Mike Dudas On PumpDotFun, Crypto's Revenue Era, & The Fat App Thesis

Transcript

But you have the chance to succeed and generate real revenue on chain because the chains are performant. They're not going to fail. So, it's on you. Get a product out there that people want. It's happening on a number of verticals. Mike, the reason that I got in was because you said no. Like Luc like he had he had trouble with so many VCs. It's cynical. It's a absolute misallocation of capital that I believe is destructive to the crypto economy. Welcome back to the Rowup. We are your hosts. I'm Andy. I'm Robbie. And this is your home to learn from the biggest guests, the brightest minds at the tip of innovation. Our goal is to help spread the collective knowledge of everyone in our community. We are

breaking crypto out of its echo chamber and taking it to the real world. Sit back, relax, and enjoy a quick word from some of our awesome partners who make this show possible. Crypto UX is broken. AI can't be trusted and users are left in the middle. Magic Labs is building something better. A verifiable agent with cryptographic guardrails. It acts on your behalf, stays within your intent, and proves every move onchain. The first one's live. The Newton DCA agent. Automate your cryptobies safely. Try it now at magic newton.com.

All right, guys. Well, we are here at the uh I guess it's the salon accelerate week here in New York City. Uh Mike Dudus, the uh the infamous Salana Bowl, pumped out a fun bull. Infamous guy who yells at me for being bearish on Pumped Out of Fun. If I ever tweet anything bad about it. Yeah, I've had to pull back on, you know, my my face, you know, up front. Man, welcome to the show. It's good to have you on. It's been a couple times. Um I'm sure most people know who you are, but I just super brief rundown of yourself and Sixman Ventures would be great.

Absolutely. So 6N ventures early stage crypto VC firm primarily investing at the app layer. So you know if you think of a traditional VC you're seeing these big L1 L2 infrastructure deals uh not our model uh and not our specialty. So you know I'm in my 40s had a career before crypto and it's been in business building. Okay it's something we understand. So, what we're looking for is, hey, how do we invest in founders who are using the things that public blockchain networks enable to build businesses that couldn't be built before. Uh, and so those can be apps, anything from DeFi to deepen to stable coin and payments to speculative fund and trading and much more. Yeah. Let's

get right into it. What do you think about the recent competition of of the of Pumpfun with these new platforms? Yeah. So I think what you're seeing is uh pumped out funds success showed that there is immense desire for tokenized assets uh for the ability to tokenize things uh to issue new assets across a broad range of use cases. Uh and basically it's the largest fee generating event um you know outside of things that have existed for a decade or so. things like per and spots. It's the zero to one for sure of of of this cycle. And these are like in the same

way that Bitcoin and Ethereum are crypto assets. So like assets that simply in Salana didn't exist before, you now have things like memecoins and you know instantly issuable tokens. It's a new sort of primitive. Yeah. Um and so people are experimenting with it. It frankly shocks me that nobody has been successful at gaining any market share for over a year. Yeah. Uh and it's no surprise that there are a few platforms you trying to challenge pump down. Yeah. I think it's I think the the newest iterative models have been around. Okay.

Let's find a way for effectively token holders to capture the value that you know pump is or that insert your platform here is. They've kind of picked up a bit like like I think Bon has one that's doing pretty well. But but yeah, I mean it's there's still you know there's there's the goat and then there's all the rest. So yeah, and I by the way I think that uh some of them are illconceived. Yeah. Others I think are really interesting. So I'll I'll give you some examples. So things that concern me Yeah. are uh and I won't name specific platforms because I think a lot of the founders out there who are

launching these tokenization platforms are iterate experimenting and iterating rapidly. Mhm. Um, but I think there are things that will get people in trouble, not just the platforms themselves, but the folks who actually stand behind the tokens. And so I think the ones that have the potential to get in trouble are things that promise more than just being a memecoin. And so what I've seen is platforms that will enable for example somebody to launch a token and then sort of put behind that some promise that it has a tie to for example a business or you know an enterprise I think that's really really risky and no matter how

you try to sort of disavow that the token that's launched has you know any sort of uh direct influence on the business people just don't hear that and so they hear something different. We saw this by the way with NFTTS and I can at length you know discuss having experienced it myself launching a golf NFT project but bottom line is uh the expectation of the buyer of these tokens when they hear that oh it's tied to you know business acts or person X is all right well that person's going to increase the value now I would argue they shouldn't have a reasonable expectation of that and the people are

