Nine

Introducing Frontier, the official release of Mainnet Beta. Built for the Early Adopters. The Experimenters. The Ethereans. It will be live for one month starting early December. Get ready to experience real-time.

Had this in my drafts and forgot about it... The old crypto is dead. It has taken a long time to finally arrive at a place where almost everyone who has spent some time in crypto is unwilling to hold tokens with no underlying fundamentals/credible growth story. Maybe this seems obvious, but for most of crypto's history we operated with massive speculative premiums. We had people that believed tokens with egregiously inflated valuations would/might justify their market caps one day with adoption. Each "meta" has produced smaller and smaller combined market caps since 2021, because more and more participants are aware that printing tokens out of thin air with nothing of substance behind them will end in the token going to zero. You can't reprogram the world to believe in worthless tokens. You can't go back in time and erase the memories of everyone that has seen every vaporous alt coin go to zero. We now know what has PMF, and which categories are adding value to the world, alongside a heap of ideas that essentially went nowhere (it turns out you can't just disrupt web2 by handing out worthless tokens). We have cycled through every experiment to cement the use cases of value. From here on out you get the post 2001 Amazon type winners. You may even see speculative discounts on good projects with actual fundamentals right now/in the near future. This isn't a bad thing for the industry, I think it is especially good for investors that will find it easier to allocate to clear long term winners... and I believe we will have some giant winners. This is a bad thing for those who haven't made it/arrived late under the premise that they will be handed easy quick 100x opportunities, and "keep clicking". It will be very difficult for terminally online crypto bros who have become addicted to fast money games. I think this cohort are going to get rinsed, and slowly lose their minds and all of their money (if they haven't already). There are a ton of sophisticated/skilled market participants that solely exist now in crypto to extract from the online crypto bros who are unemployable and can't do anything else. The odd win here and there will keep people playing a game that they will never escape. The speed with which participants are trying to offload worthless tokens onto someone else, who is also aiming to offload worthless tokens onto someone else, will continue to accelerate. Treating crypto as a get rich slow scheme is in fact the right move going forward. It's the end, but it's also the beginning.

Just like ICOs are getting retail familiar with VC processes, MegaMafia will get the Mega community familiar with startup life. → Lots of attempts → Many failures → Several ecosystem-defining apps Undoubtedly the right path.

A lot to discuss next week. Until then, relax to MegaETH block production.

Here's what I would do if I was a young person trying to break into VC: Write. Short writeups, on Twitter. Not generic market philosophical thinkpieces, because those will be assumed to be AI slop or regurgitated research. No one will read it unless you're brilliant, which you're probably not. Original research, on a specific company or sub-sector. If you want to write about robotics, even that is too broad. Narrow it down. Humanoid robotics, or healthcare robotics, military robotics, etc. Get really granular. So granular most people won't care. If it's something you could get by Googling, it's not narrow enough. You will not be able to find to do "original research" easily. This is not something you can do from a university library. You will have to go talk to people who work at these companies. Journalists who cover these companies. Pay for private industry-specific research / newsletters. Follow all of the employees/anons who are tweeting gossip. Integrate a picture that someone reading TechCrunch doesn't see. Then write about this sector and leading + new startups and tag / DM every investor at every major firm who covers your space (you can find them because they've invested in one of the companies in the sector). If they express interest, offer coffee meetings with everyone you can. Some will take you up on it. Do this enough times, you'll develop a reputation and get offered a job in venture. Don't need to go to business school, don't need to have a great angel portfolio or any of the above. "Get good deal flow" is wonderful if you have access to it, but most people just can't do this. If you're already surrounded by Stanford undergrads, you probably don't need advice to break into VC. But the above strategy--in principle anyone can do. Just need to have abnormal levels of agency and a willingness to basically do the job of a junior VC without anyone telling you to. (While you're doing this, best thing to do in the meantime is to also work at a company in the sector you're chasing after. But not always possible depending on your background. Thankfully, VC does not require any particular background. Lots of weirdos in VC, myself included.) I guarantee you, everyone wants to hire someone who can do the above. But very few candidates have this degree of agency. VC is not a "tracked" career. Hiring is arbitrary, firms are generally small and do not scale, and there is no standard path. This is good for you if you're willing to be weird. The thing that VCs have in common is that they are passionate about startups and understanding new industries. If you show that you already have that, a path will open for you.