Avichal - Electric ϟ Capital
@avichal
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Co-Founder @ElectricCapital ; Investor @anchorage @bitwise @boomaero @cruise @deel @dydx @nearprotocol @newfronthq @notionhq @magiceden @pulley ; views are my own
Bay Area / Singapore
Joined June 2008
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Pinned Tweet
Founders forever remember who believed in them and who wrote them off.
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We need to stop listening to Buffet and Munger for investing advice. Software changed the game and left them behind.
Performance since 2008 crash, when Buffet notoriously struck "sweetheart" deals:
* Nasdaq : +848%
* SPY: +444%
* Berkshire: +388%
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1/ HOW TO ASK FOR HELP AS AN ENTREPRENEUR -- Every week entrepreneurs reach out to me cold on LinkedIn, Twitter, and email asking for help. I love helping if I can!
Unfortunately most people are terrible at asking for help. Here is how to do it properly.
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1/ Time for
@ElectricCapital
's Annual Developer Report:
We analyzed 150m+ repos & xM code commits to produce these 100+ charts.
This was a community effort: 150 people contributed via email and Github! Thank you everyone who helped.
Let's dig in👇
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If you need validation from others, being a startup founder is a terrible career choice.
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1/
@ElectricCapital
has raised $1 billion in new capital, our largest fundraise yet.
The web3 economy built on top of the programmable money stack will be one of the defining disruptions of the 2020s.
Where are we going to invest $1 billion?
🧵👇
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1/ Some friends and I are trying an experiment:
$400k for 7% on a SAFE, *before* you've picked an idea for a startup
I've done this w/ 3 founders since 2017. 100% of the companies have raised a A and they are worth ~$200M
Details on the $400k👇🧵
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~20% of US Millennials own crypto. Only 37% own stocks.
Imagine Senators and the White House trying to kill the stock market for half of all Millennial shareholders.
How do you think that demo would vote in the next election cycle?
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1/ Today we are unveiling
@ElectricCapital
Fund II, a $110M crypto-focused fund!
We're fortunate to partner with world-renowned endowments and philanthropies on Fund II.
We invest $250k-$10M in tokens and companies.
Need an idea? Here are 16 we are excited about👇🏽
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Sharing lessons from running a startup through 2008. Hope it's useful to founders.👇
1/ Most important: prioritize your health and family. It's clearly stressful as the world feels like it's falling apart. If you are healthy and have your loved ones, you will be fine long term.
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1/ People look for a new job completely backwards, e.g. "I want to be a PM at these 3 companies"
How people prioritize:
A/ Role
B/ Company
C/ Manager (sometimes)
D/ Market (almost never a consideration)
How people should prioritize:
A/ Market
B/ Manager
C/ Company
D/ Role
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India today feels like 1950s America
People assume their lives will be better than their parents'
Tech is seen as a positive force
The government is competent - put a probe on the moon for $70m, built a national ID system, and shipped a realtime national payment system
Every trend line points to the next few decades being absolutely incredible for India.
-- India has more than 50% of its population below the age of 25 and more than 65% below the age of 35. “Demographics is destiny”
- India’s phone user base has…
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The "rise" of China and India is not a 21st century phenomenon.
It is a reversion to the mean.
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1/ Loot is like
@ethereum
. It has ignited the imagination of a community by giving us some basic primitives.
It is clunky and limiting, but it is a working MVP.
If the community energy persists, it is a BIG breakthrough. It is the first truly community-owned gaming platform
🧵
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Asking public health officials when lockdown should end is like asking a lawyer when your product should ship.
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The stock market in 2020 feels like the crypto market in 2017.
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"It's a marathon not a sprint" is only half true.
The best marathoners complete run 4:45 minutes/mile for 26.2 miles. How many people can run even one mile at that pace?
If you want to compete with the best, you need to run at a pace that looks like a sprint to normal people.
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1/ Right after graduating I worked at
@Google
and Larry Page said something in passing that has stuck with me for a decade: "Most important problems aren't that hard to solve, it's just that no one has really tried." With some experience, I have come to believe this is 100% true.
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This one account on Twitter is doing a better job of covering the FTX and SBF news than the entirety of the
@nytimes
.
The Internet won. Citizen journalism won.
The NYT article was unquestionably soft. They're in a precarious situation. On the one hand, Sam stole $10 billion. On the other, Sam represents globalist values they love. And on the whole, they've promoted him and he is a huge dem donor. This is why we need citizen journalism.
