Greycroft's cofounder talks social stock trading and how COVID-19 has impacted the venture landscape

Ian Sigalow has been in the venture capital (VC) space for over a decade, launching his firm Greycroft in 2006.

Since then, he's taken some big swings in the fintech space, many of which have paid off. Greycroft manages about $2 billion today. 

He was an angel investor in Venmo at a time when people told him that PayPal had already won the race of free peer-to-peer service. On this week's episode of The Scoop, Sigalow discussed how one of the firm's latest investments — Public.com — could build a similar business by combining social elements with trading. 

Sigalow sits on the board of Public, which recently garnered Series B investments from the likes of Will Smith and Adobe chief product officer Scott Belsky. It's a social network for traders, allowing users to trade stocks as well as grow their information networks. 

"So we believe at Greycroft that there is an opportunity, just like there was when Venmo was founded, to create a multiplayer game inside of a stock brokerage around a feed, and to build the first socially native brokerage application in the world," he said.

In this episode of The Scoop, Sigalow and The Block's Frank Chaparro explored Public's business as well as the VC landscape in the midst of COVID-19. The two also discussed:

• Why companies trying to marry social networking and payment infrastructure have to do so from the outset
• The lessons learned from Robinhood and other trading apps
• The future plans for Public.com, including how the company makes money and executes orders
• What the current economic uncertainty in the world means for the VC market
• How COVID-19 accelerated expected trends in tech business developments, and how a 10-year plan meant Greycroft was already invested in many of these spaces