Dragonfly: The Secrets of a Top-Tier Crypto VC - Haseeb Qureshi - Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Because venture capital, unlike trading, it's not a single
player game, right? Venture capital is a multiplayer
game at its essence, right? You're usually on a team and
you're, you win by helping people and you only win if other
people win. The other thing about it is that
the, the feedback cycles are extremely slow, right?
So you make AVC investment and you don't know for years whether

(00:20):
or not you're right. Doesn't matter.
Like all that stuff is easy to learn.
The the hard thing, the thing that I can't teach you is
judgement, but this ability to think very clearly, to question
obvious assumptions and to like cut to the essence of something.
I don't know how you train. It has to be that you have
experience making tough decisions.
That can come from being a decision maker, building

(00:41):
businesses. It can come from competitive
computer games, I think can develop that ability to make
decisions. You know, if you've just been in
school for your entire life, I don't think that trains you very
well to make decisions when you're in school.
You're mostly being told what todo and performing tasks of
memorization. You kind of have to build the
reputation of the legend of yourself as an investor

(01:03):
alongside it. And I said, look, I want us to
be one of the most technical funds in crypto.
When I'm competing with Olaf to win a deal, who's who does the
founder pick? Do they pick me or do they pick
Olaf? There's two quadrants at which
you can look at any investment consensus and non consensus.
Now almost all the money in venture overwhelmingly gets made

(01:25):
in non consensus right? Hi and welcome to Epicenter, the
show, which talks about the technologies, projects and
people driving decentralization in the collection revolution.
I'm Brian Crane and today I'm Speaking of Hasib Qureshi, who
is the Managing Partner of Dragonfly, which is one of the
best known largest crypto VC funds.

(01:46):
So we're really excited to have Hasib on today.
So just before we go into it with HASIB, we want to share a
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Great. So thanks so much for coming on,

(03:55):
Hasib. I'm really excited.
I was sort of diving a little bit into your story and your
background. I think there's a lot of it,
like interesting things there. Maybe you can start there,
'cause I mean, you started sort of your first, you know, real
serious effort it seems like wasin poker.
Like when you think of today, what are the biggest things

(04:17):
you've learned from that time that, you know, kind of like
still shape you today? Well, so I played poker
professionally for when I was 16years old till I turned 21.
And you know, when I was 19, I was ranked one of the top online
Nolan Holden players in the world.
Poker is a very, it's a very unique game because there's

(04:40):
nothing else that really teachesyou how to think fluidly about
risk and reward and about probabilities the way that poker
does. It's in a way kind of surprising
that we don't really have good ways to teach this to young
people. Like I, I sort of still can't
really even imagine if I, I don't have a kid, but if I did,
I can't imagine how I would teach them how to think about

(05:03):
risk the way that an investor does other than poker.
Like there's, there's almost, there's really just nothing like
it when it comes to understanding the way in which
you, you, you cannot be too riskaverse and you cannot be too
emotional about making decisions.
And a poker table is one of the rawest places that will test

(05:25):
your ability to actually make decisions under uncertainty and
under, you know, emotional stress.
So that part I think was really valuable training for what I
would end up doing, you know, much later in my career as a
poker player. I went through a lot of ups and
downs. And actually, you know, at the
end of my poker career, there was this big blow up that

(05:47):
happened. This, this there was kind of a
complicated story, but basicallythere was this guy who was who
was cheating and he was one of my mentees.
He was a a student that I was working with.
And my reputation ended up getting caught up in this thing
because I was trying to defend him.
And that led to me getting ousted from the poker community.

(06:11):
And you know, I was I was 21. I was very young, all of my, you
know, I dropped out of school toplay poker.
It was all that I was doing withmy life and it really caused me
to really rethink what I wanted to do with my life and what, you
know, in a way, poker it's, it's, it actually has a lot of
similarities to crypto trading because poker is a very single

(06:34):
player game. You know, you, you, you, you
obviously you're playing with multiple people at the table,
but you're not on the, there's, there's no team poker.
You know, you play for yourself and it's you against the world,
and nobody really cares whether or not you do well.
And so you're going through yourups and downs alone.
And there's this, there's a saying in poker that always

(06:56):
resonated with me, which is thateverybody who understands
doesn't care and everybody who cares doesn't understand.
Meaning, you know, in poker, you're always going through this
volatility, You're always going through the swings of ups and
downs, 'cause there's a lot of luck in poker in the, in the
short run, in the long run, to gain a skill in the short run.
There's always ups and downs. And when you're going through

(07:16):
those ups and downs, that's a lot of what makes it so
psychologically challenging. And the people, you know, you
think about your friends, your family, your, your, your mother,
they don't really understand what it means when you tell
them, oh, I just lost 100K today.
They're like, Oh my God, you know, is everything OK?
Like, should we worry about you?You know, should we call
someone? And you're like, no, no, that's
not what I need. You know, I just, I just kind of

(07:38):
need you to understand that like, I'm going through a tough
time, but like, I'm going to be OK.
And the people who really get it, who are other poker players,
they don't care. They're just like, oh man, you
know, you're complaining. I'm like, I have my own
problems. I'm going through my own
downswing. What do you know, I'm not a
shoulder for you to cry on. And so you, you have to learn to
be very emotionally and mentallyresilient.

(08:00):
And I think it's very similar for, for a lot of traders is
that, you know, if you're trading in crypto, you're,
you're on your own, you know, nobody's looking out for you and
nobody really cares if you lose money.
And in some sense, like the onlyway they can make money is if
you lose money. So that for me it was, it was
really a cauldron, I think that forged a lot of my, my own

(08:23):
determination and my own resilience.
I, I, I think it's, it was, it was a very, very difficult time
after I quit poker because I, I really didn't know what I wanted
to do with my life. And I was really questioning
myself as, as you know, was I somebody who actually could do
something valuable in the world.You know, poker is a, in a way,
again, very similar to crypto trading.

(08:44):
It's, it's a, it's a kind of, I don't want to say nihilistic,
but it's a very selfish activityat the end of the day.
You know, like I, I always reflected on the fact that as a
poker player, you know, it's a, it's a fascinating game.
It has all this mathematical complexity and really beauty to
it as a game. But in the, in the raw reality
of it, no matter how good I am, the reality is like, you know,

(09:05):
the way I make my money is some guy sits at a table who's a, you
know, a dentist or a doctor, youknow, who did something actually
useful for someone in the world and they come sit at a poker
table and they lose money to me.And when you really think about
like, OK, that's where I make mymoney from at the end of the
day, you know, I can, I can, I can glamorize it about, you
know, the the intellectual contest of, you know, this game

(09:27):
of Risk that I'm playing, it's other people.
But the reality is like, yeah, Igot really good at a card game.
And that always really bothered me.
And so it it made me determined after I quit poker that I wanted
to do something more valuable inmy life.
And that's what ended up leadingme into the tech industry and
eventually, you know, coming into into crypto.
So, yeah, I mean, I guess one ofthe really unique things about,

(09:47):
because you mentioned the analogy to investing and maybe
with trading it is a bit, you have to have fast feedback,
right? But I guess that's right.
The thing that's incredible about Fokker is just the the
immediacy and the, you know, theamount of hands you can play and
the amount of feedback you get. So I guess that's really hard to
replicate anywhere else. Yeah, trading is the most

(10:08):
similar. Ironically, VC is actually quite
different from poker, and it's one of the reasons why a lot of
poker players find their way into trading.
Very few poker players find their way into venture capital
because venture capital, unlike trading, it's not a single
player game, right? Venture capital is a multiplayer
game at its essence, right? You're usually on a team and
you're you win by helping people.

(10:28):
You win by finding a founder, finding somebody who's building
something and helping them to get there.
And you only win if other peoplewin, right?
You, you cannot win in VC on your own, like obviously by
definition. So it's intrinsically pro social
in a way that both trading and, and, and poker are not.
The other thing about it is thatthe, the feedback cycles are

(10:49):
extremely slow, right? So you make AVC investment and
you don't know for years whetheror not you're right.
And you get some signals early on.
It's like, oh, you know, this person raised more money or
they, you know, they had, they're getting some momentum.
They got some Twitter followers,but you know, being in crypto,
you know, that's, that's no guarantor of success.
And if anything, it, you know, sometimes it's an anti pattern.

(11:09):
If a project is getting all thishype really early, kind of, you
know, sort of sort of it gasses out very quickly if it, if it
leans too much into just purely building hype.
And so the reality is you, you really, it takes years before
you actually get the full feedback loop, which means it
requires a very different kind of thinking and a very different
kind of of a mental adjustment than a game like poker or a game

(11:33):
like trading where you get instant feedback, right, if you
enter into a trade. So if you're a short term
trader, you know very quickly whether or not you made the
right decision. And the same thing is true in
poker, although there's uncertainty and there's some
randomness and it's also true intrading, But directionally
you're, you're getting this, youknow, reward signal that's
pushing you in the right direction.
In venture, it requires a lot more using a lot more fluid

(11:56):
intelligence to understand it. Did I make the right call last
week, last month, last year? And a lot of times the answer is
that you really don't know. And people who look like they
make great decisions in one vintage, in retrospect, it's
like, actually, that was an absolutely terrible vintage.
And the people who sat out from this particular trend, whether
it's, you know, metaverse investing or whether it's, you

(12:17):
know, NFT issuers or whatever, for a year or two, those people
can look brilliant. And then, you know, 2-3 years
later, all of a sudden the evaluation of who did well and
who did poorly completely changes.
And that's happened in crypto somany times that it's really, in
a way, quite fundamental to the way that VC works.

