Podcasts about vcs

Audio version of Greylock investor Jason Risch's article "The Next Cloud Data Platform." As part of Greylock's interactive data project Castles in the Cloud, we've analyzed new areas of opportunities for startups. Platforms within the modern data stack pose multiple points of entry for startups to innovate. VCs are already looking for “the next Snowflake” – companies that find success in the shadow of Big Cloud by reimagining the modern data stack. To solidify their staying power, the next chapter for Snowflake and other cloud data warehouses is to continue to expand as a platform company and challenge the cloud providers as the dominant cloud platforms for developers. You can read the text of this essay here: https://greylock.com/greymatter/the-next-cloud-data-platform/ You can find the entire Castles in the Cloud project here: https://greylock.com/castles/

Sean: I mean, it's the leaders dilemma, the founders dilemma. Yeah, we eat problems for breakfast and it just keeps going. But it's also why we pay ourselves the most. Right? Bant: Well, you know, that's a really interesting one. You know, I actually suffered on that one, Sean. You know, I've read recently about how, you know, there's a lot of startup folks that always say, like, make sure you pay yourself first and I get it. But I'll be honest, I paid myself last, you know. Bant: For how many years? Bant: A good six years. Sean: Good. Six years. Yeah, the first six. Bant: I would say that I may paid myself the minimum. It's an interesting one because any dollar that I had, I just wanted to make sure that I was reinvesting, making sure that we are putting it more back into the development. And you know, I've had arguments with VCs about this. Bant: 'You are like, no, no, no. You have - ' It's a real dividing line on the philosophy on this. Some really believe that the founders have to pay themselves and others are like me, where I didn't want to raise a lot of money early, because one of the challenges that I think your listeners might have is that they may feel pretty special when somebody comes and offers them a lot of money. But what they might not fully realize is that that money might come with maybe almost like I don't want to say like poison pills, but like maybe challenges that aren't ultimately good for the company and certainly not good for the founder. Bant: Which means that like, you know, I'll sit down with these companies that come out of these incubators and they'll say, Oh, yeah, you know, we got we were given a $40 Million valuation and we're crushing it, man. And I'm looking at them. I'm like, okay cool that sounds awesome. So tell me about the business. And they'll say, 'Well, you know, we got the product up and we're, you know.' 'Do you have any customers?' 'Well, we don't have any customers yet, but, you know, we got so-and-so company is using a free trial.' Bant: And I'm listening to this and I'm thinking like, holy crap, they raised this money. They raised 2 million on a $40 million valuation. And I said, 'So what's your burn rate?' They're like, 'Oh, well, you know, we're probably going to have to do another raise in like six months.' And I'm sitting there going like, 'guys, you are f you're fucked.' Because like, you don't celebrate the valuation basically. I guess that's what I'm trying to tell you. Like don't celebrate paper, celebrate customers, celebrate revenue, celebrate, you know, usage and engagement, celebrate that type of stuff, but don't celebrate things that can be taken away from you in a down round. Right. And that's the thing that I think these people don't realize is that VCs are like, yeah, you know, these founders are smart. I'm going to knock them out in the next round, you know? Right. It's a classic move. Bant: And that's kind of the stuff I'm thinking about is like founders have to be thoughtful of like what really matters. Keep their head to the grindstone, don't burn through their cash, and don't make a huge salary themselves. I would rather hit my goals before I pay myself a lot of money. - - - Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/leadershipstack Join our community and ask questions here: from.sean.si/discord Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leadershipstack

Cobie, co-founder of Lido and UpOnlyTv, and Chris Burniske, partner at Placeholder Ventures, talk about surviving a crypto bear market, the Terra collapse, lessons they've learned from their mistakes, and much more. Show highlights: whether Chris and Cobie think crypto is in a bear market why Chris says these are the times to buy what effect the Terra debacle will have on the crypto industry why Chris was expecting UST to blow up why Chris thinks there is going to be another massive liquidation event whether an algo stablecoin could work why bear markets are sometimes a good thing how USDT was stress tested and proved its resilience how macro is affecting the crypto space and what the role of the Fed is when will we see the bottom of this bear market how meme coins are the symptoms of a broken system why this crypto cycle is different whether regulations are helping VCs rather than the retail investors why risky assets are the ones that could increase 10,000x  whether the future of crypto is multichain or not how developers signal what ecosystem is going to win in the next expansion cycle whether Cobie thinks staking is dying how Chris judges market bottoms and tops what lessons Cobie and Chris have learned from their mistakes what innovations will catalyze the next bull cycle what needs to happen in the future for crypto to succeed Thank you to our sponsors!   Crypto.com: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/unconfirmedcardearnfeb2021 Cross River Bank: https://crossriver.com/crypto Beefy Finance: https://beefy.finance     Episode Links   Cobie Twitter: https://twitter.com/cobie  UpOnlyTv: https://uponly.tv/ Substack: https://cobie.substack.com/ L1 trading: https://cobie.substack.com/p/trading-the-metagame?s=r Death of staking: https://cobie.substack.com/p/apecoin-and-the-death-of-staking?s=r Token unlocks: https://cobie.substack.com/p/on-the-meme-of-market-caps-and-unlocks?s=r Cycle Tweets: Why “the next cycle” reasoning scares him https://twitter.com/cobie/status/1524965475813568512 What projects will survive the bear https://twitter.com/cobie/status/1469253171885318146 His call to “buy” on March 12 2020 https://twitter.com/cobie/status/1238282793244860417 Which VCs will win https://twitter.com/cobie/status/1515667977118826500    Chris Burniske LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/burniske/ Twitter https://twitter.com/cburniske Previous Unchained episode https://unchainedpodcast.com/chris-burniske-a-blank-slate-of-state/ https://unchainedpodcast.com/chris-burniske-of-placeholder-on-the-downsides-of-icos/ https://unchainedpodcast.com/want-to-diversify-your-portfolio-try-bitcoin-say-arks-chris-burniske-and-coinbases-adam-white/ https://unchainedpodcast.com/how-to-value-a-crypto-asset/ Cycle Tweets Feb 2022 bear call https://twitter.com/cburniske/status/1495468570708426754 March 2022 bear call https://twitter.com/cburniske/status/1523021991619428352  November 2021 top call https://twitter.com/cburniske/status/1457884538806308868  DCA advice https://twitter.com/cburniske/status/1525906152881459200 https://twitter.com/cburniske/status/1500593438433021952  What could knock the market further down https://twitter.com/cburniske/status/1525157945079496705 https://twitter.com/cburniske/status/1524260987787902978  2017 ATH calls https://twitter.com/cburniske/status/1524838447784947712 https://twitter.com/cburniske/status/1524524188366635008  Trying to time the bottom https://twitter.com/cburniske/status/1523573129431240710  Chris x Cobie Luna https://twitter.com/cburniske/status/1524280637431164929  Feeling sorry for people who have lost $ https://twitter.com/cburniske/status/1524267901456248832   Bear Market Content Dragonfly https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/to-all-dragonfly-founders-and-friends-1a65e68093d4 Sequoia advice ​​https://twitter.com/michellebailhe/status/1526373376142348288  Arthur Hayes buying BTC at $20K in wake of Terra https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/luna-brothers-inc-712ec5abe199 Financial comeuppance https://cryptohayes.medium.com/annihilation-4effdaf3c73f Paradigm (surviving crypto cycles) https://www.paradigm.xyz/2021/03/surviving-crypto-cycles Zhu Su on being a better role model for retail https://twitter.com/zhusu/status/1525045033216397312 Nick Tomaino on stopping relentless shilling https://twitter.com/NTmoney/status/1525234408910987264 Lot's of talk about “suicide” in context of LUNA https://bitcoinist.com/luna-investors-suicidal-after-cryptos-collapse/ Helping smaller LUNA wallets first https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1525561624974700545  Punk6529 on surviving the bear market https://twitter.com/punk6529/status/1525565876711444484  Ian from Syndicate DAO on previous cycles https://twitter.com/ianDAOs/status/1524613312582799360  Best website for looking at token performance https://cryptorank.io/performance   Chris Burniske: Twitter: https://twitter.com/cburniske Placeholder VC: https://www.placeholder.vc/ Previous Unchained Coverage on Terra  Nic Carter, Erik Voorhees, and Eric Wall on the collapse of UST https://unchainedpodcast.com/why-terra-collapsed-and-whether-an-algo-stablecoin-can-ever-succeed/  Do Kwon on backing UST with BTC ​​https://unchainedpodcast.com/do-kwon-is-backing-ust-with-bitcoin-and-heres-what-else-he-is-building/ Kevin Zhou on the risk of UST's death spiral https://unchainedpodcast.com/heres-why-usdn-depegged-from-the-dollar-and-why-ust-might-too/  Jon Wu on how Terra got depegged: https://unchainedpodcast.com/did-someone-deliberately-attack-terra-luna-to-kick-off-a-death-spiral/ Do Kwon on The Chopping Block https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xl8u7-KVwM 

Like a lot of women in their 30s, Radha Vyas found herself burned out at work and in need of some fun and adventure. With her extensive travel experience, she initially dismissed the idea of joining a group tour, thinking they were only reserved for wealthy retirees or young backpackers. The more she researched, she found there was an entire market of travelers who, like Radha, were somewhere in between these two demographics, and who were being underserved. With her now-husband, Lee Thompson, Radha created Flash Pack—a luxury, adventure-travel company for solo travelers in their 30s and 40s. Though travel isn't her main mission, Radha's ultimate goal is to connect like minded people at a time in their lives when their social circle is shrinking. Flashpack is determined to build community and to facilitate one million friendships. Tune in to this week's episode of Dear FoundHer… for a conversation about what it was like for Radha to lose her business to COVID just as it was hitting its stride, only to relaunch it stronger. Plus, you'll hear her talk about the undiscussed loneliness of being a CEO, and the toll it takes on one's mental and emotional health. Quotes • "Just before COVID hit, we were flying really high. We were a team of about 55-60 people. We were just about to complete our Series A Institutional funding round. We were being solicited by VCs from Silicon Valley and in London." (19:08-19:24 | Radha) • “People want connection. And our collective isolation over two years just made everyone realize that friendship and connection is as important to your mental health and well being as getting a good night's sleep." (26:12-26:26 | Radha) • "I'm a much more confident CEO now. I've learned more from failure than I learned from years of high-growth and success. Now, I feel really super comfortable in my role as CEO of a high-growth company."(29:04-29:22 | Radha) • "Generally, I would say most businesses don't die of starvation, they die of indigestion." (31:44-31:49 | Radha) • "As entrepreneurs we need to talk about loneliness and the mental health toll running your own business has. And I think this needs to be an open subject."(34:31-34:39 | Radha) • "Understand your customers deeply and the problems they have and try to solve around that." (45:08-45:13 | Radha) Connect with Radha Vyas: Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/flashpack/ Website | https://www.flashpack.com/ Please don't forget to rate, comment, and subscribe to Dear FoundHer on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts! You can now work with Lindsay 1:1 to build the community for your personal brand or company through the same method she used to grow and scale her business. Fill out the form here and set up a FREE 30-minute consultation. You can also: • Take Lindsay's FREE 7-Day Social Media Challenge • 5 Tips and Tools to Set Up Your Business • Follow Lindsay on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lindsaypinchuk Use code FoundHer for 50% off your first month with both HiveCast and Fireside Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

0:00 Bill Gurley & Brad Gerstner break down the state and historical significance of 2022's market downturn 12:27 How VCs will handle capital commitments from LPs, underwriting startups in the new reality 24:14 Bull run mistakes, why VCs don't underwrite lower valuations, handling distributions 33:52 Gurley's take on WeCrashed & Super Pumped TV series, how sophisticated investors got "gaslit" by the market, influx of capital creating consumer-surplus businesses 47:54 Brad predicts the market for next year, Bill gives post-Benchmark plans Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect

India's largest Content Marketplace with 1L+ creators, 2500+ customers, out of which 70+ are Unicorns. Does that ring any bells? We're talking about Pepper Content, founded by Anirudh Singla, in his 2nd year of undergrad college.Pepper's journey started when Anirudh during his college decided to take up freelancing and content creation to fund his graduation all by himself. He then realised the potential of content creators in India and decided to organize it by creating an Indian marketplace for the same. In our conversation with Anirudh, we dive into the journey of building and scaling Pepper to $8 Million ARR Content-marketplace in under 5 years and their plans ahead.Notes - 03:06 - Baniya-family background, freelance exposure while at college07:06 - First few steps to building a marketplace11:06 - Splitting equity early-on12:46 - Reaching out to 80+ VCs and Angel Investors while raising their 1st round17:20 - What made them raise their 1st round? 18:43 - Scaling from $500k ARR to $8 Million ARR in 14 months21:20 - Client base: 550+ Active customers and 70+ Unicorns24:20 - Need to focus on a SaaS based approach for Content26:15 - “Hustle doesn't scale. By the same time what scale's is the mindset of thinking big enough!”28:25 - “Not building a family, but instead building a high quality sports team.”

