Signals Q&A: Meet Signals advisor, Philip Staehelin

We’re pleased to introduce you to our team’s advisor, Philip Staehelin. Read on to learn about Philip’s background, relationship with Signals and his thoughts about the crypto space of today and tomorrow.

Tell us a bit about your background.

Starting off, I earned an MBA from INSEAD. I’ve worn a lot of hats in my career, but I have an entrepreneurial core that has taken me on a global journey through corporate, consulting and startup environments. In the corporate sphere, I was the CEO of a $500M alternative payments company, as well as Managing Partner of Roland Berger, a top-tier global consulting firm. I’ve held executive roles in T-Mobile, A.T. Kearney and Accenture. I’m also a serial entrepreneur, and I’ve founded or co-founded a number of companies. Most recently, I’ve founded Blocknify, which focuses on Blockchain-based, secure document signing, and Spectacler, which revolutionizes vision care for the developing world via my patented eyeglass design.

I’m heavily involved in the startup community as the co-owner of CEE’s longest running startup accelerator, StartupYard, and I also serve as a mentor in accelerators from the Baltics to the Balkans. Finally, I sit on a number of boards for both companies and NGOs, such as Transparency International, and I serve as an advisor to a number of startups.

2. What is at the heart of your current work and interests?

I’m involved in a diverse range of activities, and my simple goal is to make an impact in everything I do. I love to help companies reach their full potential; however, I only engage when I buy into a company’s vision to change the world. With young firms, that may mean helping the teams professionalize in order to be able to execute their visions, or perhaps helping them to realize new value propositions that can dramatically accelerate their growth. I’m certainly never a passive player when I get involved with a company — what would be the point?

3. How did you first interact with the Signals team and/or platform?

I’ve known the Signals co-founders for a few years, as they came through StartupYard as a young entrepreneurs with a great concept. That original idea didn’t work out, but I was very impressed by the talented team — I even hired one of the Pavels into a company that I had co-founded. So of course, I’ve been keeping tabs on them, and I was excited to see them move into the crypto space.

4. What is it that makes Signals stand out within the crypto industry?

Unlike the vast majority of crypto startups, Signals wants to help build the underlying infrastructure of the cryptocurrency world. They’re focusing on the beating heart of the crypto ecosystem — the actual buying and selling of the cryptocurrencies themselves. By providing tools for traders to be successful, they bring in more traders, and thereby create more market liquidity. More liquidity consequently brings down the spreads, reduces transaction fees over time, and generally helps the crypto exchange market to further professionalize, which is certainly much needed to ensure the future of crypto.

5. In your opinion, what are primary strengths of Signals?

Signals combines a number of incredibly complex trading tools and makes them available in a powerful, easy-to-use platform. In the equity and bond worlds, firms like Goldman Sachs have an unfair advantage over any individual trader (or even smaller investment firm), as they have armies of smart employees that create proprietary, market-beating algorithms. But in the cryptocurrency space, the rules are still being written. Signals is way ahead of the game, and they’re using the most advanced technologies combined with more classical elements to create a powerful platform that enables cryptocurrency traders to find their own unfair advantages. Then, those traders can share their strategies, creating further opportunities for value creation in the process. I love it!

6. Where do you see the future of crypto in a handful of years from now?

The market is still in its infancy, and five years is an incredibly long time in the crypto space. Some pundits suggest the crypto world today is where the internet was in 1994, and the comparison works if you think about how much potential the future can bring in the blockchain and crypto space. However, the comparison no longer works when you think about the timeline of the upcoming change, and in many ways, this is more important.

In today’s world, change is accelerating. We’ve probably all seen the technology uptake curves (showing how long it took for a technology to reach “the first 100M users”), and the takeaway is that the adoption rates (or the rate of change) is increasing dramatically for each new technology. Thus, our frame of reference will look very, very different than what we remember from the “old internet days”.

Coming back to the question, I see investors focusing more and more of their money into cryptocurrencies, as those cryptocurrencies start to replace more traditional investment vehicles such as those provided by VCs and private equity firms. The ICO phenomenon is already being felt (and quite dramatically, actually) in the VC world. A startup isn’t restricted to looking for investment from a small group of local investors that have “all the power” in the relationship because of their relative scarcity. Instead, a startup launching an ICO raises money from around the world — both from big and small investors.

The ICO has fully democratized startup investment, and VC firms are feeling the heat. By extrapolating this trend, I believe we’ll see much more cannibalization of existing investment banking business, which will massively change the face of the investment world, even within the next five years. Of course, we’ll probably start to see some regulation (which could be a good thing if done correctly), but the cryptocurrency genie is out of the bottle and the market is set to grow exponentially over the next handful of years.