(12:38):
Yeah, I definitely want to get into into that a lot more.
I'm curious, so you said you hadthis phase of being kind of lost
and then you in the tech industry I I read so you're also
into effective altruism, right? So were this kind of connected?
They're very, very much connected.
Is so when I was, when I was young, I, I made a lot of money

(13:02):
at a young age as a poker player, I was surrounded by a
lot of people who had made a lotof money very young.
And the thing that I noticed pretty quickly, I think sooner
than a lot of people get to learn this lesson is that money
doesn't make people happy. And if you're, if you're in the
poker world, it's, it's obvious because you see all these people
who are making all this money and they're miserable, you know,

(13:25):
and, and you realize like, OK, Iknow all these people who are
like, you know, my classmates who I was going to uni with, who
they don't have a lot of money. And most of them are, are
actually pretty happy, even though they're, you know,
scraping by, They don't, you know, there's a lot of cash, but
they're having a great time. And people in poker world who
are like, you know, sitting downhunched at a casino, you know,
they're staying up late, they'reworking on hours.
They're, they're just kind of they're miserable, you know, not

(13:47):
all of them, obviously, but manyof them.
And, and that very quickly brokethis connection in my head
between money and happiness. And I realized pretty quickly
that I was not somebody who's who's very motivated by money.
They don't spend a lot of money.They don't really have a lot of
need for flash things. But but I realized coming across

(14:07):
the philosophy of effective altruism, this was around like
20/12/2013 that I first came in touch with these ideas.
It incredibly strongly resonatedwith me that, OK, money might
not matter very much to me and Idon't think money is going to
make me happy, but money has tremendous power in the world.

(14:28):
And that if the effect of that money is very, very
asymmetrical, right, that money can do a lot more good in a
developing country than it's going to do for somebody like me
who lives in America. And like, OK, well, I can have a
nicer TVI can have a nicer car, but it's not really going to
change my quality of life in a in a substantial way.
But a relatively small amount ofmoney, just a few $1000 can be

(14:48):
literally life saving in other part of the world.
And that was what ended up getting me on the, the train of
thinking, hey, I one thing I know that I'm good at is making
money. I was able to do it very well as
a poker player and I bet I coulddo it again.
And so if I go into a field that's lucrative and it's

(15:10):
something that I'm also driven towards and excited about and
care about, like, like technology, I think I can donate
a lot of that money and have a lot of impact, a lot more impact
than I could just have on myselfpersonally.
And that was what made me decidethat when I came into the tech
industry, I was going to donate 1/3 of my income to high impact
charities. So I, I decided that in like
2013 and 2015 is when I first came into the tech industry.

(15:32):
And ever since then I've been donating 1/3 of my pre tax
income. Now, the, The funny thing, of
course in crypto, you can't talkabout effective altruism without
talking about SPF because of course, the most famous, the
most famous effective altruist in the world was SBF.
And it's funny because I actually met SBF.
The first time I met SBF was in 2014 before he was in crypto.

(15:54):
He was still at Jane Street at that time.
And I met him at an effective altruist summit in San
Francisco. So he was, you know, just a
scrawny little traitor, you know, had the crazy hair wearing
the shorts. And I think I met him in the
hallway at one point. I recognized him because he was
somebody who, who was himself a very active donor in the effect

(16:15):
of altruism space. And I was an aspiring donor, you
know, I, I hadn't, I didn't haveany money yet.
So I was like, you know, so I hope to someday have money, but
right now I'm, I'm, you know, pretty broke.
So, but I, I, I met him and the next time that I would meet him
would be many years later in Berkeley when he had started
Alameda Research. So I, I, it's funny because

(16:39):
effect of altruism as a philosophy went through such,
you know, it's, it's like crypto, right?
It went through such a massive upswing and reputation and then
absolutely cratered with the collapse of FTX.
And it was very unfortunate thatthe industry ended up putting
all their eggs, not the industry.
The movement ended up putting somany of their eggs into the
basket of this one man. Because at the end of the day,

(17:01):
there are a lot of people who are effective ultras, You know,
it's a, it's a movement that probably spans, you know, 50-60,
maybe even 100,000 people. And most people are, are not
that loud about it. You know, they, they just kind
of do it. They don't make their whole
identity around it. You know, like I'm, I've been
effective altruism, been doing this for many years.
I don't tweet about all the time.
I don't try to make a big dog and pony show when I make my

(17:22):
donations at the end of the year.
But the, you know, the, the, theessence of effective altruism
is, is, is really quite simple, which is just this idea that,
you know, you think you're, you're, you're giving your money
can, can have a lot more impact if you think about it in a more
rigorous way. SPF was in in many ways the, the

(17:46):
worst element. It's, it's like a good example
of what happens when you take anything to an extreme, right.
Any philosophy can be taken to an extreme.
And at those extremes is when you start really untethering
from normal common sense morality, right?
If you start being convinced that, hey, you know, effective
altrism is so important. I shouldn't, I shouldn't take

(18:06):
care of my friends and family orI should give away everything
that I own and, and kind of liveas this weird ascetic or, you
know, I should, I should steal people's money in an exchange in
order to donate more to charity,right?
Like when you start really getting off the deep end, you
get into extremism and there's, you know, there's, there's,
there's, there's religious extremists, there's

(18:27):
philosophical extremists. And SPF sort of now serves as
this cautionary tale to everybody in the effective
altruism world of like, hey, youknow, everything, every,
everything should really be in moderation.
That includes effective altruism.
So anyway, I thought I would. I thought I would just give that
thought, but I don't know if youwant to dwell on the effective

(18:48):
altruism connection. It's OK, I think.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fair enough.
Let's talk about crypto investing.
So you got into that through Metastable, which probably not a
lot of people know today, but itwas one of the first crypto
funds, probably one of the first, certainly more like hedge

(19:10):
fund like structure if I remember correctly.
What was it like working there and what were sort of your
biggest learnings from that? So I came into metastable.
Actually, before I came to Metastable, I was, well, I was
working at Airbnb, came into crypto full time, worked at a
company called 21, which became earn.com.

(19:30):
That's biology's startup. They got acquired by Coinbase.
I left and then started my own startup.
And that was when I ended up meeting Deval sort of all, of
course, founder of Angel List, very well known Angel investor,
sort of influencer, life guru, Silicon Valley.
And he ended up convincing me toshelve my startup and join

(19:53):
Metastable as AGP. So medicine was one of the very
first funds in crypto. I didn't know anything about
investing at the time that Navalrecruited me.
Like literally my own portfolio I just had in, you know, index
funds. I don't think I'd ever made
really a, a serious stock investment.
Like even stock picking is something I just didn't do.
I was just like, no, just index invested.
Read all these papers that, you know, nobody can beat the

(20:15):
market. So just do passive investing.
And Naval was like, Hey, you should become you should become
AVC. And I was like.
VC I don't know anything at all about, you know, finance.
I don't know what a term sheet is.
I don't know what Carrie is. I don't know.
I literally didn't know anythingand Naval was like, what doesn't
matter? Like all that stuff is easy to
learn. The the hard thing, the thing

(20:37):
that I can't teach you is judgement.
But if you have judgement, the rest of it is, you know, you're
a smart guy. It's pretty mechanical.
I can teach you the rest in justa few months.
And that, you know, in in the beginning, when I first came
into metastable, I really thought this is going to be
temporary. You know, I'm going to come into
metastable, I'm going to kind ofhang out, learn a few things.

(21:00):
But then of course, I'm going togo back in the start up world.
I'm going to go build something because I saw myself as a
builder. But also, you know,
psychologically, I just thought like, well, building is
obviously the real thing. You know, VC is like this kind
of, you know, whatever sort of your bullshit job that you do in
the interim of like early retirement or something, you
know, it's like a waiting room before you have a good idea.

(21:22):
And over time, I, I came to appreciate more and more that
venture was actually something very, very interesting and
unique in it's own right compared to what I was doing
before. And, and the way that Naval
described it is something that still resonates with me, which
is, you know, if you're, if you're building a start up, you
know, you imagine crypto is likethis, this wave that's coming to

(21:45):
shore. And we know the wave is going to
hit and it's going to transform the, the beach.
And if you're a start up, you are like 1 grain of sand in that
wave trying to make your way to shore.
And you might make it, you mightnot.
And like, it's you against the world.
And you know, it's like, OK, this is the, this is the Titanic
conflict that every startup founder feels like they're in.

(22:07):
But to be an investor is to pullup a chair at the side of the
beach and to take bets on which grains of sand are going to make
it shore. And in a way, OK, maybe there's,
there's, there's some element ofdiversification you get as an
investor. But the more important thing is
that it's actually really the best seat in the house to watch
the wave come in because there'sno better place that you're

(22:28):
going to really get to see what actually happens to the world
and to be able to test your intellectual ability to predict
how it's going to play out. You know, you know, I, I came
into crypto in 2017 full time and at that time, you know,
people were talking about the ICO boom and you know, the way
in which, you know, IoT was going to get transformed and

(22:50):
all. You know, I, it's funny because
one of the very first podcast I was listening to is actually
this one epicenter, because there wasn't a lot of technical
content back in 2017. And, you know, listen to the
show. I was very studiously with
listen and, you know, try to understand like, oh, you know,
what's, what does IOTA do? What does phone do?
You know, all these projects from from that that era, you

(23:10):
know, you dutifully listen and understand and really try to
predict, is this, is this the future or is this mirage, right?
Is this wave going to make it? Sure, as an investor, that's
fundamentally your job, right? And there's a lot of other stuff
that goes into it about sourcingand, you know, building
relationship founders and helping them out.
But but this is the core of whatinvestors do.
And to be better at that, at being better able to predict

(23:34):
where the future is going and how technology will evolve, I've
come to appreciate is the most interesting thing to me of
anything that I can do. Building is fun.
It's very satisfying to, to feel, you know, your thing
turning into a real product out in the world that people use.
And the way building a firm, building an investment firm is,
is, is similar in many ways. You know, having built

(23:57):
Dragonfly, you know, we're like 45 people around the world.
We're a big brand. You know, we do a lot of, we do
a lot of things that that any company has to do in order to
establish itself and to and to build a strong reputation.
But the end of the day, investing is really about
predicting the future, and to me, there's no there's nothing
that quite resonates as much with me anymore as getting to do
that for a living. So you mentioned the the

