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Caleb Shack
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Caleb Shack
@firstc0in
Investing @variantfund | Alum @penn Backing founders with strong opinions and killer mindsets. Advocate of the em-dash—before AI took over.
NYC Beigetreten Ağustos 2021
1.3K Folgt3.3K Follower
@therollupco The US had some big wins, but Europe also dominated last cycle (Ethena, Pump). The beauty of crypto is that it’s GLOBAL. We just backed a team based in Singapore; they’re going to melt faces.
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"You can't just go to a happy hour in New York and find the next startup."
Tom Dunleavy says the easy discovery era is over. The meetup era is over. The local-network deal flow that built the first wave of digital assets winners doesn't produce the next wave.
You need non-obvious geographies. Theses nobody else is backing. Founders from outside the traditional pipeline. Different verticals entirely.
The VCs who still source like it's 2021 will miss every meaningful opportunity. The ones who adapt their sourcing to match the market structure will find what everyone else overlooked.
The winners are concentrated in the U.S. The next winners probably aren't.
Haseeb ＞|＜@hosseeb
There's an obvious answer here that everyone's dancing around: Crypto is simply harder now. Not because it was all a scam or funny money or whatever. Crypto is harder because it's winning, and there are way more mature companies and products at scale today. This makes incumbents harder to unseat. Coinbase, Binance, Solana, Base, Polymarket, Circle, Tether--they're all bigger and better and more entrenched than they were even just a few years ago. This is a natural thing that happens with industries. In the early Internet, it was a lot easier to build a social network. Very hard after 2015. A couple years ago, there was room to attack the big AI labs, now it's almost impossible to get any distribution at all. That doesn't mean there's no room for startups. But it does mean the land grab phase is over. During the land grab, almost anyone can win given the right timing. But we're in the midgame now, and most of the board is already occupied. At this stage, you'll have to attack someone powerful to take over some land, not just plant a flag in an empty field. There are still a few greenfield areas, and there's always room for people who can genuinely innovate. But crypto is harder now, and that means the ideas need to be sharper, the teams need to be stronger, and the bar is rightfully higher than a few years ago.
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@kodjima33 Self-surveillance is going to be the biggest consumer breakthrough this decade.
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Spent 4 months and built Omi for Desktop, your life architect
It sees your screen, hears your conversations and tells you what to do next
It’s like having a second brain that actually pays attention
Open source, local, link below
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@justinmujin What would make you keep your earnings on platform?
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interesting but -
underwriting 99% of YT channels is next to impossible. most channels are worth sub 1x Rev bc the moat is largely the next content piece
As a creator who’s withdrawn like 500k from YT, I would not want to keep there
YT is increasingly bifurcating into 2 camps: blue chip operators (eg mrbeast, Ryan Trahan) with real businesses with extensive banking needs. and then you have short-video algomaxxers who churn thru channels and chase fast big payout. Neither of these parties want this imo
stablecoins are great however
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@Eito_Miyamura I agree YouTube has some cultural hurdles to get over..
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I find the culture of Google making YouTube get into NeoBanking unlikely, but the post highlights a good point:
Every "non-traditional career" (e.g. YouTuber) platform have potential for a NeoBank play
Most interesting are: Instagram, Twitch, Tiktok, Subtack, Etsy, OF, Roblox
Caleb Shack@firstc0in
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The first one to do that will probably be Stripe
Whop has done it at a smaller scale
TikTok could be big, I wonder if the stablecoin stack could allow underage to tap into it more easily
Caleb Shack@firstc0in
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@gminoprio Whop is a good testing ground. Services in their marketplace are historically ephemeral while most earners on their platform are underbanked. Solution: lock in GMV > creates stable revenue overtime > banks the underbanked.
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When financial infrastructure is plug-and-play, platforms will integrate financial services at every strategic layer.
Youtube is just one example, what other platforms come to mind?
Caleb Shack@firstc0in
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Caleb Shack retweetet
The next generation of neobanks won't look like banks at all.
Having spent a lot of time researching crypto neobanks to look for differentiating products, i've come to a similar conclusion.
Global access to dollars, US virtual accounts, cards, and collateralized credit lines is commoditized. without a regional or regulatory wedge, it's going to be incredibly hard to build a "neobank" without existing platform leverage (e.g., WeChat, Starbucks, YouTube, X, or even Etherfi/Aave with solid existing Defi products).
If you accept the above, there's essentially two ways to think about the neobank opportunity from an investor perspective:
- look for products where banking features would be accretive to the existing product. Starbucks did not turn into a bank to compete with JPMorgan for all your dollars, but they rewarded you for topping up your balance to buy coffee.
- look for picks and shovel plays that provide neobank-like qualities to existing products (e.g., Bridge, Morpho, CoinFlow, etc).
Caleb Shack@firstc0in
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@tsvlvs I could see an aggregator or financial agent be the organization layer here
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@firstc0in I’m bias but most social creators are omni channel? so I skew the banking layer for them will be too
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Caleb Shack retweetet
Social Neobanks are going to be massive.
Stablecoin products are unbundling the financial and banking stack enabling any company with distribution to build embedded financial products for their users.
Caleb Shack@firstc0in
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Heading to SF for @worldnetwork Lift Off. Who wants to grab coffee while I’m there?
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@PoppyPancho Non-Finance frontiers are worthwhile investments, they just didn't pan out in previous vintages.
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@firstc0in finance having PMF isn't a new realization, it's literally the oldest use case for blockchains. the interesting question is why it took VCs 7 years to stop funding decentralized storage and social media before admitting it
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From 2017-2023, Crypto VC’s engaged in a broad aperture of opportunities. The thesis was akin to being a generalist fund with the constraint of decentralization. Finance, Data, Storage, Gaming, Social Media, AI, etc. were all considered exciting areas for disruption.
Since then, the market has revealed that Finance is a category with meaningful PMF (DAUs, Fees/Revenue, sticky TVL), while others are still speculative and leaning contrarian in 2026. This realization—in tandem with the token game being solved—has limited the scope of what feels safe to invest in.
This is the wrong mindset.
Crypto has shown us the power of markets and gave us the rails to create new ones. It proved that merit and execution matter more than age or experience. It revealed how to be self-sovereign in the age of big tech and big government.
History should serve as a blueprint for what we can build next, rather than a repellent for further exploration.
If you’re building something new, my DMs are open 🫡
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@firstc0in overfitting to what already worked shrinks the imagination of the space
crypto real edge was always about expanding what markets can be, not just optimizing what already exists
and the next wave will come from teams willing to build something new
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