saying these tokens are you valueless, not tied to the actual business. But again, that there's just so much um there's conflict of sort of expectation versus reality. You know, the fine print is different. And the other thing is it's how you market these platforms. So some of these platforms market themselves to the token buyers as like, you know, get earliest exposure to this individual's great new thing. At the same time, the fine prints like but you have zero exposure to the economic upside. So I I just I don't think that that's prudent. Um and I would prefer like Pump is pretty straightforward that like these are valueless meme coins. Now things have sprouted up around them, but

they're launched as valueless meme coins. And I think again in in the spirit of experimentation, people are getting into, I would say, territory that I'm a little uncomfortable with and and I'm out there on the risk spectrum. So if I'm uncomfortable, definitely worth paying attention. Uh that being said, I've seen some really interesting and positive ones which are, hey, slap a token onto a fun, call it vibe coding app. Uh I think that's different in the sense that the token like you don't I haven't to date seen like tremendous promotion that like by the way the token has value tied to this silly fun app that I created, right?

um it just offers a broader pallet for experiment and how it how these platforms the vibe coding with token ones have been marketed. I've not seen like an explicit marketing and promotional push that they're going to derive um you know sort of value. Bottom line, I'm not exposed to any of those things. We're obviously exposed to pump. Yeah. And uh I'm taking kind of a wait and see approach. Uh it's risky stuff. It's I think fun stuff. And by the way, Chris, crypto has a history of benefiting from bold founders and frankly bold market participants, you know, pushing markets forward. Um, it's also had a very dangerous pattern of the same thing. So,

I'm optimistic that, you know, we're moving in a positive trend of instant issuance. uh and doing it by the way I think the key now is uh with pump with some of these bonding curve based platforms you have a very predictable uh sort of growth rate in the in the token price you have locked liquidity it is harder to rug than the good old days the bad old days when you'd like send your coin you send your dollars to an address and hope somebody issued a token that was bad so that was wild we're pro we're improving yeah yeah so I actually think that that you bring up a more kind of broad point here that's hitting the market which is around this idea of um you know like basically saying okay there is some value attached to this

token and there's the value is derived from some sort of revenue being generated from a product and then effectively that product uh distributing that revenue back to the token holders via you know a buyback or via some sort of like yield which was kind of effectively not possible in the past you know kind of like Gen Gendler's uh crypto world now it's I mean hyperlas really pushing the boundary there. And then I think other teams are starting to do it as well. But I've spoken to my to my you know investor friends. We have a fund Robbie and I my partners just prop cap you know invest probably like 40 50 companies last two years. And so you know often when I do these conversations it's quite selfish. It's like all right let's let's see what what the smart people are thinking. Yep. And so I've

spoken to you know different investors and I'm like okay you know like how much does this matter to you guys? like like like are are you actively looking for teams that are like okay we have this clear revenue path and then we're clearly going to take that money or that capital and we're going to you know issue some sort of dividend buyback etc on the token to create this kind of natural buying pressure and and it's kind of been a mixed bag of reviews as to like oh sometimes it's not enough doesn't really make a difference or oh yes that's super important you know so like I'm just curious your perspective here and if if like Hyperlid is setting a standard here If that's not important, what are you seeing from the app layer?

I believe that there So, if you'd asked me this question three months ago, I would have had a very different answer. That's what I think as well. Yeah. Yeah. I would have said you can have like purely mimetic long-term value. Yeah. Uh or you can have, you know, basically value acrruel fee generating value. Yeah. By the way, I think that's still the case for call it legacy coins. Uh but I do believe it will be become increasingly difficult to launch fully mimetic coins that will have sustainable durable value. There's just too many of them launching too much noise and too much skepticism. I think we're on the

back side of the launch of the purely mimemetic zero value um you know Murad's list of 10 you need to believe forever SPX 9000 you know be what was it XBT you missed the first Bitcoin I genuinely and deeply believe and I'm pretty good at this stuff like I I helped launch Bonk like you know we invested in pump I have a pretty good handle on like what's next I do think that we're moving away from new launches of purely mimetic coins. But even for like you know research coins or like VC coins as as well like a typical L1 with like that's no great question but I would say