(24:18):
judgement thing as this, you know, crucial thing an investor
has to be good and is do you think this is something you just
had? Did you learn it in some way?
Is it something that you do you try to develop it and like how?
I don't have a good answer to that.
Like, honestly, when I look, because we obviously hire a lot

(24:41):
of investors and we interview a lot of investors and, and I'm
now on the reverse side of the table.
I'm where Naval once was when hewas looking at me and how to
determine, does this person havejudgement?
Right? Obviously when people come in
and they're and they're junior, they don't know that much about
investing. They don't know that much about
VC. You know, we'll often ask them a
case study of like, hey, you know, would you make this
investment? Write me a memo about why you

(25:02):
would or wouldn't make this investment.
And you read this memo and some of them are very polished.
You can tell, OK, they've thought a lot about investing
before. Some of them are very
unpolished. But most of the time you can
really kind of see through to, does this person have that spark
of insight that they can think for themselves?
They can think very clearly. They can cut through to the
center of the problem. And it's sort of like, do you

(25:23):
get there in one cut or do you slowly kind of trim around the
edges and maybe eventually you'll get there.
And that question, when you, when you see it, you, you know
it instantly that, OK, this person has good judgement.
And is it it's not always connected to the fact that
they've been an investor before.A lot of people who are very

(25:46):
good at this and can think very clearly and lucidly about making
good investment decisions don't have training as professional
investors. But this ability to think very
clearly, to question obvious assumptions and to like cut to
the essence of something, I don't know where it comes from.
I don't know how you train it. It has to be like, almost
certainly, you know, when I think about it has to be that

(26:07):
you have experience making toughdecisions and where would you
get that kind of experience? I think it can come from many
different places. It can come from being a
decision maker, building businesses.
It can come from come from games.
I think games are one of these places that do actually, if
you're, if you're competing at ahigh level in games, I think it
can even be true for, for, you know, not things like poker, but

(26:27):
even just, you know, competitive, like, you know,
competitive computer games, I think can develop that ability
to make decisions repeatedly very well.
But most people who are, you know, if you've just been in
school for your entire life, I don't think that trains you very
well to make decisions. I don't think you're making a
lot of decisions when you're at school.
I think when you're at school, you're mostly being told what to

(26:50):
do and performing tasks of memorization and, you know,
largely conformity, which is canyou go home and like do the
thing I asked you to every single night and memorize this
stuff. But the reality is that, you
know, being able to memorize things is totally useless in
investing. There's nothing you need to
memorize in investing. You know, on some level, you
need to have a general background knowledge about the

(27:10):
world and about, OK, you know, Ineed to, I need to think about
how big of a problem is this that's worth addressing.
But very little memorization is involved.
Very little of what you learn inschool is going to be applicable
to something like investing in crypto.
It's mostly your ability to teach yourself to think fluidly
about new domains, to really be able to, again, make difficult

(27:33):
decisions that nobody else is going to explain to you how to
make. The more that you've done that,
the better you're going to be atthis.
And that's one thing that I think for poker, you know, for
poker. It's not just that when I was
playing poker, I was making tough decisions at a poker
table. It was also that the era in
which I started playing poker. And to be clear, I think poker

(27:54):
is actually very different todaythan it was at the time that I
was playing it. Poker was not very developed as
a game when I first came into into playing poker, meaning that
the you know, a lot today you have these game theory optimal
strategies that are very well worked out.
You know, people do studying alongside these solvers, which
are these programs that will basically output the game
theoretic optimal Nash equilibrium for a given poker

(28:17):
situation. And most of what people are
doing is they're studying what the computer is telling them.
The computer knows the answer. It's like chess, right?
Poker's become much more like chess in the last 10 years.
Poker was not at all like that. When I came into the game, poker
was still in the process of being developed as a fully
fledged game and as a result, a lot of what we were doing like
what I what I see us like me andmy peers in that generation was

(28:41):
much more like science. It was much more us trying new
things, developing different parts of the poker meta and
really challenging a lot of the assumptions of the poker players
that came before us, right. It was, it was actually like
when I look back of what I lovedthe most about poker, it was
that it was us kind of opening these new frontiers and, and

(29:02):
experimenting with new strategies that nobody had
really tried before and proving that they could work in
different ways. That skill most people don't
have. If you went to school, you've
never done anything like that inyour life unless you, you know,
at a postgraduate level or you're a researcher or something
like this. That skill is the skill that I
think most translates into beingable to be a good investor,

(29:24):
because being able to be a good investor means, OK, the year is
2021. Played Earn was just invented.
What the fuck is Played Earn? How does it work?
Where's it going to end up? Right?
There's no book you can read. There's no there's no expert
that you can consult. There's no amount of learning
you've done in your life that weprepare you to answer that
question. You have to think for yourself

(29:45):
from first principles where you think it's going to go and you
have to make a bet on it. Yeah, Yeah.
Do you think your ability, thosekind of judgement is developing
much today and what way is it evolving?
That's a good question. I think my, I would say that my

(30:07):
ability to make decisions withininvesting is getting better as
I, as I get more data, as I havemore experiences, as I make more
mistakes, I'm and, and as I havemore successes, I'm learning
from all of these things, you know, patterns and behaviors
that I'm, I'm, I'm realizing aremore and more important, right.

(30:28):
So just to give you one example,right now, I have a portfolio
company that's going through a Co founder breakup.
So, you know, two people start acompany together.
They were, they were very good friends.
Now they're splitting apart. They hate each other and
navigating a Co founder breakup is one of these things that the
first time you do it as a, as AVC, you just have no idea what
you're doing. You know, it's like, it's like a

(30:49):
divorce, you know, and you're like the, you're like the friend
of both of them. And you have to somehow
safeguard, you know, what's gonna happen to the kids and
what's gonna happen to the, you know, the, all the stuff.
But also, OK, these two people who I also care about and I
wanna make sure that they're gonna do OK.
It's better for everyone if theydo OK.
You have to navigate that. And it's almost like being a
mediator, but then also being aninvestor and also being, you
know, you do a lot of different things at the same time.

(31:11):
First time I did it, no idea what it was.
You know, it was just totally, totally unprepared to deal with
that. Now I've done it many times and
the NTH time you do it, the better, more solid, more
capable, more fluid you become at being able to help people
navigate those difficult things in a, in a, in a, in a start up.
Same thing with dealing with M&Aor dealing with some kind of

(31:32):
strategic pivot or, you know, helping a company, you know,
figure out a tiring strategy. The first time you do it, you
sort of stumble along. You know, when I was at
medisable. The funny thing about medisable
is because, you know, naval, youknow, he's such a well known
person. He was so famous, but obviously
still is. But you know, at that time he
was very, very active in, in, inthe crypto investing market.
Everybody wanted his money. And so when I was at medisable,

(31:54):
you know, even by the time that I left, I had never actually won
a deal. When we wanted to make an
investment, it was like, OK, youknow, so at medisable, we did
the seed round of Avalanche and I was like, Hey, I think we
should do this. I think good is great.
Let's let's do the seed round. You know, I knew Goon and I had
a relationship with him, but theend of the day, he didn't want

(32:16):
my money. He wanted Duvall's money.
And so Duvall was the one who went out to say, OK, Duvall, we
want this much allocation. He would go and he would go win
the deal. And it was at Dragonfly that I
had my first ever actually. OK, Haseeb, it's your job to win
the deal. You have to convince the founder
to take your money. And why would you take my money

(32:36):
over ASICS and ZS money or paradigms money or Poly chains
money or anybody else's money? And it's intrinsically like a
very you, you sort of have to be, it goes against a lot of
your instincts if you're somebody like me to say like,
hey, I'm amazing. You should work with me because
I'm a special guy. And like, I'm exactly the person

(32:58):
you should work with over everybody else.
Everybody else sucks and I'm theone who's gonna, you know, solve
all your problems. You have to do that.
You have to sell, you have to fundamentally convince the
founder that you are special compared to everybody else and
you will solve their problems ina unique way that nobody else
will. And that skill is a skill that
you can only get better at the practice, you know.

(33:18):
So the judgement thing itself, Ithink at the end of the day, I
don't actually know that my judgement, you know, at a core
level has really gotten that much better over the time that
I've been a dragonfly. I think my judgement as an
investor has gotten better in the same way, you know, as a
poker player, I got better and better over the years at playing
poker. But would my judgement

(33:39):
translate? I don't know.
I think that the one thing that I have noticed to myself since I
became AVC. So, you know, I, I before this,
I was AI, was a software engineer, I was a builder, I was
of course a poker player. I only ever played again,
largely single player games. So, you know, when you're a
poker player, you're playing foryourself.

(33:59):
You know, you don't really need to be a social butterfly to play
poker. And of course, being a, you
know, if you're a software engineer, it's like the, the
most quintessentially antisocialjob is writing code.
But VC is hyper social. You know, all you do all day is
talk to people. And when I first started, it was
exhausting for me. It was very, very difficult

(34:19):
because I was psychologically and mentally quintessentially a
builder. And now that has really changed
kind of who I am. And it's something that all my
friends and my family just they can't help but notice is the way
in which becoming AVC really changed me.
And I think in that respect is very is very good for me because
when I first started, I, I couldnot handle a day full of

(34:42):
meetings. Like literally, I would collapse
the end of the day. I'd be like, I have to cancel.
I cannot do another meeting. Like I'm so exhausted talking to
people. I just want to, like, read and,
you know, go read a white paper.You know, like, that just sounds
so nice to me compared to havinganother fucking meeting.
But leading a firm, building a team.
And on some level, you know, part of what you have to do as

(35:04):
AVC is to build your own brand very intentionally.
Because, you know, at the end ofthe day, VC is a people
business. You know, on some level, yeah,
OK, Dragonfly's a brand, and people care about Dragonfly now.
And OK, it's kind of cool if Dragonfly's your lead, But at
the end of the day, funds don't really have independent brands
of the people, right? Like if I bounce from Dragonfly

(35:25):
and like everybody leaves and weturn over and there's a new team
of Dragonfly, you know, it's notlike Airbnb, you know, Brian
Chesky leaves Airbnb, nobody really cares.
You know, you'll still use the product.
Like I don't think anybody wouldeven be like, oh, you know, I
don't know if I can use Airbnb anymore now that the CEO has
changed. But at AVC fund it, it kind of
is, right? The VC fund doesn't really mean
anything without the people there.

