YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt Huang

lines on the record: 114
first: 2025-04-22
most recent: 2025-04-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Two things come to mind one is that, and maybe this is trite, but my mom was a PhD in computer science at Caltech under Carver Meade very early to what would become the parallel computing revolution and eventually a professor at Yale and BU, and she dropped all that to raise me and my brothers. For a long time, while I wasn't even aware that there was another option, and then for a long time I was confused by that because she was at the beginning of something so interesting. But now, especially as a parent, I understand it much more, and I do think it was this ultimate act of kindness that me and my brothers tremendously benefited from. And then the second, I think, is one of the kindest things anyone can do for anyone else is believe in them and to raise their I'll always be grateful to him for it.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything you just articulated is fair and right. There's a lot of value in people providing services around cryptocustody. And most people don't want to have to be responsible for their own key material. But I think the important thing is to have the option, the option to exit is a really important check on the system. And this is true in the information world too, where most people are going to use Gmail and Outlook for their email. But if you want to, you can go use ProtonMail or run your own mail server. And that option is important at the edges or in really unusual scenarios. And I think that insurance policy is just a very important thing to have in the system.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“to enter an era where regulators view this as the enabling and innovative technology that it is rather than anyone who touches it is probably a criminal.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say the last five years of working in crypto in the US has been fairly radicalizing on the competence of our bureaucratic institutions, and I think many different people come to this insight, I think, from different paths. I think COVID and the CDC was one example for people. But seeing the behavior up close is very illuminating because the Arn Sorkin West Wing vision of government is supercompetent smart, funny people with the best of intentions, and that has not been our experience thus far. And I think some of this is going to become public in hearings around the debanking and other things that have happened. I am very excited about the shift in sentiment on these political dimensions. I think we are likely.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Currently exist. And I think YouTube is a very useful analogy where it used to be that cable companies controlled content programming and you had fifty, a hundred channels and some sort of editor would figure out what people want. And with YouTube, we basically explored every possible permutation of human entertainment and discovered all these new verticals, whether it's unboxing or watching other people eat on and on. And we're probably not done. We're probably still going to find new ones in the future, especially as the culture changes. And that same thing has not happened in the financial space. There's such high fixed cost to financial exploration. Either you got to start a company to list a new futures contract, you have some startup costs around it. When crypto rails are more mature, I think we will see this breath for search of all kinds of different financial use cases that weren't public.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is with treasury rates at four or five percent So, I think the incentive for retail banks to pass along that yield somehow is broken. It's a very easy proposition to say this is a stable coin. When we get stablecoin regulation, there'll be much stronger controls on the asset base that can back them. It'll be very safe. It's not a fractional system. And you'll get basically the full yield. And that's, I think, a strong value proposition for everyone in America who has savings rather than letting someone else earn all the spread. So I think that's one where I'm excited about solving existing inefficiency. I'm probably most excited about exploring what might be newly possible. One abstract framework is this idea that permissionless platforms enable organic bottoms up innovation and kind of an explore function.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing that comes to mind is there's clearly the emerging markets use case, and I think a lot has been said about that, access to a great currency, whether it's USD or some other cryptocurrency, rather than your local hyperinflating. But I think it's underrated how stable coins could be useful to US consumers. If you go on the Chase website and you look at the interest rate paid to Chase Savings accounts, I think it's zero point something percent.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think of a lot of crypto as by removing the intermediary, by creating security around contract rules that you put on chain, lower the cost of enforcing these transactions that you want to be able to facilitate.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People who could operate the cash register were people in the family that ran the store because those are the people you could trust. Or think about security cameras that watch parts of the store allows it to be much bigger than what the cashier could look at themselves or tags and security balisters that automatically detect when you've taken something out of the store without paying for it. These are all security technologies that's preventing something bad. And you could say, well, you could just make shoplifting illegal and you can do that, but the cost of enforcement is just too high. So one thing that security technologies do is reduce the cost of enforcement of these things that you don't want to happen, thus enabling more GDP.