Had a little over 75 in-person meetings last week in Singapore. Crypto, in its current stage, rhymes equal parts with an MLM industry and the future of the web. Here is the distilled, TL:DR version of what I learned in Singapore, mixed with photos as is tradition. 1. Why Events There were 700 side events because it's the easiest way for a CMO to justify the job. In-person events are measured with footfall, instead of on-chain value creation (which is harder). Signaling linkages to others in the industry, helps close deals. Most importantly, free food and booze is the oldest trick in the game. They work. If anything, it's a sign of broken incentives in the industry. The current pipeline for capital looks like this: Fund of funds -> VCs -> Founders - > CMOs -> Night clubs. I think it really highlights what's broken with distribution and incentives. Or its globalisation. Not my monkey, not my circus. 2. Token Comps Tokens being down 70-80% on average has a dual sided impact on employee morale. People feel burnt out, and over-worked. Crypto's original promise was exponential upside, for limited risk. Last year's token performance flipped the promise. It's boundless work, for declining upside. For some ecosystems (like SOL), the story is different due to price action (and focus on community). You can see how this variance in comp affects decision making and morale within teams. Some teams, thanks to where the price is, have a disproportionate edge over others. I think there's a loop - where lower prices, lead to worse off decisions, which in turn leads to worse off decisions. 3. VCs, DPIs and tokens Most VC funds are either raising, or set to raise. It makes me wonder where all the idle capital from a few years went back. The alt-coin sell pressure from the past few quarters are likely funds selling off alts that are vested to produce returned capital before raising a new fund. Will they succeed in raising new funds? Yes. Will that new raised funds go to existing tokens or themes? Probably not. I think a lot of VCs are burnt from the past two years and will (i) suppress valuations or (ii) push for earlier liquidity. You can see this play out with consumer app valuations. Few biters. For the VC model to work - you need multiple tokens, listing at high FDVs, with low floats, to mark-up books, and raise new funds (before vests). That pipeline, relies on eigen, berachain, monad - so there's a lot of eyeballs on it. Unlike last cycle, between perps and OTC, that market has evolved too - so its an interesting time for VC overall. 4. All eyes on consumer One of our own portfolio founders added a million users last quarter. Each day, he's adding another 10-15k users. I don't think it will remain the exception. Consumer apps with founders that are non-token first, will likely blitzscale. The same applies to RWA founders with a fintech first focus. As VCs are token oriented and these founders are outsiders, many of them will remain undervalued (and as pariahs). My honest ask to many of them have been to avoid talking to gatekeepers. I think between MPC wallets, L2s and better on-ramps, we are at the cusp of seeing a new generation of consumer apps that have very little t do with existing token economies. Will they be valued as high? Will they create token returns the same way? Probably not. I think they will need a new class of equity first VCs. Or existing ones will flock to equity, and here's the reason why. 5. Exchanges have reduced listing VC backed bags. This is voodoo-hot air theory. But I think regulatory capture will drastically reduce the number of VC backed tokens that make it to large exchanges (like Binance or Coinbase). You can see versions of this if you look at the number of VC backed tokens making it to exchanges and compare to frequency in past cycles. One theory is that retail capital is not flowing in like it once used to and exchanges have no reason to. The other, is that price discovery in exchanges have been down only - and they are being more picky. Whatever be the case, not being able to mark-up books and raise new funds will have trickle down effects on venture valuations. This is why most funds have a preference of lower valuations (risk premia for illiquidity) or SAFTS (assurance that liquidity will come). I think as listings on exchanges get harder, we will see capital flow through to equity. 6. On token management. A lot of founders seem to be issuing tokens as that is what VCs are backing today. But the same guys will vanish once your FDV is around your series A valuations. If you are a founder - consider hard and strong about issuing tokens. If you do issue a liquid token, IR (or educating markets) about what you do is as important as running the product. There's space emerging for new forms of media that highlights key metrics, and earnings for protocols. This subsection of the market is small today - but as nature of investors focused on liquid markets trend to sophistication and number of tokens that are at low valuations increase, I see more capital flowing towards this segment. 7. The Early adopter-gatekeeper See all these packed events? Talk to most folks attending them, and you'll realise everyone has a clear agenda. Most of the time, its money. Loads of it. And that's fine, its a capitalist economy after all. The problem, is when a subsection has made tremendous wealth by being early and packages the same old thing in new words and continues to do the same things. We somehow presume everything needs a token. Everything needs to be overly complicated. Everything needs millions in burn. The early adopters are rich and can afford to be stupid for years on length. New guys (post 2022 entrants) that haven't made bank, have to lean on efficiency. But in pursuit of efficiency, they seek advice from early adopters, and get lessons on a constant grift. I think this is why our industry struggles to evolve. It rhymes with MLM schemes, because they work the same way. An early adopter wins by virtue of being early. As new entrants arrive, the early adopter continues to win. With each new participant, the amount of return declines. Sooner or later, you will have a desperate large bottom pyramid. If you are in the industry, it helps to wonder - are you desperate, or leading. Are you being efficient, or consuming junk. Just lots of room for introspection there. The way these systems break is when a new entrant ignores the rules and builds a business to scale ignoring the incumbents. My thoughts, prayers and dollars can be behind you if that's you. 8. DePin Data This is specific to data points (like audio, spacial data, map data etc). I think a lot of these will rhyme with P2E as it gives retail a chance to enter the industry and can be packaged like a dream. Spend $50 to make $100 is an easy sell. My concern here is how valuable is this data? My running assumption is valuation fr such data will be at 1000x what they are actually worth. They will be great trades (and worth playing on liquid side) - but the long-tail of data accumulators will be in for a rude awakening. Much of that sector rhymes with gaming guilds at this point. I know this is a sceptical take, but I'm putting it out there for healthy discourse on the value of the data. Some of it will be tremendously valuable, and much of it will be useless. Kind of like the long-tail of BS. Which leads me to my final point. 9. The Long-tail of BS. Every category initially has few players that are pioneers. They attract high valuations. Which in turn accrues talent building in the same category. If you are imitating a business, you are likely in the long-tail of BS category. It works if you have niche or geo-specific moats, but odds are quite low you have those moats. This applies to service providers (like lawyers) as much as it applies to product categories (like GambleFi or Web3 social). The long-tail of BS happens because there's more VCs than thoughtful builders in the room. The long-tail of BS cannot be avoided. It is a thing. It is a beast to be acknowledged. As the industry grows, the long-tail of BS will grow even longer. You can see it in the booths with no product. In the events with no conversations. In the KOL rounds with financial shenanigans. In the gigantic face of a founder with no product slapped on an event entrance. The long tail of BS is everywhere. I think it can't be tamed. It can't be cut. It only has to be acknowledged and waded through. The reason why the long-tail of BS exists (currently) is because founders (and talent) that can meaningfully produce impact are likely in other sectors (like AI). Even funds that deploy at scale, see this tday. There is an evident decline in the quality of individuals. But this is what retail adoption looks like. As the sector scales - it brings with it everything that society is. The good, the bad, the ugly - and well, even FTX. You just need to grow smarter as the long-tail of BS takes over. A lot of the systemic challenges (and opportunities) that exist in crypto are dependent on price. As the fed cuts rates, much of what I said will change. We are quite probably at the early stages of a new cycle. I am not as bearish - but there's a healthy amount of skeptical cynicism in me. We have work to do.