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The fall of the
@nytimes
summarized in a tweet
~25 years ago: John Burns teaches the world about the horrors of the Bosnian war
Today: A style reporter attacks the founder of a $1B tech company built on social media for not understanding social media; reporter friends pile on
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1/ We
@ElectricCapital
fingerprinted more than 20,000 code repos and 16M commits to create a Dev Report on crypto. Analyzed by
@MariaShen
(better known internally as "Maria Meeker"). Data powered by
@jubos
. Here are the highlights ⚡️
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The crypto provisions in the new US infrastructure bill are a disaster.
This bill would result in crypto companies leaving the US en masse.
You can't KYC autonomous code that lives in the cloud that happens to custody crypto. The right strategy is to KYC at the fiat off ramps.
1/ 🚨 Here's the deal with the US infrastructure bill:
A new provision has been added that expands the Tax Code's definition of "broker" to capture nearly everyone in crypto, including non-custodial actors like miners, forcing them all to KYC users.
This is not a drill 👇
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Thinking about moving permanently to Singapore this year.
What are the best resources for me to understand neighborhoods and where to live?
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Wow, the average investor in this startup has won 1.66 NBA Championships!
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Probably 50% of the advice I give Stanford students:
A. You're studying engineering? You should take more humanities classes.
B. You're studying humanities? You should take more engineering classes.
There you go students. Saved you an hour of hearing me ramble. ✌️
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0/ 20 Heuristics to Generate Startup Ideas -- I regularly help pre-seed entrepreneurs identify and evaluate startup opportunities. The following are heuristics I’ve developed and collected to identify problems to solve that may also be startups. Also:
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1/ Like Pokémon, angel investors have a natural evolutionary path. Founders who understand the evolution of angels can construct a better team around the company. A quick thread on my observations and how founders should stack their team 👇
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Ironic Capitalism: Simultaneously believing capitalism is broken and corporations should be the arbiters of morality.
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More founders *should* take money off the table.
For founders, having $1-2M cash changes your mindset. You can swing big and worry less about downside.
Good VCs only make money with $1B+ exits. They don't want you to sell for $400M.
Cashing out aligns interests long term.
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Nothing makes me happier than seeing smart and successful people who *don't* get web3 yet.
It means we are early. The best, most creative, wildest stuff is yet to come.
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1/ Q: What has 126 slides based on 89M code commits across 270k repositories?
A: The 2020
@electriccapital
Crypto Developer Report!
A herculean effort by
@MariaShen
, data infra built by
@jubos
and
@puntium
.
The full report:
Some highlights below👇⚡️
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1/ The US has lost its global lead in crypto & blockchain developers.
This is a policy disaster for the US.
Almost every other region understands the potential of these technologies and how to regulate reasonably.
We see this daily. Amazing founders are leaving the US 👇
The U.S. has lost its lead in blockchain developers & has gone from 40% to 29% market share of open source devs.
We analyzed 200+ million code commits & 11k+ developer profiles to capture geography data.
Full analysis here:
Let's break it down 👇🏽
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Whoa - a sitting Senator is filing an amicus brief in support of
@coinbase
and against the SEC!
Great work
@SenLummis
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There are no good investments as a VC.
There are only investments that lost you money, and investments where you should have put in much more money.
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1/ Only ~30% of Americans trust schools, the media, or banks. Similar trends appear globally. This is a 40-year downward trend, not b/c of the Internet. We no longer trust the pillar institutions of post-WWII society and this has significant consequences:
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1/ People are surprised to learn
@ElectricCapital
's team is 68% software engineers and designers
Why does a VC firm need engineers?
Because Crypto will do to TradFi & venture capital firms what the Internet did to retail & media companies.
🧵👇
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The
@ElectricCapital
annual Developer Report drops on Wednesday!
We have ~150 slides of insights and proprietary data. It puts hard numbers against our intuitions that web3 is taking off.
The data makes me *ridiculously* optimistic about crypto & web3. 🚀
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Great companies and founders are forged in Years 2-3, not Year 1.
-
Year 1 (pre product): This idea is amazing. We will change the world!
Year 2: OMG this is hard. Why did we think this was a good idea?
Year 3: This might work.
Year 4 in the press: X is an overnight success!
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20 years ago the left loved tech for being socially progressive & the right loved tech as capitalists.