Doug's been an investor is so many of top SaaS companies, from Marketo to Calendly to Loom to Braze to Lattice. Today he's a general partner at one of the top growth-stage VC firms, Iconiq. He and Jason do a deep dive on where the venture markets really are today, and what it means for founders.   Key Takeaways: #1. VC remains open — at least for deals < $1B valuation.   #2. So many top, mid, and later-stage SaaS companies raised tons of capital in 2021, so much … that few really need to go back to market and raise again this year.   #3. VCs are taking more time, but more “back to normal” time Growth deals can still be done in 3-4 weeks, just not 1 week now.   #4. Not only is there is plenty of money in venture — but even more is coming. Top funds are continuing to raise huge funds.   #5. The biggest issue in venture today is just that founders haven't changed their expectations   #6. 2016 was tough, too.    #7.  Watch What the Big PE Firms like Vista, Thoma Bravo, etc. do in SaaS.  They know.   Full video: https://youtu.be/WehTJ4RNBaQ   Want to join the SaaStr community? We're the

Matt and Nic return for another week of news and deals. In this episode:  Was UST/Terra a ponzi or not? Fintech apps put client deposits into Anchor Tradfi yields are competitive with DeFi yields The GBTC discount reaches its highest ever level at -31% MSM crypto hate reaches a fever pitch The World Bank publishes a new paper on crypto adoption The Warren staff have a dossier of mean tweets Will generalist VCs lose interest in web3? El Salvador hosts a Bitcoin summit for a number of central banks Nic's secret origin story Is eSwatini a dark horse candidate for the next Bitcoin Nation? The Biden admin suggests segregating client deposits at exchanges TradFi thinks Tether is about to collapse Why no stablecoins are able to secure audits Tether receives a new assurance opinion showing $39b of treasuries How many outflows can Tether accommodate? Differences in redemption between USDC and USDT What does a crackdown in offshore assets by the CCP have to do with Tether? Cloudflare's wall of lava lamps Is it time for a new batch of FUD dice? We assess the quality of the Terra mea culpas Content mentioned in this episode:  World Bank, The ascent of crypto assets: Evolution and macro-financial drivers Sponsor notes: Subscribe to the Coin Metrics State of the Network newsletter

Justin Gordon (@justingordon212) talks with Elizabeth Yin (@dunkhippo33), Co-Founder and General Partner at Hustle Fund, a VC fund that invests in pre-seed software startups. Hustle Fund is often the first check into a startup or in the first round of funding. Beyond the usual criteria that VCs typically look for, they prioritize founders' speed of execution above all else. Per their name, they also make a fast decision after speaking with a company.Elizabeth is a tech entrepreneur turned startup investor. Her mission for the next 30-40 years is to democratize wealth through entrepreneurship. She also blogs about how to raise early stage capital. Previously, Elizabeth was a partner at 500 Startups where she invested in seed stage companies and ran the Mountain View accelerator. In a prior life, Elizabeth co-founded and ran an adtech company called LaunchBit (acq 2014). Elizabeth has a BSEE from Stanford and an MBA from MIT Sloan.Elizabeth has reviewed over 20k startup pitches from around the world in the last few years and has helped numerous portfolio founders raise hundreds of millions of dollars. Her work and writing on startup fundraising has been featured in numerous publications including TechCrunch, Forbes, Huffington Post, BetaKit, and more.Website: Hustle FundLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/elizabethyin/Twitter: @dunkhippo33Elizabeth's Website: https://elizabethyin.com/ Show Notes: The transition from founder to investor and why Elizabeth doesn't actually see herself as a VC The variety of ways Hustle Fund is supporting founders and investors beyond investing capital Behind the scenes of developing Camp Hustle How Angel Squad came about and the power of angel investing communities Elizabeth's perspective on crowdfunding How Hustle Fund provides value and stands out in a crowded industry Becoming widely known for her Twitter threads What Hustle Fund looks for in their potential investments How they evaluate founders in emerging markets Lessons from raising a second fund Their fund strategy and portfolio construction What's next for Hustle Fund More about the show:The Vitalize Podcast, a show by Vitalize Venture Capital (a seed-stage venture capital firm and pre-seed 300+ member angel community open to everyone), dives deep into the world of startup investing and the future of work.Hosted by Justin Gordon, the Director of Marketing at Vitalize Venture Capital, The Vitalize Podcast includes two main series. The Angel Investing series features interviews with a variety of angel investors and VCs around the world. The goal? To help develop the next generation of amazing investors. The Future of Work series takes a look at the founders and investors shaping the new world of work, including insights from our team here at Vitalize Venture Capital. More about us:Vitalize Venture Capital was formed in 2017 as a $16M seed-stage venture fund and now includes both a fund as well as an angel investing community investing in the future of work. Vitalize has offices in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.The Vitalize Team:Gale - https://twitter.com/galeforceVCCaroline - https://twitter.com/carolinecasson_Justin - https://twitter.com/justingordon212Vitalize Angels, our angel investing community open to everyone:https://vitalize.vc/vitalizeangels/

Sean: So we have people tuning in the podcast today. We have over 4000 followers on Spotify, over 10,000 listeners. It's been a little over two years and they're listening to you right now. Sean: And they're thinking, why is this important for me? I'm just starting out. No one cares about who I am and my business is under the radar right now. It's just been three years. Yeah, I have a million problems. Yeah, I have a million things getting done every day and I have to get them done. But why is this relevant and important to me? Bant: Yeah. So, you know, when you're starting a business, they're kind of as you outlined yourself Sean, there's very little separation between the founder and their new enterprise that they've started. Bant: And so when people go out and you go out to meet people in business, whether they be partners that you'll work with, vendors that you need, customers that you want to acquire, they will really want to validate your business. And in some ways, whether they do this before they meet you or after they meet you, they're certainly going to be looking you up online. And what they see there really matters. It matters in terms of your credibility as an executive and as a business. Bant: And so one of the classic things is that when you look up a business and you find very little information about a company or an individual, it challenges the credibility of that business. So there's a bit of the kind of the instant background check that is very important for startups. What we find is that when an individual builds out a presence, the engagement that they'll get, the exposure that they'll get is anywhere between 4 to 20 times higher on their own pages than their brand pages. And it's much more expensive to grow a brand than an executive page. And so we would recommend that you start there and then kind of do it in tandem with your brand efforts. And then, as you said Sean, at some point, it becomes easier to start kind of naturally organically growing that brand effort. So it's critically important because it gets you off the bat. It gets you some notoriety that can help you raise money. And I can tell you my personal story is that I started posting on Twitter at the time about online reputation management, and I started to get some direct messages back that said, 'Hey, what are you working on from VCs?' And all of our initial money came in from inbound efforts, from things that I was posting out about - - - Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/leadershipstack Join our community and ask questions here: from.sean.si/discord Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leadershipstack

In this episode, Marc and Patrick Morley, former CEO of Carbon Black, get nostalgic as they discuss Patrick's journey of coming up through the start up scene in the 90s—from working with VCs to taking companies public—and compare it to running cyber companies today. Along with the early career experience that helped form Patrick's leadership philosophy, he shares his experience of becoming CEO of Bit9, seeing the company through a breach, acquiring Carbon Black, bring the company public and later getting acquired by VMWare—this episode is filled to the brim. You'll also learn about: How build a criteria for joining a start up Why cyber is the most mission-driven area of tech What it's like to call 600 customers in 2 days after a breach and not lose a single one Seven philosophies for running a cyber company

Welcome to The Chopping Block! Crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, and Tarun Chitra chop it up about the latest news in the digital asset industry. On this episode, Kevin Zhou, the CEO of Galois Capital and long-time critic of UST, also joined the conversation. Show topics: the UST depeg and Terra collapse  Kevinon  what it was like being one of the earliest naysayers of LUNA why Kevin believes that UST initially depegged and became a “fear cascade” how Galois Capital traded the UST depeg, from shorting LUNA to keeping their UST in Anchor until the last moment why Kevin was disappointed in the lack of transparency in how Luna Foundation Guard attempted to defend the UST peg the implications of UST's collapse across the crypto and traditional financial markets  whether Terra's decline will lead to more regulation in the crypto industry why Anchor was the “cancer” of the Terra system  why VCs are reticent to say something bad about protocols they don't believe in why grifting is so much more prevalent in crypto  what Jump Trading had to do with the Terra collapse the difference between the way trading and VC firms interact with crypto the issues with the Terra 2 proposal without UST which chains are receiving the people leaving the Terra ecosystem  why Haseeb compared the collapse of UST to the collapse of the Soviet Union who Kevin believes should be reimbursed in the aftermath of the UST collapse how political considerations might affect how Terra continues to develop going forward why Terra NFTs were skyrocketing during the Terra meltdown whether crypto is in a bear or bull market Hosts   Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly Capital https://twitter.com/hosseeb Tom Schmidt, general partner at Dragonfly Capital https://twitter.com/tomhschmidt Tarun Chitra, managing partner at Robot Ventures https://twitter.com/tarunchitra  Robert Leshner, founder of Compound  https://twitter.com/rleshner    Guest Kevin Zhou, CEO of Galois Capital https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-zhou-82938324/    Previous Unchained Coverage   Nic Carter, Erik Voorhees, and Eric Wall on the collapse of UST https://unchainedpodcast.com/why-terra-collapsed-and-whether-an-algo-stablecoin-can-ever-succeed/  Do Kwon on backing UST with BTC ​​https://unchainedpodcast.com/do-kwon-is-backing-ust-with-bitcoin-and-heres-what-else-he-is-building/ Kevin Zhou on the risk of UST's death spiral https://unchainedpodcast.com/heres-why-usdn-depegged-from-the-dollar-and-why-ust-might-too/  Jon Wu on how Terra got depegged: https://unchainedpodcast.com/did-someone-deliberately-attack-terra-luna-to-kick-off-a-death-spiral/ Do Kwon on The Chopping Block https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xl8u7-KVwM    Haseeb's summary of the Terra collapse: https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-reign-of-terra-the-rise-and-fall-of-ust-208dabbc8e6e   Jon Wu's write-up on the UST Depeg Article: https://www.notboring.co/p/terra-to-the-moon-and-back  Thread: https://twitter.com/jonwu_/status/1523793482850050048?s=20&t=lvB1zdz98wu5TE5emh4fCw    Terra Background Info  Twitter: https://twitter.com/terra_money  UST Mechanics: https://angelprotocol.medium.com/how-does-ust-work-ec7b2f6e2c2c UST Bank Run: https://www.wsj.com/articles/crash-of-terrausd-shakes-crypto-there-was-a-run-on-the-bank-11652371839 Speculation of a deliberate attack: https://onchainwizard.substack.com/p/how-to-make-800m-in-crypto-soros?s=r Do Kwon's Proposed Terra's Revival: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2022/05/13/do-kwon-proposes-restart-of-terra-blockchain-as-ust-luna-plummet/ Anchor: https://twitter.com/anchor_protocol  Terra 2.0: https://unchainedpodcast.com/do-kwon-has-a-new-plan-again/    LFG Purchases Luna Foundation Guard: https://lfg.org/team/ Pomp – the $10B Bitcoin Bet on Stablecoins https://pomp.substack.com/p/the-10-billion-bitcoin-bet-on-stablecoins?s=w 3/10 BTC purchase https://twitter.com/LFG_org/status/1503680315969060864  $1 BTC billion purchase https://twitter.com/terra_money/status/1496162889085902856  TFL x LFG relationship https://twitter.com/stablekwon/status/1502225674840555523    Galois Twitter threads https://twitter.com/Galois_Capital/status/1511455703642394628  https://twitter.com/Galois_Capital/status/151119893095193804   Tarun's thoughts on algorithmic stablecoins https://twitter.com/Unchained_pod/status/1512465290910736391 

There are around 2,000 venture capital firms managing about 4,000 funds. It's a small market in the grand scheme, but many aren't worth investing in. The return difference between the top 25% and bottom 25% is staggering. This is a game of professionals. It's no different than elite athletes competing at the highest level in professional sports. The same separation of talent exists in the venture capital arena. Investors with the best access look for 5x or more in returns. What else does it take besides capital to invest in venture? Are you an accredited investor or a qualified purchaser? Are you investing as an individual or an LLC? Are you making directs, allocating to funds, or even diversifying into a fund of funds strategy? Justin and Brandon give you the details on how the whole process works. Have questions for an upcoming episode? Want to get free resources, book giveaways, and AWM gear? Want to hear about when we release new episodes? Text “insights” or the lightbulb emoji (

On this episode we take a look at the M Network game Frogs and Flies, which was based on the Intellivision game Frog Bog. We also cover programmer extraordinaire Dave Rolfe for the first time, and we even read one of his interesting essays. I hope you enjoy it! Coming up next is A-VCS-tec Challenge, by Simon Quernhorst with music by Paul Slocum. If you would like to try this game out, you can get the rom at Simon's web page. Please send me your feedback for A-VCS-tec Challenge by May 30th, to 2600gamebygame@gmail.com. Thanks so much for listening! Van Mai story on Video Game History Foundation Frogs and Flies on Random Terrain Frogs and Flies on Blue Sky Rangers Intellivision Frog Bog on Blue Sky Rangers  Frogs by Gremlin on KLOV Willie! plays Frogs on Arcade USA Dave Rolfe's website on Wayback Machine Dave Rolfe interview by Valter Prette Dave Rolfe interview by Scott Stilphen Dave Rolfe interview by Michael Thomasson Star Fire on KLOV Fire One! on KLOV Kreepy Krawlers on KLOV Star Fire 2 prototype on KLOV

