YouSaid · the spoken record

Kyle Samani

lines on the record: 83
first: 2021-11-18
most recent: 2021-11-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Mike, thanks for having us on. This was a pleasure. It's always fun to go real deep and get real introspective on yourself.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to go with needing to have enough balance in your life to stay sane or have at times just worked and worked 12 to 14 hours a day and not take care of myself, especially working out and diet. And whether you're an investor, whether you're an entrepreneur, you're making decisions. You're making a lot of decisions. You can't beat biochemistry no matter how good you are. You have to take care of yourself. It's very, very easy to not do that. If you do it right and plan it and structure it, you know, end-to-end time, including showering, you can be 45 minutes a day, and it's worth losing 45 minutes of work to do that.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say the most important like lesson that I've learned that I wish I learned earlier was conviction and having more conviction in myself. Obviously we've been right about several really big important things and there were a lot of times where doubt created a less pleasant mental environment than it otherwise could have. So it all could have been a much more enjoyable journey.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm going to echo that. My parents also immigrated here from Iran. Both my parents worked very, very hard growing up, and that has certainly left its impression upon me.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hard work, without a doubt. I mean, my parents are both immigrants. They moved here from India. They had nothing, like 10 bucks when they moved here. That used to go a little bit further than it does now. But they worked seven days a week for my entire childhood. They owned a retail store and did the classic immigrant parent thing of work really hard and teach your kids to work really hard so that they have that value throughout their entire life. And that has served me extremely well.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think timing is a really good answer. We've both made several timing mistakes, both individually and together. I would say the biggest mistake I made was always related to fear of not wanting to do something because I was afraid of what would happen or afraid of risk”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not looking at the Newton and a bunch of other things. Had I done that homework and research, I probably wouldn't have built pristine.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say not appreciating the difficulty of market timing. Sushar and I got very, very bullish Apple 0910. I remember they were beating every single earnings and we understood that this thing was going to change the world and the world did not understand that the iPhone was going to change the world. We bought a bunch of out of the money long dated call options and didn't make as much money as we should have because we got a little unlucky on timing and then repeated the same mistake in a different form with pristine which was Google launched this glass thing and I was like, this is going to change the world. And I had a very poor understanding of history and did not appreciate how many new form factors and hardware launches had been launched over the years in technology that had not been successful. I was way over indexing on the iPhone and the iPad, which were the two most recent ones and which turns out to be two of the most exceptional ones and not appreciating how difficult it is to do new form factors.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have two things here, actually. One would be what I call got to catch them all syndrome. And a lot of investors have that, where they feel like they need to be in everything that makes money. Oh, I missed that one. Well, what was your opportunity cost? And I don't think you have to catch them all. If you didn't have the thesis, if you didn't have conviction, it is okay. We're investors. We're not Pokemon trainers. You know, we don't have to catch them all. The second thing I would say is semantics. I really care about words mean things. And when you use words inappropriately and aren't using them to mean the thing that they mean, then communication is really imprecise. And we have a shared vocabulary that we've developed at Multicoin, which allows us to be far more efficient in communications because we use the words to mean the same thing as everyone else.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Investment related, my biggest pet peeve is overstating network effects. That's like weirdly specific. I find that network effects determine on the internet is way overused and even when it is used, the implications of how it's being used are mostly incorrect. We literally in our investment MMOs have a section, we have a template of SMO system. And one of the sections is why does this investment present compounding returns? And not all notions of compounding are necessarily network effects. whenever people state network effects incorrectly, it really irks me.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say meditation. I don't know that I do it daily. I'm not disciplined enough, sadly, but I'm working towards it. And it just reminds me to zoom out. It's very easy to too closely identify with things that are happening that day or that week and just zooming out is really helpful in identifying your own emotions.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me, cycling, I used to do soul cycle or something similar for a while, and then COVID hit and all the cycling studios closed. And it was either get a peloton or get a road bike. And I got a road bike. I cycle a lot now. I still do indoor time to time, but I love cycling.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wasting time reinventing the wheel with a capitalist incentive mechanism around these tokens. And so you have motivation to go build on latest and brightest and open source everything. And I think that that combination is going to power a tremendous amount of innovation and is going to fundamentally reshape society. I see crypto as being the tool that will reshape society as much as mobile bid, as much as social media bid, probably more. And when you look at what's happened in the world today with COVID, with what's going on in politics, and you can see the effect that things like mobile or social media have had on the world. And so we really see our role as helping shape how blockchain technology can play out and impact the world. Kyle mentioned earlier about the path dependency about some of these technologies, the Quarty keyboard and such. And so that's really what motivates us is to try and be good shepherds of the technology and of the ecosystem to try and be the change that we want to see.