The Pomp Podcast - #1281 David Pakman | 2024 Outlook for Bitcoin Regulation and Web3

Episode Date: December 11, 2023

David Pakman is a Managing Partner at CoinFund, a blockchain & crypto-native investing firm. In this conversation, we talk about bitcoin, Web3, regulation, stablecoins, and what he is expecting in 2024 & beyond. ======================= Base is making it their mission to bring a billion people onchain. But what exactly is Base? It's an Ethereum L2 offering a seamless experience for both builders and users. With near-zero gas fees and rapid transaction speeds, Base is shaping the future of the onchain world. Base is a canvas for everyone, with hundreds of apps in the Base ecosystem, whether you're an emerging creator, a seasoned developer, or someone exploring the onchain space for the first time, Base is designed to bring your ideas to life. So, if you're looking for a platform where the future of onchain is being built daily, Base is your destination. Join in and make onchain the next online. Learn more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠base.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and follow along on Twitter at @BuildOnBase to see cool things to do onchain, everyday. ======================= Trust and Will has simplified the process of creating and managing your will or trust online. They leverage a data-driven, design-first approach and amazing customer support to help you protect your legacy from the comfort of your home starting at just $159. Sign up today for 10% off using ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://trustandwill.com/pomp⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 250,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. David Pakman is a managing partner at CoinFund, a blockchain and crypto native investment firm. In this conversation, David and I talk about Bitcoin, Web3, regulation,

stablecoins, and what he is expecting in 2024 and beyond. David has been playing this game for a very long time and is a well-respected investor across venture capital circles. And these insights that he shares today are eye-opening because they show exactly how someone who has navigated multiple bull and bear market cycles in the past is thinking about current market conditions. I always enjoy talking to David, and I learned a lot in this conversation. So here is my episode with David Pakman. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should

not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Today's episode is brought to you by BASE. BASE is making it their mission to bring a billion people on chain. What exactly is BASE? It's a layer two offering a seamless experience for both builders and users. With near zero gas fees and rapid transaction speeds, BASE is shaping the future of the on-chain world. BASE is a canvas for everyone with hundreds of apps in the ecosystem whether you're an emerging creator a seasoned developer or someone exploring the on-chain space for the first time base is designed

to bring your ideas to life so if you're looking for a platform where the future of on-chain is being built daily base is your destination join in and make on-chain the next online learn more at base.org or follow along on twitter at build on base again that's at build on base to see cool things to do on-chain every single day. Today's episode is brought to you by Trust and Will. I've gone through a number of different changes in my life over the last few years. I got married, I had a kid, and I had to start thinking about how could I ensure that my wife and my child would be okay if anything ever happened to me. That's where trust, wills, and estate planning come into play. Now, most people, what they do is they get introduced to a friend, an uncle, or someone

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and not only that but if you go to trustandwill.com slash pomp you'll get 10 off plus you'll get free shipping of all your estate planning documents so go to trustandwill.com slash pomp and make sure you get an estate plan in place whether it's for you or one of your loved ones having a trust and or a will can literally be the difference between someone being taken care of and someone not go check them out today at trustandwill.com. All right, guys, bang, bang. I've got David here with me. I thought a great place to start is you showed me a chart that blew my mind. I've never seen this chart before. You may be the first person to have it. And it shows a market rally every time that a major crypto CEO is fired or leaves. And so you have Arthur Hayes, you have

Sam Beckman-Fried, and then you have CZ. Talk a little bit as to one, how did you get the chart or why did you go think about this? And then two, what is this chart actually telling us? Well, I just think that the place we are, we're entering the post-cleansing rich infrastructure period of crypto. We spent the last two and a half, three years building an abundance of block space, very low cost, low latency, and high capacity blockchains. So we're sort of ready for way more consumer usage than we had pre-bear market. And we've spent the last year and a half being cleansed by regulatory authorities and getting rid of a bunch of bad actors. And so I think the market likes cleansing is what this chart shows us.

This I can't take credit for. It was a CoinFund analyst here, Dimitri, who put this together for us. But, right, the market appreciates the cleaning up of bad or questionable actors. Maybe you could argue the one major actor that is still uncleansed here is Tether. And we still have a bit of a cloud over the market until we get some clarity about their long-term durability. But the market likes it when exchanges with questionable characteristics are cleaned up. And so I think it's just a good sign for where we're going. Now, when you look at each one of these, how much of that is like institutions are literally waiting and they're like, hey, there's an exchange that, you know, we have questions about. OK, that exchange is no longer going to be a major piece of the infrastructure.