What's it all about? eScooters, eBikes, last mile solutions and all things Micro-mobility. Great to see how design thinking and innovation applies not just to technology, but to company cultures and business models. This week I talk about the challenges and opportunities for micro-mobility and mobility as a service across cities in various parts of the world, and how building an innovative company culture has helped Acton grow rapidly and globally. About Janelle Wang:  Co-Founder and CEO of Acton, Janelle is a Designer turned Entrepreneur with 15 years of Strategic Planning, New Category Creation & Design Thinking for Fortune 500s to Start Ups, bringing breakthrough Innovation and Sustainability to reality. She is leading the charge to help shape a new, more efficient, vibrant and livable urban environment. She holds 50+ patents in micromobility and sustainability solutions. Janelle has an M.S. in Industrial Design from Purdue University. Janelle was selected as one of “19 Influential Women In Mobility” in 2019, she was awarded Female CEO of the Year in 2016, and has been featured in WSJ, FastCompany, CNN, VOGUE, BBC, and more.. About Acton: ACTON, headquartered in Silicon Valley, offers Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) solution packages from multimodal vehicles to advanced IoT to move people and goods efficiently & intelligently. ACTON partners with automakers, cities, ride-share operators, and private property owners. Together, we make our cities better places to live. ACTON is unique in its range of mobility solutions on offer. ACTON has won numerous awards and has been featured in various media, internationally. ACTON creates excellence in riding dynamics, safety, serviceability, ease of use, design aesthetics, and sustainability. With over 100 patents, more than 100 cities globally, tens of millions of rides, ACTON is leading the way. Social links:  Janelle Wang on LinkedIn: (61) Janelle Wang | LinkedIn Acton website: ACTON | Supercharging City 3.0 | California Acton on LinkedIn: (61) ACTON: Overview | LinkedIn Acton on Instagram: ACTON (@actonallday) • Instagram photos and videos About Hyperion Cleantech Group: Hyperion Cleantech Group is the holding company for businesses focused exclusively in cleantech talent acquisition, retention, leadership development. working with some of the most innovative cleantech companies in the world, helping to find extraordinary talent to enable their growth and success. Partnering with leading cleantech VCs, as well as directly with founders and entrepreneurs in the sector. With our clients we are transforming business and growing a strong and prosperous cleantech economy. We work across EMEA and NORAM, with teams based in the UK, Germany and the US. EPISODE LINKS Acton's latest acquisition hints at the future of docked micromobility Acton's latest acquisition hints at the future of docked micromobility – TechCrunch Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die: Chip Heath, Dan Heath: 8601410083830: Books: Amazon.com Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't Amazon.com: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't (Audible Audio Edition): Jim Collins, Jim Collins, HarperAudio: Audible Books & Originals Follow us online, write a review (please) or subscribe I'm very keen to hear feedback on the podcast and my guests, and to hear your suggestions for future guests or topics. Contact via the website, or Twitter. If you do enjoy the podcast, please write a review on iTunes, or your usual podcast platform, and tell your cleantech friends about us. That would be much appreciated. Twitter https://twitter.com/Cleantechleader Facebook https://www.facebook.com/DavidHuntCleantechGuide Instagram https://www.instagram.com/davidhuntcleantech/

Nic Carter, general partner at Castle Island Venture, Eric Wall, former Chief Investment Officer of Arcane Assets, and Erik Voorhees, founder of ShapeShift, discuss what happened with the TerraUSD (UST) and LUNA fiasco, Do Kwon's responsibility, the impact on the crypto ecosystem, and much more. Show highlights:  how Erik used to feel that algo stablecoins were impossible and why he changed his mind why Eric considers that the demand for UST was tied to a sh*tcoin why Nic didn't think LUNA would work how a stablecoin could theoretically be decentralized whether Nic, Eric, and Erik think this was a deliberate attack why they think whether or not there was a deliberate attack is not even relevant how the de-peg started with a liquidity issue on Curve why Nic thinks that Terra's biggest mistake was the 19.5% APY on Anchor whether pursuing a decentralized stablecoin is a worthy goal what aspects of UST were decentralized, according to Erik whether algo stablecoins are dead or whether in the future, death spirals of algo stablecoins can be avoided why Erik believes that everything in the crypto space is an experiment, even BTC what it says that the VCs behind Terra knew were so reputable why Do Kwon's arrogance and inexperience might have caused this chaos whether Terra can be rebuilt whether this collapse imposes risks on other blockchains and other assets why the Luna Foundation Guard's purchase of Bitcoin might have made the UST collapse even worse what Erik thinks about the global financial system and the US dollar how this event could trigger more regulation in the crypto space and why it might hurt the entire ecosystem how regulators might use the Terra case to impose CBDCs.   Thank you to our sponsors! Crypto.com: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/unconfirmedcardearnfeb2021      Coinchange: https://coinchange.io   Beefy Finance: https://beefy.finance       Episode Links   Erik Vorhees  Twitter: https://twitter.com/ErikVoorhees   Eric Wall Twitter: https://twitter.com/ercwl   Nic Carter Twitter: https://twitter.com/nic__carter   Previous Unchained Coverage of Terra Do Kwon on backing UST with BTC ​​https://unchainedpodcast.com/do-kwon-is-backing-ust-with-bitcoin-and-heres-what-else-he-is-building/ Kevin Zhou on the risk of UST's death spiral https://unchainedpodcast.com/heres-why-usdn-de-pegged-from-the-dollar-and-why-ust-might-too/  Jon Wu on how Terra got de-pegged: https://unchainedpodcast.com/did-someone-deliberately-attack-terra-luna-to-kick-off-a-death-spiral/ Terra Twitter: https://twitter.com/terra_money  UST Mechanics: https://angelprotocol.medium.com/how-does-ust-work-ec7b2f6e2c2c Luna Foundation Guard: https://lfg.org/team/ UST Bank Run: https://www.wsj.com/articles/crash-of-terrausd-shakes-crypto-there-was-a-run-on-the-bank-11652371839 Speculation of a deliberate attack: https://onchainwizard.substack.com/p/how-to-make-800m-in-crypto-soros?s=r Do Kwon's Proposed Terra's Revival: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2022/05/13/do-kwon-proposes-restart-of-terra-blockchain-as-ust-luna-plummet/ Terra Blockchain Halted: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/05/12/luna-issuer-terra-halts-blockchain-after-week-of-losses/ Upcoming Regulation https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/terra-stablecoin-loses-peg https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/146583/yellen-says-the-stablecoin-market-is-still-too-small-to-pose-systemic-risk

Jason and Molly chat with Jason Lemkin of SaaStr (01:44). They discuss: advice for new VCs (16:14), the future of SaaS investing (27:37), playing offense as investors (35:50), secondaries and more.

Justin Gordon (@justingordon212) talks with Jon Morris (@yojonmorris), Founder and CEO of NOWHERE, an online metaverse platform that aims to revolutionize gathering with patent pending video presence technology that allows serendipitous social mingling between conversations with friends or colleagues at conferences, meetings, or parties all within dynamic web environments.Jon Morris is a conceptual artist who creates multilayered installations, performances, and experiences with the express intent of elevating his audience to a sublime state. Challenging the relationship between art and spectator, Morris' work is typically equal parts technical, playful, inventive and rich with depth. From Le Louvre to Lady Gaga from Cirque Du Soleil to the Metropolitan Opera, his work has been praised by NY Times, Wall Street Journal, LA Times, Rolling Stone, NBC, VICE, Wired and more. He previously founded The Windmill Factory, an interdisciplinary arts collective that creates interactive installations, immersive performances, stage designs, and experiential events.He has been a Thomas J. Watson Fellow, Kinnernet-Europe Experience Director, LaMaMa ETC Artist in residence, Watermill Center Fellow, Tennessee Williams Fellow, NCAA Post Graduate Scholar, 6-time All-American Springboard Diver, and holds a B.A. from the University of the South, Sewanee. Jon has taught master classes at Harvard, NYU, Columbia, Pace, The University of The South, Vanderbilt. Website: NOWHERELinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jonlmorris/Twitter: @yojonmorrisEmail: jon@urnowhere.comShow Notes: The future of online gathering with NOWHERE's metaverse platform Jon's journey from all-American springboard diver to tech founder NOWHERE as a pandemic-born pivot  Early creative development for the platform Developing NOWHERE's vision and the challenge of finding web3 engineers Sourcing talent and building the NOWHERE team The power of spatial audio in the NOWHERE platform Customer discovery and growing to venture scale How NOWHERE plays into the future of work NOWHERE's competitive advantage More about the show:The Vitalize Podcast, a show by Vitalize Venture Capital (a seed-stage venture capital firm and pre-seed 300+ member angel community open to everyone), dives deep into the world of startup investing and the future of work.Hosted by Justin Gordon, the Director of Marketing at Vitalize Venture Capital, The Vitalize Podcast includes two main series. The Angel Investing series features interviews with a variety of angel investors and VCs around the world. The goal? To help develop the next generation of amazing investors. The Future of Work series takes a look at the founders and investors shaping the new world of work, including insights from our team here at Vitalize Venture Capital. More about us:Vitalize Venture Capital was formed in 2017 as a $16M seed-stage venture fund and now includes both a fund as well as an angel investing community investing in the future of work. Vitalize has offices in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.The Vitalize Team:Gale - https://twitter.com/galeforceVCCaroline - https://twitter.com/carolinecasson_Justin - https://twitter.com/justingordon212Vitalize Angels, our angel investing community open to everyone:https://vitalize.vc/vitalizeangels/

Tono Mandly stopped by DTC Pod's Miami studio to discuss the current consumer landscape in Latin America and how Riogrande is filling a gap in the consumer market, the startup scene in LatAm, the challenges of building in Latin America, and the incredible potential for this $100 billion e-commerce market.3:47 - 10:22 Tono's background10:36 - 14:22 Ecommerce landscape in LatAm14:28 - 16:47 Challenges in LatAm Ecommerce17:03 - 21:18 What is Riogrande21:21 - 23:46 Consumer landscape in LatAm26:22 - 29:12 Operating in different countries 30:07 - 33:59 Startup scene in LatAm34:17 - 36:12 Fixing the lack of trust between consumers and businesses38:12 - 40:10 Opportunity in LatAm40:12 - 41:53 VCs in LatAM 41:55 - 43:07 Who should join YC This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further? Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTokTono Mandly- CEO of RiograndeRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

You've decided to jump in to private investing. You've already asked yourself if you should invest at all and discovered how to participate. Now that you're ready to invest - how does it actually work? Who is giving money to whom and what are they trying to achieve?First, you start with a venture capital founder - an entrepreneur that starts a company with an industry-disrupting idea. Think Zoom, Peloton, and Coinbase as recent examples. The company must grow, scale operations, and eventually become profitable to become successful.Second, the Venture Capital Firm (VC) - a group of people who specialize in finding the next trillion-dollar company before they even have profits - funds the founder with the capital necessary to realize their potential. In exchange, they become equity owners of the business and work in partnership with the founders to increase the chances of success. Some of the most well-known VCs include Accel, Bessemer Venture Partners, Lightspeed, Sequoia, IVP, Benchmark, and a16z. Third, the investors, like AWM and other family offices, then put money to work with venture capital firms to target the outsized returns. The ideal end result is an exit (sale) that generates for the investors, VCs, and founders an outsized return. Without the idea and execution, the VCs and investors would not be able to capture this return. Without the capital invested, the company would fail.In this week's episode, Brandon and Justin dive deeper into this process on how the venture capital investing works, the different seed and funding rounds, and what to expect throughout as an investor.Have questions for an upcoming episode? Want to get free resources, book giveaways, and AWM gear? Want to hear about when we release new episodes? Text “insights” or the lightbulb emoji (

Javier Torremocha es uno de los VCs más importates del ecosistema de startups en España con su fondo Kibo Ventures. En la primera parte de la conversación nos contará su carrera en Banca, y cómo el haber pasado por todas las crisis financieras del sector, lo lleva a los 39 años a tomar la decisión de cambiar su rumbo profesional y vital. Se va a California y entra en contacto con el mundo del capital riesgo, y a su vuelta a España funda junto a su amigo de universidad Aquilino Peña Kibo Ventures, del cual nos contará su historia, visión, varias empresas chulas en las cuales ha invertido y alguna otra de la cual "no debió" de haber pasado. También, un segmento de preguntas (algunas de ellas difíciles) sobre el mundo del Venture Capital, las cuales Javier responde con elegancia y firmeza. Créditos Musicales: Jahzzar https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Jahzzar

Bootstrapping is freeing, on the surface. After all, you own the business outright.  But how free are you really if you're pouring hours into time-wasting tasks just to save a few bucks? Today's guest is Hailey Swartz, co-CEO of Actual Veggies. They started out washing and reusing their competitor's packaging because they couldn't afford their own.  Now that they've taken on VC funding, they're filling the shelves of health food stores across the nation.  In this wide-ranging discussion, you'll discover how to combine bootstrap philosophy with venture capital - so you can live that free lifestyle you've been dreaming of.  Listen now!  Show highlights include:   Why 10k from Sequoia Capital is better for your business than $1M from some no-name investor (5:07)   Why raising capital from dozens of VCs gives you a competitive advantage (even if it takes more time to raise the money) (6:07)  The multi-channel outreach method that almost guarantees your product lands on retail shelves (8:02)  Why going D2C spells disaster for your profit margins (even though you're cutting out the middleman) (9:39)  The “in store activation” method that lets you run profitable advertising campaigns without spending thousands on data analytics (10:28)  How to turn your next idea into a hit product without insider knowledge or a product development team (13:00)   

Radhesh is amongst the most seasoned B2B investors in India who brings with him rich operational experience in the enterprise technology space. He is Founder and Managing Partner at Suvan Ventures, a B2B focused cross-border fund. Before Suvan Ventures, he was Managing Partner of Arka Venture Labs which was created in 2018 August with the objective of investing and mentoring B2B companies between India and US corridor. The fund has made 27 investments with 4 exits and 9 uprounds (from the likes of Sequoia, B Capital, Nexus, Lightspeed, Matrix, Facebook). Prior to Arka Venture Labs, Radhesh had an 18 years long stint in IBM with strong technical, sales, and business development experience in various divisions of IBM. In his last assignment there, Radhesh was heading the Startup initiative of IBM India and South Asia. In this episode, we will cover:1. How did Radhesh get started into the world of SaaS investing (2:19)2. How do you evaluate SaaS startups at the pre-seed and seed stage? (11:40)3. Building value into a SaaS business in the early-days (16:12)4. Best branding practices for early-stage SaaS startups (22:14)5. Rise of vertical SaaS in India (29:11)6. Why do VCs love vertical SaaS (37:18)7. Evaluating market sizes SaaS (40:01)8. Important of nailing the Pricing within SaaS (44:45)9. How does Suvan Ventures plan to add value to its portfolio (53:18)10. Advice to founders building from day 1 for the globe (57:00)

Accelerators, grants, VCs, angel backing – funding your business can be a minefield. The 'recovering' founder of Yoller shares the pros and cons of not only investment options but startup life generally, and how to survive it.