like by the way there will be exceptions to everything. Somebody's going to launch a meme coin with no value. It'll go to like 10 billion and like see dudis I proved you wrong. And so yeah there will be examples. That's a given. That's like the as a class. Yeah. Um but to I think the more important question that you're asking is on tokens launched by projects, protocols, companies that aspouse to have real value. Correct. We are absolutely unequivocally moving away from the era of ah we don't have clarity on you know regulatory

legal we you know can't you know acrue value excuse you know and I understand it deeply we've had portfolio companies I've even participated in projects where that's been the case and you legitimately couldn't it's a different era anybody who's telling you that now is not a team that you want to back um because they just don't they can't see 3 6 12 months ahead to to what is happening. So bottom line is the demand in market is if it's not a pure memecoin like like a legacy one and again there's no institutions or big serious capital um that has any edge in investing in

pure meme coins genuinely we saw there was the cabal for a while like everybody knows what was going on there like some people turn a blind eye like that guy was nice so it's okay that he did it it's not we don't need to name the people that was Okay. And they they rob people blind. We've moved past that era. Um in this era, if you have a coin and you profess that there's something behind it, the expectation in market is that there's going to be value derived. M uh you mentioned two the two most common models and the two most common models are you know buyback and sort of dividend or fee based payments

and I think the most common and popular one right now is buyback hype uh B&B is doing it exactly so these are models you know the exchange tokens have been doing them for a long time and have established that like they can do consistently. Yeah. Uh there are other benefits to those tokens over time uh to VIP customers to access to launchpad things. Uh so if you trust the issuer of that token and and the team now we can get into whether that means are they security like products but based on the way the legal and

regulatory you know environment in the US and other places is evolving unclear you know unclear that they'll be viewed as securities but the point is market expectation is for these tokens to have value the as you say the VC tokens or the exchange tokens there needs to be some mechanism by which the value that the product is achieving um or the protocol is achieving is in some way captured by token holders. You got to give people a reason to buy it. You have to you can't so you can't you know pump up fun if they were to ever launch a token. Yeah. Launching a memecoin would not be it, right? Like the market would be they'd say no. You've generated more than 700 million in revenue in the last year. Why do we have a memecoin? you

have used your protocol. So this is obvious stuff. So hype hyperlquid as a recent example other f but let's let's stick with hyperlquid what I struggled with I'm you know again my 40s I'm you know pre-boomer uh you know you think of boomer and crypto bottom line quite a lot right like hey you think of like we'll have a pro you're like profits with profits and I think the the big flip and switch here has been on the buyback and tra sort of people who come from more traditional finance backgrounds will often be like, well, you know, buybacks aren't prudent because you're purchasing, especially if you're uh really successful, you're purchasing, you know, an everinccreasing

asset. It's not a good use of capital. But what seems to be happening and uh we have a wonderful investor on our team William who's modeled this out internally for us is like it actually show like basically if you can show and Binance has done this you know Hyperlid's done it um if you can show that there's like predictable support that you're taking the actual value the proceeds of the business Hyperlid has a product people are using they love it they're using it in increasing amounts they're taking increasing market share.

It's incredible to watch. And then they're pushing that back, that value directly back into the token for token holders. Yeah. Uh with the buyback, I guess like at some point they're probably purchasing what you might call a bad price, but it's a different psychology and dynamic than traditional buybacks in equity. Now, we don't have enough data. We don't have enough examples of successful protocols in crypto doing this to like develop patterns and models. But by the way, that's the beauty of it. There are no experts in virtually any area of crypto. Like everything's new. And I think what you can see from what uh is happening with Hyperlid is that the confidence that all the value is or significant amount of value is going back into

supporting token holders um is giving folks confidence in the token itself. Yes. And then the token can then act as a superpower in other ways, right? at, you know, can they can promise future things in the same way that, by the way, Binance did with BNB and they could say, "Hey, we're gonna launch, you know, hype hyper EVM." Yeah. And then, you know, you'll be able to stake your hype and, by the way, earn fees from securing the network. And I don't know, like that's pretty speculative. Like, I don't know if they'll have fees, but I can see what they're doing, you know, with the fees today. So, it kind of gives people confidence in what might happen in the future. So bottom line is if you launch a token at high FTV, low float with no value acrruel mechanism, those things

are dying. You know, like there was one on Salana, you know, soul layer and I remember looking at it and soul layer like three weeks ago or something or a month ago was valued at 2x the value of goto. Um Jetto has 20x the stake. Yeah. Actually has a value acrruel mechanism. Yeah. And was trading at half the value of Sollayer. So within like 4 days of I tweeted about it, still makes sense. It flipped and now I think Gito's 2x the value of Soul layer. And that wasn't me.

