The Ledger, every show

“A big part of the crypto VC game is doing these private token deals, and then you kind of build some prestige media narrative hype and then sell the token to retail, and then retail gets sucked in, and the VCs kind of dump tokens on retail. That's like a big G…”

“To me, she's kind of the definition of someone that has this, like, soulless greed for attention and money, and is not authentic at all.”

“My sentiment in a lot of Silicon Valley is that it's very, there, there's a lot of soulless greed, and just this desire to create these kind of you know, massive funds create massive attention, and I think, again, Sequoia is the best example of this, and 1789,…”

“So I actually think, like, crypto shilling, crypto tribes can reduce the amount of violence in the world in the long term and will.”

“I think he'll be running and winning from a jail cell as well. The entertaining, the most entertaining outcome is is the most likely, right?”

“Yeah, I mean, I think NFTs are gonna come back in a big way. I, I've said, and I think still you know, NFTs have a good chance to be you know, bigger than cryptocurrencies in terms of mainstream adoption. And the reason is because people, I think more people i…”

“The people that got sucked into this perception game that FTX was playing that, you know, the politicians, the regulators, the investors, they all now are trying to just sweep it under the rug and say, oh, I didn't know about this financial fraud. It wasn't ju…”

“I mean, as a venture manager, you get paid two and 20, maybe more, maybe a little more, maybe a little less, but those are meaningful fees. The reason that you get those fees is because you can outperform you know, an index and you know, every private equity F…”

“If you know, everyone viewed Fund performance as the, you know, the metric of success, these, the big, you know, incumbents wouldn't have the prestige that they have.”

“But yeah, I think more recently Fundsize has probably caused them to do some of the stuff that people you know, accuse them for, which again, I don't think they're dumping. They have to be very careful about that, but I do think they are investing in some of t…”

“A hundred percent. I mean, this is again, a generalization, but I think way too much money was raised. You know, you had people raise billion dollar funds that just had no unique insights or you know, no investing prowess really or anything like that, but they…”

“Like I think a strategy, you know, a dishonest, but probably successful strategy for one of these billion dollar fund managers would be to, you know, pitch to LPs that you're investing in, you know, bleeding edge crypto that's gonna, gonna push the space forwa…”

“I have historically viewed Solana as a very tourist thing, you know, because it came in kind of right at the beginning of the last bull markets. It was, you know, aggressively marketing. There's also one of these insider VC coins that sold a lot to early insid…”

“Something like Ethereum, which from a decision-making perspective is, is pretty centralized right now, that's actually been a good thing for Ethereum, and it's allowed them to move fast and break things, right?”

“I actually think it's a really good thing. Like, there's a lot of people in the world that are disenfranchised by the existing economic systems, and crypto is like permissionless speculation that anyone can participate in, in kind of new financial systems. So …”

“The second largest donor to Joe Biden was Sam Bankman Freed.”

“I personally think, you know, he's going to be leaning into crypto in a big way in 24, 24, that's my prediction, but we'll see.”

“I still think there's a chance we get to. 10 trillion in total market value without that, because again, this, the idea of, you know, empowering billions of people around the world with this kind of new financial system is revolutionary”

“Well, frankly, I mean, I got pushed out of Coinbase. Like, I wasn't a, Great employee, I think is the truth. I think I did a lot for Coinbase in the early days. But I wasn't, Coinbase got to a certain point where I wasn't great at kind of office politics and f…”

“A-Six and Z is a great fund. In crypto. And I have a lot of respect for them. I do think they probably got too big.”

“I would say three to five years, you know, it's likely before that, but you know, with a high degree of conviction, I would say three to five years.”

“You know, we hear so much about the ICO boom, but in terms of, kind of, like, total value created this year, there's actually been way more value created by forks than ICOs.”

“I think if you're like a leader in the space, I think shilling is, toxic. And there's a big, you know, crypto Twitter influencer culture of these people that are, you know, shilling loudly, dumping on retail, and that gives a bad experience to new people and a…”

“They always come during bull markets and then leave during bear markets.”

“Like, I genuinely believe and still believe that, you know, crypto is the most important social technology of our lifetime.”

“In the first one, 22 investments, we've only we haven't had any zeros. We've had two projects that basically you know, dissolved, but they actually gave back, in one case, about 50%, and in, in another case, about 70%. So we actually haven't had any, Zeroes in…”

“Alameda was their investment arm that was basically investing in these token projects. Then FTX, the exchange, was listing these tokens, hyping up the tokens to their users.”

“There are certain founders that that go for the prestige. You know, maybe they get some hate from a non's on Twitter or something, but they're still, they get you know, press and they have prestige.”

“I don't feel strongly that it's much different than a traditional venture. I think that's kind of a narrative that some people Believe, but I don't know.”

“Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, I, to me, it's one of like the fakest parts of venture capital. It's like everyone, it feels like everyone's competing for prestige. Everyone talks about fund size or, you know, is trying to get press. These kind of vanity you …”

“Taylor Swift is never going to create music NFTs.”

“A lot of why people think she's good is because other people think she's good. And I think that can, that, that applies to cryptocurrency too. Why does everyone think Bitcoin is valuable? Because other people think it's valuable.”

“Do I think it's going to be a, an important product in the world in five years, much more important than it is today? Yes, because I think NFTs are important, and because I think an on-ramp to NFTs is is very valuable for people.”

“The people that invested in Solana have done incredibly well. So You know, I missed a big investment opportunity as well.”

“We actually invested on the way up a little bit and then sold on the big way up.”

“A lot of these big projects that have raised a ton of money aren't likely going to ship anything for many years in some cases.”

“I'm most excited about projects that are solving problems for the existing crypto community rather than the broader landscape.”

“I think mining, like, miners controlling a network has proven to be pretty problematic. And so I think kind of aligning stakeholders and miners and putting them, you know, as one will be important in terms of, you know, progress in making changes to protocols …”

“And I actually think if you focus too much on the ICO or the, you know, the token sale, it can actually really hurt your community.”

“How we view talent is like, we'd rather give money to, you know, a founder that doesn't maybe look good on paper, doesn't have credentials, but has been studying crypto deeply since 2013 when they brought their first Bitcoin or something like that.”

“Especially with, you know, AI, it's going to be harder and harder to tell if something's authentic or not, if someone's a genuine human or not, so I think authenticity and kind of an assessment of the vibe of authenticity is going to be increasingly important”

“It's like that FTX Super Bowl ad Felt very inauthentic to me. It was Larry David and Tom Brady or something, and it was just, it was clearly very concerned with what other people think, and just trying to get the maximum attention in the simplest way.”

“Richard on, on, my team, my partner, tweeted out on October 13th that Sam was working behind closed doors on a bipartisan bill that would have been very good for FTX, but bad for DeFi, right? And that tweet went viral. Obviously, a lot of other stuff happened …”

“So I now think every wallet is going to have a messaging component. And on-chain messaging is going to be a big you know, crypto use case eventually.”

“I got an email saying that Coinbase updated terms of service. I clicked the link to try to update the service, log into Coinbase to do so, logged into Coinbase with my password, boom the hacker Got into my account and drained all my Bitcoin. So it wasn't a ton…”

“It's kind of a big unknown secret. You know, unspoken secret, I should say in, in crypto, like how many people actually get hacked and no one really talks about it”

“Well, a billion in AUM includes is kind of the mark to market, right? It's the value of the total portfolio.”

“We didn't invest in one ICO.”