Mario started his career by selling blenders door to door which led to him establishing Froothie Australia, Mario continued his entrepreneurship journey by establishing a range of brands in various niches including kitchen appliances, personal mobility, fitness and e-cigarettes. Leveraging the infrastructure and connections developed throughout his entrepreneurship journey, Mario established GoGlobal, IBC, We Are Growth Hackers, TheRoundtable Club and NFT Technologies.
Q. A brief introduction of yours highlighting your major milestones & achievements
Major milestones include launching my first business and e-commerce business from nothing to seven figures in the first year and to eight figures in year two.
So that’s milestones number one and two, and then starting the biggest event in the health and wellness space in Australia the next year, and then getting into b2b with IBC in the crypto space in 2017, launching it from almost nothing to one of the biggest consulting firms in the crypto space in 2017 and 2018.
Then getting scammed and lost millions and still survived in 2018 as both of my companies, Froothie and IBC, got heavily screwed in the same year. Both of them are doing incredibly well and achieving record numbers this year. Co-founded NFT Tech and took it public on the stock market in 2021. These are probably my major milestones, and obviously, I became an international Bachata artist in 2020, So I travel the world dancing the Bachata at events. I would also like to mention migrating as a kid from a third-world country to Australia and being able to adapt pretty well. This is potentially another milestone. Lastly am travelling the world and speaking at events as of 2020-2021 and doing it on a regular basis. One final thing I’ll add which is launching the roundtable, which is the biggest weekly live event in crypto in 2022.
Q. Throughout your journey in building and investing in companies, can you summarize the most important elements of entrepreneurship and leadership?
I’ll put it into three categories from least important to most important. All three are very important, but I’ll list them in order of importance. Again, the least important one is working hard.
So, all else being equal, the person who works that extra day, that works that extra hour will end up winning. All the extra work hours and efforts will keep adding up and eventually compound so working hard is extremely important. Number two, which is more important, is making sure you’re doing the right thing, if you’re working hard building a restaurant in an African country, it’s going to be pretty difficult selling kebabs in some African country to make millions, not impossible just difficult. If you put in that same effort building an incubator in crypto or a business in the psychedelic space in an advanced economy, your likelihood to succeed is significantly higher because you’re doing something that has higher returns on every hour of work. So that’s the second most important thing.
And then the third most important thing is timing. If you were launching a crypto business in 1995, I’m giving an extreme example, it’s not going to work because crypto didn’t exist back then. People were still figuring out the Internet, but if you launched it in 2014, 2015, and 2016, when nobody was paying much attention to the space, you don’t have to do much to be successful because your timing is spot on.
So, I would say work hard, do the right thing and do it at the right time. There is a great video by Bill Gross that I always refer to, if you go on Google and type Bill Gross’s Ted Talk, you will get a TED speech where he gives examples of how timing is the most important factor for success based on his research.
Those three are the main success elements of entrepreneurship, working hard, doing the right thing, and timing. For leadership, I’d add one more element which is important for success as well, and that is the ability to understand and deal with people because you can get everything wrong, except hiring the right people and managing them well and I made sure to do that in launching IBC with very little knowledge about crypto, that was possible by hiring the right people around me back in 2017 until I built up my skill set. So, if you manage to hire someone that will make sure you do the right thing. Hire someone that will do all the work for you and do the execution. Hire someone else to figure out the timing. Hire a hybrid financial person, a marketing person etc. All you have to do is to manage them well. It is kind of playing politics dealing with people, you have to motivate people. Make sure to implement all the basics that give you everything you need to achieve success.
Q. Being a very busy man, how do you manage to keep upskilling yourself consistently?
I used to read a lot of books until I realized that the market especially in crypto changes so fast that books become outdated pretty quickly. If it’s a book about human emotions, humans are humans, if it’s a book about fundamentals of life, life is life, if it is a book about chemistry, chemistry is chemistry. Suppose it’s a book about the Internet, digital marketing, or of course crypto, the space changes so fast that books are not the best option. So to learn and gain knowledge about crypto, I’m a lot more podcasts oriented, and that is how I learned being an audio guy. So, I learn better and absorb information better when it’s audio because I have to do something while learning like getting a massage, travelling, exercising, or taking a shower. I have to be doing something because if I’m doing nothing but listening, my ability to absorb information is severely diminished when I’m not doing anything else. The first thing one should do is understand how they learn. Obviously, you can’t learn if you don’t know the best way you tend to absorb information, and the second thing is I’ll make sure I learn the right thing because there’s so much information. There’s massive information overload. So, the ability to get my information from the right sources is number two.
