Dan Morehead gathered his princeton mafia to build up in Bitcoin at $ 65 in 2013, leaving his career to Wall Street to build a cryptography fund of $ 4 billion

The new operation, launched in 2013, took a roaring start, with the support of two of the former princeton colleagues from Morehead, Pete Briger and Mike Novogratz, both of the Fortress Investment Capital Giant. The trio looked with Glee the bitcoin bought by Pantera at an initial price of $ 65 has climbed to more than $ 1,000 by the end of the year. But then, the disaster struck while the pirates cleaned the main exchange of the cryptographic industry and the MT Gox, and the price of Bitcoin dropped by 85%. “People said,” Didn’t you do this bitcoin thing that died? ” “, Remember Morehead. “It’s always alive!” He would answer.

During his trip in 2016 to Evangelize Bitcoin, Morehead took 170 meetings, each time in the office of a potential investor and to spend an hour to explain why the new currency was the most convincing opportunity possible. The result: he managed to raise only $ 1 million for his flight fund. Worse still, the more Morehead’s fees totaled around $ 17,000. “I won $ 100 per meeting, going trying to evangelize people to buy bitcoins,” he said Fortune.

Less than a decade later, while Bitcoin pushes $ 120,000, Morehead’s Brutal Early Slog resembles the fabric of founding mythology – just up there with the stories of Steve Jobs of Apple and Steve Wozniak which tinker with jobs of jobs for parents, or Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, Omaha.

Today, Pantera manages more than $ 4 billion in active in various cryptography funds. Its participations include digital assets such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, as well as venture capital investments in projects such as Circle, which became public in June, and Bitstamp, which was acquired by Robinhood earlier this year for $ 200 million. But what distinguishes the company from the crowded field of Crypto VCS is its status as an early meeting as a light bridge between the buttoned world of traditional finance and the cryptographic sector formerly renigade. At the center is Morehead, a figure unknown in an industry dominated by characters larger than life.

“I am very stubborn, and I am totally convinced (Bitcoin) will change the world,” explains Morehead Fortune. “So I continued.”

Princeton’s mafia

Back before Wall Street infiltrated the blockchain industry, Morehead remained in the chaotic world of the first crypto. A athlete of two sports in Princeton in football and the heavyweight crew, Morehead always has the broad shoulders and the square jaw of his youth. The figure he cut was far from the iconoclastic and iconoclastic types that spent most of their time on electronic babibllards on the Internet. Morehead, on the other hand, came from the conventional world of finance. It is still rarely spotted without blazer.

Morehead had already had a long business career before discovering Bitcoin. After stays at Goldman Sachs and Tiger, he started his own Hedge Fund, Pantera, who collapsed during the 2008 financial crisis, roughly when a dark figure called Satoshi Nakamoto presented Bitcoin to the world in an online white book.

Morehead heard of Bitcoin for the first time in 2011 of his brother in 2011 and was vaguely aware that a Princeton classmate, Gavin Andresen, directed a website that gave 5 bitcoins to any user for resolving a CAPTCHA (current street value: $ 575,000). But Morehead did not think about it much before a few years later, when another classmate, Briger, invited Morehead to a cafe at the Bureau of San Francisco de Fortress to talk about crypto, with Novogratz calling. “Since then, I have been possessed by Bitcoin,” said Morehead.

Technology is famous for its so -called “mafias” – shutters of eminent organizations like Paypal who run the next generation of startups. In Crypto, it is not a company but a university, with Princeton responsible for some of the most influential projects in the industry. Briger and Novogratz both served as key contributors from Pantera, with more Dehead who was even heading in an empty office space at the SF office in Fortress. BRIGER remains a powerful presence, although behind the scenes, in crypto, recently assaulting on the board of directors of the 100 billion dollars detention of Michael Saylor, Strategy. Novogratz then founded Galaxy, one of the largest cryptography conglomerates. And another classmate, Joe Lubin, has become one of the co -founders of Ethereum.

But in 2013, he still seemed eccentric that Ivy League graduates working in the radified fields of investment capital and macro trading would be interested in Bitcoin. Briger says Fortune That he learned for the first time from Wences Casares, an Argentinian entrepreneur and a first adopter of cryptography, while sharing a room in a young organization of presidents gathering in the islands of San Juan. Briger quickly saw the attraction of the upheaval of the global payment system – a point that he sticks today, although he maintains that Bitcoin is still in its infancy. He says that Bitcoin reflects the promise of the Internet, which facilitated a new form of information flow. “The fact that the movement of money does not occur in the same way is a real shame,” he said.