There were other people in the market, I believe, who were just waiting for somebody to state the absolute obvious thing. So the market's flipping to value. Yeah. Yeah. I think so. And and it just feels like like the now that the you know like the hornets nest has has been slapped a couple times you know it's just going to just get become more and more of this kind of frenzy where you know it if you don't do this then then there are consequences and it just feels like I don't know man I've been in the space for eight years and it's felt like it's been on easy mode and I think it'll continue to be a really good and investable space but it just feels like this year is going to I think we're going to look back at 25 and be This was the year where like we were we realized

that you know as a space or collectively and perhaps it's been realized on and on again in in in the past where it's like okay guys you know there's going to be winners and there's going to be a lot of losers. Exactly. Like it just you know like it's like the bifurcation is happening. easy mode in terms of the things that I have always and we've probably always hoped would happen which is easy mode if you're generating significant amounts of revenue because you have a product that people like and then that allows you to acrue value to the token and again there are some folks who don't have tokens so they do it through equity historically it was somewhat of a lottery it was like oh like this brand Cardano is really good and they whipped up a community and

fervor and bots and this and that and genuinely we are moving away from that and I think it's a positive. Yeah. The other thing is there really is enough money in the ecosystem now. We're above, you know, Bitcoin hit an alltime high. Yeah. Today, an two hours before you and I pizza day is tomorrow. It's exciting. Yeah. Exciting. It is exciting. There's a pump pizza event. I can mention it because it's going to be after this podcast. It's a big celebration. Two very different ends of the spectrum. The point is there are real fees, real businesses. Uh and so what that means is you can you will fail. Yeah. uh in many cases, but you have the chance to succeed and generate real revenue on chain because the chains are performant.

They're not going to fail. Uh so it's on you get a product out there that people want. It's happening on a number of verticals. Yeah. So what has been your recent deployment strategy when it comes to the venture side? Because we we probably wrote like 10 to 15 checks in 23 or like late 23. I mean, one of the most one of the ones I'm most excited about is we did Pudgy Penguins in 22 was super super cool one. Um, shoot me in the face. I uh Did Did you have a chance at that? Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I think that 20 Wow. Yeah. Yeah. We did the 50 one past uh NFTts weren't happening.

I literally tried to get my partners to do it and um we had the chance to put a million in. We didn't. Oh my gosh. Um anti-portfolio. Yeah. I mean, we wrote the check like um Good for you. After FTX collapsed, about a week or two after. Yeah. Is it We were August 2022. They needed just a million bucks. Yeah. We were like just I didn't supply it. And Well, that's what he said. That's the only reason like Mike, the reason that I got in was because you said no. Like Luc like he had he had trouble with so many VCs. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They said um and you know what? Like that's that's fine. The beauty of this space is that like capital's like Luca is a special special founder like he found a way to keep momentum keep things moving and the

right capital came in and he raised from a mix of believers and then finally you know I think 1K 1KX led that you consumer firm that does I mean they do more than that but but you got to survive I mean it ain't easy. Yeah. So that was 22. We did that. 23 we did maybe like 10 15 and last year we probably were like 30. Um you know just like angel sizes and like 10 to 50 and it's just like our capital butt. But this year we've done two. Yep. And I mean we had to pay taxes and like do all this other stuff and the market was down. So like we were kind of like also in like a bit of a limbo. But I've also just like not been that interested in the in what's been happening. So curious like what what your where where your

head's been at the last 6 months and like what you're seeing that's interesting. Obviously not specific deals per se but just like sectors, ideas, thoughts. Absolutely. So our investment pace has slowed down from where it was and this is not unusual. So what we find is that just as crypto, you know, metrics, market usage, etc. go in cycles. You often find that venture funding at specific stages goes in cycles. So, it's been a cycle lately. What I've seen is that um candidly series A and B and some of the growth things like I've seen bigger investors looking for those breakout protocols and wanting to put money to work there. And

