TradFi vs. Crypto, Explaining BNPL, and What's Next in Fintech (with Bain Capital Ventures' Christina Melas-Kyriazi)
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Hello LPs, welcome to our conversation here with Christina Malasch-Kiriazzi. We are so excited to chat with her. She is the newest partner at Bain Capital Ventures focused on fintech and she has been a personal friend of mine for many, many years.

Her career is very impressive. She started at her career in banking at Goldman and then at LinkedIn, went to HBS, and then has been pretty deep in some big, big successes in fintech over the past few years. She was an early employee at GoFundMe and then at Affirm, where she was most recently and there through the IPO. She's been a longtime angel investor in

in lots of companies. We have many companies we've invested in together. And of course, now she is a partner at BCV. We're so excited to chat with her. Indeed.

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LPs, welcome back. Very, very excited to have Christina with us. We've been friends for a long time and fun to record our first podcast here together. Welcome to the LP show. Thank you. I'm super thrilled to be here. Well, I want to hear first, what's the like most exciting experience

trends going on in fintech right now? And what are you looking at, at Bain? And I'm asking selfishly because I feel like there have been so many successes in fintech. It has become such a pillar of venture capital. There are obviously now many folks like yourself who just specialize in it on the VC side. But I don't have a good sense of what's coming next. What should I and all our audience be looking for is what's coming up next? Yeah, so great question. I would say...

As you've probably noticed on Twitter, there's kind of two camps of fintech now, right? There's Web2 people and there are Web3 people. And, you know, it is an interesting question of can you be both? Like, can you straddle the world of Web2 and Web3 successfully and find the best companies in each?

I don't know the answer to that question, but what we're seeing is that most people are coming to the conclusion of no, and you really need to be specialized in one or the other and spend your time going really deep. You know, in part because Web3 is so specific on the technology front and the networks that like dabbling in it is difficult.

Which, frankly, which is what I'm doing right now, if I'm being totally honest. I do spend most of my time in Web 3, in Web 2, but I'm very fascinated by Web 3 from a technology perspective. And in particular, the concept around how, you know, users can become owners, right?

There was what, like almost $40 billion of VC money that went into crypto, you know, I think just in the last year or so. But if you look at crypto adoption, like globally, it's still quite low. And I know a lot of people like to compare that to internet penetration data points. So if you think about that macro, it's really exciting. And the use cases that have been, you know, largely to date are mostly around speculation, right? It's people...

trying to get rich fast or trying to, you know, invest in these currencies. And that's why a lot of the pump and dump schemes have become meme stocks. I mean, arguably, that's also a financial product. Exactly. No, I mean, it's definitely a financial product and it's created a lot of value. That's one use case. I think the other use cases that are very real are like NFTs.

digital art or media, which is really exciting. And then DeFi, which is all of these different use cases of decentralized finance. So I am really interested in thinking through one, like where does decentralization make sense? What kinds of use cases from a consumer perspective that unlocks new products and new companies that I haven't even thought of to be built?

You know, second is we've invested actually in Bain and companies like BlockFi, for example, that enable kind of on ramps into crypto. So I'm really excited about the consumer use cases around that. I don't claim to be an expert and I might need to decide, do I like go, you know, full ham into crypto? So I do think it's the most exciting area. If you look at fintech and that's why you've seen this. My friends who are really great engineers are

they're all starting Web3 companies or dabbling in it, diving deep. And so I can't ignore it. So it's not like a, you know, original answer, but it's definitely the most real thing that I'm seeing. And so now to kind of go to Web2, areas where I've spent most of my career. Some of the areas that I'm really excited about there are, and you know, Bain has spent a lot of time in this idea of embedded finance, right?

financial infrastructure has come a long way in the last 10 years, right? When a firm was first launched, the amount of products and services that we could have used to build a firm was really different than what it is today. Because, yeah, there were no banking as a service providers. There were no kind of like depth of identity providers and underwriting and all these services just like didn't even exist. And so,

It takes six weeks to launch a bank account now, which is really interesting, right? Isn't that crazy? It's like so crazy. It's so easy to launch financial services and embed them into your product. So like, what does that mean? I think what it means today is that value is accruing even more to defensible distribution, right?

And a lot of what I think about in fintech and other areas where I'm investing like commerce, those are the two areas where I spend all my time is just how do you kind of own a defensible distribution angle? Like, do you own a workflow? Do you own the customer? And then can you embed financial services? So things like Shopify are the obvious ones who have done this so amazingly well.

Same with things like MindBody or QuickBooks. Shopify is the e-commerce platform, the storefront. Then you make a lot of money on payments and financial services. Oh my god. ShopPay is game-changing. I don't know about you guys, but I spent so much more money over the holidays just because of ShopPay. ShopPay is a beautiful product. It's...

