Investing in the Crypto Ecosystem - TOKEN2049 London 2021

so welcome everyone i guess this is one of the second last session so thank you all for staying back for this i'm samantha app as mike said um i i'm not a vc but i run a pr agency helping blockchain crypto and d5 teams tell their stories and i'm really excited to get into just investing in the crypto ecosystem and hearing from this amazing lineup of um speakers so i want to just um go across the panel and hear from each of these vcs investors how they got into well introduce yourself again and and um tell us how you got into crypto investing so jill you want to kick it off yeah thank you uh my name is jill gunter uh i i'm a venture partner with slow ventures which is a seed stage focused venture fund based in the bay area in the united states we're a generalist fund so we invest in regular fintech outside of crypto we invest in consumer retail startups we invest in enterprise sas and then we of course invest in what i personally am most excited about crypto projects as well and that spans everything from layer one protocols uh all the way into infrastructure and and equity in in companies um very briefly i got into crypto uh via wall street of all places i was working on wall street sort of out of college post 2008 crisis and i got an inside track view into everything wrong with the old school financial system and was motivated into getting into a space that was working on changing all of that thank you jamie yes so ceo and founder of um how i got into crypto i can't really remember now it's been almost eight years which is quite scary it's been nearly a decade of my life one quarter of my life in crypto um but where we are today is we're an accelerator we're focused on what we call the open metaverse thesis so that's looking beyond perhaps uh the traditionally quite narrow financial services use cases within crypto and extending it into creative industries the creator economy gaming virtual worlds all that kind of stuff we're about to hit our 100th portfolio co this fall which is awesome the majority of which have happened in the last kind of year or two and we're about to double that in the next 12 months alone so that's indicative of not really just our growth as a company but also the industry as a whole so um very happy to be back on stage it's been been a while awesome thank you jamie hi everyone um so i'm managing partner of ethereal ventures which is an early stage fund currently in stealth i'm also an advisor consensus where i led venture investments for the last few years and consensus is a global blockchain software company one of earliest investors in the space being a core builder of the ethereum ecosystem incubated you know projects like metamask and infura previously i started my career in traditional finance and fixed income investing and then fintech and crypto so kind of going like you know full circle um but you know i came to crypto from fintech actually i had the pleasure working with richard um and i think it was frustration with the existing payment stack and you know that made me believe that it might take five years ten years but the future of financial applications are going to be built on crypto rails it's such an unfair advantage with you know instant settlement 24 7 global by design and very excited to be seeing it happen before our eyes cool and richard good to be with all of you here on the panel um so yeah my name is richard muirhead and i'm managing partner fabric ventures um and in a second maybe i'll describe what we mean by our thesis which is all around what we call the open economy um but i came into it i'm really having built uh a company in the network infrastructure space and then building a little piece of the kind of cloud infrastructure and wrestling with the problem of trying to get as you know well-paid even well-paid super knowledgeable skilled people to collaborate to solve complex problems and then my second company and so started looking at um you know how could you define mechanisms and incentive structures to to do that and and saw the kind of rip-roaring success of um wikipedia and and uh and facebook and doing that kind of from a bottoms-up basis and then when it stumbled into first bitcoin and and so forth saw that that was the opportunity that if you could give people ownership of their identity and data and of value um then we can all coordinate together to solve really quite challenging problems and that is kind of what we think of as the open economy and we've um invested in everything like many people here on the panel from you know layer ones like polkadot and near and so forth um through to uh recently announced investment in um new stable coins euro stable coins through to um various different players in the play to earn space which has certainly been catching the headlines yeah totally um thank you guys for that brief introduction so um i want to kind of take a step back and look back at the year that we've had we're obviously in a crypto bull market um according to research by the block vc investment in the crypto space has seen a 90 increase quarter by quarter especially in 2021 these figures i mean i'd like to hear from the panel are they surprising to you or are you not surprised and also what do you think are the major factors that contribute to the growth i mean jill do you want to kick it off i'm not at all surprised to hear of the uh the dramatic growth in investment and capital coming into the space um you know it's funny so slow as i mentioned uh works across markets you know we work in consumer and enterprise and and so forth and i'm often talking to investors outside of crypto in the venture world and they all love to tell the war