$54 billion fund partner runs women-only DAO, LatAm blockchain gaming guild – Cointelegraph Magazine

by Arthur · March 9, 2023

Clara Bullrich must have cloned herself or possibly invoked dark forces that one shouldn’t meddle with. Somehow she’s managed to cram about four careers into one life.

Her main gig is leading her own financial unit, AlTi, which manages a huge investment fund, which grew to $54 billion under management after a recent merger. That is a big enough job in itself.

She is a member of Women in Blockchain, and also runs a DAO for women, Komorebi, which concentrates on funding female and non-gender specific projects.

“I’ve seen in crypto that there are very few women, and I really want to push that as much as I can,” she says. “For me, it’s always important to have skin in the game.”

And if that wasn’t enough, she is also the founder of a gaming guild, Ola Guild Games (OlaGG), which hopes to upgrade a quarter of a billion mobile gamers in Latin America so that they can increase their income using play-to-earn blockchain games .

She tells Magazine that she feels lucky to have been involved in cryptocurrencies, DAOs and the metaverse at this early stage.

“My sons are nine and 11 and will live through the full cycle of what blockchain and crypto is creating right now. And I feel very hopeful about that.”

She comes from Argentina, having studied in the US and Ireland, and worked for a short time for the Spanish bank Santander in the US. She didn’t stay there long. Working in the stuffy, conventional world of traditional finance clearly doesn’t float her boat. Her favorite word is “disturbing”.

“Bitcoin is just money backed by math. I came across it about seven years ago. At first I was very uncomfortable with it, then I thought: The big disturbances are the ones you should go towards.”

Disruptive innovation

After a short stint at Santander, she was headhunted by a rapidly growing Argentinian technology company called Collective Mind. So in 2000, she started a family office firm for high net worth clients under the Guggenheim Partners umbrella. At the time, family offices were not as widespread as they are today.

Over the course of 23 years, she expanded her business from Latin America to other parts of the world. Three years ago, this fund management business became Alvarium Investment Advisors, managing over $20 billion in investments, and recently merged with two other companies to form Alvarium Tiedemann Holdings, AlTi, with over $54 billion under management.

Bullrich had some challenges persuading her clients to invest in “disruptive” technology, including Bitcoin, but first she had to convince her colleagues of the benefits of investing in progress instead of simple money-making schemes.

“My discussions with my partners were very much about, ‘We should invest in technology with technical expertise, not financial expertise.’

Her intention was to support technology that would have beneficial effects in the longer term, rather than just looking at a financial balance sheet.

She established the Digital Assets Committee at Alvarium Tiedemann in 2019.

“What you have to realize is that most people there are traditional investors, so the idea of crypto, blockchain, Web3, digital assets – these were really foreign to them.”

She continues, “And being able to start that committee has allowed me to educate traditional investors about the potential of digital assets and blockchain technology.” She continues, “I wanted to create that level of expertise to be able to understand trends, why certain disruptions make more sense than others.”

She feels the mindset required is more technological and over a longer period of time than in conventional finance. This led, in 2016, to her second company, called The Venture City.

Venture City is an accelerator to promote innovative projects, so it has the financial backing, expertise and support to reach its potential.

An important driving force behind the TVC is to improve access to financial products and services. In some Latin American countries, up to 60-70% of the population do not have bank accounts, limiting their ability to improve their situation. Bullrich sees TVC’s investments as a means of combining technology and financial expertise with a beneficial social product.

“We already have 100 companies that passed through the accelerator and we’re actually starting fund 3. So we did fund 1 with $52 million, fund 2 with $75 [million], and we are going in 2023 with the launch of Fund 3. It was a fantastic experience. Very early on, we talked about community and creating lots of events and educational sessions around the products.”

Here are some examples of the many projects The Venture City has invested in:

Solid exchange: Sturdy.Exchange is an NFT-based Web3 token in the Flow ecosystem. It aims to decentralize music distribution. It is a platform for artists, musicians and entertainers to reach their audience with a new form of ownership and utility using NFTs.

Belo: A wallet app that uses Argentine pesos and crypto with a DeFi return platform built in so users can receive regular returns. It aims to be an accessible cryptocurrency introduction.

Player safe: This is an app to make online multiplayer games safer and more enjoyable, by removing cheaters, fake and duplicate accounts, and policing toxicity and dishonesty in games.

Women in Blockchain

She joined Women in Blockchain (WiB) last year and hopes to develop women’s skills, opportunities and aspirations in the cryptocurrency sector.

“We provide that platform where women can come together and be a part of those conversations and move forward in terms of education,” she says. “We can become connectors of people who need a certain type of expertise, and people with that expertise can connect with those who need it.”

“So, WiB is a completely different animal than my Venture City, which does the deep dive looking for companies and deciding which companies the fund should invest in.”

Core embryo — *Komorebi is a DAO that aims to improve the representation of female and non-binary crypto people. Source: Komorebi*

Diversity in DAOs

Komorebi is a poetic, almost untranslatable, Japanese expression that describes sunlight filtering through trees. There is also a DAO on the Syndicate Protocol, dedicated to increasing diversity and breaking down barriers to entry in the blockchain space.

The thought process behind this was that female-led startups receive only 2.3% of venture funding, but outperform investments with all-male founding teams by 63%, according to Venture Capital firm First Round.

Final Boss: Making a living in a poor country with P2E

Yield and Ola Guild Games: These are DAOs. Yield Guild Games (YGG) was founded by Gabby Dizon and Beryl Li in 2018 to involve Filipino gamers in gaming and cryptocurrency. Players can supplement their earnings with P2E winnings. OlaGG is a subDAO, expanding the successful concept geographically to the Latin American market: Spain, Latin America outside of Brazil and Latin Americans in the United States.

“The idea of Ola Guild Games is to create social and economic inclusion for the Latin American community through games.” The main platform is Axie Infinity, but there are opportunities to engage with other P2E gaming systems as well. The concept took off in the Philippines during the pandemic, with users supplementing their tight budgets or even multiples of their average salary with P2E games.

That seems like a good fit since a third of Spanish speakers’ income is $1.90 per day, which the United Nations defines as extreme poverty. Almost half do not have access to banking or financial products. However, more than 58% of the population in Latin America play mobile games, which equates to a user base of over 273 million people.

“So, the idea of Ola is how can we engage with people, teach them, teach them about these new tools for Web3 – to really create that financial inclusion. It can be through games, and it will be games to earn.”