Jean-Baptiste Dezard — Strategy, Marketing and Developement expert for technology and advisory companies
There are many reasons why people become advisors. Given the heated discussion around these operations, I think it is useful to explain my role in the Lili project.
First and foremost, I do not take any payment from the team. This is currently a pro bono work. The only reward might be a few tokens from the platform, for what they are worth. In any case, I will put these tokens in escrow on a duration similar to what the founders are doing (2 years), to ensure an alignment of incentives. I will disclose publicly the amounts I get.
Second, as an advisor, I maintain a clear separation of roles : I will take no part or responsibility in executive or operational decisions.
Third, I am not a celebrity, so the reason why Lili’s team asked me to be advisor is because of my knowledge and experience on — emerging and tech — markets, including my convictions on the development of what I call the crypto economic systems.
This market is huge, fragmented, and growing. Is it efficient and competitive?
I have known J.F. Andro, the CEO, for a very long time — we were at Institut Supérieur d’Electronique de Paris in 1987 (OMG!). I know how hard he is committed to his projects. He has been working in the AM sector for decades and demonstrates, with his associates, a strong vision of the investment management market.
This market is huge, fragmented, and growing. Is it efficient and competitive? The need for investor’s protection has created fairly high barriers to entries, redundant and tedious tasks for participants to comply with the regulation. Many emerging actors have reached the same conclusion : it is ripe for a transformation through platforms.
This is a segment where dominant retail platforms might enter, sooner than later, given its attractiveness.
Incumbent actors, benefiting from the protection of the current system, might not have incentives to move fast and/or high switching costs to do so, until they perceive a real and material risk, with client attrition and reduced collection. In the meantime, the emerging platforms may prove very attractive for both innovative asset classes and contracts and dynamic investors.
This is a segment where dominant retail platforms might enter, sooner than later, given its attractiveness. They will leverage their huge consumers and corporate reach, to capture the volume market. Investment Advisors might end up being recruited on their platform, through a « gig » economic model.
The alternative is to create decentralized platforms where participants decide how they want to trade in an efficient manner, through a « transferable utility », with less information asymmetry. Lili is one of the projects that will propose this alternative model.
This is obviously a terra incognita, and this is very exciting. There are many strategy and technology questions that will need new answers along the way. The management team needs continuous support to broaden their « bounded reality », with independent and trusted critical friends bringing ideas, point of views, advices to avoid pitfalls.
This is what I will bring to Lili.
JEAN-BAPTISTE DEZARD
MARKETING & PR / Advisor for Lili