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, totally agreed there. I think you have to be a mission-oriented team in order to drive great success. If you are a mercenary rather than a missionary, the problem is you lose motivation and you can't keep going after a certain point. Anything that's been great and really big in the world has been built by missionaries. And that's what we are. Like I mentioned earlier in this conversation, we see ourselves as a truth seeking organization, not just an investment organization. We just happen to monetize through investments. And this is the most stimulating industry in the world if you're looking for new patterns and new truths. If you're trying to reason about what equilibriums will look like and how things will develop, there's nothing quite like it. And that's because what we've done in this industry is we have combined the pace of open source development where everyone is always building on the latest and brightest.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Helping accelerate the adoption of self-sovereign software systems. That's what keeps me going every day. I think I measure our success by are we making that happen?”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would zoom out and say, like, how do we judge our success? We got into this because we understood from First Principles that this was going to have important duplications on finance to Shar more so than I, especially early on, recognize the importance of these technologies for helping facilitate capital formation and human coordination in interesting new ways that wasn't really possible before. And we wake up and work hard every day because we want to make that happen and happen as quickly as possible. And we believe in the power of that. For me personally, I think Tushar probably agrees with this, but certainly for me personally, I found COVID has emboldened my views there. There's a lot of regulators and politicians telling me how I should or should not live my life. And they're telling a lot of other people around the world how they should or should not live their lives. And I find that to be very annoying would be a generous term. And we can let your mind imagine elsewhere for less generous terms. And it's really about sovereignty in the most abstract sense, the solution. And so, you know, I get up every day very excited about.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A couple other comments I would make. One, you can actually see the helium network live, go to network.helium.com. We are about to cross 250,000 hotspots. This is one of those things that's really unique to crypto is that we underwrote the investment assuming that Helium Inc. goes away. Not to say that they will, but the entire system is open source. The hardware, the software, the antennas, the specs for integrating the SDK into third-party hardware, the blockchain, everything is open source. And so you might say, well, what's the defensibility? And the defensibility itself is the token. It's the HNT token. It's the fact that all these people have the token. It's the liquidity of that token in the market cap. And it's a very, very new kind of moat and network effect and one that I cannot intuitively reason about how you can develop a better, cheaper, faster system. It's really cool to think about we could have a world in five or ten years in which Helium Meek does not exist and you have this amazing global open network kind of.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Conscious about our water usage. And all of this is now enabled by helium because it is so much cheaper. If you try to do this on AT&T, Verizon, or some of these other centralized telecom companies, these sensors would cost a lot more. You're paying 10 bucks a sensor, 30 bucks to activate it, and then you're paying $10 a month with helium, you're buying the sensor for five bucks and you're paying a dollar a year, usually in data transfer fees. And so that new cost structure is enabling all of these new use cases. And we're really excited to see where that goes. The network has achieved pretty significant scale already. There's 250,000 hotspots live all around the world, mostly in the United States and Western Europe, also China is now growing pretty substantially and the rest world is still pretty new to the helium network. But with the amount of hotspots on backorder like yours, we are expecting the helium network to really be the biggest wireless network in the world by the end of next year, have more access points than any other centralized”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Airbnb on someone's going to actually come and rent it, and no one's going to go search on Airbnb until there are rooms or places to actually rent. And so Helium invented proof of coverage, which incentivizes people to provide coverage even before the demand side was there. And that was really important to bringing on the demand side. And now there are a number of high-profile customers that use Helium network, such as Nestle is using the network in order to track vending machine inventory. Line uses a network to track a location of scooters. There are a number of interesting smart city use cases. Here in Austin, there's a nonprofit that is testing out fire sensors, which use the helium network to help detect wildfires early and combat them. There's people using it for agricultural use cases to track soil moisture and help use water resources more appropriately as climate change goes and change the environment.