There’s a funny story about Jeanne Calment, the world’s oldest verified living person who died at 122 in 1997. When Calment was 90, she signed something common in France called a viager contract with a lawyer named André-François Raffray. The terms of the contract stated that upon Calment’s death, Raffray would inherit her apartment - in exchange, Calment would receive a monthly stipend of 2500 francs (about $500) from Raffray and continue living in the apartment until her death. 

Raffray ended up paying Calment a total of 918,000 francs (about $184,000), double the value of the apartment, until his death at 77 in 1995. That year, when asked about the situation on her 120th birthday, Calment responded: "In life, one sometimes makes bad deals.” Raffray’s family ended up continuing the payments until Calment’s death in 1997. (NY Times). 

Part 1: Catching the Crypto Bug

In the summer of 2017, I was working as an intern at OpenOcean, a Nordic venture capital firm with offices in London and Helsinki. I was in between my junior and senior year at Stanford, and I had come up with the idea of doing an internship in London to spend time with my best friend Yusef, who was from London. At my internship, I met a kid from Monaco who would end up becoming one of my closest friends, Alex Obadia. A picture of us from our internship. 

OpenOcean was a traditional VC fund, but in the summer of 2017 a crypto bull run was under way, meaning everyone working in tech was catching the crypto bug. It felt like every tech company had their designated crypto sage who was preaching about the virtues of Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH). Under the mentorship of our boss at OpenOcean, Max Mersch, Alex and I learned the basics of how to invest in a new phenomenon that was popping up at the time called an ICO. An ICO stands for Initial Coin Offering, and is “the cryptocurrency industry’s equivalent of an initial public offering (IPO)” (Investopedia). 

In retrospect, it’s a pretty ridiculous comparison given that a traditional company IPOs after many years of validation and cycles of feedback in the private markets, while ICOs were more or less a crowdfunding event for a new idea, basically Kickstarters for weird Internet coins. The first ICO was Ethereum’s in 2013, which raised 31,000 BTC. In 2017, the crypto and stocks bull market along with the ERC-20 token standard from Ethereum meant that the ICO market reached new heights. ERC-20 enabled anyone to release their own token on top of Ethereum - it’s funny that the first time Ethereum reached product market fit was as a platform for ICOs. This crypto stuff can be so self referential sometimes - we need a token because we are a platform for other people to create tokens. I guess you just can’t think too hard about this stuff. 

With Max’s help, Alex and I figured out how to create an Ethereum address, how to use a wallet, how to buy ETH, and with our new knowledge we invested in the 0x ICO on August 15, 2017. We understood the basics of 0x, that it was a decentralized exchange, meaning people could trade with each other directly without a middleman. But largely, we were uneducated and experimenting - crypto was like a shared hobby between me and Alex, a late night topic to theorize and pontificate about. 

Within days, the value of the 0x token had shot up 7 times the ETH I paid for it, and I exited my position with a 7x return. I remember the janky user interface of the decentralized exchange I traded on called Etherdelta, which later was fined by the SEC in 2018. After this initial success, I was hooked. It kind of felt like being in a hacker movie - the rush, the excitement, the renegade nature of the whole thing. There was the gambling impulse, but crypto was also intellectually stimulating, reading complicated, technical white papers about a crazy decentralized future. 

I never sold my ETH for real money, adding to the video game feel of the whole thing. It was a parallel world I could live in, away from the drudgery of PSETs and finals. I went back to California for my senior year at Stanford, and I invested in more ICOs that year, and the pattern would be the same, investing in an ICO, seeing a surge in price, and then exiting. I think this is the story of most big trading losses - a strategy works until it doesn’t, and then you lose big, I’m thinking Archegos or Three Arrows. In summary, you get high off your own supply.

Part 2: The Bloom ICO

As part of my internship work at OpenOcean, I released an article about the founders of a crypto project called Aragon, which got picked up by a journalist at Forbes named Laura Shin. She  later offered me a contributor gig to cover cryptocurrency part time at Forbes. For one of my articles, I heard about a group of Stanford students that had dropped out a few years earlier, all interested in crypto at the time, and I wrote an article about these students called the Stanford Bitcoin Mafia. 

