The benefits of a digital economy with Matthew Le Merle of Blockchain Coinvestors

Maren Kate
Today my guest is Matthew Le Merle. He is currently Managing Partner of Blockchain Coinvestors. Matthew has 30 years of experience helping others succeed as innovators. He's also a best-selling author and keynote speaker on investing, innovation, and blockchain. Matthew, we are very happy to have you here today.

Matthew LeMerle
Great to be here. Thank you so much for the invite and I'm looking forward to talking to your audience.

Maren Kate
Awesome. So what was your first job? And this is a two-part question. First, what was the first thing you did for money, like, it could be mowing grasses, and then what was the first job that you paid taxes on?

Matthew LeMerle
Oh, well, those are two different things. So, to be honest, the first job would be when I was like six or seven years old. I was what was called a Cub Scout growing up in England and we had something called Bob-A-Job and, basically, you had to go around the neighborhood, you had to be willing to do whatever the person who opened the door asked you to do, and they'd give you a shilling and you would put a sticker on their window that said they had participated in this fundraising effort for the Cub Scouts. So that was really the first thing.

Maren Kate
It was called Bob-A-Job?

Matthew LeMerle
Yea, Bob-A-Job because a bob was the colloquial name for schilling. So that was the first thing and then I did paper rounds and I worked in cafes and restaurants and then I had a job sort of, what's the word, soldering printed circuit boards for a company. That didn't go very well. And I did a variety of other things but my first real job when I would say I was paying taxes was as a pre-University intern for a UK bank, National Westminster Bank when I had to work in a branch and I was a teller and I had to code checks and I had to work on the foreign exchange desk. And all of those things became relevant a lot later because I had sort of a grassroots feeling and impression of what paper-based banking looks like. The funny thing is here we are probably 40 years later and it's not that much better. Banking has not gotten much better in the last 40 years, to be quite honest, so it's pretty interesting. It's what I focus on today. The digitalization of financial services.

Maren Kate
When you look back over your career, what were those moments were, at the time, maybe you didn't realize how impactful they would be but now looking back they were the stepping stones that brought you to where you are today, into what you're doing today?

Matthew LeMerle
Yes, well, actually, I just gave you one. But I would say in the rearview mirror and with hindsight, I can draw a straight line in a conversation about the digitalization of commerce and content and the internet and how it's led to this moment when we're digitalizing the world's financial services, payments, assets, and the rise of blockchain and Web3. I can sort of draw a straight line through all of my experiences and the experiences of the 80s and 90s were a part of that. I was working on the digitalization of content and electronic commerce in the very early 90s with a lot of big institutions but at the time I didn't know that. I didn't know that the internet was going to become what it became. I was working on it. I worked on Prodigy over at Sears. I worked on America Online.

Maren Kate
How did you get into that? Like, how did you start working with those companies and in that space?

Matthew LeMerle
Yes. So after that summer internship and going off to Oxford, my first permanent real job was at McKinsey, the consulting firm, and after McKinsey, Kearney, where I helped run the Global Financial Services Group. So I had a long time, maybe 14/15 years with those two firms and another seven years with Monitor and with Booze. I was a management consultant, rose to be a senior partner and I was working with the world's most substantial and largest enterprises, financial services companies like Bank of America and Visa and Wells Fargo, people like that, and then tech companies like Google and Microsoft and eBay and PayPal. And so Maren, at the time it didn't feel like I was working on laying the track for Web3 and blockchain. But today, I can look back and say, well, that's what I did. For 25 years I worked on projects where we digitalized industries and commerce and content. Now the second shoe is dropping and we're digitalizing on the one hand transactions and I do think we're digitalizing work to a large extent as well.

Maren Kate
Talk to me more about the digitalizing work. What do you mean when you say that and how do you see that happening?

