E01 - Jonty Kelt on Venture Capital in Crypto

Kia Ora and welcome to the very first episode of the Blockchain New Zealand Podcast. I’m Jeff Nijsse and today I’m talking to Jonty Kelt. Jonty is the Founder of Fantail Ventures, a venture capital business that has invested in some of the biggest names in crypto, including Kraken, Ledger, Stacks, Yield Guild Games, and Uniswap, just to name a few.

In this conversation we talk about: 

• Jonty coming out of Otago University and getting his start in finance; and the role of education in tech;
• He was building an online advertising business in the early days of the internet and his business was eventually acquired by google and we discuss the work culture at google in those days;
• Jonty has strong feelings about blockchain adoption providing a financial lifeline to the underbanked, and how digital ownership is just getting started;
• He’s an advisor for the teams behind VeVe–the NFT marketplace, and also Altered State Machine, the non fungible intelligence protocol;
• We wrap up with Jonty’s views on blockchain regulation in New Zealand and he gives us his thoughts on who Satoshi is.

Timestamps:

• 01:47 From Otago to NYC
  
• 04:58 Being a non-technical founder
  
• 07:03 Technology in education
  
• 11:55 Building an online advertising company
  
• 16:45 Google in 2008
  
• 20:54 Xero: a NZ success story
  
• 22:59 Fantail ventures
  
• 25:26 Advice for young entrepreneurs
  
• 26:58 Blockchain & income inequality
  
• 33:10 Bitcoin and debasement
  
• 36:00 Security & energy criticism
  
• 41:40 NFTs
  
• 47:46 Regulation in New Zealand
  
• 52:08 Rapid fire

Some notes from the show:

• Peter Thiel Fellowship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiel_Fellowship
• No college degree required https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/16/15-companies-that-no-longer-require-employees-to-have-a-college-degree.html
• Google is ten years old https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/sep/05/google.google
• Jonty’s talk at Kea New Zealand https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVfICUToQ58&ab_channel=KeaNewZealand
• NFTs with your bank account (Tweet) https://twitter.com/provenauthority/status/1517166544270381063
• Crypto Kitties https://www.cryptokitties.co/
• Ecomi & VeVe https://medium.com/ecomi/ecomi-advisors-introducing-jonty-kelt-2264026e0f97
• Immutable Layer 2 for Ethereum NFTs https://www.immutable.com/ 
• BCNZ https://blockchain.org.nz/ 

Contact Jonty:

• Fantail Ventures
• LinkedIn

Find Jeff:

• Twitter
• LinkedIn

The BCNZ Pod:

• Website https://bcnz.podbean.com/
• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
• Spotify 
• iHeartRadio 
• YouTube 

Media Enquires:

• team@blockchain.org.nz 

Recorded at blockheight 734642. The BCNZ Podcast was founded in 2022 by Jeff Nijsse and Bryan Ventura.