(35:45):
And so at the end of the day, like you kind of have to build
the reputation of the legend of yourself as an investor
alongside it. And that was something that
would have been very difficult for me four or five years ago,
and it's something I've gotten alot better at.
So when when you started Dragonfly, what was the kind of
company you wanted to build and how did you want it to be

(36:08):
different from the other cryptophonts?
So that, that was actually very central to my decision to join
Dragonfly. So I, I actually, I joined
Dragonfly about like 6 months after they first started.
So I wasn't there at the very, very beginning.
The, the fund wasn't, it was like half raised at the time
that I joined Dragonfly. So I just, I just left

(36:28):
metastable and I was kind of a free agent deciding what I
wanted to do. And I was funny enough, I was
actually working on a course. So back when apology after he
left Coinbase, he started this thing called Nakamoto, which was
this like publishing thing. I don't know if you remember
this, but I, I, I created this course like of, you know,
blockchain one O 1. And I was working on this and I
thought I was going to write a book teaching blockchain so long

(36:50):
ago. And you know, in a way, this is
also when the educational materials and crypto were much
worse than they are today. So thankfully that that gap has
largely been made-up by the timethere was really only podcasts
and one textbook, which was the Princeton textbook, which, you
know, that that's how I learned about crypto, was reading the
Princeton textbook. And so I, so I was, that's what
I was doing at the time. And, you know, Bo ended up

(37:13):
approaching me and trying to convince her to join Dragonfly
in Dragonfly. At the time, they didn't really
have much of A brand. I don't think anybody knew them
in the West. You know, they, they were kind
of this, they, they'd invested in other funds.
They'd invested into, you know, Pulley Chain and Paradigm and,
you know, a bunch of other fundsand they did some deals like,

(37:33):
you know, kind of follow on investments alongside some of
the other managers that they're backing.
But they weren't really doing direct deals, right, investing
directly into into companies andthey weren't leading any deals.
And so, you know, Bo pitched me on this vision of building a
global fund. And when I say global Fund, you

(37:54):
know, at that time, I had never actually been to East Asia,
never been to Japan, never been to China, never been to Korea,
never been to Singapore. This is, this is back in like
20/17/2018. And I knew that crypto was big
in Asia, but I kind of knew it intellectually.
It was sort of like, well, like,you know, now that I know this,
I can make decisions on that basis, but I don't really need

(38:15):
to go there. And like, I mean, I don't need
to meet a minor, you know, I know mine exists.
But you know, what does it really matter the details of
what they do? And, and Bo was the one who
convinced me that no, no, no, no, if you want to understand
what's really happening in crypto, if you want to
understand like this global phenomenon, you have to be able
to see the whole elephant, right?
Like you haven't seen it with your own eyes.

(38:36):
You don't really get it. And all the VCs and crypto at
that time were, were almost the last man based in Silicon
Valley. Certainly in 28, you know,
before COVID, everything was in Silicon Valley.
And it was out of Silicon Valleythat people were investing in
this thing that's happening all around the world, right?
And, and I was very much that I was, you know, at Metisable, we

(38:57):
were in San Francisco. We, we never invested in
anything that didn't come to SF to meet us.
And, and Bo's vision was very different and it really resonate
with me. They're like, hey, actually, why
is no one doing it this way? Why is nobody opening the
aperture and looking at the whole totality of what's
happening in crypto globally? And what would it look like to
build a firm with that being the, the initial animating

(39:19):
hypothesis that actually if you,if you could see the whole
thing, you would do it somewhat differently.
That was the pitch that he made to me.
And and I told him, like, look, I'm potentially down to join,
but I have some demands. And if you meet those demands,
it'll join first demand is that.So, you know, at the time,
Dragonfly was not a technical team.

(39:40):
There was nobody technical on the team.
And I said, look, I want us to be one of the most technical
funds in crypto. That's what Medistable was.
Medistable was led by Lucas Ryan, who was, you know, he
studied cryptography at Stanfordunder Dan Benet.
And you know, the way that he taught me how to invest and how
to diligent stuff was, you know,you go into the GitHub like you

(40:02):
actually understand from a protocol level what they're
doing, what the attack surface is.
How robust is this technology? Like if you can't run it
yourself, you don't understand it.
And that that kind of technical approach to diligence like
really nobody in crypto VC was doing at that time.
This is this. Before ACC crypto, before
Paradigm, you know, most of these teams were run by people

(40:24):
who weren't technical. In, in the, in the VC world.
And so that was the first thing is that I want us to build a
technical team. I want us to known.
I want us to be known for being technical.
Second is that we got to start leading deals.
I want us to be actually competing with the Poly chains
of the world, with the Panteras,with, with the a 16 ZS.
And 3rd is we're no longer goingto invest in funds.

(40:48):
Everything that we do from now on is going to be direct.
We're going to work directly with founders and we're going to
be known as being one of the premier funds of crypto.
And Beau said I'm down. And that was how I ended up
coming into Dragonfly. So that was that was the
original thesis of the kind of firm we wanted to build.
And now at the time, we didn't have a lot of resources, you
know, and again, we were, we were flanked by the Poly chains

(41:09):
and the Panteras and the A16CS who were much bigger, much
better resource. I mean, at that time those guys
were huge. You know, my goal originally
when we first started Dragonfly was to someday beat Poly chain.
Now, you know, today that might seem really bizarre of like
apology. Why, why Polychain in
particular? It's like, no, no, you don't
understand Polychain. At that time, they were the

(41:29):
number one fund. They were the only people who
had a billion dollars of AUM. They had it backed almost
everything from the first generation of crypto.
You know, whether it's, you know, maker Dow polka dots, they
were an avalanche. There were so many things, you
know, Cosmos early, they had didso many wins.
And you know, looking at Polychain, I was like, someday,

(41:50):
someday. We're not there yet to take a
long time for us to climb that mountain, but someday we're
going to be Poly chain and. Poly chain in terms of getting
into deals or in terms. Of the yes, exactly as a as a
VC, the way that you think aboutlike what's the actual head to
head is when I'm competing with Olaf to win a deal, who's who

(42:11):
does the founder pick? Do they pick me or do they pick
Olaf? Right.
The end of the day, that's the head to head.
You know, it's kind of like in poker, we call it playing heads
up, which is one-on-one. Like if you want to ask like
who's the better player, who which fund is winning?
The answer on some level it's like, OK, did you make better
investment decisions? Obviously that matters, but it's
hard to quantify that. It's hard to tell because like I
said, all this stuff takes yearsto play out.

(42:32):
But the one thing that you can know as a platform, as a brand
is my fund winning. At the end of the day, the
number one determinant of who ends up getting the better
returns is who can get the better deal, who can win?
And the way that you, you know, there, there's one way to think
about investing is that there's there's two quadrants at which

(42:56):
you can look at any investment. OK, those two quadrants are
consensus and non consensus, meaning that everyone agrees
this guy's going to be the winner and or maybe you see
something other people don't, right.
So an example of a consensus deal would be something like,
you know, take take open C, right.
So the open C Series A was an incredibly competitive round,

(43:18):
right? This was like in, I don't know
what was this like early 2021, Open C was growing like crazy.
Everybody knew that open C was going to be the winner and
everybody was competing to try to win that deal.
Everyone gave a term sheet. Every single VC you've heard of
or take for example, you know, the mega ETH series, a
incredibly competitive round. Everybody was giving term sheets
to to mega ETH at that time. And this is a consensus deal.

(43:40):
Now there's non consensus deal as well.
So non consensus deal would be like the Solana C round, right?
Solana C round was not competitive, right?
Solana pitched everybody multi coin wanted, but they didn't
like win it because everybody, you know, they beat all the
other people they wanted becauseeveryone else said no.
And so OK, multi coin wanted. Same thing with the Solana
Series A everybody they pitched everyone, everyone said no

(44:01):
except for multi coin. And so you have these consensus
deals, not consensus deals and there's consensus right and
consensus wrong, right. So there are times when
everybody is, you know, everybody has consensus on a
deal and the deal is correct, right?
It is, it is the winner. Everyone knows it's going to be
the winner. And then there are times when
the kid says this is wrong. Now almost all the money in

(44:24):
venture overwhelmingly gets madein non consensus, right?
That's where you get the 100 XS,the 150 XS, the the 500 XS,
right. And everybody knows ventures of
power law business. And that means that the really,
really big outcomes are the oneswhere you make the lion's share
of the returns. But a lot of money also gets

(44:46):
made in consensus right. And there's then there's
consensus wrong where you know you're going to lose money and
then non consensus wrong. That's where you know you're
making crazy bats out there thatdon't pay off.
So non consensus right is where your brand doesn't matter.
You don't need to have you don'tneed to have a great brand or to
do non contested right deals right.
And in a way, if you think aboutearly one confirmation or early

(45:09):
multi coin, they they didn't have the best brand of crypto,
but they were able to win these non consensus deals and they
eventually able to parlay that into building a great brand.
But consensus, right, deals are consistent money makers, right?
That's where a lot of the money in venture gets made.
It's not where the really incredible outcomes generally
happen, but it's places where you you you'll consistently make

(45:31):
good money. And that is purely a game of
brand. If it's consensus, right,
Everybody knows, you know, the, the classic examples of Google
Series A everybody knew Google was going to win, but only
Sequoia got to got to play right, because Sequoia, Sequoia,
they, they had the brand to be able to win that deal.
So that's where brand matters. And that's why it's very
important to cultivate that, that ability to win head to

(46:04):
One, it wasn't a super competitive round.
Second, it was after Terror collapsed, right?
The we, we led the Athena seed round after Terror collapse,
after people thought D5 was uninvestable and especially
people thought that an algorithmic sable coin was
completely uninvestable after the collapse of Terra.
And so it was, it was our ability to identify that, hey,

(46:26):
no, no, no, no. What's happening with Athena is
different from Terra, right? We never invested in Terra.
We pass every single round of Terra because we understood that
the mechanics of Terra were fundamentally insecure.
They're fundamentally something that as it went to scale, it was
going to break with probability one.
But something like Athena, no, Athena's a cash and carry trade.
Cash and carry trades have been around forever.

