I remember the first time that I was asked to assess a major technological change. I was an accounting student in the mid-1990s, and one of my projects was to decide if the Internet could become a viable platform for trade. My group and I searched, directed the figures, made the presentations and gave the answer that seemed obvious: No, Internet would not work.
At the time, we could not imagine using an online credit card. Or buy shoes on a computer. Like many people then, we have underestimated what would become the most important technological progression in our lives. How wrong we were.
In the long term, however, my university experience would give me a more in -depth understanding of the forces of innovation. When I met Crypto for the first time in 2017, I saw parallels with the Internet, including what I missed the first time. I saw a similar structure, incentives and also a feeling of inevitability. This insight led me to found Pure Crypto, a digital asset investment company which was the most efficient hedge fund in the world between 2018 and 2025.
Since the launch of Pure Crypto, I have watched digital active ingredients have gone from a marginal experience in a class of assets approved by Wall Street. Despite this, I believe that the crypto is still in its infancy. It seems counterattack to call something “early” when he created billions of dollars, but consider the few people who have crypto-only about 6.8% of people around the world at the end of 2024. By comparison, at the time of the Dot-Com Crash, less than 7% of the world was online, and some of the most transformative platforms of the Internet had not even arrived. Facebook did not exist before 2004.
What tells me is simple: when a transformative technology arrives, the opportunity window is longer and larger than it seems.
How I learned to take the long vision of technology
One of the biggest changes in my approach – and perhaps the reason why I did not evaluate the crypto as I did on the Internet – was to learn to dig more deeply. When I first rejected the Internet as a viable commercial platform, I did not understand the infrastructure. I looked at the surface – which seemed possible then – instead of understanding what could come. With Crypto, I made an effort to be more curious with tenacity. I ask different questions now:
What is architecture? What does this protocol really allow? Does this solve a real world problem or is it just noise? I am not a computer scientist or a developer, and I do not pretend to be. But I learned that understanding the fundamentals changes the way you see space.
When I assess the crypto, I try to treat it as an infrastructure, not speculation. I want to know how a system creates confidence without intermediaries, what incentives are integrated into design and if it unlocks new behaviors or markets that were not possible before.
One thing crypto taught me quickly: you can’t do this alone. It is such a quick interdisciplinary space that no one can completely follow alone. Very early on, I realized that my best understanding of the landscape did not aim to be the smartest person in the play. It was a question of being in rooms where I could learn.
It has become a theme throughout my trip. Some of the most important ideas I have acquired in this space do not come from a spreadsheet or a white paper, but from conversations. To put myself around people who deeply thought of this technology in a way that I was not yet.
Finally, if there is one thing that I believed in innovation, it is that the most important changes do not occur overnight.
The internet start dates back to the 1950s – but it took decades to evolve from an academic tool in a global trade engine. Crypto reminds me of this chronology. The media threshing cycles come and go, but the underlying – turbulent, relentless – arc continues to lean forward.
Over the years, I trained to stay focused on the longer term horizon. To eliminate noise and search for the quieter signals: where real adoption occurs, where infrastructure is quietly under construction and where people solve difficult problems, not trends. Patience is not flashy. But it may be the most underestimated edge in a space like this.
I missed the internet wave. I did everything I can not miss this one.
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