Ramp Cap Table #1: AssetDash

As mentioned in the first new edition of the Ramp Report, I am rolling out a new semi-regular newsletter feature: Ramp Cap Table. The purpose of this new publication is to highlight interesting early stage companies across a variety of sectors. Some of these posts may be sponsored, while others might just be me digging into companies that piqued my interest.

A lot of founders are building fascinating companies, and I want to share their stories with you.

Today we are writing about AssetDash, a company that wants to simplify your investments.

Nothing written here is investment advice (you really shouldn’t take advice from a meme page, right E-Trade baby?). We’re here to talk about the evolution of personal finance and how AssetDash can help you track your investments.

A Million Ways to Invest

Covid-19 accelerated the evolution of the retail investor. Remote work, free trading, stimulus checks, volatile markets, and lockdowns led to millions of new investors entering the stock market.

Additionally, with sports shut down and casinos closed, gamblers and speculators had to find somewhere new to place bets as well. The stock market welcomed all with open arms.

From March 2020 to March 2021, Robinhood grew monthly active users from 7M to 18M, and assets under custody ballooned from $19B to over $80B.

Retail investors now account for more than 25% of options trading activity and ~20% of US order flow as of June 2020 (compared to 10% in 2010 and 15% in 2019).

Robinhood was the catalyst for a massive shift: zero-commission trading. Suddenly, anyone could trade stocks and options on their phone whenever they wanted, without having to pay a fee for every trade. Its popularity exploded during pandemic lockdowns, with the platform gaining millions of users.

But the stock market was just the beginning.

Then came crypto exchanges like Coinbase, Gemini, Binance, and FTX, which provided a fascinating new market for traders, investors, and speculators to wet their beaks--not to mention the parabolic rise of NFTs.

Retail participation in alternative investments such as fine art and private equity has exploded as well thanks to platforms like Masterworks, EquityZen, AngelList, YieldStreet, etc.

Twitter, Discord, and Reddit have turned investing from a pure financial game to a social one as well. A once taboo topic, personal finances and investments are now a mainstay in casual conversation. A slew of fintech platforms like Public, StockTwits, Iris, and Commonstock have tried to capture this “social finance'' dynamic.

The result? Check out this graph from Public Comps:

There is a lot going on. 

This optionality didn’t exist for previous generations. Investing was a simple, straightforward process. Pension funds, “set and forget” 401(k)s, Vanguard accounts, and financial advisors that you talked to once every six months were the name of the game.

Now, we can access our brokerage accounts in seconds. It costs nothing to place a trade. There are dozens of different asset classes available. Thanks to social media, everyone wants to find the next hot sector.

So younger investors have exposure to stocks, crypto, NFTs, and anything else with a market.

What does it look like when they want to check their portfolio performances?

Something like this:

“Let me check my retirement account on TD Ameritrade. And my day trading account on Robinhood. And my crypto on Coinbase. And my NFTs on OpenSea. And my [insert asset class] on [insert platform]…”

You get the idea: we have too many platforms.

On top of that, we spend a lot of time checking our investment performance.

Forty-nine percent of all investors check their brokerage apps everyday and we’re checking more often because we’re trading more often. Robinhood users trade 9x more often than those on E-Trade, and 40x more than those on Charles Schwab.

It makes sense. Every trading platform has a mobile app, and we spend more than five hours a day looking at our phones. The dopamine cycle of Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, now includes Robinhood and Coinbase.

Twenty years ago, commission fees discouraged active trading, but that is no longer a factor. Anyone can trade for free, and thanks to the pandemic, there wasn’t much else to do for months.

Now add in the social dynamic of investing. Thirty years ago, it was considered taboo to discuss your finances with your peers. Now every friend group exchanges messages about hot stocks and cryptos.

Investment ideas are shared on Twitter and Discord. Wallstreetbets has 12M followers. CNBC and Bloomberg have 24/7 news cycles about markets. 