OK, let's go and deploy now versus I almost think of it like headline momentum. And, you know, people are just talking about crypto. Everyone's like, oh, yeah, I forgot about that thing. I've been thinking about AI for the last two years. Now that I see crypto in the headlines, I should go buy some of that. and then it's kind of like retail flow is actually driving some of these price appreciation after ceo leaps maybe but i'm going to throw your words back at you that you said on tv the other day markets are forward-looking and so this market is a smart market there's a you know a lot of crypto

buyers and sellers in the market we've got high volatility yes but we have a lot of volume and particularly around bitcoin and market likes uh the market's looking forward and saying we like bitcoin more when we have less regulatory risk of bad actors being you know pulled out that's simple so we've seen recently a number of hearings we've seen uh tweets go out from politicians frankly on both sides of the aisle right i don't think it's uh kind of just one or the other um and it almost feels like there are two camps now there are some politicians regulators and even market participants who are like you know accelerate let's go build let's use uses technology. This should be the home in America. There's another group of people though,

who are, you know, I mean, literally just recently, Elizabeth Warren and Jamie Dimon had an exchange and Jamie Dimon's like, it's all, you know, basically bad actors. And if I was the government, I would shut it down. And I think Elizabeth Warren's, you know, visual look was like, thanks, Jamie. Like I got my new, you know, soundbite. So how do you think about maybe the talk versus the action and where do you expect us to go in 2024 when it comes to regulation? So let me take one quick step back. We've spent a decade, in my opinion, building the most robust, decentralized, high performing, low cost, reliable mechanism for global digital movement or movement of digital items, including payments. The most obvious use case for it is payments. But payments is one of the most globally regulated industries and protected in the world.

And the one where there's a whole bunch of graft, essentially. I mean, the tax for making payments across bits, updating a ledger across the world is way too high. You shouldn't be paying the fees you're paying for ACH, Wire, Western Union, even credit card. So we built a much better network than that. This is just the first and most obvious use case. But because it's such an overly regulated sector, it's taken at least a decade

for us to start to make some progress into that. And this is the announcement you heard this week, right? Coinbase saying, Hey, take our wallet and copy and paste USDC payment links right into, you know, iMessage or WhatsApp. This is a free, globally free now zero cost way to move money around the world in seconds, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That's an incredible innovation. It also is a market shrinking innovation.

i love market shrinking innovations because it puts the hurt on incumbents who don't want to chase a shrinking market they want to fight and protect what what is the number one way that regulated industries fight um people coming on them through non-market strategies right regulatory so no surprise to me that you have resistance from the global heads of banks saying this stuff's bad it's just an easy soundbite to try to delay delay delay meanwhile you know the jp morgan onyx internal blockchain like they they crow about how many billions of dollars of assets are secured on that chain so this is jamie dimon probably talking his book more than anything he's he's too smart for that um but um it's not a surprise to me that we've got you know incumbents

fighting back through regulation i do think it's a very sad state of affairs in the us because of the sbf you know donating to 170 some politicians that people are just like anti-crypto from that but but that's just a temporary blip i'm a long-term investor we've been spending a lot of time in the uk and eu and the far east where there's just no talk of gary gensler or jamie diamond or elizabeth warren they're just building and watching now one of the most interesting data points for me has been watching usdc and tether and for a while it looked like usdc was going to overtake tether in terms of market dominance for stable coins that has now reversed and we We actually see almost a bifurcation where Tether is gaining dominance, USDC is falling off.

The reason why it's so interesting to me is I've heard kind of rumors, rumblings, whatever you want to call it, of people who have gone and visited non-U.S. jurisdictions where people will say, oh, we like the fact that Tether is outside of the U.S. system. I saw recently, I think it is Qao from Alliance DAO. He said, actually, he talked to someone who was in one of the African markets and they said, no, everyone here thinks that USDC is the US government coin, right? And so we like the idea of not having the US government coin with the other one. And what it really, I think, pulls out is just like regulation in the US. Most people look at that as like, that's a possum, like thumbs up, green light, we want regulation.

Is it actually a negative internationally? And maybe the more we regulate in the U.S., the more it'll push adoption of non-regulated things internationally? Well, let's be clear. We actually don't have crypto regulation in the U.S. We have selective enforcement with an unknown set of rules. And so it's almost like a lottery of what you can get away with or not get away with. And you just don't know.