if I followed kind of like we're friendly with the alliance folks, we invest in a lot of their portfolio companies. Yeah. And uh I think they've said it's been a little harder at the earlier stage. Uh and I don't think necessarily it's indicative of lack of quality founders or ideas. I just think it's appetite. Um so right now the last six months we're an early stage fund and there's just been more activity at the later stages. And by the way, that pulls us because we have portfolio companies that are growing. So, we're helping them, you know, raise those rounds and then you're taking some of your time. At the same time, uh, you have a lot of funds. So, structurally in the market, you've probably heard and seen, but a lot of crypto venture capital funds are

raising right now. Yeah. And so, it's and I wouldn't and struggling in a better raise market. We weren't raising. We just started in 2025. We weren't raising the last couple years. Um but we heard it was horrible in 2023 24. Yeah. Now it's a market where you can raise. Okay. Good. But what's happened is uh in order to invest in funds, people want capital return to them. In other words, they want what's called DPI. And so uh there hasn't been a lot of that. And that's by the way it's been worse in traditional even in crypto venture 202122 venture funds. Yeah. Those vintages haven't returned a lot of money. like what like how many great successful tokens or equity outcomes

have there been from 2022 companies. So, uh that tide is starting to turn. Yeah. Which is giving confidence by the way to funds again. Yeah. Meaning you can kind of like see the other side where uh and and I've talked to tremendous numbers of folks, venture managers who have been in market who believe they'll be able to return meaningful capital, you know, at some point this year uh and therefore they can raise their next fund. Yes, we're we're nowhere we're not fully deployed at all at 6 MV. So, we're investing. All right, back to your original question. Yeah. Uh so that's like the market. There's there's I think a little the mega funds that do a little more late stage have a little more capital. The earlier stage funds are not investing at the pace they have been.

And so what's happened is there hasn't been that much like many early stage rounds relative to you know I would say even point 23 24 there were more earlier stage rounds getting done the the tide is finally shifting. Yeah. Um and the reason is when you're funding an earlier stage company you're looking or protocol or project whatever you want to call it you're saying hey we're going to fund this for a couple years. I think you can confidently do that today. Okay, Bitcoin hit an alltime high. Like it's Ethereum finally like you know the CPR worked.

The CPR worked. Um it's clear that Salonometrics are trending in the right direction. We have a move chain in Sooie that I can't pronounce it but that it's finally looks like there might be some signs of organic life. like you know they they were working I think pretty hard for a while but we've finally got some signs of organic life. That's exciting. So you've got the the base layer the platform um to build apps. Yeah, you have people building apps and across a lot of different use cases. So we've seen the social stuff. We started this conversation with token issuance.

Um that's cool, that's fun. That's the casino. But I you know earlier today I was at a stable coin conference like stable coin issuance is up I think a hundred billion dollars in the last what 12 months or something like people are actually using these things not just as base pairs on centralized exchanges they're using them for business use cases for remittances for payments and you have big companies like Stripe Visa Mastercard so anyway point is an onchain economy is absolutely starting to be burned And it's better than the that we were doing in fintech for 15 years. We were putting lipstick on a peg of traditional financial networks. So

that's the real unlock. Okay. So there are companies now that are getting funded. Yeah. Stable coin companies uh companies and by the way if stable coin companies are getting funded meaning consumer business the downstream effect of that is there's more money on chain and they're promising. So the companies that are offering stable coin enabled banking like Stripe or Dakota or others for them to offer yield they're going to be going dipping into DeFi right they are bringing now capital into these markets. Yes. So now like you actually have at the same time that you have DeFi native companies like real world asset companies like bringing different types of assets on chain different types of yield. So like there's this flywheel

developing and we're actually building a real economy. And I would call this like the crypto app economy. The beauty of it is a lot of the frontends are starting to say, you know, the business banking companies, the the um consumer, you know, stable coin or self-custody companies are saying, "Hey, we'll give you a dollar account anywhere in the world, which is super attractive. Uh and by the way, you're you're going to be able to transact in the real world. like we'll give you a debit card or whatever to connect to real world merchants, but you're also going to be able to participate in that DeFi yield. And then by the way, inside of the app, there's going to be this little Coinbase wallet like browser or MetaMask or Phantom like browser. Y you want to participate in