stories of how the last year has been out of control for them and you know it's just so many high quality deals and just the velocity and the pace at which those deals are getting done and coming from crypto i have to just sort of quietly smile and uh know in in my own mind how much more quickly even the crypto space is moving um but i think that that's all very bullish for the space and very exciting but boy is it hard to keep up at times yeah jamie because you were saying you are probably going to double your investments and yeah just the volume of throughput that's going through our accelerator um we have an agnostic what protocol agnostic one and then we also have some um ecosystem collaborations with like polygon file coin polkadot we've got several more on the way but to kind of your main point around i mean you mentioned the word velocity um so what's interesting this year versus other years when even when we had this correction of whatever it was 70 80 percent the pre-seed seed stage deals kept on happening like nothing was going on which is like the first time i've ever seen that and that's where i got really bullish about what's about to come because normally people start kind of reigning in what they're doing especially at the early stages or you know valuations kind of collapse or you get discounts there was no discount deal making happened at the same velocity as when the prices were high or where they are now we're seeing a lot more entrants coming into the space coming in earlier um and doing kind of party rounds as they're called so basically a group of people just weighed into a round like hoping one of them's done some dd obviously going through an accelerator we are part of that process but you know it's there's not much discipline in investing right now valuations are very punchy um so and i think we're only just getting going i think the next 12 months is going to be even more bonkers right okay so increased velocity and deals and an investment so all right how do we keep up min how do you keep up with it all yeah i mean i think in a lot of ways crypto for a long time has been seen as a parallel universe of some sort but in a lot of ways i also don't miss the times where to like where you know our poor founders couldn't raise that like 3 million valuations because they were a crypto company and i think we have to think about what does it mean to be a crypto company so you know so rare for example which is uh i think probably the best performing like a company in the 2019 2020 vintage is an equity investment where they use nfts for um you know of like fantasy football uh and they have you know more than 200 clubs signed up at this point and if you're a generalist vc you're like is this a gaming company is this a consumer company is this a crypto company but it's certainly a company that you can't miss out on if you're a vc at this point so i think for us ultimately you know we really focus on smart technical founders because in our experience they're the ones who move the needle they're the ones who like you know just dream the frontiers that we just can't expect and we just you know provide them resources to experiment as much as possible i think we're still when you consider the sort of web 3 infrastructure stack like which the promise is user controlled platforms we're so early in that innovation arc so while it seems a bit overwhelming like you know knowing where you want to play and for us we just want to be you know we're humble precede seed funds so we just try to be first check in um it just adds a lot of discipline as an investor so you know you're focusing on where your comparative advantages are and the same thing i think you know as a fintech vc and we've seen a lot more fintech vcs get into a game which is fantastic um there's a lot of ways fintech vcs can help fintech firms who have crypto adjacencies dealing with like digital assets and there'll be tons of growth in that segment too no thanks for that i guess it's um really challenging to stay focused and disciplined especially in this market but richard how does how do you how does fabric vc like stay focused and what disciplines and trends do you look into or have you been looking into this last year i'm looking for tips by the way everyone's looking surprisingly about how i feel at the moment i'll try i mean maybe first on the how to keep up i don't think you can keep up i think you have to lean on the the community on the hive mind this kind of like effectively dao if you will that we already exist within this intermeshing of all the discord groups and the the twitter groups and um and i think uh you just surf that as best you can um i think in order in terms of keeping focused i mean i think there is we probably have 10 different opportunities right now that are kind of basically at the investment memo stage and we're not saying we'll conclude necessarily on all of them um the focus is is about just saying no to things to be able to go deep enough and move fast enough so there is um i totally agree and fortunate enough i'm also a little bit a part of the the so rare journey um that there are some equity-based investments that have definitely attracted the interest of you know vc firms sort of crossing over i think there's an archetype also of investments that is perhaps even more challenging which is that if um and it borrows a lot from the kind of deep tech investing world that you're looking for the highly technical founders um who come together in a very complimentary team and a just like that beautiful balance of confident and humble and and and you want to work with them um the challenge comes of course meeting them so again you've got to be somehow connected in a number of