And a firm, you know, we are the, I say we, I'm not at a firm anymore, but a firm is the embedded... Spiritual we. Yeah, it's the virtual we. Embedded lender within Shopify. You know, if I think about companies that are like platforms and then companies that are...

enabling financial services. Payments was the biggest category, but now this is extensible to banking, lending, insurance, wealth management, and investing. And I think there's really exciting things still happening there.

So, you know, that's like a huge macro trend we're spending a lot of time on. And even if you think in commerce, this is not a new concept. If you look at companies like Kohl's and Macy's and to some extent Target, they own a customer and then they make a good amount of their profits off of their private label credit cards. Totally. Yeah. So I'm thinking a lot about what's the next generation of that and what's the next generation of closed loop systems. Yeah.

There are a few companies, right, that are now doing like virtual private label credit cards for new brands, right? There are a handful. I think all of them are still pretty early, but they're all great teams, really exciting. And so I'm definitely rooting slash watching all of them. I made an angel investment in one called Imprint. I was going to say, yeah, that's the one I know too. Yeah. Awesome team. Made another angel investment in one called Catch. It's a little bit of a different angle, but...

Yeah, I think this space is really exciting. In talking about credit cards and merchant-specific cards and loyalty and buy now, pay later, we've never talked about buy now, pay later on the show. And so I'm curious, could you give us a primer on the history of how this came to be and how a world of BNPL evolved?

is actually different than credit cards? Because it seems like we had a way to buy now and pay later. And it's been sitting in my wallet since I turned 16. So what's going on here? Yeah, it's a great question. So I think, you know, there's a few things that are different. First of all, buy now, pay later is a big innovation.

A lot was in the distribution. If you think about the fundamental difference between a credit card and buy now pay later is it's not an open line of credit, right? Most of these products are installment loans or, you know, split payment products. And so a credit card, you had like a banking relationship or someone needed to go spend a lot of money.

to acquire you as a customer and then offer you this line of credit and hope that you stayed for a long time, hope that you revolved on a balance, maybe like paid a bunch of late fees because you missed your deadline, you know, for these private label cards. The Black Buster model. Yeah, exactly. For these private label cards, a lot of them rely on deferred interest, which people like Max Levchin, I mean, to his credit, he is actually...

like personally made a dent on the industry moving away from that paradigm because it's not very customer friendly. And it's not because...

you think that you're getting a 0% interest. And then if you miss one payment, all of a sudden you owe back interest on like the whole amount. And so it's a very consumer unaligned model. And that's a lot of the way that these business models worked. And so, so BNPL, so going back to it, one, it's a better financial product. It's consumer aligned. There's, you know, for a firm, at least no late fees, you know exactly how much you owe over time. So it's a better product experience. And then from a distribution perspective, it's,

You're able to, because you are distributing at the point of sale with the retailers, you can give someone a micro loan for $1,000 and you can acquire that customer profitably because the retailer's incentivized to show it at the point of sale. That was never possible before because it would have been way too expensive to go find people out in the wild and give them a $1,000 loan. Those two things are really fascinating. So for the retailers, why did everybody enable this?

Well, one, the credit cards weren't able to actually address all of their customers. So when you're able to take underwriting and information from the platform around what someone's buying and underwrite them for one purchase, you can give credit to a lot more people than you can when you're trying to give them an open line of credit. So people who otherwise wouldn't be able to buy a $500, $1,000 item, you can underwrite just that item? Exactly. And so all of a sudden...

you are able to enable a new customer segment that wasn't addressable before. And these merchants realized customers would pull forward purchases and they would spend more. And all of a sudden this was a conversion tool for them. It was a marketing tool and it wasn't just a financial product.

And that is a really powerful thing. And all of it came down to this innovation on the financial product and the consumer experience. Which, of course, begs the question then, is it good that consumers are spending more sooner? You can imagine all the ways that that's bad, but what are the ways that it's beneficial and okay? Yeah, I mean, I think Affirm in particular always took the view of...

We want to help people control their finances and have visibility into what they're spending and match their, you know, cash outflows with their cash inflows. So like a little bit more over time, our underwriting models would not approve you for amounts that...

didn't think you could handle. And so I think there's a little bit of that. But to some extent, I think if you're able to give consumers the right tools, like they should be able to make decisions themselves around what they should buy. And this clearly is better, I think, as a construct.

How does that underwriting work? If I've never used a firm before, or let's take it away from a firm so we don't make it about the company, but any BNPL provider, how does it work? Is it checking my credit score? What's going on there? Yeah, so it's a great question. And it depends on the financial product. So if you're asking for a...

$4,000 loan versus if you're asking for $150 loan might look different. And the financial product and the regulation is actually going to look different for each of those types of products. But largely, you know, the platforms will be looking at who are you? What's your credit history? What's your like purchase history?

There's some other magic around where you're shopping and what you're buying as well. I've never actually used a BNPL product. You bought your Peloton outright. Why would you do that? Free money. No, why would I do that? I made a poor financial decision.

