Alex Hoffman Podcast Transcript
Alex Hoffman joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Alex Hoffman. Alex Hoffman has navigated a life rich with diverse experiences and a relentless drive for entrepreneurship. Growing up in various cities across the Northeast and later relocating to Texas during high school, His sense of wanderlust was evident early on.
His journey has taken him from Nashville to Atlanta, New York to Boston, and even overseas to Bali and Thailand. Hoffman’s entrepreneurial spirit was apparent from a young age. Determined to buy a computer, he undertook a paper route to earn the necessary funds, eventually purchasing a Sony VAIO that symbolized his independence and drive.
Alex’s interest in cryptocurrency began with experimenting with Bitcoin mining on his MacBook in 2011, sparked his curiosity, which further intensified during a series of Solana hackathons with a friend. Today, with 14 years of entrepreneurial experience, Alex Hoffman is the co-founder and head of ecosystems at MovePosition, a universal credit hub designed to provide secure, efficient, and transparent financial services.
Well, good afternoon, Alex. Welcome to the show!
Alex Hoffman: Hey, great to be here. Thanks, Brian!
Absolutely. I appreciate you making the time. Generally. I know you’re out of Austin. We are in that same time zone here centrally, but I know you’re calling from the great state of New Hampshire at the moment. So, time differences can be a challenge, but again, appreciate it.
And Alex jumping into your first question here, your journey in entrepreneurship began at a young age. Can you share more about how that early drive to buy a computer with a paper route influenced your approach to building businesses?
Alex Hoffman: Yeah, sure. So, you know, my father was a serial entrepreneur and he, I guess he still is, but he, he had a successful career.
I watched him try repeatedly to start businesses on the side of, you know, he was, he was working for companies his whole career and he still is. And he was never that successful, but he just kept trying. He had multiple real estate endeavors that he did. He bought a store at 1 point. He had part of a car dealership too.
And I think he really inspired me. To just try over and over again. I think that’s, that’s a big part of entrepreneurship is you’ve just got to keep throwing darts at the wall. You know, it’s funny you say that this narrative now has gone up about me wanting to buy that computer, which I was thinking about this today that I think that’s the only time I’ve ever been driven, and By a specific thing or like the want of a thing to start a company and I’ve been spent half my life starting companies at this point, but ever since then, the drive has been more focused around building a team.
I really get a lot out of that. I really love mentoring people and watching people grow. And just being super excited about a product, you know, there have been multiple times now where I’ve just, I’ve seen an opportunity, and I think my father was the same where he’d see an opportunity and go for it. He just didn’t turn out to be a very good business guy.
I think he’s good at identifying opportunities. And so that has been something that has repeatedly gotten me going as well.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. Your father was a inspiration for you, and you learned a lot from that. And I think our parents can be sometimes our best teachers, best coaches, mentors. So, I appreciate the backstory.
It’s very helpful and love these stories. So, Alex, you’ve had several entrepreneurial ventures, particularly in the healthcare sector, leading to notable acquisitions. What were you, the biggest lessons you learned from those successful exits?
Alex Hoffman: Yeah, you know, I’m going to go back to my father for a second again, because the, the biggest exit I’ve had has been the healthcare company.
And that was when we started that together. And, you know, 1 of the things we found is that I was good at the business side of things, and he’s like an absolute subject matter expert in his area. I think that was one big lesson I’ve had is that you need all sorts of different people to form a company that really works, and you need to focus on what you’re good at and let other people focus on what they’re good.
I think that, you know, another thing that I’ve learned is you learn more from. Your failures than from your successes, and that was one of the things I learned before starting a health care company was, I’m sort of a jack of all trades and I’m pretty quick to learn new things. And so, in early companies that I was starting, I would try to do everything I had a furniture company at 1 point, and I learned so much about SEO and about pay per click advertising online and whatnot.
And I was doing okay with that, but as soon as I hired somebody else to do that for me, who is really an expert at that company did so much better. And so, yeah, I mean, 1, 1 lesson is make sure that you’re, you’re bringing in the right people. Don’t spend your time on something that you can pay somebody else who’s going to do a much better job for a reasonable rate.
Obviously, another big 1, I think, is just to at least for me to stick with my gut. There have been a number of times where I’ve had something frankly go wrong that. I felt really strongly about, and I let a partner make a decision at the end of the day that I disagreed with and one of them is still coming to bite me in the butt today.
Even years later, I’ve been dealing with it this week, a company I’m not even actively involved with anymore. So, I think sort of fine tuning your instinct as a businessperson and then knowing when to trust it is really important. And the last thing I’d say is just to Lead with kindness and generosity, right?
I’ve been in multiple situations with partners where we haven’t seen eye to eye on how people should be compensated and the sort of how you should share information with your team or whatever, you know, it’s, it’s in many ways, those are similar, even though they don’t seem immediately similar. It’s so important to make people feel like.
They’re part of something that makes people feel like, especially with it with an early venture, right? Like, they understand what’s going on. They understand why we’re doing this, even during the really tough moments, you know, when things are going wrong. I mean, I think that oversharing is, in my experience, the right move.
I’d rather I know, personally, like, I’d rather know everything. And so, if I’m on the other side of this, where, where somebody is, you know, Not sharing everything they know and that that’s just going to make me scared and I’m not going to operate as my best self during the good times. You’ve got to make sure that you’re really treating people fairly, compensating them.
Well, making them feel bought into whatever you’re doing.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I think that’s great. You know, there, there’s a lot of key takeaways here. Obviously, life experience is, is the biggest teacher I think in business and life and that sort of thing. Transparency is good. And again, hiring great people, you know, let them, they’re the experts you, you hired them, let them do what they’re good at.
