(Bloomberg Markets) — Sam Peurifoy sits at the forefront of financial innovation, but he doesn’t move around a lot. The chemistry Ph.D. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. alum, who turns 28 in May, spends most of his days at his computer in an apartment in Manhattan’s Financial District. He’s the chief executive officer of Playground Labs, a company that blends video gaming and cryptocurrency, and the head of interactive for Hivemind Capital Partners, a $1.5 billion venture firm focused on crypto investments, where he leads a strategy called play-to-earn.
Peurifoy spoke with Bloomberg Markets in early March about how skeptical he is of Big Tech’s definition of the metaverse, the nonfungible token fad, and some of the groups that call themselves decentralized autonomous organizations. While he remains on guard against crypto poseurs, he does believe crypto could help reshape the world—from Russia to gaming to payday. Peurifoy, who’s known in gaming circles as “Das Kapitalist,” says he eats the same meal every day and is lucky if he plays a few hours on the weekends these days. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
BLOOMBERG MARKETS: Your wife’s family is Russian. Do you see Russia’s invasion of Ukraine changing crypto?
SAM PEURIFOY: It’s going to boil down to two competing forces. Are government bodies evading sanctions using these tokens? The other force is: With a local currency that’s being devalued by the hour, almost, at what point do citizens turn to more stable digital currencies? Citizens using a more stable currency is obviously a plus, but sanctioned countries evading sanctions is obviously a minus. It’s a very difficult line to tread. Maybe we run know-your-customer on every single person who installs a crypto wallet.
BM: You left Goldman Sachs last year. When do you think bankers will warm up to crypto?
SP: When the market was superfrothy, I was having financial professionals reach out to me on a daily basis asking me how to get into crypto. And these were not people from low-ranking firms, either. They were very serious financial professionals, with genuine interest from across the board. Perhaps they feel like they’re not making enough in their current position, but I actually think that’s not really what’s going on. I think they’re genuinely just bored.
BM: Do you see a pattern among these financial professionals in terms of work history or demographics?
SP: You have managing directors to portfolio managers, vice presidents, analysts, equity analysts, investment bankers. It’s everything.
BM: What does Hivemind do?
SP: We provide capital and specific blockchain expertise to projects building in the crypto space. We aspire to being the Blackstone of crypto.
BM: How many people are there?
SP: We aim to have more than 30 employees by the end of the year. We’ve just ramped up hiring extremely substantially.
BM: What do your returns look like?
SP: The recent market downturn provided a large number of excellent buying opportunities for coins and companies. I don’t think I can give you anything more specific than that.
BM: The idea of Playground Labs, and your “Das Kapitalist” gaming identity, is that you seed other players with money. How?
SP: If they have joined with the intention of trying to play these play-to-earn games, then what happens next—assuming there’s no waitlist, because there’s usually a gigantic list of people trying to play these things—we basically issue them assets, they play the assets, and if they do a good job they can continue playing the assets and keep half of what they make. There’s no risk to the player, no capital responsibility on the player at all. There’s only upside. It’s constrained by how much cash we can deploy into it, which is partially determined by private investors and partially by the earnings of the ecosystem itself.
BM: How many hours of video games are you playing these days?
SP: I need to be playing more, because I need to go interact with my community more. If I do two to four hours generally on the weekend, I’m doing a good job.
BM: Do you network through video games?
SP: You’re playing World of Warcraft, you engage in a certain activity with other people, you realize you’ve enjoyed playing with them, probably because they’ve done a good job, you message them, you talk about the game, you talk about life, you get to be friends, you start calling, and now they’re in your Discord. And that’s the cycle of life right there.
BM : The crypto industry has been dominated by men. Is that changing?
SP : It begs the question, OK, if it’s so fair and open, why is it not more diverse? And ultimately it hasn’t reached an education threshold whereby most of the world could really see and know what to engage with next. We’re getting there. You’re seeing builders come online from all different parts of the world, but it’s not this tsunami.
BM : Besides inclusion, what are your biggest worries about the industry?
SP : I don’t think you can talk about crypto right now without bringing up NFTs, which are the elephant in the room. It is undeniable that NFTs have caused a lot of commotion. There have been a ton of scams. People poorly understand the technology. People are throwing money and FOMO-ing into things that they don’t understand. They think all pictures of monkeys are going to go to the moon. It’s not a good situation. It’s a mess.
BM: What are the use cases that excite you the most?
SP: You can reduce the friction on micropayments down to such a low amount that you can imagine streaming Netflix in real time and paying for each individual megabyte of data. That’s the level of granularity. Instead of waiting two weeks for my paycheck, maybe my salary is streamed to me in real time, and then I can immediately go down and buy a coffee.
BM: Where do you see decentralized autonomous organizations going as organization structures and fundraising mechanisms?
SP: A lot of people are coming out with DAOs that are not DAOs. There is a difference between governing a community using smart contracts vs. governing a community by using what basically is a Facebook poll. Unfortunately, the end user cannot read the smart contract and cannot vet the tokens. The issue is, people are basically being told they have control over some organization when, in truth, they don’t.
BM: Are there real use cases with wide appeal for the metaverse, in the current iteration of the internet or the decentralized version called web3?
SP: A lot of people sitting on both sides of the fence, web2 and web3, have completely different conceptions of what the metaverse will look like. The web3 side, the crypto builders, they see a metaverse as an area where economics and utility are fairly distributed among the users and the platforms are ultimately owned by the users. In web2, the core thesis is virtual reality is the metaverse. And it’s not! Virtual reality has been around for a long time. It’s not a huge game changer.
BM: You mentioned that you were recently diagnosed with Covid again and that you only went out twice during the pandemic and got sick both times. Is that true?
SP: I really don’t go outside very much. That’s not a joke. Two times is probably a little bit of an exaggeration, but I really don’t leave this desk. That’s partially because I enjoy it—I love being here. I’m attached to this screen for 16 to 18 hours a day. I do my one hour of exercise each day, and that’s it.
BM: How often do you sleep?
SP: I sleep at exactly 10:30 p.m. every single night, I wake up somewhere between 4:30 and 5:30 in the morning, and then I do take a 15-minute nap at almost exactly 12:30 almost every single day.
BM: You seem very disciplined.
SP: I eat here. I really like these chicken cordon bleus, that’s usually what I eat. I eat two chicken cordon bleus a day. They’re really good. It’s like two little logs. Don’t worry, I’m having tons of fun.
Yang covers crypto market structure and Abelson covers finance for Bloomberg News in New York.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2022 Bloomberg L.P.