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think a lot of crypto is this new kind of security technology where it can secure different types of human coordination. And one interesting thing to look at is when people think about security, they think about preventing something bad. But security is also a huge enabler of things that are good, countries with strong property rights do a lot better than countries with weak property rights. And if you look at the micro scale and just think about something like physical retail, we have these big box stores today like Walmart that probably wouldn't have been possible without many different kinds of security innovation. For example, the idea of a cash register that tracks all of the payments and locks the drawer so that you can trust the cashier not to steal your money. And in a mom and pop store, that's actually a problem. And for a long time”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think everyone will have different motivations, but I do think there's a shared underlying vector in this direction. I think a lot of us are working on it also just out of raw curiosity. It's just interesting. And I think you have to be really in it to fully experience this because from afar, definitely the speculative noise is much louder. But it is just breaking down ways that humans coordinate into its most atomic constituent parts and figuring out how to enable better and better versions of that and different unique combinations. I think it's just a fascinating frontier.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“skepticism of authority and the ability to coerce and I have a very strong one should be able to choose one's own path mindset.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't fully know, but my hypothesis would be possibly my mom or parents. That makes it sound like I have some bad relationship with them or something. But I think I intuited early on that in really small stakes, like not in a way that matters, but the trade-off between agency and authority. Now I see it on the other side as apparent. But yeah, in really small stakes, just the notion of navigating individual agency, and I'm sure every child, every parent ends up in some situation where the child feels like it's unfair and maybe it probably is unfair from some objective point, but it's the parents call. I think that can make one skeptical of any system that allows one party to coerce another. I think I developed very early aesthetic and intuitive.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm not fully sure. I suppose I've always had somewhat of a skepticism towards authority, and so when I see authority exerting itself, it does make me wonder, is this the way we want the world to work?”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the real internet and can find out information should they want to. That alternate system doesn't exist yet for finances. And I think crypto is building that. And so at a minimum, I think it's a check on the degree of overreach of the traditional system. But I think it's also a very important alternative. I think in the long run, we also get more efficient systems, more innovation, lots of positive affects. It's not just a political defensive point, but that political dimension is a very important part of what's being built.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're ultimately the government saying these activities are technically legal, but we don't like them, and so they apply various kinds of bureaucratic pressure onto the banking system to refuse those people as customers. And I think the law should be the law. So if some activity is illegal, then let's make it illegal. But when activity is legal, I think it's sort of incumbent on the system to enable that legal activity to happen should it want to happen. And I think of crypto as much like we would look at the Chinese control of media as something distasteful to us in the West and the free internet is something that seems more moral. And the internet is a very useful check on that type of totalitarian control because through VPNs or other technical techniques, people in China have access.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the most obvious recent example is the set of debankings that have happened Operation Choke two point zero which Nick Carter and the crypto community has done a really good job cataloging. There was also Operation Chokepoint 1.0 which happened prior primarily with marijuana gambling and other”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Healthcare without financial surveillance of their payments. These are issues that touch on all sides in this ultimate question of individual freedom and sovereignty.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dystopian system social credit score full visibility into finances one system. And I don't think they fully realize the same thing is happening in the West. So I think it's one of the more urgent problems facing freedom in the West alongside the speech issues. The common characterization only criminals need encrypted messaging or only criminals need privacy of their financial transactions. I think it's increasingly clear that this is something that affects everyone and it's not singularly political in the sense that it's not a right or a left issue. For example, I think in the aftermath of the first Trump presidency, a lot of people in the MAGA world lost bank accounts. Now with the Republicans in power, a lot of people on the left are worried about people being able to access abortions and get proper”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Freedom because you can use economic violence country to country, country to citizen to punish speech. And I think we saw this say in the case of the Canadian truckers, if you remember that incident. And so I think economic freedom is one of these underrated frontiers where we are slowly walking our way into possible totalitarianism in how much financial control our governments have over the people. And I think everyone in the US looks at China and says, that looks like a very”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't want to come off as I don't care about the investment returns and being a good steward on behalf of LPs and stuff. But I do think the mission that animates us is making sure that crypto technology can succeed in the world. And I think if we look at the internet, the idea that we have end-to-end encrypted messaging today, WhatsApp signal, I think is a contingent fact, as in there are many possible universes where we don't have that. It's not something that was inevitable. And it's something we possibly could lose or have been close to losing many times. And I think right now putting the political dimension aside, there's a lot of discussion about the idea of free speech and censorship. So I think these are some of the questions of our time. And that's just on the side of information and transmitting information. I think if we look at, there is no free speech without economic.