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Connected to your Wi Fi and you put it in your window, and you are now creating wireless coverage for your neighborhood. It's dramatically cheaper because there's no rent and there's no employees. So that means that you've just cut out the vast majority of the costs that decentralized telecom providers have. Helium is a business model innovation. It's not a technology innovation, really. It's a business model innovation in the same way that Airbnb or Uber are business model innovations. And that business model innovation is in cutting out that cost. There's one other major innovation that Helium pioneered, which is called proof of coverage. And this is to solve the Cold Start problem that any of these marketplaces or platforms have. No one wants to be a supplier to a network where there's no users and no one wants to be a user of a network where there isn't enough supply. You can imagine the same things applying to Airbnb or Uber, where it doesn't make sense to rent out your extra room on.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, for sure. Helium is really exciting and it really flips the traditional business model for telecom on its head. The way that traditional telecom works is you have some big company like an AT&T or a Vodafone, Telefonica, any of these big giant corporations. They hire a bunch of people who wear hard hats. They rent a bunch of space on top of tall towers or buildings and buy a bunch of really expensive radio equipment. They have those people then go and install that equipment and maintain it. And then they have a giant budget for marketing and customer support in order to monetize this huge capital asset that they've created. And it's really expensive. Telecom is one of the most capital intensive industries out there in the world. And so helium flips that model on its head and says instead, what if you as a consumer just go buy this commodity hardware device, you plug it in.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That really enables developers to express their creativity. Draw the same analogy to the 1990s and dial up internet. A lot of those ideas existed and you could have built an application on dial-up, but I still remember hearing that weird sound and then seeing images load line by line by line. And now we have Solana, which is like broadband to Ethereum's dial-up. And so when I see that infrastructure change, when I see things like the graph and RWEV and some of these other tools that are becoming very popular for developers to use, it just makes it easier for people to move up the stack.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I think now that the infrastructure has really matured in crypto, it's now more possible for entrepreneurs with some industry experience, whether that's something like social media, telecom, electricity, like anything really that's adjacent to crypto to come in and build in the blockchain world. And examples of that that we're really excited about right now are creator monetization. We've seen major change in the adoption of NFTs and other forms of creator monetization tools, social tokens, et cetera. And that's just moving further up the stack. And we think it's possible because crypto has had its iPhone moment. We think Solana is the iPhone moment for crypto. Before the iPhone, it was just hard to develop for mobile phones, right? Like who was developing for BlackBerry apps? But once you have the iPhone moment of the thing is now usable, then”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Computer science breakthroughs to happen in order to actually function and deliver what they needed. Solana did not need that. Solana had a ton of engineering work ahead of it in order to actually deliver the system that they wanted to be able to deliver, but they did not need to solve and unsolved computer science problem. And I think that was the key turning point in my mind. And knowing that they could deliver that product that they had promised gave us a conviction to size it up aggressively, buy out other investors in secondary transactions. And we led every single round that Slan ever did. And we expressed that conviction in significant portfolio concentration.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a dark winter for sure. So, like I said a little bit earlier, one of the things that we somewhat specialize on between Kyle and myself is Carl does a bit more of the thesis formation. I do a bit more of the portfolio construction. And both of those played a really big role in Solana's success for us. It was not only picking it, but also having the size that we had on. And really one of the main things that I think contribute to the conviction necessary to put on that large size of a position for us was their ability to ship. Really, what we saw was when we looked at the landscape of all of the scaling solutions for blockchains, we saw a lot of unsolved computer science problems. We saw a lot of questions of how are your sharded blockchains going to work? How do assets transfer between these different chards of these different blockchains? We're talking about Ethereum 2.0, Nir, Polkadot. Those are sharded blockchains and they require some meaningful.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's really operated at every layer of the stack again of the goal of saying make things go fast. And I remember one of the most striking things was all of the other layer one founders I had spoken to tended to come from a lot more academic of backgrounds. And not to say that they were necessarily professors. In fact, very few of them were professors, but that they had, I'd say, a strong academic orientation. And Anatoly is almost antagonistic to academics. He is just like, I don't care what your paper says. Show me the code and show me how fast it goes. And that struck us as very important and very distinct. That combination of things is what led us to having the conviction to say, let's pull the trigger on this thing in size and stick with them even through a pretty dark winter.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We started to look at the design of Solana, it was very clear that every decision in the system was made from the ground up to optimize for the things you need to make an order book work. And it's actually not that many things you need to get right. The obvious ones are just aggregate throughput. You just need a lot of transactions to make an order book work. And latency has to be really low. And then the cost per transaction has to be really low. There's more than that, but those are by far the three most important things. Anatoly understood those and was like, we're going to build a system designed from the ground up to do those things as good as possible. That, and then coupled with his background, I mean, just to, again, his whole career, all he's really ever done is make things go fast. And he's done that with chips. He's done that with operating systems. He's done that with wireless networks. He's done that with data systems and storage and distribution, data center optimization.