for sure. Yeah, that's kind of Ah, difficult question to answer. So I'll try my best. Thio. Summarize it. Yes. So? Well, first of all, Yeah, I'm currently the see the CEO of Temple Capital. We primarily Duke. Um um, quantitative quantitative trading for the Cryptocurrency market. Um, I kind of had a bit of an untraditional path toward getting here, because obviously, this is kind of a financial role, since it is a hedge fund. And I don't have any real like, uh, I don't have any. I don't have a financial background at all, so I kind of I got I immigrated to the U S. From Russia in about in about 2000 or so when I was relatively young. And then I went to high school in a small town in, um in were in western Illinois. Uh, my dad has a PhD in physics. Mom has a masters in physics, and he managed to get, uh, um jobs, uh, teaching mathematics as professors at what, uh, at Western Western Illinois University. So we're, um, around the time I was 14 or 15. I, uh my, uh my older brother is actually, uh, now also my uh, my my co founder, which is great. Uh, he had been programming since he was probably, like, 10 or so. So he had gotten involved in Tech like he had obviously been programming for a while, but he had started working with tech companies around the time he was, like, 18 or so and then a zai was kind of entering into high school. He was already out in San Francisco working at various tech companies, so I kind of had seen a bit of what the the startup world in the tech world were kind of like. So when I was 14 or 15 I just kind of, uh um I can't just started reaching out to some companies online. Just startups online. Just seeing if I was in any way that I could that I could help or provide value. And I ended up landing a couple of gigs doing essentially, um, like, market research on DSM. Pretty basic, like data analysis in, uh, in, uh, in excel. But it paid relatively well and I started kind of doing that. And then I did it for a couple of years, and then I went to college. Thio DePaul University in Chicago s O there personally for me, I was getting major in business management, which I didn't. I didn't really enjoy that major. I thought it was kind of easy. And it was very, very theoretical for my perspective, which is I know it's kind of bad because I know about a lot of the students are for business school, but but yeah, for me, it was kind of like very, um very theoretical to some degree, and it kind of didn't like I was working with startups and I was seeing our problems. And when I was seeing that, some of stuff that was being talked about in, like, business classes, even though it's about entrepreneurship, and it seemed like there was a pretty big discrepancy. Um, so ah, lot of this class is kind of like I just didn't really understand, like what you were talking about essentially because, like things like management and or charts and all those things like this don't really work, you know, in smaller companies, it's kind of more yeah, if you're going into, like, even if you're like an executive or if you're going to management consulting etcetera so I spend? I didn't go to most of my classes for the most part. Instead, I continue to kind of work with with startups. Kind of continue to do this kind of, um, like, data consultancy. And I found a few matters as well. Kind of teaching me more about how to start ups grow. Um, like, um, how to do like, um, How to do paid ads how to do analysis of website traffic conversion traffic. Just kind of how to think about your, uh, your grill funnel at the start of a role. So I started again, kind of do consulting there and soon enough was getting paid. Like like, uh, like, ah, 100 or so dollars an hour to do this when I was, like, 19. Or like, 20 or so, Um, which was obviously great. So and on, I kind of kept doing that. I mean, between my junior and senior year of college, I was visiting my brother, um, in San Francisco, and he knew the founder of this company called called Gig Stir I was going through that was going through that was going through. Why Combinator at the time, Andi, essentially, when I was there. My brother got recruited by the CEO Roger to just come and dio come and do sales because it's like a very technical product. So you wanted kind of software engineer selling it Robin salespeople. So you kind of got my brother Kind of got recruited for just, like, a couple of weeks. Hey, like, come down to this. We're in. What? Combinator. We're tryingto kind of sell as many projects as possible. Eso come down and just do sales for a few words. Well, I was visiting my brother and he was kind of like, Well, I'm here with my brother, so I'm not sure if I'll be able to And Roger the CEO said like, Hey, heard a bit about my background and he gave me the opportunity to come Thio. So that was kind of not based on my skill, obviously at all. Like I had just kind of got in this weird like, like, weird in. But one of things I can see is at that point. So I have a speech impediment. I still have it, and I had it growing up and it was significantly worse, like like four or five years ago, around the time when I first started doing this, and I had had no experience in sales whatsoever. So, like, you know, thinking like, I have social anxiety, no sales experience, and here I have to go sell like some, like, very technical product. But