The Time Is Now: Investing in Diverse Perspectives - Sutian Dong

um i'm really excited to be here i'm really excited that you guys are here uh i really would like this to be interactive um i don't love the idea of talking to you know sort of yelling into the void for 20 minutes and so to uh to the end where you have you know questions feel free to raise your hand in between we'll see how that works we'll test it out if it works great if it doesn't oh well um and so maybe to start i want to i want a positive question to everyone what do you know to be true that no one else does right and you don't have to have an immediate answer to that you don't have to raise your hand and answer it right now but just hold that question in your head and um and and keep it for later uh before i jump into uh what the meat of the conversation is the through line to this uh this presentation is really that i believe that the power of individual investments today into diverse ideas has the potential to change oh the slides are playing i'm just going to wing it for the next 20 minutes has the potential to change the future of what what web3 looks like and and so i i want to just pause there and give you a little bit of of my background and to say that um i'm certainly i have not built my career in the web 3 world i've spent the majority of my career as a web 2 investor i was in fashion before but back i guess right after the financial crisis i started my investing career at a shop in new york city called first mark capital first mark for those of you who don't know has invested in companies like riot games which produces league of legends pinterest shopify dcg digital currency group envision and more and i left first mark to go join a fund called female founders fund after spending a number of years there and at female founders fund we invested in what was a really non-obvious idea at that time the exponential power of exceptional female founders is this better oh okay so this is this is better uh and and while while we were there i invest in companies like tala and zola and read the runway coaster astrology um but moving through these as i said um we invest in a bunch of companies a number of them you may be familiar with either in your personal or professional lives and along the way back in 2017 i started the global women in bc community which is the largest network of female vcs in the world about 4 000 women across 200 cities uh 60 countries the majority of u.s states and and this is all to say that i am incredibly passionate about investing in diverse perspectives and unique non-consensus points of view that have the power to change the world and so a couple years ago my partner lauren and i started multitudes a new fund where we we have two core tenants one that the future is not going to look like the past and two that this next generation of innovation is going to be meaningfully different than the last and what that means for us functionally is that we invest in the most diverse perspectives unique perspectives non-obvious non-consensus ideas across companies and funds across both web 2 and web 3. so we're hyper focused on investing in one uh one kind of entrepreneur that has one kind of unique idea but we're really broad in another sense where we invest in companies funds across web 2 and web 3. but you know i'm i'm not really here to talk about multitudes i'm actually really here to talk about how web3 has enabled all of us to be individual investors this is this is a snapshot of uh the the last 30 years of internet and uh and and smartphone and uh i guess each usage the the big blue line is the number of internet users worldwide the squiggly red line is the number of smartphone users worldwide and the little yellow line down there is the number of heath wallets worldwide and so if you look at that you're like oh the yellow thing is really small compared to the blue thing right but when i look at that that means that we're in the really early innings of what could be the future of web3 and crypto and what it also means is that we have this incredible opportunity right now to change the culture and create the culture of what web3 could be so before i talk about you know your own superpower as an investor and how you can invest in the diversity of your ideas uh this is somewhat of a simplistic heuristic on how to invest uh there's a spectrum right there's things that seem like a bad idea there's things that seem like a good idea there's a spectrum of things that are bad ideas and then are good ideas and in the bottom right don't do this right not a but not a good idea not a good use of time or money those are rugs don't do those either top right this is where a lot of people think they have alpha right seems like a good idea is a good idea everyone rushes in you might make a little bit of money uh but the challenge there is that the thing that you think is a good idea everyone else does too right so it's not non-consensus and therefore it's oftentimes more expensive right and hotter than it should be in the top left i think this is where true alpha is things that seem like bad ideas right that seem like toys or silly or you know who has time for that or it'll never be big or the market size is too small like the list can go on and on and on but when they end up being a good idea right who knew 140 characters to start would result in twitter right when they end up being good ideas they are really good ideas and investing early due to your perspective means that you've monetized and capitalized on that good uh good idea and so before we jump into what's happening in web3 this is sort of the linear version of what's happening in the the old world right in the old world of investing things went from the top down and then from from the bottom up that means that limited partners invested in funds that invested in companies that provided products or services to consumers or customers broadly and you would pay the company's money or use their product or spend time on it right and that value would accrue back up to the company which then would accrue back up to the fund which then would accrue back up to the limited partnerships or the the institutional investors of the world and that's not that's not wrong right we've seen the benefits i think of venture capital over the many years many decades that it's been a business but what that means though is that the flow of capital right is titrated in such a way that only the people who control that capital get to decide what is investable or good and what is not investable or not is great and what that also means that in the web uh in the web 2 world is that the folks that the endpoints that create value right value creation that doesn't necessarily correspond to the nodes that have value capture the opportunity that you see in web3 is that value creation the points that create value they can also capture the value that they create so in this new world the the sort of creator capital and community ecosystem exists symbiotically and they exist in such a way that you don't have to be one or the other often times there's overflow between all these different systems and so going back to this point of what do you know to be true that no one else does right the hot take that shawn who was just on the panel earlier had asked like the thing that you think like that your friends are like well i don't know right or your colleagues are like oh i don't know that you know in your heart of hearts is gonna happen like that is where your alpha is and so what this means though is that our networks are a function of of circumstance and choice right our networks and our lived experiences create the the opportunities that we see that no one else does and the choice to invest in our networks today creates the changes that we want to see in the future when you think about investing in diverse ideas as an individual one of the other realities of web3 now is that investing is not just capital right investing is more than capital it's time it's attention it's influence it could be more and that more i can't tell you what that is right because it's going to be different from me to you to you to you as a function of who we are and also who we're not and so going back to this chart we're still we're still at the the the yellow line there it's still it's still pretty small but if you zoom in on it the curve is steep and this is why i think there's an opportunity today right and it's in fact imperative to exercise this opportunity today to invest in the diversity that you want to see in the world the chance that we can change the culture of the internet the culture of mobile is not super high because of the massive amount of users there but the chance for us to create a new culture and a new design around investing in the ideas that in a web-three-linear environment wouldn't seem interesting to the folks controlling the capital that's the opportunity that exists today thank you awesome i'm i'm looking at you i have a couple i think i have a couple minutes right yes i do want q a all right when you talk about these alpha ideas can you give me some examples of certain alphas that you think to be alpha that you invested in sure so uh i will give you an example um i won't i won't say what exactly they're doing in um the web 3 world but uh this is this is a web 2 example that folks might be familiar with so who who likes astrology in here one two couple who's who's familiar with astrology probably everyone knows their sign right it's like hey i'm a scorpio or it's aquarius season or what have you astrology is an area that very few vcs would invest in right they're like oh that seems like snake oil or a trick or a way to get people to buy the newspaper um i uh a couple years ago invested in a company called coaster astrology that is a very popular app for people to find their i see a couple of users probably in the audience uh to find uh not just learn more about themselves but to find connectivity with other people and i say this right now because this is the proof point of when i invested it was not a popular idea right it was seen as a toy a trick something that was a flash in the pan something that would you know the culture would pass by right and fast forward to today they're the most widely used astrology app in the world and so it's an example of believing in something that of course other people did right but when you think about the things that were unique to me like being a venture capitalist believing in that space that was an idea that i had that very few other people had and so i would encourage you to think about okay well what is unique about me and what are the intersections right of the venn diagrams of the places that you you know you have built community in the ways that you live right that enable you to have that idea that you're like that's going to be true and no one else believes in it yet popular crowd alrighty well thank you so much