Timothy Shih

“People in tech would often go escape to Burning Man to feel the sense of what a non-zero-sum world looks and feels like,” said Solana co-founder Gokal. But in crypto, “everyone feels like there’s plenty of opportunity and plenty of value to be captured.”

And no one fights as hard as people from the same tribe who want their tribe to go different places.

We’re at the fun part of the market where crypto has lost trillions of dollars in value and people are scrambling to make up reasons why it’s useful.

A $30 million seed valuation is quite high for a Web 2.0 company. You might even call it expensive. In Web3, anywhere from $10 million to $70 million is reasonable for a seed round. Most investors are willing to swallow such big numbers because of the much shorter timeline for listing on a crypto exchange compared to going public on a stock... See more

This last point is key. If we want to interact in a large, real-time, shared, and persistent virtual environment, we will need to receive a superabundance of cloud-streamed data. 

This meant three things:1. There was a ticking clock. Even if nobody else noticed the free money, anyone could remove their own liquidity at any time, accidentally receiving the tokens from the contract.2. I could put on my white hat and try to recover the tokens for the person who had accidentally sent them in. It would be as simple as calling the... See more

But in truth, the “rails” of the “virtual economy” today are much worse than those of the “real world.” They’re more expensive, cumbersome, and slow to change.

Most venture funds require at least 10% equity ownership in their portfolio companies, but Web3 founders don’t want any single investor to own more than 5%.