So I'm Jamie Finn, I'm the president and co-founder of Securitize. We are a startup that was founded in 2017, and we were founded based on the premise that there was a big gap in the technology space around digital securities. So as of today, almost every security in the world is done based on a piece of paper that somebody signs. We think that that's a pretty inefficient model, and so what we've created is a digital version of that leveraging blockchain technologies, both public and private blockchains. In order to create digital securities that are more transparent, easier to trade, easy to use, and just fundamentally better. I mean, at this point, we're competing with paper, so we should be able to make a better product. Blockchain technologies really enable fundamentally new ways of interacting with both private and public securities. They enable all new ways of understanding who owns these securities. You can see trades happening live on a blockchain. You can see the whole transaction happening end to end, and really, they create this environment of transparency that isn't available today, particularly around private securities. So that is kind of where we started, and really, one of the assets we started with was venture funds. Venture funds are a fundamentally illiquid and very hard to access asset. There's very little information known about them, they are notoriously secretive. And so taking an asset like that and making it available broadly to investors all over the world was something that we thought was a really powerful concept and creates a really cool new financial product. So that's really where we started, and so some of our customers are companies like Blockchain Capital or SPiCE VC, and a number of other kind of venture funds that we've worked with around that. And that's been kind of the point of entry for our business. From there, we really moved into what most people feel is one of the largest asset classes in the world that's almost totally non-traded, although it is liquid, and that is real estate. So real estate's a new asset class, it's also moving on to the blockchain. And we think it's actually a fantastic use case, because you're taking an asset that has all sorts of different components like debt, or equity, and putting it into a token which represents ownership of this asset. This makes it so that you can do something really unique, where you can buy a piece of a property without actually taking the title of that property as part of the transaction. This is also an interesting problem on the tax side. So one of our customers is the St. Regis Hotel in Aspen, Colorado, and Aspen coin was one of our first real estate projects. It's a single asset writ, and it's the first time that someone's tokenized a chunk of a hotel. And now, every investor in that project really has access to all the financial information and everything about that hotel through this dashboard that we give them. And not only that, the asset's liquid and tradable. So they can go on a secondary marketplace, and they could sell it to somebody else who would like to be an owner of the St. Regis, which is a fascinating business opportunity. So Securitize was founded on the premise of having to create and deliver something that worked from the very first day. If you look at the heritage of Securitize, we were really born from a demand and a need from a customer. And so, from the very first day, we've been totally focused on execution and delivering. We haven't really spent a lot of time debating things like standards, and technologies, and what's the best way you could do something, because we actually had to get it done. And getting it done, we were able to kind of create this track record of execution, and that's what Securitize is really best known for. We deliver products. We've really done the first issuances of digital securities on an ethereum blockchain. There's a public blockchain. We've enabled trading on in secondary markets for the first time ever of digital securities with Ethereum, and we're the first company ever to have the same security trading on multiple exchanges. This is a very big deal. A lot of people are interested in what's known as an ICO, and you may have heard about it from early in 2017. These were really fantastic capital formation events that had happened on a global basis in a way that nobody's ever seen before. And it's really the fundamental reason that STOs, or security token offerings, were created. When you could have an idea and have somebody give you a $100 million for that idea for you to do whatever you wanted with it, it's obviously going to attract a lot of attention. And so that attention is really what brought digital securities to the mainstream, and it's now kind of where ICOs have now moved into the digital security realm. We have a whole bunch of new products that are coming along, and for me personally, as an investor, it never really made sense in the old ICO days, because it was simply you weren't getting anything for your money. Now, you're actually getting equity, or revenue share, or some sort of distribution associated with your investment. So at Securitize, we really believe that all securities will eventually become digital assets, and they'll be available on public blockchains. So that's the future that we see, and we've seen that happen kind of with every product over time. Things that start as physical products, B2CD, or even a record, eventually ends up