Maaria Bajwa: ‘People Like to Root Against the Winners.’

(Maaria Bajwa, modified by Kevin Ross/CoinDesk) Maaria Bajwa, who has a background in investing for ultra-high-net worth individuals, had been buying cryptocurrency since 2016. So when a year later she joined the venture capital firm Sound Ventures, which was founded by actor Ashton Kutcher and talent manager Guy Oseary, who has represented Madonna for decades, as well as acts like U2, she knew exactly where her expertise would lie – Web 3.

“It’s technically more complex, it requires time, it’s new,” she says of the crypto industry. “I knew that I would never be as good at analyzing marketplaces as Ashton or growth consumer deals like Guy, so that’s when I started really digging into crypto.”

She’s only dug deeper since. With Sound Ventures, Bajwa has invested in Chainalysis, bitcoin rewards app Lolli and metaverse fashion brand The Fabricant. She also co-founded Sixth Wall, a blockchain entertainment company that helps artists use the technology to keep control of their work. The other founders included Mila Kunis, Kutcher’s wife; Morgan Beller, co-creator of libra, the digital currency Facebook tried to establish; actress Lisa Sterbakov; and metaverse consultant Lindsey McInerney.

And Bajwa also sits on the board of the Ape Foundation, which helps govern the Bored Ape Yacht Club community, and has been adding to her own personal NFT collection alongside her enthusiast husband.

“One hundred percent of both my personal and professional time is in crypto,” she says. “My whole day, I’m talking to companies and different projects in the crypto world, and then I come home from work, and me and my husband are just talking about crypto, NFTs ( non-fungible tokens ) and DeFi ( decentralized finance ). There’s not really a divide.”

When you live and breathe crypto like Bajwa does, you get a pretty good sense of where the industry is going and what projects will survive or die. She explained how she gleans these insights with CoinDesk, addressing the importance of building basic blockchain infrastructure, the criticisms of Ape Coin and the voice acting talents of Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain.

How do you and Sound Ventures choose which blockchain companies to invest in? What’s some of your criteria?

The way that we think about investing is we do a lot of building in this space. That means being active with folks who are doing really interesting, exciting things in this ecosystem. For example, as co-founder of Sixth Wall, the company behind (animated series) “Stoner Cats,” we just released another show called “The Gimmicks” on Solana. It’s doing very, very well and was the first NFT for a lot of people. Then there’s Guy Oseary and his work [representing] Yuga Labs and World of Women, and I’m helping out with Hop Protocol by running a liquidity bonder that Hop uses for its bridge .

By being active in the ecosystem, we can see the pain points and the infrastructure and technology that doesn’t exist yet. That’s where there’s a gap. That informs a lot of our investment decisions.

Take MoonPay, for example – they make it very easy for people to on-board into crypto, which traditionally has been a very challenging thing. That’s a big unlock for the ecosystem and for the environment. Things like that, that address, how do we get more people into the space? How do we make sure that this is sustainable growth and that we’re growing in the smart, right way? A lot of what we do on the building side informs that.

Yeah, because in crypto, it’s so complicated and technologically hard to use and build. People often make the mistaken assumption that the ecosystem is far more advanced than it actually is. Everyone says, “We’re so early,” but from a technology implementation perspective, we are still very early. There’s still infrastructure that needs to be built to make multi-chain a possibility. We spend a lot of time thinking through, “What are the pieces of the puzzle that need to be put in place to fuel the next wave of innovation or growth in this ecosystem?”

You’ve invested in all kinds of different industries in blockchain – like video and virtual fashion. Which industry excites you the most in terms of its prospects in the metaverse right now?

I’m a big VR (virtual reality) person. When the Vive first came out, I was on their early access list, so I got one of the first five. There was this multi-player, first-person shooting game that I played called Hover Junkers – at one point, I […]

source Maaria Bajwa: ‘People Like to Root Against the Winners.’