Previously I wrote: “One of the most important skills founders must hone is their ability to tell a compelling story. Part of that story, if they plan or want to use venture capital as a tool to grow, is articulating how much money they want to raise and what they plan to do with that money.”
Moving from entrepreneur to investor, I assumed that founders universally knew about the importance of storytelling. I took this for granted and was very wrong. Most of the time an introductory meeting is 30 minutes. That’s a huge chunk of time to leave a lasting impression, and it belongs to you. Seize it by telling the best story possible, and augment it with the best presentation you've ever made. I’m constantly shocked by how many people just want to shoot the shit, or act cute and coy and don't use the time productively to either share what they’re building and why they're building it or begin to develop a lasting relationship in a productive way.
There are many pieces of a story that are important to communicate, and every story is different, but there are some obvious and important component parts that you should always get across either with or without a deck:
Who are you? I like to know your personal background and story. It humanizes you as an entrepreneur.
What are you building? Too many entrepreneurs struggle to crisply articulate what is it they’re building. When this happens I immediately shut down. Whether right or wrong, it’s my dealbreaker and I can’t compromise on it. Workshop this, get feedback, refine it, do whatever you need to do to nail this. Another great way to communicate this is to show and not tell. A quick one liner accompanied by a very simple product demo (ie don’t show me every feature, just enough to grasp what it is) is always helpful. Do not mess this part up. This may sound painfully obvious, but too many people do it wrong.
Why are you building this? The why is the fire that fuels you for the decade to come. Express this with passion.
How’s it going? What have you learned? What’s the data look like? How are the market and customers reacting to what you’re putting out there? This is a good time to demonstrate that you’re capable of synthesizing market feedback and doing something intelligent with it. What have you learned from the capital and time you've invested invested so far? I’ve always liked Frank Rotman's framing of quality learnings per dollar spent.
What’s the plan moving forward? What does the roadmap look like? How much capital do you want to raise and what will you do and accomplish with it?
And don’t forget to paint a picture of why this is so exciting and how this becomes big and important along the way.
Some entrepreneurs are gifted storytellers. Others are not. But storytelling is a skill that can be learned and honed over time. Practice it repeatedly. Do it in front of a mirror. Nail the delivery of the most important lines. Record it and review the tapes like a professional sports team would to get better. Pace around the room by yourself endlessly rehearsing it out loud. Practice it with your cofounder for days on end. Laugh about it. Cry about it. Give each other high fives. Give each other a hug. Scream at each other. Get weird. Enjoy the process. Refine it. Get it to the place where you can enter a meeting, start presenting, completely black out, come to at the end of the presentation and know it was flawlessly delivered. It needs to be superb and capable of being delivered on autopilot.
If you do not take this part of company building seriously then you are shooting yourself in the foot. Some companies strike gold and are in the right place at the right time and have captured lightning in a bottle and could keep their mouths shut and term sheets and job applications would be delivered to their doorstep. This is the exception and not the rule. I’ve never built one of these companies, and chances are you won’t either. Not because you’re not amazing, but because the odds are statistically near zero. So in lieu of getting absurdly lucky, you have your story. It’s your ammo for attracting capital and talent. Make sure you invest in it because it pays dividends.
I’ve been spending time thinking about how web3 will influence the future of social networks and consumer applications. There are three core areas that are most exciting to me: public social networks, private social networks (eg the real-life communities that exist in messaging applications), and marketplaces. An emergent onchain internet architecture, characterized by protocols, open graphs, and composability, is giving builders another crack at reinventing these categories. I plan to write a series of posts highlighting how these different areas may evolve over time, beginning with public social networks.
Last yearSteve Martocci and I were talking about the future of social networks. We are both obsessed withself-directed healthcare, and we observed that so much of the bottoms-up dialogue that happens in the space occurs in subreddits, and it has reached a tipping point where it deserves its own place on the internet to call home.
This is a theme that will come to define the future of social networks over the next decade. Over the past 10 years, social networks have become less social and more broadcast. I’ve written about it inWTF is Social Media? The playgrounds we used to call our homes have turned into large horizontal media distribution channels and have lost their sense of intimacy. As a result, relationships - both based on real-life connections and around interests - have been pushed to the edge. They have found their home in group chats within messaging applications and in subreddits.
The time has come for these networks to inhabit new spaces that can deliver richer functionality, better UX, and a variety of different business models that benefit both application developers and network participants. I have been particularly interested in how subreddits can be siphoned off the mothership and turn into thriving networks of their own. There is no reason why a message board should be the universal form factor for social networks. We have seen instances of this happening from communities on Discord to sites likePatients Like Me.