Now no one with political power wants to defend tech companies. The left hates tech for "causing" wealth inequality. The right hates tech for "bias."
🤦♂️
Facebook, Amazon, and Google have vast power over our economy and democracy. They’ve bulldozed competition and tilted the playing field in their favor. Time to break up these companies so they don’t have so much power over everyone else.
#BreakUpBigTech
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There are 1-3 decisions that actually matter every year. Everything else is a rounding error.
Most people spend too much time on the decisions that don't matter. And too little time thinking through the decisions that do matter.
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Imagine a Fintech startup tweeted:
"We launched two years ago. Today we have $1 Billion in collateral and have given out a cumulative of $1B in loans!"
Every VC in the world would want to know what the hell the startup does and how it works.
2020 is going to be wild for crypto.
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Yet another example of how the rest of the world is 3 years behind San Francisco.
The future truly is unevenly distributed.
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NFTs are this cycle's alt-coins. We are seeing liquidity flee and rotate out as the excess comes to an end.
Just as with ICOs, the 80 IQ belief is actually right -- just too early. Ethereum, Solana, L2s, DeFi, and stablecoins all came out of the excess of the ICO boom. It just…
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Can someone do a YC for politics?
1/ Find pragmatic, smart engineers
2/ Productize training on how to get elected
3/ Build a massive alumni network, likely starting with local politics, growing into Senators in time.
Scale this and do to law schools what YC did to MBA programs!
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Almost every startup looks amazing from far away and terrible up close.
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1/ Once upon a time, crypto's survival was an open question. Now, it's how we grow to 1B+ users
Today,
@ElectricCapital
is announcing AMAZING advisors to help founders get to 1B users
+ Jay Clayton, ex-SEC Chair
+ Kevin Warsh, ex-Fed Governor
+ Pratiti R.,
@Meta
's Head of UX
👇
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21/ Ecosystems with 50+ devs growing FULL TIME devs most quickly:
@terra_money
+312.50%
@Solana
+307.14%
@NEARFoundation
+291.43%
@FantomFDN
+271.43%
@Avalancheavax
+179.17%
@0xPolygon
+175.00%
@kusamanetwork
+161.90%
@Dfinity
+146.15%
@MoonriverNW
+125.00%
@Algorand
+116.67%
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To give you a sense for how early we still are:
My wonderful mother described the events of this week as a BIG deal because "the US Government said Bitcoin is not illegal anymore."
Also I think this means my mom thinks I have been doing illegal things for the last 7 years.
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You know what makes people REALLY want to disrupt the banking system?
Having to interact with the banking system.
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🐂🚀
The # of people asking me for "crypto 101" reading is skyrocketing
🔎 What are the best "intro to crypto" articles for smart laypeople?
+ what is Bitcoin and the case for investing?
+ why crypto unlocks innovation (and disrupts FAANG)?
+ what is DeFi?
Kicking it off👇
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Automation is not going to take blue collar jobs. It is coming for accountants, paralegals, administrative assistants, and other white collar jobs.
What robots did to the manufacturing middle class in the 1980s, AI is going to do to the white collar middle class in the 2020s.
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10/ DON'T BE AFRAID TO ASK -- Silicon Valley works because people pay it forward. You'll be surprised at how many people will help, do introductions, or give you quick feedback if you ask kindly, are precise in your request, and concise.
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Employee benefits are an arms race
Google caused billions of $ to move to SF with free shuttles in 2007. Every tech company then offered shuttles and many moved to SF.
Twitter caused billions of $ to move first out of SF. Every company will now have to compete
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"You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become a bank."
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Once inflation makes everyone in the US a millionaire, accredited investor rules won't hold anyone back.
Congratulations government, you played yourself.
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Some friends had not heard this Chinese parable. Sharing because it's always relevant:
A farmer owned a horse. One day, the horse ran away.
The neighbors exclaimed, “Your horse ran away! What terrible luck!”
The farmer replied, “Maybe. We will see.”
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Crypto is a cultural movement manifesting through technology.
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1/ Many people believe early employees take on the same risk as founders. This is incorrect.
Founders stake their reputation and take all of the opportunity cost in a sideways scenario (which happens 99% of the time). Founders uniquely bear these costs / risks
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Does crypto even need the US to succeed?
