The Breakdown - Jason Choi on How Crypto Investing Can Better Align With Decentralization Goals

Episode Date: November 5, 2022

This episode is sponsored by Nexo.io, Circle and FTX US.   On today’s episode, NLW is joined by Jason Choi. Jason is an investor with Web3 angel collective Tangent, and also produces the long running “Blockcrunch” podcast (and companion VIP newsletter). In this conversation, he and NLW talk about the state of the markets, why crypto venture capital can be misaligned with the goals of decentralized networks, and what the alternatives might be.    Find our guest on Twitter: @mrjasonchoi - Nexo Pro allows you to trade on the spot and futures markets with a 50% discount on fees. You always get the best possible prices from all the available liquidity sources and can earn interest or borrow funds as you wait for your next trade. Get started today on pro.nexo.io. - Circle, the sole issuer of the trusted and reliable stablecoin USDC, is our sponsor for today’s show. USDC is a fast, cost-effective solution for global payments at internet speeds. Learn how businesses are taking advantage of these opportunities at Circle’s USDC Hub for Businesses. - FTX US is the safe, regulated way to buy Bitcoin, ETH, SOL and other digital assets. Trade crypto with up to 85% lower fees than top competitors and trade ETH and SOL NFTs with no gas fees and subsidized gas on withdrawals. Sign up at FTX.US today. - “The Breakdown” is written, produced by and features Nathaniel Whittemore aka NLW, with editing by Rob Mitchell and research by Scott Hill. Jared Schwartz is our executive producer and our theme music is “Countdown” by Neon Beach. Music behind our sponsors today is “War” by Enoch Yang. Image credit: Nuthawut Somsuk/Getty Images, modified by CoinDesk. Join the discussion at discord.gg/VrKRrfKCz8.

When institutions participate, they participate in size. The pro of this is obviously more innovation and more founders get funded. But the con of this is that there's overinvestment in crypto relative to the maturity of the space. That creates a lot of structural issues. So for instance, we see singular VCs just taking the entire rounds for the early rounds of crypto projects, which is not so good for crypto, especially if your goal is to create a decentralized and neutral network. Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

The breakdown is sponsored by nexo.io, circle, and FtX, and produced and distributed by CoinDesk. What's going on, guys? It is Friday, November 4th, and today we have a great conversation with Jason Choi. But before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. Also at disclosure, as always, in addition to them being a sponsor of the show, I also work with FTX. All right, friendos, well, today I am stoked to welcome to the show Jason Choi.

Jason is another long-time content creator and host of BlockCrunch, which often digs much deeper technically into projects in a way that I find super valuable and also features a VIP newsletter alongside the podcast. Jason is also formerly a GP at Spartan Group, which is the largest A-PAC crypto fund, and recently left to start an angel collective called Tantient. In this episode, we talk about NFTs and mainstream adoption, current narratives, and why he's trying to invest in crypto differently. All right, Jason, welcome to the breakdown. How are you doing, sir? I'm doing well. Thank you so much for having me, man. Yeah, yeah. I'm super excited to have you, you know, sort of been doing similar-ish but different things for a while.

in terms of kind of a combination of content creation and investing. And, you know, I've always super admired your brain as it relates to crypto and how you think about things and have been really excited recently as you kind of been sharing more of your thoughts as you've been making some personal transition. So I thought it was an awesome time to get you on the show and kind of dive into how you're seeing these things. Yeah, definitely. I'm excited to share more as well.

So first off, let's start with just a little bit of background for those who might not be familiar with with block crunch or with your investing and kind of what you're way you're up to these days. Yeah. So for those of you who have been following me for a while, I spend the past four or so years at a fund called Spartan Capital, one of the first Asia-focused crypto funds. We scaled the funds quite significantly in that time, and I decided to step down and focus on working with founders in a more hands-on manner. So I started an angel collective with a couple of experienced founders in the space called Tangent, and we've been investing actively in the space and just day and day out working very closely with founders. And at the same time, I've also been hosting a podcast and a

newsletter for the past five years called BlockCrunch, where every week we interview a notable founder or investor in the crypto space, or now the Web3 space. That's been a really, really fruitful endeavor. And I'm really excited to continue doing it. Yeah. I mean, so one of the things for folks who haven't checked out BlockCrunch, I think what makes, or one of the things that makes it different, Jason, is you sort of have to dig in on a deeper technical level. to a lot of these projects, a lot of these trends, because as you're making investment decisions, you can't kind of just sit completely at a surface narrative level. However, at the same time, as a professional investor, you also have to operate on that surface narrative level of those

kind of those 20,000 foot views. And I don't think there are many podcasts out there that are sort of able to kind of navigate between those two. Yeah, thank you so much. That's honestly been one of the most challenging aspects of doing the show and now writing the newsletter as well for our VIPs is kind of distilling extremely technical concepts into layman and into layman perspective. So recently we wrote a memo on ZK roll-ups, which I think is probably one of the most esoteric topics in crypto. But then I try to explain the entire concept from the perspective of like an awkward Thanksgiving party.