Actually, well, we get into a whole sidebar about the Peloton purchasing process. I think Bahama Ben on Twitter, who was a Peloton bullet, is a great FinTwit follow. He tweeted the other day that like Peloton, like he gives up amazing product, business totally broken. But anyway, that is neither here nor there. How much information do the platforms get about the purchasers? Do they get like...

employment history or status or is everything that they're inferring based on other consumer information? Yeah, I think it really varies. Usually it's not that level. I don't think you need someone's employment information to underwrite someone for an installment loan. I think if you're talking about other financial products that are more open-ended in nature and you get into the whole

alternative underwriting industry, that is maybe where that's more useful. I think here, part of the beauty of a buy now, pay later loan is that it's short duration. And that's actually one of the reasons why this class of lending companies has done

differently and better than the last class of lending companies because if the market turns you can adjust in real time and your book turns over much quicker than it when you're giving out I mean obviously a mortgage but even like a longer term even like uh like lending club or like yeah previous generation lending companies that yeah had exactly I think the problem that you're you're saying

Yeah, exactly. So this category is actually, I think, much more recession efficient. For example, part of what I worked on, I owned like a lot of the foundational products. So things like identity and fraud and servicing. You know, when COVID hit, that was a time when we had to think through how long is this going to last and what changes should we make? And, you know, I think the executive team did an amazing job of

of saying, we don't know, but let's be prudent. And let's give people tools to help repay their loans flexibly. Let's be 100% on the side of the consumer here, because that's our brand. And it's going to create more value for us as a company in the long term. How much PayPal DNA was there at the company, either in terms of people or just in terms of having lived through some of those market cycles with a financial product in the past? Yeah.

Interesting question. I actually hadn't thought about that too much before you asked, despite the fact that in the first five years of Affirm, I think a lot of headlines were like Max Levchin, founder of PayPal, which has changed. It's always now founder of Affirm. Amazing. Yeah. Funny thing about being a public company CEO. Yeah. That's right. And so the PayPal DNA...

at least in my experience, and I'm just one person, didn't really present itself that deeply. I think we look to PayPal as an example of a consumer wallet that's done really well. It's created a deep customer relationship, built a merchant network and a consumer network. So there's lessons you can learn from that. But I wouldn't say that the DNA was that deep.

Let's shift away a little bit from BNPL and go to sort of broader fintech trends. It seems like neobanking and peer-to-peer payments are sort of the...

first things that got finteched. I have a new debit card that's tied to this fancy tech company, or I'm able to send money to my friends. What do you think are the hardest things? If you think about the traditional finance landscape, what are going to be the last things to be addressable by a tech startup? I mean, I think to some extent, getting someone's core banking relationship off of

Chase or Bank of America is still really hard. I mean, despite the fact that you're seeing an explosion in neobanks, and I think that companies like Chime have done a really good job addressing a certain segment with a wedge of like, get paid your paycheck two days faster. Obviously, in other countries, too, you see NewBank, like there's, there's clearly very

very large neobanks to be built. There are ones targeting freelancers, which have very specific needs, right? There's a lot of categories where you can say this is a specific vertical that has a specific need. We're going to build a neobank for them. But like no neobank has actually gotten me to switch away my direct debit from my employer into them yet. So

What's the wedge that'll get me to do that? It's actually not totally clear yet. Yeah, it's kind of amazing that consumer investing happened before core banking relationship, that so many people were willing to say, oh, Fidelity, Merrill Lynch, no thanks, I'm with Wealthfront or any of the other robo-advisors. Robinhood or what have you, yeah. Yeah, no, it is really interesting. And I think for those platforms,

Again, it's like, what was the wedge and the value prop that was a lot better? For Robinhood, it was investing 1.0. It was like you have Charles Schwab used to call your broker and now it's online, but there's high fees. You're still paying the fees. It's online. Robinhoods are like, let's undercut that. I think the next version of that is going to be social, actually. How do you build community around that? Separate. I'm curious what you think of speed, too. I actually still use Vanguard, but I don't pay any fees in Vanguard. Right.

But it's such a laborious process to make a trade in there that when I've considered switching, it's for that. Yeah.

Yeah, no, that's right. I mean, speed is obviously huge as well. And just like a good consumer interface, I think goes a long way. You just the Vanguard app like what? I don't even bother with the app. Sorry, Vanguard. I know. I love Vanguard. Amazing company. We should tell that story someday. So disruptive, like the ultimate counter positioning story. Yep. Yep. Yeah, I would definitely listen to one on Vanguard for sure. Oh, that would be so fun.