different ways and and somehow you just join the dots on that uh without while still being inclusive and like just not relying on you know you know introductions from you know in that sense but then you've got to move super fast because if they're going to generate something that ultimately is going to have a token at that center it's a you know a cruel value accrual mechanism then um it may be that there's only one quite um widely spread round a party type round that goes on and not multiple opportunities to be doubling down so you've got to you know move fast as well and we've seen the more crypto native funds from across the world move fast to to snap up those opportunities so i mean i think that's key and so at the end of the day even if you're moving fast you need to be able to signal communicate to these folks what you're going to be able to add to to the equation um not just hey we're in europe and you know we know where the great restaurants are or something you know but but you know we can actually work around your token mechanics um you know we can actually help you find liquidity for the network that you're you're building we can actually source the talent that you need and those are sort of endlessly challenging areas and that's what we focus on yeah i'll take notes on the on the restaurant i also just wanted to add samantha though that i think in terms of this question of how do you keep up i think that our days are numbered as just being crypto investors actually i think increasingly you have to specialize um and you know you have to be a crypto infrastructure investor or a defy investor or a dow investor an nft investor i think that's increasingly the way that it's going and i think increasingly that's what we're seeing demand for from founders is that level of specialization um which is not an answer as to how to keep up with the space as a whole but i think it's just the reality yeah i mean i think to build on that you probably got first-hand experience of this yeah i think that's because increasingly those investments require you to be quite active yeah in the network whether it's liquidity providing whether it's if it's a play to earn game mechanic you can't just sit on it passively you have to put these things to work so do you outsource that do you do it in-house there's an increasing burden on the investor to be a network participant and some are set up for that some aren't but it does force you to begin to specialize in that value-add yeah i think also the global nature of most protocols and projects adds a layer of complexity so for example our fund is also remote so we suffer a lot of the challenges that our portfolio companies do with regards to paying people multiple countries taxes bank accounts bank accounts oh yeah but i mean equally bank accounts these days [Laughter] but i think equally like you know a lot of the as investors like we really take the fiduciary responsibility of lp's capital very carefully but at the same time i think the investors who are the boldest will and take risks will also have the biggest returns so there's a lot to figure out in terms of structuring like what does it mean to participate in a dow what does it mean to sort of buy nfts in your fund i would like to stake your tokens and earn income uh run routers for like you know your company companies um so it really does change the game and it's pretty exciting but i think you know ultimately everyone's figuring it out together yeah we get like questions from institutions all the time how do you guys do it and we're like we think we're doing it correctly yeah no i actually want to expand on that point because i do think that there is a uh difference between the like i mean i think everyone on this panel here are all crypto savvy investors and understand the crypto native world um but then there are like i guess vcs traditional vcs looking into the space even fintech vcs looking into the space wanting to get in on potentially like d5 dows but they don't have the infrastructure and then they miss out on the deals because they don't have the usdc to deploy into the wallet the multisig wallet and to close the round like tomorrow for example because they're they're raising at lightning speed right so um yeah for some of you on the panel who have come from a you know maybe tech vc investing background like yeah could you just explain and maybe educate um you know people on the difference between investing in crypto and in traditional sense yeah i'm happy to speak to that yeah i mean there are a lot of infrastructural considerations um certainly uh particularly if you're going to try to hold uh you know above a certain threshold in liquid tokens particularly even if you're going to try to be actively involved in in trading those tokens or even in you know participation networks staking the tax implications of staking our whole headache uh that we could spend a whole panel on at some point probably but i'll spare all of you today um and then even just in terms of thinking about where you're domiciling uh the the entity of your fund that's that's investing in all of this a lot of projects these days were only asking for usdc you know you have to think suddenly five steps ahead about okay do i have a custodian account set up um if that's the direction that i'm going is it funded sufficiently with usdc to then be able to to send through and all of these things you know it sounds like it's just sort of this administrative headache or this infrastructure headache but it does also demonstrate then to the founders how invested are you in the crypto ecosystem how native are you and that in of itself is a signal of what type of value you might be able to bring to the table and