Connor O’Shea Podcast Transcript
Connor O’Shea 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 Connor O’Shea. Connor O’Shea is the CEO of Bril Finance, which provides a user experience for seamless access to professional grade portfolio management algorithms, enabling users to earn like experts.
At Binance and BNB Chain, he directed corporate development efforts and forged strategic Web 3 and Web 2 partnerships. Prior to Binance, he supported corporate strategy and deal making with JPMorgan Chase. Out of New York, at WPP Kantar, he developed advertising and marketing strategies for FinTech, luxury goods, and CPG clients.
Before that, he was a corporate strategy associate with Strategy& in their Tokyo and London offices, specializing in financial services growth and M& A. Connor dropped out of high school in his freshman year and founded a San Francisco based payment startup, CCKB.
Well, good afternoon, Connor. Welcome to the show.
Connor O’Shea: Thank you for having me.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. This is so fun. We get to do some talking about a little bit about DeFi today and some FinTech background that you had. So, let’s just jump right into the questions. Connor, you’ve had a fascinating journey from dropping out of high school to founding a San Francisco based payment startup, and then moving through roles at JP Morgan Chase, WPP Kantar, and Strategy&. What drove you to take a leap from traditional finance and corporate strategy into the world of startups and eventually defy and blockchain.
Connor O’Shea: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a great question. I think along the short of it is that banks move really slowly, right? Financial services is traditionally all about maintaining the current customers you have and sort of risk aversion rather than building new technologies and innovating.
So a lot of the larger players that you, you’ll, you’ll see, or you’ll work with like a J.P. 99 percent of the time when you see a new feature or something else that comes out of the market, it’s usually through some sort of entrepreneur innovator in the valley who has some kind of a fintech startup and then the bank kind of grabs them and takes them forward.
And after kind of essentially getting a lay of the land and understanding the market, I wanted to get my hands dirty and effectively build something on the ground without the labyrinth of necessary kind of bureaucracy that exists at a large institution.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. And again, the backstory is always typically around our 1st question here, and I just love how people get curious, or they get passionate about something, or they want to create something that’s going to make the world a better place and love that story.
And switching gears a little bit, Connor, could you give us the Bril Finance elevator pitch? The one that would work high level for most any audience. Yeah, sure. So
Connor O’Shea: essentially Bril Finance provides both portfolio management and yield generation products and layman’s terms. We help you organize and allocate your money.
And then lastly, we help you make more through yield generation. Our flagship product yield IQ is a concentrated liquidity provision algorithm that generates compelling returns with simple and painless user experience. Essentially, users just deposit a single token, and they earn passive returns while the algorithm actively accumulates your preferred token and earns fees.
Brian Thomas: Love that. You know, we are a blockchain based publication, but we got into that because we started doing some of the crypto and we did some of that staking or mining as it’s called. And so, I like that opportunity that gives people an opportunity to, again, make some additional passive income. Connor, switching gears again, what was the inspiration behind Braille Finance and how does your experience in both TradFi and blockchain technology shape the vision and operations of Braille Finance?
Connor O’Shea: Yeah, absolutely. I think a few things, but if I were to just be briefly at a high level, I think the big, big pieces is that most people buy tokens and speculate effectively and hold them to see if they go up or down. That’s a huge part of the general zeitgeist of the, the overall market. And we thought, hey, similar to a bank, wouldn’t it be nice if instead of just holding your tokens and sitting and hoping they appreciate deploying them, being able to do something useful with them.
That was really the impetus for creating our yield provision algorithm. So, you know, you buy 10,000 dollars with a BTC and you, you know, hope it goes up. Well, on top of that, you can. You know, lock it in with us and gain, you know, 2 to 2 to 100 percent on it over long-term holding horizon. And then the other kind of element was like, myself, my team, all the people I work with, we all came from FinTech or big tech or finance.
And we loved what the banks are doing in terms of taking care of their customers in a secure and safe manner. But wanted to be able to bring those same products, services, and institutional kind of trust and care to a new, more modern technology that we think will benefit users exponentially more than the existing financial system.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. And I really love that. And that’s why we got in me, especially got into blockchain technology and cryptos because it is such a phenomenon. And as you know, recently with the hype around Bitcoin and the price just skyrocketed just the other day. I really think Bitcoin and some of these cryptos are going to be inflation resistant.
I think to an extent anyway, but again, love that you got into this. I just totally embrace this stuff. So, I get kind of giddy. Me too, man. Yeah. Next question for you here is during your tenure at Binance, you directed corporate development efforts and forged strategic web3 and web2 partnerships. How important are strategic partnerships in the blockchain and DeFi sectors, and how do you approach these partnerships at Bril Finance?
Connor O’Shea: Yeah, I think they’re absolutely critical, right? You generally the, the use case in crypto that all the web two guys love, that’s all the old school finance guys. It’s payments, right? That’s the name of the game. You can make a little bit of money and there’s interest in owning an exchange finance, right?
Which is effectively where you get a cut every time someone makes a trade, but generally speaking. Payments is, is the, is the real use case, right? I mean, I can buy, for instance you know, a BMW in Vietnam and, you know, send 70,000 USD worth of BTC and something like, you know, 30 seconds to 10 minutes for 2.
It’s just it’s a much more efficient way of doing it rather than paying on a credit card or asking to go through, you know, a week or something like that through a bank. So, anything that you can do from a payments perspective is really what those web two companies really want to see. That’s definitely their bread and butter.
