Calvin Ayre wasn’t always the rich entrepreneur he is now; He had to work his way up the hard way. He did well for himself, building up a gambling brand, and has now moved on to the Bitcoin world. Before the CoinGeek Live conference kicked off, Ayre joined Dustin Plantholt on the Life’s Tough podcast to discuss how he got to where he is now.
Ayre grew up in the farmlands of Saskatchewan, telling Plantholt that he walked to school with pig shit on his boots, just like all the other kids. But after gaining a college education and starting a business in Vancouver, Ayre quickly saw there was a market opportunity in the nascent world of online gambling. He gave his theory of how he did so well in those early days:
“I think my secret sauce was early on, coming up with a better branding strategy and marketing plan. A lot of the incumbents in the earliest days were actually street bookies who’d just kind of said ‘Lets go online.’ So they weren’t very flamboyant and they just didn’t really understand the concept of marketing. You don’t market yourself in a traditional manner when you’re doing street bookie stuff, because you don’t want people to know other than your customers.”
Plantholt asks if a drive for money motivated Ayre. “Actually, I never really thought I’d be this successful in my career,” Ayre answered. “I actually was more driven by challenges. I think I can do this, and I do it. It was incremental and it kept getting bigger, and bigger and bigger. I kind of just like building things, I’m kind of a builder.”
The secret to Ayre’s success is in seeing a window open when a door closes. “I see opportunity where other people see challenges all the time,” he said. “In fact, one of the greatest opportunities I’ve ever seen in my entire life is the crypto industry attacking BSV, because it creating all these market holes in the [Bitcoin SV] ecosystem that myself and my friends are filling right now.”
Ayre explained just why Bitcoin SV is such a huge market opportunity right now:
“Because the fundamental business model of Bitcoin’s original protocol, BSV, is so different and doesn’t actually compete with anything else out there. Because of its superpowers, massive scaling, which enables nano-transactions, and massive immutable data storage on a public blockchain, which nobody else in the world can do. BSV has a global monopoly, patent protected monopoly on that stuff.
This growing market is under invested right now, thanks to those who incorrectly see Bitcoin as competition. “Because of the reality of the distortion field coming from all the other platforms thinking that somehow what we can do that they can’t do is competition, which is mind-blowing, they’re actually stopping a bunch of people from investing and starting to fill these niches in the actual earn and spend economy that’s being created around this unique platform,” Ayre said. “That’s created massive, massive market opportunity for myself and my friends. So for that, I thank them.”
There are still plenty more investment opportunities, and you can learn about them right now, inviting everyone to go watch CoinGeek Live, happening now. “You can go to CoinGeekConference.com or just CoinGeek.com,” he said. “And it’s over three days, it’s in New York and London, and it’s live streaming so it’s free. You can just go open up an account and watch it.”
Ayre noted that going forward, CoinGeek conferences would be changing a bit. “We’re going to have a smaller version that’s going to be more of a cross section of things,” he said. “It’s going to float around in jurisdictions, probably New York, London, and maybe somewhere in Asia. We’ll have anchor conferences which will get big and have different channels in them, because BSV will have a consumer facing app channel, it’ll have an enterprise solutions channel, it’ll have an infrastructure channel…. There’s going to be different channels, and then people can then go to these events and focus on what they like.”
You can listen to Dustin and Calvin talk here on Spotify and iTunes.
CoinGeek Live will touch on all of those channels, something Ayre was careful to point out in response to some feedback he’s seen. “I’ve seen some people complaining that we had more of a finance and enterprise focus for this one, thinking that’s the way its going to go,” he said. “It’s not, it’s just that’s what we want for this market right now.”
If you haven’t signed up to watch CoinGeek Live yet, it’s still not too late. The conference is running from September 30 to October 2, and you can watch for free by visiting CoinGeekConference.com