Definitely not a tech company, though. But this will be fun. Later on, when we release the Vanguard episode, it'll be fun to point to this moment with Christina where we decided to do the episode. Yeah, I'll take credit there. And then when I go and try and send a wire transfer from my Chase account, it's still terrible, right? Brutal. I do sometimes think in

in this funny way, like macro all the investment that has gone into FinTech and all the companies I'm looking at and all the amazing things happening. And then my day-to-day FinTech experiences, like there actually is still a gap, which makes me excited, frankly, about still investing in this category.

Maybe that's actually a good place to bring it back to Web3 versus Web2 and fintech and the tensions and trade-offs therein. Are Web3 use cases and applications as they get built out, are they maybe the best chance for porting over Bank of America accounts or Vanguard accounts or people who otherwise wouldn't have been tempted to switch to new technology players?

Yes, I do think so. I think there's still a lot of challenges for Web3, right? It's not fast enough. Does everyone, are they going to store their private keys on a piece of paper in their little safe at home? Like there's a lot of...

consumer questions, I think, that haven't been solved. Yeah. I guess BlockFi actually is like a first piece of this, right? Yeah. No, which is why I think they're a really exciting company. Like the consumer on-ramp, I think I'm really excited about that. And I think there's categories where it makes a lot of sense. Like gaming, for example, is like an obvious category because you have the virtual currencies, you have the in-game economies. You've already seen sort of this trend in Asia around...

the super apps and having a more of a consumer focused, like put all your currencies and gaming coins in one place. Maybe we'll see that in the US, but so, so there are places where I think it makes sense. I just think we're still, we're still far away on the crypto thing, but you know, I'm, I'm an angel investor, like in a company called eco, for example, and it's built on top of crypto, but it's targeting saving and spending, but higher rewards. You can get people higher rewards. Yeah.

So that's like where I'm excited because you can do things that are different on top of new protocols. So yes, potentially. Okay, I'm going to shift it in the what's it like being a VC direction. And I want to start with a question that

That I've often asked myself as someone who's often had a day job and a side project I worked at Microsoft as my day job and I did a bunch of startup weekends and worked on a bunch of apps as my side project and when I started doing what I'm doing now this startup studio and venture thing It was actually my side project that led to that and had very little to do with what I had done at Microsoft and I'm curious as you look at going the venture route and

And focusing so much on fintech, did that spring more out of your angel investing or did that spring more out of your work at Affirm and GoFundMe? I think the deep interest in fintech sprung from my work at GoFundMe and Affirm.

I remember the first moment I got really interested in fintech. I was at HBS and Bitcoin influencer slash founder of Zappo, Wences Casares, came into our class. Yeah, this guy's amazing. What a story. Yeah, I remember it was 2014. I was in the classroom and he said, Bitcoin is the internet and it's 1992. And you all MBAs really need to pay attention to

Like, why is it you can go on Skype and see someone across the world anywhere instantly, but you can't send that person like a dollar? And it was just this aha moment for me just around money movement and fintech and problems are still left in the space globally in general. So that was like an ignite moment. And so then I, you know, I purposely tried to go spend my time and my career in it. But the angel investing really made me so excited about

from a day-to-day perspective that I was like, wow, I could be a VC. And in particular, like I'm a product person. Like I love building things and I love the zero to one phase. And I just started being drawn towards spending more time with the founders that I angel invested in. And I kind of got convinced that, okay, there's actually a platform where I can do this full time and someone will pay me

Like, that's crazy. My husband, John, he had been a VC at Spark Capital. So I had seen that, you know, through him. And even the whole time I was just like, this is, I can't believe someone pays him to do this job. What do you do all day? Yeah.

I do stuff like this. I just, you know, I pontificate correctly or incorrectly. My understanding is that is the, that's the main part of the job. That's a, that's what you get paid for. Oh, we're going to talk more about liquidity and content and capital and all that to come. But yes. You know, I don't claim to have all the answers, but certainly like working with people at the earliest stages through thinking through, um,

a user and their needs deeply. And like, what's a delightful way to address that? And what's a wedge? And what's a, you know, a moat you can build? And what's a go to market strategy? Like, I just really love that. You know, I just built conviction that as a VC, I could spend all my time doing that. So here I am. It's interesting, you know, for well, all of us now, I think on this podcast episode, have experienced investing in

both as a VC and as an angel capacity, I think we all know that these are quite different beasts. And the upside of being a VC is everything we were just talking about, that people pay you to invest in companies and go on podcasts. And

that's like ridiculous and fun. And it is, but it's also has very, very different dynamics that make it a lot more challenging sometimes than being an angel investor where it's easy to get into rounds and you're not leading and you're not on boards and you're not fighting for allocation or you're not fighting to lead around. I assume none of this was a surprise to you having been in the ecosystem so long. How did you think about like, okay, I'm ready to, or I want to make that transition? Yeah.

