Joining me live down here on the trading floor, right at the FinTech TV booth, J.J. Alicea. He is the president of Anagram, making his, I believe, taking stock debut. Nice to have you here.
It is. Thanks so much for having me. And it's great to be here, JD.
Of course. Let's give our viewers, first and foremost, a bit of an introduction, not just to you, but your work at Anagram. What's it all about? And in what ways is it different from maybe more of a traditional venture fund?
Yeah, it's a great question. At Anagram, we focus on two main things, building companies and investing companies. So traditional venture firms raise capital from LPs and then you deploy that capital and you kind of have like these fit duration windows. With Anagram, we have permanent capital. Therefore, we can build companies and continue to reinvest in them for decades.
And you could hear it by the sound of that massive gong that just went off. Everyone's very excited to have you down here. The enthusiasm is through the roof. Why did you choose to combine building products with the general landscape of investing?
I think these two things, kind of like this virtuous feedback loop, where the better you get at building companies, the better you get at picking winners in the investment category. So we like to think that a lot of the knowledge we have from building and our engineering team actually feeds into the investment practice quite nicely.
Can you talk to us a little bit more about the types of products that Anagram is actively involved with today?
Yeah, it's hard to kind of like put down a specific category, but historically we focus on financial infrastructure. So some of the things that you're seeing really like take flight today, we were early movies on like RWA, yields, you know, finding ways to bring the best parts of traditional finance into the crypto ecosystem.
What would you say if you've had this baked out, the long-term vision of Anagram? I've got no doubt you're cooking on a lot of big things for 2026, but even step back a little bit, where do you see this potentially going?
Yeah, we like to think of the long-term vision as working with the best potential founders to grow the entire space. So we think that a byproduct of blockchain technology winning, of crypto winning, means that we've won and our main goal is to support founders in that mission.
What lessons can traditional financial institutions, maybe some of the old school names, learn from your space and learn overall from more modern thinking crypto infrastructure?
Yeah, I think speed of iteration and innovation overall. Those are two things that technology has really, you know, kind of like crushed on. And in traditional finance, you haven't seen that same pace of kind of innovation that you would see in, let's say, healthcare or transportation or, you know, biotech, any of those other domains. So we really want to bring tech to finance.
In what ways do you think traditional finance institutions should be approaching cryptocurrency maybe a bit differently than how they've been thinking about the space previously?
It's a great question. I think right now there is a lot of buzz around kind of like tokenized deposits and banks accepting stablecoins. I think rightfully so. So it's going to be a DeFi mullet, where you get in for the value proposition of stablecoins, and then you stay for yield, composability, and all the other benefits that blockchain interoperability allows for. I'm sorry, was that DeFi mullet? DeFi mullet. That is the DeFi mullet thesis.
Business in the front, party in the back.
Exactly.
I got you. What most excites you? I love that. We're gonna start a new brand, I think, for the show, a new segment. I love it so much. What most excites you about where the general ecosystem is today given all the regulatory changes and just the way we're talking about this stuff a lot differently today than even 18 months ago?
I think it's just a much more constructive environment to be a capital allocator as well to be a builder in this space. So last regime under, you know, Gensler and that kind of like authoritarian type of policy regime, very difficult to innovate, very difficult to build. Today, it's much different. You have a lot more constructive policy. People are actually in the room talking to each other and scoping out the best approach for the consumers as well as the banks and all of the stakeholders. So I think it's just night and day.
J.J, Alicea, president of Antigram, my man. Come back down and see us here on Taking Stock anytime.
It's great to have you here. Enjoy your weekend. Yeah, thanks so much, JD. Really appreciate it.
