David Rakusan

@jayyeh 100%. Vague thesis = vague inbound. Then VCs complain about noise in their inbox. Specificity doesn't scare away great deals. It scares away the wrong ones. That's the whole point.

Hey, VCs. I know you don't like turning away dealflow. I know you're scared to be specific in setting boundaries around what you invest in (what if the next fund returner isn't in there??) but damn! it's not helpful to be super vague on your websites like "we invest in early stage innovators" More firms should take a page out of @nbt's description of @footworkvc on his linkedin... nice to know how he defines a down the middle investment for him. I bet the specificity attracts more great deals than it scares away...

The startup version: Your fundability ≈ your warm intro. Your warm intro ≈ your network. Your network ≈ where you went to school. ∴ Your fundability ≈ your college. Same leaky proxies. And the founders who don't fit the pattern get filtered out before anyone looks at what they actually built.

Hundreds of applications in 8 hours. Now imagine being the team that has to figure out which ones are real founders vs. AI-polished noise. That's the actual bottleneck in early-stage — not deal access, deal verification.

Verification is underrated here. In startups specifically: AI collapsed the cost of looking fundable to zero. Anyone can generate a perfect deck, a polished pitch, even a working prototype. But verifying whether the founder and their claims are real? Still takes weeks of manual diligence. That gap is only getting wider.

What’s still important in the age of AI? Vision and verification. Prompting and polishing. Community and geography. Scarcity and cryptography. Physicality and resiliency. Vision is where you are going. AI can move fast in a direction but it needs direction. Vision means focusing on that direction. Verification is making sure the AI is doing what you want it to do. You can use AIs to critique each other, but you are the final critic. Prompting is articulating what you want in clear written (or spoken) English. Those with great vocabularies will do far better than those without. Polishing is realizing that AI often does it middle-to-middle, but not end-to-end. AI is a construction crane that can build much of the building, but often at the end you need human tweezers. Community is online and offline connectivity. It’s what stays roughly constant even as software becomes variable. Geography is the longitude and latitude that governs your laws. To first order the Internet is roughly uniform across the surface of the earth, but to second order it really is not. Scarcity is everything from physical scarcity (like robots and drones and houses and cars) to distribution scarcity. The hard-to-make atoms as distinct from the easily made bits. Cryptography is everything AI can’t do. LLMs can solve partial differential equations, but not discrete logarithms. The hard-to-fake bits as distinct from the easily faked bits. Physicality is where AI will truly shine. Robot task completions can often be more easily verified. The real world is the verifier of whether a box is on a table. It’s much harder to verify whether an essay is done. Resiliency is about cutting your burn rate, strengthening your community, and picking the right location (and allocation) to weather the dislocations ahead.

Gemini 3 models from @Google @GoogleDeepMind have made a significant 2X SOTA jump on ARC-AGI-2 (Semi-Private Eval) Gemini 3 Pro: 31.11%, $0.81/task Gemini 3 Deep Think (Preview): 45.14%, $77.16/task

What makes investors say yes? @DavidRakusan and @0xjimmyl explain why most deals start after they meet the founder in person. Watch the clip.

@cioffi_victor @ether_fi @Plasma @UR_global @KASTcard @galaxyoneapp @useTria @usePicnicBR @neobankless @AviciMoney @OrbitX_Pay @piggywallet_app @berryinvesting nash.io @nashsocial

who is building Neobanks? @ether_fi @Plasma @UR_global @KASTcard @galaxyoneapp @useTria @usePicnicBR @neobankless @AviciMoney @OrbitX_Pay @piggywallet_app @berryinvesting Tell me more names

How to correctly time a token purchase if you raise $100m+ in cash as DAT? Here's the guide: 👇 These are your options: 1) Wait and start purchasing later 2) Purchase all asap 3) DCA over some time period The goal is to maximize digital asset per share while minimizing execution risk (the risk of the price moving against you). Let's break those options down: 1) Wait and start purchasing later - Works best in a bear market if you don't expect any rapid reversal. [Hint: We are not in a bear market] 2) Purchase all asap - DATs execute the buy order as soon as they have money ready. This option minimizes execution risk and deviates the least from the earliest possible price when the purchase could have happened. - It also works best in a rising market, in which you don't expect any significant pullbacks. Those are inherently difficult to predict. 3) DCA over some time period - Depending on the period and pace of deployment picked, you get a good average price over the period. Works best in a ranging market, where you don't expect any rapid price changes. - Optimizes for uncertainty in price, but not in execution risk. Digital asset treasury companies are long-term holders which should focus on boosting token / share sustainably. We’re in an upward-trending market— at least for BTC, ETH and SOL, so DATs should deploy as much funds as they can now (option 2) and then hustle for new capital to grab more in a accretive way for their token / share to go up.

Wall Street will soon discover Solana, and this doc will help them wrap their head around it! 👇

The big news is out. @Rockaway_X not only supports Solmate but has become a strategic partner!

@0x_Clon @viktorfischer @emptymetadata @tjfanta1 @hyperanar Thank you for everything! All the best! 🔥

It’s been a privilege to work alongside and learn from everyone at RockawayX, especially my colleagues on the investment team - @viktorfischer, @emptymetadata, @tjfanta1, @hyperanar, @DavidRakusan, and the rest.

After more than three years investing at @Rockaway_X, I’m happy to share that I’m joining Win Win - a research-driven web3 advisory firm - where I’ll help founders successfully prepare for fundraising and guide them through the entire process to a successful round close.

There is a unique angle Figure is approaching the tradfi investors with. They bring diversification beyond exchanges to Wall Street. Most 2025 crypto listings, Circle ($1.1 billion raised), Bullish ($1 billion), and Gemini ($425 million), are exchange/stablecoin plays. Figure brings a credit-market angle: real consumer-loan economics plus blockchain infra adoption across lenders/servicers—broadening the investable crypto-equity set and Wall Street seems to like it!

2/3: Founded in 2018, Figure uses blockchain for financial services, including HELOCs and mortgages funded in about 10 days compared to the industry's 42-day average. It also handles asset tokenization, stablecoins, and crypto-backed loans. Recent six-month revenue: $190 million, with $29 million in net income.

1/3: Figure Technologies completed its IPO, pricing at $25 per share on September 11, 2025. 📈 It debuted on Nasdaq under $FIGR on the 12th, opening at $36 (a 44% increase) and closing at $31.11 after a bit of volatility. The company raised $787.5 million at a $5.3 billion valuation. I would conclude it was a successful IPO for the company.

Lastly, clarifying one misinformation about @fundstrat (Tom Lee), @BitMNR chairman, and his compensation. Per BMNR’s filings, Ethereum Tower Instant LLC (ETI) was issued an equity 5-year warrant at $5.40 for 5% of fully-diluted shares as of 7/8/25, under a Strategic Advisor Agreement. ETI is managed by MOZAYYX UGP, LLC; its owners aren’t publicly disclosed, so it cannot be concluded that Tom Lee is the sole beneficiary. There is also a separate consulting deal with Ethereum Tower LLC (ETI) to run the ETH treasury of BMNR. ETI should receive fees ranging from 1% (at <1B AUM) to 0.25% (at >$5B AUM).

10) Let's look at Sharplink ($SBET) @sharplink where the non-employee board members received $35k per year as base, $10k a year as bonus and 80k restricted stock units (RSUs) worth around $280k at grant date as equity incentives.

1/ How do Digital Asset companies pay their leaders? Here’s a quick, breakdown from recent CEO/C‑suite/board packages in the space. 🧵