Matthew LeMerle
Yes. So Alison and I have written a book or two on this topic. One of them is about the Fifth Era, which we define as being a fully digital global economy, and we're sort of halfway there. In that book we asked the question a lot, why do we do the things that we do, and a lot of what we do today is because we grew up in a physical world. When I say we grew up I don't mean we personally. I mean our businesses, our industries, our enterprises, and the way we do things grew up in a physical world. Once you take away the need to be physically proximate it turns out a lot of the things that we do we don't need to do the way we do them. So I'll use a couple of examples just to make the point. An example that I think is clear for everyone as soon as you said it is we do higher education at locations called universities because that was what was necessary. The knowledge was concentrated in the mind of a few people that we call professors and you as a student had to go and sit under the tree and listen to Socrates or Plato talking to you. Then we built locations around that. We also stored things in libraries. So we had the great library of Alexandria and, eventually, we had universities like Oxford and Cambridge, or Harvard and Stanford, or whatever getting created and we've continued with that model. So we still have the model that you should pay $100,000 to go to a physical location to sit in a classroom and be taught by a professor. But actually, all of the ingredients of that are being digitalized. So the world's content is all digital. It's no longer true that only professors have knowledge. In fact, all of their knowledge is easily accessible through digital means. It turns out that people are increasingly demonstrating they can learn pretty effectively remotely and digitally and even collaborative projects can be done pretty well digitally as well. So you don't even necessarily need to be in the classroom to do a case study and to work as a group. The other side of the coin is when you actually look at what the students do in the classroom at university you'll notice they all have their second screen up and most of them are not really in the room. The professor's talking at them from the front of the room but their heads are somewhere else and they're only there because they have to demonstrate attendance.

Maren Kate
Which I guess is, if you think about it, that's a corollary with traditional work, too.

Matthew LeMerle
Yes, Yes, Yes, absolutely Maren. It's why I use that as an example. In a minute I know we'll talk about more broadly defined work but just to finish off that story, just one moment. So I can say everything I just said and professors will get really heated under their collars and they'll say, “well, no, the physical interaction with my students is really, really important” and maybe they're right but the real point and this is the real point, is there's 8 billion people in the world and only 100 of them are able to squeeze in front of the room of that professor. So when you really put the point to them, Hey, Professor, you're teaching two and three hundred people a year and there's a billion people, you know, get off your high horse and figure out how you use digitalized education to educate the world, not just the lucky people that can pay $100,000 to sit in the room. I think that's the real point. The digitalization of the way we do things allows accessibility. It allows more equal opportunity. It allows large numbers of people to participate. And on the whole, those things are good because we've come out of a physical world in which opportunities were not equally distributed and we can use digital means to do a better job of distributing opportunity equally globally. Education would be an example of that. Education is a very concentrated thing. Most people in the world do not have access to the best educators and they are less advantaged as a result. So this is about equal opportunity and diversifying the way the world works.

Maren Kate
How long do you think it will take for that shift to really take hold?

Matthew LeMerle
Yes, it's a great question. Here we are in 2022 and I was working on the digitalization of various industries and businesses in the late 1980s and the internet and TCPIP were actually written even earlier but they were certainly known about in the 80s. You know, many of us were aware of the internet by, say, the early 90s. So it's been at least a 40-year journey to digitalize communications and content which is a piece of the puzzle that’s very important. Every industry has been impacted, all of us have been impacted, however, digitalizing transactions and then digitalizing the rest of work, I'm absolutely sure it's another 40 or 50 years at least. But what is different this time around is that we have built a global communication backbone and we have digitalized content and half of the world's population, the digital natives, have grown up in that world. They take for granted digital communications, the sharing of content, and the use of those platforms and so I think there is the possibility that this can be accelerated. I think digital natives understand more intuitively the benefits of digitalizing their workplace and their work process and their work groups and relationships. So it's going to take a long, long time, however, it is inevitable and it is what the digital natives want and, ultimately, they are the future. So you can force them back into the office. You can be Elon Musk and say, you're not gonna have a job if you don't come back to the office, but Elon Musk is not a digital native and most of the people that work for him are.