“When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.” ― Pablo Picasso

All games played outside the rules of merit eventually die sad, pathetic, well deserved deaths.

been in dubai for a few weeks the energy around tokenisation - and second order products being built in this region has me convinced irr on 2027 cohort of startups from the region will be off the charts. quality of founders + ambition much higher exciting times.

Sad to hear Hsin Ju's passing away. She was full of life and built incredibly cool things. Life can be cruel in how it takes someone like that away in a blink. Life is random. One never knows how long we have with one another. Be kind, and watch when people are at the brink of giving up. The startup game is filled with glitz, glamor and a lot of big numbers flying around. But if you are an operator - sometimes living to see another day, is a win in itself. Take care of yourself if you are in a dark and gloomy place. My DMs are always open if a chat helps.

a founder has only two real jobs 1. validate where $ comes from 2. invalidate everything else ruthlessly i think in pursuit of optionality, startups prioritise too many things. inevitably leading to death. fwiw - a version of this extends to raising capital too.

capitalism is the world's best multiplayer game

Some of the best VCs ever came from non-traditional backgrounds: - Michael Moritz: journalist, history - Peter Thiel: lawyer, philosophy - Keith Rabois (@rabois) lawyer, political science - Chris Sacca (@sacca) lawyer - Ron Conway (@RonConway) sales - John Doerr: sales - Don Valentine: sales / marketing, chemistry

a growth oriented culture is never comfortable a comfort oriented culture, never grows