we were selling is essentially, um, like software development as a service. So you have kind of made a better way. Kind of like, um, like, top tile or up work essentially combined talent on projects. But in order to kind of close the project, you have to understand what's being built. Um, like, how complex it's gonna be and then work with finished in your adjustment for cost. So I kind of had a lot of anxiety about going to do it, But I was like, Hey, it's This is obviously a very good opportunity for my career. So I went and did it. And then three months later, out of like I was actually the top performing sales person out of like 10 find enough. So yeah, and then I was doing that, um and and then I And then this was between my, um this is the summer between my junior year, as I mentioned. So when the senior year start again, I kept, uh they kept me on and I kept doing this and I, um yeah, I kept performing well and again, I didn't go into my any of my classes at all because I was like, at this point, it's like I kind of already I'm doing sing well And then that winner. They raised their syriza from, um, and recent Horowitz for about, like, for about 10 like for about 10 million or so. And I was like, Hey, like, we're going to grow up a sales team a lot like I'm kind of good attack that point. I was already kind of managing or helping to carry some over salespeople. So, like, this just seems like a good opportunity. So I ended up actually dropping out of college, uh, with, like, to I think I ever had one class left or two classes left. I mean, in kind of, um uh, after that winner. So, like earlier the following year, I moved to San Francisco. I think it was, like, 2015 or something like that. So moved here in 2015. It started doing this full time. And then I kind of managed the commercial sales team for a bit. I managed to be. Then I like. Three months later, I took over the enterprise sales team, and over two years, I kind of grew about Thio from doing about 500 k a year in revenue to closer to, like, 10 15 million or so Ah, year in revenue. Um, and through our cities be razed like 25 million from from from red point from the time eventually kind of transition into a because I kind of like the sales team was getting, like, too big. And it was just like I kind of like, um I was kind of like capped out, uh, temporarily to moved over Thio the finance and Operation side of things. And I worked on that for a bit and then did that for six months. And then I left to start Temple Capital. Uh, which the reason I started to do that was my brother Lex and I. We had heard about Bitcoin very early on in 2012. Uh, we didn't make a huge investment, but we kept off of a space. And then when the theory of my CEO came around, um, we invested in Ethereum. He invested by CEO. I bought some in 2015. We kind of, um, held it all the way for 2017 to come. 2017. We solve it for our obviously. Crypto had gone up a lot. There was a lot of excitement. But when we looked at like, we started thinking like, Okay, how do we wanna like we have some ethereum like, should we just, like, keep holding it? Should we sell? How are other people think about this market And what we found is, yeah, there were a lot of hedge funds being started in the crypt of space, but a lot of them weren't really hedge funds, like having like typical Wall Street hedge funds. There were more so kind of, um, like closer to either index funds or venture capital funds. Essentially So they were. And by that I mean, they were like buying like they were taking capital from investors, and then they were just buying, let's say, 70% of, like, 70% towards towards Bitcoin 20% towards a few, um, and 5 10% towards some of our some of our Ault coins. Or maybe it was in some other order, but kind of had that. And they were re balancing, like every every month or so. So it wasn't Actually, it was very, um, beta heavy. And there wasn't a lot of kind of added value for charging a pretty high performance fee. Um, so when we kind of saw was that look, no one's really doing like quantitative trading and, like Quantitative Trading is saying that obviously are huge quant funds on Wall Street, right that make a new, insane amount of money right in quant trading. And it's obviously in those markets. It's very hard to compete with them because very have billions and billions of dollars for spending towards finding like every, um, like every inefficiency in the market and taking each other well, encrypt So you don't you don't have that. You kind of have a lot of people who are kind of, um, gambling and with proved to currency positions. And we're not kind of very sophisticated, and you don't have a lot of traditional hedge funds who are trading this because of issues with regulations, and it's too small for a big funds and etcetera, etcetera. So So we So we thought that hey, like this seems to be an opportunity and that also, if we can do this, well, then we could actually maybe become one of the like, largest crypt of funds in the world. And and from a quant perspective, that's what we've achieved over the last 2.5 years or were now probably one of the top 10 cryptic quant funds in the world. And in terms of performance, we're pretty much up there, too. So I know that it was just kind of spend a lot of time on that, but yeah, that's kind of the Yeah. Hey.