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“or Solana we have stablecoin transactions that are extremely cheap and fast now whereas in twenty seventeen or twenty twenty one those same transactions would have been ten dollars or a hundred dollars to send a mainnet transaction. So I think we're in a completely different place on the infrastructure side now, mostly invisible to the broader public, but manifesting in real applications like stablecoin payments being possible.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that makes people uncomfortable sometimes, and I think I see a lot of people very confident that Bitcoin, for example, cannot possibly be money or gold. And I think it comes from this place of just the inherent distaste for speculation versus trying to inspect it more carefully. Then yes, there's the Carlota Perez idea of speculation as a bootstrap. And I think we have seen that play out productively in crypto. So for example, a lot of the stablecoin activity that's possible now, 200 billion in stablecoin assets, lots of stablecoins being used outside of crypto, whether it's cross-border payments or access to USD in countries that struggle with their local currency, corporate payments, etc. That's all enabled by the infrastructure work that was done over the last two, three years.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think the speculation has been productive. Okay, you could debate have the ratio of speculation to the utility that's been created and compare that across trends and crypto, I think, is definitely more speculative than typical. But that's in part because assets that one can speculate on are part of the core thing that's being enabled and the core form factor. But yeah, within crypto, I think a speculation in two ways. One is that it's actually very core to the adoption of any new monetary asset because to believe that other people will eventually accept some asset as money is inherently a speculative act. You can have fundamental reasons for believing that because the supply is fixed or it has certain technical features. But ultimately, your belief hinges on belief in others.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the one we have a team that is very curiosity first. Part of our process is everyone on the team can spend time looking at and investigating whatever they want. And so we have plenty of people who are super fascinated by AI. We actually spent some time going down that rabbit hole exploring it and ultimately decided that one, we're definitely interested in the intersection. I think right now might be some of the most interesting times in that space. But also, I think there are extreme returns to specialization. And there's also a sense in which AI is everyone's working on it, and it's going to be fine with or without us. I think crypto is a very important technology that needs to coexist with AI that, to your point, there aren't a lot of great champions, and we believe it's very important for us to work on it to make sure that.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Markets for participants to engage in if you wanted to run some kind of auction or allocate a scarce resource through purely programmatic means, crypto is sort of made for that. And so I would envision a world in which AI agents are basically constructing more elaborate ways of coordinating with each other beyond just payments.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a really interesting frontier, which is still super fuzzy, is the intersection of AI and crypto. In a lot of ways, like if AI is intelligence, crypto is a way of coordinating intelligences. And that's really what money is. It's a database of value, and we shift it around. That's the coordination mechanism of capitalism, say. And it seems to me that I have a hard time visualizing if AI agents really take off and become possible for them to primarily be transacting through traditional systems. And I think right now a lot of people are focused on the idea of just agents paying each other or paying for things on the Internet. I think an interesting step further is you could think of crypto as ways to construct.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a recent and topical example is the prediction market platforms, which are these contracts that say you deposit X dollars. And if X person wins the election and you bet on that person, you get paid if the other person wins the election, you don't get paid. That logic is represented in a smart contract. There's a crypto-based way of resolving that event. And so that's an example where that wasn't possible before us.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For the first time, we're starting to see people build all these different ways you can program and use them. And I think 10, 20, 30 years from now, it seems inevitable to me that basically all of our financial transactions will run through Rails like this in some way.