Haseeb >|< Profile picture
Jan 16 12 tweets 3 min read
Every year at @dragonfly_xyz we do a retro on the biggest lessons of the year. This year we came up with the top 10 lessons that we wanted to take away as venture investors in 2023.

I thought it might be useful to share them. Here are the 10 lessons in order: 👇
1. Diligence actually matters.

In the year of FTX, LUNA, and 3AC, this is the one lesson everyone in the industry learned.

Doesn't matter how impressive the founders seem. If you don't verify what they are telling you, you *will* eventually get burned.
2. When everything seems crazy, it probably is.

Valuations and narratives got ahead of themselves last year. We felt that something was off and late-stage valuations were not sustainable. It's tempting to brush that off and say "well, the market is smarter than me."

Not always.
3. Move faster and push harder to close deals.

Some of the biggest mistakes we made in 2022 was moving too slowly on deals we were excited about. Speed is everything in venture. That doesn't mean you can sacrifice diligence, but if you lose momentum, the deal often goes with it.
4. Don't laugh at crazy ideas.

Crazy ideas are often just crazy. But sometimes, they end up changing everything.

Listen to every pitch with an open mind. Imagine what happens if the entrepreneur is right. Think through the consequences.

The future usually seems weird.
5. Don't blindly follow the "Ethereum cool kids."

There are a lot of trendy ideas and concepts in crypto that don't actually map onto *what people want*. If you invest in that stuff, you might win some CT clout, but that doesn't always make a wise investment.
6. Macro fucks everything.

The performance of every asset class this year was mostly decided by macro. A shift in the macro environment changes how you should value growth, how you judge unit economics, and relative valuations across sectors. You have to rethink everything.
7. Regulation is slow.

You may be able to draw the line out and say "this will eventually get regulated." But it always *always* takes longer than you think.

Since you passed on a deal because you thought regulation would crush it, it grew 50x. (And later paid a small fine.)
8. Legible businesses will be bid up. You need an edge to make money.

If it's a company or deal that's obvious to everyone (read: growth investors), it's going to be expensive. You won't make money investing there.

You have to find your unique insight if you want to make money.
9. The best deals are usually won by brand.

Winning deals is mostly marketing, not sales. By the time you show up the pitch, most of the work is already done. If you're not known to be a great partner to entrepreneurs, it's much harder to win the deal.

Invest in brand up front.
10. Don't trust the judgment of other VCs.

When you see what other VCs are investing in, it's easy to look at yourself and say: are we just out of touch? Do we not get it? Are we not true believers?

Stay true to yourself, and only invest in things that make sense to you.
11. 2022 was a brutal year for crypto investing. But probably the most educational year I've ever had as an investor.

Hope this thread was useful to you.

And if you're working on something cool in crypto, we'd love to chat with you. Hit us up at @dragonfly_xyz!

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Haseeb >|<

Haseeb >|< Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @hosseeb

Jan 9
/1 The AI era is upon us. GPT-3 makes it clear: we will achieve AGI in our lifetimes.

Crypto will have a big role to play in this.

Why? Because crypto changes the API of money, decoupling *money* from *people*.

In the age of AI, this will matter more than ever. 🧵 👇
/2 Money has a simple API. It was designed over a thousand years ago.

The API is:

Person => Money
Company => Money
Government => Money

If you are not a person, a company, or a government, you can't have money.
/3 But there will be agents that use money that are not people, companies, or governments.

AIs will use money. Self-driving cars will use money. IoT devices, long-running software, even physical objects.

Hence crypto's new API for money:

Cryptographic address => Money
Read 7 tweets
Nov 11, 2022
1/ Pouring one out for all those who were impacted by the FTX collapse. If you lost more money than you can afford, I'm so sorry.

I promise it will get better.

I'm exhausted.

Have been thinking a lot about what happens from here, and what it means for this industry.
2/ First, there will be a global regulatory backlash.

It's not just in the US—FTX Int'l collapsing is a global catastrophe. This is much bigger than 3AC or Terra.

It's one thing to defraud lenders or retail degens. But Sam was the golden child of this whole industry.
3/ When you pull one over the rich and powerful, a darker depth of wrath awaits you.

Second, more things will break. We don't know yet the full tangle that was wrapped up with FTX/Alameda, and the indirect contagion effects are yet to be felt. More is coming.
Read 18 tweets
Sep 29, 2022
1/ I’m excited to announce that @dragonfly_xyz has made a strategic investment into @AptosLabs!

Aptos is building a next generation L1 blockchain with a unique take on scalability, safety, and usability—here’s why I’m excited to partner with them:
2/ @AptosLabs's optimistic concurrency, Move VM, account model, and consensus mechanism will let Aptos achieve massive on-chain throughput while retaining decentralization. From day 1, Aptos should support high-throughput use cases across games, social media, NFTs, and DeFi.
3/ Reimagining smart contracts, @AptosLabs's focus on safety is unparalleled. With formal program verification via the Move Prover, and native key recovery services on-chain, developers have room to experiment safely. Move was designed from the ground up to be safe for SCs.
Read 6 tweets
Aug 1, 2022
OK, I'll summarize @Galois_Capital's arguments:

1) If merge succeeds, ETH1 will continue to exist because of support from miners. DeFi, exchanges, devs need to deal with it. Acknowledging this fork is taboo in Ethereum-land.

2) The merge has a nonzero chance of failure.

Done.
(It's that with a lot of shitposting.)

It's important to listen to critics like Kevin. They do an important service to throw ideology into sharp relief.

See also haseebq.com/ethereum-is-no… which I wrote about this possibility ages ago, back when ProgPoW was the fork de jure.
But to say the fork is not viable is different from saying it won't exist. You *do* need to consider exchange listings, replay protection, on-chain liquidations, etc. They will all happen, and especially so the more significant the fork is.
Read 5 tweets
May 12, 2022
4 Lessons on losing lots of money (from someone who has done so many times) 👇
1. Human beings are resilient. We habituate surprisingly fast.

When you lose it all, the first night feels hopeless. The next day feels gloomy. The next week feels manageable. The next month, you forget that you even lost it.

You'll be OK, I promise.
2. There are no free lunches. Any time you think you found a way to make easy money, you're probably missing something.

Edges are continually earned through hard work, and the universe will teach you that the hard way.
Read 5 tweets
Mar 1, 2022
Today we released the AMM Test: a no BS Look at L1 Performance.

Research piece benchmarking L1 performance across the EVMs and Solana. If you want to know how fast the L1s *really* are, read on for the (surprising) details 👇 🧵

medium.com/dragonfly-rese…

(By me and @0xsudogm)
2/ First, there's no universal way to benchmark performance. But most internal benchmarks are bullshit (just xfers).

So we decided to create an objective benchmark: AMM trades per second. It's easy to measure, it reflects real-world usage—it's not perfect, but it's informative. Image
3/ So let's go through each blockchain in turn.

First, Ethereum.

Uniswap v2 trades per second: 9.19 average, 18.38 max

Block time: 13.2s

Time to finality: 66s Image
Read 16 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

:(