Christie’s Turns Venture Investor With A New Tech-Focused Fund
Christie’s Venture will focus on early-stage financing for companies developing Web 3.0 and related technologies, innovations that make it easier to consume art.
Christie’s Venture will focus on early-stage financing for companies developing Web 3.0 and related technologies, innovations that make it easier to consume art.
Christie’s announced on Monday that it’s now investing in leading-edge technology related to the future of the art market through an internal strategic venture fund.
Christie’s Venture will focus on early-stage financing for companies developing Web 3.0 and related technologies, innovations that make it easier to consume art—including digital art, and on financial technologies that make it easier to buy and sell art.
“We’re particularly interested in founders who are doing things that reduce friction in our space—whether it be buying and selling, provenance, security, or technologies that help people consume art better,” says Devang Thakkar, global head of Christie’s Ventures. “Those are the kinds of areas that we’ve identified where we can help move the needle.”
Thakkar began advising Christie’s CEO Guillame Cerutti and the executive team during the pandemic on a range of digital considerations, including web and mobile applications, trends in nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, and digital ownership.
“With the growth of that area last year, we had a front-row seat to the development and innovation that founders were bringing to us,” he says. At the time, Christie’s didn’t have a way to participate in these fledgling businesses, so Thakkar pitched the idea of a venture fund.
The vehicle’s first investment is in LayerZero Labs, which Christie’s describes as a “cross-chain interoperability company.” In other words, LayerZero is developing technology that will allow people to move assets between blockchains such as Ethereum, Solana, and Algorand.
There are more than 1,000 blockchains currently in existence and Christie’s expects consolidation in the sector will reduce the number to 20 to 30 within the next year-and-a-half. LayerZero should make it easier for individuals to move their holdings without going through several steps and paying lots of fees. It’s technology that should benefit any crypto holder, not just those who own NFT-based art, Thakkar says.
Aside from such Web 3.0 technologies, Christie’s will also invest in technology that makes it easy to consume art, whether it’s through today’s computer systems, advanced screens, or something else, he says, adding, “It’s an area of investigation for us.”
Concerning financial innovation, Christie’s, which has its own art financing division, is looking outside of traditional art lending to the selling of fractionalized shares in fine art and other innovations that make it easier to sell art.
The fund is launching at a time when cryptocurrencies have fallen sharply, taking the value of many NFTs down too. Ethereum, which is the basis for many NFTs, was down nearly 66% through Friday.
But Thakkar says this “crypto winter” actually makes it “a little more realistic to invest in this space—the fog of speculation and high-price points have tapered down a bit.” He points to Andreessen Horowitz, a US$33 billion California-based venture firm that began investing in leading-edge tech in 2009, in the midst of the financial crisis.
Christie’s Ventures is seeded from the auction house’s balance sheet and will not include other investors. Legal and financial due diligence will all be handled in house, too.
Thakkar, who has been investing in companies on his own for 10 years, worked at Microsoft for a decade and was a former executive at Artsy, and he says, he also grew up around art. This new role at Christie’s is “a perfect blend of every fabric of my being,” he says.
Reprinted by permission of Penta. Copyright 2021 Dow Jones & Company. Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Original date of publication: July 18, 2022
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Vacationers scratching their travel itch this season are sending prices through the roof. Here’s how some are making trade-offs.
Capri Coffer socks away $600 a month to help fund her travels. The Atlanta health-insurance account executive and her husband couldn’t justify a family vacation to the Dominican Republic this summer, though, given what she calls “astronomical” plane ticket prices of $800 each.
The price was too high for younger family members, even with Coffer defraying some of the costs.
Instead, the family of six will pile into a rented minivan come August and drive to Hilton Head Island, S.C., where Coffer booked a beach house for $650 a night. Her budget excluding food for the two-night trip is about $1,600, compared with the $6,000 price she was quoted for a three-night trip to Punta Cana.