So that took me like two days to come up with. So I'm sure more technical minds can probably come up with better analogies. But part of the fun is trying to translate that technical knowledge to a more general audience. Yeah. Well, I know you had John from Aztec on recently. I just interviewed him as part of this kind of series as well. And I think that there, I think that everyone who's involved with C.K. Rulps would say at this point that there's not necessarily really good ways to explain it or really good kind of messaging patterns that people have figured out yet. So that's definitely a big challenge. But let's, let's do this as a way to kind of kick off the conversation. You just kind of wrote a post, or, a thread on Twitter called the state of crypto VC. And in a lot of ways, it was sort of a reflection on, you know, it was a bare market reflection on what, what had happened in the last bull run. And, you know, this was not sort of like some fire brandy, here's all the things

that VCs did wrong. It was more just sort of an honest assessment of what a different kind of moment in time in terms of capital availability meant. And, you know, for me, it rang true, not just for crypto, but I think probably a lot of sectors of tech, but walk through a little bit about kind of where that came from, where some of those sort of misaligned incentives or excesses you saw, you know, in the last bull market were. And then how you guys are thinking about them a little bit differently now. Yeah. So basically, I think last year or even a year before, we saw a lot of capital inflow into crypto. A lot of this was institutional. And when institutions participate, they participate in size. So the pro of this is obviously more innovation and more founders get funded.

But the con of this is that there's overinvestment in crypto. relative to the maturity of the space. So that creates a lot of structural issues. So for instance, seed stage companies have to raise at much higher valuations. And especially for projects with tokens, this also means that they come to market a much higher valuation, which curtails the upside for retails, which, as we know, is a pretty big part of most crypto communities. So that's pretty important.

The other thing is also we see singular VCs just taking the entire rounds for, you know, the early rounds of crypto projects, which also is. not so good for crypto, especially if your goal is to create a decentralized and neutral networks. So a lot of these phenomena would have been okay in a Web 2 setting, if you're investing like SaaS or consumer software. But if you're investing in crypto-native networks that are supposed to be decentralized and community-owned, a lot of these principles simply wouldn't work. So this is not a dig at any specific VCs. I think VCs play a really crucial role in crypto, right? Especially back in 2018, in a bare market when we needed capital.

But now we have way too much capital. So I kind of took a step back and thought to myself, okay, what is a way to invest in this space that doesn't contribute to this problem that actually fits in this context? And what we decided was, okay, we should first of all stay small. And second of all, second of all, solve the principal agent problem. Instead of being incentivized to raise as much money as possible, let's just invest our own money and let's invest with a bunch of founders who have, you know, walk to walk, who have done

it before, who have scale billion dollar protocols. And they'll come in with not just their own capital, but also their own insights and dedicate their face time to each founder. And that was the simple concept. So I think the good way to kind of discuss, to kind of describe us is a very bespoke and hands-on and boutique fund. Some people think we're an incubator and accelerator. That's not the case.

We're really just a kind of new way to invest together. Super cool. I want to talk a little bit more about tangent in a minute, but kind of stay on the broader theme for a moment. You know, one of the things that was really fascinating, I was doing venture in in Silicon Valley and sort of the teens, let's call it, sort of the middle teens. And back then, it was wild how little awareness of the macro forces that were shaping things like valuations, there was, right?

So like when you talked about valuation creep in 2016, 2017, it wasn't a sort of structural problem of a low interest rate environment that had been around for, you know, eight plus years. It was just that Y Combinator had more power now, and it was sort of driving valuations up, right? And it's fascinating now to kind of to look back and see to what extent the dynamics in, this is sort of Web 2, you know, venture capital, were shaped by these larger forces that didn't necessarily

have to do with the optimal way to create startups. I think the other big, obvious one that is, that that sort of part of the world is going to have to grapple with is the incentive to raise further funds on the basis of the theoretical valuation growth in your portfolio versus actually on the basis of exits, right, and returns. There's sort of the hugely compelling 2% management fees where, you know, if you're, if you've got a 400 or a 500 million dollar fund, it just totally changes the kind of dynamics of the incentives. I know this is something that you were kind of starting to see come into crypto as well.