india gang — more awesome ideas to build this hackathon season from the 🐐

Since this is superteam India - here's 10 things I wish we saw from the blockchain ecosystem in India - some harder, than others to solve 1. Banking app for Indian NRI diaspora - I know it sounds like the most generic thing but do you realise how big the TAM is? 2. A marketplace for tokenised instruments coming out of India - mostly debt instruments from gift city. 3. Healthcare record digitisation (needs legislative help) 4. Carbon credit market (needs chutzpah and a lot of dollars - but worth it) 5. Supply chain verification for geo-specific, luxury products (again, hard product - but large TAM) 6. Private credit pools for fintech startups (running on-chain, with zk for verification) 7. An edtech lending marketplace working on income share agreements for students 8. Cross-country credit for NRIs moving outward (basically credit score portability) 9. Land/Title deed verification stack (dont tokenise it, just let me verify things) 10. Same stack - for automobile verification and underwriting. There is this idea that everything needs to be a market and speculatory. India is the opposite - it needs you to aggregate, verify and integrate with capital markets. Ideally $ flow requires capital market partners and does not use the balance sheet of the startup, but solving the aggregation side of all problems mentioned above is hard work. Which is why nobody within crypto tackles them. That is also why there is opportunity there. If you build any of these - I'd be happy to brainstorm and help see things through zero to one. I might know a thing or two. I have been steadily rebuilding a portfolio of firms working on hard financial problems - far away from CT. Strong preference for fintech operators / folks that have seen systems to scale within the region

A theory on why markets are the last thing left to build on the internet. When Ben Thompson wrote about Aggregation (in 2015) - the social web had just matured. Facebook had a billion users. Digital media had taken over traditional ones. That proximity gap - of making the world appear closer was Meta's original pitch. Connecting people. Aggregation theory functioned on the idea that if you pull together the demand side (an audience) you could determine how the supply side (creators) operated. For creators, giving up that freedom was worth it because on the internet - the TAM for your writing, music or whatever else you did was infinitely larger. The internet aggregated the longtail of niches such as the weirdo in Bombay with a love for Soviet era stamps, could find a friend from the Soviet Union on the internet. The problem that's happened with the web, is that while the demand side has scaled infinitely (±5.5B eyeballs online now) - the supply side has also grown. So you have splintered attention switching between niches constantly. Algorithms serve content on personal finance, health, what that questionable match from hinge from six months back all at the same time. It was a beautiful world, where attention did aggregate online - because the old was being replicated digitally. That is - the physical world was gradually being remade online. And since the nature of these conversations are often optimised for virality and engagement - the human element of connections no longer exists. What you have is a master that determines who is rewarded with digital serfs working harder for lower pay. The casualties of this transition lay littered in the history of the web. Zynga. Buzzfeeds. Vice. Scaled media has been slaughtered and in its place, Substack and a series of long-form writing has emerged. So long as the internet runs on economy of scale without payments in the process, we are bound to repeat the mistake of the past 20 years. Between 2007 and 2012, there was a wave of social networks because the advertisement driven business model of clicks had come of age. Between 2026 and 2031, you will see transactional businesses that come of age. Instead of selling physical goods (like Amazon did), these will sell digital goods. And the lower the cost of production of these digital goods, the higher the margin a platform has. Polymarket’s marginal cost on a yes contract is 0. Perpetual markets embedded in products do not cost more for each new product they embed in. You can see this with wallets. MetaMask, Phantom, Jupiter have each embedded and expanded the nature of their markets. You see this with Hyperliquid’s builder codes allowing anyone to launch a market. While x402 is likely to be the element that makes a paywalled, curated and reasonable internet likely - in the interim, we will have a phase where speculation and trading drives the bulk of the revenue in new age internet economy platforms. This will blend financial products (like equities), with cults of personalities and entertainment (like prediction markets or meme coins). The reason for this is simply incentives. And by that I do not mean platform incentives. I mean user incentives. In an attention economy - if a meme went viral, the user (audience) never benefited from the fame. In transaction economy markets like the one you see on Fomo, a user benefits from liquidity concentrating in what they are early to. The platform benefits, but there are wealth effects for the users. Statistically, most of this wealth goes back. But the psychological after-effect of dopamine and the commercial (possibility of) outcomes being huge means these trends are here to stay. But not everything has to be a speculatory market on its own. The nature of networks (and profit seeking) is such that new markets form. Stablecoin remittance is a market. So is tokenisation of equities. And so will agentic trading for rebalancing of equities in portfolios. In such a world, although trading platforms will be the toys that show what is possible, there will be a new economy (or market) of hyper-personalised financial goods that are managed by commodified intelligence, running on blockchain rails. They will require working on distribution, legislation and understanding geo-specific nuances. These new age markets, will be where the bulk of the value on the internet will emerge for the next decade. Aggregation theory’s first leg looked at physical goods and human attention. As those markets get saturated, the next leg will look at financial markets. The reason is that the underlying - of commodified assets (like equities) are now on the internet. In the previous decade, that was not the case. Perhaps, this is the bullcase for blockchain apps. Not memes or prediction markets - but a new class of markets that operate at the seams finance struggles to reach because they operate on legacy infrastructure, with practices designed for an age before the internet existed. Because when the VCs wake up from their atoms not bits slumber and AI (as a sector corrects) - mankind will still need to do what we’ve always done. Move money and transact with one another.

