Exploring Crypto with Thomas Lee: Insights from Fundstrat and Bitmine
Thomas Lee, Chief Executive Officer of Fundstrat and Chairman of Bitmine, joins theCUBE at the New York Stock Exchange Wired to discuss the evolving landscape of cryptocurrency. With an extensive background in macroeconomics and equities, Lee delves into the performance of Bitmine, noting its remarkable growth in market capitalization and revenue within just two weeks. This interview, hosted by John Furrier of SiliconANGLE Media, offers a rare opportunity to gain insights from a leading authority in finance and crypto.
The video begins with Lee sharing expertise on the transformation of the crypto space, highlighting the growth of Bitmine and its listing on the New York Stock Exchange. Key discussion points include the rapid adoption of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, the emergence of stablecoins, and the growing interest from institutional investors. Lee addresses how the crypto sector shapes the future of financial markets, discussing both challenges and opportunities.
Viewers gain valuable insights about the importance of recognizing the regulatory landscape and the role of stablecoins in the broader financial system. According to Lee, Ethereum has emerged as a major player, especially with the rise of tokenization and blockchain's integration into financial services. The conversation also touches upon strategic moves by leading financial institutions to embrace crypto, which Lee asserts is crucial to their future success.
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Alexandra Debow, SWSH
Exploring Crypto with Thomas Lee: Insights from Fundstrat and Bitmine
Thomas Lee, Chief Executive Officer of Fundstrat and Chairman of Bitmine, joins theCUBE at the New York Stock Exchange Wired to discuss the evolving landscape of cryptocurrency. With an extensive background in macroeconomics and equities, Lee delves into the performance of Bitmine, noting its remarkable growth in market capitalization and revenue within just two weeks. This interview, hosted by John Furrier of SiliconANGLE Media, offers a rare opportunity to gain insights from a leading authority in finance and crypto.
The video begins with Lee sharing expertise on the transformation of the crypto space, highlighting the growth of Bitmine and its listing on the New York Stock Exchange. Key discussion points include the rapid adoption of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, the emergence of stablecoins, and the growing interest from institutional investors. Lee addresses how the crypto sector shapes the future of financial markets, discussing both challenges and opportunities.
Viewers gain valuable insights about the importance of recognizing the regulatory landscape and the role of stablecoins in the broader financial system. According to Lee, Ethereum has emerged as a major player, especially with the rise of tokenization and blockchain's integration into financial services. The conversation also touches upon strategic moves by leading financial institutions to embrace crypto, which Lee asserts is crucial to their future success.
In this theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Mixture of Experts segment, Alexandra Debow, co-founder and CEO at swsh, joins theCUBE’s John Furrier to explore how AI-powered shared albums turn live experiences into persistent, searchable content that reconnects people after the moment. Debow explains swsh’s event-first approach – supplementary to platforms like Instagram – highlighting features such as “find pics of you,” brand/object detection, semantic search (e.g., “two people with microphones”) and AI-driven best-shot selection. She also shares why albums are private and...Read more
exploreKeep Exploring
What inspired the creation of swsh and how has it evolved in its usage?add
What role does social media play in sharing experiences and memories from events?add
What does the platform swsh aim to achieve in terms of in-person social interactions and connections?add
>> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE here at our New York Stock Exchange Studio. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. This is our mixture of experts here. We talk to the entrepreneurs, founders, leaders in the industry who are making things happen. Of course, the mixture of experts goes into our AI corpus and hopefully makes great content for you. Alexandra Debow is here, co-founder and CEO of swsh, S-W-S-H, that's the app name. joinswsh.com, that's the URL. I think that's the URL, right?
Alexandra Debow
>> Yes.>> Did I get it right?
Alexandra Debow
>> Yeah.>> Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on.
Alexandra Debow
>> Thank you. Thanks for coming and thanks for having me. It's an awesome, awesome studio you guys have.>> We had a meeting before we came on camera, showing some of the product, the features. I love photo apps. Even going back to the or web 2.0 days into now, and I think we lost that with a Facebook, but you guys have a killer app right now. I love the focus. Explain swsh, the founding of it. What is the product? Just give the quick highlights.