Turns out the non-US Internet markets are large enough for crypto to scale
And it wouldn't be the 1st time a technology has gotten to 100s of millions of people with the US lagging behind (QR codes, mobile payments)
👇
1/ The US is still on the fence wrt crypto. But the rest of the world isn’t waiting on the sidelines anymore.
Non US policymakers are embracing crypto
Non US consumers are using crypto
Let's dig in 🧵
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1/ We are excited to announce that Ken Deeter (
@puntium
) & Maria Shen (
@mariashen
) have been promoted to General Partners
@ElectricCapital
!
Here's why we believe engineers make for amazing crypto investors and how Ken and Maria exemplify our approach
👇
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Holy crap!
The Dems are publicly flipping against Gensler
Great work
@RepRitchie
🚨
@SECGov
is acting like an overzealous traffic cop arbitrarily ticketing drivers while keeping the speed limit a secret.
It prefers to communicate by enforcement rather than by rules or guidance. But that's no way to regulate digital assets.
I'm calling for an investigation.
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1/ Announcing NFT Pulse!
At
@ElectricCapital
we kept asking NFT questions but had 2 problems:
A. data sources were sus
B. data was not cross chain
We built a v1 on
@AlliumLabs
data & are opening the dash publicly. Feedback is appreciated!
Fun charts👇
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Spoke with multiple liquid crypto fund managers this week. They all have investors leaving their funds and leaving crypto altogether.
Feels like true capitulation is finally happening.
🚀
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1/ The H1 2019
@ElectricCapital
Developer Report is out!
@MariaShen
compiled this with data infra built by
@jubos
and contributions from
@puntium
and
@thuanlee
.
We analyzed 22 million commits across 22k+ code repositories. Read it here:
Some tidbits 👇
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Sometimes life is complicated & nuanced. This is not one of those times.
Targeting and murdering children and the elderly is abhorrent.
Hamas is a terrorist organization.
Israel will & should defend itself.
🇮🇱
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1/ Six months ago
@southpkcommons
,
@jubos
, and I ran an experiment:
$400k for 7% *before* you pick an idea for a startup, no demo day, no timelines.
The early results are VERY promising.
We are looking for a new batch of Founder Fellows:
🧵on why👇
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Cancel culture creates a mega opportunity for a new social network -- Twitter 2.0
1. Pseudonymous (no verified profiles!) so you can't be cancelled and policies are applied fairly
2. Public follow graph + DMs (Twitter + Telegram)
3. Discovery engine to find insightful new voices
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The real crypto story isn't how much went to Hamas; it's how much went to Ukrainian humanitarian aid.
Crypto sent to Hamas: $500k
Donations for Ukrainian humanitarian efforts: $135 million [1]
[1] -
An inaccurate report last week claimed Hamas raised nearly $100 million via crypto assets.
In reality, it was less than $500,000.
This encapsulated the misconception that crypto is a tool for illicit finance when it accounts for less than 1% of global illicit finance activity.
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Sign in with Ethereum is one of the most slept on things happening in web3 right now.
This is how decentralized identity will emerge.
*Exciting News*
Today we shipped "Sign in with Ethereum" 🥳
You can now:
1. Connect your wallet to your account (Settings > Wallets
2. Show your address on your profile (Settings > Profile)
3. Log in with your wallet, no other credentials needed!
Enjoy 🧙♂️
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Every market and company looks amazing from afar and absolutely terrible up close.
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E'rybody want to have a newsletter, but don't nobody wanna do no heavy ass research.
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Deep fakes are going to be a big problem in 2024.
How do we mitigate the risk of deep fakes?
1/ content should have a verifiable cryptographic signature
2/ publish the signature to an openly readable, difficult-to-corrupt database
AI 🤝 crypto
Introducing Sora, our text-to-video model.
Sora can create videos of up to 60 seconds featuring highly detailed scenes, complex camera motion, and multiple characters with vibrant emotions.
Prompt: “Beautiful, snowy…
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@balajis
The trend lines are clearly very positive.
There is tremendous optimism on the ground as a result.
Young people know their lives will be better than their parents' and grandparents' lives. Which is unfortunately no longer a commonly held belief in the West.
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Silicon Valley and crypto may be wrong about COVID-19. Maybe it'll pass and cause limited healthcare & economic disruption
If so, SV and Crypto people will look very dumb.
But joke's on everyone else, because SV & Crypto people are used to looking dumb. We do it for a living.
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Want to co-found something with me &
@ElectricCapital
will lead a seed round?