It might be a bear market but there are great teams incredible things at the frontier. Often without noise. Kicking off a series notes on some of them. For today, we have @get_truenorth questioning what happens if you put an analyst in everyone's pocket. 📱

I've been tinkering with both Hermes and Grok bot for the past few weeks. Here's a note on what each of them are good at and what might be a better fit for you. Hermes is closer to a lego block set. It takes time to set up, but everything is customisable. You can choose the model you want, the place cron jobs deliver and what it does. That can mean a steep learning curve for people who don't have the patience for it. If you are tinkering with Hermes - the fastest way to do it, is to go through their cloud deployment, use deepseek v4 flash, and plug to whatsapp/telegram/imessage. Ask the agent (via session chat on terminal in the cloud) to not send outputs that are mid-way through generating. Now you have something, that looks and functions close enough to instinct. If you change the model to Fable or Astra, the outputs are incredible. The point of a cloud instance is having a machine doing things while you are afk. Hermes comes pre-set with a bunch of tools that give it browser access. If you want to go further - load exa with $5 and set up a keenable api. I like to read niche, ancient articles and this is what I generally do with it. I type into whatsapp whatever is on my mind and it usually pulls things from arxiv/internet archive and adds it to my readwise. If you give it a Sora API key (costs ±20) it can also pull twitter feed info. Treat Hermes - as an interface between you and the web. If you want to get more sophisticated - use the cloud instance, set up webhooks and have jobs that run on specific things happening. A rather ugly example could be - tracking flight tickets to a certain region, when odds of conflict on polymarket go above a certain price. Or tracking transactions happening from a wallet. Or scanning a specific subreddit for trending content delivered to your inbox. Now onto Grok. Grok is the enterprise product that was built by start-up folks. The best use of the $300 plan is the inference you get on grok heavy - instead of the bot itself. So if you have grok heavy (the sub), and you are okay with it - you can use the Hermes harness with Grok API and use both the bot AND hermes. You can get grok's entry level plan but odds are high you will be out of usage before you set up your accounts and the first batch of cron jobs. Now why would you do that? (AFAIK) - Grok's marketing suggests a cloud computer, but all their agents run on the same machine. So if you have a heavy throughput workflow, you are looking at your agents lagging sooner/later. Hermes skill/mcp set up means you can swap out the model and use something else if you run out of mileage. That said - Grok is exceptionally smart with a few things Its agents chat delivery system is a lot easier to work with than the learning curve for Hermes. The cron jobs deliver where you'd expect it to. And they are clean outputs. I liked that. The bot marketplace and integrations - remind me of Apple's store. Hermes' is open, but it has a steeper learning curve for someone starting from scratch. Grok has the benefit of social proximity to a lot of SV folks talking about how they use it directly in their workflows. Its onboarding of your work tools - gmail, slack, notion etc is much more streamlined. So for someone who has 20 mins to be good to go, this will always be the preferred tool. For whatever reason - the agent is exceptionally smart with looking at emails, slack and notion and triaging what needs done. I would say its an 8/10 EA. One of the things Grok has going for it is the twitter integration. You can get tweets synced directly to a grok bot and have bookmarks saved on tools like Readwise or Cubox - which is what I like to use it for. The subscription gives you $50 of API credits on X, which is handy to set up some of these work flows. It also has mobile apps that are live and functional today. Which matters if you do not want to tinker with a messaging app. I see Hermes as a very powerful tool that needs quite a bit of tweaking. And Grok as a very useful tool that lacks quite a bit of power. And in some sense - that is the reality of it. Hermes is built by ±3000 contributors by a startup that (afaik) is ±2 years old. Grok sits within xAI and SpaceX's broader mandate. One of these are hitting way above their weight. Now - where do I see value? If I had $300 to burn without a care -and that meant my worklife got better, Grok is where my dollars would go. If I had $20 to burn, and I wanted just as much value but I do not mind spending a few hours tweaking and figuring how cron jobs work - then Nous is where the $ will go. - Grok is like iOS. Closed ecosystem with taste. To be precise, it feels like an iPad. Highly functional but restrictive. - Hermes feels like a 2018 era thinkpad running linux because it is powerful and works well but has some hiccups along the way. The keyboard (or skills/mcp and modularity of model switch ups) and the modality with which you can interact with it - feels like a step up to how we interact with the web. Can taste, modularity and functionality in the context of these harnesses intertwine? I think yes. The gap in whatever i call "taste" above will probably close in the next six months because Hermes will release its own apps. And fwiw, their cloud deployments are already far better than what Grok does. tl:dr - most of the things you see on grok vs hermes lack nuance. use claude for 90% of the things you do if you're on a budget. use hermes if you have the time to set it up. use grok, if budgets are not a constraint and you have a job that does not require heavy throughputs. P.s - I have no affiliation with either of these guys. I do spam the folks at Nous research from time to time with product feedback and that's about it.

Words from @JohnMayer on the 20th anniversary of his legendary Continuum album. “Nobody cares how long it takes if the music is meaningful.”

Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.