Hello my friends, thank you once again for your patience for this new episode featuring Laser Gates by Imagic. A fun time was had by almost all! Coming up next is Frogs and Flies by M Network. If you have any feedback for Frogs and Flies, please send it to 2600gamebygame@gmail.com by end of the day on May 17th. I should be able to get it out on time despite this episode being late. Upcoming games include A-VCS-tec Challenge by Simon Quernhorst and Paul Slocum; Cookie Monster Munch by Atari; Master Builder by Spectravideo, and Gauntlet by Answer Software. Thanks so much for listening! Atari XP preorders Limited Run Atari preorders (only 1000 of each will be made, I said 1500 in the show because I can no longer read) Laser Gates on Random Terrain Laser Gates (Innerspace) on Atari Protos Innerspace on Atarimania My email interview with Dan Oliver Is Laser Gates Inner Space? Atari Age thread Dan Oliver's Waterbug Design site on Wayback Machine Just Kidding Imagic segment, 1983 Laser Gates review by Phil Wiswell Jan 1 1984

To the southeast of Ypres, in what was once a lover's lane, stands a small artificial hill created from the digging of the Ypres-Comines railway.  Standing just 60ft above sea level, Hill 60 was strategically a vital spot, giving unbroken views towards Ypres.For a period of four days in April 1915, this small hilltop became one of the most dangerous places on earth, with four battalions of infantry battling the German defenders with bombs, bayonets, and picks and shovels.  The fighting was so intense that no less than 4 VCs were won on the hill, 3 by the East Surreys and one by an officer of the Queen Victoria's Rifles who became the first Territorial soldier to win the VC during WW1.Support the podcasthttps://www.buymeacoffee.com/footstepsbloghttps://www.patreon.com/foostepsofthefallen

Justin Gordon (@justingordon212) talks with Amanda Greenberg (@AKGreenberg), Co-Founder and CEO of Balloon, a research-backed platform that unlocks ideas and feedback from a group by eliminating groupthink and amplifying voices. They're rebuilding the way teams collaborate, making them more productive, innovative, informed, and inclusive.Before founding Balloon, Amanda was a public health researcher, translating science and research into national behavior change campaigns for the U.S. CDC and EPA. Her research focused on engagement, listening, and community-based decision-making, and it was in that work that she discovered that groupthink plagues decision-making. To solve this problem, she and her co-founder Noah built Balloon from the ground up to align with research for how to unlock the highest quality and quantity of information from a group...and how to do it in the most productive way possible.Website: BalloonLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/amandagreenberg/Twitter: @AKGreenbergShow Notes: How Balloon is enabling teams to drive better outcomes, leverage creativity, and improve productivity Amanda's background and how it led to great founder-market fit to build Balloon Navigating minimal prior exposure to tech entrepreneurship and VC Deciding to raise funds through angel investors, being Vitalize Angels' first portfolio company, and the value of diverse cap tables The big vision for Balloon  How Balloon's flight templates fuel their growth by building credibility How they on-boarded and partnered with industry experts How pandemic-related shifts in FOW have affected Balloon Balloon's use-cases and the ROI it provides to companies How Balloon uses their own platform internally More about the show:The Vitalize Podcast, a show by Vitalize Venture Capital (a seed-stage venture capital firm and pre-seed 300+ member angel community open to everyone), dives deep into the world of startup investing and the future of work.Hosted by Justin Gordon, the Director of Marketing at Vitalize Venture Capital, The Vitalize Podcast includes two main series. The Angel Investing series features interviews with a variety of angel investors and VCs around the world. The goal? To help develop the next generation of amazing investors. The Future of Work series takes a look at the founders and investors shaping the new world of work, including insights from our team here at Vitalize Venture Capital. More about us:Vitalize Venture Capital was formed in 2017 as a $16M seed-stage venture fund and now includes both a fund as well as an angel investing community investing in the future of work. Vitalize has offices in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.The Vitalize Team:Gale - https://twitter.com/galeforceVCCaroline - https://twitter.com/carolinecasson_Justin - https://twitter.com/justingordon212Vitalize Angels, our angel investing community open to everyone:https://vitalize.vc/vitalizeangels/

Hello everyone, I'm excited to share my second conversation with Sebastian Mallaby. Last time, we discussed his book More Money Than God. A quote from that conversation stuck with me: “The key was to do an unreasonable amount of preparation work. It shows you're serious and not wasting people's time by asking the obvious questions." This time, we discussed The Power Law (see my write-up) in which he tackled the history of venture capital. The two worlds make for an interesting contrast: venture capitalists, networkers by nature, are more willing to meet and chat. But they're also natural storytellers which presents a challenge in the search for truth. In his book, Mallaby tried to disentangle luck and skill in venture investing, how to build winning and lasting cultures, and the importance of VCs for silicon valley. And while he admits that individually “the story of every bet can seem to hinge on serendipity,” he argues that over the long run, “the best venture capitalists consciously create their luck.” Individual venture capitalists can “can stumble sideways into fortunes” and at times it seems like luck beats diligence and foresight. The best however, “work systematically to boost the odds that serendipity will strike repeatedly.” “The great challenge at venture partnerships is that the principals must refrain from killing each other.” Michael Moritz “When people write about the venture business, they're always writing about the startups we back. They never write about the most important investment we make, which is in the business.” Michael Moritz. "The fast moving of ideas, people and money until they reached their optimal use, that's what made Silicon Valley worked. That's what made innovation turbocharged. "But where did that fast circulation come from, and my argument is it comes from venture capitalists." I had a lot of fun digging into these questions with him. I hope you enjoy the conversation.

Journalist and author Sebastian Mallaby, the Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, chats with Trey Elling about THE POWER LAW: VENTURE CAPITAL AND THE MAKING OF THE NEW FUTURE. Topics include: A definition of "power law" (0:35) An explanation of venture capital (VC) (2:05) The "Traitorous Eight" and their influence on the beginnings of Silicon Valley and VC (3:00) VC's investment in Atari factoring in "wild-man risk" (6:59) VC's responsibility in accelerating DNA-editing technology in the 1970s (12:02) Apple is an example of a successful venture network (14:41) The counterintuitive concept that weak ties generating a better circulation of info than strong times (18:34) What Don Valentine's achievements with Cisco in the `1980s unlocked going forward (21:38) Mosaic Communications (aka Netscape) serving as another major step in the Power Law's evolution (26:11) How Yahoo's insistence that its search engine remained free altered the way VCs approached internet technology investments (29:44) VCs' responsibility with the tech bubble bursting in 2000 (32:59) Google playing the investment game so well that created another massive shift with VC (36:08) The cause of Peter Thiel's disdain for VCs in the last 1990s and early 2000s (41:37) Why Thiel is so good at the VC game (44:52) VC's significant role in China's financial advances (49:08) Whether Venture Capital has fueled the rise of blockchain and cryptocurrencies (54:27) If VCs are making the world a better place, more often than not (55:33)

In this week's Immigration Law for Tech Startups podcast, I am joined by Danielle D'Agostaro, the principal partner at WV Ventures, a 100-million joint venture between Advocate Aurora Health, Foxconn, Johnson Controls, and Northwestern Mutual. We talk about competing for tech talent on the global stage as well as the biggest challenges facing early-stage startups and founders in growing startups.    Prior to WVV, Danielle spent the last 7 years building the Alchemist Accelerator from the ground up, working with hundreds of companies such as LaunchDarkly, Rigetti Quantum Computing, and Cobalt.io., and ultimately becoming a leading enterprise accelerator in the U.S.     While Alchemist serves as the first check-in to a company, WVV is the next-stage pass where they would need to do due diligence and evaluate traction. Although they are also geared toward helping B2C companies, their main focus is on B2B startups.   Please share this episode with companies, HR and recruiting professionals, startup founders, international talent, or anyone who can benefit from it. Sign up for the Alcorn monthly newsletter to receive the latest immigration news and issues. Reach out to us if we can help you determine the best immigration options for yourself, your company, your employees or prospective employees, or your family whether in the U.S. or abroad. In this episode, you'll hear about: Switching from B2B SaaS to health care and insurance Investing in immigrant founders and a requirement for U.S. presence Focus on data-hungry AI startups and other domain expertise The biggest challenges facing early-stage startups and founders How equity incentivization looks like Strategies when presenting to VCs Why you shouldn't use conferences as a fundraising strategy How to focus on relationship building with VCs What early-stage investors should focus on Trends in hiring global talent   Don't miss my upcoming conversations with top Silicon Valley venture capitalists, startup founders, professors, futurists, and thought leaders on Immigration Law for Tech Startups. Subscribe to this podcast here or on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or whatever your favorite platform is. As always, we welcome your rating and review of this podcast. We appreciate your feedback!   Resources: https://www.wvvcapital.com/    Alcorn Immigration Law: Subscribe to the monthly Alcorn newsletter   Immigration Law for Tech Startups podcast: Episode 16: E-2 Visa for Founders and Employees Episode 42: Capture Investors' Attention With Your Authentic Story with Strategist and Storyteller Eileen Wu Episode 63: Immigration, Global Mobility, Working from Home, and the Future of Work   Immigration Options for Talent, Investors, and Founders Immigration Law for Tech Startups eBook Extraordinary Ability Bootcamp course for best practices for securing the O-1A visa, EB-1A green card, or the EB-2 NIW (National Interest Waiver) green card—the top options for startup founders. Use promotion code ILTS for 20% off the enrollment fee.

What's it all about? Electric Flight!! We had just before Christmas an episode on battery flight, we turn our attention again to fuel cell Hydrogen powered flight. This is one of the use cases in transport I do see hydrogen having a big part to play. I talk technology, timelines, talent, and territory ( I like alliteration!) with CEO and Co-Founder Alex Ivanenko of Hypoint, developing the powertrains for regional electrified aviation. I hope you enjoy the episode. About Dr. Alex Ivanenko:  Dr. Alex Ivanenko is the co-founder and CEO of HyPoint, the NASA award-winning Silicon Valley startup pioneering air-cooled hydrogen fuel cell systems for aviation and urban air mobility. Prior to founding HyPoint, Alex held senior sales roles at both 3M Corp. (NYSE: MMM) and Owens Corning (NYSE: OC). He attended Saratov State Technical University, where he received his Bachelor's and Master's degrees, both in engineering, as well as a Ph.D. in electrochemistry. He splits his time between HyPoint locations in Menlo Park, California, and Sandwich, England. About HyPoint: HyPoint develops industry-leading hydrogen fuel cell systems for zero-emission aviation, aeronautics, and urban air mobility. Its NASA award-winning system features an innovative "turbo" air-cooling and oxygen supply system to deliver unprecedented energy density and specific power performance compared with existing battery and hydrogen fuel cell systems, dramatically increasing zero-emission aircraft operational time, utilization rate, and flight range at a lower total cost of ownership. HyPoint is backed by leading venture capital firms and has offices in Silicon Valley and the United Kingdom. Social links:  Dr. Alex Ivanenko LinkedIn: HyPoint Website: HyPoint - we make zero emission air transport possible HyPoint on LinkedIn: (55) HyPoint: Overview | LinkedIn Hypoint on Twitter: HyPoint (@hypointinc) / Twitter About Hyperion Cleantech Group: Hyperion Cleantech Group is the holding company for businesses focused exclusively in cleantech talent acquisition, retention, leadership development. working with some of the most innovative cleantech companies in the world, helping to find extraordinary talent to enable their growth and success. Partnering with leading cleantech VCs, as well as directly with founders and entrepreneurs in the sector. With our clients we are transforming business and growing a strong and prosperous cleantech economy. We work across EMEA and NORAM, with teams based in the UK, Germany and the US. Hyperion Executive Search is a retained search firm operating at Board, NED, C-Suite, VP and Heads of… level www.hyperionsearch.com Fully Charged Recruitment is a contingent recruitment firm operating in the Mid/Senior level. www.fullychargedrecruitment.com EPISODE LINKS Follow us online, write a review (please) or subscribe I'm very keen to hear feedback on the podcast and my guests, and to hear your suggestions for future guests or topics. Contact via the website, or Twitter. If you do enjoy the podcast, please write a review on iTunes, or your usual podcast platform, and tell your cleantech friends about us. That would be much appreciated. Twitter https://twitter.com/Cleantechleader Facebook https://www.facebook.com/DavidHuntCleantechGuide Instagram https://www.instagram.com/davidhuntcleantech/

In this episode of #AcquisitionTalk, we listen in on a Twitter spaces discussion hosted by Andrew Kirima and Pablo Felgueres as part of their series on American industrial dynamism. Check out industrialdynamism.com and @morefactories. Tons of great speakers join, including Liz Stein, Jake Bullock, Jake Chapman, Griffin Barnicutt, John Dulin, AJ Piplica, and Eric Lofgren. Excerpts: "I'm pretty sure if the future of defense is AI, the future of AI is also in defense. And so that's why we do a lot of really ambitious AI research at Modern AI." "You'll often see, tech crunch articles about, name your defense company, and the billion dollar contract they signed because they got an IDIQ. What the article won't tell you is that they're not actually getting a billion dollars and that contract might have 50 people on it." "Are you a commoditized product, as in another piece of software or a certain parts maker that someone else can 3d print for cheaper? Or are you something that they literally can't replicate, which is hopefully where a lot of this American industrialism and dynamism will end up." "The reason a program of record as a word is meaningful is there are so many moving pieces in government acquisitions as it's done today... What you're trying to do is cobble together those three people and acquisitions officer, a user, and then a funder together." "You can raise a seed round with a deck but to get to Series A most of the VCs, and anybody feel free to correct me if you want, but most of them need to see a production contract. It's really hard to get there on the timeline that you could in any other sort of industry." "A big reason that we encourage our portfolio companies to definitely pursue a commercial product first and find products that are 10x better than what's in the government, 10x cheaper. So frankly, a Herculean task, but that really is sometimes the bar." "My pessimistic take on this is that if you're relying on the DOD to fundamentally change, how requires technologies in order for what you're building to be successful? I think it's a fool's errand." "The way that you're going to have to write your proposal will lock you in to a very defined waterfall process that ultimately leads to bad products." "The entire industry doesn't want to shift to horizontal platforms because that will cause new incumbents to emerge and it will effectively erode the power that these primes have." "If you look at the new ULA and Amazon partnership, even with satellites, it's give or take a couple of billion dollars. I will put a lot of money that half of it will be subcontracted out and will generally go to startups." "One of the most beneficial things out of that consortium model is being able to have the conversations with the end users. And that happens so rarely because of fairness in the procurement process." "A lot of us on the outside have been a little bit weary about getting our hands dirty and playing the game the way it's played. Frankly, that's what's required in order to work within a system that's been entrenched for decades."

