founder @portalventures | previously: @insightpartners, @goldmansachs | not financial advice

Joined August 2019
I’m incredibly proud to announce the launch of our oversubscribed $75M @PortalVentures Fund 2. We exclusively lead crypto pre-seeds with the first check in. Across our two funds we’ve now raised $115M. ~~~ Crypto is an industry that requires real conviction. Prior to launching Portal, I was an investor at Insight Partners. Insight was founded in 1995 to back software founders in what was, at the time, a cottage industry. Since then, they’ve raised $90B+ and had 50+ IPOs across the portfolio. Leaving that seat was not an easy decision, but I saw a similar opportunity. Build a firm that is purpose-built to back the emerging protocol economy. ~~~ When launching Fund 1, I was fortunate to have a great investor base for support and mentorship. Our investors include Midas list investors, decacorn founders, and Managing Partners of large funds across asset classes like @djparekh of Insight Partners, @KyleSamani of Multicoin, and Henry Kravis of KKR. There are so many people that helped me get here, but I’ll never forget Deven, Jeff, Ian, Nikhil, and David from Insight for being my first-ever investors and supporters. ~~~ Launching in early 2022 presented a slew of challenges. While crypto rallied to ATHs and mentions of the supercycle peaked, we grounded ourselves in the age-old Buffett quote “be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.” As the year went on, exuberance evaporated with the crash of Luna and FTX. Fear filled the markets, it was go-time. We wired for one of our most exciting early lead investments within weeks of the FTX crash. From Q4 2022 through all of 2023, we were aggressive. As some told us to pivot to AI or ‘slow our deployment,’ we ran faster… We grounded in our conviction and ran into what looked like a burning market. It was the right decision. ~~~ When we started raising for Fund 2 earlier this year, BTC was still ~40% down from its ATH and many still questioned the viability of the industry. We’re super thankful to the teams at Accolade, Theta, and CrossLayer for betting big on us early on. An investor base that can see through the cycles lets us focus on what we love… ... And there are really two things that I love most about what we’re doing at Portal: 1. Backing founders with high conviction on day zero builds special relationships: We’re the first believers. Building in a volatile, emerging industry is a highly personal experience. It’s incredibly rewarding to see founders grow from an individual with an idea, to the leader of a category-creating product with a large team and scaled business. We’re on the rollercoaster with our founders. We take the late-night calls. We can relate when it feels like the world is ending. And we certainly celebrate the wins. 2. Crypto is a new asset class: New asset classes create new types of investment firms. There is no age-old playbook on being a world-class crypto investor, just as there was no PE playbook in the ‘80s or venture software playbook in the ‘90s. We get to think from first principles and help write the rules on investing in an industry that will create tens of trillions of dollars of market cap. Opportunities like this don’t come along often. ~~~ With our new $75M Fund 2, we’re excited to double down on what we do best: leading first-check investments into category-creating protocol businesses.
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Evan Fisher retweeted
Against all odds’ encapsulates what @VestExchange is about. They say you need a massive marketing budget to win the attention economy. Vest did it with no ads, no token incentives, and no shortcuts. It is incredibly inspiring to witness this journey as an investor: just five years of relentless execution and an unwavering belief that the best product can sell itself. A belated but massive congratulations to @VestExchange, and shoutout to fellow co-investors @coinbase @SeliniCapital @Auros_global @ambergroup_io @thirdeye_fund @Gold_Mansack and many more!
At most prop firms, ~6% of evaluations ever end in a payout. At Vest, nearly a third of traders receive a payout. We still have a lot of work to do to make that number higher. Grateful to @FortuneMagazine for sharing more on the Vest story: fortune.com/2026/10/07/exclu…
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Most people still don’t understand just how seriously the big institutions are taking blockchain
Incredibly excited to work with Fidelity, the 3rd largest asset manager in the world with ~$7 Trillion AUM and ~$19 Trillion AUC, to bring their assets to the onchain world Hear @teddyP_xyz speak with Cynthia, Fidelity's Head of Digital Assets, talk about our work together and the future of onchain asset management. Still just the beginning, much more to come!
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Offline will power swarms of fleets across the world Pumped to have Draper join the good fight!
Every machine waits for a signal. When it breaks, everything goes blind. We started Offline Protocol by keeping people connected when networks failed. Today, that same technology runs on hundreds of thousands of devices worldwide. Now we're taking it further: resilient coordination for physical systems. Machines, people and AI agents that keep working together over whatever path remains. Where we are today: → 350,000+ devices across 140+ countries → Nearly 20,000 new accounts in August alone → 11,500+ local networks active this month → 60,000+ SDK downloads → 440,000+ location proofs received in the last 30 days → Zero paid acquisition Earlier this year, we closed a new round led by @DraperVC to turn our consumer scale into a rapidly growing enterprise business. Over the past month, we've begun working with partners including a global wind-energy manufacturer, an agricultural IoT provider, a fleet telematics platform, a physical AI operating system, and a data streaming platform, alongside teams in aerospace and satellite systems, embedded silicon and consumer wearables. Our pipeline also spans maritime and industrial monitoring, equipment custody, secure device identity, airline catering and restaurant operations. Wherever machines operate, Offline Protocol coordinates. Learn more at offlineprotocol.com
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I've never seen a company grow as fast as Vest is Not to mention the founder replies to every DM to collect feature requests!