that more than anything more than any of the administrative uh headaches that that i could go on and on describing here i think that that's the biggest hurdle uh for mainstream investors getting into the crypto venture world yeah richard yeah i mean i can build on that but i almost have to ask you a question like what are we trying to who are we trying to educate about this because if we're talking to a a mainstream vc about getting into the space and the you know we're talking about that admin overhead i mean that is like not even table stakes yeah but because you're just not gonna be ready to do the transaction that needs to be done sort of way in advance maybe sort of you know years ago and probably a bit of a constant uh battle uh to you know have banking relationships that aren't being questioned by trad fire should we say to deal with um although i do see very many different standards for this for different jurisdictions around the world but to be doing kyc and aml on your obviously on your investors but also in your targets um that that's an interesting challenge in some of these um projects where you at least most people don't know who the actual founders are or some of them are that's that's that's a unique challenge um so you know i think even just starting at being in a community that is going to reference you well um as someone who's participating as a you know protocol politicians we say in the governance of some of these platforms you know getting to that point is is that how you can even access the opportunity let alone you know be successful in securing it i would say you know what i would say is as an accelerator we like a long time ago we stopped educating traditional pc this is like not worth our time you know i mean if you're if you're not here then right you know there's enough people that are um so and you know it's funny we still get calls people think they can lean on their heritage in something else let's have a coffee and swap notes it's like sorry but like 100 startups to accelerate so you know i think i don't know how everyone else finds it but those calls just quickly don't happen so so the rules are changing like the the traditional vc rules are changing and you guys are probably you know i guess i would say pioneering or kind of like you know on the ground kind of like really looking at crypto native um projects and teams um i want to touch on kind of the so we talked about like the velocity of like deals coming up and um investing and um and we were also asked about how to keep up but um there is obviously still a big knowledge gap uh with a lot of things i mean things are moving so fast so how do you guys kind of yeah stay on top of um the trends or what's going to be um you know big in in the long term and how do you do your like due diligence or research now redirect and spend too much time on uh on crypto twitter crypto twitter right so true it's so embarrassing you have to do at least two or three hours before you get out of bed get up at five or six that's the first stint i mean it's pretty challenging i mean we've now managed to end up and also kind of with a remote first approach with a couple of people in you know london lisbon berlin paris luxembourg quite spread out and then spread going back to this point of specialization um you know with some folks who even though i try and resist this a little bit because i still feel there's huge opportunity for uh sort of cross-fertilization between the different areas i mean like obviously d5 primitives are being applied to the play to earn space and so forth but we do have people who are going deeper and necessarily so so maybe it's like your top 10 or 20 people in the play to earn space on crypto twitter you better be sort of tracking what's going on there to to be keeping up to to speed with you know the latest like you know well yeah the latest dow that's been created with its native token yeah did you want to add to that i mean i just say so as an accelerator really we just have to make we have to be quite generalist so we might have certain themes but really our job is to reflect what these guys want to invest in and to try to bring you know a good volume of high quality startups to them and we even though we've got near 50 full-time staff now even with that amount of internal people you just can't keep up with all the various trends it's just not possible so we lean on both our membership so we've got a membership of another 50 people including some of the top web 3 founders that are venture partners that help us source deals that kind of help us do dd that we can increasingly lean on but ultimately we've got a network of over a thousand investors and often they'll refer things to us that they see that a bit too early for them that they quite like they'd like a bit of risk taken out of it um and so like i think one of the things that we're really seeing a lot is increased collaboration within and across the industry um and so get back to your earlier point if you're outside of that i think you're at an asymmetric disadvantage if you're not part of that community you just can't doesn't matter your scale you can't you can't compete i i think that i would add something to that though which is that one thing that i love in particular about the crypto community since i got into it you know seven eight years ago now is how inclusive and welcoming it it is provided you're getting into it for the right reasons which end up being sort of genuine interest at times you know ideological we don't need to skirt around it um and i think that what founders increasingly sniff out and i think what you're alluding to jamie perhaps is when people are just sort of coming in as tourists you know it's