Hey everyone!
I know I’ve been super absentee about the stewardship of Speculations over the last several months (sorry!), I’ve maybe got some sort of writer’s block and/or am just busy with other pursuits. Life has seasons for everything really and these past couple seasons just didn’t include a ton of writing, idk.
This post will not really be the grand intellectual think-boi heir to Unholy Unions, but perhaps putting stuff back in this space will chip away at some of my inertia at using this blog as a “low-stakes channel” for content.
Anyway, I find myself in a transitional period again and write to you today to share some professional updates:
Leaving Binance
So, this one is not breaking news here, I announced it last month already, but figured I would share some more details.
I know my decision to leave Binance was abrupt and a bit of a surprise (more on this in a bit), but I’m incredibly grateful to the team at Binance for the very productive 2-ish years spent there.
Thanks to CZ for giving me a shot after I hit him with a cold DM on Twitter, He Yi for hiring me, Matt for letting me grow to an APAC leadership role, and my amazing SEA+ team for executing it all so damn well.
Though I left seemingly prematurely, these crazy Crypto Summer numbers we put up in the Philippines, then Southeast Asia, then APAC are highlights that will likely stick with me for the rest of my career. Candidly, the structure and opportunity to lead at Binance gave me a lot of new skills and confidence that I feel I really only pretended to have when I left Coins.ph. I am definitely way better-off for the experience.
Love that team and am still rooting hard for Binance and their mission to advance the Freedom of Money globally.
All that said, the opportunity ahead of me was too strong to pass up. Gabby approached me about the Global COO role at YGG and immediately I knew I would be mad at myself if I were to pass it up.
Joining Yield Guild Games (YGG)
I’m very excited to announce that I’ve joined the team at Yield Guild Games as Chief Operating Officer.
I met Gabby in 2018/2019 as part of the broader #CryptoPH ecosystem, he was already working on NFT Games in relative obscurity (certainly complete obscurity compared to his stature now) and was totally outside the standard crypto “scene” in Manila. It was kind of weird to have people focused on crypto stuff unrelated to tokens/trading/finance and I appreciated the novelty of it for its time.
In 2020 and 2021, I got much closer to Gabby as we explored the about-to-explode NFT Metaverse.
He egged me on in collecting a bunch of the early pieces in my Crypto Art collection and I would do long lunches (with a quite few bottles of chardonnay) with Gabby and his wife Mench at the back deck of Samba in BGC where we both conceived of and executed on many of our most notable NFT side projects: Narra Gallery, the First Mint Fund, our show at Art Fair Philippines, and our curated drop on Nifty Gateway - just to name a few.
We developed a great cadence of working/communicating together and got to experience successes and failures.
In these sessions, we also talked a ton about Axie Infinity, Play-to-Earn Gaming, the Crypto-Metaverse, and many of Gabby’s earliest ideas about YGG.
I also helped to connect Gabby and Jiho to my friend LCB at Emfarsis, who would go on to create easily the most famous #CryptoPH article of all time in CoinDesk and an even more famous documentary on the same topic - and have been involved since YGG’s very first round as an investor.
Between my working closely with Gabby and the reputation of Beryl (a fellow Coins.ph alum) and some of their key hires like Luis (a complete powerhouse in our community in his own right) - working with that team was already a no-brainer.
Beyond my love for the team though, I think YGG stands alone in the uniqueness of its mission. Much has been said about the incredible impact that Play-to-Earn gaming has had in the Philippines and broadly across emerging markets - and I think the social impact part of this story has still barely played out globally. It’s a nascent force that is going to have profound impacts on the shape of society in the 2020s.
Furthermore, I am excited about YGG because it’s in many ways one of the very first Philippine-native startups. YGG is not the “[proven Silicon Valley business model] for the Philippines” → other guilds are the “YGG for [their country/space].”
