When UVM alum Brian Kelly ’93 was looking at schools, he wanted to be an accountant and a lawyer. His choices were Boston University and the University of Vermont.
“As I grew up in Boston, I loved to ski and UVM has a great accounting program, so I ended up in Vermont; oh, and fell in love with it too,” says Kelly.
While Kelly’s original accounting career didn’t exactly pan out as originally planned—he discovered finance—the differing perspectives and diversity of curriculum he encountered at UVM have subsequently served him well.
“It was nice here at UVM to see different perspectives,” he says. “So, as I go out into the business world, I’m a little bit more understanding of where people are coming from rather than that kind of very narrow business profit and loss kind of thing.“
Those different perspectives Kelly began to appreciate early on have subsequently popped up throughout his career, and continue to shape his business life and philosophies today.
“There’s been a couple times in my life that I’ve kind of taken a hard right or a hard left,” he says. “One of them was right here at UVM when I discovered I wasn’t that good at being an accountant, and I got into finance and really loved it. That set the stage for me to go to Wall St. I carved out a niche for myself there, which got me into foreign currency trading which led to the bigger picture global macro investing where I read this story about Bitcoin in 2012. At first, I thought there’s no way this will work, and I dismissed it for about a year. But after my interest was reignited and taking a year-long deep dive into it, I changed my perspective and thought it was an amazing creation.”
Of all the buzzwords used in business and our global economy today, “disruption” must surely be at, or near the top. For Kelly though, when it comes to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and their impact, using disruption is perfectly appropriate.
Kelly, who is a member of the UVM Grossman School of Business advisory board, wrote a book in 2014 called “The Bitcoin Big Bang: How Alternative Currencies are About to Change the World,” and can often be seen as a contributor and guest on financial shows such as Fast Money on CNBC.
“In terms of trends I think decentralized finance is probably the most exciting thing. And I say that because it really is the promise, and the scalability, of cryptocurrencies and blockchain that I saw early on in 2013 when I got into Bitcoin,” he says. “It hit me that ultimately all this thing is–is a piece of software that removes the middleman. That's all it is. We can talk about all the complexities of it but that's what it is. You look at what email did to the post office. What YouTube has done to media, and blogs have done to newspapers. Those are all just software; they disrupted this industry. We're finally at a point, and it's just started within the last year, that this new software technology is disrupting finance and that to me is going to be a sustainable trend.”
From 2013, Kelly has been an active participant in the emerging digital currency ecosystem with his initial hedge fund, opportunistic funds, and proprietary trading of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The company he now leads, BKCM Digital Asset Management, currently runs and manages two different cryptocurrency hedge funds.
Additionally, via a recent donation Kelly generously made to create a managed crypto-centric fund for finance majors, Grossman students now have a hands-on opportunity to learn first-hand about trading in this sector, as they’ll be part of a team actively managing the fund this semester.
Kelly’s ability to see the future and adopt new trends goes back in part to his willingness to take on board new perspectives, especially via the collaborative culture he encourages at his company.
“Billions is a TV show about finance, and it definitely has that kind of Wall Street culture of ‘Eat what you kill,’ kind of hard-nosed aggressive approach. That’s not the type of culture that works for me–I like to have a very communal feel. I want everybody to work together, I don’t want people to be siloed and have a ‘this is my job, and that’s all I do approach,’” he says.
“When I am making an investment decision, I am dealing with uncertainty. For me, it’s all about probability – what’s the probability that this is going to go up versus going to go down. And my process is I want every piece of information that I can get, and I get it from different perspectives. And I recognize that I have a skill set that I can do some things–but I am not going to be able to see everything. So, I need people around me that are looking at it from a different perspective. There is a lot of benefit to having different perspectives coming in.”
Aside from the impact cryptocurrencies and the blockchain will have on the world of finance, Kelly offered one final example and perspective of the disruption to expect from them in careers, and opportunities across other business areas.
“I would encourage people do not think of it as purely a financial vertical, it is not just another investment asset class,” he says. “If you're in marketing, it's going to touch your life. If you're in engineering, it's going to touch your life. I'll give you an example – NFTs are very hot right now. Someday, Nike is going to come up with a NFT version of Air Jordan’s that are limited edition that you're going to be able to wear in your computer game. Think about how many different career paths that will touch from the point it gets from Nike to the blockchain, to the computer game, to the marketing of it. For all of that you are going to at least have to know the language, and the vocabulary. Just because Bitcoin's going straight up and you think this is just kind of a financial game, don't dismiss it because of that – there's so much more to it than just the daily trading of the cryptocurrency.”
Time will tell exactly how much disruption the finance industry faces, but one thing is for sure, Brian Kelly will have an informed perspective.