(46:47):
This is the oldest thing in history.
You know, like I, I was, I was talking to hedge funds that were
pitching the catch and carry trade back when Dragonfly first
started. You know, it's a very well
understood financial product. It's not like, oh, this is a
bank that takes on more and moreleverage the bigger it gets,
right? That's what Tara fundamentally
was. So understanding that and being
able to see through to the future is how a lot of the

(47:08):
returns adventure get made. But the, the, the, the
measurement of winning is how most of the bread and butter of
adventure works. And so that was when I, when I
say that I wanted to beat Poly Chain, that's what I mean.
Eventually you beat them in returns, but the first thing the
first thing you see as you become a better fund is

(47:29):
eclipsing them in terms of beingable to win in the head to head.
But you still think like most ofthe returns if you think of like
Dragonfly's track record was more in this non consensus right
bucket or like to what extent was the consensus right also a
driver for this? It's usually something like 7030

(47:50):
is that 70% of your returns comefrom a very small number of non
consensus deals and then 30% of your returns, which is still
substantial comes from your consensus deals.
And most of the time it's not always true, right?
So it's not literally true that Athena had no other bids when we
won that deal, but it was not the juggernaut.

(48:12):
It was not perceived as the juggernaut that it is today,
right? It wasn't every single VC, every
single neighbor in VC bidding onthat deal, but there are a lot
of times that like the, the big winner can end up continuing to
win and win and win and win and win.
You know, one example of that issomething like hyper liquid,
right? So we were, we were one of the
VCs that were, was trying to getJeff to take AVC check, you

(48:36):
know, and we were, this is, thisis relatively early before their
air drop. Obviously we were, you know, we,
we built a relation with him andwe were really trying to win
that deal and we weren't winningit against other VCs.
Like there was no round. It was us pre empting and trying
to get him to take our check because we thought what he was
building was, was really different and really compelling.
And ultimately, you know, he gotclose, but he said no, that I

(48:58):
don't want to take any EDC money.
And you know, there were other firms, other top 2 firms that,
you know, that we're trying to do the same thing later, trying
to stuff him with a term sheet, trying to give him a bunch of
cash and say, Hey, you know, let's, let's, let's do
something. Even though you're not looking
for money, your ability to do that is ultimately constrained
by how strong your brand is. But, but at the end of the day,

(49:19):
you know, you're, you're never going to win all of them, no
matter how good your brand is, right?
There's always some hyper liquids out there that will just
say no to everyone. And no matter how good your
brand is, even if you're, you know, a 60 crypto or paradigm or
Sequoia or whoever, you're always going to lose deals.
And so the, the, the question is, you know, as a fund, do you
have that feedback loop of, OK, we lost this deal.

(49:39):
Why did we lose the deal? Do we actually understand why we
lost? And is this a problem that we
can learn from and get better at?
So the next time we go at this, we're going to do better, right?
If you have that mindset, like aproduct founder, that you're
constantly thinking about how toiterate in the direction of
getting better, then you know, with, with near certainty you
will improve as a firm. The weird thing in venture is

(50:00):
that, you know, one thing I realized part of the reason why
we've been so successful in venture, I, I think a few
reasons. 1 is that we're just really persistent and a lot of
people just kind of gave up whencrypto went through downturns or
when things went badly. They just, you know, they just
didn't have the resilience to keep going.
That's the honestly the most common thing that I've seen from
all the VCs that I remember fromwhen I first came in the

(50:21):
industry. Most of them aren't here
anymore. Most of them just bailed.
So, so that that is the most obvious thing is just do you
have the stomach to be able to handle an industry that's as
chaotic and as cyclical as crypto?
But the second thing is like, why did you get into venture?
A lot of people came into venture because they think that
venture is this, you know, genteel job that you can just do

(50:43):
on, you know, in the summers andyou take the summers off and
you, you know, you work like 9:00 to 5:00.
And then, you know, it's like, it's like ultimately a kind of
early retirement for people. Like that's how they see it.
They see it as this like high status job that you get invited
to a lot of cocktail parties andyou have to pontificate on
Twitter. And that's not how I see it.
You know, like, that's not why Igot into space.
I gave you the space to win and I, I come in the space to win

(51:06):
and it's me. That means that every single day
you're getting better. Every time you lose a deal, you
obsess over why you lost. Every time you don't see a deal,
you try to go understand, why didn't I see this?
Why didn't this founder come andtalk to me?
And if you don't have that mindset like you're, you're just
going to lose. You're just going to keep losing
and losing and losing and not learning why you, why you're
losing. And so that feedback with that
iteration cycle that that founders have of getting better

(51:29):
every single time, every single day, every single moment you get
product feedback, how can we getbetter?
How can we get better? How can we get better?
That loop, I, I learned with enough time that a lot of VCs
don't do it. And they just, they just keep
sucking as VCs and not ever really committing themselves to
intentionally getting better. And that's why that's why, you

(51:50):
know, as, as a firm, I've been continuing surprised at how
quickly we've lapped. So many other VCs have been
doing this much longer than us. So you mentioned the ability to
get into deals. Obviously there is ultimate
returns of the fund. Are there other sort of
dimensions by which you judge the success of Dragonfly?

(52:13):
I mean, those are, there's also like 3 dimensions that you care
about is success as a firm. So the first and foremost is
returns, returns at the end of the day is the North Star.
The second is brand, right? Your ability to actually win
deals when you're up and head tohead against another firm.
The third is ability to raise money because at the end of the
day, you know, VC is a scale business.

(52:33):
So if you cannot actually raise the capital, you need to go
deploy your strategy, then you know, you're, it doesn't really
matter how good you are, right, Because you don't have the money
to actually go put all this stuff into motion.
So you learn as well as a, as AVC is that you, you kind of
have two different audiences, what the audience is the

(52:54):
founders and just kind of the crypto community, how they
perceive you and how they understand what you're doing and
how they perceive your brand. The second is actually among
LP's, which are totally different worlds.
You know, they don't read cryptoTwitter, they don't care.
You know how many retweets your,your stuff has gotten to them.
Your brand is constructed by this totally different channel

(53:14):
and style of communication, which is to institutional
investors or to family offices or whoever it is that you're
raising your capital from. How do they perceive you?
What content do you create for them?
What are the things that you've done in this world that
contribute to your brand? And they care a lot more about
things that nobody in crypto Twitter cares about.
When I was reading through your blog, one of the things you'd

(53:38):
link to was this post by Mark inrecent where he talks about, you
know, people, product and marketas sort of, you know, 3
dimensions by which you can evaluate a start up.
And you know, he comes like, hey, the most important is
market, right? If you don't choose to right
market, like the rest kind of doesn't matter.

(54:00):
I'm curious like if you, let's say you left being ABC and you
had to start a company in crypto, what, what would be, I
don't know one or two, maybe 3 markets that you would focus on?
That's a great question. I I definitely can't name you 3.

(54:24):
I think so. Probably if I were to try to
build something I would be spending a lot of time at the
intersection of crypto and AII think probably the thing that I
would want to build is to work on AI powered wallet automation.

(54:45):
I think this is. Kind of wallet automation.
OK. So, you know, how can I get my
wallet to be much more intelligent than it is today?
And the reality is that we depend a lot, like our security
model and our UX model for wallets is very, very highly
dependent on humans catching mistakes, whether it's mistakes

(55:07):
in, oh, is this the wrong contract?
Am I getting spearfished? Or, you know, like clicking
through all these buttons to bridge from here to there.
It's like, oh, make sure you come back in 3 minutes to like,
you know, could do this other transaction.
And clearly, the wallets should be a lot smarter than they are.
They should be able to do a lot more of this, such as as a human
being, you're operating at a higher level of autonomy and

(55:27):
direction giving compared to where the wallets are today,
which are extremely brittle. And you know, there's, there's
there's almost no intelligence that's baked into your wallet
besides, you know, a little bit of transaction simulation these
days. I think that is going to be one
of the most Titanic changes thatwe see in the crypto industry
over the next few years because of AI.
And I think in order to get there, you need to do

(55:49):
reinforcement learning at scale with a really robust data
pipeline and simulation environment in order to do that.
And I haven't seen anyone reallytry to tackle this today.
I think it actually requires quite a lot of capital and I
think it's a very hard problem to solve and we're clearly not
there yet. Like we we were not incapable of
solving it today because, you know, models cannot consistently

(56:13):
order pizza. They can't even consistently
book a flight. What makes you think they can
consistently, you know, bridge assets and do dex trades and
like not get fished right? Like that's even harder than
ordering a pizza. So if you look at the latest
generation of models, I think ifyou look at, you know, the
newest Cloud 4 Opus, some of these agentic benchmarks, I

(56:34):
think on ordering a pizza, it's something like 80% ability to
order pizza and like 60% on booking flights, which is, you
know, it's incredible compared to where they were a few years
ago, but it's still abysmal in absolute terms, right?
Like if you had a personal assistant who could order you a
pizza, 80% of the time you'd be like, what the fuck is wrong?
Like I'll just order all my own pizzas.
Like I'm not even going to deal with this.