While Aspen is still in its early days, we're excited to have Keta Burke-Williams on the pod to discuss the logistics of building a fragrance company. In this episode of DTC pod, you'll hear Blaine & Ramon talk with Keta about creating a scent, finding a manufacturer,  finding her voice when pitching to VCs, optimizing for online and offline sales, being smart with your resources, and tapping into your network. 8:20 - 9:20 The inspiration behind Aspen15:43 - 16:06 Consumer trust is fragile 32:34 - 33:24 Why being cheap is smart19:06 - 19:43 How to sell a scent online26:03 - 26:47 Combatting imposter syndrome 40:10 - 40:49 Don't underestimate your network! This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further? Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Keta Burke-Williams - Founder of Aspen ApothecaryRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Entrepreneur Founders, Angel Investors, and VCs all want to maximize their Return on Investment, their realized gain, when it looks like there is potential for an IPO with the company. It is hard to predict which startups will navigate the treacherous journey from start to finish of an IPO when the race isn't a sprint, it can have many twists and turns and obstacles to over come, to reach the pinnacle of an IPO rather than acquisition or merger. Many of the ways to avoid taxes on capital gains and even 'phantom earnings' need to be dealt with at the start of the incentive or in the early days of the company starting up, not in the final stretch to an IPO. Host Karen Rands is joined by Aaron Rubin, JD, CPA, CFP, partner with Werba Rubin Papier Wealth Management, LLC and author of "Financial Adulting", a guide for young professionals navigate tax, investing and estate planning. Aaron works with pre-IPO executives and early employees at late-state tech companies to help them minimize their tax liability and keep more of their equity compensation. He is known in tech circles from Austin to Silicon Valley as the PreIPO 'Stock Option Whisperer'. www.wrpwealth.com What you will learn: * Worse, yet easiest IPO tax mistake to avoid * Alternative Mininum Tax laws changes * Benefit of "Qualified Small Business Stock" * Pre-Purchase 83B Early Election Option to avoid GIANT Tax Bill on IPO Stock Gain Karen Rands, is the leader of the Compassionate Capitalist Movement™ and author of the best selling financial investment primer: Inside Secrets to Angel Investing.  She is an authority on creating wealth through investing and building successful businesses that can scale and exit rich. Visit http://Kugarand.com to learn how to hire her firm to identify the red flags of deal before you invest or try to raise capital. watch: https://youtu.be/1jmEaVhwAEw

Matthew Scullion got an early start in entrepreneurship. Even though he grew up far from Silicon Valley his latest company has raised hundreds of millions from top VCs. Now one of the first unicorn companies from his corner of the world, his venture serves fast-moving small businesses and global corporate giants alike. The venture, Matillion has attracted funding from top-tier investors like Scale Venture Partners, General Atlantic, Sapphire Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Episode 226 features Saverio Bianchi who is the Founder and CEO at Atelier & AvenueFind Saverio Online:Website: www.atelierandavenue.comPersonal Website: SaverioBianchi.comLinkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saveriobianchi/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saverio.bianchi/Twitter: https://twitter.com/SaverioBianchiAbout Saverio:16 years and 50 iconic brands later, Saverio drives eCommerce acceleration faster than ever in Luxury, Fashion & Beauty.With clients in London, Paris, New York, San Francisco & Melbourne, Saverio and his boutique strategy firm ATELIER & AVENUE, coach and advises VCs, Founders/CEOs & Executives in eCommerce, Marketing & CRM - strategy through execution.Saverio is also a speaker at international conferences and writes about eCommerce leadership on his blog SaverioBianchi.com........Thank you for listening! If you wanted to learn more about the host, Brian Ondrako, check out his “Now” Page - https://www.brianondrako.com/now or Sign up for his Weekly Newsletter and 3x a Week Blog - https://brianondrako.com/subscribe/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week, in episode 106, we start with an update of how 21 Hats has been doing since its sale brought new resources and new ambitions (Spoiler alert: It's not going great!). Then, Dana White tells Shawn Busse and Jay Goltz about the progress she's made on multiple fronts: attempting to sell franchises to revive her struggling Midtown Detroit location, to open new salons at Fort Bragg and in Dallas, and to secure financing. The owners discuss Dana's financing options—venture capital, private equity, bank loan—assessing, in Shawn's words, their “degrees of evil.” Plus: Shawn explains how his views on remote work have been evolving, and Jay explains why he's tired of being called a tyrant (even though no one's actually called him that).

