Morning Mist #1: Consumer Crypto Investing

Hi all - welcome to the first issue of Morning Mist.

This issue will be public facing, but make sure to subscribe to receive the private only issues as well.

*This issue is a crosspost from Morning Mist.

This first issue comes in timely, as we’re doing our yearly portfolio review at Social Graph Ventures.

It’s been ~2 years since we started investing, and a bit more than a year since I started doing it full time. We’re a bit more than halfway deployed, and there’s a lot of learnings that we’re implementing for the second half.

Anonymizing the markups using fruit names.

We’ve seen 438 early stage crypto companies, most of them building consumer products. We’ve funded 36 of them. That’s an 8% rate, which is way higher than we want, for 2025 only, the rate has been ~5%. For top tier firms, preseed/seed deals are 1-3% range, and series B rates are 5-10%.

For 2026, my goal is to have a 2-3% and have seen 500 companies in total for the year. This means that we need to actively chase more deals. More than 50% of my net worth is tied to SGV, and my incentives are to make sure this ends up being the most successful crypto consumer vehicle out there. This means ramping up efforts on content (like this), cold outreach, and warm outreach within our network.

Our writeoffs come mostly from 2023 investments that have died down. A learning here, if we can, avoid investing in ecosystem centered projects. Projects tied to a specific ecosystem have an additional layer of risk that is too heavy to carry.

Another fact is that there’s a lot of ongoing pivots, and half of them are chasing prediction markets, which is the shiny thing at the moment. A lot of companies in this group have underwent through layoffs, reset periods, and just plain hard times.

Most of our companies are in early PMF, scaling usage, but not having crazy traction. Companies here are lukewarm, neither good, or bad, it’s very easy to become complacent at this point, and to be honest, I’d rather have a company go through a pivoting phase or jump to the markup area.

Only a handful of our companies have had markups (14%) and even fewer are doing significant growth and revenue numbers. We’ve had a couple of 4-6x markups, but we still want to have the 100x exit that will return the fund.

The common thread across the best companies are:

Skilled technical cofounder or founder.
Young and hungry founders: Most of our successful founders had good young careers, rising ranks in their companies at high speeds.
Multiple touchpoints: In most cases, we were able to see if the founders had executed over a period of at least a few weeks before deciding to invest.
Not chasing the current thing: In none of the cases, the founder was focused on building on top of the shiny new thing.

For 2026, the things that I’m leaning into are:

Great founders creating new paradigms: This is innovation at it’s core. No one knew about prediction markets before they were big, we plan to have our eyes wide open for great founders working on novel concepts, stuff that it uniquely enabled by crypto, ZK, futarchy, decentralized ai and social graphs.
Consumer trading: Wether it’s neobanks, neobrokers, or prediction market mobile apps, the next interface of these products looks a lot more like robinhood than a traditional trading terminal.
Creator coins: A lot of protocols have tried and tested with creator coins, and I do think a newcomer will build on top of the learnings, and make a great platform for creators to launch their coin(s) and for fans to use them, and monetize along the way.
Ads and growth platforms: Protocols that help companies grow their audience through web3 primitives, whether it’s connecting ads with onchain actions, or through zk innovations, we think the future of ads is ai first, and crypto first.
Social: We still think the social battle is yet to be won. We think a protocol, ideally short form video first, has a decent shot at winning the market over.
Miniapp studio and ephemerality: Consumers have shorter dopanime paths than ever, we think that teams that are able to ship a new product every quarter and go viral will be able to develop build and gtm motions that sustain long term financial success.

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Best,