There's no question that being an angel investor is very different than joining a multi-stage VC firm, you know, investing out of a $1.3 billion fund where, you

Your time is the biggest constraint. So you're not just putting little checks into a bunch of companies. You are incentivized to make bold, high conviction bets and take board seats and partner with people, which is a totally different beast and frankly, something I'm still getting used to. I thought a lot about what's the platform I want to join? And do I think that, you know, I have like a right to win both myself and in that platform?

For Bain Capital Ventures, we have a deep history of investing in fintech and commerce, and I think have a competitive advantage being attached to Bain Capital, which is $130 billion asset manager, a large player on Wall Street, owns a large retail portfolio and a portfolio of other companies on the private equity side. And we're quite collaborative. And so as I thought about what's a platform that can scale and where in the verticals that I

really want to invest in. We have deep expertise and a right to win. I was really excited about joining BCV. I actually didn't realize that there was still a relationship there. I had assumed that BCV had spun off fully a long time, but

Is that not the case? Yeah. So we are a separate fund. So, you know, different LPs and managed fully independently, but it's still part of Bain Capital. Right. So, you know, my email address is like at BainCapital.com. So there are some synergies in terms of like the overall brand and the platform, even though it's separate. Right.

What are some stats on BCV, just so our listeners can get a sense of the shape of the organization, fund size, number of partners, that sort of thing? Yeah. So we're currently investing out of a $1.3 billion fund. We have about eight partners right now. We are very vertical focused. So we like to be really deep in the areas we invest in. And the verticals are fintech, commerce,

application software, and infrastructure and security. And we really kind of stick to those verticals. And then we are a multi-stage fund. So we'll invest everywhere from seed, you know, even some pre-seed in the sense of we'll incubate some companies, we'll partner really early with founders. So seed all the way to growth. And the kind of way I got introduced to Bain Capital Ventures was via one of my good friends from HBS,

who's a partner here investing in growth stage fintech, Merit Hummer. And so, you know, it's really fun to collaborate with her when, you know, we've been doing a lot of LATAM. We actually went to my very first week of the job, we went to Mexico together. She also went to Sao Paulo. So, yeah. And then, you know, Matt Harris was the OG fintech investor.

Yeah, a deep in tech investor in like the whole ecosystem. He like coined the term, you know, embedded finance and the fourth platform. And he's, he's just one of the smartest and nicest people I've ever met. It's just been amazing to kind of work with him and have him as a partner. And he's super deep in the ecosystem. So yeah,

I honestly feel really lucky to be working with the people I work with. And that doesn't even include all the other partners. Scott Friend is a partner on the commerce side who I work really closely with, who invested in things like Jet.com and Rent the Runway and Attentive and a bunch of other really exciting companies. So it's actually very collaborative, which, again, a lot of people say from the investing side. But I was almost surprised by how collaborative it is. And I love it as someone who comes from a team-based perspective.

background and operating background. So it's been really good. As you think about like how you inform your theses,

Do you go into a hole for a while and, you know, do a bunch of research to figure out, hey, I think the market's headed in this direction. And then you know how to approach startups with, as Sequoia would say, a prepared mind? Or is it more like, I'm going to go meet a bunch of startups and let that shape my view of the way the world is unfolding? I think it's a little bit of both, right? So sometimes you'll see a cluster of companies pop up all at the same time, where it's like, oh, I feel this

pop from entrepreneurs where there's a spark, like clearly there's something there. Maybe I hadn't thought of it. Like, let's go dig in. Or other times it'll be more informed by, you know, I have relationships with a bunch of people in various roles at commerce companies. I'll make sure I spend time talking to them and saying, hey, what are your problems? How are you solving them? Where is the market going? And so then I'll say, okay, well, I need to find a company solving this problem. So it's both.

Shortly after you joined BCV, you did something interesting. Contrarian, one might say. Contrarian. That was really fun. And actually, it sparked us doing this podcast episode together, which we should have done anyway. But it's like, oh, well, we got to talk about this. Well, BCV has had a scout program for a long time, right? Yeah.

It's actually fairly new. I don't know exactly how old it is yet, but I wouldn't say like a long time. Okay. Okay. Well, BCV has a scout program like many venture firms. But typically those scouts have names rather than pseudonyms. Typically. You added a synonymous scout. Can you tell us about that and how it all came together?

Yes. So this was maybe a contrarian move, like week whatever on the job. But I got to know liquidity on Twitter, you know, like we're all beautiful relationships are formed on social media, of course. And so then we started trading notes on areas we're excited about.

Kind of talked a lot about creator economy, DeFi, Web3, all the various ways of democratizing finance, giving people better access. And we just formed this relationship. And I said, do you want to come be a scout for us? So it was really that simple because, you know, we were really excited. Did you talk to anybody at BCV before? Actually, no, I didn't. I just did it. I love it. Again, back to my like obsession with distribution. Yeah.