(56:56):
So, but I think they will get there very soon.
I would guess within a couple ofyears, we're going to have these
things consistently booking flights for us and the, the, the
whoever wins this of being able to get AI and getting agents to
work directly within your walletand be as trustworthy as a self
driving car, right? If you think about, you know, I

(57:18):
don't know if you've ever taken a Waymo, but you know, today,
you know, you take a Waymo in San Francisco or in Phoenix or
in Austin. And it's just like, this is I, I
trust this more than I would trust an Uber.
It's, it's kind of, you know, it's slower and it's more
methodical today, but it's, it's, it's almost certainly
safer than than going in an Uber.
So when are we going to have self driving wallets?

(57:38):
And those self driving wallets are going to totally change our
experience of blockchains. I think this will be one of the
biggest companies and one of thebiggest opportunities because of
the fact that it's going to change our relationship with
blockchains, right? Not just that, OK, I'll be able
to tell my wallet, Hey, move my assets from here to there.
It's that I won't even care where my assets are because why

(57:58):
would I need to care? Just tell like, Hey, I want to
go trade on hyper liquid. Go go, go get me, you know, a, a
5X long on Bitcoin and the wall will just figure it out.
It'll say, Oh, well, my ass's over here.
I'm going to go bridge. I'm going to do this, I'm going
to do that. It's just going to happen in the
background. Same way, you know, I tell my
Alexa, Hey, order me diapers andit just doesn't right.
I don't need to, I don't need todeal with anything that will
happen. You will, you will trust the
intelligence of your wallet enough to be able to delegate

(58:20):
that task to it. And when that happens, how does
that change your relationship with blockchains?
How does it change your relationship with Arbitrum, with
Solana, with all these things when I no longer care what chain
this thing is on, I no longer have even allegiance to say, oh,
well, I'll only use Solana apps because you know, I love Solana.
I'm a Solana guy, right? That I think is going to be the

(58:40):
biggest shift that we see in crypto over the next five years.
And that I think that's the kindof scale of opportunity that I,
if I was going to build something, I would want to go.
After yeah, I totally agree withyou.
I mean, I I think 11 aspect of this that to me seems so crazy
and and illustrates like how crucial this is.

(59:01):
It's just like wallet security, right, because it's so, so hard
and and it feels like it's actually gotten worse.
I mean, at least, you know, backin the day, you know, everyone
was like, oh, not your keys, notyour coin, self custody.
It's the way to go, right? And it was very much and like,
you know, you don't go people onto a Krypton.

(59:21):
They're like, you know, you haveto write down you see, place
your own wallet. I think today with like you can
often barely predict what are you?
What are you signing? You have all of this phishing
attacks, hacks, sophistication. It it feels like something where
most people shouldn't actually use a wallet, right.

(59:43):
You shouldn't do selfless. And I think the only thing that
can solve that would be something like this where you
can basically you can say, oh, Iwant to do this.
And then it there's some, some verification thing that will
translate into a transaction, verifies that this is really the
right thing, what you want to do.

(01:00:04):
So, yeah. And.
It's a level like if, if you look at smart contracts, right?
In a way, smart contracts, we talk about how magical they are
and how amazing they are. But the the thing that's obvious
about them is that they're really not designed for humans,
right? In a way, they're kind of
designed for machines. Like, it's a lot easier for a
machine to parse EVM byte code than it is for a human being to

(01:00:25):
do so, right? And it's certainly easier for
them to parse Solidity with like, you know, if you've got
this, you know, diamond contractthing with like, you know, you
can't even, you look at the code, you can't even tell what
the Hell's going on. Even if you can read code, you
can't tell what's happening, buta, an AI can very easily go and
parse the contract that it's interacting with under, you
know, simulate it, interact withit.

(01:00:46):
Go see what are other deployed instances of this contract.
Are there any wallets that have been poisoned by it?
Check the DNS records, make surenothing's changed recently.
Like all this stuff, there's nothing stopping you from doing
it. You could do, if you were
sophisticated enough, you could do it, but you just won't,
right? You're, you're, you're lazy,
it's slow, it's time consuming. Like you just don't have that
level of, of patience. But an AI never gets bored,

(01:01:08):
never gets lazy. You know, it's like, it's like,
you know, a Waymo. A Waymo never does a rolling
stop. It's kind of annoying that it
never does a rolling stop, but it never does a rolling stop
because it never gets impatient,right?
She's like, OK, here's a stop sign.
I will come to a complete stop and then I will start again.
And, you know, it's like we maybe we need to modify this
behavior. But at the end of the day, it's
completely configurable by us. The level of scrutiny and

(01:01:28):
carefulness that these a IS willtake.
Now there will definitely be attacks against a IS and that
will freak people out when the first time, you know, an AI does
something purely that an AI would a mistake only an AI would
make and that a human being would never make.
But eventually we will get to a point that a IS are safer than
humans for self custody. And eventually, and I think not
not too, it won't take too long to get there that a IS will
basically never make a mistake of that kind, right?

(01:01:52):
Just because of the fact that it's actually pretty easy to
understand, hey, the user wants to trade on Uniswap, the user
wants to use this app, the user wants to do this user wants to
do that. And almost every case, not every
single one, but almost every case.
If a technical intelligent person had reviewed this, you
know, attack surface area, they could have figured out something
went wrong, but just nobody is ever doing all those checks all

(01:02:15):
the same time, right. One of the one of the things I
think they just to be proud of is the industry, even though I,
I agree with you that wallet security is, is really
difficult. It's really fraud is that if you
look at the amount of hacks thathave taken place in crypto over
the last five years, the amount of hacks actually at the smart
contract layer have plummeted. Almost none of the losses that
you see any more happening on chain are actually smart

(01:02:37):
contracts getting hacked. It's almost always spear
phishing, wallet compromise, some kind of, you know, malware
user error. And the reason why is that we've
actually figured out how to write secure code now, which is,
you know, thank God, right? But you know, like, if you even
think about, you know, the Bibithack, which of course,
unfortunately happened relatively recently, one of the
biggest hacks in crypto history,you know, Full disclosure, where

(01:02:58):
investors in Bibit that hack, you know, the question is like,
OK, well, that, you know, that wasn't even notice it.
Like, you know, the, the, the, the smart contract itself was
not compromised. It was the front end that was
compromised. And if they had checked the
actual hash corresponded to a clean computer computing the
hash of what they thought they were citing, they could have
noted the non correspondence between those two, right.

(01:03:21):
And again, and AI could have done that.
And AI could have, you know, went and, you know, spun up a
virtual machine and go and verified that thing or, you
know, ran the code itself. But you know, they they didn't
do it. And maybe they would have if
they had it in front of time, but they didn't.
And AI could have also just readthe front end.
If you'd read the front end, youwould have seen that there was a
special case in the JavaScript on the front end that said, if

(01:03:43):
your wallet is this, do this instead, right?
That code was there in the JavaScript payload that they
were served. And as a human being, you're
never going to see that. You're never going to, you're
never going to check. But an AI will always check.
An AI will always check. So that is my fundamental
intuition where that comes from,of why wallet security in five
years will be much better than it is today.

(01:04:06):
Let's talk a little bit about the market.
So right now the market is in a kind of interesting position,
right? Bitcoin is obviously doing
extremely well and at the same time most of or a lot of the
rest of crypto is actually struggling a lot.
I mean, I think so if the entirealtcoin market, a lot of the new

(01:04:26):
tokens are launching, you know, of course funded by VCs and
where like VCs mostly invest, right have basically a struggle
to find any buyers, you know, with, with some exceptions.
What are your thoughts on where the crypto market is today?
Well, there's, there's definitely malaise in the

(01:04:47):
altcoin market and you can see that there's not a lot of retail
activity in alts. That being said, I think in
absolute terms crypto market is doing OK, right.
If you look at where is that marginal retail buyer instead,
the answer's that they're in public markets.
So you can see, you know, with the Circle IPO, you can see with
all these, you know, micro strategy and with all these

(01:05:09):
treasury plays that are coming to public markets, that's where
you're seeing a lot of the energy and attention really
being driven. Now, crypto markets are very
cyclical and we know that right now we're in a cyclical low.
Most of the attention is on Bitcoin.
Monetary policy is still quite tight, right?
If you, if you remember back in the beginning of, of last year,

(01:05:32):
we thought there would be 6 ratecuts last year.
Instead we got two. This year we've had none and
it's already halfway through theyear, right.
And again, we thought there weregoing to be more rate cuts this
year. So we're, we're continually
being disappointed on macro. And all coins are by their
nature very sensitive to interest rates because interest
rates are, are, are basically just the, the, the, the cost of

(01:05:52):
risk. They're the, you know, when
interest rates go down, that means that risk appetite is
higher almost by definition, because people are being paid
less to take less risk. So when people are being paid
very little to be safe, they're more inclined to go further on
the risk curve. And all coins are pretty much
the riskiest of the risky thingsthat are out there.
So all coins are by their nature, going to be very

(01:06:13):
sensitive to macro. And I think you should expect
that to continue. Is that the, the institutional
bid that's arisen for Bitcoin is, is relatively unique, right?
Because that that has, has, has come about for reasons that have
nothing to do with the overall broad crypto cycles that we
otherwise see. But if you think about where
crypto was relative to the beginning of this year, you

(01:06:35):
know, the beginning of this year, all coins are probably 2X
where they are now. Like, you know, Solana was
roughly 2X where it is. You know, most all coins are
probably roughly 2X where below where they were or 50% below
where they were at that time. I think you will eventually see
a reversion. But it, it's going to be macro
that leads first in absolute terms.
It's very obvious that the positioning of the US

(01:06:57):
government, which has been, you know, the most powerful
government in the world waging war on crypto over the course of
the last year, the fact that that's completely reversed.
And now we have, you know, the most positive and constructive
government we've ever seen in the US about digital assets are
almost about any tech industry. That obviously should mean that

(01:07:18):
alts are worth more than they were six months ago.
Or like, if you just think even before Trump was elected, alts
are higher than they were, they are now.
So I, I think what's happening right now in the all market is
an anomaly. I think it will eventually
correct, but macro has to lead and that might mean six months
might even mean 912 months before we see that change.
But the one thing that you can know with absolute certainty is

(01:07:40):
that the cycles in crypto are not over.
There are more cycles to come and and that that's something I
I lose no sleep being confident.In so the, the environment for
crypto VCs obviously has also been challenging, right, because
if you benchmark to something like Bitcoin, you know, which
this point is like super easy tobuy for, you know, anyone

(01:08:02):
really, then I think, you know, few funds have outperformed
that. And you know, I think the sort
of the DPI, so the amount of money returned from funds is
mostly not being so great. I think fundraising has been
very hard for VCs. Do you think the crypto VC
market is going to change a lot and like how?

