The Covid Trade that Helped Build a Bangladeshi-Canadian Family Office
Craig D'Cruze shares his unconventional path to investing in venture capital, cryptocurrencies and more at his family office.
Craig D’Cruze is a multifaceted entrepreneur with a passion for investing. In his 25+ years in equities markets, Craig has developed his outlook that emerging technologies will alleviate the largest hurdles facing the human race. Prior to joining Inverted Ventures, Craig led teams of between 22 and 70 people as an award-winning Executive Chef for companies like Marriott Hotels International, Delta Hotels, and The University of Calgary. He learned cost control, budgeting, creativity but most importantly team building, mentoring, and growth.
Craig has always been fascinated with numbers, finance, P&L, and cost-effectiveness. His attention to detail gives him the ability to read between the lines when analyzing innovative investment ideas.
These factors have led Craig to take on the role of Chief Operating Officer for Inverted Ventures and is responsible for leading the research team on early-stage venture capital investments and cryptocurrency portfolio development.
We heard from him on:
His personal background
Story of IV & overview of its main activities
The process of setting up a family office, asset allocation, management
Discussion on a few portfolio companies in which he has invested
🎙️ Listen to the episode on Spotify
💼 Actionable Insights
If you only have a few minutes to spare, here's a summary of our key takeaways and highlights:
I always loved cooking, because if you go to a Bangladeshi house, there's always food. You go to a Bangladeshi party, there's always a table full of food, and people surround themselves around food. Our family was no different. It didn't matter what event there was, or if you just went to someone's house on a whim. There would be a table full of food. So, food was always a central part of my life. I always knew that food made me happy and everyone around was happy when they had a plate of food and were eating some great thing. So, I always thought of that as it makes people happy, I want to make people happy.
There are so many skills involved in being a chef that I didn’t realize how much I use those in my day-to-day life now. I didn’t go to finance school, or business school. I went to culinary school and went to the school of hard knocks in the kitchen to really learn how to organize a team and run numbers. I learned it at large corporations like Marriott International and I made mistakes on their dime. I always said that I wanted to own my own restaurant at some point. If I made a $10,000 mistake, Marriott, the billion-dollar company, isn't really going to care. I'm going to learn something from my mistake and never make that again. But, if I did that with my own company that could make or break the business. So, I always tried having learning exercises from the different roles I worked in.
When I was 14, I started trading stocks, bonds. I love the markets. I love looking at the stock market and looking at how the stock went up here, this and that. I was always good with numbers, so if the chef thing didn’t work out, I knew I was going to be an accountant.
We started researching heavily on cryptocurrency. And we really believed that it was going to be the best-performing asset in that timeframe during COVID. There were a lot of factors that brought us to that realization and to that thesis. We weren't wrong about it, which was great because there were a lot of people who did not exit at the right time and got just burnt. We had a great outlook on it - okay, this is a time when there's a lot of free money coming into the market, there's a lot of people sitting at home that are looking to trade, there's a lot of fear in the market, especially mortality wise, people didn't know what was going to happen in a month, in a day, in a week because of what we were being told on the news and everything that was happening around us.
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