Noozzlers! Let’s get inspired and get a lesson from an incredible story of crypto hero and crypto bull — Mike Novogratz.
Why we have chosen Novogratz? According to Forbes in February 2018, Mike Novogratz was a number 10 in Forbes 2018 List of the Crypto Richest with breath-taking $700 million to $1 billion net worth.
The former Goldman Sachs partner, and founder of Galaxy Digital made and lost a fortune on Bitcoin.
Let’s dig in how it all happened.
A famous Princeton graduate lived years in Tokyo, while being a salesman at Goldman Sachs and that’s where the crypto story starts. Quickly he realised and complained to his boss that salesmen get paid a lot less than traders. Being a salesman is an important job, but it’s much rarer skill to be a trader.
He took a decision to become a trader and moved to Hong Kong to run the trading business. Novogratz was amazed how dynamic the whole space was, how fast the business move. Back in days he was talking with his friend and he told to Mike, they have 11 050 employees and Novogratz replied: “This company just started a couple years ago”.
As a result, from 1992 to 1999 Novogratz learnt that Asia is one of the most dynamic parts of the world and people do not wait, they just do! The other piece he learnt, which makes crypto interesting in Asia is that the Asian cultures love to gamble. He used to laugh that at the horse races in Honk Kong during a normal Thursday night, people would bet four times more than all of America would bet on the Kentucky Derby, biggest horse race. It’s a staggering statistic of just how much they love to gamble. All that marries up with crypto as a speculative asset.
Afterwards, Novogratz was involved with Wall Street as a principal director of Fortress Investments. Usually, when you leave Wall Street, you do not leave gracefully: “You break some glass, you scrape your knee, your ego is bruised”.
As a result, Novogratz looked at his portfolio and found a lot of Bitcoin and having investments in Corbett, Bitstamp, Zappo, which he made few years earlier.
Mike visited his college roommate Joe Lubin who was running Consensus company, at that point still a tiny company. It was the first time Novogratz understood that crypto was a lot more than a speculative investment. It was some social, cultural and economic phenomena. Novogratz noticed, that people like Vitalik Buterin and Alex Morcos getting involved in it deeply, cared about changing the world and a new world order, which came out of the breakdown in the financial system in 2018 and peoples’ fear of central authority.
Mike Novogratz got inspired by all that and even bought a bunch of Ethereum at $0.96. When you buy cheap and it goes higher, you starting to pay a lot of attention to it. Since then, he has been heavily supporting the nascent asset class. The experienced investor became head over heels for Bitcoin and crypto, which led to the launch of his own crypto-centric company, Galaxy Digital Holdings Ltd. His brother named it, because they love Star Wars and it was also symbolic, to be in a center of crypto space that’s exploding.
Novogratz started to make a lot of money and contributing to crypto ecosystem. His mission was to convert institutional investors to crypto. Also he realized new ecosystems and young companies need guidance, banking services and consulting. Thus, they decided to become a merchant bank, Goldman Sachs for crypto.
However, 2018 — changed it all!
Michael described the difficulties building a crypto company during the ongoing bear market, and recent company filings show Galaxy Digital’s net realized and unrealized losses on its trading operation bringing losses for the first nine months of the year to $136 million.
Despite the cryptocurrency bear market, the Bitcoin bull investor remains convinced that prices will come back. Novogratz jokingly admitted to Bloomberg, that he was once “the pretty face of crypto with multiple good calls and is now the ugly face as he’s made multiple bad calls”. Revolutions Don’t Happen Overnight! However, the next bull market may be driven by institutional investors and an increase in different token sales known as STOs (Security Token Offerings).
The latest article about Novogratz was released on 19th March 2019 by FxStreet, where “Novogratz predicts Bitcoin bull rally as six banks plan to launch own coins supported by IBM and Stellar”
Mike Novogratz still believes in Bitcoin and sure that Bitcoin will be digital gold, as Noozzle team does! What about you?
We’re curious. What are your thoughts? Do you agree with Mike, why or why not? Noozzle team respects Mike for his deep investing experience. We are inspired by his drive and hunger to grow the crypto ecosystem, and we are following his further track record of success.
Please give us a thumb up!
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