As we turn the corner on 2023, I find myself checking in with a lot of people I haven’t seen in a while. The conversation tends to start with a simple question, “Lawrence, what have you been up to?”

I haven’t been as great about updating my personal blog lately, so it’s possible we have a lot of catching up to do. Whether you remember me as the debate obsessed high schooler, the college party animal, the mid-20’s kava bar fiend, the late 20s overly outspoken MBA student, the 30s expat entrepreneur or my more recent adventures in the world of crypto from the last few years, I will try to provide a response that will update sufficiently. I will spend less time on the deep history and go into more detail on the activities that take up much of my time and mental space currently.

After getting my MBA at Cornell in 2012 I moved to Singapore with an investment company. A few years after getting to Singapore I saw an opportunity to live the dream as an entrepreneur, working for myself, and started MBA Admissions Consulting firm MBA Link in 2014. I ran and built that company as my primary activity for the next several years and succeeded in getting it to a point where it was stable, profitable and no longer dependent on me for anything but light touch mentorship of the very qualified team. 

It was around this time in late 2019 that I started thinking about what else I wanted to do with my career and though to return to previous roots working in the finance industry while simultaneously exploring the tech world, an area where I had less experience but great curiosity. I had had a chance meeting with another young expat entrepreneur named Arthur Hayes who founded the BitMEX crypto exchange that ended up becoming the largest crypto exchange in the world for some time. I asked him for a role that would give me the chance to learn the industry and he offered me the position of his Chief of Staff. 

After a year in this role, the founder I was working for resigned and the new CEO asked me to build an academy business for our exchange. After laying out the initial foundation for BitMEX Academy, I got the opportunity to take the business private, rebranded it as XD Academy, and have been working on that for the last 18 months or so.

The crypto industry imploded almost the moment I came out of the gate with my new plans and that has made things hard. Hard to raise money, hard to win contracts with established businesses, hard to penetrate a saturated and distrustful consumer market, just the whole process put into “hard mode” in a way that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. 

That said, I think it may not be a bad time to reflect on some of the accomplishments I’ve achieved in this time period:

1. Negotiated a Management Buyout of a business division from a multi-billion dollar corporation
2. Figured out and set up the complex legal structure for a crypto business that would allow us to have independent token issuer and operating companies
3. Designed a business model that would allow us to operate independently of our previous host
4. Recruited key team members to be co-founders of the new company
5. Recruited additional key team members to help round out the competency areas
6. Developed a brand for ourselves through a podcast I host with now over a dozen episodes, many with quite decent viewership
7. Established new relationships with business partners interested in what we’re doing
8. Raised close to $1 million to help fund the operations of the new company in its infancy

I made a lot of mistakes along the way and it’s impossible to deny that I would do many things differently if I could go back. Of course, that option is never available for any of us, so I push onwards. After 18 months of sluggish activity and extreme negative perception for the crypto industry, it seems more hopeful than ever now that we may be turning the corner. 

If you’ve read this far into “what” I’ve been doing, it stands to reason that you may also be interested in the “why.”

So, why XD Academy, Lawrence? What is it about this project that has your attention and energy in this way?

I will try to keep the high falutin rhetoric to a minimum and give it to you very blunt.

One, I think I am uniquely qualified to act on this opportunity. While not what many would call a “crypto native,” my roles as Chief of Staff for one of the industry’s most successful and well known entrepreneurs, and business leader at one of the top exchanges, gave me intimate access to problems faced by the industry. The crypto industry, in my mind, is largely driven by how well people understand the rationale for adoption, as well as the access people have to trustworthy and engaging information. While the situation has improved, there remains a lack of options available for normies to intellectually onboard into the industry and not feel like idiots when trying to learn. Education is near and dear to my heart, my parents were both teachers and it’s the industry I’ve spent most of my career in. I believe that I can say, with humility, that I am a rare education talent in the crypto space that is mostly dominated by engineers, financiers and technicians of various sorts.

Two, I think it’s an incredibly important mission and the right thing to do. We are possibly on the cusp of a total upheaval of the way money works globally and the lines around financial power centers are potentially being redrawn as we speak. This creates an opportunity for a new demographic of people to take greater ownership and control of their financial independence but it could also be a vector for the powers that be to deepen their control. I see myself as one of the good guys in this fight and I want to fight for greater democratisation of financial power. While not rising to the levels of zealotry many core industry folks possess, I do believe in the mission in crypto and want to play my part in the story to unfold.

Third, I think it’s a massive financial opportunity. When I first met Arthur Hayes we were two struggling entrepreneurs that would even give each other encouragement about staying the course and making things happen. I’m privileged to know a number of people who found great success in business but no one close to the scale that Arthur was able to achieve. While Arthur’s own unique abilities and dedication certainly had a role in this, there’s no doubt that the success he achieved was also related to picking the right industry. To put it simply, there’s gold in them thar hills. The crypto industry’s meteoric growth and its unique ability to efficiently capture the value created by its participants makes for a compelling business case. I don’t know if I’ll ever create a company on the scale of what Arthur has achieved, but I feel certain that I’m playing in a space where that kind of potential exists.

After 11 years of living in Singapore, never leaving for more than a month or so at the most, I decided to leave on a sort of mini-sabbatical earlier this month. Sabbatical may be the wrong word, as I am still working daily, but I am currently working from a beautiful villa in Bali where I will remain for the early part of 2024. I am spending my days living a healthy and harmonious lifestyle between meetings with my team, prospective partners and investors and whatever solo work I can do to push the ball forward and be useful.

Come see me if you find yourself on this beautiful island, or feel free to reach out if you just want to say hi. You can check out XD Academy at xd.academy, it is a work in progress but already has some really cool stuff on there worth checking out. 

Wishing you a very Happy New Year ahead, and a strong and prosperous 2024 for us all!