Yeah, absolutely. I think it became an easier business to raise a lot of money and get a guaranteed two-person management fee than to actually gun for returns in a pretty frothy market. So that kind of warps incentives for a lot of investors. And I think the only way to really solve that is to either be disciplined with your fund size and not raise just because you can or just go full prop, right? But full prop is another business model entirely. There really is no business model in prop, right? You either succeed as an investor or your own necks on the line, which, you know, I think it's a risk that I'm willing to take and I live for that excitement. Yeah. Well, so the other thing that I thought was really interesting about your sort of assessment of where things were was that you made the distinction between companies for which the sort of some of these excesses were maybe bad in aggregate, but sort of whatever for the company. You know, like if a Web 2 company raises it too high evaluation, really the biggest risk is that they're constraining themselves in future rounds, right, to the excess.

that sort of circumstances change. Whereas the point that you were making was for crypto, it's actually much more existential. You have kind of two factors. One is VCs needing to take more of the sort of network value than is perhaps appropriate given the sort of decentralized goal. Or, and or the fact that the valuation becomes too high for it to sort of incentivize early participants to get excited about because it's already kind of, you know, had some sort of metric even before any of that real community effort has gone in. Yeah, I think there's a few factors that play here. So on one hand, I think a lot of VCs play to the egos of founders and basically say that, wow, look at this team that's, you know, trading on a thin circulating supply right now at this massive valuation. And your

team is clearly much stronger. So you should raise at this higher valuation because you're worth more and you should give us more allocation. And a lot of founders fall for that. And I think in Web 2, it probably is okay. And like you said, the only downside is really you could tell your, you kind of cap how much of an upround you can raise later on, and maybe you scare off some of your potential employees who want to join you because of potential upside, because there's lower upside if you raise a much higher valuation relative to your development. Now, for crypto, it's more existential, as you said. You know, you really want to make sure that you enrich your early supporters, not just kind of insiders and VCs. And it's very, very hard to do that if as a pre-product startup

you're coming to market with a token at like $10 billion valuation. So that's something that I think a lot of founders don't think about in crypto, especially founders who come over from Web 2, because this is a nuance that really only makes sense if you spend enough time in crypto. Yeah, yeah. No, I think it's a super salient point. I was excited to see you kind of dig into it, because I do think that it's the type of thing that even a well-intentioned founder wouldn't necessarily just kind of think about, right? You know, because it is such a new space to design for. So yeah, listen, I'm excited that you, that you're coming out of it in this different way. And, you know, part of, part of that excitement, I think, also comes to, you get to kind of learning and sharing, you know, out loud and live as you go. And so the next question that I have for you is kind of where have you found yourself gravitating in terms of themes, sectors, you know, whatever, during this bear market. Are there particular kind of ideas or spaces that you're particularly attracted to? Yeah. So for a while, we spent quite a lot of time looking like.

to NFT finance. We invested in the Dow actually called Goblin Sacks, and their primary aim is to provide liquidity to NFT finance. So it's an extremely experimental idea, but it's so interesting because we basically see a lot of zero to one innovations happening in NFT finance, which reminds me a lot of what happened back in 2019 or 2020 for Defi. So these were things like NFTFI, pseudoswap, so we spent some time, you know, studying up on what went wrong with Bent Dow, for instance. And we wrote up a memo for this on BlockCrinch for our VIPs. We want to kind of dive deeper into that. On the infrastructure side, we're spending a lot of time on understanding really the app chain thesis, you know, looking at things like data availability, projects like Celestia. We invested

in a project called Say, which is building a sector-specific chain on Cosmos for Defi, which is trying to fulfill the vision that serum painted out by failed to achieve. And also kind of things that are maybe slightly further out on the horizon, so things like ZKEVM, CKrollabs, trying to get smarter on that. On the side, I've also been experimenting with a lot of different web3 social projects. So we recently just signed up for an account of Forecaster, which is a sufficiently decentralized version of Twitter. I'm not an investor there, but I just thought it's really cool to see projects like this.