After sharing the idea with Novogratz, they thought that Morehead, who had experience in the exchange markets, would be the right person to provoke. When Morehead decided to devote the rest of his financial career to Crypto, he renamed Pantera as Bitcoin funds and opened it to external investors. BRIGER and NOVOGRATZ both signed as limited partners, with Fortress and venture capital companies and RIBBIT taking issues of general partners, although they retire later. His former mentor at Tiger, legendary investor Julian Robertson, even supported a subsequent fund.

Pantera’s rebirth

At the start of Hurley-Burly from the crypto, the entrepreneurs had to face booms and dramatic busts that make today’s volatility look like minor blips. But the roller coaster mountains were not the biggest headache, recalls Novogratz. He was just trying to get BTC first.

He went to Coinbase, then one year old, to try to buy 30,000 bitcoins, which would have sold for around $ 2 million. He met a pop-up that his limit was $ 50. After trying to work with Olaf Carlson -Wee – the first Coinbase employee, who would become a famous full -fledged crypto character – the company has agreed to increase its limit to $ 300.

However, the most impressive realization of Morehead can resolve it during the slump from 2013 to 2016, when the prices remained in the basement and no one outside the island community of the blockchain, was not part of the bitcoin. “In these quiet years when crypto was not shit, Dan was there, beating the sidewalk,” said Novogratz Fortune.

This time always had its highlights, including three annual conferences organized by Morehead outside its house in Lake Tahoe. To one, Jesse Powell, the founder of the Kraken exchange, chose to take a private plane chartered by Morehead and led to the place. “There was a sufficiently large fraction of the Bitcoin community (over there) that it feared that the plane was crashed, it would make Bitcoin fall,” recalls Morehead.

Unlike many of his compatriots, Morehead has never positioned himself as a “maximum bitcoin” or someone who maintains that no other cryptocurrency should exist. After buying 2% of the Global Bitcoin Supply, Pantera became a first investor in Ripple Labs, who created Digital Asset XRP. “The way I think about it is Bitcoin is obviously the most important,” explains Morehead. “But there is not an internet business.”

According to Morehead, Pantera has made money out of 86% of its venture capital investments. It is an astonishing figure since the vast majority of startups supported by VC fail. The crypto can be more indulgent since many projects are delivered with a cryptocurrency that accompanies it, which means that the speculative value often continues even if the product of a startup is nowhere.

Morehead now spends half of his year in Porto Rico, which has become a home for the crypto. Joey Krug, then partner of Pantera and now at the Founders of Peter Thiel, had moved there, and Morehead decided to take the plunge. He estimates that there are 1,000 blockchain entrepreneurs on the island, although they had a meticulous exam for having increased real estate prices. Morehead faced an investigation by the Senate finance committee for having violated federal tax laws by moving on the island and earning more than $ 850 million in capital gains in Pantera. He said to New York Times Earlier this year he thought he “acted appropriately with regard to my taxes” and refused to comment more on Fortune.

Bitcoin’s future

Morehead acknowledges that a large part of the cryptography industry is saturated with games of chance, Pantera remaining away from the same, unlike many other venture capital companies. However, he argues that he should not distract from the wider objective of the blockchain to reshape global finance. “It is ridiculous to try to dismantle the blockchain industry because of a small slideshow,” he said. “(Gamesop) does not mean that the entire American stock market is tainted.”

Pantera continues to grow, in particular the collection of a fifth venture capital fund with a target of $ 1 billion, which, according to Morehead, says that the company will close after having finished investing in its fourth fund later this year. Pantera has also moved into the fields of digital assets, where listed companies buy and organize cryptocurrencies on their balance sheets.

But Bitcoin remains at the heart of Pantera’s strategy. At the end of last year, its Bitcoin fund reached 1,000x, with a life return of more than 130,000%. When asked for a prediction in which Bitcoin heads, Morehead has always had the same answer: the price will double in a year. For the most part, the simple model worked, although Morehead admits that rapid growth days slow down. He maintains that Bitcoin will always increase another order of magnitude, which means that it will approach $ 1,000,000, although it is the last time that it will have an increase of 10 times.

Morehead is happy to exhaust the criticism if Bitcoin never reaches this step. In 2016, after all, he had trouble asserting the cryptocurrency at $ 500. And less than a decade later, it is just beginning. “I have the same conviction – the vast majority of institutions are zero,” he said Fortune. “It looks like we still have a few decades to do.”