We are constantly exposed to market commentary, and we are constantly checking prices as a result.

Elon Musk tweeted about DOGE. What happened to the price?

Russia is invading Ukraine. How are defense stocks doing?

Matt Damon had a crypto ad. Did Bitcoin pump as a result?

Someone mentioned an NFT airdrop on Twitter. How much is mine worth now?

How do you keep up with this constant bombardment of information, when your investments are spread across a dozen platforms? 

You can’t.

Enter: AssetDash

Let’s replace that previous cluttered image with something a bit cleaner.

Much better, no? AssetDash is a dashboard for all of your assets (get it?). This new application integrates with hundreds of investment applications spanning across all asset classes.

Robinhood? Yep.

CoinBase? No problem.

OpenSea? 100%.

Its purpose? To simplify the tedious process of scrolling through a dozen investing apps by putting them all in one place. I’ll break down how the app works in a minute, but first, some background.

Background and Founders

Naval Ravikant once said, “Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.”

Matias Dorta and Jorge Perez, the co-founders of AssetDash, took this message literally.

Team:

Matias Dorta (Co-Founder / CEO)

Matias was previously the VP of Marketing at Roundhill Investments. Roundhill is known for its “thematic ETFs” like METV (metaverse), BETZ (sports betting), and NERD (esports). Matias was also the Head of Community at Unstoppable Domains, the largest NFT domain company in crypto.

Jorge Perez (Co-Founder / CTO)

Jorge was previously the VP of Engineering at Cylera, a healthcare IoT cybersecurity and intelligence company. Cylera uses big data analysis and machine learning to protect critical medical equipment in hospitals from cyber attacks.

As an engineer over the past 10 years, Jorge developed and managed over 35 technology products across web, iOS, Android and TV platforms.

Jorge can build. Matias can sell.

Marc Andreesen, who originally coined ‘Product/Market Fit’ in his post “The Only Thing That Matters” said: Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.

They saw a massive opportunity in the market and decided to build a solution.

When asked about their product, Matias said, “We are living through a unique period in the investing world as traditional and digital assets converge. The average user now has multiple investment accounts across different brokerages and crypto exchanges, along with multiple crypto wallets on different blockchains. AssetDash allows users to seamlessly connect all of their investments, across stocks, cryptos, NFTs, and DeFi, into a single dashboard with real-time updates.”

So How Does It Work?

AssetDash uses Plaid to seamlessly and securely link your various investing accounts to its platform. 

It is compatible with hundreds of applications across every market that you can think of, and the AssetDash team continues to build out new integrations.

From Vanguard to OpenSea, they have you covered.

You simply download the app, and follow the prompts to link your brokerage accounts, wallets, etc.

If you want to later add other accounts to your dashboard, you can easily do that through the settings. For reference, it took me ~30 seconds to link my primary brokerage account.

Once you have added your information, you can see a general overview of your investments as well as breakdowns of individual holdings. AssetDash also tracks performance of your total portfolio and each asset over different time frames.

Here is what the app looks like for users:

Additionally, AssetDash shows market overviews for various asset classes, as well as current news about your positions. Here is a video walking through the platform:

AssetDash updates prices of equities, cryptos, and NFTs in real time, while users can also manually input illiquid assets like collectibles, real estate, and private equity.

Price, past performance, news, and market summaries are now in one place. Checking your portfolio used to be a tedious process of updating half-a-dozen apps.

Now? You can review anything and everything in one place, in under five minutes.

They’ve also begun implementing a new marketing strategy to expand users’ NFT collections on the app. Multiple times throughout the week, the AssetDash Twitter account partners with NFT creators to airdrop free NFTs to users who have connected Ethereum or Solana wallets. When’s the last time a traditional broker did that? Never.

Centralization Is Cool Again

The motto of crypto and web3 has been the decentralization of everything. Take money away from traditional institutions, and take ownership away from platforms. 

