Regarding stock pairs, I think the launchpads that win over time will be the ones bringing more of the actual benefits of stock ownership onchain, e.g., voting rights, dividends, and a say in the company’s direction, even if it’s in the minority. This will allow them to stand out against competitors and blur the lines between offchain / onchain benefits.

Unsure about the saying “retards in motion vs. geniuses at rest” but working with founders across all spectrums, I’ve seen a recurrent trait, which is the distortion of reality that they create around them. Whether a genius or a retard, thinking you can challenge the incumbents or change the fabric of society is all of the distortion you need to lead talent to victory outside of execution / domain expertise / obsessive etc

Compute infra feels a lot like the early crypto days. From bare metal to hardware financing, data center construction, chips, cooling, power procurement, grid interconnection, and state by state energy permitting. Then networking, Gpu/tpu utilization, workload scheduling, and inference optimization. And finally compute markets via onchain, trading infra, financing, pricing oracles, and verification that the compute you bought actually gets delivered. Hair on fire problems in almost every part of the stack. Pretty exciting times.

Funding onchain teams is hard because the failure rate is extremely high. There are teams that are great on paper but do horribly when building onchain products. Sometimes it’s a mismatch with the user base and culture, but more importantly, onchain products have to get a lot right. If they don’t, things can implode and people can lose a lot. Or they get lucky, become successful and start printing revenue quickly. Then ego gets tested, and many times people fail that test. In many ways, building onchain requires a very specific understanding of culture and onchain mechanics, but most importantly, you have to check your ego and stay humble if you start to win. Very different from non onchain startups where it takes years to get to $100m in ARR and the founders have had to grow along the way and earn the right. With onchain, it can happen in a few months and it takes a very specific founder to understand this responsibility. Which is why very few win long term in this space.

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