Duncan Cock Foster
2.9K posts
@dccockfoster
Working on something new. Prev. co-founder of @niftygateway, sold to @gemini. Angel investor (best exit is $IMX) & venture fund LP
The founder of Stripe just said we will look back on q12026 and everyone will say it was so obvious then that crypto was about to explode. And I feel sick I will never be free of this industry
We at Starship Ventures invest in the world we want to live in Here is a glimpse into the companies building it
We at Starship Ventures invest in the world we want to live in Here is a glimpse into the companies building it
A lot of people in crypto don't quite grasp how big the existing financial system is. Conversely, people outside crypto don't quite realise how novel crypto primitives actually are. The entire crypto market cap is ~$2.5 trillion. Whereas the OTC derivatives market is over $500 trillion in notional. 200x and that's just one asset class. And yet crypto invented financial instruments that didn't exist before: AMMs, perpetual swaps, permissionless lending vaults, composable stablecoins. All within the last 10 years. A Uniswap pool does the job of a market-making desk in a few hundred lines of code. And these primitives are general-purpose. An AMM can price any pair. A vault can accept any collateral. A perp can reference any asset. They eat whatever market they touch. Being able to see both sides clearly is where the biggest opportunity lives.
Normally, I don't speak ill of the dead but: rest in piss. Paul Ehrlich's work wasn't "premature," it was wrong, completely so, and evil: his recommendations resulted in many hundreds of thousands of coerced sterilizations and abortions among the world's most vulnerable people.
Great men of history had little to no introspection. The personality that builds empires is not the same personality that sits around quietly questioning itself. @pmarca and I discuss what we both noticed but no one talks about: David: You don't have any levels of introspection? Marc: Yes, zero. As little as possible. David: Why? Marc: Move forward. Go! I found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It's a real problem and it's a problem at work and it's a problem at home. David: So I've read 400 biographies of history’s greatest entrepreneurs and someone asked me what the most surprising thing I’ve learned from this was [and I answered] they have little or zero introspection. Sam Walton didn't wake up thinking about his internal self. He just woke up and was like: I like building Walmart. I'm going to keep building Walmart. I'm going to make more Walmarts. And he just kept doing it over and over again. Marc: If you go back 400 years ago it never would've occurred to anybody to be introspective. All of the modern conceptions around introspection and therapy, and all the things that kind of result from that are, a kind of a manufacture of the 1910s, 1920s. Great men of history didn't sit around doing this stuff. The individual runs and does all these things and builds things and builds empires and builds companies and builds technology. And then this kind of this kind of guilt based whammy kind of showed up from Europe. A lot of it from Vienna in 1910, 1920s, Freud and all that entire movement. And kind of turned all that inward and basically said, okay, now we need to basically second guess the individual. We need to criticize the individual. The individual needs to self criticize. The individual needs to feel guilt, needs to look backwards, needs to dwell in the past. It never resonated with me.
