How Bloccelerate’s founder turned early conviction into a thriving venture capital platform
Subscribe: iTunes / Spotify
Apply to be a guest on our podcast here
Show Notes:
In this episode of Mission Matters, Adam Torres interviews Kate Laurence, CEO of Bloccelerate (BC VC), about her journey from enterprise research to launching a blockchain-focused venture fund. Kate shares insights on navigating early market skepticism, building strategic founder networks, and scaling in a rapidly evolving Web3 landscape.
About Bloccelerate (BC VC)
A global decentralized engine for blockchain innovators. Bloccelerate is a platform for blockchain products and services to actualize their true potential. Providing them with world class mentoring, go-to market solutions, access to peers, developers pool, academic evaluation and research, access to markets, regulatory compliance and funding necessary for them to succeed.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to mission matters.com and click on BER Guest to apply. All right, so today my guest is Kate Laurence and she is the CEO over at Bloccelerate, also known as BC VC.
And this particular interview is part of our Milken Global Conference coverage series where we bring to you the best. Of attendees, speakers, panelists, and other individuals that attended the Milken Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California. So first thing, first, Kate, welcome to the show.
Thank you Adam, and I’m really excited to be on Mission Matters. Alright, Kate, so we got a lot to talk about today, so I’m excited to get into your journey, really in venture capital investing and learn more about Bloccelerate, also known as BC VC for the audience. And just get us kicked off here.
I mean, how’d you get started in, venture capital? Where’d that start for you? So for me, the venture capital journey started while I was still working at my previous firm. I spent 10 years at a global research firm, publicly traded, called Gartner. For those of you who don’t know, they’re publicly traded under the stock symbol.
It for 40 years they’ve been working with IT professionals across Fortune 500 companies and helping them. Make technology investment decisions. And over the years they’ve developed a practice called the Invest Group, which then supported venture capitalists and private equity firms in making due diligence decisions on software investments.
So that’s where I ended up at Gartner spent four years in Silicon Valley. I supported some of the largest venture funds. From Andreessen to Sequoia, NAA private equity firms KKRs of the world. And that gave me a an in, if you will, and an insight into that world. And then I. the same time I got personally excited about the blockchain technology.
I started investing in mining Ethereum early on. And when I went to pitch the venture catalyst on blockchain, none of them really had any idea about what it is or why it matters and weren’t interested at the time to start their own crypto focused venture arms. What year was this, roughly? So what year was that, roughly what you’re talking about?
That was roughly 20 when they kind of had no idea yet. Go ahead please. 2016 2017, obviously that was a, the beginning of the hype. So people started paying attention, but really we didn’t have, these major vc I was early. Yeah. Right. They did not get involved until I would say 2021 or so. So that was, my early start.
So I had to make a leap and start my own fund, and the rest is history. Mm. So, what was that like? Like, like let’s stick in that, in that time period a little bit longer. So you’re pitching, you’re trying to get this new idea. And The reason I ask, by the way, is ’cause there’s many individuals that are either entrepreneurs, executives that watch this show and, if , at first you try you and it don’t succeed, you know, in this case you, you went out and launched your own thing.
So I think it’s super interesting. What was that like, pushing your idea? Further after maybe initial didn’t get, initially get that same traction that you were hoping to get? Yeah, no, I think that’s a quick kind of synopsis of six years or seven years of hard work. Mm-hmm. And overnight success as they say.
It started with with a million dollars that was a seat check from one high net worth individual and in the family office. To now we manage close to a hundred million assets under management. So that’s just a short history. Mm-hmm. If you will, you know, you just go from one to a hundred.
That’s an easy story. Right. But then there’s a lot of ups and downs. Yeah. Ups and downs in between. But, depending on how much time we have, of course I can go in in a lot more detail, but I’ll try to keep it, keep it short. It wasn’t an obvious choice for me to mm-hmm. To start my own thing. Yeah.
Obviously I spent 10 years in a very comfortable, as they call it, golden handcuffs where, mm-hmm. Every time I thought about leaving, they would raise my salary and give me more, benefits. And I know there’s a lot of folks like that in the same, boat, but you really need to think hard about what you wanna do and make sure you wanna make that leap of face, because it’s definitely not an easy journey.
Also, I had offers from very good places like Amazon and Microsoft and a few other venture funds that I could join instead of starting my. Fund and I had a decline those to pursue this. But in terms of, in terms of how, how we got started. We had an idea for something that hasn’t really been an established market yet.
Crypto VC has not existed as a market. In 2018. There was a couple of VC funds, but they weren’t really established. So there was a couple of battles that we had overcome. One was, we need to convince people that blockchain is here to stay and believe it. Mm-hmm. Believe me, I’m still doing that. I’m still convincing people here to study.
I do believe you actually go ahead and two and two. We had to convince why venture capital is the right vehicle to deploy into this space, not a hedge fund, because in 2017. Especially during the runup, we had a lot of hedge funds and a lot of them made a lot of money in the very short period of time.
So, you know, you’re asking people to lock in their funds for 10 years instead of making a quick buck like a year or two. So that definitely was a an objection that we had overcome. Yeah, over the years, the venture capital objection. Sort of , fell away in a sense because a lot of hedge funds just went outta business because of the volatility of this space and blockchain.
Objection also. Not completely you know, tackled, but we’re getting less and less questions about that just because of the proliferation of the market caps of these mm-hmm. Large blockchain protocols, but it’s still definitely out. There is a question , for some folks, the bigger question now, seven years later.