Maren Kate
Yep.

Matthew LeMerle
But at some point, Elon Musk won't be there anymore and the people running Tesla will be digital natives.

Maren Kate
And Jamie Dimon is the same, right? He's said multiple times that he believes people need to be in office and it's not that he's not obviously a very smart man and obviously a very successful man but he didn't grow up with that. Like my first business in college, I started on a computer and I started when I was always working remote. I used to go to cafes to get WiFi and I never thought of it as remote work until that term kind of came into the norm. That's how I founded a business and I enjoyed that. Then by the time I was in my early 20s I only wanted to work that way. So starting another business I started it fully remote and this was in Silicon Valley and I remember VCs being like, you have to have an office and I would be like, why, and they would say culture or something. And I always thought, well, they're smarter than I am so they must be doing something right. But it's funny at this stage now people like me who have worked remote for all of our professional careers and even before our professional careers I would be less productive in an office environment if I was forced to go in every single day. So it's definitely interesting thinking about the next 20 years and what that will look like.

Matthew LeMerle
Yes, yes. So it's a great point. So going back to Jamie Dimon. So Jamie Dimon did grow up in a physical world and he may well be much more productive himself in a physical setting and he may even have designed his business environment, his bank, his company, to operate better with people in physical proximity. It's possible. But the real point is he doesn't get to sit there and ask for what he perceives to be the advantages of physical proximity without also taking on board the responsibility for the negative externalities. So I think the thing you should say to Jamie Dimon is okay, Jamie, you want us all back in the office so you, Jamie, are responsible for destroying the environment because we're all going to be driving to work and we're polluting the environment. That's you, Jamie. You created that. You created the over congestion of the city, New York. You created the noise and the pollution of the city. You created the broken homes because the people could not care for their children in the way they wanted to. You created the inequality where the disabled have more difficulty coming to the offices at JP Morgan in the city if they're out in New Jersey and so they get less opportunity. You created that Jamie Dimon. So it's okay for you to say that you operate better in a physical world and you want everyone back in the office but you must take on board the ESG consequences of your physical model of work. If we can create a digital model of work that is better for the environment, better for most people, better for most families, better for most children, then we should balance off the pros and cons at an aggregate level, not at a disaggregated level when he's only measuring what's good for him and JP Morgan.

Maren Kate
Yeah, and I think even from a standpoint of what will happen is the people that either have to work this way, so if you're disabled and you can't leave your home or people that enjoy that flexibility or want to be with their children, they will just start self-selecting out. And what will happen is that I think, in reality, talent will kind of dictate. Companies can have a hard line on it but, eventually, in the next 2, 5, 10 years they will have a smaller and smaller pool from which to fish from, pretty much, and that will be what forces people’s hand. Either they'll retire and someone who's digitally native will come up or there'll be like I can't get the best people anymore so I have to adjust. That brings up a good point so with Blockchain Coinvestors, tell me about the companies that you invest in or the companies that you've been seeing that are starting to make that positive difference?