As I was researching the article, four members of this group would go on to be involved in an ICO called Bloom. Another member of this group became famous and then infamous for being the founder of a fintech payments company called Bolt. I was bullish about the investment because the team seemed amazing - Thiel fellows, Stanford dropouts, into Bitcoin since 2013.
They sounded more legit than any previous ICO I had invested in, and, crucially, ICOs had never let me down. It seemed to me like I knew what I was doing. I should have taken to heart the oft repeated maxim: “Past performance is no guarantee of future results.” 

On November 29, 2017, I aped 39 ETH into the Bloom ICO. “Apeing” in crypto refers to “the act of rapidly investing in a new or trending cryptocurrency, token, or DeFi project without conducting in-depth research or due diligence” (Koinly). At the time, the value of my 39 ETH was close to $17K. At today’s prices, it would be about $150K. 

As a 21 year old, 17K was a lot of money. But with all the ICO investing, I was only calculating in terms of ETH. I wanted to multiply my ETH because that’s the game I was playing. I first invested 14 ETH into the ICO, a safer bet, but suddenly I started thinking more. Logically, the team was the best I had seen, and I had never lost money on an ICO. At some point I was tired of thinking and debating endlessly in my head and wanted to just act. It’s this decisiveness and impulsivity that has helped me and hurt me in equal measure in my life. Against the advice of Alex, I more than doubled my ante, putting 25 ETH more into the ICO. 

There were problems with the Bloom ICO from the beginning - the hard cap of $50M in funding never got reached, meaning interest in the sale was lower than expected. The biggest problem was that there was a one year lock up period, meaning I could not trade my Bloom tokens or exit my position for a year.  

My feelings after the trade paralleled the markets, with healthy doses of what the Internet calls hopium and copium, strategies of avoiding dealing with the reality of a situation. Over the next few months, Ethereum would reach a high of $1400 in January 2018 while I had my Bloom tokens locked up. It felt like I was watching life under house arrest. I winced the following months each time I thought about my trade, but I also gradually accepted it. I checked my portfolio less and less. By the end of 2018, when my Bloom tokens were finally tradeable, ETH was at $100, the Bloom tokens were virtually worthless, and I wasn't even looking at the prices.

‍Part 3: Exiting Crypto

Despite my mistake with the Bloom ICO, I continued on the crypto path for some time. The technology and the space remained interesting to me. I went through all the best crypto projects in my senior year, hustling and freelancing for the ones I found most interesting, like Status, Dharma, Zeppelin, and 0x. After graduating college in 2018, I managed to get a full time job at my top choice of project, 0x, the first ICO I ever invested in. I was elated, as the team was amazing, full of talent from the best tech companies.  At 22, I was the youngest employee there. I worked at 0x from April 2018 until June 2019, when I was abruptly fired. To this day, I don’t know the right word to use for my departure, is it fired, laid off, or let go? I tend to use fired because if I use anything else I feel like I’m downplaying it. One day I was working at 0x, one day I wasn’t, and I definitely didn’t have a choice in the matter.

The day I was fired, I had a one on one scheduled with the COO, and as I walked into the meeting the CEO came in and I knew I was either getting promoted or fired. They told me they were letting me go, and it felt like a first person shooter game when a grenade goes off nearby and you’re in a stunned state. I wanted to cry but I managed to keep it together. I asked if I could have done anything better, and they told me, no, I was just lacking the experience.

As I stared at the two of them, I almost wanted to laugh. It was two 27 year olds firing a 23 year old. They had never done this before, and I had never done this before. It felt like we were all playing adult. I signed the papers, I was escorted out by the HR lead, and by the time I had left the office my Slack had been deactivated. It was clinical, almost cloak and dagger. The hardest part was leaving the office, keeping my head down, watching all my co-workers continuing to work out of the corner of my eye. To them it was just another work day, they had no idea about what had happened to me. But how was it that my life could turn upside down, and it didn’t affect anyone else?

