Insight
Silagadze: VC pushes founders to optimize for the next funding milestone
“Venture tends to push a kind of short term thinking. You know, oftentimes there's a conflict. In the business between doing what the right thing for the business would be if you were to run it for the next 20 years versus doing the thing that's going to allow …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Silagadze predicts global transaction value will eventually replatform onto DeFi
“Gave me a lot of conviction that over time, you know, a significant amount of value that's being transacted and the world was going to replatform onto crypto rails, onto, onto DeFi.”
Insight
Silagadze: Universities neglect teaching tech because funding comes from research
“The incentive structures within universities are set up such that the amount of resources they're willing to expend on actual, like, teaching technology and, like, investing in in student engagement, not super high. And it's just that most of their revenue, mo…”
Opinion
Silagadze: 90% to 95% of all crypto activity is just gambling
“And even today, I would say, you know, pick a number, 90, 95% of the activity that happens in crypto is various forms of gambling.”
Insight
Silagadze: Founders err by launching in domains without firsthand experience
“One of the mistakes, frankly, that entrepreneurs tend to make is they'll, they'll start a company in a completely kind of random domain that they don't have a lot of experience or they don't have firsthand experience with the particular problem that they're so…”
Insight
Silagadze says finding the right customer is edtech's hardest challenge
“It's also about finding the right customer and the right channel to sell into. And I've seen a lot of companies sort of fall down on that aspect of it, especially in education. That's oftentimes the hardest thing to figure out in education technology.”
Disclosure
Top Hat investors bought a majority stake to provide Silagadze an exit
“We had an acquisition offer come in that was pretty, pretty compelling and that prompted kind of a conversation around you know, other options other than just selling the business to you know, public acquirer. I think you can talk about this. One of our, you k…”
Disclosure
Silagadze self-funds Gadzi's crypto infrastructure using its hedge fund revenue
“The idea of this sort of hedge fund that generates boring, predictable returns, And then using the income from that to finance technology development that's focused on building these crypto rails, that's the, you know, that's the That's the sort of premise of …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Silagadze: Early Top Hat angels took 30% equity for $25,000 checks
“We raised money from kind of random people, from, like, random, like, consultants and executives and lawyers, just random people that could write a 25 or fifty-k check, you know, in exchange for 20 or 30% of the business. Like, that, that was the environment t…”
Insight
Silagadze: If you aren't sure you have product-market fit, you don't
“Like the most compressed kind of answer is like, when you have it, you know, and if you're not sure that you probably don't have it, that'll be kind of my guidance to entrepreneurs. It's just, it's a, it's pretty clear when you've got something that customers …”
Disclosure
Silagadze says Gadzi's market-neutral crypto fund returned 11% last year
“You know, we've, we're up, I think, around 11% over the last year. So we've done, you know, we've done a lot better than the rest of the market, a lot better than most crypto funds”