Matthew LeMerle
Yes, well, so I don't want this to become Web3 and blockchain v. the rest of the world. It isn't. This transformation you and I just spoke about, which is going to take a long time and is going to be disruptive and complicated, is being driven by the world's governments and NGOs and by the big companies themselves. The ESG movement and the metrics of ESG, which companies are going to have to manage, are going to make what I call the negative externalities a central part of the decision-making process. So right now, JP Morgan says, Jamie Dimon says, everyone back to the office but he does not measure and quantify the impact of everyone's commutes and it is not part of his decision-making. He sort of waves that away. You'll figure out how to get to the office and the carbon footprint of all of that transportation is not part of my decision-making process. It will be. So what's going to happen is we are going to put, we being global governance and decision-makers, are going to put the burden on Jamie Dimon of fully measuring and quantifying the impact of his decision and that's part of the ESG movement and then it goes on into other topics. So now turning to the other shoe, if you will, digital natives when they create companies they begin much more comfortable with the notion of fully virtual, companies and they design their companies at the outset to be digital and virtual and they're very comfortable with that and they seem to do it well. Those companies seem to do quite a good job. So it's not so much that they are a different category of company or that they do anything specifically different. It's just that they're born digital. So JP Morgan has trading desks, well, crypto exchanges have trading desks, and the crypto exchange trading desks are virtual. They were born virtual. They never took a space at number five Wall Street and made everyone go to Wall Street. So if you went to the trading desks that Coinbase or Robin Hood or Sbox or Amber or Binance they are born distributed, virtual, digital workplaces. Now, those are still centralized organizations so that's very interesting because born digital centralized corporate entities are demonstrating that they can be effective and productive and get their work done with virtual workforces in fully digital virtual work environments. Now, Web3 takes it to another level because there we not only do everything I just said but we also decentralize the corporate entity. So the actual governance and the organization itself could be distributed and decentralized and there's a lot of experimentation going on around that. So these things are points in a transformational migration path. So you have Jamie Dimon at one end, you've got to be back in the office it's a physical world. You have people experimenting with virtual digital centralized organizations and I gave you some examples. Then you've also got people experimenting with decentralized distributed organizations, DAOs we call them. And that's a spectrum and some businesses will find they can go further down that path than others. It won't be one shape fits all sizes, so to speak. We will have different types of entities that work best in different places along that spectrum. But Financial Services is clearly one that can be digitalized. So financial services has no reason to argue you have to be back in the office. That just doesn't make sense. Elon Musk, you know, you can't make a car without having a physical component of your work. Pretty much everything a financial services company does is digital anyhow. Money is digital, assets ought to be digital. Why on earth do you have to go to a physical location? It's sort of absurd.

Maren Kate
Yeah, I agree with you and I think that one of the most exciting things, at least for me, when thinking about the future of work and everything from worker compensation to worker engagement and alignment, I think DAOs actually, to me, that's one of the most exciting things that have cropped up in the last decade or so. I'm curious what businesses or organizations or DAOs have you seen recently that you think are really interesting and potentially have the ability to really impact the future of work, or how people get hired, how people find work, things like that?

Matthew LeMerle
So here I'm actually going to be not as future-leaning as maybe you are. I feel that I see everywhere the benefits of virtual digital workplaces and the work-from-home movements and, as we've been talking about, born digital organizations, and so on. That for me is very, very clear and the benefit is clear and I could give you many, many examples. On the other side of the coin, I won't say it again, but you don't have to be too smart to look at JP Morgan and Jamie Dimon and see all the destruction and the waste they create by the choices they make about the ways they work. It's really quite remarkable that it has not been measured and the burden hasn't been put on the decision-makers and it will be. So we've already talked about that. The ESG metrification of negative externalities is going to weigh heavy on Jamie Dimon and his board because they are responsible. But DAOs are something way, way out there. It's the notion that governance, decision-making, work itself can be left to a crowd and I struggle with that. I do struggle with that. I mean, it's one thing to say governance can be left to a crowd. That's called democracy and we've experimented with that for hundreds of years. Winston Churchill said, I think it was Winston Churchill, democracy is a terrible form of government except all the others are worse. So we know that it's not that efficient. It doesn't work that well. It takes time and there are issues but it's still fit for purpose, probably in the political domain. Can you have a wisdom of crowds decision-making process for all the decisions of a company? I don't know. But let's assume for a minute that governance could be decentral, that is, governance decisions could be decentralized and the employees would have more control over the decisions in their companies. So companies would be less top-down decision-making. They would be a little bit more bottoms-up decision making. I can sort of imagine that. I can actually sort of imagine that. But when it comes to completing the work, I struggle. I actually struggle with the notion that the work can be left to an autonomous organization to decide who does the work, and people have to step forward and offer to do the work, and I don't quite understand how the work gets done in a DAO.