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is some kind of program. There's logic that governs who pays who and there's an escrow or maybe there's a payment condition, think insurance or mortgages or payroll, all of these things are payment with programming on top of it in an abstract sense. And all of that is possible to build on these new crypto rails. But there's a bootstrapping problem because most people don't trust the rails or use the rails. There aren't a lot of assets there. So there's this bootstrap between assets and programs. And I think what's interesting about stablecoins, we've been bootstrapping the crypto native money for a while. Ethereum, Solana. With stablecoins, we now have a very widely used monetary asset to your point without any of the volatility or crypto hair.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's a payment rail that's 24 seven global and programmable. I think those are pretty key. I think it's amazing that we live in a world where the internet is 24-7, but payments closes over the weekend. So in some sense, this is just modernizing finance and payments in a way that we're already used to with the Internet. And a lot of the FinTech innovation has actually been product and go to market innovation on top of antiquated backends. And you can think of crypto as building a new finance backend from the ground up. I think one way to view the programmable financial system or one frame on it is as a two-sided market between assets and programs. So every financial activity we undertake through a traditional institution or through an app.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For stablecoins, and then they can just send those stable coins over the wire. And that's ultimately a cheaper FX transaction than doing it the other way.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, one remarkable thing about stablecoins, which are, for the most part, dollar denominated tokens that are pegged to the US dollar, but they live on blockchains. And I think over the past few years, stable coins have grown to over two hundred billion on chain. And they're starting to be used in sort of real use cases outside of crypto. They were originally conceived, actually, to be a way to facilitate crypto trading. It's how you on-ramp to certain exchanges abroad and got dollars and dollars out. But now, companies like SpaceX are using stablecoins to move money around. And a lot of others will have this corporate treasury use case where they'll generate revenue in some country, let's say in Africa or Latin America, and want to repatriate those dollars back to the US. And so they'll use some local exchange to trade the local currency.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It has one in a way that exceeded what I would have predicted a handful of years ago, but I think we're still early in the degree to which that really is understood, despite some of the commentary around it. And one rough way to think about the adoption of Bitcoin is how many people around the world weighted by dollar amount believe Bitcoin is something they should own. And then there's the other axis, which is like what percent of their portfolio is in Bitcoin. And I think we're getting to a point where a lot of institutions are starting to think, okay, maybe we should get off zero, maybe it's one to two to five percent. You even have fidelity like recommending baskets that have that weighting. I don't think we're going to get to or should get to people being broadly 100% Bitcoin, but I think it'll be much higher than where we are today.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think today it's primarily a store of value or maybe more accurately a bet on a future store of value. I think over time it may find some transactional use, but I don't think that's necessary for it to be really useful and interesting.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a tool that I think is very valuable. And gold solves some of the issue, but it's physical, heavy, inconvenient, lots of reasons why a digital version is superior.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the idea of a money that is non-sovereign is valuable. I'm not someone who believes that crypto or bitcoin should replace all fiat currency. I think they actually coexist quite nicely. And the rise of stablecoins is a great example of that. But I think it's very useful to have an alternative. And we used to have that in the form of gold and people adopt gold for that purpose as a hedge against hyperinflation, fiscally irresponsible spending, etc. But Bitcoin is not just that, it's also something that can help individuals and families preserve wealth in some of the least safe places on earth. You see whether it's people escaping Ukraine or Venezuela or other nations in distress. Crypto has started to play a much bigger role there. So I think just from a humanitarian level,”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even the acknowledgement of digital gold, I think, five years ago, again, was deeply contrarian. And if you think about the adoption of any new monetary asset, it is this process of building acceptance and legitimacy. Like that is the actual KPI. Price is an output of that. But the primary input is how many people actually believe that this might be possible.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thought you were crazy. We thought it was possible someday, maybe ten, fifteen years. So honestly, I've been very surprised by growing legitimacy of Bitcoin as a monetary asset. And it's not just at the government level, it's at the institutional level. I think in 2017, Larry Fink called Bitcoin an index of money laundering, and now he's on CMBC once a month talking about how it's the future and its digital gold. Jerome Powell at a conference the other month, I think, was asked whether they would ever adopt Bitcoin or whether it's a threat to dollar. And he said, no, it's not a threat to the dollar. It's just digital gold.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“grew up around it. It's not just the most valuable startup. I think if you told us at the startup paradigm twenty eighteen that nation states would be talking and actually adopting Bitcoin?”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Highly unconventional market, the market for money. It doesn't have a conventional corporate structure or a team or a CEO. But I think if you step back and think about that, I think it's kind of remarkable that that even happened in a completely new industrial organization like Satoshi dropped a nine page white paper, wrote some initial code, and then the whole ecosystem. Now it's trillions.