And I've pretty much tried out all of them. Just trying to get smart on that too. Want to keep more profits when trading? Get the best possible prices and trade with 50% lower fees on NXO Pro. The new Spot and Futures trading platform uses aggregated, liquidity of over 3,000 order books collected from multiple sources. Utilizing the complete nexo suite allows you to earn interest and borrow funds as you wait for the next trade setup. Visit pro.nexo.io.

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Let's take the NFT piece because you started there, and obviously you were kind of talking a little bit more about NFT finance. But, you know, as of recording, a lot of the chatter recently has been sort of a rejuvenation or re-exploitation on the back of Reddit's digital collectibles product actually kind of engaging a new set of users. What do you think about what's been going on with the Reddit, you know, NFT but not NFTs?

recently. Yeah, so I literally woke up yesterday and I saw on this headline about how many, however many million people signed up for this new NFT on Polygon and Reddit. And I thought it's quite hilarious because for the most part, I think a lot of mainstream audiences were quite against NFTs. And a lot of this was perpetuated by this narrative around environmental destruction because of NFTs. And it seemingly, it seems like Reddit, all Reddit did was rebrand the NFTs as digital collectibles. And suddenly something clicked in the minds of all the mainstream retells. And they started to kind of just pile in. And I think this is, I think someone tweeted this, but I forgot who it was.

But I think this is probably a good analogy for what will happen with a lot of mainstream apps that have crypto railings in the coming years. Basically, something will suddenly pop up in the mainstream world that crypto Twitter, all the crypto natives are completely unaware of, but then it will suddenly bring in millions of people into crypto. I do have a soft spot for, you know, crypto native apps and applications that are built for like defy, DGents. but I do think the path to mass adoption probably looks a little bit something like what we saw

happen with Reddit. Well, and it's super interesting, too, because I think that when you kind of get a little bit of space from 2021, DeFi Summer certainly forked the audience in crypto in some way, where the set of folks, I feel like, who got deep in Defi really stopped caring per se about a lot of the, I don't know, the previous internecine battles, right? Like, you know, it's not that they didn't care about what Bitcoin was doing in general, but it was like that was all of a sudden it was so far out of the purview of like 2017, 2018 discussions, right?

There was this whole new world of things that were really exciting to explore. But it was also kind of a return to roots of crypto as this financial application. Whereas I think like 2020 and 2021 in particular saw this huge influx of people who got into NFTs and maybe they sort of broke over from that into regular crypto. But like, NFT Twitter was distinctly different than Bitcoin and crypto Twitter in a lot of ways. Certainly there were, you know, a number of folks who kind of transposed or went between the two. But by and large, it was like its own self-contained thing. And now you kind of have this whole additional phenomenon of NFTs be getting an additional entirely other self-contained thing, you know, which which has even.

kind of less connection to the technology underlying it. I think there's something pretty interesting about that. One of my favorite sayings, probably pretty macabre, but the saying basically goes, society progresses one funeral at a time. Now, I don't think it's as extreme in crypto, but I do think that we do see waves of just outdated ideology replaced by the next wave of things that appeal to more people and making the last wave kind of less relevant. And one of my worries is that the Ethereum community, I think some people are pointing out that there's a lot of kind of intolerance in Ethereum relative to some other communities and they're worried that, you know, we could go down the road of kind of Bitcoin maximalism. I'm a massive kind of Ethereum proponent.

I personally don't see that happening, but I could see that happening down the road. So I hope that's not the case. But going back to your point, it does seem like, you know, every time there is a market expansionary narrative or wave of users coming in, it kind of makes the last wave look small or almost irrelevant. And that's part of the exciting thing about crypto is you've got to always be keeping up to date. And that's part of why I keep doing this podcast is because every week I get to talk to the newest developers in the space to make sure that I'm not getting left behind. I'm not just some like defy guy that got lucky a few years ago. I'm always keeping on top of everything that's happening. Do you think that some of the same things we're seeing with Reddit NFTs

right now in terms of rebranding, obfuscating what's underneath. Do you think that we'll see similar things play out in other areas like gaming? Yeah, I think most definitely. I don't think crypto can go fully mainstream beyond crypto natives with the current set of user heuristics it has. It just makes no sense for everyone to write down their seat phrases and sign up for Metamask and sign for every transaction and worry about gas and all that to learn about the infrastructure before you can actually use the applications. So I think a lot of account abstraction would have to become mainstream. So one of the things that I was talking to a friend just yesterday was smart contract wallets and this idea around account abstraction and the fact that we could have so much

more, you know, new UX if we just have a little bit better wallet experience. So I think a lot of that will have to start from maybe the wallet side. And then, you know, I think the emergence of games is almost like a forcing function for, for better UX as well, because, you know, a lot of people, they just want to play fun games, right? So we recently did,

like, an interview with Gabby from YG and we talked about, you know, what's going to bring people over to Web3 games? And one thing we discuss is that, you know, it's not about whether the game is web three or not.