So, I appreciate those messages in there. And Alex, if you could briefly share move position, the company you co-founded focuses on providing secure and transparent financial services. Can you explain what MovePosition does and what motivated you to create a universal credit hub?
Alex Hoffman: Yeah, so I give a little bit of background.
We started building what was, it was originally Concordia, and the company has gone through a couple of evolutions since in order to. Build sort of a cross-chain credit hub, a universal credit hub for crypto, where you could use the assets you have wherever they are and leverage their value wherever you want, which is something that you can do for the most part in traditional finance, a little bit harder in web three and crypto.
And I actually went through a tough moment, another protocol that I’d started got hacked. And that led to some soul searching and to really doubling down on what I wanted to focus on, and we were able to evolve what we were building to be focused more on asset safety than just about, you know, being able to leverage your money wherever you want.
And so, we spent a long time. Working with some of the best people that we could find in the traditional finance world on how portfolios should be valued. And this ended up leading us to build what is now superposition and move position. There are 2 products that are basically the same thing on different chains, which is an extremely safe and efficient money market for web 3.
Crypto has an issue in that the way that assets are valued as collateral when you’re wanting to borrow against them is done in a very static and antiquated way. It’s done something akin to like 1920s or 1950s traditional finance and traditional finance has been done Solving these problems basically since the mid-eighties when it was a big crash and every time there’s been another crash they’ve refined these risk models and made them better and better and for some reason the future of finance web three is not utilizing even one year old risk models from traditional finance so that ended up being our focus.
And what we ended up building was a money market that uses what’s called a value at risk model, where it’s actually taking all of the assets and liabilities that you have in your portfolio. And it is looking at how they’re correlated. It’s looking at how volatile each asset is, and it’s trying to determine how much leverage you’re able to take at any given moment.
So, the outcome of this is. A lot of what people are trying to do, whether it’s in traditional finance or in web 3, they are taking correlated assets and they’re going long against them. So, the easy web 3 example is there are what’s called liquid stake derivatives. And people will borrow liquid stake derivatives against the core derivative on the ecosystem or the core asset on the ecosystem so that that would be ETH on Ethereum, and they use ETH too, or they really are using liquid stake to borrow ETH against it.
Since those two are correlated, you can trade between them and go in and out of those two assets. You should be able to go super long and get a lot of a lot of value for your collateral there. But unfortunately, the way that virtually every other money market works in Web3 is they just assign these static values.
If you’ve got liquid state, you’re able to borrow up to 70 percent of the value against it, or you’re able to borrow 80 percent of the value against it, whatever it might be. Whereas we built a system that actually calculates it. That’s what MovePosition is. It allows for extremely efficient and safe borrowing against collateral. Essentially.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that. And you shared, obviously you hit a challenge, you know, with security early on, but also you wanted to solve a problem and the way this automatically calculates these for you makes it a lot easier for the average Joe that wants to get into this market and start do some investing and buying of things is just opening that door for more and more people to DeFi train as I call it.
So, thank you. And Alex, last question of the day, looking ahead, what trends in cryptocurrency, blockchain or fintech excite you the most and how do you see move position playing a role in shaping the future of financial services?
Alex Hoffman: So, I originally got into a defy and a web three mainly because I was excited about democratization of the sorts of financial products that I don’t have access to most people don’t have access to unless you’re, you know, a large fund or a high net worth individual.
A lot of the ways that these groups make money. It just, it’s, you know, it’s not something that, that we have access to at all, unless you want to drop 10, something. So the tokenization of real world assets is something that I think really, as we drive that forward, it’s going to get super interesting, allowing people to sort of make money in new creative ways that as an individual is not worth 100 million.
I’ve never been able to before. It’s a big part of why we built these products, really, you know, they support ETH and USDC and whatnot, all these tokens right now, but it’s all meant to be future facing for as that future starts to evolve, where we’re seeing more products. A really interesting one I saw recently was a company that takes whole life insurance policies, and they allow you to tokenize them and borrow against them because that’s an asset that I think there are some ways to borrow against a whole life policy, but it’s not easy. And if you just tokenize it, then it’s a very clear-cut thing to do at that point. Assuming you’ve got something like move position or superposition, or you can just drop that collateral in there.
The other thing. Is the abstraction of really the experience of blockchain away from, from how users are using it right now using any sort of defy is funky and it’s complicated to my friends regularly. Hey, how to do that. Should I be doing this? You know, and I’m trying to explain to them how to get wallets and how to use their ledger.
And like, a lot of times their eyes just gloss over at that point, because they’re realizing that all of this is more complicated than it should be. And this is a real issue. For web 3 is I’m sure a lot of people listening. No, but the more that that the experience gets abstracted away to where the sort of apps that people are used to using allow for blockchain to be working in the background, you know, the more users there obviously will get into web 3 and the more opportunity there is not like a perfect example of this is, you know, if we were to integrate something like move physician into a Venmo like app, You could use your, your assets that are just sitting in there doing nothing.
You’re probably not even getting interest in them as lending into a pool that we have. And you can just have this happen automatically to where you’re going to automatically get whatever the market rate is on the assets that you’re holding. And this could be really seamless, really simple. And I think there, there are people working on this right now.
So, I’m really looking forward to that future personally.
Brian Thomas: That’s great. It’s awesome. And I’ve had many folks in the Web3 space and beyond talk about tokenization. Real estate’s a big one. Had many guests that were in that space or are looking to get into that space. But you’re absolutely right. There’s, I think, a whole new horizon of different investments that people can get into.
And I think it’s, it’s just very promising. So, I appreciate that. And Alex, it was certainly a pleasure having you on today. And I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Alex Hoffman: Yeah. Thanks so much, Brian. Appreciate it.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Alex Hoffman Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