He who owns the, you know, the meme. I think Elon Musk tweeted something about like the memes of production. And I loved that. And it's just, you know, I think Lit has a great pulse on consumer culture in the intersection of memes, finance and startups. And so I was like, this is great. Let's let's work even more closely together. Yeah.

So is Lit getting like great deal flow because of the just unbelievable, I can't look away social media posts? Or is it more like Lit is getting great perspective on where the world's going? And so they're useful on that front. So I think it's really both because Lit has created this community of engaged followers. So startups want to...

not only distribute to that group, but Lit also has an interesting perspective kind of helping push the culture forward. This is just like brilliant. Lit has about 200,000 Twitter followers, I think.

Why wouldn't you want somebody if they were a non-sidonymous entity who had that number of followers and engagement in a vertical that, you know, a VC firm deeply cares about? Of course, everyone would want that person to be their scout. I just thought this was so brilliant. Well, David, thank you. You say the $200,000.

Twitter followers, but if you go look, it's like 650,000 Instagram followers. And the fascinating thing, as someone who is not a meme lord, but an admirer of meme lords, I like the science behind how people...

decide to curate different channels differently. And lit has a very intentional and different way that they engage on Instagram and Twitter. Oh, I'm not on Instagram. So I'm missing the whole you're missing three quarters of the audience. Oh, yeah. Got to get on Instagram. No, that's right. I mean, I think that's what good influencers do.

They often pick one or two channels. And now Lit has a podcast too and a newsletter. So Lit has diversified channels. But usually I find that influencers pick, you know, one or two that they get up to speed, gain a lot of distribution, and then they try and own their customer relationship more directly with, you know, whatever channels. Often that's email, that's more direct, but can be other ones.

Let's ask you. I don't know. I shouldn't be talking about this. We're serious podcasters. We can't really talk about memes. We have no idea. I think someone made a joke to John that I should like brand myself as the VC meme queen. The beast. I like that. Meme aggregator or like the... Yeah. Yeah. If any other meme accounts want to come chat, like...

Call me. I think anybody who's like anti-meme is kind of missing the future. I mean, to Elon's point, you might say society is going to hell in a handbasket because of it. But

memes drive people's decision making. I mean, I think if someone sees a sufficient number of memes about a certain company, it decides whether they're going to go work at that company or not, or make an investment or not. I mean, they just drive very significant economic decisions at this point. I totally agree. I mean, I think that's why you see so many people trying to hire meme marketers. Yeah.

Companies are trying to do this. I don't know if it's authentic enough from that angle, but there is no question that a meme is a very powerful medium that taps into something deep and elicits emotion and drives decision making. There's no question.

Well, this is also part of what I thought was brilliant about you doing this is... I don't know any examples for sure, but I am 100% certain that there are many VCs, firms, and individuals out there who have meme ghostwriters for themselves or their firms. And that would be the obvious, easy thing to do. Instead, you went and you were like, no, I want to have a relationship with...

you know, you, I'm not going to like, I don't want to hire you to come write my memes. I want to have a relationship with you. What's the business relationship with, with lit? Is it a standard scout agreement? Would you do more like that? Would you consider other types of business relationships with influencers and meme accounts out there?

Yeah. So, you know, it is a standard scout relationship. But to your question around what I consider other ones, I think definitely, you know, I'm investing in fintech, but I...

I think that a lot of, you know, fintech companies that have broken through, you couldn't maybe predict it beforehand. And I do think having a pulse on where people are excited and what's the conversation and who's, you know, able to resonate with the consumer and then distribute to them is a very differentiated thing.

I would love to spend more time in that. And yes, I don't think I'm ever going to be the person who makes the memes. I think that would probably not be the best use of my time, although I could argue it is a good use of my time. I need to think about that one.

But certainly I want to help give those people, you know, access to capital and a platform and partnership with me around, you know, making investment decisions. Someone should raise a fund this way. I mean, it strikes me that there is an opportunity to raise a capital pool and then have kind of like exclusively the capital allocators.

or at least the deal flow part of it, be a bunch of meme accounts. And it's just their capital pool to... The hard part is how do you develop the right investment committee out of that? But to the extent that this is the future of distribution to founders, then it's kind of a big problem if you're a capital pool that's not leveraging this.

Yeah, I mean, I think people like Turner Novak, Banana Capital. I mentioned Packy. I think Harry Stebbings was the original one here around turning a large distribution into

you know, in this podcast into a fund. And I think he's done an amazing job. I don't know him personally. That's an interesting idea. Maybe I should do that. You know, maybe no one else take that idea. It's mine. I call it. Part of what I think is cool about this is in many ways, you know, us, Packy, Harry, you know, as much as we all love ourselves, we're like the old school. Like I think the pseudonymity of it is really interesting. Like nobody knows who lit is.