Alexandra Debow
>> Absolutely. So, we started swsh because I grew up in Hong Kong, which is a place where people move around a lot. So, it was always really important for me to find a way to help reconnect with people after a party and event. And frankly speaking, by the time I got to college, the way you follow up with someone after is, "Hey, can you send me the photos of me?" And you're like, "Who is that cute guy I met?" And photos are such an awesome way or an excuse rather, to retain and maintain those relationships. So, we started building these really cool shared albums. Obviously in the advent of AI, we were able to utilize AI for really cool tools we've never been able to do before, like filtering for the best photo that AI determines or filtering for photos you are in, photos that other people are in. And creating these easy-shared, very lightweight albums that people find social and fun, but also a lot of utility. What we've been able to understand now is it's not just photos, obviously it's videos, it's live photos, it's content. We're no longer living in just a photo space, it's an aggregation of content that can be shared as a start of conversation. And as swsh grew really quickly on college campuses, primarily within sororities and frats, people started taking it over the weekends to use in a bunch of other places. They started taking it to music festivals and concerts and sports games, et cetera. So, we started then partnering with some of the largest music festivals, concert tours, sports leagues, large events in the world. And now, powering stuff like you guys. So, it's been really cool to see the evolution, and ultimately, that photos act as a vehicle to reconnect people afterwards.>> Yeah, and we've been using swsh a lot on theCUBE. NYC Wired has been an easy way to use it, so great ease of use. So, thanks for doing that, really grateful. But photos also connect people. And you guys have a lot of other features, like there's a social component, there's some engagement. What has been the top kind of, I won't say seller, but it's like the top feature that gets people coming back? I mean, albums are great, but is it sharing after?
Alexandra Debow
>> Totally.>> What is the main highlights that are jumping out at the feature side?
Alexandra Debow
>> Yeah, there's, I would say two things, I'll point out, number one, just from a value prop. Number one is find pics of you. Everyone likes to find photos of you. So, from a consumer point of view, like someone like me, I want to filter photos that I'm in, but from a brand point of view or a company point of view, if Coca-Cola is sponsoring a Coachella, for example, you want to find the photos of Coca-Cola immediately. We can use AI tools to find all the organic content that has that. The second tooling is being able to find the photos most relevant to be able to share. So, these could potentially be, "Oh, my gosh, this was someone that I wanted you to meet," or, "Hey, this was a moment that's there." Potentially for clients, "This is the presentation." It's your internal point of view of the filtering and aggregation and the other opponent of filtering and searching for someone you want to share it with.>> On the photo album side, because people see Instagram, TikTok, I mean Instagram basically was photo was the killer app, but that's out there already. So, how do you talk about the Instagram dynamic? The people who use Instagram, millions, millions of people use it-
Alexandra Debow
>> Of course, and .>> So, it's not a replacement for Instagram.
Alexandra Debow
>> No.>> So, the positioning is what?
Alexandra Debow
>> Definitely. So, the supplementary is live experience, swsh and then Instagram or LinkedIn or Twitter, whatever that may be for you. What we realize is that when you go to an event, like today for example, or if you go to a sports game or a trip, you're probably taking, especially in this day and age, you're not worried about storage, you're probably taking hundreds of photos in a moment that matters to you, but you're only going to upload the two or three highlights. Like we were speaking earlier about how you have all these amazing AI tools to find the most viral moments, it's because those are the things that anyone externally only cares about. But in reality, if you're there and you're with people collectively that share that experience, you actually want to see all the content together. And the social contract of you sharing an album of people being there in-person allows you the opportunity to be able to share that. So, while Instagram owns the behavior and should own the behavior of best photo, maybe two best photos, swsh holds the behavior of drag and select, which is that feature when you're thinking about when you're dumping->> And also, photo streaming, for lack of a better word.
Alexandra Debow
>> Exactly.>> Everyone takes a lot of photos, but they curate what they post to Instagram because they care about not just having a bad photo because they want to look good.
Alexandra Debow
>> Exactly. And then, yes, of course we help figure out what the best photos are for sharing, as I mentioned. Photos of you being able to search semantically with AI, photos of two people sitting down with microphones on. But ultimately, there is such an aggregation of content that needs to be in one centralized place that we help with.>> Yeah, I love the event focus, the live event, because I think those moments are really what people gather around.
Alexandra Debow
>> Totally.>> And more and more face-to-face now more than ever. Certainly, we're four years past COVID, we're like, "Hey, we love these live experiences where the humans are actually there. And not some digital..." Well, digital's fine, but you've married digital with first-party face-to-face. That's real right now. Are you seeing that?
