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

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

“On the public asset side, our mindset is point to point, so we're less focused on the interim ball. So a lot of our focus was on this is clearly going to impact the entire private portfolio in runway for those companies' ability to fundraise employee morale, revenue, etc. So a lot of our focus is triaging to make sure that the rest of these companies in crypto would survive. And then we had a healthy amount of reflection about the 21 era because broadly throughout crypto and also tech, it was kind of a very abnormal time. And so the waking up basically in 2022, 23, a lot of the decisions we made in 21 were ill fit for what we thought the next five, ten years would look like.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's the hot thing today. And so that's created a lot of thrash in times of fall. And so more and more, we were always a bit oriented this way, but much more today we're very focused on zeroing in on people who truly get it and are in it for the long term.”
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 honestly the assets I find a lot easier because it's just a number and I think Vaul is just a lot less concerning when you have clarity about the long term. If you look at the underlying vault of our belief in say Bitcoin or crypto broadly, there are definitely ups and downs, but it's much less amplitude than the price. I think that's comparatively easy. The organizational effects and the people effects are much harder. You get this actually throughout all of crypto when the easiest time to hire people in all roles at companies and at paradigm is when crypto is hot and it's in the news. And if you think about the selection function there, it's also the people who may not be in it for the right reasons or may not truly believe in crypto on a 10-year horizon.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mathematical formula, there's tremendous leverage in crypto in getting the mechanism right, and we think that will not just apply to what we've already seen, but there'll be a frontier of new ones to invent. And so a lot of the team is focused on that where those mechanisms ultimately manifest eventually in products.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very rarely would you see an Excel model? Much more commonly couple people might be at the whiteboard hashing out some math. You have Giorgios with his three screens, two hundred tabs typing code. A lot of the work that we do is really in the weeds of the protocols and mechanisms that we think will be important for crypto. And one of the reasons we spend time there is we think that they're tremendous leverage points. On the open source side, the work that Georgios is doing, that code can be used across all of crypto. On the mechanism side, the work that Dan Robinson, Dave White, many others on the team, those mechanisms are at the heart of protocols, for example, that serve thousands of people, millions, hundreds of millions, billions, trillions actually, of trading volume, all from a single”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Casting for someone to be hired at another investment firm. For better or for worse, everyone on the team has a unique entry into thinking about the future of crypto. We have engineers, researchers, security experts,”
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, we were twenty people on that team in twenty twenty one. Yeah, in hindsight, he was too large. There are many different ways to build a successful investment team, and I think one of the most fascinating things learning about how lots of other people do it. I think there are teams that are very large, but I think it definitely changes the dynamic of how a group of people gets to a decision. I think at 10 or less, it is possible still to have a full contact mutual discussion and search for truth. The larger the room gets, the more people are self-conscious and afraid of saying something stupid or challenging someone more senior than them or whatever. So it works for us. It's an eclectic group of people. So not every person, in fact, I don't think there's a single person on the team who would be sent.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“65 people, mostly SF, some in New York, some in DC, the policy team is in DC, and what we call the investing and research team, which is the core group of folks making investment decisions and trying to figure out the future of crypto. That's about 10 or 11%.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, basically between 6,000 and 3,000, and Ethereum was a hundred dollars. And then in the year after laundry raise another about $300, $400. So about $700 to $800 raised total. Then we also have a venture fund that we raised in 2021 that was $2.5 billion. And we're in the midst of investing that now. And we raised commitments for our second venture fund about eight hundred fifty million earlier this year, or I guess 2020.”
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 2018, yeah, early 2018. It was still deeply controversial and almost everywhere we talked to had plenty of crypto skeptics at the table. But we raised four hundred million, launched late twenty eighteen, and our plan was to start averaging into our highest conviction positions, which were at the time Bitcoin and Ethereum.”