“That way, everyone can still be together and we can still have that family time,” she says.
With hotel prices and airfares stubbornly high as the 2023 travel rush continues—and overall inflation squeezing household budgets—this summer is shaping up as the season of travel trade-offs for many of us.
Average daily hotel rates in the top 25 U.S. markets topped $180 year-to-date through April, increasing 9.9% from a year ago and 15.6% from 2019, according to hospitality-data firm STR.
Online travel sites report more steep increases for summer ticket prices, with Kayak pegging the increase at 35% based on traveler searches. (Perhaps there is no more solid evidence of higher ticket prices than airline executives’ repeated gushing about strong demand, which gives them pricing power.)
The high prices and economic concerns don’t mean we’ll all be bunking in hostels and flying Spirit Airlines with no luggage. Travellers who aren’t going all-out are compromising in a variety of ways to keep the summer vacation tradition alive, travel agents and analysts say.
“They’re still out there and traveling despite some pretty real economic headwinds,” says Mike Daher, Deloitte’s U.S. transportation, hospitality and services leader. “They’re just being more creative in how they spend their limited dollars.”
For some, that means a cheaper hotel. Hotels.com says global search interest in three-star hotels is up more than 20% globally. Booking app HotelTonight says nearly one in three bookings in the first quarter were for “basic” hotels, compared with 27% in the same period in 2019.
For other travellers, the trade-offs include a shorter trip, a different destination, passing on premium seat upgrades on full-service airlines or switching to no-frills airlines. Budget-airline executives have said on earnings calls that they see evidence of travellers trading down.
Deloitte’s 2023 summer travel survey, released Tuesday, found that average spending on “marquee” trips this year is expected to decline to $2,930 from $3,320 a year ago. Tighter budgets are a factor, he says.
Wendy Marley is no economics teacher, but says she’s spent a lot of time this year refreshing clients on the basics of supply and demand.
The AAA travel adviser, who works in the Boston area, says the lesson comes up every time a traveler with a set budget requests help planning a dreamy summer vacation in Europe.
“They’re just having complete sticker shock,” she says.
Marley has become a pro at Plan B destinations for this summer.
For one client celebrating a 25th wedding anniversary with a budget of $10,000 to $12,000 for a five-star June trip, she switched their attention from the pricey French Riviera or Amalfi Coast to a luxury resort on the Caribbean island of St. Barts.
To Yellowstone fans dismayed at ticket prices into Jackson, Wyo., and three-star lodges going for six-star prices, she recommends other national parks within driving distance of Massachusetts, including Acadia National Park in Maine.
For clients who love the all-inclusive nature of cruising but don’t want to shell out for plane tickets to Florida, she’s been booking cruises out of New York and New Jersey.
Not all of Marley’s clients are tweaking their plans this summer.
Michael McParland, a 78-year-old consultant in Needham, Mass., and his wife are treating their family to a luxury three-week Ireland getaway. They are flying business class on Aer Lingus and touring with Adventures by Disney. They initially booked the trip for 2020, so nothing was going to stand in the way this year.
McParland is most excited to take his teen grandsons up the mountain in Northern Ireland where his father tended sheep.
“We decided a number of years ago to give our grandsons memories,” he says. “Money is money. They don’t remember you for that.”
Chima Enwere, a 28-year old piano teacher in Fayetteville, N.C., is also headed to the U.K., but not by design.
Enwere, who fell in love with Europe on trips the past few years, let airline ticket prices dictate his destination this summer to save money.
He was having a hard time finding reasonable flights out of Raleigh-Durham, N.C., so he asked for ideas in a Facebook travel group. One traveler found a round-trip flight on Delta to Scotland for $900 in late July with reasonable connections.
He was budgeting $1,500 for the entire trip—he stays in hostels to save money—but says he will have to spend more given the pricier-than-expected plane ticket.
“I saw that it was less than four digits and I just immediately booked it without even asking questions,” he says.
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