Juan Orbea

Interviewing for values doesn’t guarantee you’ll hire mitochondria. But if you don’t interview for values nor communicate the importance of your values during the interview process, your hiring process is suboptimal at best. Just like actual mitochondria, mitochondria employees won’t scale directly to total employees if you don’t make efforts to... See more

The last 12 years were "up and to the right". It’s easy to make IRRs work really well in a 12-year bull market but VCs have to make money in good markets and bad.

TAM arbitrage: The core idea is that if you, as an investor or a founder, can do the work and understand a market better than anyone else, and appreciate that its actually bigger than anyone gives it credit for, then investors can pay higher prices, founders can be more aggressive with burn, and experiment more broadly.

Pebble fuel: Typically used for HTGRs, fuel pebbles are meltdown-resistant small, solid pellets that encase uranium fuel (typically HALEU). The pellets retain fission products under all reactor conditions and are structurally more resistant to neutron irradiation, corrosion, and high temperatures than are traditional reactor fuels. TRISO... See more

In this interview we discuss what, if anything, can be learned from his unusual career path. Should more people pass on university and just throw themselves at solving a problem they care about? Or would it be foolhardy for others to try to copy a unique case like Chris’?

A classic problem in computer science is hill climbing. Imagine you are dropped at a random spot on a hilly terrain, where you can only see a few feet in each direction (assume it’s foggy or something). The goal is to get to the highest hill.

Blockchains are the Lego of crypto-finance and crypto-governance: they are a very effective tool for implementing transparent in-protocol rules to govern common resources, assets and incentives.