Maren Kate
It's kind of like the idea of holacracy, which was popular maybe a decade ago, that in theory worked but in practice didn't really net out.

Matthew LeMerle
Yes. So if you listen to Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, Fred will say, whilst he believes in digital assets and crypto and other things and he's a big supporter of Bitcoin and Etherium and so on, he'll also say Etherium doesn't do much work. If you have the number of people, you know, Google has probably more developers than the Bitcoin community have and the Google developers seem to get more code written than the Bitcoin development community does. And part of the reason for that is the Bitcoin developer community is very consensus-driven but it does also sometimes have difficulty getting people to do the work. He'll actually say that to Etherium more than he'll say it to Bitcoin. I've seen quotes where he's talked about that. But going back to the point, I struggle a little. So DAOs, decentralized autonomous organizations, what purpose, is it about making decisions about who should be elected to be politicians? Well, you could argue democracy is a DAO. But when it comes to getting work done and someone's actually got to go out and plant the seeds, and water the fields, and harvest the crops, can we really just leave that to an autonomous organization? I sort of doubt it. Even if you look at the experimental, and I'm talking agriculture now, but if you go out to Israel and you look at kibbutzes, or you go to Eastern Europe and you look at the communal farming system, or you go to China and you look at the way the Chinese did agriculture, there's still people calling the shots, there are bosses. There are bosses and it's not just left to the wisdom of the crowd. There may be sub-decisions that certain people take. Do you want to go, on the kibbutz, do you want to go and harvest something today or do you want to work on killing the chickens and plucking? You know, you may get some choices but someone's still running the kibbutz. It may be a group of people. It may be an individual. It may be a large group of people but it isn't everyone. So I'm struggling with that and I don't quite see it yet.

Maren Kate
Yeah, there's definitely a point there. I think the idea of governance and maybe even the idea of compensation is a little more baked out than the idea of that true model where everyone is self-governing and they're choosing what they work on, things like that. I think one of the ideas, and I don't even know if technically this would fall under a DAO or not, I think is the most interesting is the idea of rewarding people for their output, for the results-based work, versus right now we obviously, at startups we have grants, at bigger companies stock options, at partnerships you'll get bonuses but I don't think that's a super elegant way to handle things. There are definitely people that maybe are more junior but, actually, the results that they put out, maybe they're impactful in the next year, maybe they're impactful in the next five years and that's probably complicated to understand but if someone can crack the reward alignment system, to me, that would really take us steps forward, because I don't think the way we compensate right now is particularly, yeah, I just think there's a lot of ways that can break.

Matthew LeMerle
Yeah, so I think we went down that path because you asked what do I think about DAOs and decentralized autonomous organizations and I did express some mental challenges with fully embracing the idea. But on the other hand, the glass is often half full and there are some really powerful things that are happening in Web3 right now that are being enabled by a more expansive, distributed, and decentralized approach.

Maren Kate
What would be some examples?

Matthew LeMerle
Yes, yes. They shouldn't be underestimated. One of them is capital formation. You know, we've lived in a world in which capital formation is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. Going back, sorry to berate JPMorgan, but here we go again. JPMorgan takes a lot of our money. They represent a dead weight loss on capital formation. They don't do it well. It's very slow and it's very costly and that is the reality of capital formation around the world. Suddenly, out of the blue, we've discovered that in a networked global world Google and Facebook demonstrated that content could be shared with massive addressable markets and populations and so they grew very fast. So did YouTube and Spotify and Pinterest. But it turns out that the same thing is true of capital formation. If you have a digital network, you can call it a marketplace, you can call it an exchange, and if, essentially, four or five billion people can access that environment they can all be potential buyers and sellers. And yes, there are some rules around accredited investors but, fundamentally, you have this ability to take an offering, I'm trying to launch this company and I need some capital or I'm trying to create this community and I need some supporters and you need to do some work and you can bring that to an enormous population. It's been shocking just how much you can raise from a capital formation perspective and how quick. It is shocking because some of the projects that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars really don't have very much other than an idea.