So when you have that much uncertainty, the best entrepreneurs just opt not to be a part of that system and to go where there is some clarity. the uk entrepreneurs and eu entrepreneurs will tell you no we don't have full clarity here but what they have is we're not going to get sued for launching a token in the us you launch a token there's a high probability that you're named in a lawsuit somewhere even if you know every best lawyer in the world is telling you it's not a security uh so so the first piece is like entrepreneurs go build where they have some running room and i don't think there's running room in the us today i think it's going to change i'm a long-term optimist but right now it's just

not hospitable the second part of your question is like well what is that doing to the reputation of u.s companies and products on the global market and it's hurting us and you're right usdc which i think we all look very favorably upon in the us is named in a way that if you don't really understand that it's a truly independent company um you've got uh you know it sounds like a u.s coin for sure and and right now you've got a u.s is telegraphing not just to its own citizens but around the world like we don't like crypto we don't want crypto here like don't touch our crypto so no surprise to me um but by the way like all non-us well let's talk about telegram for a minute so here we have this you know messaging service with i think 800 million uh mal uh mostly non-us

many of us in crypto use it in the us but it's heavily used outside the us uh for you know just general messaging it's got you know a nexus with um founders of russian origin because of uh their their backgrounds um and so it's you know it's it's got a little bit of an overhang over here in the us for that reason but it has launched a blockchain a token and now a wallet that is being built into a really easy to use consumer app you can't touch it in the us it's geofenced away from us here for all the reasons we just talked about but it has maybe some of the most consumer traction of any blockchain outside out there something like three million um wallets i believe and about 900 000 actives um monthly active wallets this is these are big numbers in crypto

right now um so uh you just an example of innovation activity and and what could become very quickly a seamless payments platform a la wechat which we gets a lot of talk in the u.s Well, someone's going to build the super app. This actually is a more interesting candidate to build one, and it's going to happen outside the US. Now, I want to talk a little bit about the institutional world, because I think when we talk about regulation, we talk about market dynamics, even sometimes macroeconomics, people are very much focused on the market participants, people allocating capital, people consuming

that capital to build stuff. But the capital usually comes from somewhere, right? It's usually these big, large institutions, and so they pay attention. And they can sometimes be very loyal to a market. Bonds, as a great example, are kind of fixed income. Regardless of what happens in that market, they're going to keep allocating to it. Crypto is on the other end of the spectrum, and it's almost a little bit of fair weather over the last couple of years. You all raised a seed fund.

I think the original target was like $125 million. You raised about $155 million, $160 million in that fund. And so oversubscribed from institutional-type investors, why are they excited? What is it, other than CoinFund is the best investor in the world, and you guys have a great track record, and David Pakman is a great venture capitalist? What is so exciting to them to keep allocating to this industry? I think there are allocators that allocate in different sectors of the market in general and different types of asset classes. So venture is this tiny pimple of a sector within alternatives, but the people who invest

in venture and who've been doing it for some time, the LPs, the institutions who invest in venture, they know it is a very long-term, slow liquidity bet. It's a six to 10-year fund cycle. and a fund today is not going to show its success for at least six or eight years, maybe even a decade or more. So those types of investors are like, hey, if there's a bunch of noise in the market right now, that's not what I'm thinking about. Is this an interesting sector over a decade? Do I want to be in it? Really hard to say that crypto is not. If you're like just being an objective investor, there's just too much activity, too much innovation,

too much value created. I mean, what are we at today with all the price movement? Over a trillion dollars of total asset value here. You just can't ignore it. You kind of do it your own peril. So to put some money into, who would you put it into? You would put it into investors with a track record. CoinFund's been doing it since 2015. Investors who are institutional friendly, like we're registered with the SEC as an RIA and trying to attract institutional capital. and people that have theses about where it's going and try to avoid the bad actors. That seems to me to be a smart move with people that have a long-term investment orientation. But the other point that's just about to change in the market is, you talked about the date,

but sometime in January, we're going to have probably 15 companies launching ETFs, right, to allow both retail and institutional access to crypto assets through the stock market as ETFs. And, I mean, that's a seminal moment, right? That is institutional adoption at scale to at least buy and hold or trade digital assets. And I think that, you know, this is the beginning of it all again. Let's take off kind of the crypto hat for a second and just leave the venture capital hat on. There's a lot of industry change that's happening. It feels like macroeconomics definitely driving some of that valuation compression or multiple compression has occurred.