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's pretty amazing that even as far back then, again, the term DeFi would not be coined until October or November of that year. And Anatoly was like, I'm just going to build the fastest trading system possible. And he was just like, I want to build an order book and I want to have it on a globally distributed network of nodes that are permissionless. And none of us could really appreciate the significance of that, but we were just like, that's what he wanted to build. And it turns out that trading was the thing that we kind of recognized was important.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Systems had all kinds of weird properties in them that the teams had to deal with the fact that Ethereum was not designed for trading. And so they had to make all these weird, weird design decisions and compromises to try and make their systems work. We met in Atoly and Raj in his April or May of 2018, and the subtitle for the title slide said Nasdaq for blockchain. They don't use that messaging.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Couldn't understand what DeFi would mean, but we could feel that that was important. Over the course of 2016 and 17, we started to observe the first applications on Ethereum. And those were Ether Delta was the first real application, which was a very primitive exchange. And then ICO was the next major application, which is a capital formation fundraising tool. But obviously the key is once you get the ETH and the ICO, you need to be able to trade it for something. The third major application we saw was the 0x protocol and its associated exchanges, which was a less primitive but still not great exchange system. And the fourth was Maker, which has this dies stablecoin thing. But in order for DAI to work, you need to be able to trade DAI. Like die has to be liquid for the system to really work as intended. And I remember at some point in early 2018, we sat down and we were like, you know, it seems like the common thread among all of these things we're seeing is trading. And at some point, it clicked for us that trading is the key thing. And if you look at Ether Delta and ZeroX, which were the two first real exchanges, both of them.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think first was thinking from first principles, what are these blockchain things for? Bitcoin was digital payments or like digital gold, depending on your perspective. But it really only can send money from point A to point B and then has some pretty strong guarantees that there won't be more than 21 million Bitcoins. That's about all it does. It was architected around that idea. Ethereum launched with a bunch of very grand visions for decentralization. And I mean, you go watch Vitalik's keynote from January of 2014. It's about 17 minutes long. And he highlights theoretical use cases for Ethereum. And actually most of the ones he highlights are actually finance applications, which is like pretty remarkable. But the architecture of Ethereum looks like Bitcoin, meaning proof of work, block production, all these other things. Ethereum looks a lot like Bitcoin. When we got into crypto in 2016, Lightbulb went off for both Tushar and I was finance. We were like, this seems to have important implications for how to think about value movement, value trading, risk, and et cetera.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is necessary to allow these platforms to explore different parts of the trade-off space of the products that they're building, while also giving you the same levels of returns to scale or network effects that cause the whole system itself to be the most efficient. So if I had to guess what the long-term outcome of layer one blockchains will be, I would expect it to be a similar duopoly as what we see in older operating systems.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Operating systems. And this arrow operating system has certain trust guarantees and security guarantees and neutrality guarantees that it makes, just like the mobile era of operating systems had some performance guarantees and screen layout optimization things that they did. And typically, I think the way that these things develop is first someone thinks of it and they write the first one. And then there's only one and then people think like, should there be more? And then many companies realize, oh, this is interesting. This is going to be a really big market. Let's go compete and the world gets really heterogeneous. And there are many. And then what you see is there are natural returns to scale or network effects to these types of platforms. And so it consolidates down. Now, in the history of operating systems, what we've found is a stable equilibrium is usually two operating systems at scale. We have iOS and Android at an enormous scale. And I think that preserves the amount of choice.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do. I think this is a really complex topic. So I'll give a simple analogy. There are, like all analogies, some holes in it, and it doesn't exactly map one-to-one, but I think it's a useful framework. The way I see layer one blockchains is they are similar to operating systems. We've had two major waves of operating system development and maybe three in history. The most recent one that was meaningful before this was mobile operating systems. And what we saw was originally there were several. There was BlackBerries operating system, there was Palm OS, there was Symbium, there was Windows Phone, then obviously there was iOS and Android. And I'm sure there are several others that I'm not even remembering right now that had some capital behind them, had some marketing behind them, had some users, but then ended up being not super relevant. And when I look at layer one blockchains, what I see is the new era of”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Support and all these other things that are harder to measure, but are very real social costs. But those two are like explicit technical costs. And given both the explicit technical cost and then the softer, squishier social developer experience costs, I think gravity trends towards one chain. So that's kind of my base view of the world. I don't know, Sharif, if you want to add anything to that.