Who is Alex Gierczyk?

By his own definition, Alex Gierczyk is an entrepreneur and a child of immigrants. He grew up in Texas before attending the University of Notre Dame. Despite his passion for reading and ongoing education, Alex dropped out of his finance program to start his own business and has been a serial entrepreneur for the past 10 years.

By Alex’s own admission, he has made plenty of mistakes and while he is now well-established in the crypto world, he didn’t start out with a clear direction for his career. Alex thought that he could make a living by investing in the stock market, but soon discovered you have to have money to make money in the markets.

This led Alex to want to start a business as seed money for future investments. He started to do his research, reading about how to get started as an entrepreneur, and what skills are necessary to be successful. Alex took on some freelance work before his first e-commerce business took root.

Once he was earning a basic living with his e-commerce business, Alex pinpointed software development as the next skill he needed to learn. He developed a mobile game that reached over 100,000 downloads. The year that Alex spent learning how to code didn’t directly result in much profit; however, he learned how to develop a product from the ground up.

Alex’s next business was a supplement company that he recently sold. His product marketing resulted in more traffic than he expected, and Alex used the profits from this success to relocate to California from Texas. He partnered with a friend who had a health blog, which gave the e-commerce store a huge boost. His catalog of products continued to grow as the company matured.

Currently, Alex runs an accelerator, helping other start-ups that are disrupting the web3 ecosystem. His new start-up is Tender Finance, a DeFi protocol that allows for undercollateralized loans in crypto. The Tender Finance team is working to build a system that allows for more efficient loaning, despite the anonymity of cryptocurrencies.

Lessons Learned

As a young entrepreneur who has reinvented himself several times over, Alex has learned many things in his thirty years. However, when asked to hone in on some of the most important things he’s learned, he first notes the value of persistence.

“You get good luck and bad luck. If you’re persistent, good luck tends to carry you past the finish line,” he says.

Empathy, and creating good karma by showing kindness, are second on his list. Next up are having a specific skill set: the ability to delegate and the ability to automate. Alex says that creating systems keeps you from getting caught up in minutiae and allows you to scale your business.

Crypto is the Future

When it comes to identifying future opportunities, Alex knows to follow the money. And as he points out, technology and cryptocurrencies have attracted a lot of money and a lot of human ingenuity.

Alex calls crypto “the next step in information technology.” Platforms like YouTube and Twitter have proven to abuse their power, which has created distrust and concentration of power. What’s exciting about crypto is that it takes something that is integrated and decentralizes it.

Monetary policy is influenced by the Fed and political whims, which is not transparent at all. Many changes to monetary policy do not benefit the greater good. Bitcoin is a monetary policy that is fully transparent, fully decentralized, and can only be changed by consensus; it cannot be manipulated.

Ethereum came next and is a smart contract platform. With Ethereum, you can decentralize monetary policy as well as financial services. You can start to decentralize the markets. You can start to decentralize things like Twitter, and create a platform that is fully decentralized and without censorship.

Alex Gierczyk of ANG Ventures is excited about the future for crypto and decentralization, as well as the promise of privacy and democratization of the concentration of power that the internet created.

Learn more about Alex Gierczyk on his YouTube channel.