Hey everyone! Thank so much for giving us feedback the past week. We are heads down building a product that traders love! Things in the works 1. Copy trading 2. Larger account sizes. $50k first, then $100k, then more. 3. Fully customizable plans 4. Drag and droppable TP/SLs
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Proud to be a day 1 backer! We wired the first check just a few weeks after FTX collapsed. DeFi was controversial at the time. The tides have certainly turned :)
CT. September 30th.
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Evan Fisher retweeted
Hey everyone, First, I'm honestly blown away by everything that's been happening lately. We can't thank our traders and supporters enough, truly. My team and I have been working on Vest for almost five years now. We are traders ourselves who started Vest because we thought we could build the product we all wanted to use ourselves. We spent years doing open-source research for the betterment of the industry (research.vest.xyz), often with no one watching. We pivoted dozens of times. We were told over and over again that what we were doing wouldn't work, that it was impossible, that we should give up, sell, walk away. We faced rejection, after rejection, after rejection. There were days it felt like no one believed in this but us. So to see all of that work, all of those late nights and hard calls, finally turn into something traders actually love and use every day is extremely humbling. It means more to us than I can put into words. Truly, thank you. Second, I want to address the allegations of wash trading head on head-on, because they come from a HUGE misunderstanding of how our product is different from other perp DEXs. We're not just another perps dex, but also a funded account platform. In fact the large majority of our traders use funded accounts. When they do, they can get up to $25k accounts for as little as $210. They can then open positions of up to $1.25M notional on some markets like ES and NQ. These accounts have a daily loss and drawdown limit, so most traders trade shorter-horizon and flip positions often. If they pass their evaluation phase, their trades are in “live” mode and get shown in the A-book where they trade against other traders and market participants. Because of the nature of the high implicit leverage and max drawdowns, that usually leads to high volume and low OI behavior on the live market. This is now accurately displayed on ALL OFFICIAL Vest platforms. We’ve gone through a few iterations of the front end to move away from combined 24H volume. Previously, if you hovered over the volume number on Vest, you can see the breakdown of eval and live volume. To make it even more obvious, we now explicitly display both at all times. In our API’s we now very clearly separate and document our eval and live volume. If anyone has feedback on how to make this clearer, our team is always here to listen. Part of the confusion is what is shown on official Vest platforms and what is not. We cannot control what third party aggregators use to display us. Some of them are also using information from an old outdated exchange that we are deprecating. We also cannot control if they decide to put us in the same comparison with other perp DEXs where the product offering is fundamentally different. I also take some blame for not reaching out to all aggregators beforehand and making sure that everything is up to date, but there are hundreds of aggregators out there, and I hope you’ll excuse me on this front. It is our belief that the perpetual future is the best asset class for retail traders to trade with. It has been our goal, and vision, to onboard the rest of the world - the futures traders, the CFD traders, the options traders and more - onto this form factor that we believe is ultimately better for them. We believe that funded accounts are the best way to learn and trade with this new form factor because it lowers the barrier to entry. We have been extremely blessed beyond belief to achieve this mission. If you search up vestexchange on twitter, we have thousands of traders from traditional finance that have never traded perps, receiving payouts and expressing really positive feedback on our platform. Many of the feedback is that “we are too good to be true” because our rules are so trader friendly. I will continue to answer all feedback and hopefully continue to help explain anything people are uncertain about. Like all other platforms and exchanges, affiliates receive a commission on referrals. Some partners also have content creation and partnership deals, but these are few and far between and we ask all of our affiliates to disclose when posting. Candidly, we also don’t really want to burden our balance sheet with 5 or 6 figure retainer deals because that value should be passed onto traders in any way we can. For those who haven’t tried out Vest. I would love to onboard you! For those who are FUDDing Vest (mostly competitors), I would ALSO love to onboard you and for you to see why we’ve achieved such fast growth! It is our goal to build the best platform for retail traders, and I am glad that our product is putting pressure for innovation in this space.
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Evan Fisher retweeted
Plume has joined The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) Digital Assets Solutions Industry Working Group, joining industry leaders such as @CharlesSchwab, @AlpacaHQ, and @Nasdaq, who are also members. The group was created to provide feedback on the DTCC Tokenization Service and facilitate ongoing, robust dialogue that drives widespread digital assets adoption and advances innovation. @The_DTCC provides custody and asset servicing for over $114 trillion in assets and is the premier post-trade market infrastructure for the global financial services industry. We look forward to contributing to this initiative and leveraging our expertise in compliance standards to the work the Digital Assets Solutions Industry Working Group is doing. We work with world-class security partners to scan every transaction at the sequencer level, before it's ever included onchain. Through Kimber Transfer Agency, a SEC-registered transfer agent, Plume maintains an official record of ownership for tokenized securities.