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Keyboard is horribly inefficient, but we all use it because that's what they use for typewriters and they use it for typewriters because it was slow because people jammed on more efficient keyboard layouts 40 years later we're still stuck with the QURTI keyboard. And there's other examples in history of this, but that's probably the most high profile one. So the value of these things in being composable and being on a single chain or a single shard is what naturally gives that to you. If you do introduce multiple chains or multiple shards or mollups or whatever, there is a cost of that. There's at a minimum two explicit costs and secondary and tertiary costs as well. But the two explicit costs are increasing the total amount of computation to be done because you're having to verify signatures on at least two chains or two places as opposed to just one. And then the second is you're introducing latency because there's some latency cost of moving between these various environments. There's other more squishy costs of things like developer experience and user experience and wallets.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Experimentation on the edges in terms of encryption on front running resistance and MEV stuff. There is some design space around consensus algorithms. I don't mean to imply there isn't interesting experiments to run, but rather in some end state of the world, once the answers to all of those experiments are reasonably known and understood, it's not clear why you need to have three versus six of those different layer ones other than maybe scaling reasons is arguably the only one I can come up with that I think really stands the test of time. Given that reality, I tend to be a one-chain maximalist in the long run. However, the scaling question is undecided and will take a while to figure out. And the world is path dependent. There are things that you can reason about that they should theoretically be this way, but because of the way history plays out, you end up with suboptimal or incorrect outcome. Probably the best example of this would be the QWERTY keyboard.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This terminology is not widely adopted or framed this way, but will become increasingly true over the next few years. There are different kinds of layer ones. The most common kind is what looks like Ethereum or Solana, which is primarily for smart contracts, which really means DeFi. That is the primary use case. I'll highlight two other functional kinds of chains, something that looks like RW or Filecoin, which the primary objective is storing large files. And the third kind I would highlight is something that looks like textile or ceramic, which looks like a blockchain.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I certainly have shiny object syndrome. I like new toys and new things. They capture my attention quickly. I also tend to forget about them pretty quickly. But I certainly have found the object syndrome. And that can be both a feature and a bug. I'd say for the most part annoys other people around me, which I understand why, but I still like the shiny new objects.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot of debates come down to being a function of time horizon. Also, speed of making decisions, I think is another one of like, oh, we saw this thing. Should we act immediately? Or should we go and wait and think about new competitors entering, et cetera? I would say those are probably two major topics”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Observed that being forced to make my case both in writing and then in dialogue after that is what allows you to identify the holes in your logic, but you oftentimes just need other people to poke the holes in the logic. It's very difficult for me to imagine being in a single PM model given that reality. I realize it can be done, but it's just a lot better to have people poke and holes.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As well. Kyle leads on more of the thesis formation, and I lead on more of the portfolio construction. Now being said, we both have strong opinions in either direction, but plays more to my skill set or more to Kyle's skill set. And it's very fluid, but having the mutual respect and the knowledge that the other person is open-minded and willing to change their mind when presented with new information, I think is key to making a co-PM model work. And if you can make it work, I think it's much better. It's much more stable than a single leader model just because you do have the stability of, oh, well, one person's having a bad day is not going to change big decisions or change how decisions are made. I think that stability is quite valuable.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a really good question. I mean, I think it really fundamentally works because we started as friends and we had a long relationship already. I mean, we were roommates for four years. We had spent a lot of time arguing already. And so we had developed the right tools to be able to argue effectively and be able to actually convince the other person. And the really important thing is that we both keep our minds open to be convinced by the other person. I had this funny conversation with my wife a few months ago, and my wife was good friends with Kyle as well. And she said, you know, you and Kyle agree on basically everything, but all you talk about is like the small sector of things that you disagree about. That's basically right. So it sounds like we're arguing all the time, but really we agree on most things. And I think that those fundamental first principles are really key. Then the other thing that I would say is we recognize where the other person is strong.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's extremely unintuitive to entrepreneurs. Almost no one has launched a second token. The number of people who have already launched a single token and gone through that cycle is extremely low. And therefore, the vast majority of people who launch tokens, it's their first time to launch one. And they have not gone through that process and that experience. We have gone through that process and that experience 30, 40, 50 times just so much accumulated knowledge we have on what to do, what not to do, how to engage the market, et cetera. I think it's extremely important. And you can really either create or theoretically destroy a lot of value very quickly by either doing that well or doing that poorly.