give a sense of besides eso um um being I think the CEO of a hedge fund and specifically quant fund, I think, is very different in some ways when being the CEO of a typical tech company, specifically where I'm when you're a CEO of a tech company. Kind of, um, acquiring MAWR customers and growing revenue. It's pretty much for number one thing that you are focused on, and especially if it's a small company like ours is currently five people in the tech company, the CEO is mostly doing, um, sales, for most were doing sales and talking to customers and, um, and and working on product. But it's it's probably very sales heavy early on. Um, for a typical tech CEO for quant fund, it's actually kind of a bit of ah, a bit of opposite where, um, kind of the hedge fund industry is both very simple and also very hard for the sole reason about everything comes down Thio varmints. Essentially, um, you even making money or you're not. And if you're making money, getting people to invest, um isn't that hard for for the most part, because people want to make money, s's a pretty straightforward, uh, it's a pretty straightforward sales pitch, but on the other hand, if you aren't making money, then there's not much todo essentially So, um, eso ah, lot of my sales. It's kind of just developing relationships with various family offices and just building kind of long term relationships. Eso it's not, you know, I'm not talking Thio, you know, 10 different customers a day. It's kind of, um most I talked to, like, a couple a couple every week or so and ah, lot of my job, actually go starts working with the rest of the team to find various trading strategies. And Alfa, um, to be able thio make mawr make mawr money in in the markets. So it's a lot of it is spent, um, writing kind of code in python and doing, uh, like, doing various, like doing, um, data analysis. Talking with, um our engineers were talking with one of our researchers who does a lot of research on the on the machine, learning side of things to figure out. Like what? Uh, what? Um, what he's up to and how he's thinking about whatever problem that, uh that that that he's working on. That's pretty much it. Like my days are, um uh, pretty flexible for for the most part, is just, you know, working very hard. And it's a very creative work. Um, what? When I'm in, when I'm in, When I'm when I'm when I'm out fundraising, that's when I'll travel a lot more. I go thio like l a Chicago, the the East Coast as well. I went thio Thio Thio? Yeah, Europe like like once or twice before. Just for to talk to some family offices. That fair. So, yeah, That's kind of how things look from, like, a travel perspective. Yeah, yeah.

mhm the same kind of like, high level questions of just like, what should the company be doing right now? What's the most important thing for a company? And you just thinking about that? Like, constantly? Essentially. And I think that, um, unique, um, the hardest part. But also, I think in some ways, the most fun part of being a CEO is that you have to balance a lot of different things at once. Even at a small company like ours, Right? I have to balance. Um um, how much are we? Are we like, like our the financial health of our of our of our business? Essentially, right. Like, first of all, just how much are we like? Are we making or burning each month? How does that correspond to, um, like as a hedge fund avoid we make money is we get money from our investors like assets under management, and then we charge a 2% annual ized management fee on that, and then 20% of a performance fee on any, like additional capital that would make some china kind of figure out. Okay, if I think that in three months we'll have significantly more assets under management and will be making more money. Should we bring someone else on to the team now, or should we wait until then? Kind of. And what would be the risk and the reward of making a decision? Um, like, such as bad. For instance. Other things might be on. What work we do is very, um, data and compute intensive. So we use, um um um aws um Amazon Amazon Web services for a lot of our computation, and part of that is like Okay, well, um, then it's thinking about questions like Okay, um, if we use more compute, how much more potential like Alfa would we be able to generate? And how confident are we that that would actually have a really impact on our performance? And as a result, our our our financial health? Yes. So and then it's also kind of balancing. OK, where should my time be going? Better lines. Most with with the priorities of a company. So most of the time again, it comes down to What do we need? Thio? Yeah, Yeah. And what do we need to do, Thio Thio grow as a company? Sometimes that's improving the product. Sometimes it's just going out for selling more like, right now, I'm at a point where I'm just trying toe, um, focus on improving our product as much as possible so we can have another good couple months. And after that switch switch Thio, uh, Thio switch to going out and and raising money as my top priority. Yeah, Big. Okay, yeah.