It's really about whether the game is fun or not. That's the, that's the one thing that would bring people to games. And if you have to, you know, make users, you know, think about gas prices and pay for every single transaction, and we're about Metamask and all that,

chances are you are alienating most of the players in the world. So going back to your question, yeah, I do think that a lot of abstraction will have to take place for crypto to go mainstream, and that's already happening on multiple fronts. Super, super interesting. Conversation this week that I've found really fascinating on exactly these lines, which is around these new Apple terms as relate to, you know, and their implications for Web3 and Web3 developers. And what I found really interesting about it is that, you know, you could think,

throw darts at sort of the crypto Twitter response board and hit completely different takes with, I would characterize kind of one set of takes as this is Apple officially kind of blocking out crypto infrastructure, you know, because it just does not work with its sort of proprietary payment system, basically. And then another set of people who are basically saying, Apple has now officially opened the door for people who are basically, willing to pay the Apple tax to do their sort of their NFT crypto things, you know, in the gaming context specifically, but mediated through Apple. And they're, they're sort of, the folks who are on that side aren't saying, oh, it's great that Apple's still going to get their 30 percent, but they're

seeing it as actually still bullish for people to have a choice to decide whether that's going be an access point that they want versus they're being, versus they're not being clarity around whether they can, you know, the games that they're building can touch NFTs or digital kind of asset technology at all. Yeah, so I haven't read through the entire developer update for Apple yet, but I'm aware that there were two main updates, right? So there's one where you are not allowed to use cryptocurrencies to gate content. And the other one is you are allowed to sell NFTs in apps. So obviously, the latter, I think, is a good thing. You know, mobile is one of the big things that I don't think crypto has fully cracked yet. Now, the first thing is, I think it's definitely a handicap. I do think over time,

know, if crypto does become big, big enough of a threat, and these decentralized systems becomes big enough of a threat, we will have to break away from centralized distribution channels, you know, like Apple, you know, like any type of devices. So to a certain extent, I think a lot of people were kind of clowning the announcement of the Solana phone and thinking it just makes no sense, but I thought it was actually, you know, probably a necessary first step. Like whether the Solana phone itself will be the thing that takes off, I don't know, but I think, you know, crypto does probably require its own hardware and its own distribution channel way down the line. But, yeah, all in all, I think it was a pretty neutral development.

You know, there was, you know, one good clause followed directly. One bad class immediately followed by one good class. That was all I saw. It sounds pretty standard for right now. I mean, I feel like you could also kind of map a lot of the regulatory discourse over the course of this bear market has been very similar, where it's sort of like, you know, we veer away from kind of worst case scenarios, but then there's sort of challenges along the way. what's your take on kind of the regulatory discussion right now and how much are you kind of thinking about

that as relates to, you know, your business and what your entrepreneurs are building? So I think there's a few regulatory authorities, especially in the U.S. that are cracking down on crypto. So for the most part, what I see from the SEC is often a slap on the wrist. So if someone issues an unlicensed type of what is perceived to be an unlicensed securities offering, they often get slapped with a big fine. I think some founders seem to be comfortable with that risk and they go ahead with doing their stuff with their token. But I think one risk that most founders,

or probably all founders are not willing to phase, as the risk coming from OFAC, because violation of OFAC sanctions basically means jail time and pretty significant penalties relative to the SEC. So I do think this is probably one of the hardest times to be building, especially in DFI in the U.S. I like everyone else waiting for regulatory clarity on what's going to happen with Defi. And what I heard is that a lot of good folks in DC are fighting for this.