Alexandra Debow
>> Absolutely. It's so ironic where you think pre-COVID people already were in-person, but it's almost like the trough of COVID made people re-remember why in-person is so important and it's such an alpha. Being in a curated dinner party or a trip with friends or a music festival, concert. The joke of why and the ultimate vision for swsh is building the largest ever and the first ever in-real-life social graph. Your Instagram is your social graph. Your Facebook or maybe your LinkedIn is more your professional graph. Your Twitter is your interest graph, but no knows who you've been in physical proximity with. And the only way to prove that is if you're actually in a physical photo with them. And so, with swsh, we're on this front-end growth angle, being able to create and growth hat on top of existing social graphs of who you're with in-person. Who do you go to parties with? Who do you go to concerts with? Who do you go to sports events? Who do you go to corporate events with? If you're in a photo, if you're in an album with them, it means you're with them in-person, so it means they're probably more valuable to you. And so, if we own that social graph, we're more likely to tell you who to work with, who to be friends with, who to marry. All that stuff.>> Well, that's great. I love the AI assist on that one.
Alexandra Debow
>> Yeah.>> One of the things with theCUBE, 16 years, we're known for doing event coverage. And I got to tell you one of the things we totally agree with you on is that for the first time, this face-to-face, physical, digital, first-party fusing together, if you look at Nvidia's CEO, Jensen Huang, he talks about physical AI. You're basically doing the photo version, content version of what you are digitally and physically together and using AI to say, "Hey, this is your physical representation," like a digital twin of the experience.
Alexandra Debow
>> Exactly. Exactly. It's a really great way of looking at it, for sure. Especially because when you think about an experience, you only have one perspective. If you're having your party, if you're having your dinner or whatever it may be, you've only experienced it through your eyes, but in a swsh album, you get to relive that moment in 20,000 different perspectives. What is the brand point of view? What was someone else's point of view? What was the point of view from the back of the room? And so, you were able to splice and split these moments to be able to create new content, create new experience, create new connections based upon reliving it in a really unique way.>> Are there demographic differences on the user behavior? I take photos all the time. I'm a mad man. I just take zillion photos.
Alexandra Debow
>> I love it.>> Because it's digital, we get the right one. So, here I can ingest them in. Is there like a editor zone? Okay, the pre zone of photos? Do people take photos like me? Is that common?
Alexandra Debow
>> So, so common. The joke is that people's Instagram and people's camera will look so diametrically different because Instagram is ultra, ultra curated and people's phones and people, there's no memory storage. There's no, "I have a roll of film left." People are taking as many photos as possible. So, there needs to be a middle ground where you're able to have this aggregation and repository of people who are in the same moment sharing their photo albums from that moment, and then being able to find the best ones to post. Because if you're missing them, you're actually not even finding the best moments, best angles, best moments and connection. So, you're user behavior that you're describing, which is around hyper-obsession, everyone is that. There's obviously some->> So, I'm normal?
Alexandra Debow
>> You're very normal. You're very, very, very normal. We have millions and millions and millions of photos and videos. So, I can tell you with content that you are. And when people are given the opportunity to share photos, especially in a shared environment where it's like, "Hey, this is an album where it's normal and encourage for you to share photos, please do so." People want to do that. People want to contribute to things that they care about. May that be Comic-Con, may that be a football game, be that may a corporate event. If someone is told, "Hey, it's not weird for you to share a photo because you were here," people will share all the photos .>> And user-generated content has been around for a long time, multiple generations of tech. I just like how you're bringing together because an independent a live, real life... And that's different than iPhotos or Google Photos because they're just a repo.
Alexandra Debow
>> Totally.>> How do you handle that objection when someone says, "Hey, I have iPhotos. I mean, I have photos on my Mac or I got Google Photos." They try to roll up an album, but it doesn't do a good job.
Alexandra Debow
>> Yeah, it's different use cases, right? Photos, similar to text, is just a form of communication. There is incredible amount of text platforms, Word doc, Google Pages, Twitter, LinkedIn, these are all text platforms, but the usage of it, the market of it's totally different. So, similar to iCloud and Google Photos, to any other photo app, it's different use cases. We're really targeting these live events with shared albums where photographers, attendees. Everyone's a photographer now, so being able to target the two aspects of it being something that everyone is sharing and that people are contributing to really allow us to be able to utilize our AI to create the best experience.>> I love what you're doing. Talk about the origination story. She's not here, but your sister was here earlier when we were going through the product because we're going to use it at theCUBE and NYC Wired. We working with your sister, founding the company. Talk about the origination story. How did it start?