And like Lick could be a 12 year old in a basement. And that shouldn't matter. Whereas like who Ben and I are, who Harry is, who Paki is like that, that matters. So I just think this is really cool that like now not only does this person have influence, they now have capital. Totally. There's an open question around

Did Marc Andreessen tweet this? Somebody tweeted recently, like, we're going to be shocked about how we use the internet, you know, in 10 or 15 years. And everyone's going to be shocked that your identity is, that you disclose so much about you online. I don't know if that's true, but certainly there's a version of the future where you have many different identities and you choose to

show different parts of them. I think we're like trending towards anonymous for a lot of reasons. First of all, you can just speak a lot more freely. And I think this, you know, goes to another question about platform dependence. I don't want to necessarily belabor this point, but I love the article Substack wrote recently about sort of defending free speech. And it was a beautiful defense of it from a tech company just around like we have a trust problem in society. And so we actually need to make sure that we allow people to

have a voice. It is really interesting. And I think in the crypto movement actually ties into this a lot, right? So it's a trend. It's something that I am paying close attention to. It is interesting how crypto was sort of the final unlock for being able to get incentivized you to be anonymous online, because there were lots of anonymous Twitter accounts before that. But

If you were really serious about developing a whole identity, at some point you needed to off-ramp to fiat currency. And so it was kind of like, well...

I can stay mostly anonymous, but if I'm going to do some kind of revenue generating deal based on the identity and life that I've built, it's a non-starter. I have to be a person who has a job in a real regular person way. And this kind of completes the circle where you actually can build distribution and monetize it.

And stay anonymous the whole time without risking doxing yourself. And I think that's not technically true. Like, I think if you run a forensic scan on a crypto wallet, it's pretty easy to narrow it down to a certain set of people. But we're getting there. Exactly. It's not technically true. And also, the other piece of this where it breaks down is if you're a, you know, Delaware C Corp, if you're incorporated in the U.S.,

You still are regulated as like a financial institution going through KYC and these other... Like we don't have free money movement for like US companies. Very intentionally. Very intentionally, right? Because you don't want to enable money laundering and you don't want terrorists to be able to move money on your platform. And there's a lot of regulations that are very like truly useful for this. But I think...

Yeah, that's an area that means that the promise of sort of Bitcoin being this fully anonymous, you know, money movement, you can't reconcile that like fully in the US today. All right, I have a kind of a left field question for you. What is the least widely held belief that you believe today? Or another way to put that is like, maybe what's your most contrarian thing that you personally believe?

The things I do believe that are contrarian, I probably wouldn't say on a podcast, but... You say those on your anonymous Twitter account. Exactly. That's why I need an anonymous Twitter account. It all comes back to that. I don't know how contrarian this actually is, but based on my Twitter account, it is definitely contrarian. I am long San Francisco. This is talking my book a little bit, you know, being a San Francisco resident. I think that...

The city is going to...

continue to thrive. It's a beautiful place to live. We have problems. They seem to be getting addressed slowly. Like people are paying attention. It's really exciting to see that. And I think that in five or 10 years, this is still going to be an important place for technology. And of course, globalization and the fact that you can build a company fully remote and there are exciting pockets of innovation everywhere. Like, of course that exists. I'm looking all over the world, but I am long San Francisco.

I'm curious in the context of BCV and joining BCV, many of your partners are not in San Francisco, right? That never happened. Yeah. So we have partners in Boston and New York and SF. Those are our three major locations. And, you know, who knows where we'll have partners in five years? Like maybe we'll have some internationally. Maybe they'll be more distributed. But I think for partnership, having hubs is helpful in my view.

But it's interesting on San Francisco. I agree, right? There's so much narrative. I actually think it is contrarian to be long on San Francisco. You know, if you're in tech Twitter, everybody's moving to Miami. If you're in mainstream, it's, you know,

San Francisco is going to hell in a handbasket and is everything wrong with the neoliberal experiment. And yet there is still such a center of gravity here. You know, I'm not sure that there's anywhere else where you can went for a walk this morning with a longtime friend who is a general partner at a top venture capital firm. And I could do the same every day of the week with a different person here. And I don't think there's anywhere else in the world that's like that.

Totally. I was walking in the mission last week with another VC. Yeah, and we just ran into like four or five really interesting people on our walk around Dolores Park. And I don't think that happens quite in the same way anywhere else. So maybe if we continue to see the city crash and burn and everybody leave, I could be wrong here, but...

I love the city. I think it's one of the most beautiful places in the world. I think that the quality and the idealism and the desire to build is deep rooted here. And I'm here to stay. Love it. That and deeply entrenched network effects.

And that definitely helps. All that is true. And my God, is it hard to chip away at a flywheel that is that big and spinning that fast? Even, you know, you have some pandemic that's creating some friction, so it slows the flywheel down a little bit. But to stop a flywheel and get it to spin the other direction is an immense task. Exactly. That is exactly right.

