1) Can you also tell us more about your teammates too. Please share their Linkedin profile too.
Ben, our CEO, got interested in crypto while working in the cybersecurity industry. He brings a wealth of knowledge around biz-dev, marketing and of course the security side of blockchain.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dohertyben/
Tom is our CPO. After exiting his last SaaS startup, he knew he wanted to get involved in the crypto space, seeing that this was the next natural web transition. Tom has years of expertise building products, finding product-market fit and scaling marketplaces. All skills he employs daily at Lithium.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-littler/
Jake, our Head of Trading, bring an arsenal of financial and trading skills to the Lithium founding team, skills he’s built over the last decade working in Tradfi as a global macro trader, and VC analyst.
Due to Jake’s current involvement in Tradfi he’s not doxxed, but this will be changing within the month.
2) What is Lithium’s mission? Where is your entity based?
At Lithium, we have a mission to revolutionise the early crypto space. As seen primarily across the Binance Smart Chain scams are rampant and retail investors are having their capital taken from them by unscrupulous dev teams. This breaks down the social contract between investors and the teams they’re investing in. Confidence is being eroded, and the trust in legitimate teams is diminishing.
Lithium was formed in order to address two sides of the problem. Initially, it was crucial to creating an environment or ecosystem that retail investors are more informed, increasingly confident, and assured in the legitimacy, validity and potential in their investments. This is achieved through our KYB’d Launchpad bringing them cross-chain projects with exceptional founding teams solving real problems and adding value to the wider Web3.0 ecosystem.
Additionally, Our fund products allow retail investors to diversify their portfolio through varying risk-rated products, including a directional fund acting as a VC fund for Lithium to help invest in exceptional founding teams going through our incubator. This provides founding teams with the seed capital they require to expedite their time to market, and retail investors the earliest stage opportunity to invest in projects under a fully managed investment fund.
As you can see, our entire ecosystem is geared toward the advancement and development of the crypto space through the effective redirection of capital.
In terms of where Lithium is located. We’re an entirely London based team, and as a business will be incorporating in the U.K. very shortly.
3) What is the overall vision for the fund side of Lithium?
We have an insane vision for the fund projects offered via lithium – focussed on empowering retail investors and giving them access to institutional type structures and strategies. The higher-level objectives can be split into 2 streams, the VC vehicles (Fund I & II), and the non-directional Delta One fund.
The former sits behind our launchpad and incubator, aiming to solve one of the biggest issues in launching an early-stage venture (in any industry!) – which is access to capital. The crypto space has made it incredibly efficient to raise this capital and get projects off the ground – a cause we are hugely passionate about. We do this by raising funds from our community, identifying teams / early-stage projects we feel are best placed to succeed and writing seed investments to support them. This model of investing can be incredibly lucrative, and whilst traditionally its been available to super HNWI and institutions, our model allows our retail community to own the upside from these early rounds.
Our non-directional Delta One vehicle is structured as a hedge fund – again, an industry where retail has been excluded due to massive minimum investment levels, high costs, and opaque structures. We have flipped this model on its head, running a feeder fund out of Lithium Ventures which pools retail capital and allows them to access our institutional fund product. Behind the scenes, we have seen massive demand from other institutions and after lots of feedback have been working relentlessly with auditors, administrators & regulators to wrap this into a new regulated structure which – once attained, would be amongst a handful of regulated crypto-currency funds within Europe.
4) What have you incubated so far? Or what kind of founders/ projects are you seeking now?
The incubation applications have been open for a while, and we have had a serious amount of interesting inbound interest from fascinating founding teams and projects across the whole spectrum of the crypto and DeFi space. The incubator is winding up to take on its first cohort of roughly 5/6 projects that Lithium will be taking a seed stake in.
In terms of the projects, we’re speaking to an array of teams working across a broad cross-section of industries including:
– Adult Entertainment
– E-Sports
– Gambling
– Investment
– KYB/KYC
– Insurance
– Exchanges
And more.
We’re specifically seeking to engage with founders of exciting DeFi insurance and NFT projects. These are areas where we see the macro trends looking really strong, with insurance becoming more and more in demand within the space.
5) Tell us more about your Starter, Investor, Strategist, Evangelist tiers.
Aligning investor incentives in crypto is key. As Charlie Munger said (don’t blame him for his take on crypto, he’s still a legendary investor) ‘Show me the incentive, and I’ll show you the outcome.’
Unfortunately, too many projects offer questionable utility via their tokens, our tier structures offer huge upside to our community.
The starter tier is for those looking to dip their toes into Lithium, and will allow holders to invest small stakes in our private sales projects.
At the investor tier, the potential investment in launchpad projects gets larger, but you also get access to our funds with 0% management fees.
Things get really interesting at the Strategist and Evangelist tier; as well as increased private sale allocation, you get access to airdrops. This changes the game as simply by holding tokens you will be airdropped a proportion of the total airdrop token supply for each launched project, I wrote a more detailed article on how this works, but the potential for passive income is staggering.
https://lithiumventures.medium.com/how-holding-ebsc-generates-passive-income-83406ef0f689
6) Can you tell us how did you do for Fund 1, Fund Delta One and Fund II?
Fund I was a huge success and we put in a good 22x return in a fairly short space of time which lay the foundations to expand the model outside of family & friends to the wider community. Fund II has only just been raised and we have begun to deploy this capital into some really amazing projects. We will be starting a weekly NAV tracker so investors and anyone else interested can see the up-to-date performance!
The Delta One fund launched on June 8th and is aiming for smaller but less volatile returns. Since the launch less than 2 months ago the fund is up 16.17% and expect the returns to increase now volatility is picking up.
7) Being part of the early crypto space and seeing good projects come by and you cannot invest in every one of them. How do you cope with these “temptations”?
In terms of our investment decisions, we have developed a framework to help guide our decisions. This is informed through both micro and macro trends, as well as overall market sentiment. We apply this framework to all of our investment decisions, and as a team bring different levels of analysis and interpretations to the teams and projects we analyse and interview.
To ensure that we’re not just throwing our investors’ money at every hyped project that rears its head we find that sticking to this framework and method of investing is core to our strategy. It promotes diversification, removes emotion, and ensures that as a team we are putting our investors’ interests at the forefront of any decisions that we make.
8) Crypto is still new to many. Education is also a key part of your business. What plans do you have for education?
It’s great to see companies taking educational content more seriously over the last few years. From A16Z pouring millions into their ‘Future’ platform to Hubspot acquiring The Hustle for mid $10’s of millions. Large tech co’s are understanding that engaging customers through organic content make good business sense.
At Lithium, creating high-quality educational content for our investors has been key from the outset. From our very high production value YouTube videos explaining various parts of our product offering, to our Medium articles showcasing the thought process behind each decision we make.
We’re only getting started on the content front, crypto is still novel to many, and we see the need to investigate inexperienced investors, and also potential developers, one of the biggest projects we have in our roadmap is a free solidity course on token creation, which we hope will draw more talented engineers to space, and in turn feed our incubator and launchpad pipeline.
Check out our resources section for a view of what we’ve done, and what’s to come
https://lithium.ventures/resources
9) Before we go to the next segment, can you share an inspiring quote for our community members?
Crypto has given everyone the power to truly be sovereign individuals – unbeholden to banks and institutions, for the first time ever. Blockchain technology is making every single industry more efficient, placing capital where it’s most productive, rewarding early adopters, and forcing archaic corporations to lose monopolistic power. We are currently living in an absolute revolution and the largest wealth creation event of our generation.
