From Conviction to Corporate Strategy | BTC Prague 2025 Fireside Chat

At BTC Prague 2025, I shared how my career as a hedge fund manager led me to Bitcoin — and why I believe the Bitcoin treasury company model is still early, still misunderstood, and still one of the most compelling opportunities in public markets today.

How I Found Bitcoin

I’ve spent most of my career as an investor. I ran a hedge fund called TCS Capital for many years — about four billion under management, focused on technology and media. My instinct was always to look at things other people weren’t paying attention to, things that were controversial. Bitcoin fit that profile perfectly. It was an early mega trend that most institutional investors were ignoring.

My first real exposure came from walking into Wes Casaris’s office back around 2012. His energy and conviction impressed me, but I didn’t act on it then. I wish I had. Over time, friends of mine who got in early did extremely well, and I started paying much closer attention.

The Zombie Company Problem

The idea of a Bitcoin treasury company crystallized for me when I started listening to Michael Saylor talk about zombie companies — what I call smidcaps. These are small and mid-size public companies with decent balance sheets, sometimes solid free cash flow, but completely ignored by the market. Investors would rather buy one of the Mag Seven than spend time figuring out a thinly traded name.

I knew that world well. I’d spent years as an activist investor, pushing companies for change, joining boards. And when Saylor described his own company in August 2020, I recognized it immediately — because I was chairman of one. I had recently taken an activist role at Semler Scientific, restructured the board, and there we were: a classic zombie. So I reached out to Michael. He couldn’t have been more welcoming. What still amazes me is that we ended up being the first US public company to follow his playbook after him.

Why It Took So Long for Others to Follow

People didn’t copy Saylor because they thought he was an outlier — that he just got lucky, that it was unique to him as a cult figure. A lot of people also didn’t fully understand the financial engineering he was doing. Honestly, I didn’t either when I first started. I was excited to put Bitcoin on our balance sheet. The full playbook came later, when he educated me on it.

The other major factor was the regulatory environment. The SEC was adversarial. Getting an ATM in place was extremely difficult. That’s changed dramatically now, and that’s why we’re seeing so many treasury companies emerge today.

Aggressive vs. Conservative: To Each Their Own

There’s a spectrum here. Some companies just want Bitcoin on their balance sheet as a hedge against fiat debasement and fiscal instability. That’s completely valid. But we’re not interested in the mild version. We believe in the aggressive, ambitious approach — using debt and equity to accumulate as much Bitcoin as possible. The more Bitcoin we own, the more digital real estate we hold. It’s a gold rush, and we want to be a scaled player.

One thing I feel strongly about is the scarcity of investable public equities with real Bitcoin exposure. Most institutional fund managers can’t own Bitcoin outright or even the ETFs. MicroStrategy is essentially the only name with sufficient scale, and no large fund can put more than five to ten percent into a single position. The market needs more public equities in the five to ten billion dollar market cap range — and that scarcity alone may justify trading at a premium to net asset value.

Why Semler Should Trade at an mNAV Premium

We got a meaningful head start. We’re among the most levered Bitcoin treasury companies, which means if Bitcoin rises — and we believe it will — we should outperform. But beyond the numbers, there’s an intangible factor: community trust and brand. MicroStrategy and Metaplanet have done a phenomenal job of that. We’re working hard to