Yonatan Ben Shimon / YBS Capital
Yonatan Ben Shimon on YBS Capital's crypto portfolio strategy
In this episode
Ashton Addison interviews Yonatan Ben Shimon, Founder of YBS Capital. YBS Capital portfolio interests in the crypto industry include marketplaces and companies in the ownership economy, and exits to community transactions.
ybs.capital · binance.com · Watch on Refinitiv
- YBS Capital invests in internet marketplaces and platforms that distribute ownership tokens to users and creators rather than extracting value through ads.
- The ownership economy represents a shift where platform contributors like drivers, hosts, and content creators gain financial ownership stakes instead of remaining unpaid stakeholders.
- YBS Capital provides portfolio companies with a consortium of service providers including market makers, distribution platforms, and other vendors to facilitate token distribution.
- The firm seeks investment opportunities in internet platforms with producers and consumers where crypto can be leveraged to enable community ownership models.
- YBS Capital is building a DAO called Stakeholders Knights to facilitate collaboration between VCs, market makers, entrepreneurs, and projects interested in community capitalism.
Transcript
Read the full transcript
let's talk about ybs capital can you first give an overview of the company and how you started it yeah for sure i started in crypto about seven years ago and initially i just invested for other people into you know ethereum pre-sale and a lot of other token sales before we film and after ethereum since 2017 until let's say 2016 until
until now more or less or until a few months ago i was involved in a starting couple of projects in different areas within the crypto space an ft project a social network project a privacy coin project an accelerator project and i decided to focus on an area called the exit the community
because i understood that this is a niche that is not getting enough attention equipped to have crypto is the best vehicle to execute on that so i decided yves capital as a firm that help marketplaces in the internet to distribute value to their stakeholders
so any marketplace that have users that create content you will consume this content the marketplace can distribute tokens to those people and basically automatically increase the value of the network because they distribute the ownership of the platform so what we do is investing into internet platforms whether it's that empower developers or
other internet creators like streamers gamers and different application applications and other things and after investing into it we are helping helping them to exit the community to basically measuring and distributing tokens to the people that contributed the most to the
to the specific platform thanks jonathan and that's really interesting that you got involved first at the dawn of ethereum and back then there wasn't a lot of capital in the industry and the trends have just shifted so much and now there's so much institutional interest and more adoption which is great and i'm sure that your portfolio has now sort of shifted gears between seven
years ago and now to the to the upcoming trends so what type of investments does ybs capital primarily have in its portfolio right now so right now we are just we just invested into platforms that already did this exit the community thing so you know like most of the phi compound uni swap
and also other other protocols that does it by itself in audios and protocol that distribute tokens to their stakeholders by itself and we are now negotiating or in conversations with couple of other projects that are more below the radar
and to invest the meaningful investment into them and to help them to go through this distribution process that we're doing and another thing that we are building here is a group of leaders that can help everyone's do it so we are bringing
together all the people in the space that are speaking and doing stuff around the community and around distribution and try to bring them into a power group and to use that as a facility to help those projects as well that's great and i think marketplaces are a really good place to have investments just because they are a platform for others to build
content and they're all fighting for demand and for attention on those platforms and they have the potential to grow into giants or monopolies and it's really marketplaces that are controlling the majority of the tech space right now so i really do think that's a good spot now through researching ybs capital i saw that you mentioned you're investing in companies in the
ownership economy can you explain what that means yeah sure so currently you know since the internet was started basically people don't have ownership on their work and you know if you are an uber driver if you are a lb host if you are a dodge delivery boy
if you are a trader in an exchange if you're a lot of internet participants you're working almost full-time for some instead of a platform and you're not you don't own this platform but you are the one that create value for this platform and that's why those platforms are so valuable because they have so much unpaid employees and in our world you can
have wealth only if you have financial assets only if you have ownership in a business and all those people millions or hundreds of millions or even billions of people don't have ownership and they invest a lot of energy and they don't have ownership and the shift that we see is that in different ways especially coming from crypto but not only
there is a shift towards ownership to these people so basically the ownership economy means that you use different mechanisms in order to give peace of the business to the people that give you the value basically people that give you the value gets more the value they are creating and not they're not being extracted by those
platforms and also the usage in these platforms should be for money not for free in the business model you know is not the ads if users will will pay for example you have the instagram channels and each channel can be subscribed with a subscription fee and you will pay to the to the
