I’ve sat in front of $1T in PM equity capital over the past two days in Boston and NY (🙏 Robert Friedland & Jeff Currie, Cantor for the support), and the 400 tuned into our conf call last week…
…A few rough thoughts and conversations:
• We are “investing” in a global scale futures exchange clearinghouse for a 1mm ADV market, minimum (OPEX losses for 6 years in developing contracts, markets & customer development, a clearinghouse, tech, liquidity fly wheel, etc); but none of that shows up as a real tangible asset on our balance sheet (more about the ‘goofy mining engineer’s’ audacious approach below) — obviously newcomers get confused by the market cap vs historical rev…then at the same time understand that when [not if] the onboarding and milestones keep checking off, this can be worth substantially, substantially more with minimum additional capital
#WorldBuildersOrBust
• Conversations obviously night & day different now that volumes are growing significantly (and will likely compound exponentially for years to come), even though from an internal perspective almost nothing has changed in our pitch, our process, our products, our own self-expectations for half a decade
#PlanYourMineMineYourPlan
• Given the war (“Don’t mention the war!” -Monty Python), A LOT of detail on how Abaxx is building “the Federal Reserve of Molecules”, where the clearinghouse becomes a ‘Quantity Guarantee’ of commodities, which is far more important than a paper/survey ‘Price Guarantee’ for counterparty risk (again, major disconnect between the vision, service and scale of what Abaxx is investing in versus the ‘but wut revs & assets, bro?’ financials…so far!)
#LetsGetPhysical
• We have an
#OwnerOperator mentality when it comes to dilution (🤢), will obviously want more capital on our balance sheet for the clearinghouse (even though working cap is plenty okay for a few more transformational quarters ahead); have global ambitions for our tech that I have kept in check and back burner for 6yrs and don’t want to dilute before it’s understood/valued, but always talking to strategics and creative expansion ideas / investors when price is right (2/2.5B?)
#29ers
• I’m not focused on break even (it’s a point in our network growth curve that will come and go in a blink of a trading session) — we should be spendvesting waaay more on leveraging our world class team and infrastructure (a business with the best people, operating leverage and multiples in all of finance). The only equation I think about is Fx(spendvesting in winning markets vs cost of dilution)
• There are only ~12 global scale future exchanges ( 1mm ADV), but I only really consider two as competitors in the way I think about the world. Both highly respected and profitable, highly formidable and effectively founder led. ..but those ‘founders‘ will be in a different boat than me in 5 to 10yrs, and the world I’m investing in looks VERY different in 10yrs (the world looks VERY different in 12 months).
#WeComing
(• What do I do in my “spare time”? I wrote a whitepaper/thesis on the future of computing this past weekend; Abaxx will not only be fully agentic_.md, and full of skills_.md for developing and launching new products and sales/client support etc over the next few quarters, but I might just have invented the “soverign computing stack” — maybe the ID tech stack for the future of ‘Bloomberg terminals’ if not all computing)
#PrivacyEngineering 🆔
• We invest in solving big problems with big payoff business models, collecting every under-priced option that we can along the way in our approach to spendvesting. We
#ThinkDifferent, we like ”hot dog stand markets” that the oligopolies consider two small for the next few quarters; we will put 5yrs into a chance of long tail volume/rev streams that solves problems for our clients, checks in the mail years from now
• We will keep investing in people (& agents) to do this
Human Captial >> Finacial Captial
#29ers $ABXX