“What I’ve come to realize is that investing literally shapes the world that we have. It is effectively at the highest of levels, allocating resources, whether financial or human capital, to things and teams that build the future that we all live in. Investing builds the world.” - Ian Lee, Syndicate.
Today we discuss the topic of a revolutionary new construct – DAOs – and how it can change investing for the better.
Today’s guest is Ian Lee, the Co-Founder of Syndicate.
Ian combines a background in financial services with a prescient view on the future with what he's building at Syndicate.
We discuss:
How Syndicate is doing to investing what YouTube did to film and media.
How Web3 enables community ownership where Web2 didn’t and how investing will become more community driven.
How DAOs are a social financial technology coordinating social and financial capital seamlessly and natively on the internet.
How DAOs are unlocking participation from all sorts of communities who historically haven’t had access to investing.
Why Crypto Covens is one of his favorite NFT projects because it’s changing the face of investing.
And how we are in the middle of a multi generational shift of decentralizing and democratizing investing - and how Syndicate’s Web3 Investment Clubs enable that to happen.
Ian has been a serial founder, he's worked in the Office of the Global Chief Innovation Officer at Deloitte, he's run the Lab Network and Acceleration Fund at Citi Ventures and was Head of Bitcoin & Blockchain at Citi before co-founding IDEO's CoLab Venture fund, where he led their crypto efforts and made over 80 investments in the crypto space.
Most recently, he's founded a ground-breaking company, Syndicate, which is a decentralized investing protocol and social network that is creating the infrastructure for DAOs to run efficiently and effectively. Syndicate is creating the infrastructure and mechanisms for much more efficient, digitally native human coordination.
DAOs have similar properties as corporations, but they are significantly faster and cheaper to set up and run because code governs the decisions and actions taken.
It's hard to put into a short paragraph how profound the creation of Syndicate could be for the formation and governance of organizations and Ian's background lends itself incredibly well to both understanding how things worked in a Web2 (and financial services) world and how they can work better in a Web3 world.
Ian and I had a fascinating conversation about his desire to make investing more inclusive and impactful – and how DAO structures can enable that.
Thanks Ian for coming on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast. It was a pleasure to have you help us peer into the future of investing.
You can listen to this episode on Spotify here, Apple Podcasts here, and Transistor here.
[AGM Podcast] Re-architecting the world of investing with Ian Lee, Co-Founder of Syndicate