Startup Spotlight: Asset Dash
All Things Venture #059
Hey Everyone - Dez here from All Things Venture. I’m writing this email today from Boston. I’m here this weekend for the Ivy League basketball tournament (Go Big Red!!!!!), and to meet a few friends I know that live in the area. My very first work trip ever was to Boston when I was just out of school working at Deloitte as a consultant. It feels like a lifetime ago. I took the same exact shuttle from LGA to Logan airport this morning and it was a bit of a full circle moment. Anyways, since joining FirstMark back in August I’ve been more or less spending all of my time learning about and studying fintech and fintech adjacent businesses. Broadly, and this is an oversimplification, I view fintech businesses as businesses that help other businesses or consumers do one of three things:
Save their money
Spend their money
Invest their money
Some massive companies have been built that help you achieve the above either directly (i.e Robinhood) or indirectly (i.e Plaid), and there’s a whole other category of fintech businesses that help you do one of the above but layer on software that is purpose built for a very specific type of customer (i.e Toast for restauruants, Selfbook for Hotels, and Coast for truckers). Because I believe that a fair degree of investing (and the world writ large) moves in cycles, and because some of the earliest fintech companies that help you invest your money are getting to be ~10 years old (i.e Wealthfront, Sofi, Robinhood) I’m not surprised that today’s company, Asset Dash, is starting to see traction. I’ll let Matias, who is one of the co-founders of Asset Dash, tell you more about what they do, so as always let’s dive right in.
Matias! Tell me a little bit about yourself, what AssetDash is, and what is the problem you’re trying to solve?
Hey! I’ve been a marketer in the crypto / investing space for the past 6 years. From a young age I’ve always been interested in investing but that passion accelerated once I discovered Bitcoin in 2016-2017. For the past few years I’ve had the opportunity to work with a few great companies in both the Web3 and TradFi investing space. Through that experience, I noticed two important points: (1) investors are actively expanding into new asset classes (2) the investing landscape is fragmented.
To solve this, we created AssetDash, an all-in-one investment tracking platform for all asset classes. AssetDash has one of the broadest sets of integrations in the app store with coverage across stocks, cryptos, NFTs, private equity and more. Today, AssetDash has support for over 100 wallets, exchanges, brokerages, banks, and blockchains. Investors can plug in all of their accounts into AssetDash and track their entire portfolio in real-time.
Why do you care about solving this problem? And how has it differed from the previous startups you’ve worked at?
I care about solving this problem because the path towards financial freedom is through investing. I believe AssetDash can play a powerful role in helping people on that journey. My experience at other startups has enhanced my ability to operate at AssetDash. I’ve had an opportunity to work with great founders in a number of different places and I’m constantly implementing those learnings into my role at AssetDash.
There’s been a proliferation of platforms where people can invest their money, and these platforms are across asset classes (i.e Robinhood, Coinbase, Cadre, Masterworks, etc.) How do you see AssetDash supporting this direct to consumer investing renaissance? And what are your early customers telling you they need the most?
We see ourselves sitting in the middle of the investing ecosystem. The natural course of action now is for investors to have multiple investment accounts. There are many reasons why this is the case but to name a few (1) spreading assets across multiple crypto wallets as a security best practice (2) opting to use an “asset specific account” ex: a wallet designed for a specific blockchain or NFT platform, specialty accounts for 401Ks, real estate investments, or private equity (3) asset listings differ from exchange to exchange (4) investors move assets across chains frequently now to optimize DeFi yield. AssetDash is platform agnostic - all we care about is serving our users by meeting them where they choose to invest.
We see AssetDash as the platform for the modern investor and our users are telling us this as well. We receive messages daily from our users sharing how they moved from traditional trackers to AssetDash. In particular, users are raving about our NFT functionality which allows them to track their NFT as an investment asset, with an assigned “price” based on market data plus the ability to see that value reflected in their overall portfolio. With this in mind, we are doubling down on our NFT offering and expanding to new blockchains.
Why should a consumer connect to AssetDash? What’s the highest and most immediate value they can get?
AssetDash will improve your experience as an investor from day one. In a few minutes, you will be able to track your entire portfolio, in one place, in real-time. This type of portfolio visibility across asset classes will help you make better investment decisions.
What was your “aha” moment when you realized something was working at AssetDash?
The first “aha” moment was the day after launch when I woke up to a full inbox from early users sharing incredible feedback. The general takeaway was users have been looking for a product like this and we were solving an important problem. This was extremely exciting for our team.
What are some of the challenges that you face at the current stage for AssetDash?
Our biggest challenge is the best challenge you can have. We are growing quickly and our passionate users have a list of new features they want to see in the app. It is up to us to scale quickly and continue to enhance the project for our users.
What defines success for AssetDash over the next few months?
(1) increasing our total number of integrations (2) making the account connection process as seamless as can be (3) continuing to grow our base (4) launching the pilot program of our first monetization strategy
What advice do you have for any aspiring entrepreneurs?
Take the leap of faith and do it. It is 100% worth it.
Short, sweet and to the point. Gotta love it. Till next time everyone!