The Most Contrarian Bet in Venture Capital

To drive outsized returns, make concentrated bets. Part of Multicoin’s genius is its willingness to back up its conviction with capital. Many of the firm’s best-performing investments were sized aggressively, contributing to the fund’s outpermance.

By definition, you will likely succeed a vanishingly-small percentage of the time, but—as the saying goes—that’s a feature, not a bug. The point is to venture—fistfuls of money in hand—at the furthest extremes of capitalism, hoping to stumble upon that rare, proper intersection of technology and commerciality.By design, most investments will miss t... See more

sometimes as an entrepreneur, you have to over-index to courage. You have to think about the world that you wish to exist, not the one that does exist. As investor, I'm constantly looking at distribution of probabilities, that those outcomes will in fact be achieved.

Make equity investments in businesses based on its data, a la Tencent.

The firm has won by taking a contrarian approach. When Multicoin started, the investing landscape was dominated by funds focused on Bitcoin and Ethereum. Founders Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain saw opportunity elsewhere, making contrarian bets on Helium, The Graph, and Solana.