How are you thinking about how you're spending your time now at BCVE? You know, in some ways, that's sort of a trick question. It is like, VCs are always thinking about that ask, but like,

Given that you're relatively new starting out and are coming in with all of this context, like I'm curious in every dimension, location, travel, you know, your first week you were in LATAM, which is awesome. We were texting about that when you went. I was so happy, especially, you know, our relationship with SoftBank, LATAM and everything going on there. And yet also San Francisco and partnering with Liquidity. How have you thought about this question coming into the role?

This is such a good question. And this is the number one biggest difference from a day-to-day perspective, being an operator versus a VC. As an operator, you know how to spend your time. As a VC, there is absolutely no playbook. And also, there's many ways to get it right. So I think for me, the key thing I've been doing is trying to

build the flywheel of people and ideas so that I can be in the mix. And that will help me over time develop the larger theses and areas I want to double down on and the geos that I want to double or triple down on. But today, that looks like spending time with my network and the

early stage investors or people who are on the forefront, whether that's a meme account or, you know, an engineer at X company. And then the rest of it is really just

meeting great founders in any way that I can and trying to partner with them early and, you know, be there before, hopefully before someone else's. I know it's just really competitive these days, but, but I think that's where like I get excited. Like I want to try and be there and be a partner to them as soon as I can. So the flywheel, I don't know, it's going to evolve, but it's, it's great. It's just spending time with smart people.

What do those meetings with those founders look like now? I imagine they're not, you know, they're coming to Bain's office in San Francisco to give you a formal pitch for a round that they are formally raising, right?

I'm guessing that happens 0% of the time these days. It's maybe 1%. Not zero. That's the contrarian move is to do that. Yeah, no, actually, I would love to do more in-person stuff. I mean, I was trying to be a little bit careful with Omicron, but I miss in-person. And I think that the difference between Zoom and in-person is vast in terms of like relationship building and

cutting through the noise and just getting to the core of, okay, what are you building and how can I help? Because ultimately today you have to get to how can I help faster than before. And that's part of the reason why I wanted to be really focused on like FinTech and commerce. It's like, you have to be deep already. Then you have to like evaluate quickly and you have to get to how do I help quickly? So in-person helps with that.

How much of those meetings and interactions with, you know, founders of like a company that, you know, you might, you might lead the round or you want to lead the round. Is it a,

a formal meeting? Or is it, you know, is it text? Is it getting introduced? Like, what's the, what is that? I don't know, process, like right now? Yeah, it totally varies, I would say. And it depends, because sometimes I'm meeting someone, they're like, I'm raising a series A, and we're already in process with a bunch of firms. And I'm like, okay, we got to, we got to scramble, versus if it's like building a relationship that might look

So, you know, a lot of time on Zoom, a lot of time, if I can see them face to face, go for a walk, meet in the office, whatnot. And then I think when it gets closer to Zoom,

you know, like a fundraising process, then I, you know, I like to have them get exposed to other people in the partnership, maybe meet some of my partners, loop in some of the other people on the team, like really show like, here's the collaboration and also show like, here's how we want to help you specifically. So if I can, I'm already saying like, here's some customer intros, here's some ways I can help.

I'm not like an overly formal person. Like I'd love for everyone to be able to be comfortable texting me. And that's the relationship I strive to have with the founders I work with.

It's funny hearing you say that. It's not that different. Some of the mediums have changed, but it's not that different than how things used to go down, at least in my experience back when I was at Madrona leading rounds there years ago. For that relationship to lead around to be a major investor, I think on both sides, you still want that depth of...

of relationship before you enter into it, which is, you know, it's so different than an angel investing. And part of the reason I asked is like, most of the rounds I do these days are text. Like, there's no Zoom involved. There's no talking. There's no face to face. But it is still very different in an institutional context. I think that's true. The product that BCV is trying to offer is, or we strive to offer is we're an active investor and partner. Now, I think there are different VC products that are not predicated on that. You know, maybe that's

hey, like actually we don't ever, like we're just money. Right, right. And that would be different. But I think if you're trying to... That definitely exists in the market now. That definitely exists in the market. It's something that like the market competes against. And so, yeah. So I think for the value added investors or people, you know, at the earlier stages, I don't think there's something that replaces...

a relationship. And yeah, the way people build relationships have changed because of Zoom, but the fundamental of the relationship isn't different and hasn't probably changed for a very long time. Yeah. Well, speaking of building the relationship, Christina, if folks are listening to this and they're like, my God, I have the perfect startup that Christina should know about, or perhaps they're another venture investor that wants to work with you, what's the best way to find you on the internet? Yeah.

I'm on Twitter. So my email is cmellaskiriazzi at baincapital.com. Twitter or just if you Google me, you can find my email address. Would love to hear from you. Awesome. And we'll link to all that in the show notes. I hear Twitter is a great place for building relationships. Love Twitter. I hear that too. All right. Well, listeners, thank you so much. And we will see you next time. We'll see you next time.