Maren Kate
They just get people excited.

Matthew LeMerle
They get them excited. It's sort of like in the old-fashioned capital formation world you go to the people who have a lot of money. So you call on very large, multi-billion or 100 million dollar family offices and funds and you ask them to back your idea and a few of them say yes and it takes a lot of time and energy, right? No one ever really thought that you could go to 100 million people and ask them each for $1 and raise 100 million. Well, now you can and it seems to work. And yes, there are some rules and regulations around it but capital formation is clearly being transformed by this notion of decentralized distributed global digital marketplaces and we haven't yet got our heads around it. But that would be an example of something that clearly is being unlocked. I think that marketing is going to be is changing dramatically to use another example. We talked about one on one targeted marketing in the 90s but we didn't really do it. We are a little bit closer to it today but it's still very, very clunky. Now all of a sudden, you can put in place differentiated incentive systems, you can incentivize different behaviors, and you can have millions and millions of people contributing and working on behalf of the project or the cause or the company. The tokenization of those incentive systems is much more powerful than the old-fashioned loyalty programs and points-based programs. We have now the true ability to operate global incentive loyalty and relationship-based marketing platforms and community platforms to get large populations of people to help in whatever the mission of the company or the project is so that is truly an unlock of this new decentralized distributed world.

Maren Kate
I agree. I think it's a really exciting opportunity as well.

Matthew LeMerle
So it's this like day one. It's like day one in a multi-year journey and we don't know where all of this is heading. Anyone who says there's nothing there, you know, there's two points. Firstly, they're wrong. But the other one is, get them to really tell you how they do it today, which is, back to our listener, we always say, why do we do things the way we do it? If they're sending junk mail to you, you go down to your mailbox, I go down to my mailbox, I opened my mailbox, almost everything that's in my mailbox is junk mail and that's the best they can do. So they cut down trees, they spend huge amounts of energy processing the paper, they pollute the environment with inks and chemicals, they print up the paper, they have all these people rushing around delivering this junk mail to my mailbox. I don't want it anyhow and that's the most effective marketing they have and they have a less than 1% response rate and they're destroying the environment. They're destroying forests and they're polluting the environment in the way they go about it. That cannot be the best solution to marketing.

Maren Kate
Yeah, there's definitely a lot of room for improvement regardless of how you think it's gonna happen.

Matthew LeMerle
Yes, and so I use that as an example but the thing is when you talk to a corporate executive and they're very quick to tell you DAOs won't work here, there's no benefit to crypto, there's no benefit to Web3, don't get into an argument about what the future looks like, just dig in and put their noses into the way they do things today. Because if they're going to try and defend junk mail, they just gonna look really stupid. They look really stupid because junk mail is not a good thing for the world. And even if the response rate gives them an economic positive, we're going to start putting all the externalities of the paper and the pollution and the chemicals on to the cost of junk mail. That's what ESG is about. And when that happens, junk mail is going to have a very negative return on capital employed for the company. We just haven't done it yet. The whole US Postal Service is a negative externality that should be priced on to junk mail.

Maren Kate
I definitely haven't thought of it that way before but I like the approach of instead of trying to argue the future, argue the inefficiencies of the present. So lastly, Matthew, what's the future look like for you and for Blockchain Coinvestors? How are you putting your money behind what you think and where you think the future lies?

