Innovate and Grow: Introducing John Wu
Financial markets demand innovation. Tremendous value can still be found in upgrading legacy financial market infrastructure and processes, which is why I began my own company. The past twenty years of fintech, finance, and the infrastructure around them have seen new products, new services, and new market entrants. The digital world continues to find new opportunities to make finance more efficient and democratic.
I founded Investery to tackle a need in private securities that markets have been demanding for years. Private market investors lack so many of the tools available to public markets that they have trouble making trades at all. Investors need tools to discover, transact, and manage their alternative investments in one easy workflow — Investery would provide those tools in one platform.
As I realized what an incredible opportunity there was for private markets, I saw a greater need — secure tools for global discovery, trading finality, capital access — all faster and digital. For Investery, relying on aging infrastructure to create new financial tools was a contradictory move. So I sold my company to Ava Labs, a company building Avalanche, and joined as President to build a better path to make private markets more efficient.
I have seen firsthand how market structure and technology have changed and improved over the years. For example, public markets require use of a clearinghouse to clear and settle trades. This process used to take three days (T+3) but was shortened to two days (T+2) in 2017. As early as 2012, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) estimated that moving to a T+2 cycle could save the entire industry $170 million annually. Speed, security, and efficiency reduce costs for all market participants, opening up artificial caps on trading volume, capital access, and new markets with limitless potential.
My time in various markets including Equity, FX, Credit, and Commodity markets at Tiger Management showed me these patterns again and again. Once I joined SharesPost as CEO of the Digital Assets Group, I saw the opportunity to build such a solution for the slow-moving market of private company investments. After building a marketplace for trading security tokens and architecting a settlement network, I quickly realized there was a more immediate problem to solve.
More Than Hype: Blockchains and Financial Markets
In 2017, the financial world was buzzing with ‘blockchain.’ It was going to save us all! Blockchain was going to revolutionize traditional finance, global monetary policy, supply chain economics, and maybe even walk the dog if we let it. But it soon became clear that blockchain wasn’t ready to change the world in 2017 (nor 2018, nor 2019 for that matter). As a technology, several obstacles needed to be removed before it became a viable alternative to our existing centralized infrastructure, namely speed and scalability. Regardless, blockchain’s potential applications were so compelling that it was only a matter of time before someone found a way to scale beyond Bitcoin.
I first met Emin Gün Sirer in 2017, sharing our visions of how blockchain will intersect with finance. His vision shaped Avalanche into the solution that Investery was looking for, and beyond that, what the markets have needed. Avalanche has emerged as the next evolution of blockchain: a fast, secure, and efficient platform built by people who understand traditional markets and what it takes to improve them.
The stars aligned once I saw what Avalanche could do. Not only does this give private and alternative markets an incredible technological foothold, but also the scalability to move confidently into the future. It’s not a hacked-together cryptocurrency speculation but a full-fledged enterprise technology stack that enables the distributed future of interoperable financial markets with split-second finality and secure architecture.
Imagine a future where investors can buy shares of private companies as easily as public equities. Imagine a future where real estate can be traded in a second. Imagine equity vesting directly into a founder’s account every year, quarter, month, or even streaming each second.
The speed and security of a distributed future are here and they give markets more opportunities to grow than ever before.
A Business-First Technology Solution: Avalanche
Big thinking has shaped Ava Labs from day one. The standards for the technology are uncompromisable. Gün prioritized getting the technology into people’s hands to begin testing and building so he raised a Series A to get to work right away. Getting the network ready and the code into the hands of the community were paramount — the codebase has been open sourced.
We can build Investery on Avalanche and investors will have access to more than just private alternatives. Avalanche’s technology allows me to bridge all of Wall Street with blockchain. I cannot be more excited to see what’s in store.
