Chapter One

some confused folks think I left SOL because I talk about not one but *two* coins now reminder: we run the no 1. validator, no 1. trading infra, no 1. dev platform, RPCs, & soon the no. 1 privacy protocol - on Solana the *only* Solana exclusive leading provider pls. trillions.

We built a tool to increase our Claude Code and Codex usage by 3x with the same spend. nerfguard.com It also saves us hours a day per person in time we’d otherwise be waiting around for model generation time. Today we're sharing it with the community.

Generational company. Congrats @kiwicopple, @AntWilson & team. Supabase is a relentlessly product-focused team that shows up every day and does the work. One of the most important AI companies of the future. Grateful to have backed them since the early days.

Pay for your favorite AI tools with ether.fi Cash and get 15% cashback on your spend. Start earning: ether.fi/app/cash/safe

I doubt @ethanrthornton will read this because he's too busy building a generational company to be on here much. But we're proud to be investors in @Mach_Industries at @chapterone - one of the most ambitious teams in tech. Another one building in our backyard, Huntington Beach

Users are choosing ether.fi because it's the only place where they can spend and grow their digital assets with institutional-grade security. $1 billion soon.

How are people still sleeping on @FlexSuperApp? They are building a fintech giant right under all our noses...

Great to see @FlexSuperApp included in such a great list of category leaders. They've grown from zero to 9-figures in revenue in 2.5 years. One of the most underrated stories in fintech right now.

Two years ago, I was asked to nominate a company in our portfolio that institutional finance investors should know more about for Medici. The answer was obvious. People needed to learn more about @nathanlallman & what he was building at @OndoFinance. I was honored to spend time with him that day, and in true Nathan style, we prepared a lot for the interview starting months beforehand. Nathan truly was a trailblazer. There were so many parts of his life story that were interesting to me. And preparing for this interview let me spend time learning more about his life beyond what is typical for an investor. His childhood in Honolulu, Hawaii. His time at Brown University, where he was on the varsity sailing team and a two-time academic All-American. His decision to leave Goldman Sachs after two years to start Ondo Finance. His evolution as a founder of building the most consequential company within real-world assets and achieving his dream of bridging the gap between traditional finance & digital assets. All within 32 years. Going to miss you, Nathan.

The system wasn't built for you. But EtherFi is.

Sometimes your portfolio becomes thematic by accident. You make a few early bets in a sector, some of them go well, and that pulls you toward the next opportunity, and the next. That’s what happened to us with financial services as one of our investment themes. My original reason for investing in the category was simple - the products were terrible. Finance was clearly the largest category that hadn’t been consumerized yet & was a massive market where people were stuck using products they hated. Huge TAM, miserable NPS. As an angel, I was one of the first investors and an early advisor at @atlascardhq. @patrickmro took product design as seriously as anyone I’d ever worked with, and he was applying that taste to building a new kind of consumer card product. I was also lucky to get into the early rounds of @mercury, where @immad was just as thoughtful & bringing that same design rigor to startup banking. We were seed investors in @FlexSuperApp, one of the most underrated financial services companies out there and only getting better. They focus on small and medium-sized business owners, and @zaidrmn has built an incredible product that Silicon Valley hasn’t fully appreciated yet. More recently, we invested in @ether_fi, which brought consumer-grade financial products to crypto and became the fastest-growing crypto neobank in the world. When all is said and done, I think @MikeSilagadze will go down as one of the best crypto founders of his generation. And we’ve been lucky to partner with @ereborbank, who are building financial products for the innovation economy & serving deep tech across defense, manufacturing, robotics, and other industries they understand at a deep level. I don’t think of myself as a fintech investor, and I never planned to go this deep on the category. But one thing leads to another, and suddenly you’ve gone down a rabbit hole that turns into a career-long passion. I still feel that way about financial services today, and I hope to keep backing founders building innovative products in the space for years to come.

We just wired our 6th (!!!) investment for a Los Angeles-based company in less than a year. Co-led the deal with a T1 Bay Area multi-stage firm who we love working with. Imagine that... two firms co-leading a seed deal together. It still happens guys.

This will eventually send much higher imo, just a matter of time $ETHFI is one of the very few things that I might actually be willing as a "longterm investment" rn already fully vested and card metrics keep printing new aths every week

Flex is one of the fastest growing fintechs of the year. In the last 7 days alone, we processed roughly $75M in card spend. We've been able to scale up to this point simply because we built the best credit card for business owners. With up to 60 days to pay at 0% APR and up to 2% cash back, our card is a must have for elite level operators.

if you have a sudden interest in zcash, download @zodl_app swap into it from any chain in existence and then press shield shielding your coins feels like what crypto was supposed to be Become invisible

Most VC firms describe venture as a game of access. We think that's backwards. Venture is a product. We wrote down what that means, and the standard we want to be held to. chapterone.com/reason-to-exist

It takes about 10 years in venture to really hit your stride. I went full time on @chapterone 6 years ago. This is what year six looks like when you're doing the best work of your career with a killer team. We've come a long way.

Our newest investment: Blackstar ✴︎ @DanielEdrisian is a product & eng savant. We invested in his last company, Alex, which OpenAI bought. When he called to say he was building something new, we said yes on the call. Blackstar ✴︎ is a category creating product. Watch it.