Ian Lee: Why DAOs Will Replace Venture Capital; Biggest Threat to Web3 | 20VC #893

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Ian, I'm so excited for this show. I heard so many great things. I said to Avichal after our show, "Who must I have on?" And he was like, "You gotta have Ian. Ian would be amazing." So thank you so much for joining me today, Ian.

I'm looking forward to this. I, I listened to Avichal's, uh, podcast with you and I, I feel like about 40 to 50% of it was talking about DAS. So I was thinking to myself, this is, this is a great setup for our conversation today.

Totally. I mean, that was just purely prep for this. This was my ultimate goal and I thought he could be the warm-up. Um- (laughs)

Oh, come on man. He, he's, he's, he's a, he's a hero. He's a legend, so...

He's a total hero. But I wanna start, and before we like dive into the meat of the show, how did you make your way into the world of investing and come to found Syndicate most recently?

Okay, so one thing I've, I've learned about you before coming onto this show is that you're, you're a no bullshit guy.

Yeah.

So I figured I, I might as well follow suit and be as authentic as possible. I'll be honest, I dabbled in venture about 15 years ago, and from that experience I realized that I never wanted to be an investor.

(laughs)

Uh, (laughs) so, so it's kind of odd that about a decade ago-

Pause, pause, pause. Why?

Well, I always viewed myself as more of a builder. I, I, I, like for example, I used to be an art- an artist, and I, I loved getting my hands dirty and going into the details and just the craft of like creating something from scratch, right? And, and working on things with my hands on like the shop floor. Uh, I was a consultant for about a decade, and my most rewarding experiences were actually ones where I was in places like Texas and Michigan and Ohio on the factory floors, uh, figuring out how to optimize manufacturing systems and stuff like that. So I just like loved that stuff and, um, when I got exposed to investing, it, for me, was very removed, I guess, from the process of building. It was like at least one or two derivatives off from the actual work that was happening. And so, at the time, this was, again, 15 years ago, I think I was still very young obviously and, and pretty naive, I, I think I intuitively understood that it was important, but I, I didn't quite grok like the actual, uh, impact of the work that investing had. And, and it was only about 10 years later when I actually got into it that I became much more fascinated by it and appreciative of it. But yeah, initially I did not wanna go be- become an investor. It was actually about eight years ago when I came in primarily through the operating lens when I joined Citigroup's venture capital arm, City Ventures, where I was hired to work on emerging technologies as part of the venture arm and figure out how we might be able to commercialize and scale these technologies and these startups that we were investing in. So it was, it was from that angle that I got into investing and then as I got more exposed to the actual work of investing and, and the impact of it, that's when I started getting more into it and ultimately became a full-time VC for a number of years.