Alexandra Debow
>> Yeah, absolutely. So, I actually started... My sister, she was an intern for us, so it's always awesome to work with family, but I started the company with two of my friends, one of which I actually grew up with in Hong Kong, so I've known for a super long time. The three of us were all juniors at the time, around three years ago. And we were just hacking and building a bunch of different projects from our dorm room. We built a bunch of different apps all around this idea of swsh. Swsh actually stands to the phrase, see you somewhere somehow. And the idea is that we grew up around the world traveling a lot and it was really difficult to stay in touch. So, we would always say to our friends and family, "See you again, somewhere, somehow." So, that's where swsh comes from. So, fall of->> But you had a desire to keep in touch. The photos were the gravity around everything-
Alexandra Debow
>> Exactly. And we tried a bunch of stuff. So, we ended up dropping out of school actually at the top of 2023. So, we raised money, dropped school, the full Silicon Valley thing. And we built a ton of different apps and it's super, super important for any young founders or entrepreneurs out there to think about specifically in consumer or prosumer products that things are going to iterate. That you have to believe in your team, believe in the ultimate vision. Things are going to always be hard until you find something that starts to work.>> So, you did raise some money?
Alexandra Debow
>> Yeah.>> And you're based in California or New York?
Alexandra Debow
>> We're based in New York.>> Okay, got it.
Alexandra Debow
>> Yeah. Raised money. Based here. And yeah, we built a bunch of different products. We built a calendar app, we built a share rating your location and your sports data. We built a finsta. We built a bunch of different products, until ultimately we landed on this because it was what we kept coming back to. We'd host these launch parties at different colleges and people after all these launch parties would be like, "Super fun, blah, blah, blah. Can you send me the photos of me? Can you send me the photos of that girl?" And we're like->> Yeah, air travel them to me or send them to-
Alexandra Debow
>> Exactly. Exactly. They shared this moment they wanted to reconnect and photos were just the vehicle to do so.>> And you can make it private too, right? You can make these private?
Alexandra Debow
>> Of course.>> Okay. Here's the first draft of the photos.
Alexandra Debow
>> For sure. Yeah, these albums are inherently private, similar, so to a WhatsApp or like an iMessage, you have to be invited to an album to join an album. They're not inherently public or discoverable on the app at this time.>> Talk about how long you guys been in business and what's the current momentum?
Alexandra Debow
>> Yeah, we started about two and a half years ago, and we have been able to roll out kind of, I would say this prosumer model in the last six months. We've been able to power some of the largest music festivals and events in the world. Everything from EDC to Rolling Loud, Cannes Lions, some of the largest events, which has been really, really amazing. A lot of sports, things like that. And we have a lot of huge partners coming up that we're excited to announce.>> All right. So, what's your focus? What's your growth strategy? What are you working on now? What's next?
Alexandra Debow
>> Yeah. Right now we're working on verticalizing and really getting as many partners as customers to help distribute albums, use albums, and really engage with us across different verticals. So, music's been a big one for us across festivals, as well as concerts, sports, tons of different sports leagues. Tons of different sports leagues has been huge too. And then, cultural events, Comic-Con, F1, things like that has been really awesome for us.>> And your strategy on money-making, what's the focus on the revenue model?
Alexandra Debow
>> Yeah, we charge events or brands based on the albums and the usage of that. So, let's say a Coachella will pay for X amount of albums or X amount of usage, but then many times as well for any live events, brands ultimately are footing the bill there. So, it becomes the Heineken-sponsored Coachella album or the Coca-Cola-sponsored F1 album because it becomes an entirely new piece of digital real estate for them to own the content, because when you join the album, you consent to the brand being able to use that. So, it's more organic UGC, it's new real estate, new ways to engage fans, and it's all wrapped up, so everyone's winning.>> I love the branded angle because it's like a festival.
Alexandra Debow
>> Totally.>> I get that Coca-Cola may be sponsoring or Nike or whoever, but I just want the good product.
Alexandra Debow
>> 100%.>> I want the good band.
Alexandra Debow
>> Exactly.>> I want the good band, I want to see the good photos.
Alexandra Debow
>> And they can find the photos that their brand is in. It's organic content. The artists get more photos and the fans get to engage, connect with people. It becomes a win-win-win.>> Alexandra, great to have you on theCUBE.
Alexandra Debow
>> Thank you.>> Congratulations. Love the new idea. I love to see the traction. Any commercial you want to put out there, needs, you hiring? What kind of people are you looking for?
Alexandra Debow
>> Yeah, if you're hosting events, if you're doing anything cultural, sports, music, corporate events, let us know. We're powering the largest events in the world, so we'll help you out.>> All right. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it.
Alexandra Debow
>> Thank you so much.>> All right. theCUBE, bringing in the mixture of experts, of course. As these new apps come in, AI-enabled really changes the game on one, making the products better, but also the user experience. Starting to see that more and more and obviously swsh is a great example. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.
