Chips on Shoulders
Skyline Standard has something to prove
Without the trust layer you’ve got nothing.
What is the bond market without the rating agencies? A bunch of companies calling around, trying to find someone who will buy their debt?
Imagine companies calling fixed income investors and saying “just come over and I’ll have Terry in accounting show you our books”. It’s laughable. No rating agencies, no market.
Imagine oil producers trying to convince you that one future barrel of oil is as fungible as the next. Imagine companies trying to sell you small shares of ownership without SEC filings and disclosures.
It wouldn’t work. There is nothing to invest in. No trust, no markets.
You want to know why real estate liquidity dries up any time rates rise? Why institutions are still paying 2 & 20 for access to private real estate? Why tokenization platforms that solve trading efficiency in a hundred ways are still waiting for institutional investors to wake up and notice them?
Because without trust you don’t have a market.
Skyline Standard is building the trust layer. Because it has to be done. And because we are the right people to do it.
Did you know that 94% of US CRE is privately held? Did you know that US asset managers own half of all stocks in the US, and only 3% of CRE? You want to talk about opportunity, you want to talk about TAM, you want to talk about tokenization use cases, you want to talk about liquidity and markets and efficiencies and price discovery and all of that. It’s all here. All of it.
And we’re not gambling on markets. I’ve done that already. I’ve gambled on markets coming to their senses. I bet my first company on a new fund that weighted stocks by reciprocal market cap. I was trying to bottle and package the equal weight premium, and I was betting on mean reversion. Instead, momentum and flows took the largest outlier companies larger, and larger, and larger. Small cap never caught up. I lost the company and it set me back years.
It set me back, but I tried again. This time proving to the world that private/NAV REIT funds were being marked 30% above their public market comps. And again, nobody cared. It set me back again.
But I’m still fighting. And this time we’re not gambling on markets. We are facilitating them. I’m learning.
We’re not gambling on the future. We are authenticating it. I think I’ll sleep much better at night this time around.
Tokenization without verification is just digitized opacity. Investors deserve more than vibes. They deserve due diligence, prudence and trust. So that’s what we are giving them.
I’ve been teasing a post about my co-founders, and that post is coming next week. It’s a band of pissed-off geniuses who think big, execute, and have fun doing it.
And more importantly, they have something to prove. Each one of them has something to prove.
Chips on shoulders put chips in pockets.
We’ve been working for this moment, and we’ve been waiting on this moment. And now it’s here and I couldn’t be more grateful for these partners and this opportunity.
We are going to make real estate a liquid and tradeable asset class. Might take us a decade, might take us two, whenever it happens you’ll call us an overnight success.
But it will happen. We are going to make it happen.
Just watch.