So hopefully we'll see something come out of that. But at the same time, you know, we also see large players, which a lot of people perceive to be beneficial to the space, kind of almost turning on the space a little bit and lobbying for more restrictive regulations. So hopefully, you know, that could lead to a discourse that that leads to backpedaling on some of those things. But it is definitely a really tricky time to be a founder from a legal perspective in the U.S. And it's quite interesting for people who want to kind of understand a perspective of builders outside of the U.S. You can check out a recent interview with Ribbon as well because they're based in Asia. And I think a lot of their approach to regulations is quite

different to how a U.S.-based founder might be thinking about it. Super interesting. Yeah. there's another kind of point that you recently made on Twitter that I thought was interesting, because it's something I think about a lot as well. You argued that you felt like we were finally hitting the apathy stage of the bear market. Do you think that's actually the case, or is it sort of just, you know, a quiet moment in between still a lot of excitement? I guess in terms of volumes, right? We're down pretty quite a bit from all times high. In terms of prices, we've obviously, you know, been stagnating for like.

two months now. In terms of deal flow perspective on the primary market, we haven't seen as many application layer deal flow. There's a lot more infrastructure stuff coming. So things like data composability, a lot of people working on zero knowledge stuff. But in terms of, you know, the wide-eyed kind of web two developer coming in and trying to build a game or consumer app, those have pretty much died down. So I do think we've entered almost apathy. I don't know how long this will last, But this to me is usually a good sign that a lot of the stuff that remains is probably not noise. A lot of these things were a lot of the people who are raising capital now or building right now or just starting to build right now could end up being, you know, the market leaders in a few years. So we're paying extra attention definitely at a time when, you know, most people are probably turning away and, you know, going out and touching grass and stuff.

It seems likely that crypto has to wait for the macro to turn around for it to have kind of. of a full turnaround as well. But when that happens, what are catalysts that you see that are kind of crypto-specific catalysts for a resurgence, a return of interest, a return of people paying attention here, again, outside of just the Fed being forced to pivot and be accommodative again or something like that? Yeah, honestly, I think we just need one or two breakthrough use cases, right? So you remember that wave of just wellness or fitness applications that came to market because Stepin was paying people, you know, $1,000 to walk around every day. So obviously that wasn't sustainable,

but that unlocked new use cases and I think tapped into new types of users around the world. And we kind of saw this with another project recently, which I probably shouldn't disclose because we're still doing work on it, but they unlocked a new use case, which I think most of crypto Twitter is not really aware of in a part of the world that I think most of crypto Twitter isn't paying attention to, but the volumes generated there are more than the entire NFT market. So we're paying close attention to things like that. that potential breakthrough use cases. But all in all, I do think that macro definitely plays a bigger factor here. A lot of the reason why we had that massive run from 2020 onwards, which is because

of excessive liquidity across all risk assets. And I think the conference is true as well. For that to come back, we definitely need a less restrictive monetary environment. So we're paying very close attention to that as well. There's not financial advice, but a personal take is that if we do get some sort of a shift in global policy, crypto probably front runs it as we have in the past, given that it's global 24-7 market. So yeah, we're definitely, you know, keeping taps on both what's happening in the macro world throughout context and what's happening natively in crypto. Awesome, man. Well, listen, I'm super excited to see kind of all the thinking coming from you. For people who want to kind of find you, where's the best pace to get in touch and, you know,

pitch you or pick your brain or, you know, try to find what you're, you're putting out. Yeah, so you can find me on Twitter at Mr. Jason Choi. And if you want to follow the podcast, it's at the BlockCrunch. We also have a newsletter for people who want to go deeper. It's called BlockCrunch VIP. You can find it on to Twitter as well. Awesome. All right, Jason, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and look forward to having you on again soon. Yeah, thank you so much. I think one of the really interesting insights that Jason is bringing to his particular brand of investing, is that problems that might have started as excesses of a former monetary policy regime, a loose money, easy money regime, result in problems that look different in Web 3 versus Web 2.

For example, if a venture firm forces too high evaluation on a company and buys too much of their round so that it actually matters in terms of the allocation of their fund size, which is, of course, giant size because of all that easy money sloshing around, maybe that doesn't matter that much in Web 2. But in Web 3, where the goal of most protocols and projects, at least on paper, at least in terms of what their founders say, is to move towards a state of greater decentralization. Being forced to sell off a bigger than necessary chunk of the network value in the form of early tokens or equity can be really problematic. I think it's great to see folks who are experienced in venture cutting out on their own to try to do it a different way, so I wish Jason nothing but luck.

And like I said, he's producing a ton of great content out there, so I hope you get to find your way to some of it. For now, I want to thank Jason again for being on the show. My sponsors, nexus.io, circle and FtX for supporting the show, and you guys for listening. Until tomorrow, be safe and take care of each other. Peace.