David Fung: The Dealmaker Behind CryptoMondays

David Fung’s first business ran out of a school lunchroom.

“I was buying and selling M&Ms,” he says. “Bought it for 25 cents and sold it for 50 cents during lunchtime.”

By the end of the week he had made about $100. For a kid in one of New York’s poorest neighborhoods, that was real money. It also taught a lesson he would carry through Goldman Sachs, Silicon Valley hardware and, now, crypto: find the margin, then find the people who can help you scale it.

A global community, one Monday at a time

Fung is Global Head of Institutional and Partnerships at CryptoMondays. The network runs chapters in 65 cities and counts about 170,000 members. It bills itself as the largest in-real-life Web3 community in the world.

It began in 2018 as a few people meeting at a bar through meetup.com to talk about crypto. Founder Lou Kerner’s idea spread one chapter lead at a time. Fung’s job is to grow those chapters worldwide and bring in sponsors who fund the local scenes.

In New York, CryptoMondays hosts an event every Monday, with a different host, panel and venue each week. One recent speaker was the chief investment officer of Bitwise, one of the largest crypto fund issuers.

The crowd has changed too. “It used to be cypherpunks and small investors,” Fung says. “Now institutions want to learn and engage.”

Growing up in East New York

Fung’s parents immigrated from Hong Kong. He arrived in the U.S. at eight months old.

“I came from the poorest family in the world,” he says. The family settled in East New York, Brooklyn, which he calls “one of the worst neighborhoods you could think of back in the day.”

He was born in 1975 and grew up through the city’s hardest decades. “It was rough growing up in the ’70s and ’80s in New York City,” he says. “A lot of hard, grinding times for my family.”

The family held together. “We supported each other,” he says. “It’s a close-knit family.”

Richie Hosein, who hosts the series, put it simply: “If you make it from East New York, you can make it anywhere.”

The candy business

Nobody handed Fung a playbook. “In the environment I grew up in, there’s not much anybody had,” he says. “I was in school. I needed money. I had no money.”

The idea came from the track team. The team sold M&Ms to raise money, and Fung noticed the math worked just as well for one person. “I realized I could do this for myself,” he says.

So he found the source. He slipped into the principal’s office and found the order slip showing where the school bought its candy. “That’s when I was like, I could order this myself and start selling it,” he says. When fundraising season ended, his business kept going.

He learned his product mix fast. The peanut M&Ms, he says, were the better sellers.

Goldman Sachs and a number on a screen

The same instinct got him his first real job. “When you don’t have money, you just gotta find the ways to make money,” he says. He applied for every kind of job. Out of college, he landed at Goldman Sachs.

He earned his undergraduate degree at NYU. While he was at Goldman, he says, the firm sent him to graduate school at Columbia.

Then came lunch with an old classmate, the kind who used to copy his homework. The friend had become a trader. He pulled up a number on his screen and told Fung it was what he had made that day.

It was a seven-figure number.

Fung had thought he was doing well. That moment changed his mind. Soon after, he moved into trading himself.

A technologist’s eye for investing

Fung’s career also ran through the hardware that powers modern computing. He was a lead architect at VMware, the virtualization company. He then spent about six years leading sales at Supermicro, the server maker that builds hardware for NVIDIA.

That background shaped how he invests. Asked how he made his first million, he points to early bets on companies like Palantir and Tesla. “I was a Tesla fanboy,” he says.

“I have a very big technical background,” he adds. “Technology comes first in a lot of the investments I make.”

His view on building wealth is just as plain. Spread your money across stocks, real estate if you can, the top cryptocurrencies and some gold. That way, he says, you are hedged against the market’s ups and downs.

Gold on the blockchain

Fung’s newest work sits where traditional finance meets crypto. He is with Streamex, a company listed on Nasdaq. “We have one product,” he says. “We tokenize gold.”

Putting gold on the blockchain, he says, “enables the whole world to have access to our gold.”

He also partners with investor networks and looks for new products, especially in AI. He invests in projects and helps young founders grow.

“I’m a deal maker now,” he says. “I’m all about making deals across the world.”

Pick the right friends

For all the deals, Fung’s advice comes back to people.

Crypto is full of characters who “may not have your best interests in mind,” he says. You sort them out through reputation and by showing up and meeting people, and it takes time. The goal is to find people who are successful, who you can learn from, or who do even better than you, and to stay in that circle. “Great things happen from being in the right place at the right time,” he says.

Family matters, he adds, but the family you choose matters more. “If you don’t choose the right friends, they can take you down. The five people closest to you really reflect your life.”

Asked for one piece of advice for the world, he doesn’t hesitate.

“Pick the right friends, guys. It’s really important who you hang out with,” Fung says. “If it wasn’t for the people I’ve been around, who knows where things would be.”

David Fung is Global Head of Institutional and Partnerships at CryptoMondays. Learn more at cryptomondays.io, connect on LinkedIn or follow him on Instagram. Interviewed by Richie Hosein for 1NFLUENC3 Media. Watch the full interview and read more stories at 1NFLUENC3.COM. More from the Capital desk.