Tell us about the journey you are on
I'm Kevin Monserrat, founder of Consilience Ventures.
Entrepreneur by heart and by choice.
I've worked with many companies when I was in charge of the ecosystem development for Microsoft,
So I was building a tech ecosystem for big brands and I was very lucky because it would be probably the best experience of my life, when it comes to understanding the complexity of growing tech companies.
Funding tech companies and so on.
In 2018, I met a friend who is now co-founder and we sat down and we thought, how can we use technology to serve entrepreneurs and to serve tech entrepreneurs?
So we came up with an idea of blockchain tokenization.
It was very confusing, but we thought that by using blockchain and by using A.I., we would be able to significantly improve the lives of entrepreneurs and investors and of people working with those companies that we call experts.
So that's where we are coming from and our mission is to improve the lives of entrepreneurs by 100 times
By removing the pains that are currently, unfortunately, hurdles for most tech entrepreneurs, which is.
Raising money and accessing talent.
And we've created a technical solution.
That is not crowd funding that is not venture capital.
That is not another incubator or an accelerator, but that is.
Basically, enabling start ups to convert their shares into a digital assets that they can use to buy time and to access capital.
How far into the journey are you?
And we've got 250 members globally.
We've got seven and soon ten companies in our portfolio.
We've invested about £2 million, so it's $3 million of sweat equity.
We've built our platform with our pricing and we've probably built one of the most advanced operating system for venture capital and engineer networks/syndicates.
But in the scale of things of where? We want to be. We've done nothing.
Why did you choose DeFi?
It's true that we are inheriting everything from. 40,000 years of doing trades.
The same way we've started with bartering.
Then we realized that we need something else.
And we came up with stones and then we went to the rarer stones.
Gold, platinum, silver and we are now in a world where all of that is digitized.
And therefore, we can do things that were not possible and we're not are not possible in the physical world.
So I'm not going to do the history of money here for your audience
But, with crypto, we can now program money.
And if money can be programmed, it can be probably more trusted.
So long as the program and the algorithm that basically executes the contracts, so-called smart contract has been approved by the people that want to play the game that this protocol has to offer.
What are the challenges?
The biggest challenge is is educating people on about.
What is really, what is money, what really is money
and is money good for innovation or is it just another hurdle that entrepreneurs have to overcome.
And if you remove the need to raise money.
We are going to empower more entrepreneurs, and hopefully we are going to enable them to take even riskier bets.
While mitigating their risks and that's that is very exciting because we won't save the world with the traditional way of thinking.
Let's face it, the traditional financing models are not, they're not here to save the world, they're here to make money, they're here to make money on money.
So there's a conflict there.
What we need to do is we need to create better mechanisms to fund those companies and to accelerate those companies.
To enable them to focus on the real challenges that are really moving the needle are really changing this world.
What is more important? Money or Talent?
100% talent, 100%
Money is being printed.
We do not print talent.
If we knew how to print talents, we would have saved this world and made this world a much better place long ago.
So we do have to create better ways to attract talent.
To incentivize talent.
And. And talents are not following the money they are following the missions
and therefore in the culture and missions and culture and movements are attracting money.
So it's the other way around.
If we come up with a concept where we bring the best talents around the very innovative companies and we incentivize everyone to win, which is the so-called skin in the game concept.
Money will follow.
100%.
But what you see is that some of the world's best talents, they do not work to work for the banks.
Nobody's interested in working for Goldman Sachs.
Yeah. I mean, not, you know, that's why you know, the big brands are not are struggling to hire the best talent.
It's because the best talents are not interested to work for just money.
They want to work on on things that makes sense to them.
And the big, you know, the gaffers, and they're not offering that
Same for the FAANG or the MAANG.
We don't know how we call them anyway.
I think I think talent is far more important than money, and I think money's always following talent, and I think that talent is not always following the money.
Are the rules for success universal?
Everything has to reflect the environment.
We just need to look at nature to see how innovation works.
If you plant a seed, you know, in the wrong environment.
It won't grow.
And it's the same with innovation.
If tried to replicate the venture capital that, the Silicon Valley model, in an area like Manchester, right, or in Sydney, the model won't work
Because the environment is not the same
Because the culture is not the same
Because the rules are not the same.
So we need to be like water.
We need to adapt to the environment and if we want to empower entrepreneurs.
We've got to give them the ability to be a giant.
And to leverage the strengths of the environment to build solutions that are probably relevant locally, and that can be relevant globally.
What is transformative?
And. In a fully digitized world.
DOAs are going to take a much more, much more. Much bigger space.
Much bigger space in this world.