Kanav Kariya (President, Jump Crypto) joins the Solana Podcast to discuss his optimism for the future and the many areas in which Jump Crypto is innovating in the crypto and blockchain space. Austin Federa (Head of Communications, Solana Labs) guest hosts. 00:49 - What is Jump?03:07 - The path to operationalizing crypto06:00 - Optimism for Crypto10:49 - Discovering and Building in Crypto with Jump14:24 - Personal Journey at Jump16:43 - What's being built at Jump?17:55 - Reasons to want to build19:39 - What does Pyth offer?22:22 - Criticism about conflict of interest26:30 -  How Web 3.0 facilitates resource coordination28:46 - Data contributors benefiting from onchain data31:01 - Token Plans for Pyth31:46 - Message bridging34:48 - Wormhole, stable coins and asset tokens37:36 - Time synchronization for cross-chain dApps39:14 - State storage on wormhole for dApps40:21 - Is Wormhole layer 0?41:14 - Wrapped NFTs44:13 - Jump's position towards NFTs48:36 - Exciting things in the ecosystem49:43 - Custom silicon / FPGAs53:22 - A parallel execution model? DISCLAIMERThe content herein is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose. Those who appear in the content may have a financial interest in any projects referenced, and any content herein is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.  This content is intended to be general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional advisor. Austin (00:10):Welcome to another episode of The Solana Podcast. I am Austin Federa, sitting in for Anatoly again this week. Today we've got a pretty special episode I think. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. I think it's been a long time coming with a few false starts. Today we have Kanav Kariya president of Jump Crypto, or do we just say Jump at this point?Kanav (00:32):Yeah, Jump Crypto is good.Austin (00:34):President of Jump Crypto, which maybe this time last year very few people knew existed, very few people knew what you guys were doing, what you were building, what your role in the ecosystem has been. So yeah, I guess let's just go ahead and Jump right into it. What is Jump Crypto and how did it come about?Kanav (00:51):Yeah, thanks for having me on Austin. So for context for the audience that aren't very familiar with us, Jump is historically a prop trading firm founded over 20 years ago in the pits at the CME. Today one of the largest quantitative trading firms in the world. And we started a crypto division over seven years ago. It started as an intern project at the University of Illinois, where we were running a miner in a closet and building some trading infrastructure.And today we've got over 150 people on the crypto team doing a lot of different things. So the way I like to describe our business is spitting it into three primary pillars. One is prop trading, which is exactly what we do on the other side of the house, we build trading intelligence and we scale it. The second piece is building and that's the piece that I hope we'll get to talk a lot more about on this call and it's closest to my heart and closest to the heart of the team.And that's in building pieces of infrastructure, really streets and sanitation for the space and a couple of the marquee projects that we've really focused a lot of our efforts on have been Wormhole and Pyth. And of course, along the journey, we've aligned ourselves with a lot of the major ecosystems in the place, including Solana, Terra and a whole number of others in building a lot of different things across those platforms.The third bucket is venture, I like to call ourselves accidental VCs in that we found opportunities to add value, or we had requests come in to work with partners over the last six years in various different capacities. And we found that we could be meaningful in those contexts and work with people that were solving problems for us. And that has now grown into the venture division that's deploying across the space.Austin (02:31):I want to get into a lot of the work that Jump is doing as core code contributors and supporters of projects in the ecosystem. But I kind of want to start a little bit with that journey. I would say that the transition from prop trading equities and commodities to prop trading crypto, that feels pretty organic. And there's a number of firms in the space that have also made that transition. Albeit you guys seem to have made it sooner than a lot of other firms in the industry. What was that process like of going from deciding that you wanted to add crypto to actually operationalizing that? And then we'll get into some of the journey to actually becoming builders.Kanav (03:07):The project started as an intern project at this thing called Jump Labs. There was a research lab at the University of Illinois and was meant to work on cool stuff with the university on working on fun problems. So alongside the crypto stuff we were doing when I was an intern, there was a VR project working with professors at the university to abstract away trading screens. And there was work on some interesting machine learning and networking problems.And the group has grown out of that. And of course matured out of these things, but we've definitely strongly retained that ethos. Now I want to caveat this by saying we definitely didn't have oppressions in being infrastructure builders. When we started the project in the lab that many years ago. It's been a very organic and natural process for us. And it's hard to make the instant leap from prop trading to what we're doing today, but it's easy to reason through the steps along the way.As one of the earliest large trading firms in the space, we had a lot of requests from institutional liquidity exchanges, OTC platforms, and importantly projects that were looking to solve trading and liquidity related problems. And those conversations gave way to us exploring a lot of DeFi projects and a lot of L1 platform projects that shared a lot of the problems they were thinking through on complex financial system design or programming in resource consumer environments, which are very natural and germane to a quantitative trading firm. And those conversations led to jamming about foreign ideas to implementing governance proposals, to maybe starting to write a little bit of code in them. And then all the way into committing over 50, 70 engineers that we have today in building through the space. And that process involves a few different steps. One, it involves the willingness for the institution at large to be mentally long the space. It requires a recognition and frankly a little bit of a taste of the upside.It requires flexibility, which of course, prop trading firms just generally naturally just have to have. And then everything else you can just learn along the way, right? We've done a lot of things wrong. We've stumbled over ourselves a hundred times, but you've got to keep digging shots on asymmetric upside and with all the resources that we've had at the firm I think we've been able to make some good ones.Austin (05:20):Going back to you last year, Jump Crypto had sort of a moment where it decided it wanted to make itself public. You wrote a blog post that was laying out. I wouldn't quite call it a thesis, but laying out an idea of how you view the space and the role that something like Jump could play within it. One of the things I was struck by going back and rereading this is your level of optimism in this post, right? Which is something that you don't see from many financial trading firms. You see them seeing opportunities to make lots of money. You see them making lots of money. They're very profitable endeavors, but you usually don't see optimism contained within it. Where'd that come from?Kanav (06:01):That's a pretty good question. So quant firms today are basically research and development firms, right? So the people that build trading systems, that build the intelligence behind trading systems are generally of quantitative background. They generally have PhDs in either statistics, machine learning, physics, those kinds of endeavors. And the people building the platforms are low latency high performance systems engineers that there are different optimizations across every level of the stack to build robust, scalable, fast infrastructure.The environment down to the lab five years ago was about exploring this space. It was like, what does this space mean? Right. And it wasn't about, okay, how are we going to make X billion dollars kind of getting into this endeavor? It was about exploring it. And I think it attracted that kind of people and it occurred that kind of environment.And the leadership that stays since then has kind of embodied that. And just personally I'm a raging optimist, I believe in technology, I believe in the future, I believe in building towards something bigger. And thankfully I think the firm has shared those ideas and I hope I've been able to shape a lot of the culture and behaving that passion.Austin (07:10):Where do you think that optimism in yourself comes from? There's a lot of things you could have gone into coming out of school. What about both, something, an organization like Jump, which is undoubtedly a great place to go work. But you stay there for a while now, you've worked your way up, you're now in charge of the crypto division. Where does that sense of optimism in you come from and what makes Jump the right place for that?Kanav (07:33):I feel something for Jump because they had a cool internship program and they had a lab on site and they were working on really fun problems in a well resourced environment, that just made it fun and attractive. And after I had the opportunity to intern there for eight to 10 months, I kind of got a sense for the possibilities that existed. And this is the flexibility that the whole space had. And it was like, you come in, you get to make a lot of bets, you get a lot of resources. And if you make good bets, you get more resources and then you get more resources. This is the only place I've ever worked. I think it would be rather unique to have that kind setup. And again, no, I wouldn't say it was a passion moment to come in to Jump and know that I would be able to build suites and sanitation for crypto. But I knew I would get to do a lot of really cool stuff, work on fun problems with smart people. And where does optimism come from?Austin (08:25):Yeah. I mean, you look at a space like this. It's been through boom and bust. There's tons of amazing projects being built in the space that end up going nowhere. And especially from the vantage point of a trading firm, right? One of the secret sauce of a trading firm is it can make money in an up marketing, it can make money in a down market, right. And that is the advantage of a professional trading operation versus a more passive trading operation. But again, like those are not usually characteristics that breed optimism. Those are usually characteristics that bleed margins, where you're optimizing 1%, 2%, 3% here. So you can compound that over a year and it will make a marginal difference. But again, that's not usually an optimistic space, that's a very functional space to work in.Kanav (09:10):Yeah, it is. And traditionally I don't think it lends itself to naturally just exactly this. Jump culture has kind of always been a little bit unique. So Jump also has a number of other kind of divisions that work on non-high frequency trading stuff. Historically, since about 2011 or 2012, had a VBC arm called Jump Capital that invests in growing technologies in this space. They've had some cool endeavors in the biospace working on automation there in healthcare.And so the founders have generally been optimist. They definitely believe in the future. They've been able to take shots at things that are going on. And even if it's not naturally germane to the trading business in and of itself, the culture itself lends itself to being able to do something like this, which is a really awesome combination of knowing how to monetize, but then also knowing how to build. Yeah, it's been an absolute pleasure to be able to soak in from that environment.Austin (10:04):Let's look at the building for a bit. I think it's pretty open secret at this point that Jump are core contributors to Wormhole and Pyth, you've been very heavily involved in that process. Take me back to some of the early days there where you are internal to Jump, and you're saying like, "Hey, we need to do more than just trade and invest in this space. I think we can actually build." And especially you're talking about this from the perspective of sanitation and roads and the very base level infrastructure. Crypto's been around for a long time. I think most people coming into the space in that time horizon wouldn't have necessarily looked at and said like, "Oh, there's very base level features that are missing from this ecosystem." What was that both discovery process like, and then the process of convincing everyone internally that this was worth dedicating resources to?Kanav (10:50):Yeah, the discovery process was very organic. We had a lot of inbound from people looking to solve trading and liquidity problems because a lot of people in the space, even though we were quite kind of new of our trading presence, and as one of the early trading firms that really was trying to make bigger pushes in the space. When you get to talk to awesome founders every day about all the problems that they have and get to build relationships with them, you start to uncover a lot more of the problem space that exists, start to internalize a lot of it.And once you've got the opportunity to sit in that for a little bit, and I'm sure you see this today. We are much later on than we were when we made a lot of those big switches, but there's still a lot of opportunity, right? When we were kind of ideating on the origins of Pyth, the conversation we had was, look, our whole thesis at Jump Crypto is to be as long aligned with the space as possible, right? We're trying to get the maximum exposure we can on the space that we think is going to be explosive. And we're trying to ideate this ways which we put that quote unquote trade on, right? The best way to put a long trade on in a growing space, and the best mode to value capture is value creation. There's definitely a lot of inefficiencies created by hyper growth, right? And there's room to capture those inefficiencies. But those are small in magnitude relative to the absolute value creation at play.And then there's a value creation capture correlation that you think about there. So if you think about it in that lens and you know that you want to be big contributors to the space and just aim to create a lot of value to both, then you start thinking about what the opportunities are within your realm to be able to engage in that capacity.Austin (12:27):But at some point there's a meeting, or you have a boss who you report to, and you have to go down and sit down in front of him or her and say, "Hey, I want to spend a lot of money to hire a lot of engineers to do something that's going to be totally public and totally open source at a firm that historically likes to stay out of the news."Kanav (12:46):It was a few meetings.Austin (12:46):Yeah, I'm sure.Kanav (12:46):And it's kind of baby steps along the way, or big steps along the way that compound into a complete shift and a big switch of that nature. We had this summit, we called the August summit a few years ago. And we went down to an offsite location and we talked about what being in this space means for us and how we differentiate. And I remember we showed up with these sheets that we went around and distributed to people. We were like, this is the toolkit that we have. This is the opportunity set in the space.And everyone kind of had their own, things went on, but that was one of the approaches that I've taken. And if we believe this is where the space is going, this is the opportunity set that we can tackle. And these are the levels that we have to pull, right? And then you socialize that and you try to convince them people that there is opportunity to be had here and you get buy-in to take a first little step. And once you get the buy-in to take a first little step, and you kind of really show the big medics of differentiation in a native space, you get the buying for the next step.And then suddenly it's the entire [inaudible 00:13:47]. You get the whole kitchen sink thrown behind you, and then you are kind of propelling to this part that you want to be at. And that's the whole thesis of Jump everywhere. You take bets with asymmetric upside and we throw the kitchen sink at things that are working. And a lot of the stuff that we were doing started working.Austin (14:02):How is that journey for you personally, going from an intern involved in a few projects now to the Jump Crypto teams over a hundred at this point?Kanav (14:11):Yeah. We've got over 150 now, hard to keep track.Austin (14:14):Wow. Yeah. From a leadership role, and from your own perspective, how has that transition been? What parts of it were easier for you? What parts were harder than you were anticipating? Scaling yourself is often much harder than scaling a company.Kanav (14:28):Without a doubt, yeah. I started in the team as an intern like you pointed out, working on software problems. I came back to the team a year later in a formal full-time capacity, working on quant problems, which was to do with predicting crypto markets, building alpha and kind of scaling that piece. And the early conversations with projects where we were trying to solve liquidity problems was an area that I got really, really interested in. And I just kind of went about trying to build that a little bit further.Over time that led to a transition from engineering and quantitative work to more conversational business development work, just having spent years across all those functions and natively knowing how to live them has been the biggest tool that I've been able to build in the toolbox. Now that doesn't teach you how to manage a hundred people, that doesn't teach you how to propagate culture. It doesn't teach you how to scale hiring strategy. Doesn't teach you how to value the troops when things are low.I definitely want to make a claim that there are many who are close to a finished product, rather than trying to be good at everything, good at every one thing, we always try to be excellent at a few things. And then by force just propel everything forward. I'd say some of the biggest lessons I've learned, the biggest mistakes we've made, definitely been in the shape of trying to shove square bags in a round hole. Where in a trading environment it's like the only people you have on your team are engineers and quants. They're just smart people that can solve any shape of technical problem you throw them at. When you move that towards sales and marketing and product and everything else, that all kind of falls apart.Kanav (16:05):And you need people that are able to natively live within specific sub domains across those functions. And that's something that we've been trying to scale in. I spend basically all my time hiring and trying to focus on making sure our zero to one projects have a lot of momentum. But yeah, it's been an awesome journey. And of course I have support from a company that's grown to a 1500 people as the largest quant trading firm in the world and so lots of guidance and help along the way.Austin (16:33):Let's talk a little bit about that work you guys are doing and actually building. So if I understand correctly, the two projects that you are mostly core contributors to is Pyth and Wormhole. Is there anything else that you'd put into that category of engagement?Kanav (16:46):That's the highest level of engagement for sure. We do a lot of things across the big ecosystems of course. We can talk all of what we're doing with Solana. We're always trying to get deeper. We built an NFD project on the Metaplex landscape after their investment as an intern project. That was a real fun one. We've been core contributors to some of the projects that are coming out on the data landscape today. We've worked on a lot of the mechanism design that goes on, on the other one. And there's a few other projects, but the highest levels of engagement have definitely been with Wormhole and Pyth.Austin (17:18):Looking at over that landscape, Pyth high frequency Oracle. But again, Oracles, they've existed for a long time. There's a number of name brand ones that got their start on the ecosystem in the 2017 range. Lots of people have had ideas about Oracles over the years, some of them have worked, some of them haven't. Similar to Wormhole, bridges have existed for a long time. Bridges are actually the basis of how any L2 works, right? Both of these are hardly new ideas I would say. What about looking at the landscape gave you guys the confidence to say, not only there's a need for something different, but we can help build something different and better.Kanav (17:57):Again, just like 100% organic. In that August summit, we were looking at some of the biggest things we could do. And a big problem that everyone kind of kept voicing to us is that they don't have access to equities data. They don't have access to fast data so that they don't have to have things like clawback mechanisms and all these different things that LPs don't get direct on every turn, right?The fundamental thing with financial oracles is that they're used to settle risk transfer. They're used to set a price at which two parties exchange value. And if that price is latent or slow or not accurate, one side gets left folding the bag. Now, DeFi, the way protocols are constructed, the side that gets left holding the bag is either the LP that's contributing to the protocol or the protocol stakers or a key stakeholder in building the ecosystem.And the takers are able to take all that value. If you are going to build something that's going to house all of OTC, if we're building something like synthetics for example, and your protocol stakers are taking the other side of every trade that happens on S-Oil or SSNP, you need to make sure that's the right price. Otherwise you're just going to get up the way down to zero. When we were ideating on what the biggest ways we could contribute is let's contribute our data. And the first idea was in let's start, let's go and figure out how we bring together a network of people to build an Oracle.It was how do we contribute our data, right? And we browsed through the category of solutions. We had all the conversations. We spoke to dozens of investors and builders in the space. And there wasn't an easy way to slot in high fidelity financial data, into existing Oracle solutions. And so we spoke with some of the founding partners of the Pyth program and came to consensus that there was an opportunity here. And that led to the first step and we just kept building sets.Austin (19:39):In your mind, what is it that Pyth offers that other Oracle solutions don't offer?Kanav (19:46):Pyth is a very hyper specialized tool for high fidelity financial data, specifically financial data for settlement of risk transfer, right? If you think about the way the market data landscape looks today, it's different across asset classes, but there is a class of people that have access to high fidelity, streaming price data that they can legally distribute and make available to a protocol, create like an Oracle program.One you need access to very fast financial data, which is hard to get and even harder to have a legal right to distribute. You want to make sure that the people who are publishing the prices are the real owners of the data so that you can set incentives for the data to be accurate, right? If you are staking the value of a third party aggregator, their third party aggregator has no skin in the game. That's one of the other kind of fundamental things that you have to think about.And third, you need to acknowledge the fact that a price is not absolute. A price for Bitcoin has about 20 liquid trading venues that are distributed across the globe that can often be fractured, that can often have all kinds of different idiosyncrasies. And that being able to accurately determine the price on most relevant venues and build a dispersion is really important. If you think about kind of all those things together, you want very fast access. You want a broad range of access of independent sources, not reporting from the same source.You want very high liveness and uptime of course, and you want kind of good legal clarity that that price can continue to be distributed because you don't want the application to suddenly get turned off when the regulator says, "What's going on?" And those are the kind of key things that Pyth has really focused on very heavily to build that piece of infrastructure and Solana was the perfect opportunity. Before Solana there wasn't a way to create a high fidelity fast Oracle. There just wasn't a need for it and there wasn't a platform for it, right. And so all those things just came together.Austin (21:49):One of the criticisms that you'll hear about Pyth is that because of its structured model here, where the people providing data are permissioned at this point and are also like firms that are professionalized trading operations themselves, that there is an inherent kind of conflict of interest in that system. With any system in blockchain, you have to assume everyone is trying to cheat, everyone is trying to extract the most value possible. How have you gone about setting up incentives to make sure that the users of Pyth and the contributors to Pyth are not at odds with one another?Kanav (22:27):Yeah. I think you made a totally fine point there in that we are building for byzantine systems, right? And so that's the kind of incentive design you've got to keep in place. I'll frankly say I think that claim is a little bit ludicrous for a few different reasons. Once you peel back the onion just a little bit, and I'll talk through some of the reasons why.Austin (22:43):Let's peel back the onion.Kanav (22:44):One, you've got to first understand that the amount of value that can be created in actually pulling something like Pyth off successfully is dramatic. And the forms that are building this are now incentive aligned to make that happen. But two, this is an open sourced protocol, it is decentralized, and you can look at exactly what the inputs are, how they're being aggregated and what their resort in price output is.Three most importantly, there are about 50 financial firms that are submitting independent price data to this article to construct final outputs. And these financial trading firms aren't friendly with each other. This is the very first time that a group of highly adversarial trading firms, banks, exchanges, and ODC players across the entire space have come together and said, "Let's go build a piece of infrastructure." And one, I think that needs to be celebrated a lot, it's a huge win.But two, the trading firm, there are 50 global financial trading firms contributing their proprietary prices directly to Solana on the Pyth program today. We have realized that these 50 comprise of between 60% to 80% of global asset class volumes at this point, given the network of participants that have aggregated around this protocol. When you are that big of market share that you're covering that kind of breadth, the participants in the protocol themselves are on the other side of each other's trades almost by definition. And so who's manipulating the price against who? Let's kind of just start there.The system of incentives that set up in this taking protocol, you can read through this on the Pyth white paper has some really intelligent aggregation algorithms that put all this data together, that identify the quality of each of these independent data publishers that then sets out a mechanism to aggressively punish providers that don't have good prices. And good prices can mean I published a malicious bad price. It can mean I have slow prices. It can mean I published, I had a bug, it can mean anything.The incentive design mechanism is meant to reward data providers that are not honest, but that have great data. And that's a fundamental difference in how system designs, we're not kind of rewarding agreement, we're rewarding prediction. And so you are rewarded for correctly predicting the price that would come up rather than for rewarding agreement between parties, and which can both have different kind of models and can both work in different ways.But there is almost no possibility for one collusion across these landscapes, given the composition of the people in the network. And the incentive structure again is obviously explicitly set up to discourage that. Third, all these forms are heavily, heavily regulated. I spoke about 20 years of its reputation and a giant, giant business behind kind of making a lot of this happen. And we're definitely incentive aligned to make this thing as successful as it can possibly be.Austin (25:39):The Web 2.0 world and the rise of FinTech apps has largely taught people that organizations that claim to be on their side often aren't. There's very legitimate reasons from a market making perspective that during the game stock run up and squeeze, users of Robinhood and other FinTech applications, their trading was turned off. Now, there's a bunch of really good backroom reasons for why that might have happened. But the effect is what matters to the retail trader, which is that they were using a platform that they thought gave them equal access to a market, that platform did not provide them equal and neutral access to a market.I think when people look at something like Pyth, it wouldn't be crazy to say that, well, the same incentives that made us think that Robinhood was on our side, could also be applied to Pyth. What is different about the Web 3.0 space and the construction of something like Pyth in your view that makes that not something someone should worry about.Kanav (26:37):Web 3.0 is fundamentally any means of resource coordination, and it facilitates that by, one, facilitating the export of trust. And the export of trust is actually one of the big reasons why the whole Robinhood debacle went on, right. They basically ran out of margin requirements in order to continue to clear trades on one side, since it was so directional.And there is this massive web of intermediaries that set up all throughout traditional finance for the express purpose of establishing trust as the FCM, the DCM, the clearinghouse, all the other three letter acronyms. And all of them exist to make sure that when a match occurs on any platform that actually settles into a financial trade.In crypto the match is the execution. And that's facilitated by the fact that you can export all the trust of executing a piece of code onto Solana, onto Ethereum, onto the blockchain itself. And that's unlocked this completely new means of resource coordination, which makes