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 first fund was a evergreen fund that could hold publics, privates, everything in between. We raised four hundred million. And that itself was an interesting process. Crypto was somewhat hot the prior year, and so it was on everyone's radar”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You put it like that, it sounds reckless. I mean, part of the founding idea was to create a vehicle. We didn't even think of ourselves as venture capitalists. We wanted to create a vehicle that was very flexible and could participate in the value that we saw being created in crypto and to contribute to that. And it wasn't always clear what form that would take. In the early days of Bitcoin, for example, there was always this question of should you invest in the Bitcoin startup or should you just buy Bitcoin directly? And I think a lot of people got caught in that. The right answer was just do both. But I think it was very important to us to be able to participate across the stack of early stage investments, currencies themselves, tokenized protocols, and we viewed the early fund as a barbell strategy between what we viewed as extremely 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
“Part of this is just aesthetic orientation of I think both Fred and I liked building things in a lot of the early team do as well and we were just oriented towards trying to figure out on the technical or product side where the frontier should be going. But part of it's also we think it's one of the best ways to also invest in the space. Perhaps the analogy is somewhat like biotech where it's so technical that you really need subject matter domain experts to understand what's happening. That's not enough on its own because you have to mix that with the commercial sense too. But a lot has emerged from thinking of ourselves not just as an investment firm but as a place that builds products and does research.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get a little bit lucky. I think we'll also generate great investment returns. But it's really that first thing of this is an important set of technologies that really needs to exist. We think a lot of value will also be created. The second thing is that we try to build a team 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
“That skewed us in a much more technical direction. And I think today I would say two primary things that drive us at paradigm. The first is we think of our mission as advancing the frontier of crypto. We care about investment returns too, but we're not primarily optimizing for that. I think if we advance the frontier of crypto, make crypto work, grow the pie,”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our founding insight that both Fred and I had around Paradigm, we had a shared belief that crypto would be one of the most important technical and economic trends. We believed that to invest in crypto required being what we call crypto native. And we sought to build that. We didn't actually have a top-down plan. What that meant to us was making sure that we had the right group of folks who could navigate that uncertain future back to the legible point. I think crypto even today, but definitely back then, is a frontier that's extremely illegible. It's hard to understand what is valuable, what will be valuable to separate noise from signal. It's a deeply technical space. And we knew that hiring investors from central casting was not going to be it. We were lucky with some of our first hires.”
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 try to make this happen. So from there, it was intellectually easy that this was the right call, but on relationships and personally it was hard.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, I don't know about whether that's true. I do know that it was very hard for me to leave. I remember a very intuitive sense that when I got to Sequoia experienced the culture all the great personalities, the extreme high standards, the excellence that everyone strove for, I thought, wow, I could be here forever. This doesn't feel like a job. This feels like a place I could retire from. And then ultimately, I became obsessed with crypto. I mean, that's the simple answer. And I really developed a strong sense that this would be one of the most important technical, economic trends over the next couple decades, and that it was very important for humanity to develop this technology from a financial freedom and privacy and individual sovereignty point of view. And it was just the first thing that I really felt was a college.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What makes Sequoia great is the kind of multi generational team that for any given tech idea, there are twelve opinions and there's this intellectual sparring to find truth. And that was just lacking in crypto. And so I ended up going outside the firm to find thought partners that could test my thinking and I could learn from. And Fred was one of those people that left Coinbase at the beginning of 2017, started angel investing. We ended up looking at a lot of projects together. And just in that process found both someone, the first, I'm sure you experienced this, I sat across from him and started talking to him. And as soon as he started to articulate his thinking, I had a deep sense of this feels like someone would want to work with in some way. I don't know. I definitely wasn't thinking, let's start something, but maybe I'd try to invest in whatever next project he was going to.”
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 had tuned out crypto. I still own some Bitcoin, and I still followed a couple Twitter accounts that would post the Bitcoin price every now and then. I think for a couple years they stopped posting the price, or maybe I missed those messages. But as it started to pick back up, I started to see those again. Oh, there's actually signs of life in this ecosystem. And then I also noticed the activity happening on top of Ethereum. It wasn't just another digital asset like Bitcoin, but there were actually these projects like Augur, which was an early prediction market. I thought, okay, it's not just an asset, it's now an entrepreneurial platform. And so I started to spend time there. And Sequoia was very supportive of that. And we, on behalf of Sequoia, made a bunch of, I think, interesting crypto related investments at the time. And honestly, I think what...”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Space, and this was probably the best company in that space. But after joining and after the crash, I kind of tuned it out. Bitcoin was just an asset, and there were some companies serving it, but it wasn't clear that it was this really generative software platform. And so it wasn't until a couple years later that I re-engaged once seeing the activity happening on top of Ethereum.”