We can create our own societies and you can join a DAO which has your believes, your culture, your values.
And you can be anywhere around the world, but you can belong to that community.
I live in London, I love London, there are things I love about London, there are things that I don't like about London.
But in my digital world, in my metaverse.
I'm much more likely to be surrounded by people I share value with.
So the physical world is becoming less relevant.
And though the concept of DAO is typically global, internet based democracy is not just advancing.
This. This. Is this real transformation that we are going through
Tell me about your portfolio model
Actually, money, it's the best voting system
We decide who dies and who lives with our money,
and if we're only putting our money in fintech, what will happen to agriculture?
What will happen to climate?
What will happen to sustainability?
So this concept of financing innovation in areas that we do not understand, but we use our money to vote.
To improve or to enhance those industries is it's very important.
It's very important.
So the way we're doing this with Consilience Ventures is we building a global portfolio of very diversified companies so you can be a mini LP, you are technically not coordinated.
When you invest in Consilience Ventures because the fund is tokenized so you can invest £10,000 or $10000 and you can invest regularly and there's no capital call and.
And it's more liquid and and so on,
but the key part is that if I am...
If I were a wealthy. Woman and I want to vote with my money,
meaning I want to create a better world for the next generations by putting my money in clean tech can agritech.
If I don't know where to find those companies,
if I don't know how to select those companies,
if I do not understand the risk associated with those companies,
it is very it is going to be very difficult for me to give that money to this companies, even if I would like to.
And Consilience Ventures. If you buy a token, if you buy a security token called CVDS from a fintech company or a climate tech penny or a sustainable company or a media company or whatever, you are giving your money to the company you were voting for, even if you don't understand it, but your risk is removed because you actually buy a share of the portfolio is only one token for the entire portfolio.
There's no one token per startup.
And this this concept here is very much changing.
It's moving the boundaries because I can now with my money, I can say I'm going to invest 50,000 pound in climate tech, even if I know nothing about climate tech.
I don't take your risk of investing in climate tech, but my money goes there anyway.
My money goes into the climate tech company, but in reality, I'm buying a portfolio, meaning that I probably have in my portfolio companies that I understand.
And I can help, and I can help those companies, and I can earn more tokens, more security tokens and I'm growing my portfolio, mitigating my risk, adjusting my returns, but I still know that my 50,000 Pounds or Dollars check went into climate company.
That is a big, big, big difference.
10 Years from now... What's changed?
I think blockchain is the one that is going to have a bigger impact than most other technologies.
But it doesn't mean that it makes blockchain a better technology than the others, it's just going to be very clear.
And it doesn't mean that blockchain in ten years will be what blockchain is now.
I actually believe that blockchain in ten years would be very different than what blockchain is right now.
I think we're going to come up with.
Very fast transactions trust list on transactions.
Without spending energy.
So we're going to come up with this far more inclusive.
And a far more efficient and far more transparent financial system.
And this will lead to what we are already seeing today, the digitization of the private market.
I think the digital transformation of the private market is probably.
It's a must watch.
There are trillions, possibly more more. Maybe. Tens of trillions of dollars of value locked in illiquid assets.
And I believe that. We're going to digitize and tokenized all of those illiquid assets and that will open up opportunities for the next generations who may not be able to buy a full house if the house, you know, the housing market keeps going up like it has for the past 20, maybe 30 years.
So if we if our children are not able to buy a house, a full house.
How can we make sure that they are included in, in this society if?
And how do we ensure that they can climb the ladder?
And this is what's exciting.
I think it's going to be more democratic,
I think more and more people will have access to more digital, more assets, more asset class.
And we'll. Hopefully benefit from it.
What's your competitive advantage?
That's where we were going very early.
That's what that's why our model, our model is very cash efficient and also very well designed to find companies very early in their journey, de-risk those companies to the best of our abilities and double down, triple down on the winners.
But we can play where the big players cannot play.
We very much we we are we are at the forefront of innovation
We're not investing in Series B with checks of 20 million, 30 million and.
Hoping to change the world.
That's not where the world is changing, the world is changing at pre-seed and seed.
That's where the world is changing.
So. I think this. Model that we designed has, you know, Pros and Cons like every model,
the one of the biggest challenge is to explain it to, you know, my grandmother feminist,
because the rules are different and people tend to know the rules and they tend to box you with the rules they know.
But when you are changing the rules and people are having difficulties to comprehend, and that's why when I look at the cons of having probably the ability to run the world's global largest scouting program.
And acceleration program at the same time and be able to fund those companies working with our network of family offices to bring this huge once these companies are less risky, then the time to market for those companies is significantly reduced and significantly less risky.