Matthew LeMerle
Thanks for asking that and, obviously, I appreciate that Maren. So we're the world's leading blockchain fund of funds. We're investor in more blockchain VCs globally than anyone else and we have the highest returning fund of funds in the world according to Preqin and PitchBook in our categories. So that is the core of what we do and we've been doing it for 10 years now. We very much enjoyed the fact that we've been allocating capital to the best venture capitalists in blockchain and Web3 for a long time and through them, we're investor in more than 400 blockchain companies and projects as well as more than half of the blockchain unicorns and we don't plan to stop doing that. We are complementing it with a couple of other things. So in addition to our fund of funds, and anyone can find us at blockchaincoinvestors.com if they want to learn more, we use the asymmetrical information and the privileged access we received from being an investor in most of the world's good blockchain VCs. We use that to inform two direct funds, our early-stage token fund, and our mid-stage growth funds. So those are our three investment strategies. On an open podcast like this, I'm not allowed to say much more. I'm allowed to talk about our investment strategies. So they are we are a fund of funds, we are a direct token fund, and we are a mid-stage growth strategy. Those are our strategies and we plan to keep on doing it. We think we're on day one of a multi-year journey. It's just beginning but it's inevitable. Digital transactions, digital monies and assets, and the digitalization of the corporate world is just beginning.

Maren Kate
I definitely agree and I think I liked that structure that you approach too. I also didn't realize you all had been doing this for 10 years. If we're in day one now then that was really like pre-day zero when you started out.

Matthew LeMerle
Yeah, well, no, we were early but not at the beginning to be fair. So we've been working on the digitalization of financial services our whole careers. One of my first projects at McKinsey was the big bang in London. That was back in 84 so we have been around the digitalization of monies, transactions, payments, and assets our whole careers. Blockchain specifically is obviously Satoshi Nakamoto and it took us a couple of years. Allison actually is the one that first really dug into that in 2013. It was 2014 that we started investing in the space and Alison became chairman of Blockchain Capital’s advisory board. We love them and are in all of their funds. And we then did the same with some others. So that's our journey. It's been a long time but I only wish I had been at the table when Hal Finney and Satoshi started moving Bitcoin back and forth and I would have loved to be in the third node but I wasn't.

Maren Kate
Well, Matthew, this has been wonderful speaking with you. It's been really interesting getting your insight and just thinking through what decentralization and digitalization will mean for the future of work, for the general future, as you mentioned, from everything from sustainability to the environment. You mentioned briefly people can find out about Blockchain Coinvestors by just Googling it. I did it myself, it popped up, the first result. And where can people find more about you, your books, your speaking?

Matthew LeMerle
Yeah, thanks for asking that too. Well, so every book Allison Davis and Matthew Le Merle have ever written can easily be found at Amazon, Apple, Smashwords, and everyone else and most of them are available in paperback, hardback, Kindle, and all the business books also in audible format. So we've written about the Fifth Era, which is this future digital world. We've written about corporate innovation. We've written about blockchain, Our goal has always been to just bring the concepts in the simplest possible way to the largest possible audience because it gets complicated if you start with the technology. Our preference is always to start with how are we doing things today. Why are we doing things in the way we're doing them today and how could we do things better? And if you just start with that thread it's so much easier to appreciate the power of these innovations and technologists because most things that most of us do don't make sense anymore. They grew up in a digital world, or sorry, in the physical world, they grew up in a physical world and now the constraints have been knocked out by digitization but we continue to do things in a physical way. And that's education, that's entertainment, that's health, that's financial services and banking, and I could go on. There's almost no business in the world that is doing things in an optimum way today. They are doing things with the burden of inertia and legacy. And JPMorgan and Jamie Dimon is a great example. He's a financial institution, everything he does is digital except that he makes everyone work physically. I mean, that doesn't make any sense.

Maren Kate
I agree and I think the bright side of it is that for entrepreneurs, for founders, for people that are joining early-stage startups, anything within Web3, the opportunity space is massive and that is really exciting to think about taking your lens, your framework, which I really liked, that simplicity, how are we doing it, why are we doing it, it gives us a lot of optimism and hope for the future. Matthew, thank you so much for being on the podcast. We really appreciate it. We will put the links to your books in the show notes. Thanks so much.

Matthew LeMerle
Thank you very much, Maren and I'll keep listening to your show, and thank you very much for hosting.