💫Matthew Buxton

Long - UA Long - Distribution Long - Defi rails for instant settlement Long - Games we publish Short - everything else

@MG_web3 How do you find out those things?

the amount of alpha you can extract from running DD on the VCs you chat with is insane. who else they're looking at. what their IC actually cares about. which partners are fighting for allocation vs which are just taking calls. run these convos like a proper sales process. you're qualifying them too.

@coopernicus01 It was the smooth brains in $500 hoodies that raised for those companies

@BuxtonMatthew noooo too many big brains who thought their very technical project would be valuable to normal peple

it’s hard to explain to high IQ people but it’s really important not everyone at the company is a gigabrain everyone being smart is bad when your target audience is not smart being too smart also often leads to focusing on logic instead of feelings, this causes big problems in business because most people are NOT logical anyway, i guess im saying hire some dumb people with good vibes

@Dexerto It’s a bold strategy.

Jeff Kaplan says his new game will focus on allowing players to unlock items through gameplay rather than microtransactions "It's like this crazy idea that hasn't been seen in the past ten years, maybe I could play the game to get s**t"

@whiteonblack9 @WarpGameCHAIN We’re gonna bring it back

@WarpGameCHAIN Where is Call of the Voyd these days?

@WarpGameCHAIN Let’s goooo ai vs taste

@jonahlau_ And this is why we’re building the future of UA

Precedent matching from Web2 is leading teams to optimize for the wrong things Every startup pitch references 2008 social apps or 2015 SaaS waves - build fast, grow users, figure out monetization later. That worked because distribution was expensive and hard to replicate. If you built an audience or network effect, you had time to figure out the business. AI tools have the opposite problem. Distribution is hard but building is trivial. You can copy the product in a weekend but you can't copy the go-to-market. The precedent that actually maps is DTC brands in 2019. Infinite competitors, zero product moat, entirely dependent on owned channels. The AI companies that survive will be the ones that owned their distribution before they scaled.

@Jakeronthia_ @avax I know right

@BuxtonMatthew @avax Wow Bullish

Ok so gaming is back on the @avax menu? Big news

@jayyeh Just a casual billy from the back of the sofa.

see, anyone can do it. just throw in an extra bill, larry. come on...

@henrychang10000 As someone who’s building the UA chain for games I’m kinda shocked we haven’t crossed paths yet ;)

8.3M+/acc We're finalizing human sponsorship via agent tokens to be released tomorrow. Stay tuned, humans!

@HarryStebbings Raise for UA meta.

I miss the days of a $15M on $75M Series A. Can’t do anything for less than $30M on $160M today.

@bradcarryvc I’m trained to ignore VC DMs

I have a simple strategy as a VC Each year, I organize a March Madness bracket pool with every founder invested in I send it out and ask them to join And then once someone joins and fills out their bracket, I immediately pull funding from their company If they have time to think about silly sports games, then clearly they aren’t focused on building a trillion dollar company

@WarpGameCHAIN Was fun

Join us to chat about gaming infra. 300 Billion dollars waiting to be decentralized. Let’s get on it💫 twitter.com/i/spaces/1RKjp…

The amount of unsolicited scam emails I get saying I want to invest in your project is kinda ridiculous. We are approaching a raise in Q2. -No it’s not suitable for angel investors. -Yes we have traction -Yes we are fully bootstrapped -Yes we’re building for minimum decacorn status -Yes our vision is horizontal occupation of an existing market -Yes AI If you are interested in leading or taking part in the future of UA for the post AI world, please reach out in DMs or LinkedIn.

@jonahlau_ I got 0% 😂

The bar for replacing me is apparently still pretty high Check yours now 👇

@stitchbygoogle Figma in shambles rn

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@SinjinMAYG @gothburz I definitely didn’t see them before they were expensive so maybe my perspective differs a bit. Never felt satisfied with the explanation of the economic work required by land to actually attain those values.

@BuxtonMatthew @gothburz I held them to 70% or 95% down. Of course I'm up on those tokens because I was so early, but Im definitely an exception as I could see the flaws early and cashed out when I saw them.

