Building digital assets into roboadvisor strategy, with Betterment VP of Crypto Investing Jesse Proudman

In this conversation, we chat with Jesse Proudman, the VP of Crypto Investing at Betterment, who was also the co-founder and CEO of Makara. Proudman shares his journey of building a web-design business, which eventually morphed into a cloud computing service and was later acquired by IBM. He then explains his interest in blockchain and the business he built to manage crypto portfolios, which led to the creation of the private cloud product. He discusses the challenges of the public internet versus private internet, public cloud versus private cloud, and public blockchain versus private blockchain, and how the industry has evolved since the ICO collapse of 2018.

 

MENTIONED IN THE CONVERSATION

 

Betterment website: https://bit.ly/3WlCM8B

CEO's Linkedin profile: https://bit.ly/3Ww8mQG

 

Topics: fintech, roboadvisors, crypto, investment, blockchain, cloud, cloud-as-a-service, digital assets

 

Companies: Betterment, IBM, IBM Ventures, IBM Cloud, Strix Leviathan, Makara, Plaid, Gemini

 

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TIMESTAMPS

 

1’28”: The entrepreneurial journey and the influences that led Jesse to becoming a founder

 

3’04”: Connecting the dots between designing websites for the local dentist to running cloud-as-a-service and getting acquired by IBM

 

7’41”: Public technology vs private technology and whether they solve for a similar answer

 

10’36”: Building an accelerator for IBM Ventures and how this drove the inspiration behind Strix Leviathan (a quantitative crypto hedge fund)

 

16’16”: Building a quantitative crypto hedge fund in the first crypto bear market and the investment strategies needed for it to work

 

20’32”: The trigger(s) that led to founding Makara (a cryptocurrency robo-advisor startup)

 

24’58”: The acquisition of Makara by Betterment, the combined offering as a result, and the psychographics of who this offering is for

 

30’26”: Custodial vs non-custodial holding of crypto assets, and the regulatory mine field of providing investment advice in the United States

 

33’53”: Betterment’s approach to modelling the full user journey/financial picture combining the traditional asset allocation with a crypto asset allocation

 

39’38”: The strategic vectors within the digital asset advisory business and what the future looks like for this industry

 

43’07”: Channels to use to connect with Jesse & learn more about Betterment