With respect to DeFi, I think it’s, it’s an interesting question, right? So, for us, we definitely want to partner with more of the central finance players, right? So, like Coinbase. Among others, to really capture those users who enter the space and don’t want to go through the kind of learning exercises associated with creating wallets for the 1st time.
So, anything from a partnership perspective where you can work to bring customers in in a frictionless way is great. And you have to make that decision basically as a. When you’re building a DeFi company, where do you want to be on the centralization spectrum? For us, we like giving our customers the option and for that we prefer a more DeFi specific solution.
But for others, they’re going to want effectively to be as centralized as possible, and they’re going to want to partner with us so we can provide them new users, new technology, new yield products. We’re going to obviously want to partner with them so that they can help us to bring in new customers into. You know, Web 3 that have traditionally just sat within the Web 2 realm.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. And I appreciate, you know, offering some of those or highlighting, I would say, some of the benefits of moving in this direction with Braille Finance. There’s a lot of benefit again, we’ve got to not listen to those naysayers.
There’s still quite a bit of, you know, information out there around crypto and, and people are skeptical still. And, you know, you get these, unfortunately, things like FTX that really leave a bad taste in people’s mouth. And so, we just need to continue to overcome and show people the, the benefits of moving in this direction. And I think real finance is doing a great job of that.
Connor O’Shea: I always think that’s a fun one because. I spent my whole career in, you know, kind of financial services consulting before I came in the DeFi, right? So I always laugh because for me, FTX is a, is a very small blip on a long, long, long list of scandals that has existed in Western finance at all the major institutions for, you know, hundreds of years, that’s a rounding error compared to, you know, obviously some of the stuff I’ve seen come out of the mortgage crisis in 08 and all of that.
Brian Thomas: Oh, absolutely. And I had somebody on here that serves to 10,000 customers pro bono for the MF Global crisis back in 2011, total corruption, of course. And it just, people don’t realize again, mainstream is telling everybody, Oh, crypto is bad. So, we’re going to fix that. And I, and I definitely see it. So, I appreciate that share Connor.
Last question of the day, based on your experiences at real finance and your observation of the market, where do you see the future of DeFi heading in the next few years, especially in terms of mainstream adoption and regulatory landscapes? Yeah, a hundred percent. So
Connor O’Shea: look, I mean, my old teams and strategy houses all over the world are sitting in the CEO offices of banks.
Trying to make sure that when the banks embrace crypto, they will be the ones who have all the TVL and it won’t sit in defi. I think the opposite is also true, right? You have individuals who love the promise, the flexibility the efficiency, the speed, and the, frankly, the cost of DeFi services, right?
Who hopes to retain those customers. And I think that basically the battle is always going to be there and there will always be a market for both. Now, to what degree users and assets will shift from one to the other, I truly don’t know. I think over time, you’ll probably see the majority of capital, probably say, let’s just say 70%, would be my guess, somewhere in that range, 60, 40, 70, you know, 30, effectively will sit in fully centralized regulated platforms.
Like if I was sitting at JP, for example, one of the first things that I would do is acquire Coinbase. Or if I was Fidelity, right, and pull all of those new tools and services and assets in house. So then suddenly, you know, Binance isn’t really kind of competing and other, other DeFi protocols aren’t competing against, you know, a new entrant with a kind of a FinTech style.
They’re now competing with a battle-hardened bank that has a 200 billion operating budget to conquer you. So, I definitely think that’s coming. But then at the same time, right, at the end of the day, there’s always going to be that need for new products. There’s always going to be that need for things that move faster, quicker, that simply returned better.
And I don’t think that will ever be replicated outside of DeFi. So, I do think there’s room for both, but I would not underestimate the titans coming in and entering the room and the competition getting a lot tougher.
Brian Thomas: Yeah, totally see that. Obviously, it kind of a flip of the narrative around wall street and big banks were big naysayers of Bitcoin.
And now you’ve got some of these people jumping in now with Bitcoin. I don’t know what to think, but I’m always very cautious as I look at the landscape, but you know, this area is better. And I appreciate your insights on that Connor.
Connor O’Shea: I was going to say, I can give you one really tangible example, right?
So, to kind of help answer that question, which is, you know, when I was a JP. It was very common that people wouldn’t understand how intense the regulations are. Right. So, we had at least 30 regulators that I can think of. You know, if you’re a trader, every call that you make is recorded and sent to the Fed.
You’re constantly reporting on everything from assets, liabilities, race, religion, gender, all kinds of things that are measuring you on a, you know, on an hourly basis. You’ve got trillions of dollars that you’re holding under custody and are responsible for, which you’d be criminally negligent if something goes wrong.
There’s not a lot of advantages to publicly embracing something that is relatively risky when you’ve got senators dragging you to D.C. and trying to beat you to death with a club every, every week. But they’re not stupid, right? So, they know this is advanced technology. They’re all going to implement it, but it’s not strategically advantageous for them to publicly endorse it while they’re also making promises to protect everyone’s dollars effectively.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Appreciate sharing that little nugget again. And again, I know your opinion, but I think a lot of us, especially in our audience. Embrace what you’re doing and your sentiment there. We just have a lot of people that need to be educated on the one hand. And on the other hand, it’s fighting that big Wall Street behemoth.
As you know, it was such a pleasure having you on today. And I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Connor O’Shea: Thank you very much. Have a good one, Brian.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Connor O’Shea Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
