Founder & CEO
Bump®
A streaming platform where every song is a live market. Fans back tracks early and share the upside; artists earn from belief and trading volume, not just streams.
bump.fm →I bet early on things most people think are crazy. Bitcoin. Prediction markets. Men's skincare. Psychedelic medicine. Independent film. Dance clubs that don't close until after sunrise. Now I'm building Bump — turning music itself into a market. Previously co-founder of Augur, the Blockchain Education Network, Ausum Ventures, Mystic Ventures, and more.
Music is now a market. Discover it and get in early, or watch it run.
The music industry has a distribution layer — streaming — but no capital layer. Fans create hits and capture zero upside. Artists go viral and barely monetize the momentum. Bump introduces a new primitive: every song launches with a live market, so the people who believed early win alongside the artist.
We empower exceptional teams in psychedelic medicine and consciousness expansion.
Humanity faces a mounting mental health crisis that existing treatment options cannot address — a shortage that extends to countless conditions of the central nervous system. The resurgence of psychedelic therapies, combined with breakthroughs in precision neuromedicine and machine learning, represents an imminent wave of transformative mind-body tools. Mystic makes targeted seed and pre-seed investments at the intersection of biotechnology, AI, and longevity, with the ultimate aim of elevating consciousness at scale.
I've spent the last decade at the frontier of emerging industries as a founder, angel investor, film producer, and philanthropist — backing things before the world was ready for them. First bitcoin and decentralized markets, then psychedelic medicine, now music.
I found bitcoin as a college student in 2013 and never really came back. I founded the Blockchain Education Network, a nonprofit that grew into the largest student blockchain organization in the world, then co-founded Augur — a decentralized prediction market and the first ICO on Ethereum.
In 2014 I started the Crypto Castle® in San Francisco, a house that doubled as an office and became a kind of clubhouse for a generation of crypto builders — and a brand in its own right. I'd go on to open Castles in Miami and Los Angeles as I moved around the country.
At Blockchain Capital I sourced multiple winning investments, earning carry on a fund that returned more than 60x. In 2018 I founded Ausum Ventures, a crypto VC-hedge fund backed by Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, and Tony Hawk. Three years in I bought out my LPs at a 4.7x MOIC to focus exclusively on psychedelic medicine, and have run the remaining book personally ever since. In 2019 I started MadeMan, a men's skincare brand — a detour that taught me more about building a real business than anything before it.
I've been an active funder and advocate in psychedelic medicine for nearly a decade — longer than virtually any institutional investor in the category. That work now runs through Mystic Ventures, a fund backing the science and companies bringing psychedelics into mainstream mental health care. It's the same bet I made on crypto: a misunderstood technology with years of quiet research behind it and an enormous amount of human suffering it could relieve.
Today my main focus is Bump, where I'm founder and CEO. Streaming solved distribution for music and left the economics untouched — fans make hits and capture none of the upside, artists go viral and barely monetize it. Bump gives every song a live market so belief pays. It's the clearest through-line of everything I've done: markets as a way to let the people who show up early actually participate.
I've been angel investing since 2014. I wrote the first check into Polymarket, Polychain, Nabis, and Vise — four companies that went on to raise from the best firms in the world — and invested early in Ethereum, Qtum, and Filecoin. Most of what I know about investing I learned doing it with my own money, before anyone would let me do it with theirs.
I produce films through Crypto Castle® Productions — five features to date, premiering at Cannes, Sundance, and Tribeca. Tyler Taormina's Christmas Eve in Miller's Point played Directors' Fortnight, became a New York Times Critic's Pick, and was named the second-best film of 2024 by The New Yorker; Bao Nguyen's The Stringer premiered at Sundance and was acquired by Netflix. Backing a singular filmmaker is not so different from backing a founder — you're betting on a voice, early, when the market can't price it yet.
And I own nightclubs in four cities — Club Space and Midline in Miami, Refuge in New York, Pawnshop in San Francisco, and Gonzo's back home in Northampton. Different business, same instinct: build the room you wish existed and let the right people find it.
And I write, occasionally, at Medium.
People started calling me Gonzo early in my college years, after Hunter S. Thompson, and I have never once tried to correct them.
