Meltem Demirors

2023年5月23日

在加密,人人都有“比特幣起源的故事,”Meltem Demirors說。她把她從公司財務工作的可靠路徑為石油和天然氣行業投資的事情很少人聽說過。但十多年後,Demirors”職業生涯早期打賭使她最突出的啟動密碼的投資者之一,擁有Blockdaemon等公司的支持下,blockchain-infrastructure公司價值34億美元,和Messari crypto-data公司。Demirors降落,CoinShares戰略主管,內幕的種子30女榜種子投資者。“我總是喜歡開玩笑說,在過去的十年裏我的生活,我和一群瘋狂的人在互聯網上meme全球貨幣存在,”她告訴內幕。“這是基本互聯網的每一個孩子的夢想。”Jokes aside, Demirors is steadfast in her belief that crypto has the potential to be transformative for markets — despite all the flaws that have come to the fore in the past year. Her "bitcoin origin story" began in 2012, when she started researching the cryptocurrency at the prompting of some of her relatives. As she surfed bitcoin forums and subreddits, the notion of a stateless, decentralized currency that would enable her to send money to her extended family in rural Turkey appealed to her. Three years later, as she was finishing up her MBA at MIT, she decided to make crypto her full-time job, joining the newly launched Digital Currency Group — the crypto-focused holding company created by Barry Silbert, who previously founded SecondMarket — as an investor. Demirors aimed to apply the financial-analytics skills she honed in the energy sector to help source investments and hone crypto founders' far-flung ideas into solid businesses. She also began angel investing, making early bets on startups such as Messari and the crypto-powered predictions market Polymarket. In 2018, she moved to CoinShares, a publicly listed, European crypto-focused investment firm, where she focuses on startups related to markets and finance. In addition to Blockdaemon, the firm's portfolio includes the crypto-derivatives-trading network Paradigm and the blockchain Solana. At the start of her career in crypto, Demirors spent much of her time working to win over other venture capitalists, who largely viewed crypto with a skeptical eye, by hosting investor summits and making the rounds to build up her firm's reputation. In the past few years, several VC behemoths have entered the crypto fray, including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, and Bessemer Venture Partners. The collapse of several crypto companies — most notably, FTX — in the past year, however, has brought back much of that skepticism. In many cases, that's justified, Demirors said. "I do think our industry suffers from a credibility problem," she told Insider. "And I think that sometimes gets exacerbated by some of the behaviors that we see, that are unfortunately many times enabled by venture investors who are very much focused on prioritizing short-term gains over long-term sustainability." But, she added, such challenges aren't new. Crypto had a similarly dodgy reputation when she was just getting started in the industry in 2015, a year after the collapse of the exchange Mt. Gox. What has set her investing approach apart, she said, is focusing on markets and fintech and ensuring that the companies she backs have a path to a sustainable model. Her narrowly focused approach to crypto investing is now becoming standard as the technology branches out into areas such as art, music, and gaming. "One of the big challenges is that a lot of people in crypto have a very generalist approach to investing," she said. "I think some of the firms that will be really well positioned going forward are those that really have domain expertise."