Psychology, Value, and Data: How Santiago Santos Navigates The Markets

Summary

Avi Felman interviews Santiago Santos, founder of Inversion and a top crypto fund manager who sold the top in 2021. Santiago shares how growing up in Mexico and consciously erasing his accent shaped his high-agency, truth-seeking approach. He explains why crypto matters more outside the first world and why he recently shut down his fund’s original crypto thesis after finding no sector where the tech adds enough value. He has pivoted to buying boring, cash-generating businesses and treating technology as orthogonal. He argues that AI levels the playing field, making this the perfect moment for curious generalists, and expresses a specific long call on data-rich pharmaceutical companies.

• Santiago erased his Mexican accent to remove bias, embodying high agency and a drive to be the best.
• He argues crypto’s killer use case is for cross-border payments and remittances in developing nations, not within the US.
• His fund Inversion raised $26.5M but never deployed capital because no sector met his return hurdles after filtering for crypto transformation.
• He pivoted to buying boring cash-flow businesses (e.g., critical power servicing) and now sees technology as an orthogonal enhancer, not the central thesis.
• He urges young people to be marginally delusional, embrace curiosity, and use AI to collapse barriers to building and learning.
• Santiago is long pharmaceutical companies with large proprietary datasets that can be mined by AI to accelerate drug discovery.
• He highlights the growing value of offline human experiences and vintage assets in an AI-driven world.
• He warns that algorithmic echo chambers make markets more inefficient, making truth-seeking a bigger edge.