There are some things I will always do no matter how much money I have, for example flying commercial. I’ll always fly commercial no matter how much money I make. Because I have gone through the process of flying so many times it became a monotonous task, going through security, sitting in a café, walking around the airport, I’ve gone through this process dozens if not hundreds of times that it’s a monotonous task for me and it’s a perfect time for me to absorb information so I tend to learn the most at an airport.
While receiving knowledge and learning you should pay attention to actions or what we call action steps. So, while you’re learning, you’re gonna forget very quickly what you’ve learned. So, you have to act on what you learned pretty quickly. I used to use my smartwatch all the time and record voice notes on it, right now I use my phone. Whenever a good idea comes to my mind I make sure to list it and I immediately take action because I know the human brain forgets really quickly. So that’s my tip, learn how you learn, do that every spare minute you have, and take action throughout the process and never depend on your memory.
Q. How do you see crypto and digital assets being integrated with the startup funding ecosystem?
It is done through a better understanding of tokenomics and token structure. So, when tokens were pumping in 2017 and again in 2021, VCs flocked to the scene.
They loved tokens and everyone wanted to invest in tokens. Why? Because they were pumping. But the problem is they didn’t understand tokenomics or token structure.
The first step is understanding how that works. If you just buy a token because you think it will pump, you’ll end up buying tokens that are structurally flawed and that will dump just as quickly as we saw some tokens plunging down by more than 99%, even though they had a great team and they were building up in a fast pace and most importantly they were not a scam project. They just had a fundamental flaw in the tokenomics and it’s not just about having utility, does the utility work? How does that integrate with some projects that raise money through NFT tokens and equity? Where is the value congregated?
Understanding is probably the biggest hurdle right now for investors on both sides of the fence because a lot of investors are jumping into tokens without understanding how they work. At the same time, there are a lot of people avoiding investing in tokens because again, they don’t understand how the value flows through the ecosystem when there is a token built into it.
So, I go back to the same thing I always say in the space that education is heavily needed and the same applies to NFTs. What role do NFTs have to play in whatever ecosystem has been built? A lot of places are building an ecosystem that includes tokens and NFTs and they have equity as well. The best example is Yuga Labs and the Board Ape Yacht Club, they started with an NFT then they raised an equity round, and then they did a token drop.
They’ve done a really good job at it, and as a result the whole token structure and the token economics started making sense. But it’s very, very, very difficult to pull it off.
Q. What does IBC Group offer to the technology community here in the UAE?
Incubation and guidance. One thing I found in the ecosystem here in Dubai is that there’s a lot of money flowing around and a lot of talent. There is a strong lack of understanding, especially by investors in the ecosystem.
What is the Metaverse? What are NFTs? People still look at NFTs as digital art and collectables. What is the Metaverse? What are NFTs? How will the ecosystem look a few years from now?
Understanding the tech and investing in the right places, Dubai investors want to support the space, but they also don’t have enough people guiding them in the right direction, everyone’s chasing their money. So recently we started to try, we are working hard to educate the traditional money here in Dubai, there’s a lot of it about the space so don’t waste your assets by deploying them in the wrong places.
We are advising investors to build those relationships. We are trying to support more Dubai-based projects to make sure they have the right token structure, the right tokenomics, and the right utility for the NFTs when they launch them, make sure they get the support of the NFT community and ecosystem, which is extremely important for an NFT project success because a lot of projects are still following Web2 rules and traditional rules for fundraising and building businesses without understanding the important differences Web3 requires to succeed.
I say this again. A lot of businesses are following Web2 rules to build a business and raise money for that business. Ignoring the intricate differences within the Web3 ecosystem which are extremely important and almost needed for project success. To our surprise, we did a lot of research to get to this conclusion.