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Especially for consumer products. Third, just the dynamics of token distributions engaging with exchanges, market makers, community engagement. You don't have quarterly analyst calls and earning statements. All of those norms around comms, there are no legally defined rules on any of that stuff. There are some norms that have developed, some of which are good, some of which are bad. And then there are other things that are better to do if you're a consumer app versus dev infrastructure or whatever. But all of the norms of engaging the capital markets themselves, you kind of have to redrive them from first principles given the unique structure of this capital market. And so we look at all those things combined. We have developed the kind of instincts and intuitions around how to navigate those realities. And traditional generalist VCs certainly have not. I mean, it's taken us years to develop those instincts and those intuitions and it's required making a lot of dumb mistakes and working with CEOs and helping them deal with those dumb mistakes. But also.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meaningful way. They're unused to seeing that. I mean, just multiply that by like a thousand because the amount of retail that's outside the United States is just in much, much, much larger audience. So that's a very different structure. Second, I think this is very underappreciated. Everyone thinks they're a VC. Everyone in the world, both in the United States and outside the United States, has seen what the internet and the iPhone has done. Uber and Airbnb and all these apps. Everyone gets it. There's new software ideas that keep coming around, that keep being big. And everyone wants to bet on the next one. And they generally have a poor sense of history and competitive dynamics and network effects and whatever, all these other things that make investing very hard. But nonetheless, everyone just thinks they are a VC. And so risk tolerance specifically for early stage software things among the global retail populace is much higher than I think traditional capital markets investors acknowledge or recognize because everyone wants to be a VC.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A functional example of that. I think it's the one that is the most unique and difficult for outsiders to appreciate is we really help entrepreneurs understand crypto capital markets. There's a lot of norms that have developed over the last 30, 40, 50, 60 years, both in private markets and public markets. In public markets, you talk to an investment bank, there's an IPO process, there's an FINS1, a roadshow, whatever. analyst engagement, all these kinds of things. Private markets have similarly developed and the others with how you engage VCs and decks and presentations and all these things. Crypto is really a new kind of capital market. It's different in a few pretty important ways. One, it's global. You can kind of see this today in the commentary from politicians and regulators about Robin Hood and GameStop and AMC and all of that. And to some degree, I think they're largely just confused of like who is this new class of investor in the market that is moving the needle in some way.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That protocol to help make that protocol credibly neutral, help make it decentralized, and help drive it forward. So what we find is you cannot execute team level governance in crypto. You need to do network level governance. And that requires more active participation by investors into the community in order to have the legitimacy to change the protocol. You don't want a protocol that's changing with 51% majority. That's not great. That's not the nature of a lot of these things. You want rough consensus. You want broad consensus. And you want to make sure that people agree to these open source standards. The crypto world is just totally different than traditional business in this way. And so we find that the best entrepreneurs want to work with investors who understand this in crypto.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I wrote a post a few years ago that was titled The Evolving Role of Crypto Investors. And I really saw that as a guidepost towards some of the things that we do today. In crypto, these products and projects are decentralized. And that means that it is not just one centralized team that's driving forward all the progress. Typically, investors are used to centralized teams and they're used to things like centralized governance, where, oh, I invest in this company, I have a board seat, and if the board doesn't like the plan, we can remove the CEO and change the plan. That doesn't work in crypto. There is no board. There is no CEO, and there is no team level governance, really. What you need is what we call network level governance. You need to participate in the protocol. You need to have a brand in the community. You need to be putting forth governance proposals, et cetera, and actually being a part of.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think another helpful way to frame it something goes up 10x in a month or two, whatever pretty short period of time, which again, this happens in crypto pretty frequently. The natural inclination is to sell and the implicit assumption is some notion of mean reversion. It's gone up too fast. Therefore, it must go back down. As like a fundamental worldview, strongly am averse to the notion of mean reversion because the world is changing. Software has obviously changed the world tremendously in the last 20 years in the internet. In crypto, we are at the bleeding edge of software and finance, believing in meaner version. I find it to be like a very backwards facing view of the world. Our job is by definition to be forwards facing. So I reject kind of the notion of mean reversion as a point of principle given our mandate to be long-term fundamental investors.”
2021-11-18 · Capital Allocators · Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - Multicoin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.20) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source