(01:08:23):
How does it need to evolve? I think it's almost certainly
going to change. It's already begun to change.
So I think that change has takenplace largely because most of
the funds that were raised in crypto VC were raised in
2021-2022, and that was peak ZERP.
ZERP stands for 0 interest rate policies when all of the central
banks around the world were sending their rates to 0 or even

(01:08:44):
below 0 in many places. And that just meant that money
was burning a hole in your pocket.
You had to put your money to work somewhere.
And that meant a lot of risky capital.
A lot of a lot of risky capital found its way everywhere into
private equity, into VC into, you know, obviously crypto VC
was one of those beneficiaries. So those funds have largely run

(01:09:04):
off now. You know, usually in in venture,
you have a two to three-year fundraising cycle and then you
deploy your fund and then you goraise the next one.
Almost everybody who raised big funds during that time is now
coming back to market or they'realready back in market and those
funds in 20/21/22 have been drawn down.
So once those funds are over, you see that, you know, the next

(01:09:27):
vintage. If you can't raise that amount
of money anymore, then you have to downsize or you just have to
fold. You just have to go, you know,
find some other line of work. And that's for a lot of these
CS, that's the answer is that it's not just that, oh, they
can't raise as big of a fund as last time.
So they can't raise at all. You know, if you raised 150
million and now you can raise, you know, 20, those economics
mean that you have to fire your old team, right?

(01:09:47):
You can't, you can't run a fund,you can't keep your team.
You can't, you know, do what youwere doing before.
And so a lot of people, I think,just quit if they realize that
they can't really do that anymore.
Now we're in a relatively fortunate position that we have
a strong brand, we have strong returns.
And, you know, there are a lot of LP's that that know us and,
and want to continue working with us.
But I've seen even a lot of the brands that you know and love

(01:10:08):
really struggling in market to be able to get, you know, fund
vintages that are even comparable to their previous
sizes. You can see for some of the
funds that have been announced significantly smaller than they
were in 2021 for, you know, a lot of these name brand VCs have
come back to the market. So what does that mean for the
industry? A few things.
One, it means that there's a lotless money and a lot less froth

(01:10:30):
in investing into companies bothin the early stage and the late
stage. Now that may correct as you
start to see other forms of capital come into space.
So we see more growth capital and more, you know, pre IPO
investing. I think that's likely to be
actually pretty robust because there's, you know, growth
capital that's willing to touch crypto now, especially in the
fintech stable coin space. But in the crypto native stuff,
that's where it really is just the the crypto native VCs that

(01:10:54):
that invest into, you know, layer ones and layer twos and
things like this Dax's and so on.
And this capital is much tighterand everyone already feels it.
So I think what it means is fewer VCs.
I think it means more rational pricing.
I think it means that founders the bar to to raise money in
crypto and to and to be successful founders higher than

(01:11:15):
it's ever been. And many people were thinking
that, oh, well, there's going tobe mean reversion, like it's
going to go back to the way it was.
Things are going to be hot and crazy again because, you know,
all just haven't moved. And if all start moving, then
everything's going to change. And I think that's actually not
true. I think that even if all start
to move and you start to see like, OK, some of these funds
are getting good DPI and so on, the reality is that the

(01:11:35):
environment we had in 2021 will never come back.
Like we're not going back to ZERP again.
And we're not going back to the amounts of money and the
splashiness that you saw in 2021where deals are getting done
with no diligence, super fast term sheets, you know, half
baked ideas getting, you know, $10 million.
That is not going to come back. Even if as a price is too much
better, it does mean that valuations will go up, but those

(01:11:59):
valuations will be fought over by a smaller set of VCs moving
at a pace that's more akin to what traditional venture has
always looked like. If you think about it from the
perspective of someone starting a crypto company today also
feels like a very different environment, right where it's a
lot more mature. It's a lot of things have become

(01:12:20):
very competitive. As you pointed out, the
fundraising environment is more challenging.
What's your sort of main advice for someone wanting to start a
crypto company today? What should they keep in mind
and what has changed about like how we should approach this
today? My very glib answer is nothing

(01:12:44):
has changed. The reality is that founding a
startup in crypto was always hard.
Every single moment that I can remember, it was always hard.
Founders never thought it was easy to start companies and to
build things crypto even in times of the past.
Like if you think about 27 to 2018, which was, you know, the
golden era where a lot of the most important projects were
first built. I remember what it was like.

(01:13:06):
I remember how those founders felt at that time.
And the answer was that they felt like shit.
They felt like it was really hard.
They felt like they were struggling to get access to
capital. They felt like, you know, the
world didn't care about what they were building.
And and you might think even, you know, 2021 was the party
years. You know, that was when
everything was crazy. Money was really loose.
You know, everything felt kind of wild and splashy.
But even then, you know, I remember when a lot of these

(01:13:30):
companies were raising their seat rounds and they were
struggling. And it's just like, yeah, OK, I
can get some vanity metrics so Ican get a bunch of Twitter
followers. But can I actually get people to
use my product? Can I actually go hire a team?
Can I actually go, you know, build something that the world
cares about? The answer is that it doesn't
really matter where you are in the cycle.
Building companies is hard. Building products is hard.

(01:13:51):
Just even the act of deciding I'm going to go leave my job,
stake my reputation and my future career on the success of
this crazy idea that nobody believes in but me.
That's hard. And it will never not be hard.
So the end of the day, you don'tknow where markets are going and
you can't time things right. Nobody in 2018 was like, you

(01:14:11):
know what, that that was a greattime to quit my job and go all
in on crypto. Turned out to be right.
Nobody at the time thought it was a good idea.
It's in the in 2021, it turns out that actually was a terrible
time to start a company. Most of the companies in 2021
are failing miserably and do allthe time, Oh, it's a great time
to quit my job and go, you know,do some crazy thing.
So the reality is that you just don't fucking know.
And at the end of the day, starting a company and going

(01:14:34):
into, you know, building something and staking your
reputation on it is an immenselypersonal decision.
And that's where your convictionand your willingness to do it
should come from. Should not come from.
Hey, I think the market's good timing.
It's this and that, blah, blah, blah.
Who gives a shit? You don't know.
I don't know. Nobody knows, right?
If you have a good idea, if you really believe in it and you

(01:14:54):
believe in yourself, go build a company.
And if you don't, don't. Cool.
I have two more questions I wantto ask you about SO before.
Before, before you ask me that question, Brian, you are you are
yourself an entrepreneur. What would you say?
I mean, I, I feel like the, you know, just the key is to find

(01:15:17):
something. I mean, I would always use that
approach if I wanted to start another company at some point,
you know, I'd want to find something that of course one I'm
like deeply passionate about andthat I would be willing to keep
working on for like 10 years, right?
Because, and I think that is oneof the things that wasn't like I
wasn't so cognizant when I started course one for example,

(01:15:39):
was just that like, OK, once yougo down a road, right?
Once you choose something, right, like you have to stick
with it, right? Like you have to you have to
stick with it for a really long time.
So I think that is one thing that I think it's like super
crucial. And then, I mean, I am
personally very like, like I have a strong instinct of like

(01:16:03):
wanting to go somewhere that it's kind of overlooked and
ignored and not hot. And where I'd feel like, OK,
this is something that, you know, will become really big,
which, you know, I think a lot of people have the opposite
instinct, right? A lot because maybe a lot of
people are very good at execution and they're like, hey,
this is an obvious opportunity. Let me go and compete with

(01:16:25):
everyone else. And, you know, some people can
succeed that way. But I think right now you just
see so much copycats, right? It just feels like a vast
majority of stuff it's, you know, just people saying, oh,
this worked over there. Let me do the same thing over
here or and that's it seems veryshort sighted, right?

