy in you can expect to get something good back If you don’t you half-ass it you can expect nothing Just like anything else in the world
Federico Ramallo (43:24) Right, I love that idea of hiring through people that you know. We do something similar with our training program where we train people for three months. We pay them before I can recommend them to work with our clients because I don’t know them and I want to weed out people based on just on their attitudes, right? Because what we teach them is
They have the technical background, so we teach them the specifics of the projects, some technical knowledge, but mostly seeing how people react, right? And yeah, we’ve been able to weed out bad elements and we’ve been able to have a much more significant feeling about, you know, are these people going to be a good hire?
So I can see how that that happening. Yeah.
Joseph Argiro (44:12) Yeah, and I think maybe what we’re kind of getting at is that seems like the old hiring model is kind of broken.
There are other ways to go about it.
Federico Ramallo (44:19) Right. It’s kind of what I’m trying to do with Prevetted, the platform that I’m building, to try to fix the hiring model. But I agree, there’s a lot of things broken on the traditional hiring model.
So we’re running out of time, but I want to ask one last question before we wrap it up. Can you tell us more about the Phish network? What problem are you solving? And who feels that pain the most?
Joseph Argiro (44:42) Yeah, so.
product is built for emerging managers and their investors. We call them fish school organizers and fish. Frederico, have you ever seen the TV show Shark Tank?
Federico Ramallo (44:54) Yes.
Joseph Argiro (44:55) Yeah. Okay. We’re building a software platform that looks and feels like Shark Tank with real emerging managers, real money on your phone and TV.
Federico Ramallo (45:06) Wow, that’s a great way to describe it.
Joseph Argiro (45:07) So, but it’s not TV
shows, it’s a software product.
Federico Ramallo (45:10) Right.
Joseph Argiro (45:10) And what we’re solving for is we’re giving emerging managers a new way to deploy capital that’s more capital efficient. So the old way is to organize an SPV, and there’s a lot of fees, middlemen, accountants, lawyers taking fees in the middle, including the fund manager who’s actually stripping the investor rights and taking them on behalf of all the investors.
And again, it’s just who is the system designed for? Well, was designed for the fund managers to make money at the expense of the investors. And that’s just the way our world has been set up with this whole two and 20 fund compensation structure that’s been adopted all over the world the last 40 years. And what we’re building is a more capital efficient way to do those types of deals in an investment club model where it’s community driven and
In the eyes of the SEC, it’s a little bit more informal, but we’ve built software that has compliance built in to make sure that these things stay in investment club and don’t become a fund. And so what we’re giving is power back to the individual investor, along with voting rights, information rights, and allowing them to actually feel confident deploying capital alongside people they know and trust and respect, think even influencers.
who have a social media following and maybe they invest in real estate or crypto or whatever, we’re building a software toolkit to keep everyone honest between all the investors and giving them transparency, but also enabling that FISH School organizer or emerging manager to launch that fund zero or fund one. And instead of launching a fund, they launch an investment club through our FISH Network, which is called a FISH School.
because FISH swim in structure, coordination, and direction. So rather than large sharks and centralized platforms, we target FISH to facilitate crowdfunding for domain-specific investor communities. And this is what we’re building at FISH Network, is a platform to revolutionize private markets investing, starting with venture capital, going into other alternative assets, and creating a shared liquidity model.
to actually make all of these assets more liquid and more accessible to the average investor.
Federico Ramallo (47:21) Wow, that’s amazing. I mean, I’ve seen, I had the utmost respect for the sharks, but I’ve seen some, one of my former clients went to Shark Tank and they showed up there. And I’ve seen a lot of the misses they have, right? At the end of the day, they were able to be successful, but the…
Some of the investments I looked up, they were not. In Mexico, they did a shark tank, and I just searched for 10 random investments, and they were all gone after a year or two. So I don’t know if that’s represent… I know if that’s representative of the whole investment, but what I’m trying to go with this is that this top-down decision-making is inefficient at best.
But what you’re describing is this distributed decision making with coordination. I think that’s going to be much more powerful because that would allow first democratization, but second, better and more informed decision because now we have a collective people making a group decision towards investments. Wow, I think that’s amazing.
Joseph Argiro (48:23) Thanks. Yeah. Well, it’s definitely something that the world needs. And regulation is changing to make this a lot more possible, even in the US. And it really should break down barriers to giving international investors exposure to US assets and also create a safe and compliant way for people to pull capital together.
to make investments and also do whatever people want to do in terms of, and that’s an informal way of saying the social coordination of capital, right? What do people want to do with their money? They can pool it, they can invest it, they can buy something, they can buy a business, they can invest that together, and they can do it in a way where it’s transparent and auditable and seamless.
Federico Ramallo (49:10) Amazing. I believe in the libertarian model where the market should be able to decide in a fair playing field, fair game, a playing field level. So I think what you’re describing is amazing. And I’m looking forward to see where you’re taking the fish network platform next.
Joseph Argiro (49:27) Sounds great. Yeah. Well, you can find us at fishnetwork.co. That’s fishnetwork.co. And you can find us on Instagram and Twitter at fishnetworkco. And we’d love to see you on the platform and happy fishing.
Federico Ramallo (49:42) Amazing, Joseph, thank you very much for joining us today. I truly appreciate it.
Joseph Argiro (49:48) Thanks for Rico. was a pleasure. Thanks for having me. Talk to you soon.