Packy McCormick - Founder of Not Boring Ep #49

Packy McCormick is the author of the tech/web3 newsletter Not Boring and runs Not Boring Capital.

00:09 - Intro

01:34 - What are people building in the world of crypto / What does ‘Not Boring’ invest in

09:36 - Ownership in Crypto

16:00 - Conversation around Play-to-earn

19:06 - The regulatory aspect

22:14- How does Anatoly balance his time

23:54 - Thoughts on DAOs

29:33 - Network Effect and defensibility in Crypto

32:18 - Centralizing in Crypto

35:20 - Solana in relation to DeFi, the cultural and the metaverse side of things.

39:13 - The internet is Silicon Valley

41:12 - NFTs

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Anatoly (00:09):

Hey, folks. This is Anatoly and you're listening to The Solana Podcast, and today, I have with me, Packy McCormick, author of Not Boring. Hey, man. Good to have you.

Packy McCormick (17:27):

Good to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Anatoly (00:21):

So, You're an author and you're also an investor. How did you get into crypto?

Packy McCormick (00:26):

Yeah. So, I got into crypto back in 2013. I read Fred Wilson's blog post on investing in Coinbase, bought a bunch of Bitcoin, I think 38 Bitcoin, and then I went on a trip to Oktoberfest, and I felt bad about it, I had just quit my job, so I was like, "You know what, instead of spending money when I'm unemployed, let me just sell this stupid Bitcoin and I will pay for the trip."

So, because of that, because of the pain of selling then, I avoided it until earlier this year, later last year, and really, really got back into it as I was talking to a couple companies that I was thinking about investing in and thinking about the intersection of crypto and the metaverse and how an open economy just fits so much better with that vision, since then, I've just gotten deeper, and deeper, and deeper down the rabbit hole.

Anatoly (01:18):

So, you held Bitcoin because you can sell it? That's just too big of a pain in the ass.

Packy McCormick (01:24):

I felt so bad about selling it and missing out. I think at the peak, it was like a two million dollar plus mistake, and so I was like, "You know what? I'm out of this for a little while."

Anatoly (01:34):

That's funny. What do you guys invest in?

Packy McCormick (01:39):

Yeah. So, I run a small 10 million dollar fund called Not Boring Capital, and we really invest across stages, across geographies, across verticals. For the first, I'd say, half of the fund, it was really traditional investments, I'd say for the second five million in the fund, it's been pushing up against the 20% non qualifying limit. I'm actually investing in my first Solana based project this week, which is yet to be announced, so can't talk about it, but something in the real estate space and something I'm super excited about. But doing as much crypto as I can in there, but I still think some use cases are perfectly well suited to crypto and some are really not. There's plenty of things in Web 2.0 that I'm super excited about as well, so really trying to balance investing across both.

Anatoly (02:27):

So, by traditional businesses, you mean like software internet based ones?

Packy McCormick (02:32):

Exactly.

Anatoly (02:33):

Cool. I mean, I've been in crypto for like the last... I can't remember... it feels like a decade, and I can't imagine what the world is like. So, what are people building?

Packy McCormick (02:48):

It's a good question. So, today, I talked to a company, for example, that is making it a lot easier for a restaurant to order the food that they need. So, right now, if you're a restaurant and you're ordering food, you're getting a bunch of PDFs from suppliers every week that aren't even searchable, and then you're going through the 6,000 items on there and picking something. So, there are still a bunch of these huge unsexy categories that are completely ripe.

There's some security stuff that bridges into crypto, but there's one, again, stealth right now, but is also dealing with some Solana projects on t