I moved to Berlin shortly after the whole experience with my close friend Zach. It was a mix of doing what I had always wanted to do, living in Europe, along with just running away from a painful experience. Alex came to see me in Berlin and we did some traveling together. The months afterwards I had lost a lot of confidence - my friends, especially Zach and Alex, were there for me as I processed the whole experience. I got through it, and I learned from it. I figured that I should work on my fundamentals instead of going straight into a bleeding edge industry. The crypto bear market didn’t help. 

I also just wanted a clean slate. Tabula rasa. So at the end of July 2020, I sold all I had left of my crypto for a loss. However, it wouldn’t be crypto without me making one last hilarious mistake. On Uniswap, a popular decentralized exchange, I was trying to sell my Bloom tokens for Ethereum. Instead, I executed the transaction the wrong way and ended up doubling my Bloom position instead of selling it all, the dreaded fat finger trade. Since the market for this token pair was very illiquid, my trade was enough to significantly move the price, and I ended up losing 4 ETH in the conversion process. I couldn’t help but laugh, it was just too funny. I repeated this error when I bought flights between Berlin and London the wrong way this past January. 

Since my crypto exit, crypto prices have gone way up. If I had played my cards right, it would have been lucrative for me. Many of my friends who persisted through the crypto bear market became very successful - Alex became a co-founder at Flashbots, a juggernaut in the MEV space, and Max, our mentor, became the co-founder at Fabric, a crypto VC. Many others I worked with at the time saw huge financial success, either investing wisely or becoming founders of successful companies. However, for every success in crypto, there were many failures, with my story just being one tiny footnote in a massive novel.

Part 4: The SEC Strikes Back

On January 9, 2024, I woke up to a text from Alex. 

Since 2018, the SEC, the chief American agency responsible for regulating stocks, began ramping up its measures to regulate the ICO market and crypto industry. Many ICOs were considered to be illegal security offerings - under the terms of their settlement with the SEC, Bloom agreed to pay back their ICO investors. After a lengthy, multi-month claims process, I got the following message on May 3, 2024: 

I would be getting a refund of nearly $18K, my initial investment plus interest. I was shocked. You either die a crypto supporter, or live long enough to see yourself support the SEC. This time, the money felt real.

It’s funny, being 21, confidently apeing 39 ETH into a random ICO, and thinking the whole financial system is broken and too complicated and needs to change. And then being 28, having made a bunch of dumb investment decisions on magic internet coins only to be bailed out by the US federal government.  Matt Levine has a running gag on his newsletter Money Stuff about crypto re-learning all the mistakes that the traditional finance system has already made - somehow, these learnings seem to be tough to transfer from generation to generation. You can’t teach failure. I had to learn it the hard way.  

In Jonah Hill’s Stutz, a documentary about Hill’s therapist Phil Stutz, Stutz says that embarrassment and shame tie the human race together, because it shows the world we can’t do this alone, that we need others. When I told my dad that I had been fired, I was expecting him to be angry and disappointed. When you fail at something it feels a bit like nobody wants to touch you anymore. But you’re forced to rely on the people that are there for you then, and it brings you even closer to them. The first thing my dad told me was that he was happy that it had happened to me. He had been laid off twice in the dot com bubble before making it on his own as an entrepreneur. He said it’s a gift to have struggles in your 20s. You have to experience it, go through it, and not let it break you.  

The crypto experience challenged me. In terms of investment decisions, I learned my lesson. Today, my investment portfolio is just boring, old Vanguard ETFs. But after a period of fear, I’m taking risks again, trying to do a startup of my own. Because even though my world turned upside down, I still kept the same friends. As I read all the chat messages I had with Alex about the Bloom ICO, I had to scroll through pages and pages of just banal, everyday life. Music recommendations, memes, travel plans - the friend I made along the way. Priceless. 

Thanks to Alex Obadia, Mitchell Mendoza, Michael Zhu, Ena Alvarado, and Karl Miklautz for edits.