Is why you, and , that is not a question we were asked to seven years ago because there were only five or six or 10 of us to start. So it would’ve been why you, because there’s no one else. That’s right. Because there’s nobody else. That would’ve been the original answer going, exactly. That’s awesome.
Now there’s billions of dollars that flew into the into the venture space in crypto. Now you have to differentiate yourself. Mm-hmm. So, what are some of those differentiating things? And, and also just, I mean, in, deploying capital in your side of things, what do you, what do you think now is the answer to that?
Why you question that is the question I wake up with every single day. And it’s the same question that I think, of course, I don’t know, but I think Sequoia and even, you know, Bessemer in Lightspeed and KKR and yeah, you know, a Klein at Perkins, they must be waking up with the same question. I totally agree.
No matter, no matter how good you are, you are just one investment away from being second tier venture fund and you have to constantly take risks and. Push the envelope and try new things. So one thing that I am honing in on as a, as a fund, I’m honing in on as a strategy for the venture fund that I think is not prevalent among others, and I think as a career differentiation for us, is the founder, founder led deployment strategy.
Mm-hmm. Hmm. We really believe that founders are actually much better at writing checks into other founders than VCs. Hmm. And not just founders who are former founders, but founders who are active founders. Because if you’re an active founder, you have boots in the ground, you can see what’s happening, you can see the trends.
You are talking to your peers, and you can see the next trend before everybody else does. And also other founders are attracted to you because you have level of success. They wanna learn from you. They see you as a mentor. So these founders have amazing deal flow that frankly, I don’t think VCs have. Yeah.
But founders don’t have often liquidity or the time to really manage this process as an institutional mm-hmm. C firm. So what we do is we, we solve that problem for them, we say. Hey you, you have amazing deal flow. You have a good sense and ability to pick winners, but you might not have time or resources to deploy capital.
Let us help you. Mm. And that is really the strategy that we’re leaning in. As a fund, and that seems to be working well. But again, if we talk maybe two years from now, three years from now, yeah. You know, others might catch on and I’m gonna tell you something, something different.
Yeah, I can, I could see that obviously you’re thinking about it and you’re right. Things move fast. And that’s interesting to me. Any, kind of like key lessons or things that you care to share that you’ve learned maybe specifically from deploying capital in this particular field? I mean, you’ve been in there, you know, seven, seven plus years or so.
Any, any, anything you’d share there? Key lessons? Yeah, absolutely. When, when you started find you. Don’t necessarily think about what you’re gonna be doing 10 years from now, but you are mm-hmm. Locking yourself in for a 10 year journey. Mm-hmm. And the number one thing that you need to think about is who you’re gonna lock yourself in the journey with.
Mm-hmm. Because ultimately you’re gonna spend. Quite a long time, oftentimes longer than a lot of marriages last with that group of people or a person or two people, depending on what type of fund you want to start. Mm-hmm. As a part of that question, when you think about that, you need to decide for yourself, do you wanna be a lone wolf or do you wanna build a team?
Do you want to build a service business or do you wanna build a product? Do you want to build something that scales or are you okay with the type of business that does not scale because mm-hmm. Ultimately, venture capital is a business. Is is like being a real estate agent. It’s not. Mm-hmm. It’s not a scalable business.
You’re not building a platform. Mm-hmm. So then the question becomes why, if you have limited time, why are you building something that’s not scalable or if you think it’s scalable, how you’re going to scale that over the next interesting 10 years. And I don’t think that. A lot of people have a good answer to that question.
A lot of people say, well, I’m gonna do such a good job, but I’m gonna raise so much more money that I can just hire more people. But hiring people who are just as good as you is extremely, extremely difficult in venture. Why? Because if they’re so good, they can go raise their own funds. Exactly. Yeah, I’ve always found it tough because of that.
Like, like it’s almost like yeah. And, and that’s also why you mentioned, or, and actually, I don’t wanna put words in your mouth, but one of the reasons why, you said in the past when you were maybe going to do something else, , you get a raise and some more benefits and it’s like, don’t go right.
’cause to find another one of you ain’t. It ain’t easy. Yeah, and, it’s, you not only need to hire them because they’re good, but you also need to get along with them because you are, it’s not just like you hire an employee, which is already a hard thing to do. Of course. Like you’re almost hiring your, you know, your significant others in this case because you, you’re in it every single day for 10 years.
It’s not something like you would ask for a commitment when you hire to join a company. Mm-hmm. That’s great. Well, Kate, I’ll tell you, this has been, I learned a lot today and it’s fun to see and, and hear about kind of the beginning spaces and what you’re one of the pioneers in that space during that time period.
So great, great having you on the show today, if somebody wants to learn more or connect with your team how do they do that? Yeah. And thanks for having me. It’s been fun. They can email me. I’m k to block dot bc I’m sure you can spell that out on, on your website. Mm-hmm. ’cause it’s not an easiest name to, to spell.
Mm-hmm. But yeah, I would be happy to chat offline with, folks who are interested in venture and blockchain and crypto, or just startups. Yeah. Amazing. And for everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll definitely put some information in the show notes as, as Kate mentioned. And speaking to the audience, if this is your first time connecting with Mission Matters or listen to an episode don’t forget, hit that subscribe or follow button.
This is a daily show. Each and every day we’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way on your journey as well. So again. Hit that subscribe or follow button. And Kate, thanks again for coming on the show. Thanks so much.