just being a stream you get on Spotify. Securities have been the last thing to get there. Right now, most of these transactions are still done on paper. So that has to go away, and we're leading the charge to get rid of that. So right now, there's a trend going on, and we've seen this trend in the past, and I'll liken it to that. So today in the blockchain space, we have public blockchain such as Ethereum or Bitcoin, and then we have private blockchains such as Hyperledger, or any number of other kind of protocols that are out there. What's interesting about this space is that we have a very similar thing to compare this to. So if you look back maybe 10, 20 years ago, everybody had a data center. And that was what you ran in order to run your Internet products, you ran it into data center. Then flash forward to today, everybody runs on cloud. If you're going to look at things today in the blockchain world, what's happened is that people have started in banks, in particular. Because I believe banks will end up being the biggest users of digital ledger technologies or blockchain, and they will eventually all end up on a public blockchain. To get there, they're going to start on private blockchain. Because just as in the past where everybody was uncomfortable with a server in the cloud, and today, the CIA runs their servers on Amazon. Eventually, even the financial institutions will become comfortable with these public blockchains. Public blockchains are the right long-term solution for all financial, products because they offer the transparency and immutability that you're going to want, and they have the controls that you need. Today, the banks aren't comfortable with it. In the future, they definitely will be, and that is the future of blockchain. The regulatory environment around blockchain is relatively murky. Securitize has taken a position where we feel that these are all securities. They are not some sort of random token format. And we believe that as securities, they have to be treated that way under the securities laws which exist in the US. In the US, our regulatory framework is actually pretty clear and pretty good when it comes to these types of things. Most people don't realize it, digital securities were created and authorized to exist when Hurricane Sandy wiped out almost all the paper records in New York. So after that, you could actually just have a digital entry without any paper to back it up. That's a really big step, and it's actually one of the only countries in the world where you can do that. So we think the US framework is actually pretty good for issuing and managing digital securities. We're working across a number of other countries with them on this topic. But just emphasizing the fact that you can do this today on a blockchain in the US legally. As long as you follow the rules that have existed since 1933 and then were updated in early 2000s, you're in a really good place to be able to operate this type of business. At Securitize, we're looking always to find people with true grit and people who are unwilling to give up. When you're doing a startup, the easiest thing to do is to quit and to stop. Because actually, what you're doing at a startup is probably not going to succeed. In fact, in 99.99% of the time, it's just not going to work. But the 1%, or the tenth of 1% it works is it extremely massive opportunity. So we really look for people who have experience, not only kind of creating their own business probably when they were younger, from a lemonade stand all the way through to delivering papers. But also, generally, if you're interested in marketing, be really great at marketing. Marketing is badly needed in FinTech. And all these different kind of components are things you should really know about. Obviously, understanding numbers, understanding balance sheets, understanding how cash flow is working, all that's fundamental and really basic. But at the end of the day, what we really are looking for is somebody who has the grit to not kind of give up in the face of a pretty daunting task. And that's something that you're going to find really rarely, and it takes a lot of effort and a lot of interviews to go through with someone. And many times, those really great people are already at great companies. So then, you have to try and pull them out of there and bring them into this highly risky environment, which is a startup. FinTech today is really controlled by a few different very large entities. And whether or not you know it, almost all of your money one way or another ends up in the hands of probably eight or nine banks in the whole world. This is not something that will last forever. It is changing, and it's changing because people are becoming more empowered, and more people need access. If you look at millennials today, which I'm barely missing out on, one of the most interesting things is how unbanked they are. And then again, how comfortable they are with digital assets and digital currencies. I really see things like Bitcoin and other digital currencies becoming very mainstream in the long-term, particularly as a store of value. And I think FinTech is going to have to evolve to support this new generation of wealth that's coming up. All these folks who are coming in this next generation understand digital natively. And if your FinTech products aren't natively digital, and you have to make a phone call to get something done, they are not going to be your customer.