the den economy. So like they all work together. Yeah. Now that's the stable coin wedge. On the other side, you have pump, you have moonshot, you know, bringing people in with, you know, moonshot with the Trump. Yep. Yeah, you know, um, with the Trump coin and and then bringing folks in, then you can introduce them to other products. So, point is, we have a lot of people now getting these self custody accounts, putting money into it and then a bunch of different apps that are starting to get folks to stick with it. You need stickiness. Um, we haven't had that historically. We've had, you know, the NFT craze, then it went down, and what's next? So, um, what we've been doing to go five minutes back in the conversation

to when you asked this question, uh, we've started investing consumer again pretty pretty um, aggressively. So, we funded a company called football.f fun. It's basically imagine so rare but with liquid player tokens. Uh, we think that's so exciting. It ties to people's everyday experiences. Um, so that's one that we love. We're uh investing in a company called Worm, a prediction um you know, we're so excited about prediction marketplaces. We've been looking for the right team for many, many months and they have a really nice design. And all these things are going to work together.

Yeah. To get folks to keep their money in a self-custody account after they've, you know, sort of bridged it over from fiat world. Tired of multi-chain headaches? You need Omni. Omni makes being onchain feel like you're online. Perform any action on any chain in less than two seconds. It's all powered by SolverNet. Omni's breakthrough SDK for crosschain speed, scale, and cost. To kickstart adoption, the Omni Foundation is offering $10 million in rewards for solver powered apps. Start earning today at Omni.network.

Innovating finance, global, institutional, and onchain. Deep liquidity to drive capital efficiency. Now maximize yields on institutionalgrade liquid staking with me. Unlock trillion dollars of capital via Fitbitcoin. All of this secured by Mantle's treasury of billions in stables and ETH capital pools. This entire ecosystem is coordinated by a vast network of seasoned VCs that are aiming to create the next generation of banking and financial technology. This is Mantle. Yeah. It just it just begs the

question of like why do all why do God's work of investing in all these applications to push the frontier of crypto for when you can just you know invest in in infrastructure for a potential better return? It's a great question. So what's going to happen? So, uh, to be clear, yeah, uh, that's not available to retail. Okay. So, you're going to have cynical venture funds and like I could name them, but like why? Uh, we know the funds who just invest in infrastructure. Is there anything wrong with that? Uh, so it distorts the capital markets. It it's they're raising money from the same LPS that I am. Yes. And I would argue

that I've onboarded 10 to 100x more people to crypto than some of these funds. Yeah. Now, they may have returned the same amount of capital per dollar invested as I have, but I have a much more useful, much more productive dollar invested than they do in terms of like what we're doing, the mission, the vision. Yes. So, you know, investing in the next DA layer that's overvalued that you can dump your SAF before the token goes live. Invest in Movement Labs. Like, just look at that cap table. I don't need to name names, you know? Look at that cap table. We got it. Like, it's easy. I named them. All right. There we did. I did the thing I said I wasn't going to do. It's cynical. Yeah. It's a absolute misallocation of capital. Yeah.

That I believe is destructive to the crypto economy. And if we don't start calling these people out, it's going to keep happening. It's, by the way, it's happening in motion. Yeah. Day in and day out. Yeah. So, the LP dollar that's going into the people who allocate to the infrastructure that everybody knows isn't going to get used that gets pumped by centralized exchanges so that there's tons of trading volume and they get their fees. Let's get rid of that crap. Like, nobody wants it. We said last sill we weren't going to do this again and it's happening again. Um, so anyway, it's an economically rational thing for those funds and those founders to do.

