Why I joined CoinFund

I am pleased to publicly announce that I have joined the CoinFund team as an investment analyst with a specialization in decentralization infrastructure research and active network participation.

Why I joined CoinFund

My background is in computer science and previously I worked with Outlier Ventures on investments and deep research at the intersection of AI, IoT, and blockchain. I am very grateful to have worked with such a competent and passionate team. Their guidance and support helped me hone my venture and technical skills and set the stage for my work at CoinFund.

CoinFund is a cryptonative fund. It has been shaping the industry since 2015 by investing, empowering, and working with some of the best crypto founders in the world. What attracted me to CoinFund include:

  • Multidisciplinary Expertise. The team is diverse and apart from having financial skills they also have deep technical knowledge, a clear advantage and ability to understand how crypto networks work in their core.

  • Cryptonativity and Longevity. All of my colleagues at CoinFund have been in the industry for a long time, as early as 2011. They are a multidisciplinary team coming from finance, computer science, law, and even biochem who have built a strong reputation for being deep, technical, and long-term aligned.

  • Hands-on Approach. The most ambitious founders prefer to partner with us because we eat our portfolio’s dogfood and provide hands-on support. Our technical expertise, broad network, and business experience allow us to provide an extra unfair advantage to the founders that we back. We help them build world-class teams, improve their products, network governance, scale their businesses and provide active network participation by deploying and running nodes.

I couldn’t be more excited, humbled and grateful to join CoinFund’s diverse and reputable team. I am looking forward to investing in and partnering with the most ambitious founders in web3.

From 56Kbps to Web 2.0

Growing up in the ‘90s, I had a 56Kbps dial-up internet service. It would take minutes or even hours to download MP3s, JPEGs, and tutorials from the Internet Relay Chat (IRC). After playing a bit with MS-DOS, I moved to Linux Red Hat and Windows 95. In school, we would log into a virtual 3D world where each student had their own avatar that could walk around and chat with fellow avatars in real time. It was a web1.0 small private metaverse, and it wasn’t considered cool. When I wasn’t out playing with friends I was using mIRC, an IRC client, web1.0’s Slack to connect with strangers around the world. 

This was my first interaction with the open source community. People who didn’t know whether I was a dog or a human being would share their knowledge with me. I was interested in understanding how systems work and, together, we learned how to build scripts, write programs, and optimize networks. Now and then, we would even meet up in person.

My youthful behavior was the product of a social movement called the free software movement, which was formally started in 1983 by computer scientist Richard M. Stallman. He wanted to use UNIX which was proprietary, so he decided to build a replacement for the UNIX operating system called GNU, which stands for “Gnu is Not UNIX” and then make it available for free to run, study, modify, and share copies of the software. Stallman later established the Free Software Foundation in 1985 to support the movement. 

Web 1.0, from around 1991 to 2004, was the “read-only” version of the web. It was mostly composed of non-interactive web pages without the additional visuals, controls and forms we have today. Ads were banned completely. There were very few content creators. Instead, most users were passive consumers of content.

Web 2.0 is referred to as the “read/write” web, starting around 2005 and onwards. Websites became more dynamic, responsive to user input, and easier to use as they  enabled users to create and upload their content. We saw an explosion of podcasts, blogs, tags, RSS curations, social bookmarks, social media content, memes, and personal experiences. 

Web 2.0 has been marked as an era of digital expressionism. Virtual communities formed, grew, and the world became more connected than ever before. The voices of many underrepresented minorities could be heard and people could more easily hold their leaders accountable. People shared more knowledge than ever before.

Web2 was revolutionary but suboptimal

However, it became apparent that data had become the most important resource. Businesses started to use data to better understand, predict, and “hack” systems. Since data is so valuable it was often sought at the expense of the user’s privacy. Companies started abusing data ownership. Centralized ownership has been acting as a monopolistic power over developers and creators who cannot build upon such infrastructures. The incentives between developers, creators, and centralized data monopolies are not aligned. Bad incentives stifle innovation.

The 2008 financial crisis helped us understand how impactful incentive mechanisms can be. If people get bonuses for selling subprime loans as AAA, and if caught get bailed out and face no serious consequences, then 2008 seems bound to happen given enough time. People have lost trust in governments, financial, and other institutions.

Web2 now resides over a global zeitgeist of complete and utter institutional failure across many institutions and areas.

The dawn of web3

The same hackers, hustlers, and cypherpunks that used to teach me in the IRC era and have been building the cryptography technology to preserve our privacy, autonomy, and freedom in the form of web3. Web3 is a more open, inclusive, and rewarding web for creators and contributors. New primitives are being built and powered by decentralization technologies that enable us to have services run safely and correctly without the need to place our trust in institutions, organizations, or governments. Primitives that enable the community to participate, build, invest, capture value and exercise governance over them.

The decentralization movement started with the Bitcoin digital currency in 2009 and quickly expanded to other primitives such as compute (Ethereum), data storage (IPFS, Arweave), DeFi (lending, borrowing, staking, decentralized exchanges, non-custodial wallets, stablecoins), decentralized identity, IoT, P2P network sharing, non-fungible finance (NFTs), and much more.

If you are building a base layer, middleware, scalability solutions, dev tools and other composable blocks of web3 infrastructure reach out to me!