From Broke to $300M: How He Built the Fastest Growing Digital Asset Firm in the World | Ep3 with Jake Claver

Welcome to Perseve Reality, on your host Nadia Atval. My guest today is the leading voice in the reimagined Welk Management, and he has a lot of interesting details to tell. Welcome to the show, Jake Laver. Thank you for having me. Jake, I want to know all about your company, but first I would like to know what inspired you to go into that industry and how to do all start and develop for you. So back in 2020, I was doing some M&A consulting and I had put some money in digital assets. And I'd gone to school for finance and I'd actually stayed out of the stock market for a long time, but when COVID happened and the market fell, I saw the opportunity and I jumped in with both feet. So it was in traditional stocks, just bought Facebook, Amazon, Google, Tesla, rode those back up. And when it got back to the same levels, I did pretty well on that. And I just looked at D-risk, you know, and I was watching a lot of things about Austrian economics, Peter Schiff, and I happened to catch a debate between him and a Bitcoin guy. And that's when I started to understand what these digital assets were and why everybody was so crazy about them back in 2017 when we saw the run up in Bitcoin. And so I took a leap of faith and I took all the money that I made in the stock market and I rolled it into digital assets, diversified across a few positions that I thought made sense. I look at these the same way I would equities. You look at the partnerships, the problem they're solving, the use case of the asset, the traction that they have in the industry, the total addressable market for what they're trying to accomplish. And so I got a 13 different positions and went pretty heavy in those and timing played out for me. I ended up making a lot of money in 2021 and I didn't come from money. So, but I'd gone to school for finance. I knew I needed to surround myself with specific individuals, CPAs, estate planners, tax attorneys, a wealth manager, maybe a CIO. And so I started calling around to all of these different people across the US that said that they work with digital assets. And I found out very quickly that there was a big gap in the market for these individuals. And I would do down to the 15 people we work with today and kind of curated services for myself and my estate. And then I got on social media in 22 and started talking about how I was mitigating taxes and establishing structures to be able to mitigate taxes and protect my assets. And I was met with a deer in the headlights look from most people because again with no regulation around this. A lot of people just have stayed away from it. And so we doubled down at that point and people were nice enough to make a few introductions to some family offices that had allocations. We started consulting for them. And then in 24 we launched our SEC registered RAA. And now we provide institutional custody, wealth management, segregated accounts that are insured and bankruptcy remote for our clients. And we provide really creative ways for them to be able to journey returns on top of their digital assets. We currently manage about 300 million today all in digital assets. What are the red flags in the digital assets world? So we don't know what they're going to be considered, right? There is no right. I know what I think they are. I bet you said you have no take on that. We don't have any guidance from regulators or Congress on what some of these are. SCFTC governs Bitcoin and maybe Ethereum as well. We'll see how that shakes out. And then we have some clarity that SRP itself is not a security from the case with Ripple. But there's still a lot of these that are up in the air when it comes to what they're going to be over the long term. And so we've just made sure that we're buttoned up on every end. We have a little licenses and certifications to be able to provide these services irrespective of which asset class they fall into. And so just doing everything that we can, talking to regulators, working with them on a regular basis, be able to ensure that we're doing everything at a high standard and actually kind of set the standard for the industry. You are working with people who are highly accomplished, they're high net worth and ultra high net worth. Yes, ma'am. But how can you make sure also that it's sustainable so that they have a legacy and that also their children will so be well off because some people are very successful, very rich and then somehow gamble it away, maybe also via false advice or just not being careful in general. How do you go about that? Well, so it depends. Are we working with the Gen 1 family office or is this Gen 2 or Gen 3? We have different approaches depending on which those are. We spoke with the family office the other day. They've made a lot of money in real estate. That's their primary investment vehicle. They're going to look to make an allocation of digital assets that's somewhere between 1 and 2% of their total portfolio. And that's the conversation we tend to have with family offices that have already established themselves, managed somewhere between 50 million and a billion dollars. If it's a Gen 1, it's made their money in digital assets. They're much more akin to a lottery winner. They made a really good choice and invested in something early, similar to somebody that builds a company in the nascent industry or something that's emerging. They get some equity and they're a founder and one of those corporations that have a liquidity event that come into a lot of money with low basis. And for those, we always make sure that we start with a family compass or family charter. So we put together a mission statement or values principles and that defines the mission for the next 100 years for the family. We'll put together governance documents to be able to make sure that the next generation or whoever else they want to take care of has certain provisions around how they can access that capital and win. Ethics documents that go along with that to make sure that no people are abiding by what they're supposed to be doing and are ethically aligned with the goals of the family. And then once we have that in place, we're then able to look at the estate structures and how we're going to use those funds to accomplish those goals. If the Vanderbilt said done this, I think that they would still be very wealthy. Unfortunately, they had lost all their money by the third generation. Whereas the Rockefellers and some other successful family offices have been able to curate this and then last much further than three generations. And so that's what we look to help people do that have made a lot of money in digital assets is make sure that they are set up for success and that generations from now have the education and the guidance so that they can maintain this wealth over the lifetimes. So they're basically wealth-proving people and family businesses. Very, very fascinating also how you are combining the digital world with the classic approach to wealth management. What are the goals for your company for this year, for the near future? What is your focus for you? So, growth, obviously, working with, we are the fastest growing RA in the world. We are zero to 300 million in just under seven months. And that's all digital assets. We take those in kind. So very different than your traditional asset manager that would take cash and invest it for you somehow. We take the investments that people have made in digital assets and we provide the institutional grade custody, advisory around those and all the other services I mentioned before. But really trying to merge to your point, TragFi and DeFi. Be that conduit or the bridge that sets the standard in this industry so that people have the same assurances that you get with TragFi and all the benefits with the insurance and segregated accounts and institutional custody as well as the advisory. So you know that you're taking care of and you can sleep at night, which you don't get in crypto. In crypto, we're playing in DeFi protocols. There's hacks all the time. These exchanges go down or go out of business. People go bankrupt and you don't get your coins back. Ever, you might get some cash back when there's a settlement on these lawsuits that take place. We make sure that we mitigate all of those risks. So really just blending all of the benefits that digital assets provide for liquidity, ease of access to things and the appreciation. With traditional mindset and all the benefits that you get there. Sounds like the best of all worlds. So I try to make it that way. Jake, I hope you will join us again. I will follow your work. And I think this is something where people really need to dive into. Now with the digital assets, it's a fascinating words also confusing and people need guidance. It's hard to navigate. If you are just getting into this and you really don't know how to buy or where to buy, we've had one client lost $30 million because they purchased on the wrong platform and thought they were buying one thing and bought something else. And so we don't want that to happen. And that's the other reason we've established what we have is there are a lot of questions and there are a lot of stands out there and you want to be working with professionals that can provide you with a lot of reassurances. And again, I won't say I can't make any guarantees but mitigate those risks as much as possible. Totally. Thank you so much, Jake. That was another episode of perceived reality. Join us again next time.