David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yup. We also totally skipped over crypto, which I think is okay, but can you give one or two sentences on how they're different from other firms with a lens toward crypto? In one respect, it is just simply that they're first and early. They've been part of these big ones. Other firms have, too. USV being primary among them, and then native crypto firms like Paradigm, Multicoin, and all those great folks, but to the extent that success breeds success is going to apply in early-stage crypto investing as it always has in venture. Andreessen has been there, like Coinbase, dang. Solana, yup. Everything interesting, they're there. I think that's a big part of it. The other piece of it is that it's different doing that. They've built the machinery to do it in a way that other traditional venture firms have not. Have I understand the history right, I think part of the reason why they created a separate fund for crypto versus doing it out of the main fund was because of the same things that secondaries needing to be an RIA. I think if you do too much token investing in a core fund, you would need to register and you would lose your venture capital exemption. While other firms were registering as RIAs to do secondaries, which of course Andreessen also does, they were like, oh, we'll go do this first with crypto funds and then now for the whole firm, to be able to buy tokens instead of equity. I think it's just going to take a lot of firms a long time to catch up to that. And the operations of things of staying abreast of the things you can do in the US versus international takes overhead. They've invested in that overhead and they've figured out what the necessary infrastructure is from a regulatory perspective to do crypto investing with LP dollars.…

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