There was some major blowups, as there always is, in kind of the headlines. And so people get a little nervous. What are the trends that you think will remain the same, right? Like, what are the things that you're like, hey, look, regardless of the change, if we just continue to do X as venture capitalists, we'll make money in 2024 and beyond? Well, I will say I'm an evidence-based investor, not a religious one. So I don't declare that a market is going to be the only place that you should put your money because six years from now crypto will change the world i'm looking for evidence and

so the evidence i look for is where are developers building what's the quality of the developers and what's their ambition level and even in this brutal bear market for the last two years when you attend the developer conferences and you meet with the teams they still are amazingly high quality i think i would argue today pound for pound even higher quality than in any other time in the market just because you got to be a true believer to have been building in the last few years. Their ambition is to build globally available products that change mostly the financial system, but in some cases change consumers' ownership of digital assets like NFTs and gaming. And their ability to attract talent and inspire leadership is strong. It's

not the only place you find that in tech. You see it in a lot of leading edge markets, But this is still true today. And I think I would argue that we're past the trough and we're emerging from a challenging build period with really rich infrastructure. We've got great working layer ones. We've got super fast layer twos. We have like 25 percent of layer two settlement is already on zero knowledge, which is maybe one of the most interesting pieces of infrastructure ever built across all of tech. certainly hard to build zero knowledge um and so we're sort of ready but at the same time like how many users are using stuff on top of this and this is where i'm very self-critical of this ecosystem it's why i brought up the telegram example where is there evidence of adoption and that's the only way that we will build venture returns over a decade we need consumers or enterprises to be

built using apps built on top of blockchains and so what are the candidates for that should i offer one or two okay one of that one is stables right we've been talking about stable coins already but i haven't checked the last few days but my guess is 130 140 billion dollars of uh of total stable coin minted activity today this is not a small number it's been higher in the past but it is a beautiful product right being able to send digital dollars or digital euros at effectively no fee like unbelievably low fee certainly one one hundredth of the cost of using other networks 24 hours a day seven days a week with no middleman like no no trust required that's an extraordinarily important innovation it now needs to be uh integrated into more and more products but i

think it will we have paypal announcing right that they've got 430 million monthly active users and 40 percent of their users do cross-border remittance and the fees are too high doing cross-border wins this is a public company and they say what's our solution to high fees for cross-border remittance we're making our own stable coin and we're sending them paypal to paypal over public blockchains that's an incredible example but let's watch the volumes i think shopify is a company to watch here they claim they're building a lot of web3 products that they're going to start to unveil what would what's interesting to shopify and web3 probably getting the fees on payments down like if the user wants to buy something from a shopify merchant could you

imagine if like you automatically buy stablecoin and then that's automatically transferred into the merchant's wallet and the fees are zero like there goes the 3.25 percent on every transaction and the what percentage of the total uh e-commerce market like large so here is we have staples um and then you know i think we we we look for evidence of consumer usage uh of gaming um nfts we saw obviously a lot of activity that's that's come way down but we have the disney announcement that they they're in this market now with their most interesting ip um amazon coming to market with the nft offering i i i'm sort of hedging a little bit here because i want to see the data um but but i think that's also a a use case that we that we watch now when we look at

2024 uh i always go to what are the what are the narratives right and you can go back there was you know the d5 summers there was obviously um bitcoin and kind of uh nation state adoption and we can go through a bunch of these different ones what are the things that you're paying attention to most like you're talking right now about like usage uh sometimes those align with the narrative sometimes they don't frankly and so what are those narratives that you're paying attention to as we go into the new year crypto is too hard to use for the last decade so a lot of companies have spent a lot of time kind of creating web to like onboarding experiences more like username and password than you know some crazy 12 or 20 some word phrase right um so making non-custodial

wallets easier to use and there are seven or eight companies that have built a lot that are that are getting adoption like if you look at their client list of who's on board with them it's impressive so as those products come to market do we see really we're just looking for like consumer conversion rate like what's the abandonment when you've come to a web page and try something out um versus uh web 2. and we got to get those numbers way down um we've seen some examples of that being of that you know being what to like in its adoption so let's watch that if if that happens we we can expect much more consumer usage this wave so that's one we're watching closely another is like what's the durability of the apps one thing that a lot of people got excited about