My net worth peaked at $1.2 million. None of it was real. I don't mean that philosophically. I mean it was located on servers that have since been turned off. I own eleven properties in the metaverse. Three in Decentraland. Four in The Sandbox. Two in Voxels. One in Otherside. And a beachfront villa in Horizon Worlds that I bought for $214,000 because Mark Zuckerberg called it "the next frontier." The frontier closed last week. It's a mobile app now. Last year I mass DM'd 340 people the phrase "you don't understand how early we are." I have since stopped doing that. Not because I was wrong. Because most of them blocked me. I got into metaverse real estate in November 2021. Everyone was buying. Someone paid $450,000 to be Snoop Dogg's neighbor. In a video game. With no legs. The avatars didn't have legs. I thought that was bullish. "The legs are coming," I told my Discord. "Legs are a roadmap item." Three hundred people reacted with rocket emojis. I called myself a "digital land baron." I put it in my Twitter bio. I put it in my LinkedIn headline. I said it on a podcast that had eleven listeners. Three of them were bots. The rest were my alts. My virtual property has more square footage than my actual apartment. My actual apartment has furniture. Location, location, location. My most valuable asset was a plot next to a virtual Gucci store. Gucci left in 2023. The store is still there. Nobody's in it. It's like a mall in Ohio but with worse graphics and no food court. I held. Diamond hands. That's what we said. "Diamond hands." It means refusing to sell while your investment loses 94% of its value. We turned financial paralysis into a personality trait. A guy in my Discord paid $2.4 million for a 618-parcel estate in Decentraland. Prime district. High foot traffic. I asked him what "foot traffic" meant when the platform had 38 daily active users. He said I didn't understand the technology. I didn't. I still bought more. We had a DAO. A decentralized autonomous organization. That means we voted on decisions. There were nine of us. Three never showed up. Two voted on everything without reading it. The other four were me and my alts. We voted to "acquire strategic parcels." The vote passed unanimously. I voted four times. My portfolio peaked at $1.2 million. I told everyone. I made a spreadsheet. I projected 40x returns by 2025. I made a pitch deck. The pitch deck had a slide that said "WE ARE BUILDING THE DIGITAL ECONOMY." The slide had a rocket emoji. That was my entire financial model. In 2023 I bought a Bored Ape for $189,000. It's worth $14,000 now. I don't talk about the Ape. I still use it as my profile picture. People ask me about it. I say "I'm long-term bullish." Long-term bullish means I can't sell it without crying in a Panera. My mom asked me what a Bored Ape was. I said "digital art on the blockchain." She asked why it cost more than her car. I said "you don't understand Web3." She said "I understand you live in a studio apartment." She's not in my Discord. Justin Bieber bought one for $1.3 million. It's worth about $90,000 now. I felt better about mine after I heard that. That's community. WAGMI. We're All Gonna Make It. We said that every day. In the group chat. While the floor dropped. While the volume dried up. While 95% of all NFT collections went to zero. We're all gonna make it. None of us made it. But we said it with conviction and a laser-eye profile picture. That counts for something. It doesn't. But we said it did. That's decentralized consensus. Meta spent $84 billion on the metaverse. I need to say that again. $84 billion. More than the GDP of Luxembourg. More than the GDP of Iceland, Luxembourg, and Malta combined. They spent it on a platform where the avatars had no legs, the graphics looked like a 2006 Wii game, and the peak user count was lower than the lunch rush at a Chipotle in Des Moines. They just pulled Horizon Worlds from VR headsets. It lives on as a mobile app. My beachfront villa is now a mobile app. Location, location, location. Zuckerberg renamed the entire company for this. Facebook became Meta. A $900 billion company changed its legal name because the CEO watched Ready Player One and said "I want that." Reality Labs lost $10 billion in 2021. $14 billion in 2022. $16 billion in 2023. $18 billion in 2024. $19 billion in 2025. That's not a strategy. That's a speedrun. They laid off 1,500 Reality Labs employees this year. Shut down three VR studios. Killed Supernatural. Put the entire VR social vision in a casket and said "we're pivoting to AI and wearables." The pivot took four years and $84 billion. I pivoted too. I'm an AI real estate investor now. I bought a virtual plot in an AI-generated world that doesn't exist yet. The founder said it was "the intersection of spatial computing and large language models." I don't know what that means. I gave him $40,000. He has a whitepaper. It's 47 pages. I read the title and the tokenomics section. The tokenomics section is a pie chart. I love pie charts. They make everything look like a plan. The project has a roadmap. Q1: "Build community." Q2: "Launch beta." Q3: "Scale ecosystem." Q4 is blank. Q4 is always blank. That's where the exit scam goes. My accountant asked me to value my metaverse portfolio for tax purposes. I said $1.2 million. He said "current market value." I said $6,400. He stared at me for eleven seconds. I know because I counted. He asked if I had any other investments. I showed him my NFTs. He stared for longer. I told him they were "cultural artifacts with long-term provenance." He asked if I'd considered a 401k. I told him a 401k was "legacy finance." He told me to leave his office. The metaverse is dead. I don't accept that. I am a digital land baron. I own eleven properties across four platforms. I have a beachfront villa in a mobile app, a plot next to an empty Gucci store, and a cartoon monkey that cost me more than my actual car. Location, location, location. The location is nowhere. But I'm early. I'm always early. That's the same as being wrong except you get to say it with confidence.