moving incorruptible money @0xfairblock @hack_vc @uwcrysp investing in fairies, monkeys and octopuses of future financial systems
Payman Islands
Joined December 2015
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don't listen to VCs/traders
90% never built a company
90% them are not technical
90% are late outdated alpha
90% don't understand sales or marketing
talk to everyone, get feeback and ideas, kill your ego, but don't pivot over a comment of someone who just chatgpt'd your deck.
My colleague brought up the time when a seed-stage VC passed on us at a ~$3M valuation. Enough time has passed that I think it’s worth sharing some wisdom on this topic…
They verbally offered a term sheet, pending a reference call with an industry veteran. We were pre-launch, so we had no customers or testimonials. We could only count on these quant industry veterans to vouch for our idea.
Well, the quant experts dismissed our idea so fast that the VC revoked the term sheet. 😌
The most famous expert who caused the term sheet reversal is now a Databento customer. (Although it’s unfair to compare apples and oranges, we’ve surpassed their incumbent business in terms of revenue as well, so for folks to refer to them as a “quant veteran” while calling me a “larper” is pretty wild lol.)
But anyway I think the lesson perhaps is to take even the most expert-level advice with a grain of salt, unless they’ve been a real customer.
When I say that market data is an old idea, everyone agrees. We’re definitely not the first or even hundredth company in our space. But there’s also a lesson in executing better than the incumbents and adapting to the needs of your customers. Many argued that it’s a small TAM, but they didn’t consider that we’d actually increase the TAM by meeting those demands.
Anyway, the next time y’all do one of those Tegus or AlphaSense expert calls, just know that some random startup’s fate may depend on your words. 😂
it's great that we have calculators but sometimes we're so dumb for basic math, it's great that we have cars but sometimes we're too fat to walk, it's great that we have AI but sometimes we're too dumb to read or talk or write or create
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Is NVIDIA basically Binance?
The more I think about it, the more similarities I see between Nvidia and Binance. Arguably the two most important companies in AI and crypto.
Both have North American founders with deep Chinese roots, close family involvement in their businesses, drama, and complicated relationships with US regulators and sanctions.
The business similarities are even more interesting.
Nvidia started by selling GPUs. Now it has CUDA, inference software, cloud infrastructure, its own AI models, and investments across the AI ecosystem.
Binance started as an exchange. Now it's everywhere: perps, custody, payments, wallets, token launches, prediction markets, token, and the BNB chain.
Both have basically become the default infrastructure for their industries, with network effects that reinforce themselves.
Developers build around CUDA because that's where the GPUs, libraries, and tooling are. Market makers and token projects integrate with Binance because that's where the liquidity, users, and distribution are.
Everyone talks about decentralization and avoiding vendor lock-in, then builds their entire business around Nvidia or Binance.
Another interesting similarity is how they actively finance their own demand. Nvidia invests in AI companies and GPU cloud providers that buy its hardware. Its relationship with Coreweave is particularly interesting: Nvidia is an investor, supplier, and customer, with multibillion-dollar commitments to purchase cloud capacity.
Binance has its own version through listings and ecosystem investments. It can help bootstrap liquidity and distribution for new projects while benefiting from the trading activity they generate.
Neither company really needs to predict who wins and
they increasingly have the capital, distribution, and infrastructure to determine how those industries grow.
I love how all AI businesses together, fal, venice, nebius, crusoe, pltr, pharma, enterprises etc etc are all converging to the same thing
even if they were middlemen or in a niche market, they're all going to get their own gpu, run opensource models, sell/use inference directly
kinda like the appchain/ecosystem/infra days of crypto, everybody wants their own L1 to boost valuations, escape from revenue valuation, and IPO
I expect this is going to even accelerate post election/high debt market as AI agent and workflow narratives gradually die and middlemen can't keep up with high growth/net rev numbers
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I think the key is avoiding investment in infrastructure style vague large projects and focus on the ones that use this commodity technology and focus on doing something specific and important 100x better (hyperliquid, prediction markets, crossborder transfers are successful longstanding examples in crypto). In AI, maybe the equivalent can be drug discovery, fintechs that really adopt AI, robotics for large scale/expensive/impossible tasks (e.g. mining, maintenance, factories etc), and not flashy or vague big projects
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Huge congrats to my private and compliant friends at Predicate! @pumpernikhil @khushii_w really knowledgeable, passionate, and friendly team. Not surprised by their success at all.
We are thrilled to announce our $8M Series A to connect regulated markets to onchain finance.
Predicate enables digital assets to reach every market compliantly. We do this by embedding compliance controls directly into digital assets to block high-risk and sanctioned activity at every transaction.
To date, Predicate has:
- Screened $1B+ in transaction volume
- Evaluated 6M+ transactions against custom compliance policies
- Blocked 100K+ non-compliant transactions
The round was led by @bcap with participation from @Paxos, @1kxnetwork and @tribecap.
Privacy is Fairly Based now.
Confidential stablecoin payments are now live on @base
Pay privately through the Stabletrust app or integrate our API for agentic payments and x402. Built for individuals, businesses, merchants, and AI agents.
App: stabletrust.io
API: docs.fairblock.network/ct/gu…
Karma is really a bitch. France is now tasting the same poison it gave Iran by sheltering Khomeini and flying him to Tehran on Air France
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