this year was friend tech um it you know sort of has very crypto native appeal to it like betting on um basically trading on the value of uh of social celebrities and social influencers um but uh but you know its durability is in question here and so we care not about these sort of quick spikes in usage but are they products that um consumers will use over time so um i think that's the theme we build a lot of infrastructure who's using it and we're going to watch it closely what can go wrong is like none of it none of it sticks now um you've been doing this a long time and uh you've seen i would think almost everything but i don't know if anyone ever saw the open ai situation before right that might be the one that every single person i've talked to is like i saw

everything until that one um what are your takeaways from that both for founders and and maybe also for venture capitalists and kind of people who are investing in these, you know, very explosive asymmetric type opportunities in venture capital. I'm so glad you brought it up because what's not being talked about around this is you have something like 10,000 companies

that have built on top of OpenAI's API. And one of them, even in the information this week, they detailed like Morgan Stanley has built significantly on top of OpenAI's API, like somewhere in their workflow. I think it's in like their private bank When like a private wealth manager is talking to a customer, there's like a, you know, an open AI chatbot that's helping them decide what to talk about. And they had emergency meetings over the weekend because here we have a company that's in the middle of a tender offer at $80 billion that almost evaporated in 48 hours because of a founder dispute.

So like that is the opposite of anti-fragile, right? That is so unbelievably fragile. It's so Web2 that you've got a platform company that tens of thousands of companies have built on that could literally 700 of the 770 employees are going to leave if, you know, we were within minutes of that happening. And that to me is every reason why I like Web3. Because what you don't have happen to Ethereum is like Joe Lubin and Vitalik have a disagreement. And so everyone who's built on Ethereum is suddenly in jeopardy. Like the network doesn't go down because of those types of governance issues. And we as the users, and by users, I mean developers, have a say in the governance of the software.

So we need platforms that everyone's building on to be way more durable, to be anti-fragile. And you don't have them in Web2 at all. You're counting on the largesse of like people, of like fallible humans that are like number in the six or seven or eight or ten people. So this was just a stark reminder for me that we need, just like we need to centralize compute platforms, we need to centralize the AI platform, which is an area that we've invested pretty heavily in during this bear market. I mean, it was shocking, shocking. One of the areas that has been very hot outside of crypto is artificial intelligence. Now, artificial intelligence, many people who are experts there, if you talk to them, they're like, well, if you got data and then you can use this artificial intelligence, there's value that can get created. it seems like there's a lot of data on a blockchain, right?

There's a lot of both transactions. There's all kinds of information. Do you see these two industries kind of blurring the line and actually coming together in some form? Or is that maybe both AI and crypto people trying to like, you know, team up just to get more hype around what are already pretty hyped up industries? If you didn't like investing in my company when I was crypto, how about if I'm AI, will you invest?

Yeah, for sure. There's some of that at play. But I also appreciate you bringing this up because, you know, You know, you have a lot of words on the internet that you've spoken and written, and I'm pretty sure that a whole lot of that was scraped by the training data sets in Google and OpenAI. Have they sent you any shares in OpenAI or any compensation for any of that? I'm just curious. No? No.

It must have got lost in the mail. Yeah, right. Well, I'm sure they've read the CoinFund website and my blog post, too, and I haven't gotten any shares either. So here we have like the biggest graft of some pillaging of content that creators have created over the last decade and filled with the internet. And we have six or seven companies who've scraped it all and built tens of billions of dollars of value without any compensation to any of us. And this will be settled in the courts. This is a copyright question. And I am on the side that having been through the music wars, I do not think this will be rendered fair use, especially if the chatbot, which has already been proven, spits out word for word what other people have said.

I mean, Fred Wilson's blog alone had to teach the thing everything it needs to know about venture capital. The guy's written more about venture capital over a decade, right? He hasn't gotten paid. I asked him this question. So why is Web3 relevant here? Because Web3 has a model where contributors, whether you're developers or content creators, can get rewarded in tokens when you put things into a network, into a data supply. Or we can do airdrops even after the fact. We can look back.

We could deploy an AI model to train on information on the blockchain. We already know the address of what put that data on the blockchain. We can do an airdrop of tokens back to it if we've used it. This is a much more equitable model, a more democratic model where the users or the contributors get some share in the upside. Now, the problem is there's not an example of us doing this in Web3 right now around AI, but we've solved the problem before we even knew we needed it. What are the areas that maybe people are excited about that you're not excited about in crypto?

