Social Graph Ventures

In November 2023, we introduced Social Graph Ventures. A lot has happened.

This post is about a spectrum under which we underwrite the venture investments at Social Graph Ventures

This article is a nudge to the classic good product manager / bad product manager article by Ben Horowitz. Back in my product days, I printed a copy and kept it at my desk at all times. Today I'm applying a similar mental model to consumer crypto products. Good crypto products are design driven, bad products are clunky Teams often bucket user experience design as “I’ll get later to it” type of task. But, great products have been design driven from the start. Design should be interpreted in al...

The Investment Early 2024, we came across Receipts as a fun product launched for early Farcaster users. You could easily connect your Strava account, and they would create a “receipt”, which was an onchain attestation on Base, of the workout you just did, or your overall activity for the week. It was a fun way of putting offchain data, onchain. When we met Victor and Steph, we were blown away by their vision, and their product market fit. Both have shared their journeys both as builders, and ...

This was a big year for crypto, and we will probably look back to it as a pivotal point for the industry. In terms of social and consumer, we had improvements all over the stack. To summarize them: It’s never been easier for a builder to focus on their core user experience, instead than the technicalities. 2024 is the year crypto turned on stable revenue across every onchain sector. Both protocols and apps from DeFi to social. Farcaster and Lens both turned on revenue at protocol level, essen...

The InvestmentNeynar hit close to home, as it was our first markup.We met Rish and Manan in the summer of 2023. After solid careers at Co...

The Investment Rewind to March 2023, Lens had 66k MAUs, Farcaster had 3k MAUs. Orb was a hackathon project that gained traction on the Lens protocol. We were surprised by its quick 100x growth over a 6mo period, and the increasing engagement and retention on the app reflected in their screen time. Even though they didn't dominate the user share, they dominated the attention share. Users were more engaged than other Lens clients. From our memo back then: "On the surface, Orb looks a lot like t...