Last week I attendedFarcon, a sufficiently decentralized conference organized by people, mainlyTed (not lasso), who are active participants in the Farcaster community. It was small (roughly 500 attendees), but filled to the brim with energy that was reminiscent of SXSW from 2009-2011. Everyone there was eager to experiment with new products, learn from the people using their products, and support the ecosystem. It felt like a very special moment in time and in ten years I think we will look back on that event as a tipping point for web3 social.
Dan andVarun (Farcaster founders) kicked off the conference and they discussed their strategy for growing the Farcaster protocol to 1m+ DAU. One of the pillars of the strategy that they call "cozy corners" rhymes with the idea of giving flourishing subreddits a place to call their own on the internet. Dan alluded to the notion that subreddits with millions of active users can and should actually be their own freestanding networks and businesses on the internet.
This deeply resonated with me. "Creating cozy corners" is an endearing turn of phrase, but there are powerful pockets of the internet that pack a punch and will emerge as independent social networks of their own. Channels on farcaster may very well be the thing that enables the rapid acceleration of this trend, which we can think of as the unbundling of Reddit.
Channels are the perfect conduit for this because as they become decentralized and protocolized, channel creators can spin them off into their own client. They can build their own UX around them. They can monetize them through a variety of different mechanisms. Maybe participants will need to pay a one-time fee to be able to post to the network. This could improve the quality of content and dialogue. Perhaps those that can't afford to pay will have different paths to post, like volunteering to be a moderator. Each network can have its own programmatic reputation system. Maybe it's interoperable with other channels/networks. Perhaps everyone needs to subscribe to the channel usingSTP. Each network may have its own native economy and token used for tipping and payments. Maybe network creators can economically participate in minting fees from the channel as a native monetization mechanism. Maybe every channel participant is also an owner and can accumulate more ownership over time based on a transparent set of rules and dividends are distributed regularly. Maybe users can collectively determine that their posts and various contributions to the network can be sold as data to train an open source AI model and they're each individually and proportionally compensated.
The canvas is wide open. Composability, openness, tokens, reputation, and native web3 monetization models - both existing ones and ones to be invented - along with a whole host of other onchain primitives will come to define emergent social networks. Web3 is opening the aperture to an entirely new UX and business model paradigm and we are going to enter a new age of many smaller but thriving social networks, each special and unique in different ways yet built atop shared infrastructure and information.
I believe this decade will be very special and I feel lucky to be here for it.
I remember buying my first BTC on Coinbase in 2013. It was during one of the first crypto bubbles, and the world was freaking out that BTC had surpassed $300. I happily participated in that hype cycle without really understanding what crypto was.
When I was building Fundera I was pretty heads down for the better part of a decade. I continued to buy BTC over time - I can probably time my purchases to increased mainstream media coverage. I was easily influenced and I never really took the time to do a deep dive and teach myself about blockchains or read the BTC and ETH whitepapers. It wasn’t until I read Digital Gold in 2018 that things really started to click.
After Fundera was acquired in 2020 I finally did the work. I voraciously consumed every piece of literature I could get my hands on. I also tried to play with every product I could. As I was doing this, I would attempt to identify areas of opportunity and investment. What protocols would power the future internet? What was the underpinning of a new financial system? Which NFTs would maintain their value through a market downturn? Of course, this was in the midst of the last bull market. Needless to say, I got rekt.
This was an important learning experience for me. I was fine with losing money as an angel investor, especially because a lot of the investments I made had sound reasoning behind them, they were just poorly timed. They also provided a good opportunity to tax-loss harvest. What I wasn’t fine with was getting caught up in the hype and doing things because of FOMO. It was disappointing to succumb to it, and it taught me that doing things because they are in vogue is not the right reason to do them. I should do them when I have a deep understanding and conviction. I imagine this is a lesson I’ll continuously learn, but I can at least now recognize what it feels like in the moment.
Fast forward to today and something is very different for me in the world of crypto. I am fully red-pilled, as Nick likes to point out. When I first started to really dig in in 2020, a lot of the products I used felt like they were enabling me to participate in the global casino. They were speculative in nature. It was fun, and there were definitely foundational developments that emerged, but a lot of the UX for me was oriented around trading and swapping and buying and collecting and hodling. Today so much of the UX is wrapping my hands around products I can regularly use and immediately get utility and joy from. They’re social in nature and familiar, yet novel and experimental.
There has been much talk and writing about the theoretical power of onchain applications in the context of rebuilding consumer networks and services, but now we are seeing those theories become reality. Every day my eyes light up when I see the power of composability and headless application architecture and open graphs manifest in the form of a new product and experience. Entrepreneurs are connecting the dots in real-time, and they are enabling consumers to experience a better way of doing things on the internet.