Over time I grew really weary of the Philippine startup scene because of the delusion that every generation seems to have in creating “The Silicon Valley of Manila” - and instead, because of YGG, the idea that other parts of the world are going to start creating “The Cabanatuan City of [some other place]” as their Play-to-Earn hub gives me incredible energy.
This is a unique moment in business and technology, not just for the Philippines but for the global crypto ecosystem, and I’m super excited to drive it with the YGG team.
(Just posting some receipts below…)
Investing in the Open
On balance, I actually don’t see this move as “leaving Binance and joining YGG” - it’s more like “leaving Binance and becoming fully Crypto-Native.”
As crazy as it might seem, when you work at Binance, Coins.ph, or other crypto services - you’re really still playing very close to the shore of the vast crypto ocean. Your job still resembles a Web 2.0 role to a large extent - you have a database of users, you compete against other companies with databases of users, and you gear your operation around competition in a way that is a lot less prevalent in positive-sum Web3.
Furthermore, at Binance, because we were such a large crypto venue, we rightfully had to be very careful with how we conducted ourselves so as not to have our actions misinterpreted as signals to the market. We had policies and restrictions on trading, we had to be careful in public comms, and we were very careful of our investment activity generally (all things that were correct for that business).
At a more Web3-native operation like YGG, this becomes less of a problem, the positive-sum (WAGMI) nature of the space allows me to exist as an economic node individually in a way that wasn’t fully possible for me at Binance.
Thus, going forward, I plan to be more open about my activities as an angel investor / advisor in the space - and to (hopefully) ramp up my activities in both domains in a meaningful way.
In many ways, I’ve been able to have this “build in the open” mentality in my NFT collecting practice, but now hope to take this spirit to my other pursuits as well.
As an Angel, I think I sit at an interesting intersection of crypto platforms, Art, NFTs, and Southeast Asia - the various cross-sections of which are becoming very valuable for a lot of teams.
Some of the stuff we’ve done so far:
As an Angel / Private Investor: Yield Guild, Utopia Labs, Launch House, Piñata, HaloDAO, Continuum World, Blockchain Space, and others
As Advisor: Blockchain Space & Breadcrumbs
I also hope to be more involved in Web3-native stuff like NFT art projects, Play-to-Earn games (as a player), and broader DAO governance.
I’ll definitely dive into all of this a bit more later - my various theses, market perspectives, competitive edges, and so forth - but for now I’m excited to grow these side-practices out in the open.
What Happens Next?
Up until very recently even, I would grapple constantly with the “what do you want to be when you grow up?” question.
I liked the idea of getting some operating chops and then becoming a VC. I liked the idea of becoming a Founder, of becoming a tech executive at hyper-scale, of making a few bucks and traveling the world, of becoming a hobbyist Marine Biologist.
In the world of linear industrial and post-industrial careers, these things all involved tradeoffs due to resource allocation, location, transaction costs, random frictions of doing business. That world was less positive-sum than it is today.
I think that in the “True Internet” (pick your buzzword: Web3, the Metaverse, Crypto-Native, the Blockchain, etc.) the career path doesn’t have to fork in quite the same way. In a world of infinite digital leverage, a focused individual in good standing can absolutely choose to be “all of the above” professionally.
Instead of the “what do you want to be when you grow up?” question, I now think much more regularly about how to accumulate “Type-4 Luck” (Luck from your unique character), as popularized in Naval’s “How to Get Rich” podcast-opus.
Instead of thinking about which jobs I want to chart a path through, I am trying to focus much more on building and being a unique character that can bring value to the projects I work with. I can feel my experience start to compound and I’m doing my best to accelerate it. The luck is starting to actively seek me out.
We’re in the “Player Empowerment Era” now, baby. I’m trying my best to be a strong node in the network, working with other strong nodes - and at YGG we’re going to bring a billion+ more self-sovereign nodes onto the network too.
👋 See you all out there.
-Colin Goltra, December 2021