an opportune moment they want to show up in the space do some hot deals and then you know be on their merry way and not really invest themselves uh for the long term um and i think that that's a differentiation that i would make i think that there are plenty of individuals investors within funds that are you know well-established funds in other realms uh who are getting into it for the right reasons and i think that that's very obvious and i think that they tend to be welcomed with open arms again i think i mean i have my own personal war stories about working with vcs when i was building company yeah who who then you know for the fun decided to change the strategy and therefore the the individual change or whatever and this is not what you need when you're yeah you know in the trenches so i think the founder institute is is a good one on that and um and so i hope they continue to sniff that out and you know building on this sort of point i think maybe was being made earlier that the division between what was mainstream vc and mainstream finance and mainstream capital markets is is growing bigger i think the fundamental advantages that are being built in decentralized finance are so great that ultimately you will have a kind of a flipping you know that the things will shift that direction that's i think it's that significant nonetheless when you do later stage investments um that are equity-based something like a surrey you do have some fantastic investors like peter fenton who pop over and um and know you know have a very good nose for you know the opportunity and for the company building and they can cross over but that's more on that side of the the house of investing than on the token side so it's a mixture of crypto twitter leaning on your community a bit of like other investors or signals but then also like founder instix so a bit of that okay um all right i just want to maybe touch on so we talk about like being focused and having a discipline and like you know um you know each of your funds have a special like you know um well i guess jamie's a bit more general um i want to get your takes on um projects building on multiple different uh layer ones so like the obviously there's ethereum um projects then there's the solana polka dot you know now avalanche um and near so i mean yeah if any one of you can jump in there's there's a lot to follow there as well where do you begin i think uh you know it's a good one yeah you noticed we all just meddled around you can share about you know i mean i think firstly like the types of funds in our space are really varied as well are you a vc fund a hybrid fund a hedge fund a crossover fund uh you know there are many different funds of different objectives so mine is maybe the perspective of someone who's doing a vc fund but you know ultimately we're we're really excited about investing in product innovation and i think it's non-controversial to say that you know we are in a multi-protocol world and the question is how like what does the multi-protocol interstate highway really look like with all the bridges and you know where will value accrue where are developers going to end up right now you see a lot of bridges that are trying to divert liquidity from ethereum but that's not going to be the case long term so you know and ultimately these interoperability layers need to be extremely strong and robust we've seen quite a few hacks there already you know there are certain protocols that have sort of won out that you use case at least it seems so right bitcoin seems to have won out the you know a store value use case i think ethereum like seems to have won out the you know high value asset settlement use case we see lots of amazing sort of privacy focused l ones and we think that you know there's absolutely space for them as well because that's a missing layer like you know a lot of privacy a lot of blockchains were not built with privacy in mind and of course you have something like selena that you know for anything that has like high frequency trading and maybe you can trade off like you know certain elements for that kind of you know low transaction fee and like high throughput um so we're just really getting started and i think you know in terms of our portfolio companies going cross chain that's something that is you know is certainly on their minds but you know we're also seeing a lot of exciting layer two developments happening on ethereum um you know arbitrarium and optimism getting live and obviously starkware zk sync coming on too so you know will other l1 start being l2s on ethereum like is that ultimately what happens like that's also a good possibility and uh it's really exciting to see it's one of like you know our key themes as a fun for the rest of the year oh that's so interesting yeah so i said earlier we we a lot of our growth at the accelerator is now coming from collaborations with particular protocol ecosystems which and if you look at some of them they seem quite competitive at surface level but you know the reality is so you know someone saw how can you work with a layer 2 for ethereum like polygon and then polka dot at the same time the reality is at the moment we're in conversations with probably i don't know uh one quarter one third of the top 50 protocols that have you know entities that might manage funds um and you know we select our partners based upon two things really one is is the technology ready for prime time or is it a point of friction um and do they have a sufficient level of capital allocated to that protocol not just their own funds but like funds who have pockets or funds dedicated to that protocol and because you need you need you know ultimately it's not our job to push a protocol