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Never Compete. I was on with someone from our team at slow talking about competition recently… ‘how do you compete in venture capital’, etc… win deals. My honest philosophy? I hate competition professionally (love it in sport, but not business)…. And I think competition is especially stupid in early stage venture capital, where you are competing over / crawling over each other for out of the money call options on things that almost certainly will not work. Early stage VC competition on deals almost by definition leads to over-pricing / overpaying … and it also demonstrates a fundamental lack of creativity. Egotistically, if you want your money to matter / to make a difference, you want to be funding otherwise unfunded opportunities — where you see something others don’t… where money is most expensive, commands the highest return AND - to put a nice spin on it - where the money matters the most. So if you find yourself in a competition over a seed deal, IMHO you are a bad capitalist / limiting your returns, an un-creative person / a mere ‘market participant’ (yuck), and also misusing the incredible mandate and license you have to find things and make them happen in the world. You have to be careful about seeing mirages, because some things / most things are not funded because they are actually bad.. you can’t like things just because they are unliked… BUT your job is to have discipline in the wilderness / in the wander, and as the game evolves … both as a capitalist, and egotistically as someone who realizes how awful it is for your tombstone to say ‘market participant’
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Studying crypto market structure as a microcosm for broader financial markets has been really informative
Do we live in a capitalist multiverse of value or does SPCX just have insanely low float. Crypto has spedrun the history of finance so fast we are now ahead.
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1. Consciousness is pre-verbal 2. LLMs are trained on something post-verbal 3. How can something post-verbal be conscious?
Google DeepMind researcher argues that LLMs can never be conscious, not in 10 years or 100 years. "Expecting an algorithmic description to instantiate the quality it maps is like expecting the mathematical formula of gravity to physically exert weight."
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What would you do if you hacked satoshi's wallet? 1.⁠ ⁠Taking a large levered short on BTC. 2.⁠ ⁠⁠Move tokens from Satoshi's wallet. 3.⁠ ⁠⁠Close short. Open long. 4.⁠ ⁠⁠Announce you have the wallet and for the purposes of making BTC PQ, you will be burning all tokens. Alternatively, you might: 1.⁠ ⁠Accumulate BTC and lobby privately to make BTC PQ 2.⁠ ⁠⁠Or, focus attacks on lost private key wallets not satoshi's wallet You would not, however, immediately sell and / or try to break the network. Your issues would be: 1. The price of BTC will crater once any of Satoshi's coins move (lowering your EV) 2.⁠ ⁠⁠Liquidity at that scale will be challenging 3.⁠ ⁠⁠Off-ramping at that scale will be challenging
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Portal Talent Network — 3.11.26 Role #1: @utexocom Title: Head of Exchange Relationships Description: Be the face of Utexo to exchanges. Manage existing partnerships, secure new listings and integration opportunities, and drive strategic alignment between the product roadmap and the needs of major trading venues. This is a senior, high-visibility role at the intersection of business development, product strategy, and ecosystem growth. Role #2: @JoinHorizon Title: Growth Marketing (Contractor) Description: Own paid social, lifecycle, and influencer-driven acquisition across TikTok, Meta, and referral channels. Produce high-performing video content and manage paid campaigns to drive brand awareness and customer acquisition. ***This role has the potential to convert into a full-time position if the engagement is successful. If you're interested in either opportunity, DM @evanzsolomon or send your LinkedIn and resume to [email protected]
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In 2001 people thought the internet was dead & overhyped. Today it's $10T+ in mkt cap Blockchain is entering the commercialization phase. Large market. Real value props. Proven biz models. Don't miss Amazon bc you're appalled by Pets dot com
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Moats for the next decade: Capital intensivity Trust Network effects
For 50 yrs we treated the supremacy of asset-light businesses as a permanent economic law But if AI commoditizes asset-light businesses, we’d just be reverting to the historical mean where value accrued to atoms, infrastructure, energy It would be a 50 year blip. An anomaly
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When LPs ask who I most respect, my answer is usually "I'd give Kyle my money." I once made a joke that Kyle's love language is debate. He's truth seeking and incredible at standing behind his views even when contrarian. I've learned a lot from him and he's gone out of his way to help us as we build our firm. Excited to see what's next 🫡🙏🏼
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We got 2 pitches today that didn't include any info on founder background Founders - you are the most important piece of a startup, at least tell me your name!
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Tokenization is one of those special markets that is both consensus and still underappreciated. Within tokenization, what's most exciting to us? Latent Capital Markets. Join us as we talk with our portfolio companies on this intersection. xitter.cf/i/spaces/1dRKZalewWMxB…

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Latent Capital Markets: xitter.cf/evanbfish/status/19962…
1/ Most tokenization pitches miss the point. We've had hundreds of conversations with financial institutions, capital market experts, & founders. Out of that came our thesis: Latent Capital Markets.
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