channel owner and also the platform will get something and the channel owners will get some of the platform shells you know instagram worth a hundred billion dollars or tick tock or whatever so we start to see it in platforms that pay to use to pay the super users but not give them ownership like patreon and platinum that enable a
user to sell merchandise and stuff like that but more and more will see platforms that give ownership can not only pay for the super users producers on the platform definitely and you touched on this a little bit at the beginning of our discussion but are you offering a variety of services or help to the companies in your portfolio you mentioned that you're starting to
dabble into different projects in nfts and d5 but are you active within the companies that you're investing in besides just providing the capital yes so right now we are building a basically like a consortium of a group of helpers of providers and we and these providers whether it's a
platform that can help with distribution whether it's market makers whether it's other investors whether it's the other platform that can use for the distribution to get more users and other power users we have this stack of vendors and this vendors will be used for the projects so each project will invest in
we will design a plan and we already have a template plans that we are we will connect with all the vendors and will pay for i mean those vendors as well so it will not be the cost for the projects and yeah we want to go with the projects and go and help them to exit the community and
and shift their achieve the model so it will be a by a model of a community ownership and not play by ads model or something like that so definitely when we go step by step with the project that's great and to elaborate on that a little further if there are outside investors vcs or fund managers that are looking to get involved with ybs as well are you
looking for partnerships or strategic partners or dealing with other investors yes so currently we have a like a dao like a power group that we are creating and that called the stakeholders knights which is a basically a group that enables vcs market makers other projects entrepreneurs to offer their services to projects
And we will have projects that does interviews and introduced to this vendors and basically we're trying to facilitate this economy and not necessarily dominate it i want to help create it as well so definitely everyone that is interested in stakeholders capitalism or this is the community or whatever you want to
call it should speak with us and we happy for it to collaborate and help them to find more projects for themselves as well that's great and in terms of newer investments and seeking out investment opportunities what kind of opportunities right now is your firm most interested in and where are you seeing the bulk of opportunities
come from sure so the opportunity that is the most interesting have to answer two criterias one is that it must be an internet platform that have producers and users so one kind of a user is producing something whether it's financial services or whether it's content
and the other type of users is consuming this thing and pay for that and the second term is that the service that is being offered on the platform catered to crypto people so what is scheduled to crypto people is stuff that related to financial services trading development anything that's related
to data maybe a adult i noticed that it's a it's also very relevant for crypto people but mainly financial opportunities and financial instruments and stuff is about developing these kind of things so give a couple of examples general analytics is a very good example is because one kind of users is creating the data
the data queries it's like sql and the other type of users is consuming those data sets or all those feeds another interesting is all different you know uni swap as the compound everything one type of users is contributing to the pool and other type of users is growing from the pool
another a good example is ganache which is a developer tool that enable developers to create stuff other to use this software and so we are basically looking for places where there is a consumer and the producer
well the service is service that the skaters will hit the people with development and maybe development and trading but not only great and gaming we're running close to the end of our time together but i want to look forward to 2021 for ybs capital what is in the upcoming roadmap and what are your goals and what are you looking for as you
move into 2021 so we are looking for two things so our general our in general our goal is to make as many people as we can to millionaires because we believe that if someone gets part of the ownership he can gain wealth so our end ultimate goal is to make a million people to have a million dollars from from from our work but coming to
end of 2021 we hope to invest in one to three more like three platforms and to tokenize them and complete the distribution and on the other hand expand our network of professionals and have more people that care about the community and ownership economy within our
group our community so well that's great jonathan thank you for that and what is the best way for projects or other investors strategic partners to reach out and to learn more about ybs capital so one way is to telegram one way is through twitter and one way it can be through the website i will update most of the things in the website
but twitter is a great place and telegram is a great place my telegram is eoni9091 and on twitter is johnsonvon without an n in the end sounds great i will leave those links in the description box below for the viewers thank you so much for the time jonathan all the best with ybs capital moving forward and let's follow up in the near future thank you very much for having me
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