Are there things that maybe you're like, it's hard for me to see that becoming a thing, but i understand other people are either excited about or capital is flowing there or developers are working on it i i think uh this intersection of ai and crypto i think is a very interesting one that will take many years to play out this uh this sort of broad-based question of how do we rest control of the compute platforms of the future away from you know the three or four companies that have them. And my great developer usage to these decentralized platforms is of great interest to me, just as someone who's a veteran of the Web2 wars. And boy, I mean, we saw over and over again the whimsical nature of what it's like to build on a platform like Facebook or

Twitter, where the CEO pulls the rug. I mean, we should have invented the term rug pulls to to talk about the web two platforms not the web threes um so i'm really focused on like durable uh decentralized platforms for a lot of different use cases not just basic blockchains but you know i i'm interested in ai training models ai inference models and and jake brookman our our ceo has spent a lot of time publishing thesis on this i'm also just really interested in the ownership of intellectual property and what that really means to i mean you you're a content creator you've got a model that's um that that is perfectly applicable to web 3 where you know you could be well let me just back up and say over the history of intellectual property like going back

millennia we sold it the way the way a creator monetize their content is they created some physical product and sold it a book a work of art a sculpture or something like that and someone got to own it and then resell it later and so they were like invested in the long-term economic value of people's works then we hit web 2 where as we made content digital we could not control its replication right it's it's too abundant and so therefore we had to go to access models if you want to listen if you want to patronize me you got to like pay for access to my stuff and then when you stop paying i'm going to shut that off spotify netflix subscriptions but that's like this bubble in time over the history of intellectual property with nfts we are back to

being able to own intellectual property which is historically the way humans like to um like to uh support and and uh and enjoy intellectual property so i am super bullish on this idea that we're gonna enable ownership of intellectual property again but it has not you know fully played out and and so even though nfts are way down it's an area of great interest now david you talked about the areas that are of great interest um before we end what is the promise of working with coinfund I think one of the pieces that founders, especially first-time founders, don't understand is there's a lot of people with capital, but you want to work with people who actually can help you build your business. So how do you all think about that at CoinFund? And if somebody takes money from you guys, what is kind of that promise that you have to them in terms of why you may be a better fit for them than maybe other venture capitalists?

You know, I'm a former entrepreneur. I started two companies and worked at three startups. And it's hard. The odds are super against you. You're probably not going to succeed. Like, I mean, that's what the data shows, right? They say that venture capital is the triumph of hope over data. Like, so is being a founder.

Like, it's probably not going to work out. So how do you increase your chances of success? My MO is like surround yourself with people who are smart and have experience to help you avoid the problems, help you see around corners. So we've built CoinFund to be more than our money. We want to help you build. We want to help avoid some mistakes. We want to help accelerate you through hiring, connections, strategy, partnerships.

And we have a network of now 105 companies we've invested in since 2015. We've got a lot of scars, mistakes that were made. Crypto is also a different path than traditional software companies because of tokenization. And now because of the nexus with regulatory bodies, where should you build? Which geographies should you launch in? What's the, should you launch a token? And if so, how and why? it's it's sort of a unique set of questions that i think certain crypto native vcs um are uh are

well suited to and the last thing i could say is that um we've survived we've been through multiple bear crypto markets and we're stronger now than ever we raised more capital in the last two years than we've ever raised and we're being really judicious and thoughtful about how to invest it we've got institutions who believe in us so we hope we're durable but but ultimately um ask our CEOs, are we helpful or not? Do we help them accelerate? That's the best pitch. Just go talk to the people you work with and they'll tell you what they think. I hope so. I mean, we're not perfect. We make mistakes, but that's the measure of whether we're good or not. Where can people find you on the internet if they'd like to talk about anything that you talked about here today?

Yeah, I'm still on that platform of Hellfire called X. So I'm Pakman, P-A-K-M-A-N. But you find me there you find me everywhere i'm he's fine david packman there are two of us one is a younger uh um influencer who does a lot of political talk that's not me but uh i'm the only one no i'm not the only pac-man in crypto you've got pac-man from blur who uh oh yes but no so i'm pak and please come find me awesome david thank you so much for doing this uh i've been a big fan of yours for a long time coin fund obviously has a strong track record and continues to uh be a great steward of of the industry. So cheers. You are the man. You're an incredible community builder, a sane voice, a sage voice and a believer. And it's great to have you as a guiding light through crypto.

We'll do it again soon, my friend. Good to see you.