on the startup normally they're coming to us they've made their selection for whatever reasons and the thing we have to assess is does that add execution risk or not to ultimately creating a high growth startup and is there enough capital that's going to go into this thing to make sure it's well capitalized um so those two things need to be there and beyond that we don't really care be outside of our thesis you know and the things the principles that we care about and startups we want to see in the world and like how we get there we don't really care okay um i want to just quickly touch on well i mean i guess we moved to towards the kind of last part of our discussion on i guess the trends and predictions for the industry so um i guess as investors how do you differentiate between you know a development phase or the hype phase you know to give you an example nfts have been around since i guess you know cryptocritties were around um a few years ago um but then it's just taken off this year uh maybe spearheaded by like you know nba topshop as well as you know i guess what sorer's doing as well um yeah how do you guys differentiate between that and also what are you seeing um coming up this year and in the months and year to come i think that the biggest lesson from the investment side having now been through several cycles in this space is to just always remain open-minded and not write off a given concept or product idea or or sort of niche of the industry you know it was very easy sort of post-crypto kitties to write off nfts and you know little did we know that we'd be sitting here three four years later having practically a whole conference about nfts right um and that's one that i got very wrong at the time and have since rectified my ways but that's always uh that's always the best and hardest way to to learn a lesson in terms of what i'm excited about i'm excited about new functionalities that will be opened up that will cross-cut all of the different spaces that we're seeing whether it's daos and nfts and and d5 and so forth so things like privacy what does that look like because it's being implemented across all of these different spaces um that's what i'm paying attention to cool so as an accelerator our job really is um to be ideally no more than six ahead six months ahead of the wider venture market because if we're too far ahead if we're like a year ahead things that go through the accelerator don't get any funding because nobody else is investing in it so we want to be just had enough but not too far ahead so you know we were talking about nfts and defy and how we thought a boom was going to be happening around this time last year we published the open metaverse thesis first week of january um this year and like how we get there isn't rocket science it's not because we're geniuses it's just literally we will speak to 3 000 startups at pre-seed stage so we just have this unique window to just do some basic pattern recognition and say it looks like nfts might be a thing here's some trends within it and then we just try to communicate that to the market in order to prep it so we have quite a unique advantage just by virtue of the volume and the stage that we operate at right um i think probably two things the first one is uh you know decentralized identity or reputation i think we're just at the stage now where the space is so sued anonymous but you know you see a lot like yesterday on the d5 panel they're talking about your favorite anon and you know we feel like we know zero x tuba or zero x sisyphos even though it's really an anime character and a pseudo-anonymous handle but i think people want to be seen and you know ultimately how do we create more personalized applications how do we move to more capital efficient defy that all boils down to identity and reputation working i think the second thing i'm excited about is to really see excess funding for tooling it's something that i think like you know we're still early in the stages of like and you know the space the values of the space really tend towards open source and collaboration and composability and there's still a lot of tooling that we're sort of missing to make the developer experience more robust on new protocols like selena like you know a severe severe shortage of like you know say security auditors and we need like people people to be working on things like that to make it safe for consumers to use so um building on to jeremy's point the way we think about it is luckily we don't really have to predict what's going on just kind of be prepared to spot it you know kind of when you you see it it's good for me because i felt in my startups i was always a little bit too too early um but um the we were pretty early in the kind of nft space back in decentraland who co-authored the standard back in 2017 2018. um and so i guess in the sense that has has played out and maybe connecting it back to this point of of what's going on between the different layer ones um i think what is often mis underestimated is the um the importance of go to market and and and of community and the power of getting that that right um and and also how early we are so if you take the success of axi and you know from sky mavis there's only just you know say a million or two kind of players or so possibly but whereas something like clash of clans there was probably like a 100 million players or of the order of that order of magnitude so super early but yet that kind of success can now drive propel them forward with their ronin side chain and an opportunity to build some success around that so we're gonna that could shift you know the direction of travel of um of kind of the the ecosystem and i think you know connecting again to