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Change at the bottom of the foundation of the building. And throughout history, we always coordinate through institutions that are centralized companies, governments, monetary systems, and crypto enables us to do it in a decentralized way. I think it turns out that the most valuable application of that is money. And I think crypto is progressing in three rough stages. First, as money. Second is a financial system. And third is a kind of internet platform. And I think it's coming into focus most on the first two. Useful as money, useful as a financial system. I think the internet platform is probably the most illegible at the moment. But I think on the money side, Bitcoin is the most valuable startup created in the last fifteen years, except most people don't think of it as a startup because it's competing in a high.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think some of the most foundational platforms where generative outlier outcomes can happen like that are the most illegible at the beginning. I think the internet was an example of this. Everyone today, I think, takes for granted how obvious the internet is. But if you think about even just the idea of Google, the pitch for Google was this helps you search the internet. But like what is the internet for? Well, Google is like this use case of the internet. There's a circular reference there. And it just turned out that over time more and more stuff ended up on the internet and became really useful.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The discussion there, it's not clear exactly what to do, but the same thing happens in the investing world, Peter Teal has this hate of buzzwords. As soon as there's a buzzword for an ecosystem stop. Runaway. Moritz has this great look for the interesting, complexed bird, don't look for the flock. I think they're all getting at this idea of the outliers are going to be unique. And if you're investing by meme, you're kind of losing all the underlying texture and complexity.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. And maybe the modern version of that is seeing a meme. The ecosystem selects for memes that are very simple because simple memes can gather a lot of power and energy and spread. And you see this basically on the current topic on Twitter every day is people fighting over higher dimensional versions of memes and the memes causing people to misunderstand what everyone is saying. But without the meme, you don't actually get the”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of this term Web3, for example, which I think is useful in the sense that it is an analogy that helps tech people understand what might be happening with crypto, but it also introduces a lot of incorrect comparisons too. And so if you're trying to build in crypto and you take the legible meme too seriously, then you might actually build something very wrong because you're misunderstanding the underlying complexity of what's possible.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think the legibility has very strong gravity, or put another way, I think to make things legible inevitably reduces the accuracy. So there's this idea, the idea of the map versus the territory. We come up with legible explanations of things to better understand them, to better communicate and transmit ideas to other people. But they're always approximations of the fully textured version of the reality. I think there's often a temptation. I see this especially in crypto to make it legible too quickly. I think there's a lot of value in tolerating the illegibility. For example, a lot of people are wondering what's the crypto use case. First of all, I think we can get to that, but money and finance are the obvious ones. But a lot of people are wondering, okay, what's after that? And I think there is this temptation.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's probably an inverse correlation between how legible a space is, how understandable it is to others, and prospective returns. Because almost definitionally, the more well understood it is, the more priced in, so to speak, everything should be. Silicon Valley is an interesting case study because I think it's always kind of the frontier, but in some ways the ecosystem of Silicon Valley has become very legible to what used to be bespoke is a bit more factory farming today. I think maybe the frontier of AI currently remains very illegible and a super interesting space for builders and investors. Software as a service is no longer illegible. Maybe the phenomenon of tiger and kotu and everyone else pricing SAS multiples to perfection is just the expected outcome.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most visibly wrong is probably us investing in FTX. I actually don't know the right takeaway on SBF. Were there yellow flags? He was a unique and different shaped person, but a lot of the best founders are. And the other thing is we did identify the core issue that ultimately ended up being the problem, which is sort of the related party nature of the market maker and the exchange. We actually drilled into that in our diligence and were ultimately lied to. I think venture is very hard when founder is willing to do that because so much of the ecosystem depends on trust and it's hard to go diligence the lie. And we had no reason to think he was lying.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the trade-off of having a deeply technical, very building and research-oriented team is that we inherently have strong opinions about technical futures. And if you think about maybe the idealized version of an investor would be much more agnostic, that's a conscious trade-off that we always have to navigate. But I think a fair critique of paradigm would be sometimes they're too wedded to their technical views.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source