things like Pyth possible. It means that you can explicitly lay out a system of incentives in a closed loop fashion. And regardless of who's uploading the code, or who's proposing designs or architecting any of this, everybody is independently participating according to the incentives laid out very plainly by the program itself.And that means DRW and Jane Street don't have to trust Jump when they decide to publish prices to pay. That means they look at the program that's running on Solana that they can read. They look at Solana's trust model and decided they can or don't trust Solana as a platform. And then contribute to the platform that then self executes and lives on its own terms. And the fact that we can allow different kinds of state to compose in a trustless fashion is the entire revolution Web 3.0, that's basically what the whole space has been building for the last 10 years. And that's what makes Pyth possible, it simply was not possible before.Austin (28:32):What does something like Jump or Jane Street or anyone who's a data contributor to Pyth, what do they get out of it? What is their incentive apart from any rewards that might be generated from contributing data. How are they then going back and using this on chain data in their own operations?Kanav (28:51):There's a few elements. And so one, it is fundamentally a two sided marketplace, right? It has data publishers and it has data consumers. And the other interesting thing like Uber did for taxi cabs, where it created a marketplace where cars could now come online, created this marketplace where data that was once latent came online.Jump is publishing its own trades to the Pyth network. That is IP that it has the legal rights over, has only just been a cost center so far, and now has the opportunity to get monetized. And that's the same for all of the trading firms that sit in the network. It's a lot of people to turn cost centers into potential elements in the marketplace and that bootstraps the supply. The consumers of the data obviously are paying for this extremely created highly robust set of data inputs that then get aggregated. And that creates kind of flows in one direction. And then like your regular two sided marketplace, it accrues value, right?All the data publishers today in Pyth have some sort of stake of asset interest in the thing succeeding. And there is a set of incentives that then rewards them for the correct participation going on with fees, rewards, all those kinds of things. And all that is in gross detail laid out in the white paper and we can go over some of that. But the off chain applications and some of this stuff is also quite interesting, right?So if you look at kind of back office systems around the world at forms like Jump, you don't need microsecond level access to financial data, but you need that for your trading engines because otherwise you're playing at a disadvantage related to the field. But in order to make sure that your clearing prices have happened correctly in order to make charts in order to do something like a trading view, in order to get on the Bloomberg terminal or to be on a ticker somewhere, all these applications are now easily facilitated by subscribing to something like Pyth, that's living on an open kind of blockchain area. And so a lot of the off-chain use cases are getting more and more interesting I think over time. The fundamental value is in creating the pricing source for on chain data. And this is kind of like an awesome thing that just falls out of it.Austin (30:56):That's a really interesting way of thinking about both the incentive alignments and the rule that the data providers versus the data consumers play in the market. Are there any token plans for Pyth?Kanav (31:07):Yes, there is a token plan for Pyth. You can read all about it on the white paper, no comments on timing or anything of that at this point. And that's going to be a networking governance decision, but I'm sure in the near future.Austin (31:16):Transitioning over to Wormhole, which is the other project that Jump is heavily involved in as a core contributor of the code. When people look at wormhole, I think it's very easy to look at it and say, asset bridge, multi chain, cool, fundamentally utility. The first thing I noticed when we were talking about this and looking through it is this whole component of allowing different smart contracts on different blockchains to communicate with each other. I think most people understand how asset bridging works. Can you talk a little bit about this whole concept of message bridging?Kanav (31:51):Yeah. And this also kind of goes back to your question on, how do you decide that there's an opportunity here when bridging is something that people have talked about for a while? When we were kind of ideating with everybody else on kind the Pyth's team and the network on how Pyth goes across chain. Hendrick and team were building Wormhole as Solana Eths token bridge on the hackathon project at [inaudible 00:32:17].And I called Hendrick and I asked him, "Look, is there a way to generalize this thing so that we can get Pyth messages across?" We're building this Oracle thing on the best, fast, scalable censorship resistant message bus we can, but we want to get it to all the other ones that operate on a slightly different resolution. And through the course of that conversation, we came to a conclusion that enabling generic message bosses to allow this cross chain composability in a much more high dimensional fashion than just the token bridge word was a massive opportunity set that had to be filled.And so when we launched last August as a completely generic message bus. And what that means is that any piece of state that is created or lives on a blockchain can be included as a message that then gets communicated to any other blockchain environment. And so if you think about Oracles, you think about a governance board, right? Uniswap passes a governance board on Ethereum, produces workloads on a lot of different chains. The outcome of that governance board has to, in a secure, reliable fashion, be communicated to all the other geographies that Uniswap lives on. That needs to be encoded as a message.And so Wormhole has outpost contracts on every chain that is deployed, it is deployed over eight chains today. The outpost contract just listens for a message that is sent to that contract and the Wormhole network of guardians attests to that arbitrary binary block. That block can then be picked up, relayed to any other blockchain environment, verified that is coming attested from the homeowner network and then decode to do anything arbitrary and interesting. And so generic message process have really exploded over the last year. We've seen so many awesome applications being built on it. And I think we're just kind of scratching the surface, right? There's a lot to do here.Austin (34:04):When I think about messaging, I think about how a lot of the models right now for cross chain communication of assets are a little tedious and maybe have more risk inherent to them than are necessarily required. A very centralized example, USDC, right? You can go to FTX and you can withdraw USDC as an ERC-20, as an SPL token or across several different networks. And what's happening there largely is because the mint authority to that is centrally controlled. They're able to issue new, quote unquote new USDC natively on each layer that USDC is supported on. Do you see the capability of developers using something like Wormhole to make that possible for fully decentralized, both stable coins and just asset tokens?Not only possible, but already widely adopted in the Wormhole X asset framework, right? There's over four and a half billion of assets in the token bridge today. And the word token bridge kind of has meant a lot of different things to people at different points in time, right? The old token bridges were bidirectional, state sponsored bridges that sovereign ecosystems would run to communicate to Ethereum, to get liquidity in as soon as possible.And then if you send that across a different bridge, then you would have like a double wrapped and triple wrapped implementation and just an absolute UX nightmare. When you use something like Wormhole's X asset framework, you retain complete path independence as you move assets across the ecosystem. Once you're registered as an X asset, let's take USD as an example, there's a couple billion dollars of USD on the bridge today. It flows throughout the ecosystem using Wormhole on the back end, Terra bridge money, uses one more on the back end to expose one of many front ends to users.When USD flows from Terra over to Ethereum or to Solana to Polygon and then to Avalanche, it retains the same representation on Avalanche that USD flowing from Terra to Avalanche directly or through any other part in the ecosystem would retain. It's a truly cross chain native asset. It doesn't fracture liquidity, it fungus seamlessly, and it allows a lot of cool composition.If you look at something, now like the result in second order effects of this, it's this theme that we've been calling X Dapps, right? So cross chained apps. And we've seen kind of the first marquee deployment of one of these apps in the form of X anchor, which is deployed on the Avalanche chain now, right?And X anchor is just a light set of endpoints that's deployed on Avalanche. And all that does is it lets you kind of hit some functions that then really assets and/or messages bundled or separately or back to the Terra blockchain and then trigger state transitions on the Terra site. Anchor contracts don't need to be deployed to every chain. You don't need to replicate state everywhere, you don't need to stay synchronized continuously. But you allow for outposts and communications and different chains to then communicate back to the home chain using messages and assets. And now the USD that's in the X asset standard can be deployed to X anchors everywhere. And it's a much faster, much more robust getting strategy that has far less communication over.Austin (37:07):Let's dig into just a little bit on like a technical level too. When you're talking about X Dapps or cross chain Dapps that are communicating via Wormhole, you're inherently talking about fractured state across multiple L1s or L2, it's unavoidable when you're ... anything cross chain is inherently working under a fractured state model. How fast does that time synchronization need to be for developers to actually deploy something like an AMM or a club across chain and actually maintain price parody and appropriate liquidity between them.Kanav (37:42):Yeah, I'm glad you brought this up. There's a few different programming models for how cross chain Dapps works, right? One is you try to state synchronize as aggressively as possible. You keep sending messages back and forth. You have allowances, risk limits, tolerances that allow your apps to communicate. And the other is this X Dapps framework where state only lives on one chain and you allow people from other chains to then interact with it.Now, of course that also comes with its own downsides, right? If you look at something like a club and you're trying to trigger a cross chain swap using the club from another chain, you are inherently incurring the latency of the two blockchain transactions and the finality assumptions that you want to kind of work with that. The more stateful your application becomes, obviously the more latency and risk constraints everything through. With something like a lending protocol or like a cross chain anchor, things like that. They are less stateful than something like an order book, but order book is probably the most stateful you can get right in the spectrum of applications.And so any cross chain swap design inherently has to have some additional liquidity back then, that's like fundamental, right? You can ask people to take risk on your behalf. You can have the protocol take risk on your behalf, but that risk exists. There's a lot of ways to program around it and create better user experiences, but fundamentally that's a real problem and somebody has to be compensated with that risk.Austin (38:56):For the X Dapp framework, are you looking to actually be able to offload compute to the wormhole level there? Or is it really just ... The natural extension of this seems to be that eventually there's some sort of state storage on Wormhole that Dapps are able to actually access and leverage with some functionally side chain compute resourcing. Are you guys thinking about that as well?Kanav (39:19):Yeah. The fundamental cross chain thesis is that there are going to be independent, specialized compute environments that attack their own communities, their own audiences and their own apps. And Wormhole is away for folks to leverage state that results from these autogenous environments and compute the solutions on these environments to compose.And you can cut that in a million different ways. You can leverage Solana as a state execution machine. You can leverage Terra as your stable coin asset layer and you can represent this third thing as a NFT thing, or you can bundle them all in. But the Wormhole vision itself right now with all the genetic message capabilities that are out there, in the near term roadmap doesn't need to build an execution layer of its own. It can naturally extend to it. I think you're definitely kind of pointing to something that's relevant.But I don't know if that's the lowest hanging fruit given the capacities that exist in current blockchain compute environment. The vision of course is to make people, Web 3.0 users rather than blockchain users or L1 users. You basically want to deploy resources to the most relevant execution environment with the right community, that's creating the right apps and then expose that to at a higher order to consumers.Austin (40:24):Would you describe Wormhole as layer zero?Kanav (40:28):I'm rather old school, I think of layer zeros as networking protocols and internet backbones and things like that. I think it is maybe a useful analogy for kind of blockchain audiences given how we've very economically can't use the word L1, so I don't have an allergic reaction to it, but it's not my first word of choice.Austin (40:46):What would your first word of choice be?Kanav (40:49):Interoperability protocol. I'm not that creative.Austin (40:51):Yeah. Wormhole is also supporting wrapped NFTs, which is kind of an interesting concept. I think most people don't think of NFTs as something that's been bridged and quite frankly, the numbers on Wormhole on bridge NFTs are quite low compared to the success as an asset bridge or a messaging bridge. What was the original idea of using wrapped NFTs? And why do you think it hasn't caught on as much yet?Kanav (41:20):I think cross chain NFTs as a story are just beginning to play out. So there's about 16, 1700 on the NFT bridge itself. And again, NFTs are also cross chain fungible and composable across environments. They are also part of the X asset framework. And so X assets can mean anything. It can be in rebasing assets like STE, it can be in NFTs. It can be in fungible assets. It can mean anything else, right?The NFT story started to play out as a result of new other ones trying to access marketplaces that supported one or the other chain, right? And so you get to access as new audiences, you get to create experiences with different communities. You get to access different user bases, but we're seeing the experiences get a lot richer. So you see something like [inaudible 00:42:00] come out recently, they got featured on Bloomberg for new cross chain staking program where they have in game elements that kind of change based on cross chain NFT staking that are different experiences with different communities. And much like the asset bridge has that kind of globalization and cross pollination of commercial kind of elements. Cross chain NFTs are globalization kind of culture. And incorporating a lot of those elements across games that live on Solana, that live on Terra, that live on other environments and just creating those kind of richer experiences.And so we're seeing people make NFTs on one chain, come to Solana, fractionalize them, trade them, put them back in, move them over to OpenSea on Ethereum. There's all kind of interesting use case patterns. And so it's definitely been less aggressively adopted than the explosive token bridge or the other generic message applications. But there are still 16, 7,000 NFTs, there are a lot of teams using it for cool and innovative stuff that we just kind of keep up out of the wood works every some time.Austin (43:02):Do you think that's social? Do you think that's technological? Do you think that's just like the ecosystem hasn't matured enough? I think I'm surprised how much ... well, I guess surprises maybe the wrong term. People have a lot of emotional attachment to an NFT, in the same way they don't have an emotional attachment to a Bitcoin. They may have emotional attachment to the concept of a Bitcoin, but I would be upset if I lost my particular Degen ape, even if I got a different one for the exact same value. Do you think that factors in at all to how people view the concept of wrapping an NFT, that it somehow weakens the authenticity?Kanav (43:39):I think for a lot of purists, it does. I think it was just so worthy, right. For the most part, people aren't even going to realize, the large end of this consumers like buying these things, an NBA top shot or air, or any of these other platforms, it's something on the app for them. And eventually it's going to be extracted away as we draw to Eth, we draw to Solana, we draw to wallet, connect wallet, and it's going to be kind of as simple as that. And so we're always going to have purist stakes, but I think that's going to remain within our little chamber here.Austin (44:05):For Jump Crypto in general, how do you view NFTs? There are obviously firms now that are dabbling and market making and NFTs. Is that something that you've looked at and if not, what was the decision not to enter that space yet?Kanav (44:19):It just doesn't take a lot. We are looking at trading opportunities. You are looking about margins, you're looking about what predictive offer you can have, like what the edge you can have on a traders and then how many times you can apply that edge, right? It's just as simple as that. And even if you can get a 30% margin on something that trades a hundred million like week one, I mean, [inaudible 00:44:40] now.But if you have a low volume asset class, even if it has slightly higher edge, and it is harder to predict and more dimensional, this is on a good researching decision. So as that volume changes, we will continue to stay on top of it. And I don't know if these are trading tens of billions of dollars every day, and have really interesting datasets, I'm sure we'll be trading them.Austin (45:00):If the market hundred X in size, you wouldn't be opposed to it, it's just the sizing opportunity issue right now.Kanav (45:08):[inaudible 00:45:08] you can't be the richest man. It's about identifying if there's opportunity and executing all native there is.Austin (45:14):Looking at wormhole, one of the things I do want to touch on is the wormhole hack and exploit that happened a little while ago. It was one of the larger bridge hacks at the time. It was eclipsed a few weeks later by an even larger hack of another bridge, also targeting stolen Eth in this process. I'm sure that activities and projects that Jump has been involved in have had larger losses of money or similar volumes of money just based on the area you operate in. But this is one that inherently to the nature of Web 3.0 is very public. How is that like internally knowing that your core contributors to a project that suffered this kind of exploit, and also that failure is now a public failure, as opposed to maybe where it would've been a private failure beforeKanav (45:56):Building is hard, building in the open is even harder. And building in a decentralized open space where there's a large network of participants, consumers, affected people, the stakes we're playing in, right? That's the stakes that every DeFi application, that every L1 at every bridge and that everything in Web 3.0 that aims to do something meaningful inherently adopts and has to learn to deal with.The hack was big punch in the gut, obviously a big financial loss as well. The fundamental nature of smart contracts is that the code and code can have bugs. And this exploit was kind of deep, deep, deep down in the stack, in kind of like Solana instruction verification account check that was missing. The auditors listed our team that has independently been one of the biggest bug bounty finders in the space missed, and code based at the opportunity to be out in the wide for seven months, kind of had unchecked.The day of the hack, of course really, really rough. Jump is not used to being a public institution. So this was like you said, a very public kind of fallout in nature. I can't possibly have been prouder of the way the team reacted to this incident. We kind identified it within short course of it happening. We pulled the meeting room together, identified the bug, fixed up a batch, managed to coordinate the guardian network to bring it up, bring it down, announce our intent to refill the gaping 320 million hole within an hour of the incident being reported on, and brought the bridge back up within 18 hours to end to end.Building bridges and building cross chain is very, very hard. And that's where the reward for it, building it right, is even harder. You don't even make 320 million decisions very lightly, and this should hopefully signify you how much conviction and faith we have in the code base in bringing it back up in 18 hours. It should tell you about where we think this whole space is going and where Wormhole is going and where interoperability is going and what a core piece of infrastructure in that realm would mean.Security continues to be extremely, extremely top of mind. We have a 10 million bug bounty. We have an internal red team that's basically thinking about breaking Wormhole and our key projects every day. We have multiple audit from [inaudible 00:48:12] with lots of audits going on, pretty intense security review practices, all of which can be found publicly online. And I'm incredibly confident that Wormhole has come out more stronger from this incident. The team has come out kicking and that we're building one of the best and most trusted inter op solutions out there.Austin (48:32):Looking across the ecosystem, let's say over the next 12 to 18 months, what are you personally most excited for and what keeps you up at night? What do you still have worry around?Kanav (48:44):I'm looking forward to a whole bunch of things. So definitely very excited about all the advancements that we are seeing in the succinct proof and zero knowledge space. That stuff is just awesome, it's magic. And I'm just so excited to see all the things that's going to unlock for us. There's a lot of interesting problems in the hardware acceleration space that need to be made to make that possible. There's a lot of problems algorithmically that are kind of being uncovered there. And I think hopefully this conversation has lent on that we have a big infrastructure mindset. When I say streets and sanitation, that's kind of what we think about every day. That's what we're looking forward to. And on what we can build to and contribute to that.Austin (49:19):You said something I got to get a little more info. You said specific hardware to accelerate certain kinds of applications. The only place we've really seen this so far across the entire crypto landscape is ASICs for Bitcoin mining. You see GPU mining optimization, but again, nowadays I wouldn't necessarily even call GPU specialized hardware. It's really commodity hardware at this point that's just deployed for a specific application. When you're looking at the space, where are you seeing actually custom silicon or FPGAs becoming something that it makes sense to deploy?Kanav (49:50):Yeah, I mean, definitely for zero knowledge provers, right? So like two verification times have compressed a lot to the point where it's pretty feasible on most blockchain environments today. But proving itself is still super, super resource intensive. That's where there's a lot of simple math operations that can be encoded into Silicon and into FPGAs or ASICs to speed up the process significantly. And that's where we are seeing a lot of adopt. There's already a lot of people working on this on hardware acceleration using FPGAs, maybe even ASICs on zero knowledge provers.It's a little bit of like it's tough to say when the right time is because there's new changes like algorithmically coming out all the time with the new advances in new papers. And so when you spend a whole bunch of time just optimizing Fast Fourier transforms. And then the next paper makes Fast Fourier transforms not relevant. It's tough to make a decision on when the right time is, but I know there's a lot of work already going on into it. And it's a space that we are very familiar with and that we are also excited about. And mostly, mostly positive stuff on the regulatory side.Kanav (50:56):As of recently I think there's a lot of good faith engagement from regulators around the world on setting frameworks and policies for how kind of all this stuff gets put into place. Outside of maybe China we haven't seen anything very aggressively or handed on cutting off innovation. We even saw India now finally starting to open up. And so I feel more optimistic about the regulatory landscape than I did 12 months ago. We need a new influx of builders to keep coming and building cool experience and leveraging this technology where we're seeing that happen. We need capital being continued to commit to this space where we're seeing that happen.Austin (51:35):The inverse of that question, what are you most concerned about on a macro level for the space still?Kanav (51:39):Asset pricing is of course highly dependent on macro environment and that is unrelated to crypto, right? And there's just like, it's its own thing. And so we'll see price movements on a different time scale. And if you see a very sustained global macro depressed environment, then we're going to see less capital, less builders and less momentum in the space. And I think that's probably the biggest overhang we have today.Austin (52:03):In the long run we're all dead.Kanav (52:05):In the wrong run we're all dead. That's right, so let's keep building.Austin (52:09):Yes. One kind of last question here, I think if you rerun the clock maybe three or four years, the prevailing wisdom in this space was not that traditional financial institutions were going to expand their vision and embrace blockchain and we'd call it Web 3.0 at the end of the day. And you'd have Twitter profile pictures of NFTs, you'd have Jump Trading building software that's open source for a decentralized environment. And we really have seen that that is what was originally pitched as a forked parallel path of economic development.Austin (52:42):It's a little bit more twisty curvy than we thought it was going to be. And there's a lot more integration with traditional companies. As crypto has a thesis about it, that it's moving more consumer, right? Across the spectrum you see more normies getting into crypto in one way or another. Does the existing market of specifically the United States and Europe where you see very few competitors within an ecosystem.Austin (53:07):There's basically only two phone companies. There's basically only three cell phone companies. There's basically only four internet provider companies. Across the spectrum you see very non-competitive markets. When you look at the consumer landscape in the United States, do you imagine that we're going to see similar patterns rolling out there as we saw in the financial industry, or we really are going to go back to that idea of a parallel execution model?Kanav (53:30):Yeah. I'll strongly state that I don't hold a heretical view of this kind of being a completely forked off parallel path that has no relevance to anything that we do today. I think it's an amazing technological invasion that gives us tools to coordinate resources in an untrusted environment. And that's unlocking a lot of magic.Kanav (53:49):But that again bleeds in with the rest of the real world, which is also big and has its own dramatic pieces of innovation and with a whole bunch of other stuff going on. I think one of the most exciting things has been kind of the global equalizer that crypto can serve to be. Yesterday we saw Polygon come out with an integration with Stripe. And these are three kids from India that had no early supporting or backing that kind of boosted the network on their own and are now competing on a very, very competitive landscape with people from every single part of the world that are very well resourced, competent teams.Kanav (54:23):We see [Inaudible] coming from Korea. We see teams from Australia and New Zealand over the [inaudible 00:54:28] guys. We see people from Berlin and the US and everybody competing on the same, not only the similar consumer markets, but also on the same capital markets. And there are network effects that accrue, but not cannibalistic network effects that accrue. That makes me very excited about where the space is going overall. When we talk about integration points itself, it's going to largely depend on [inaudible 00:54:52], right? And that's like an unsatisfactory answer.Kanav (54:55):But if you're talking about financial markets, crypto is already integrated heavily into the financial markets with 15 excellent international venues that are competing, so we already have a fractured environment. That is before the [inaudible 00:55:08], the NASDAQ, the CME groups have made their moves in the space. And they're clearly not going to be monopolies in crypto, obviously, right?Kanav (55:16):If you look at something like a telco and interactions with like cell networks still remains to be seen, whether like decentralized constructions of those kinds of things can be competitive. I mean, building telcos and stuff has such strong network effects and so many economies of scale. And it's unclear whether a Web 3.0 means of accruing that value to a decentralized organization has the ability to accrue the similar kind of network effects and so remains to be seen. But I'm excited to see it play out.Austin (55:43):I always enjoy getting to pick your brain about where these technologies are going and the intersection of a very traditional financial world with this new global system that we've all been building. But thank you so much for joining us for spending some time digging into this stuff.Kanav (56:00):Thanks a lot for having me on Austin. This was super fun and as always, love chatting, so yeah, we'll see you again soon.Austin (56:04):Thanks.

