Vinny Lingham

Vinny Lingham (born February 7, 1979) is an entrepreneur and technology investor renowned for his significant contributions to the cryptocurrency and blockchain industries. He is best known for his early investments in major blockchain projects such as Solana, Filecoin, and Render, as well as his role as a General Partner at Multicoin Capital from 2017 to 2020. In 2024, he co-founded Praxos Capital, a cryptocurrency money market hedge fund. Quotes Not all entrepreneurs drive around in big cars with fancy houses. I live in a modest little apartment. It’s nice, but it’s just two bedrooms. The difference between entrepreneurs and other people is that you work for a lot lower salary on a monthly basis, but then you’re building long-term equity wealth and value in your shares and the companies you build. Ambition often comes with sacrifice. I built (Clicks2Customers) up within three and a half years to a $10 million-a-year business, with only one South African client. So all the revenue was coming from the States. Clients ranged from eBay to Expedia, and Lingham attributes the search marketing company’s success to his own technical know-how. “I understood the techniques to rank keywords for clients higher than anyone else. Other people try and start businesses with a very shallow knowledge of the field that they’re in, and it’s difficult to teach someone else if you don’t know how to do it yourself. So I spent many years building up my knowledge and developed a unique insight into how Google’s algorithms work, and we were able to use that to our advantage. There’s a similar vibe to Silicon Valley, some fantastic tech companies, and the culture is nice and diverse – people from all around the world live there,” he says. “It’s not just about Cape Town, it’s about South Africa, but you’ve got to start somewhere, and tech hubs needs to be geographically centralised, and Cape Town makes a lot of sense. The biggest mistake that the government and people of South Africa (are) making is to think that South Africa is going to be the biggest economy in Africa in 10 to 15 years. South Africa is no longer the gateway to Africa – that’s just BS. If you want to invest in Africa, you actually avoid South Africa because of bureaucracy and red tape. The governments of Tanzania and Kenya, Nigeria, make it very easy for foreigners to invest. South Africa’s just sitting back on its laurels, and by the time the government realises (that), it’ll be too late. For entrepreneurs within the country, Lingham also thinks there are substantial structural and cultural difficulties impeding the establishment of a vibrant venture- capital scene. Among them, he cites the often antagonistic relationship between business founders and funders; the lack of potential exits for backers because there’s not much of a culture of mergers and acquisitions; the lack of consumer protection in South Africa; and the fact that there hasn’t yet been the kind of technology revolution necessary for start-ups to take on big incumbents. The goal of government should be to eliminate red tape for entrepreneurs, not create it,” he says. “Government should set the playing field and be the referee in the soccer match, not the player. Unfortunately, the government wants to be the referee, the player and the ball. Too much education in business is a bad thing, because the time you’re spending learning theory you could be gaining real-world experience. I laugh at people who, from studying business, go into an MBA after one year’s experience. You learn nothing like that. MBAs don’t maketh the entrepreneur. I analysed where the opportunity was there, and credit cards are a very difficult market. But when you look at gift cards, it’s a lot easier as a market. It’s a lot less regulated, and it’s huge – in the US alone it’s $100 billion a year. We live in a weird simulation, for sure. The guy who the courts have ruled is not Satoshi wrote a prediction tweet thread about a man who is trying to own more BTC than Satoshi... Would be even more crazy if this comes to fruition… Lingham has previously highlighted concerns over investor protection in the digital asset space. He noted that retirees lost money after the Strategy STRC advert promised safety and 11.5% returns. In a separate warning, Lingham said AI ads had misled retirees about STRC’s 11.5% yield offering. When I recently flew to New York for three blockchain and cryptocurrency conferences (Ethereal Summit, Consensus and Token Summit), I accidentally didn’t have any photo ID on me. At the airport, I gave them credit cards with my name on them, underwent a full pat-down and search of my belongings and they let me through, but the airline didn’t really know that I was who I said I was. The problems I faced seemed particularly relevant a few days later, when I interviewed Vinny Lingham, founder and CEO of blockchain identity startup Civic, for my podcast Unchained, (Google Play, iTunes, iHeartRadio, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio). Talking about the challenge of verifying someone’s identity over the internet, he says, “We haven’t as a society solved personal presence. How can you digitally confirm someone is who they say they are if they’re not physically there? Let’s be honest, even if someone is physically there, we’ve had people who’ve walked into banks with a stolen driver’s license and pretended to be someone else. I’m from SA and grew up under apartheid … I come from a world where I was born without a vote, so as a mission, if I could give a voting to the world, that would be amazing,” says the South African-born four-time entrepreneur who has also served as a shark on South Africa’s Shark Tank and who has been dubbed “the Bitcoin Oracle” for his uncannily accurate bitcoin price predictions. External links Category:Businesspeople from South Africa Category:Entrepreneurs Category:1979 births Category:Living people