#14 - The Bitcoin Believer

I remember waking up every morning terrified that I was going to make nothing of my life in terms of what I wanted to do because I would get too complacent. I probably wouldn't have left as quickly as I did if I hadn't gotten really into Bitcoin. Did you dip your toes in the water with like a hundred bucks or was it a thousand or ten thousand? I won't say the number, but it was fifty percent of the money I had in the world at the time. Cannonballed into the water. Yeah. The Bitcoin. Now what's the Bitcoin? To what some are calling fools gold. The value of each bitcoin hit a new high.$113. More than$2,$9,700. 11,$19,500. Honestly, it was just very clear to me that this was distinct from anything else I'd ever seen and that if it worked, it was unlikely to go from a hundred dollars to two hundred dollars and kind of be done there. To me it was like this either goes fucking huge or it dies. You said you listen to an episode or two. Yeah. What did you say? Yeah, it was it was great. It was so funny'cause I just like randomly came across it and then like you messaged me like the next day or something. Like within day like it was wild. No, I thought it was super interesting. I actually listened to the episode with Sam and it's always interesting to hear people who just had some idea and then just

build it up and and what they actually did in terms of like steps because to your point I think there's a ton of like oh then I did the thing and it's like Yeah but like what things did you actually do? That's why even I was asking all these specific questions around the podcast. I'm just curious about like Steps. I'm very much a fan of the kind of entrepreneurial hustle. I have like always taken the less paved road and so I think it's always fascinating to see the stories of other people who have done that as well in totally different environments. So I was looking at your Twitter beforehand'cause I'm like how the best way to do research is just to read someone's Twitter feed because they're posting all like all of their thoughts. And so you can see how they think. And you had a tweet which was good, which was like I feel like in college everybody should be required to take a test that makes you do a twenty second intro of yourself. This should be required. It's s shockingly bad at just like introducing themselves simply. So I'm gonna put you to the test. Uh you're gonna have to do your twenty second intro here and uh no pressure. And let's see how it goes. So for the audience Who is Ariana Simpson? Sure, yeah. So my name is Ariana Simpson. I'm an early stage tech investor.

I've been involved in crypto for about six and a half years, which practically makes me a dinosaur. And prior to that, I worked at Facebook and a couple other tech startups. Yeah, I love investing. I think that's definitely what I'm gonna be doing for the rest of my life. So I think that's like a pretty strong part of my identity at this point. And did you think you were going to do investing like when you're grown up, you're in college, were you like that's the path I want to go down or Now, if you look back, you can kinda see the seeds of it at various points in time, but it was not obvious at all. My parents are teachers, now professors, have no interest in anything financial. But I always did. I just I like numbers, I liked money, I thought it was interesting and I like things that are quantifiable and specific and that's just kinda how my brain works. And so I was always interested in kind of reading financial history books and things like that. And so that was kind of the impetus for it. But in terms of my academic trajectory, I studied international relations and Spanish and history and thought I was gonna go work at the UN or for the State Department, and then realized I was probably not very well suited to bureaucracy given my lack of patience in general. And so I kind of started thinking about technology and it's just kind of a bizarre how I ended up there, but I

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