How is Sydecar balancing its services and technology offerings, and is there a core technology that the company is leveraging?

It's not like there's a silver bullet technology piece that pulls everything together and says, “This is what makes side currents stoppable. It's more aligned.” The silver bullet then, would probably be the vision, which is around creating the standard—the one way to transact. 

Sydecar has been able to automate where other players in our space have not because we only accept one way of doing business—our way. When you work with Sydecar, you’re accepting our standard way of doing things – whereas everyone else in the ecosystem says, “You have your own documentation that your council drafted. Cool, we'll help you with that. We’ll figure out how to take that on, because we have an army of accountants and lawyers behind us that will interpret what's there and help you with reports and tax season." But what they don’t consider is that, by accepting every single different way of doing things, every different set of custom legal documents or banking partners or reporting requirements, they create an immense amount of friction and inefficiency. They create reliance on manual processes and opportunities for human error. 

At Sydecar, we say: “This is our one, standard way of doing things. We believe it’s the best way and the one that will create the least amount of friction for you (our customer).” Pushing forward our standardized way of doing business isn’t about being overly rigid or static. Our standard, and our infrastructure, will be constantly responding to what the market is asking for.

Our standard starts with an SPV, which is the most simple of venture vehicles. It's going to evolve over the course of the next few months to include a novel fund structure and more. But everything that we introduce to the market will be pioneered by us, based on what we think is the best standard for the ecosystem, largely informed by my experience as an attorney for over a decade.

Using that intellect and applying it to how we do business is our secret sauce. The technology that backs that is the infrastructure that powers Sydecar. Since we've taken that standard and said, “This is how we operate,” and built a verticalized software stack that allows us to automate the back office operations, we can offer what we do at a much lower price point in the market than our competition. We’re not trying to race to the bottom on price today, but we’re confident in our ability to operate more efficiently than others in the market.

The way we’ve built product has also allowed us to present a frictionless user experience.  When you bring your LPs to Sydecar, you’re not having to introduce new agreements, new forms, DocuSign requests, whatever every single time. It's seamless and takes far less time than anyone else because it's truly verticalized.