Diego

@d1ego

1043 Following

1174 Followers

Chris Dixon pfp

I’m excited to announce that we’re co-leading the $10M seed round in Merit Systems, which is building a new economic model for open source. Open source software is the lifeblood of the internet, but it’s poorly funded and too reliant on volunteer contributions. Merit is building a protocol that attributes and rewards contributors proportionally to the value they create. The goal is to enable code repositories to become the organizing unit for protocol networks, in the same way that companies are the organizing units for corporate networks. Merit was founded by @samrags and @rfs. As an @a16zcrypto investor and engineer, Sam developed Jolt, one of the fastest and most promising zkVMs. Similarly, Ryan excelled at Blockchain Capital as an investor and engineer. @mason, a gifted technologist and investor also from a16z, joined the Merit team to help them scale. We are excited to back the Merit team and support them with their ambitious mission.

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Agreed. Gotcha, thanks. Flexibility is good but can be a distraction

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My daughter is starting to crawl. So far, it's 1 inch forward, 3 yards backwards. So fun to watch 😆

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What's your take on early crypto investors doing venture and also having active liquid strategies? IMO, different skillset & time horizon but some managers like the flexibility to act on arbitrage/valuation opportunities between equities/tokens in each cycle. Thoughts?

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Diego pfp

I think it's stage and sector specific. Given increased valuations and deal activity I'd say activity has mainly recovered. But growth stage remains uncertain imo, less investors underwriting downstream so not everything has been flushed out the system yet

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Carta just dropped its Fall fundraising data (software). Valuations closing-in 2021 levels driven by AI (75th percentiles look rich). No deal count specified for Series B and C but growth rounds continue to be scarce

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Impressive, but not surprised. Stock markets in Latam are kind of a joke. Low float, low liquidity, corporate governance, high concentration, etc. and it's not trivial for local folks to access global equities markets. Monetary use cases in crypto have natural PMF in regions like Latam - just a matter of time before adoption becomes parabolic imo

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Tricky. LPs don't love cross-fund investing, that's why Continuity funds re preferred over Growth funds (cleaner structure, less conflict of interest). Growth funds are also trickier to raise in current cycle (bloated valuations in late stage). That's why CRV gave money back to LPs https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/02/venture-firm-crv-returns-275-million-citing-overvaluation-of-mature-startups/

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That's why Sequoia bought back Stripe shares from it's LPs: https://www.axios.com/2024/09/09/sequoia-capital-stripe

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Yup, most have 2-3, 1-year extensions but after that their options are limited to A) Liquidating positions in secondaries, B) Raising a Continuity Fund that buys the positions in the prior fund allowing LPs to cash out if desired C) Changing the LPA

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1. Started crypto journey in 2019, started investing institutionally in crypto in 2020 from a broader venture firm, and just made the move ~3 months ago to go all-in and go solo 2. Underwriting crypto requires 100% of your time 3. Better

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Crazy stat. 18 years for VCs to get fully liquid. I don't think it's sustainable. Secondary markets will become much more robust and liquid if incentives for going public don’t change in the medium term https://x.com/jasonlk/status/1846216066260959710

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Great presentation by @DSBatten made for family offices on Bitcoin and the environment. This type of narrative clarity & delivery is what's needed for normies' sentiment to change. https://x.com/BTC_Archive/status/1846237445961982068

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😂 I got a decent bicep & shoulder workout from carrying my sleeping daughter for hours yesterday — apparently she’s got beef with her stroller now 🙃

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Not the cell phone 🙈

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Agree with Fred Wilsons’s response. Blanket statements lack substance. Some times company building in early stages is better suited for equity w/ token warrants when derisking early milestones are not visible to the community or target market

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