DAA Manager Insights: William Mougayar
We all know Hans Christian Andersen’s story “The Ugly Duckling,” where a little bird matures into a beautiful swan. It seems the same has happened with William Mougayar’s DAA, which started off slow but finished with one of the best results in the first three-month period after DAAs were launched. His recipe is simple, and following it could easily be on everyone’s list of 2018 resolutions.
You are a long-time industry insider and a prolific researcher, writer, and theorist who has been described as the most sophisticated blockchain business thinker. What would be your advice to people who are just starting out and one day want to follow your steps?
There is no specific recipe, except a lot of hard work and staying focused on what you are curious about.
I would say being curious and analytical by nature may have given me an edge. I’m never satisfied with answers I get or hear, typically. Finally, the ability to form your own opinions is important, but that typically comes with some maturity and experience.
Recently, you posted a blog post discussing the difference between Tokens 1.0 and Tokens 2.0. Have discussions in San Francisco given you any new ideas or insights into any particular topics you would like to share with our community?
Since the Token Summit in San Francisco and throughout the month of December, I have been repeating this theme to my audiences in speaking and writing engagements. And it has continued to resonate with them. I have more to say on that topic, but a key take-away is that I’m seeing several attempts to use the blockchain where it is not needed; maybe 95% of the use cases I see fall in that category. Most people haven’t internalized well, as a second instinct, what the blockchain is really good at.
Neither the first search engine nor the first social media platform was able to keep up with the competition. Both were disrupted and eventually forced out of business. We see this pattern across various industries. Could the scenario be repeated in blockchain? Could something similar happen to Bitcoin and Ethereum, or are they “too big to fail”? Are you putting these calls into your DAA structure?
I like to pick promising technologies that can carve their own niches and markets, without a necessary relationship to existing competition. Companies that become leaders create their own markets and lure their customers and users into new habits that didn’t exist before. These are the best types of long-term opportunities. The competition is old habits, old markets, and old processes.
Looking at the first three months, your DAA structure achieved one of the best results. Can you share some thoughts about your approach and, of course, your outlook for 2018?
I take a deep dive into each pick; I try to understand them and talk to their CEOs, teams, customers, and users. Having known and analyzed the blockchain landscape since its inception gives me a depth advantage that few have, and that helps me in deciding who might be the winners in the long term. You need to have a thesis you believe in, or a set of hypotheses that you think will materialize. Just as entrepreneurs have their own vision of where their products can go, investors also have their own vision about how the markets might get shaped forward; then, you follow those instincts and invest in companies you believe are the best positioned to fill these gaps and complete the picture.
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