Thompson didn't report on the Hell's Angels. He rode with them for a year and got stomped for his trouble. I've run my life on roughly the same principle.
I moved into the boom instead of writing about it. Threw the parties. Made a reality show about my own life. Took the drugs I now fund research into, and wrote most of it down afterward.
It has been expensive, occasionally humiliating, and I would do all of it again. The name is on my domain, my handles, a nightclub in my hometown, and a trademark: Gonzo Gardner®.
Being inside the thing is also how you see it early. Every call I'm proud of came from being in the room — not from reading about the room.
A streaming platform where every song is a live market. Fans back tracks early and share the upside; artists earn from belief and trading volume, not just streams.
bump.fm →An early-stage biotechnology fund investing at the seed and pre-seed stage in psychedelic medicine and consciousness expansion. 35 portfolio companies across pharmaceuticals, clinical infrastructure, neurotech, and consumer.
mystic.ventures →A decentralized prediction market built on Ethereum. The first ICO on Ethereum and the first utility token, raising roughly $5.3M — $REP would go on to peak above a $1.1B market cap. I served as Director of Operations through the build and launch.
Started in college as the College Cryptocurrency Network. Grew into a 501(c)(3) and the largest student blockchain organization in the world, with affiliate clubs on campuses across the globe.
A crypto VC-hedge fund at the intersection of blockchain technology, crypto assets, and social impact — backed by Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, and Tony Hawk. LPs bought out at 4.7x in 2021; I've held the book personally since.
A men's skincare brand built to normalize male self-care. It didn't survive — and I wrote openly about why. My proudest failure, so far.
Read the postmortem →A film production company named after the San Francisco house that started it all. Five features executive produced to date, premiering at Cannes, Sundance, and Tribeca. Backing independent filmmakers with singular voices.
Ausum Ventures' 4.7x MOIC reflects capital actually returned to limited partners upon their 2021 buyout. The ~11x figure reflects the wholly owned book to date and is largely unrealized — it represents marks on positions not yet exited, is not attributable to outside investors, and may not be achieved. Individual multiples are gross of fees, carry, and expenses, are marked as realized (R) or unrealized (UR), and are not representative of overall performance. Selected investments are shown for illustration and are not a complete list; a full list including losses is available on request. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Nothing here is an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy any security.
Tyler Taormina's sprawling, warm-hearted portrait of an Italian-American family Christmas on Long Island, featuring Michael Cera, Elsie Fisher, Maria Dizzia, and Francesca Scorsese. It premiered in Cannes' Directors' Fortnight, played AFI Fest, and became a New York Times Critic's Pick — and Richard Brody named it the second-best film of the year in The New Yorker.
"The clichéd premise of a memory-rich family drama set during the holidays yields a comprehensively original film. Its mosaic-like structure and epigrammatic dialogue are propulsive, its characterizations high-relief yet finely etched, its performances prickly yet tenderly observed." Richard Brody, The New Yorker
An investigation into the most famous war photograph ever taken. Using forensic analysis and testimony from surviving AP staffers, the film argues that the 1972 "Napalm Girl" image was shot not by the man credited for fifty years, but by a Vietnamese stringer named Nguyễn Thành Nghệ.
A Lynchian horror comedy starring Jack Dylan Grazer, Alexis Bledel, and Bill Camp. A teenager working at a suburban buffet is adopted as a project by a wealthy developer who insists on becoming his mentor — a parable that speaks in riddles and ends in full surrealism.
I own and operate five nightclubs across four cities. Rooms built around music, craft, and the people who show up for both — the same instinct that drew me to crypto and psychedelics, just with a better sound system.
The legendary Downtown Miami institution, home of the sunrise terrace and a 24-hour license that's made it a global pilgrimage for dance music.
A Miami room built for the deep end of the night.
An NYC space for people who take the music seriously.
Nightlife in a city that's often told it doesn't have any.
Back where I'm from. The hometown room.
Full press list and high-resolution assets available on request — use the contact form below.
I speak regularly on music and market design, psychedelic medicine, the early history of crypto, and what it takes to invest in things before they're respectable. Based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. For conferences, panels, podcasts, or press, use the form — it comes straight to my inbox.