Q. What are the factors that you take into consideration before investing in a startup or SME?
- their understanding of tokenomics and token structure
- their understanding of the space
- the team and how important their credibility is to them
- who are their advisors and backers
But how much thought is put into token structure, tokenomics, and long term rather than focusing on the short-term, height and launch of the project are very important for me and the utility of the token as well, which goes back to the first idea of token structure and tokenomics
Q. What are some of the real-life utilities that you predict NFTs will serve?
NFTs are just digital ownership. Look at everything we own right now in the physical world and see how that would apply to the digital world identity. You’re going to own your own identity virtually, whether it’s a version of the physical identity you have or a whole new identity you build online. In-game assets, being able to own assets within a game, trade and move them from game to game is going to become the norm.
Most assets in the physical world will likely have a digital representation of them just because of the benefits of immutability and the ability to transfer them very efficiently without the need for intermediaries. Financial instruments, tokenization of financial instruments and there are just so many the list goes on. Just looking at the physical things that we own and seeing how we can replicate them in the digital world should be of sufficient answer for someone to come up with like hundreds of examples.
Q. How do you foresee the future of the financial market moving forward?
It is a question I don’t usually answer because it’s so impossible to know. But I’ve just had so many smart people come on my show week after week, and I’ve listened to their answer time and time again and my conclusion really hasn’t changed, the smartest people disagree.
I just have a thesis of investing when there’s blood in the waters when everyone’s scared and everyone seems pretty scared right now. Even though I just don’t see enough reasons to be scared or as scared as they are. There’re reasons I just don’t think they’re sufficient. I just don’t see the war in Ukraine escalating to Armageddon levels considering those two assumptions of fear, the risk assets are going to do well in the near term and the long term, thanks to globalization, our economy has just become so complex, it’s such a complicated economy. I just think crypto is well positioned very early, growing a lot faster than expected and getting adoption a lot faster than I expected. For me it’s a no-brainer as a place to put in capital and more of my time.
Q. What advice do you have for new investors in the crypto space?
Two points of advice. Understand it. Because when you understand it you’re going to be extremely excited when you understand what NFTs are. It’s not just art or collectables.
Your whole perspective is going to change. I’ve had so many traditional investors that were sceptical of NFTs and after I explained to them very objectively what NFTs are, some of them invested on the spot. They invested like hey Mike, can you buy me an NFT? Or where can I deploy capital or can you help me invest? Multiple times, all I did was explain to them that NFTs are not art or collectables. It’s digital ownership, art and collectables can be NFTs, but it’s a very small percentage of what the technology is. Their whole mindset changed after I explained to them what NFTs are and understanding what the open Metaverse means is enough to change the entire view of the space. I’m talking about traditional investors that don’t understand the space. Crypto investors just look at what happened in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. If you’re feeling hurt by the current bear market, just remember that this happened time and time again. I should be more excited right now to deploy more capital rather than being hurt and scared.
Q. Lastly, what message do you have for our readers?
The best piece of advice I can give anyone is to understand human emotions.
Once you understand that, as humans, we’re like sheep and we have FOMO and we start getting scared when everyone else is scared. You start to realize that what you feel is the right decision could very well be the wrong decision. What do I mean by this? When everyone was talking about every Metaverse being worth billions, if not trillions in 2021.
You’ll be like, hey, everyone’s talking about this because everyone’s throwing money at this.
I should be sceptical because it just doesn’t add up. It doesn’t make sense that something that didn’t exist a year ago is suddenly worth trillions in people’s minds. Every Metaverse project is pumping 100x logically doesn’t make sense. So, understanding human emotions and understanding that the ability to be a contrarian at the right time is probably one of the most financially rewarding things you can do and that will give you a massive edge in crypto, it’s easy to understand what I just said, but it’s extremely difficult to practice because of human emotions. When everyone is scared, it’s probably a good time for you to start getting involved and getting more interested in a certain investment or asset class. I know it’s nothing new for most people, but it’s funny enough that people still don’t practice it, a year ago, they thought the world was going to be changed because of blockchain a year later the world’s coming to an end and Cryptocurrencies are dead. That’s insane!
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