that point of community and go to market with this question of identity in uh these decentralized communities that min made um i think the whole move towards um dao's is a way in which capital is allocated and decisions are made um opens up an opportunity that i don't know whether we're as early as 2017 with respect to nfts and therefore it's going to take several years for this to play out but you know how do you how do you vote how do you hire people into daos how do you get rid of people who shouldn't be there how who decides who shouldn't be there um how do people get rewarded for you know participating in them because you know certainly we feel that that intersection of of of capital and governance and almost a society is just incredibly potent and so it's going to lead to great things so yeah that's an area that we're focusing on yeah i mean it's been fascinating to see um this whole entire year seeing like just dowse um investment into dows and that roll out even vcs investing in 2010 i think touching on men's point like people are still working it out people are still learning and it's it's fascinating to watch it all unfold unlike crypto twitter um we just have like three more minutes to go be great to see if there are any questions on the floor yep cool go for it wow that was keen he didn't oh that was a very good hand up cool just bringing the mic no problem hello how are you doing it's nick from oven blocks nfc game project uh from your perspective uh because i was listening to you very carefully from your perspective while making research about the project what is what are the elements that make this kind of project projects that you choose stand up or for example uh help us to stand up on your targets let's say or on your radars direct do that everybody all of you all of you anyone can it's super hard to pick out one game that's going to be successful um you know an outfit like supercell that did produce clash of clans that had to build whole culture in their organization to run many experiments in parallel uh arguably that's what yield guild games and blackpool and so forth do in managing database allocation of funds to lots of different games and lots of different players so you know how do you stand out that that's that's a tough one but if you've got if you've got great technical chops from a decentralized perspective and you've produced beautiful and successful games then that's probably a good starting point but that's also probably wrong um but it's different for other kind of companies or projects it depends on the stage you're investing at right so like at the stage that we're investing at generally there is nothing but founders like there might be some tech but i mean you're really betting on these people to find value and be able to execute on it and you know often we have projects come to the accelerator and they'll come out if not totally different partially different i imagine you know as you kind of get into later stage you're going to be much more metric driven there's going to be some hopefully fundamentals that you can track and measure um but for us the kind of tried and tested thing going back to the founder thing the founders that work best for us we found are the most humble ones and actually the great thing about an accelerator is to acknowledge you even need to go into one so i never went into one i thought i kind of knew it all um wrongly um people that acknowledge that they need to go into an accelerator that they need help that need to accelerate certain elements of what they're doing generally we found uh go on to be very successful because of that humility but that's like a personality trait thing any other questions oh hi everybody uh i'm ken berger from lorem labs and i know there's a few of you on stage i won't look at anyone um but around 2019 it was pretty tough to you know raise money from you know lps especially traditional ones it feels like things have thawed considerably and going a lot more mainstream so my question is just generally you know to everybody what kind of sentiment are you finding from lps and to what extent is there still a stigma uh you know what are you finding um i think in our experience like people are a lot more open-minded and there's a huge macro overlay right which has been drummed on a lot like super low rail rates like you know asset inflation and whatnot um and i think with every vintage that people stay out of crypto like they run the risk of getting in trouble so generally i think we've found um you know the the space become increasingly open-minded not only that our lps also want to make direct investments too and learn how to custody and learn how to actually do taxes and k1s and you know we've been very impressed with that open-mindedness any last point otherwise do you want to oh i was just going to find a point yeah i think europe i'll get a little plug-in for europe i think i mean so i've been in my whatever fourth decade or something crazy but but over the last 10 you know 10 years it's been transformational for europe in terms of lp's enthusiasm for backing managers out here which is like boring as that is that's pretty important for making sure it gets through to the startups here also um but actually coupled then with what men said about another macro perspective and people getting comfortable that you know this is not a criminal activity crypto i just recently had a dm on twitter from an endowment fund from a university in the united states saying that they'd like to look at investing in the fund i think that's kind of that was new for me at least so yeah i think cool well on that note we're running out of time just want to thank you richard min jamie and jill thank you guys