Welcome back to another amazing episode of Startup Mindsets! Hope your year has been great so far! - Dan Investing in startups was traditinally reserved for the rich or people with access to capital such as VCs. But enter Wefunder, founded by Nick Tomarello in 2013 in an apartment in Noe Valley.  Today we sit down with Jonny Price VP of Fundraising at Wefunder and learn what it's like helping startups raise Community Rounds, persevering internally at Wefunder despite growth challenges. We also learn more about how the public can invest as low as $100 in startups on the platform. Notable companies who've raised on Wefunder include Mercury, Checkr, and Zenefits to name a few.  If you're a startup thinking about a community round, DM Startup Mindsets and we can consult you for free.  --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

0:00 Intro.1:18 Start of interview2:01 Anat's "origin story". She grew up in Israel. She practiced corporate law, VC fund formation, startup representation and M&A in Israel before moving to the U.S. 7:03 Her academic focus at Case Western Reserve University School of Law (Cleveland, Ohio).9:12 On the practice of compelling employees, who are not yet stockholders, to waive their stockholder inspection rights under Delaware General Corporation Law (Section 220) as a condition to receiving stock options from the company. Based on her paper Bargaining Inequality: Employee Golden Handcuffs and Asymmetric Information, triggered by this WSJ article on the DOMO case.20:42 Her hand-collected data set consisting of the SEC's public filings finding that many firms began requiring that their employees sign a waiver clause titled “Waiver of Statutory Information Rights” post Domo (there was a "huge uptick"). NVCA's model legal documents including this waiver clause in its Investors' Rights Agreement.27:58 The Good Technology (2018) and JUUL Labs, Inc. v. Grove (2020) cases. Description of classic conflicts of interest in venture-backed companies. Discussion of the "internal affairs doctrine".37:35 On dual fiduciaries and "new" conflicts by founders with other common stockholders (prompted by super voting shares, multiple board votes, ff preferred stock, etc). The Trados case. Fiduciary duties of venture-backed company directors. On the shift of control from VCs (preferred stockholders) to founders. "Bargaining power is the key."54:32 Take-away thoughts for directors of venture-backed companies. Lawyers as gatekeepers.58:06 The 1-3 books that have greatly influenced her life:Startup Nation,  by Dan Senor and Saul Singer (2009)Regional Advantage, by AnnaLee Saxenian (2006)The Capitalist and the Activist, by Tom C.W. Lihn (2022)59:34 - Who were your mentors, and what did you learn from them? Irit Haviv Segal, from Tel Aviv UniversityLynn Stout, from Cornell Law SchoolRobert Hockett, from Cornell Law SchoolFrom NYU: Ed Rock, Helen Scott, Karen Brenner, Gerald Rosenfeld, David Yermack.1:00.48 - Are there any quotes you think of often or live your life by? "Be the change that you want to see in the world" "I've always been an activist and that's the mantra that I live by."1:01:28- An unusual habit or an absurd thing that she loves: Fricasse (Tunisian sandwich), working out.1:02:02 - The living person she most admires: Prof. Jill Fisch (Penn Law).Anat Alon-Beck is an Assistant Professor of Law at Case Western Reserve School of Law. Her research examines how legal and regulatory structures influence the shift in equities from public markets to private markets, and the rise in the number of “unicorn” firms.__ You can follow Evan on social media at:Twitter: @evanepsteinLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/epsteinevan/ Substack: https://evanepstein.substack.com/__Music/Soundtrack (found via Free Music Archive): Seeing The Future by Dexter Britain is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License 

Harley Miller is the Founder and Managing Partner @ Left Lane Capital, one of the fastest-growing growth equity firms of the last five years. Just yesterday, Left Lane announced the closing of their new fund taking their AUM to over $2BN with an early portfolio including M1 Finance, Masterworks, Choco, GoStudent, to name a few. Prior to founding Left Lane, Harley spent over 9 years at Insight Partners investing in the likes of DeliveryHero, HelloFresh, N26, Calm, Udemy and many more breakout companies. In Today's Episode with Harley Miller You Will Learn: 1.) Origins into Venture: How Harley made his way into the world of venture with his first role at Insight? What were Harley's biggest lessons and takeaways from 10 years at Insight? 2.) Left Lane: Fundraising What are harley's biggest takeaways on fundraising from speaking to 2,500 LPs for Left Lane I? With that experience in mind, what advice does Harley give to other first time fund managers on what it takes to raise successfully? How did the Left Lane pitch to LPs change over time? What worked? What did not work? With the benefit of hindsight, what fundraising elements would Harley have done differently? 3.) Left Lane: Firm Building What are the hardest elements of building a firm today? How did Harley navigate the transition from investor to fund manager? What was challenging? What is Harley's biggest advice to young people in venture looking to scale their career fast? What are 1-2 core inputs aspiring VCs should focus on as they build their career? 4.) Left Lane: Investing and Consumer How does Harley approach portfolio construction with the new fund? How does Harley think through outcome scenario planning and ownership requirements with the new fund? How does Harley think traditional growth equity models can be applied to consumer investing? What will Left Lane be in 20 years? What firm does Harley want to build? Item's Mentioned In Today's Episode with Harley Miller Harley's Most Recent Investment: Masterworks