I have two ideas I want to incubate:
1/ a crypto infra company
2/ an NFT-related protocol
Are you a talented smart contract engineer, data eng, or CTO?
DM me with a link to your resume and Github🙏
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Anyone else feeling the "first they came for..." vibes with this H1b visa ban?
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Each
@ycombinator
batch has at least $1 billion company.
With Demo Day entirely online, this batch may have the first unicorn and IPO where fundraising happened entirely online!
It's not a big a leap to imagine this being normal in 10 years.
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Exciting to see people learn how far ahead
@ilblackdragon
was with AI, LLMs, &
@NEARProtocol
Transformers, Tensorflow, a sharded L1 + shared sequencers + DA + trustless bridge + chain abstraction, YEARS before people knew these terms 🤯
The 🐉 deserves to be a 🐐
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Lots of startups and investors are worried about a correction. The best companies are looking forward to it now.
When capital dries up and competition goes away, the best companies consolidate talent and customers. It's no accident Google, Amazon, FB scaled after a crash.
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19/
@0xPolygon
more than 2x’d monthly Devs while
@Cardano
was +90%,
@BinanceChain
+80%,
@cosmos
+70%,
#Bitcoin
+10%. As we will see later,
@cosmos
and
@Cardano
's growth is unique in that it's ramping up later in life than new protocols.
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JP Morgan's new "cryptocurrency" is like the America OnLine of crypto. People used to think that AOL was the Internet. We all quickly learned the Internet beyond AOL was far more useful and interesting. After that, AOL just became an on-ramp to the real Internet.
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1/ In 25 years, founders will push a button to start a "company," raise funding instantly from around the world (cutting out the terrible VC firms that shouldn't exist), avoid armies of middlemen doing reduandant legal work, etc.
On-chain incorporation will turn corporate charters into code.
Every shareholder vote will be performed via digital wallets.
Every liquidation waterfall will be expressed as a function.
The nation states that first recognize on-chain vehicles will be advantaged as domiciles.
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New Yorkers on the NYC subway system: "This is a barely functioning piece of 💩. The Mayor should be fired."
Me on the NYC subway system: "This is amazing. I wish San Francisco's public transportation worked this well."
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Great reminder for all founders:
Control matters much more than economics.
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1/ Currency wars are going digital.
In this new world:
+ For the USD to remain the global settlement currency, the US govt must embrace crypto
+ For crypto to survive, the crypto community must help the US govt
@ElectricCapital
article w/ LOTS of data:
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Most people are raised to believe they are money-poor and time-rich.
The best founders understand they are actually money-rich and time-poor.
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1/ We are thrilled to announce 3 more advisors to help crypto founders scale to 1 billion users:
+ Elad Gil (
@eladgil
) renowned investor, author, & founder
+ Rebecca Rettig (
@RebeccaRettig1
) CPO at Polygon Labs
+ Akash Garg (
@akashgarg
) ex-CTO at Afterpay (acq for $29b)
👇
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Want a free copy of
@cdixon
's new book "Read Write Own" ?
@jubos
,
@ElectricCapital
, and I are giving away 1401 books.
Just fill out the form:
DEADLINE: 11:59PM Pacific Time, Feb 1 (today!)
NOTE: We can only ship to the US
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I used to think the Curve token emission model was terrible.
I now realize it was brilliant.
@CurveFinance
actually created the single best token design model from DeFi 1.0
1/Everybody wants a piece of the $CRV cake 🍰
With 183M (~$157M) in CRV tokens emitted this year the Curve ecosystem continues to flourish. This long tail emissions curve tied with ve + gauges has produced an integrated & dependent ecosystem. Let's dive into the key players
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Disrupting finance will be much harder than most crypto founders expect.
Software historically ate the world in markets with companies/people that were not quantitative and not aggressive. Finance is filled with highly quantitative & aggressive people. They will not go quietly.
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This is a fascinating test of intellectual property rights in a decentralized world.
Is this infringement?
Will BAYC members sue?
Who exactly do they sue?
Can/will Twitter enforce DMCA on profile pics that use these?
Probably the 1st of many wild IP tests to come
Tomorrow (9/12), Outcast Apes will officially evolve into
@Solanapes
.
After being rejected from the yacht club for not being able to afford rising gas prices on Ethereum, the outcasts have had enough. Solanapes marks a watershed moment for the NFT space.
#Solana
#SolanaNFTs
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