(01:16:52):
Because even if maybe you have some initial success and it's
probably a lot easier to get initial traction with a lot of
this stuff because, well, it's already kind of worked somewhere
and you can replicate it. Then I think that to actually
converting to something that like works in the long term
really hard. And I think the other issue I
see is I think people are just going to get bored of this

(01:17:15):
stuff, right? And they're like, this is kind
of lame, right? The thing I'm working on.
And then I think that's, that's the worst thing, right?
Because then I think the, the founders will get bored.
It will be harder to hire peopleor the people will be very
mercenary and kind of come and go and move to the next thing.
And so I think it's, and then I think crypto has, I guess one of

(01:17:40):
the things we are seeing, which I think is a, is a challenge for
the industry is that it's becomemore something that people see
as, hey, this is an industry where you can make a lot of
money quickly and a lot of opportunities.
So I think it attracts a lot of those people.
And then a lot of people I know,you know, who've been in crypto

(01:18:02):
for a long time, I feel are increasingly not that excited
about it anymore. So I think this is actually for
the first time, like last year, this year, where I see a lot of
people I know who've been aroundfor a long time who kind of
like, maybe I want to do something else, something I can

(01:18:23):
only encrypt anymore. Whereas, you know, a lot of
these people were like so passionate and so driven and
like so ideologically motivated.And so I see that as a, you
know, big challenge for the industry as well.
Yeah, that's very well said. There's a line by Sam Ullman
where he talks about, you know, when he was at YC originally, he

(01:18:45):
would talk about a very common advice would be, OK, don't try
to come up with some super crazy, extremely ambitious idea
because it's just too hard and you'll never be able to tackle
that as a start up. And after he came to open AI, he
said that he realized that he'd been giving bad advice at YC.
And then actually when you, whenyou pick something that's really
ambitious, that's like really crazy and they're like, OK, you

(01:19:07):
know, we're going to build AGI. It's like, OK, it's so unlikely
to succeed. It's so capital intensive.
It's crazy for a startup to wantto do that.
But the one thing that you will do with almost certainty is you
will attract followers to your cause because people want to
work at a company that's ambitious.
They want to go do something crazy.
They want to go do something that will change the world.
And you will be surprised at thelevel of credulity that people

(01:19:29):
will be drawn to. And it'll say like, fuck yeah, I
don't know if we'll pull it off,but like, let's try, let's go
try to build AGI. And that isn't that's resonated
more and more for me in cryptos that a lot of people, like you
said, they try to play small ball.
You know, I think like, Oh, well, you know, someone did this
thing on this exchange or on this this chain, although poured
over to this chain. And it's like a very safe
approach to building a company. And it's like, I'll probably

(01:19:51):
win. But you're absolutely right.
It doesn't attract great people,doesn't attract great investors.
And like, at the end of the day,the really like the the the
things that really energize people is always first and
foremost ambition. And that's what that's what, you
know, employees want to see. It's what investors want to see.
It's what the world wants to see.

(01:20:12):
Like the world will reward you for having an ambitious idea.
It might not succeed. But it it'll be a hell of a lot
better of a ride for you than going and building, you know,
the NY on on AZ. Yeah, absolutely.
I heard this on the interview with you where you said that you
think discipline was like the most important contributor to

(01:20:32):
your success. Like how how do you think about
discipline? How would you define it?
And what's your advice for someone who wants to become more
disciplined? Oh, damn, this is very, this is
very like general life advice. I don't know.

(01:20:52):
I don't know how good I am at, at this, but I'll give it a
shot. So I, I, I would consider myself
to be a, a very, very disciplined person.
I think I've been that way not all my life, but for much of my
life. You know, I, I work pretty much
all the time. I don't drink anything but
water. I get to kind of eat, work out
very you follow a regimen very assiduously.

(01:21:13):
And like my ability to stay focused on one task and not just
one task, but like one meta task, you know, not just
literally, OK, I'm, you know, writing and I'm going to write
for the whole hour, but just, you know, I'm going to be a
great investor and I'm going to learn everything that I need to
in order to be a great investor.The discipline to just keep
doing that over and over again for years is very rare.

(01:21:37):
And so discipline, I think it's something I intentionally
cultivated when I was younger because there's something I knew
I didn't have, you know, when I was, you know, I was younger, I
was at school, I was, I was a serial procrastinator.
I was super lazy. You know, I just played a lot of
computer games and, and I didn'treally give a shit about a lot
of things. And it's something I really
didn't like about myself is the fact that I was very
undisciplined. I was, I think I was obsessive

(01:22:00):
when I really, you know, catch my teeth and something, you
know, I'm the dog that can't letgo and, you know, just gets
dragged by the tailpipe by the truck.
You know, it's for many, many streets.
So I've always had that quality in me.
But being able to intentionally think like, hey, this thing that
I don't want to do, it kind of sucks.
I should just go do it. So I think that is one of the
qualities that I that I have andthat also intentionally

(01:22:20):
cultivated myself. And I think if, if you're asking
the question, how do I become more disciplined, I think the
answer with all these things is just practice, right?
So how do you practice discipline?
The answer is, OK, what's something you think you should
be doing? How do you, how do you create a
system that forces yourself to do it?
So I'll give you one example. I know that as AVC, it's very
important to me to build, very important for me to build my

(01:22:41):
public brand to tweet to like kind of be out there, right?
And, and, you know, over the last few years, I've, I've, you
know, my, my voice is very much risen in volume and, and in, you
know, having a spotlight within special crypto Twitter.
And that was very intentional, right?
It was not an accident that I was able to cultivate my voice
in that way. But one of the most people don't

(01:23:02):
know about me is that I actually, I don't read Twitter.
I, I actually block all feeds onmy phone.
I have a rule, no algorithmic feeds on my phone ever.
Everything that I try to do is pull based rather than push
based, Meaning I don't want to be told, hey, read this, read
that. I want to intentionally go and
choose, I'm going to read this, I'm going to go look for this
information, etcetera. And so my relationship with

(01:23:25):
Twitter is like literally I block it.
I block the feed. I have a like browser extensions
that block all feeds on my, on my browser.
And I don't have the mobile app installed on my phone.
And nevertheless, I'm tweeting very regularly, a tweet
actually. I have a rule.
I tweet once a day every weekday, at least once a day
every week. And if I don't any given day, I
have to pay somebody $100. And I've been doing that now for

(01:23:48):
years because the honest to God,true, I hate tweeting, really
don't like social media, but I do it intentionally cultivate
it. And for a long time, the the way
that I did it is that I would force myself to do it right.
And like, how do I force myself to do the most excruciating
thing you can do is to send $100to your friend and be like,
like, don't, don't, don't donateto charity.

(01:24:10):
Don't do something good with it.Go waste it on something that's
going to really piss me off. And I've been doing things like
this for years as a way of cultivating this habit in myself
of just tweeting regularly. And now it's like a muscle.
Like now I just, you know, oh, Igot a tweet today, Boom, boom,
boom, you know, get it out thereAnd, and, you know, try to try
to write something that I think is going to resonate with
people. So this kind of thing, you know,

(01:24:31):
just multiply that by, you know,everything that I'm doing in my,
in my, in my life that that I find is important.
You can do that. Anybody can do that anytime they
want. It doesn't have to be $100,
could be $5.00, but it just has to be like, look, you know the
things already that you wish youwere doing that you're not
doing. And in a way, like how can you

(01:24:52):
create? The one thing that you've
learned in order to actually cultivate discipline is not
about being disciplined, right? Like one thing that you have to
assume about yourself is that you are a lazy piece of shit.
You know, that is how I model myself.
I have a lazy piece of shit. And the only way that I will do
things is if I have to, if I either pre commit myself to

(01:25:13):
doing it such that I can't back out of it, or I've created a
structure that is going to forceme to do it right.
It's sort of environmental design.
These two things to me are the core of how you ultimately
cultivate discipline is by either making public commitments
that you can't go back on, or bycreating these structures around
you that are going to force you to do it.

(01:25:34):
And if you keep doing those things, eventually people look
at you and they'll call you disciplined, right?
It's like when people look at meand they call me disciplined.
I'm like, that is not how I pursue.
I've, I, I have a lazy piece of shit.
I know myself wanted to know that if all these structures
fell away, I would just, you know, I would lie in bed and
play video games and smoke dope or whatever.
Like I would be, I would be absolutely useless as a human

(01:25:54):
being. So this, these things come from
what you put into it, that that's the best answer I can
give about how to cultivate discipline.
I think that's a fantastic answer and it definitely
resonates. Maybe it's just the final one.
So do you, you know, you're someone who's very curious,
right? Do you like to explore different

(01:26:15):
things, learn? I mean, you've made, you've had
some, you know, very fundamentalchanges in, you know, your
career and focus. Do you think you'll always be an
investor or do you have something in your mind or like,
OK, one day this is what I want to do.
I, I will always be an investor in the sense that I will always

(01:26:40):
be investing into things, but will I always be a professional
investor? I doubt it.
I think I'm somebody who I naturally have moved through
many different domains in the course of my life and I'm almost
certainly not done. That being said, you know, I'm,
I'm very committed to building Dragonfly and to investing into
what I see as that, you know, generations of, of crypto

(01:27:02):
technology that are still yet tobe fully, fully done.
But there will come a time when crypto's basically done, not
that crypto's not going to change anymore.
That's there's not going to be new founders or new start-ups.
But you know, if you think aboutlike, for example, social media,
social media really stopped being venture investable after

(01:27:22):
about 2010 right now. That being said, social media
companies between 2010 and 2025 became the most important
companies in the world. Social media won.
The thesis was absolutely correct, but there's there's
really nothing more to do as VC,right?
Almost every single social mediacompany was already built before
2010. And so I think that I think that

(01:27:46):
that's probably going to be trueof crypto at some point.
I don't think it's true yet, butit will be true of crypto at
some point that all the most important companies slash
protocols are basically built and the growth is going to
happen in public markets, non private markets, the same way
that happened in social media. And I think that will be the
point at which we say we were right, we won, right.
All the things that that you know, you and I, when we first

(01:28:07):
came in this industry, all the things we were saying that
nobody believed us, we were vindicated.
But there's there's nothing moreto do as AVC like you're done,
hang up your hat, go do something else.
I don't want to overstay my welcome as AVCI don't want to be
cling on and raising funds when I don't really believe that
there's still this, this golden era of opportunities of

(01:28:28):
companies and protocols we built.
I think there very much obviously still is.
And you can just see how much turn, you know, Solana just went
from nowhere to being a dominantchain in the span of like a year
and a half. Like that just happened.
So very clearly, like we're not done.
There's still an enormous rate of change in this industry.
But is it going to last 10-15 years?
I don't know, maybe not. And if not, I will hang up my

(01:28:50):
hat and go do something else. Cool.
All right. Well, thank you so much to
Steve. It was a huge pleasure to have
you on. Really enjoyed the conversation.
Thanks for having me, Brian. Thanks a lot of fun.
It was an honor to be on this is.
If I if I told myself seven years ago that I'd eventually be
on Epicenter, I think I would have been elated.
So thanks for having me. Thanks so much, Asib.

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Dragonfly: The Secrets of a Top-Tier Crypto VC - Haseeb Qureshi

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Dragonfly: The Secrets of a Top-Tier Crypto VC - Haseeb Qureshi