Um, but it's a misallocation of capital because there is no long-term value being created. In fact, there's long-term value being destroyed. A select group of venture capitalists, founders, and their LPs are going to make a ton of money and it is straight pulled out of the pockets of people who are duped. Coming back to to the venture side and I and I appreciate the candid advice as well and uh answering that kind of on the spot. Um what's something that that you've learned through your venture career um that has shifted the way that you do investing now? Um and I'll just give you quick example from my perspective. You know, I learned that

like path dependency is something that like you you can't foresee nor control, but it has like such a outsized impact on the profitability potential of any given investment, right? So, you know, you you write something here in this, you know, in in this sector and then all of a sudden, you know, a chatbt has its moment and then that leads to like X Y and Z and now either you're perfectly positioned for it or it's like, well, we don't even need this anymore because of CHBT. And it's just like a very broad example, but that's something that I've learned that you can't really control, but like that you have to be like, you know, thinking of. Just curious about, you know, some of your key learnings.

Yeah. So, a I'll give you a couple and I think it relates to what you just said. So, one is in crypto specifically more than anywhere. It's all about people. Okay. The idea often changes. Uh Magic Eden being an example, it was a Salana NFT marketplace, a little one that you know we loved. We invested in it in 2021 in like a preede round before Paradigm and it's a totally different business now, right? It's a wallet. It's a crosschain, you know, app that exposes people to every element of crypto, but just the people drove that. They were absolutely incredible. So, uh, you're backing people and the idea very well could change, but the success, uh, is

going to attract them. By the way, that's true of all venture, but uh for things to change, they changed so quickly in crypto metas. An example that we didn't invest in was Tensor. Tensor was an NFT marketplace, and now they're, you know, they have the Vector app and a bunch of other things. They're extremely successful. You know, that would be in our anti portfolio. We didn't invest in them, but the people are very nimble and have adjusted uh dramatically. Uh getting back to people matter. So what I found in crypto investing more than in and I was you know an angel investor and a founder in traditional tech for a long time uh I would say that crypto people on average are less I would say

it's not surprising like they're anti-establishment this that and the other thing they honor contracts less they honor terms less they're more shifty they're harder to trust and uh it is really difficult to get the outcomes that you expect even if you have like a legally binding contract. So I have been really surprised because I even approached as a founder my ventures in a very traditional way. Okay, like we have this contract like you know you sign this safe or this agreement and I'm going to get your money back. I've stunned at the deep deep deep um level of adjusting terms and you know pushing

people to you know basically sue and we don't sue. So you're like constantly in conflict particularly in success scenarios. It's not just us. I see it across the board. It's distressing. It's disappointing. This just actually recently happened to us. Yeah. The markets are total and utter chaos. you hit a really nice win on a team and then now they're trying to change the vesting schedule on you and it's like you don't have a choice and they'll use uh you mean so that's like the lightest of it and we'll just knock the tokens road you know and and I'm exaggerating a little bit uh but the point is I mean you will actually have that and then you'll have to like negotiate it's it's a the markets are a bit chaotic I've been very

very surprised so the other learning out of that is so now you're dealing with people who are unpredictable. The markets are deeply unpredictable. So these are highly volatile markets uh where we go in two to three year cycles that you just don't get in like SAS markets. You might actually start to get them in AI. Like it feels like AI like the biggest areas of traditional venture are changing such that they're actually changing as fast as crypto now. So it's going to be very fascinating and fun I think. Uh but the magnitude of wins is just staggering in crypto. Okay, you could put a small amount of capital in you could you know very small teams and have just massive

outsized wins. You know an example would be steppen right like we put we only put 100k in and the scale of the win yeah you know investing at 15 million and it you know traded in the billions. Yeah it's just staggering. Um and so that's one where uh those are the only stories you hear about though. So like it's like there's a lot of failure in between, messiness in between. So the outcomes you have to the key the so one other key learning you have to like smooth it out.

You have to try to remain and I'm not a calm guy at all. You can tell uh my partners are. It's good to have a It's good to have a partnership with different personality types, but you're you're always trying to smooth things out because you have these like really big things and hey, maybe I'll realize the value on it, maybe I won't fully realize it. You'll have these things that seem like they'll fail, but then they come back. Um the cycles go up and down. Uh so anyway it's but what I would say is given the amount of capital deployed uh the outcomes the three trillion plus in total asset value that we have in 15 years is pretty astronomical. Yeah Mike uh goss man goss game one game one today huge series versus the Pacers. So I am

uh I'm excited going to the game. I like to say it's going to be the uh you know Salana headquarters tonight. Hopefully we have a lot of folks from Acceler. I think I think there will be should it should be a good series, man. Thanks for coming out. All right.