Author: ReBecca Compton

One of the (thousands of) perks of the Digital Age is enjoying access where there wasn’t any before. Vincent Amm (#ThirdParty Product Management), Mona Feder (#ThirdParty Interaction Design), Lenny-Campino Hartmann (#ThirdParty Software Engineering) and Alexander Borowski (#ThirdParty Product Management) founded tokenstreet, and soon, Jonathan Freiberger (#NextGen Software Engineering) and Daniel Reichhart (#ThirdParty Software Engineering) joined them. 

tokenstreet’s goal was to give The Everyperson access to financial spheres that were previously unavailable unless you had years of investment knowledge and/or Scrooge McDuck-levels of money. 

This intro into the project might sound very abstract, so let’s share what Vincent and Mona told us about tokenstreet as a way of summarizing what it is and why it needs to exist. 

“With tokenstreet, we are building a digital family office that enables everybody to invest in high-quality alternative investments such as venture capital, private equity or real estate in an easy, seamless and accessible way. Our goal is to deliver attractive returns over the long term by applying investment strategies that were available only to the wealthy. 

We founded tokenstreet to solve exactly this problem and provide retail investors with the same access to alternative investments that institutional investors have, even with a small ticket size.”

 

Vincent says that the amount of money you typically need to invest was a barrier for people who otherwise would have invested. “There are alternative assets such as venture capital funds or private equity funds which usually have a minimum investment of 1 to 10 million; with tokenstreet we can give access to these investments from twenty-five euros.”

Investments are their own universe of considerations, and one of the things the founders of tokenstreet experienced, is that one of the strongest gravitational pulls in that universe is regulations. We asked if this caused hurdles for them. “So many.” Vincent laughed. “When it’s about capital markets and investments, it’s highly regulated, so you cannot just launch a product and see if it’s working.”

Hearing Vincent talk about these obstacles led us to ask about some of the team’s learnings since working on tokenstreet. Vincent told us that his experience taught him that working on such a topic should be fun, but you need something motivating you beyond fun. “As in every business, things don’t always work out – there are so many difficult moments and problems. At those times, you really need to know why you are doing this, take a step back, look at the bigger picture. In these moments, I remind myself: ‘I have the chance to transform the way people deal with their financial future and to contribute to financial independence for everyone.’ And that’s not just because I think it’s important, but because it’s important for me. It’s really important to have the right mindset.” 

Mona agreed. She added, “it’s this mindset and knowing why you are doing this that keeps you motivated even during hard times. But one of the biggest learnings for me was the importance of focus combined with pace, testing and making everything measurable. While building a company, there are tons of tasks you can do while many of them lead you nowhere. I learned that it’s crucial to allocate your resources – like time and money – optimized on the step that is bringing you to the next level, and cut off everything else.”

tokenstreet’s had happy moments too of course! Vincent talked about one of his favorites. “It was around Christmas. I remember we’d had three months of intensive work with our lawyers, modelling, evaluating and testing different models. Then, just before Christmas, we got the news: one of our models works. It was a good Christmas present.” 

As we neared the end of our time together, we asked tokenstreet one last question. If you could communicate one message to potential users, what would you say? What’s your core message? Here’s what they told us: “With tokenstreet, you are able to build up a portfolio that is similar to those of super wealthy people. There are so many people who work hard to gather some money. And diversification with alternative assets is an elementary strategy for long-term asset accumulation. It’s not like we have a certain magic formula, but we use technology to improve transparency in the investment process. We use blockchain technology to create efficiency when it comes to investment, and we use the access we created to make our vision reality.”

You can get more information on tokenstreet by checking out their website.