Facundo Werning

I’m thrilled to share that I am joining Agora @withAUSD as Head of Latam alongside some of the best operators in the space. We’re backed by some of the strongest investors in the space and are hot off announcing our $50M Series A led by @paradigm and @dragonfly_xyz.

Special Projects— the “I hired this guy and have no idea how tf to explain how valuable he is to me but is” role

@kay00nee debanked twice ;)

dm me for early access if you've ever had more in stablecoins than a bank account

@htaneja @WeAreLegora @parloa_ai This is last-mover advantage. Lots of these had in-between companies no one talks about now. Eg: technically Google was first mover on LLMs; Friendster + others for social media; etc.

Second mover advantage has always been powerful. AltaVista, Google. Myspace, Facebook. AppDynamics, Datadog. OpenAI, Anthropic. We're seeing this at GC with @WeAreLegora in legal and @parloa_ai in CX. Every tech era has a different source of 2nd mover advantage. internet era = distribution and reaching users at scale. cloud era = design and building workflows that got people to use tech. Today we are in the AI era. Intelligence is an ever improving input. Do you have the right models, infra, and capability to build products that deliver what AI unlocks for customers? founders shouldn’t be afraid if someone is currently the leader. Most industries have not yet seen the dominant stack.

@nicoypei Think as always good to have a nice mix of investors. Someone who can follow-on, someone who has a real platform (their portcos actually use), someone with operating experience.

Caught up with one of the most creative and practical founder in defi last week who has closed deals with many crypto and tradfi institutions. Concluded: > balance sheet investors and high value angel / prop funds are strictly better than any VC funds 1. Their own money vs. LP's money which has fund length mandate and DPI pressure -> limited time horizon is bad for your team and long-term vision 2. Being rich and having longer time horizon also means that they don't need to sell. with their main business as cash cow, they don't rely on investment to make a living. One of @SupernovaLabs_'s investor held a 3m investment all the way to 3b in 2021 without selling a coin. it was mostly unlocked too. 3. If their main business are some of the most successful in crypto/tradfi, that branding and their connections open you way more doors than any VC funds, esp if you know how to leverage their strategic value. 4. If you get to connect with the founders, that's the best. They are operators themselves. They understand and have built successful businesses. Not all but most VCs don't have that under their belt.

@ethanrkho @orrdavid Doesn't it take ~10,000 - 50,000 hands to remove luck in poker?

"If the idea is not making money within months or a couple quarters — I'm wrong. Full stop. I'm cutting it." @orrdavid Ex-poker pro. Hedge fund founder. 40%+ annualized. "In poker the feedback loop is so fast that within even a session you've made so many bets. I have way more reps than most fund managers." "There's that saying — you'd rather be right than make money. Poker beats that out of you." Most fund managers stay wrong for years. They'll hold a losing position for three years and keep morphing the story. Poker doesn't let you do that. Neither does David.

As a note: Ahora 12/18/30, a government financing program (referring to how many monthly installments) spent years training consumers to finance everything: clothes, electronics, groceries. Credit became reflexive. Debt stock built up.

The Argentine financial system is starting to see higher delinquency rates. IMO, few factors: 1/ Argentina used to have massive crowding-out, banks don't know how to loan to people (parked in LELIQs, LEBACs, etc.) 2/ Huge explosion in non-banking financial institutions that were giving loans against purchases. Real-rates were negative. Inflation was bailing out bad loans. 3/ Consumers took loans out in ARS expecting higher inflation. Lower inflation means rates were high. People are holding loans priced for a 200%+ inflation world in a 50% and falling one. 4/ Most loans in Argentina are against consumer-spending, people take out loans when buying clothes, electronics, or even when paying for food -- mortgages are relatively small as a category. Not as serious as not paying your mortgage off. Will likely cause churn off, especially for NBFIs.

I wish airlines wouldn't slowroll you when your flight is getting delayed. If it's a 1-hour delay, sure. If it's a 1-hour delay due to weather conditions and those are expected to last, say, 8 hours, they should just move the flight back 8 hours.

The endgame of the war on slop is that some of the ai is going to become so good you won't be able to tell the difference. It's not that hard to get the frontier-models to write like a moderately well-spoken human if you prompt them correctly.

@philip_hurupay @colosseum In town for the weekend! Want to grab coffee today/tomorrow?

@colosseum office in SF🇺🇸 has to be the best place to lock in. There are 100+ like us left in crypto. We will move this industry forward.

I wonder what would've happened if I walked in and said "I need a student discount, because I'm buying this for my little sister, no she is not available, and also, no I do not have a document from the state demonstrating she is of normal student age."

Is this employee really squeezing the most surplus out of them? This becomes hard to know. So it gets codified into a set of norms. These often have very specific incantations. Including: "I am buying this for my *little* sister." This makes them hackable, though!

One of the interesting things that happens with businesses is they try to figure out consumer demand elasticity to price, such that they can try to eat consumer demand. This is usually called "haggling".