20 Months, 2 Weeks (Addendum)

Bullion… who?

It has been nearly 2 years (20 month, 2 weeks) since my last post on this site (Fin). A short time after writing that post I cleaned up the blog, removing a lot of the content that wasn’t ‘timeless’. The rest will remain live until I decide I no longer want to pay to retain the domain or until Google does away with Blogger which is hosting this content.

If you weren’t already aware, I did shortly after that last post de-anonymise myself and I am now posting under my real name on Twitter.  

I am writing this addendum for 2 reasons.

The first is to share the startups I have been working on.

I wanted to share these ventures because if you previously read my articles as Bullion Baron, perhaps you may be interested in what I am writing about and spending my time on now.

Secure Nest: I have been working on Secure Nest for over 4 years. The platform is designed to support people with mental health problems. People who haven’t had all their needs met in childhood (many of us!), resulting in long term unhealthy patterns in thinking and behaviour. Our mission is to increase the accessibility of schema therapy (a therapy designed to resolve these long standing patterns) to enrich the wellbeing of individuals. You can signup for the newsletter here, which I write a considerable portion of.

SOCIETY2: I started working on SOCIETY2 this year. I was looking to build a new venture and found myself excited by the prospect of working in the distributed ledger technology (DLT) space. I have long had an interest in cryptocurrencies, since discovering and buying my first Bitcoin in 2012 (selling way too early, doh!) and writing about it here and on Twitter since 2013. More than anything the opportunity that excites me about DLT is enabling choice, in much the same way as precious metals do. Gold and Bitcoin, while very different assets (in my opinion), enable investors a choice to own a monetary asset which isn’t controlled by a single third party. People have the ability to ‘opt out of the system’. I think at the heart of it that is driving my passion to work on SOCIETY2. I can see a framework for decentralised social media (DeSM) providing choice to those using social and communication platforms. This is not an easy concept to explain and we are just getting started, but if you are interested in reading my posts again I would recommend signing up for the newsletter on our site. I have an article coming out soon on the current landscape of DeSM and where I see SOCIETY2 fitting into the future.

The second reason I wanted to make this post was to share an investment opportunity with readers.

Since entering the startup sector through my own ventures I have taken a keen interest in investing in other startups too, which are speculative early-stage companies, with potentially lucrative returns if you back one which finds product-market fit and scales rapidly. I really like Jason Calacanis’ approach to investing in startups (see his book Angel) which includes distributing your capital across a number of companies. Before I started networking in this space though, I had no idea how to find these early, but risky companies to assess and invest in. One of the early startup companies I invested in last year (along with a number of other readers) is now raising a pre-seed round of funding and preparing to launch their service after rigorously testing it for the past couple of years. Unlike many companies who would struggle in the current (COVID) environment, this one is likely to thrive in it and they’ve bought on some exceptional talent in preparation for the launch. If you have investment capital, where A$10k wouldn’t be too significant a portion to put into a single company and you are interested, but locked out of investing in early-stage startups send me an email at [email protected] or DM me on Twitter and I’m happy to share a bit more and introduce you to the founder / chairman of this company (remotely of course!).

That’s it, that’s the post.

It feels a bit self-promotional on reflection (sorry!), but given my new foray into a second startup venture I wanted to share the news with past readers in case you wanted to see what I am writing about now and join me there.

For the record… gold and related miners have been performing quite spectacularly over the time since my last post. I am still very bullish on them over the medium term, though my interest will be in cycling out from such a heavy position in the years ahead as I diversify across other assets. I will continue to hold a core position in physical precious metals though, there’s no other asset, digital or otherwise, that can provide the insurance and SANF as safely stored physical bars and coins.

Cheers,
Joseph (aka Bullion Baron)