The Future of Capital Formation with Ian Lee

Today’s guest is Ian Lee, the Co-Founder of Syndicate. Syndicate is a decentralized asset management platform and social network. It creates an investing syndicate for 1000x less time and money. Syndicate is a decentralized investing protocol and social network transforming how the world creates value. Previously, Ian was Managing Partner of IDEO CoLab Ventures, a crypto venture fund backed by IDEO focused on web3, crypto, and blockchain startups. From 2017-2021, Ian led investments and helped incubate 80+ crypto startups in the areas of DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, and more. From 2014-2017, Ian was the Head of Crypto at Citigroup and Citi Ventures globally. We discuss various topics, including Syndicate, Investing’s role in society, the ETH merge, the dynamics of angel investing, and much more. We began our conversation by discussing Ian’s background and what brought him to the crypto space. Ian shares how when he understood that Bitcoin and Crypto were an open Fintech stack, everything clicked for him, and he fell down the crypto rabbit hole. Ian explains why the investing industry is ripe for disruption. He breaks down how the tech stack is archaic, how bloated and slow the industry is, and how crypto can disrupt the investing sector. Ian also explains why investing is so important to society. Ian stresses that investing shapes our society by helping allocate monetary and human capital. Ian discusses how the venture capital infrastructure is incredibly inaccessible for many people because of the expenses required to start and participate in a fund. We discuss how Syndicate enables a new paradigm of capital formation by removing these barriers and eliminating the unnecessary overhead needed to create a venture fund. Our following conversation focused on how angel investors were the initial driving force that powered the Bitcoin and crypto industry. We discuss how they fueled the first startups of the space by being their primary source of capital for these early companies. We discuss the importance of DOAs and syndicates