“Decentralize your assets”.

The problem with decentralization is that it creates “overchoice”. This term, which was first coined in Alvin Tinley’s novel Future Shock, describes a cognitive impairment in which people have a difficult time making a decision when faced with many options.

10,000 investment options across hundreds of asset classes is a suffocating overchoice. Many investors shy away from new assets because of this problem.

The antidote to overchoice is centralization.

While the assets may remain decentralized, the platforms used to buy these assets have grown more centralized. Centralization of platforms eliminates friction and increases adoption. In the early years of crypto, poor UX and questionable security kept the masses from touching the asset class. Now, anyone can trade whatever coin they want as easily as they can trade stocks.

Centralized platforms and better UX always promotes greater adoption. Robinhood brought a new generation into the stock market. Coinbase introduced millions to crypto. OpenSea took NFTs mainstream. Platform centralization saves time and promotes simplicity.

Robinhood simplified stock trading.

Coinbase simplified crypto trading.

AssetDash simplified everything.

While better UX on different trading platforms brought more users to those platforms, better UX on an investment dashboard encourages investors to diversify across multiple asset classes.

It is much simpler to track additional assets through your current platform than to keep adjusting to new interfaces.

Competition

There are hundreds, maybe thousands of investing apps.

This is a known problem, and AssetDash isn’t the only company working to simplify investment tracking. Personal Capital and Mint, for example, both allow users to integrate brokerage accounts and crypto wallets to track investments as well.

These two incumbents do have sizable market share. That being said, investment tracking isn’t their primary product offerings. Personal Capital uses its tracking dashboard as a funnel for its advisory services. Meanwhile, Mint is primarily a budget tracker.

Additionally, asset management is a massive market, and it won’t be a winner-take-all. 

AssetDash stands out in this field for a few reasons. First, they are a mobile-first application. The average person spends more than five hours per day on their phone, and retail traders executed 20% of their trades on mobile apps last year. This percentage is likely to increase with time as mobile interfaces improve. A mobile-first application integrates well with AssetDash’s target audience.

They have also taken a progressive approach to crypto, NFTs, and web3. AssetDash was the first platform to offer real-time Solana NFT portfolio tracking on mobile for example, allowing users to integrate Solana NFTs into the rest of their investments.

The founding team has experience operating in the crypto and Web3 ecosystems, giving them a leg up in scaling integrations and building tools to help users that invest in these asset classes.

After just three months of operation, AssetDash has one of the broadest integration lists on the market. The company has continued to incorporate new applications, a recent one being FTX US.

Feedback

While the company is still very young, initial feedback has been fantastic. 

On January 18th, 2022, AssetDash was ranked the #1 Product of the Day on ProductHunt. The company also ranks highly on a number of categories in Apple’s App Store:

• NFT Tracker: 2nd

• NFT Portfolio: 4th

• Portfolio: 5th

• Crypto Portfolio Tracker: 9th

• Portfolio Tracker: 10th

Not bad for a platform that just launched last month.

Where Is AssetDash Headed?

In its first few months of operation, AssetDash has onboarded thousands of users. What now? The most important step is continued integration. Matias and Jorge will integrate and expand to new blockchains to accommodate the biggest audience possible. However, integrating more assets is just the first step.

AssetDash is building a unique set of tools to better connect community leads with investors. The company has identified friction points in web3 communications, and they believe they can streamline these processes to help DeFi protocols, NFT projects, and other investment groups to build better, more engaging communities. 

Wrapping Up

The financial world has overwhelmed investors with choices, and AssetDash provides a solution for the clutter. Checking your portfolio should take minutes, not hours.

The progress that the AssetDash team has made in a few months has been impressive, and as a friend of the founders and advisor to AssetDash I am excited to see where the future will take them.

If you want to try AssetDash yourself, click here for iOS and here for Android. 

Also make sure to follow them on Twitter.