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 so there's like a time shifted cohort adoption curve if you think about the adoption of Bitcoin based on encountering it. So 2013 was that first cycle for me. I think I was not a professional investor. I was day trading on my Coinbase account, bought it at $200 or $300, rode up to $1,000, kind of crashed back to $600, and then slowly ground down from there. Actually, right around that time is when I joined Sequoia. So this was right before that. I remember thinking that, I mean, it was a topic I was fascinated with and I was interviewing at Sequoia, they asked me to put together a part of the interview process was put together a one-pager company you think we should invest in. And I picked Coinbase and I think it was seven employees at the time. This was free the A16Z investment. So just Union Square and Ribbit. And I had a strong belief that it would be an 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
“You give up on it, maybe write it off, it's dead. And then when you see it come back, then you start to wonder, because there are lots of bubbles and tulips and all this stuff. But the tulips did not have multiple successive bubbles over time. Beanie babies did not have kind of a second and third and fourth cycle.”
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 I first encountered Bitcoin right when it launched in White paper, I was in college at the time. And I internalized it. As just like a really beautiful idea, it sort of hits the intersection of computer science and math, economics, game theory, the kind of history of money. And it caused me to go down a bunch of rabbit holes learning about some of the tributary ideas. Because if you look at the citations in the Bitcoin white paper, people have been thinking about this for a long time. It references a lot of old work. So it was fascinating and I didn't have capital at the time and it didn't seem like an investment. It seemed like a toy. My next encounter with it was in 2013. And I think that's the first Bitcoin bubble that I participated in. And I think there's a deep point here about the cohort adoption of Bitcoin. You almost need to lose money or be stupid the first time. Then I find this was certainly true for me.”
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 moment that they realized that they didn't have to follow some existing mentor or some book of orthodoxy, but that they could figure it out themselves, and that ultimately being the catalyst for the greatness.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of different personalities at Sequoia, but there's also a very impressive level of consistency along some key dimensions. Another takeaway back to your prior question from my time at Sequoia, which was I think it was the first time that I realized very intuitively that there were many paths to greatness, whatever you want to call it. Because at Sequoia, there are many, many great people who, if you just looked at their track records or what they've accomplished, it's insanely impressive. And yet they're very, very different styles. That was very liberating for me, the realization that I can find my own way and do it the way I want to do it. And that's actually like a flavor of thing I think is really fascinating to follow. Like you see it in athletes or performers of all kinds. You can sometimes read in their interviews.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In some ways it's daunting because the bar is so high, but in some ways it's liberating because it's much easier to determine where it's not worth spending time. And I think as an investor, the temptation to good over great in terms of every level of zoom ways of spending your time making an actual investment, company, your founder quality is extremely great. And so unless you have very, very high standards, you can spin wheels for a long time chasing things that won't end up mattering.”
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 was expecting everyone to celebrate. Instead, everyone's like, this company was kind of a waste of time. Why did we waste six years for this middling outcome? And so that just rubs off.”
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, that question is somewhat framed in kind of the negative version of it, which is you're doing poorly, you need to do better. There's also another version, which is the positive flip of that of you're awesome, we believe in you. And I would say Sequoia, Douglione in particular was a big impact on me on that. I think the first investment I sourced and brought to the firm and we ended up choosing to invest was when I worked on with him. And in that process, one, just getting to observe him work with that team, but then have him validate the opinions that I was having about the investment and what we should do with the company was a very ambitious, increasing, confidence increasing experience. But a lot of the high standards are unspoken. They're the habits and rituals that you see everyone else embodying, of like $100 million investment.”
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 not a culture that celebrates often. But yeah, I think high standards is not just on the company or investment level, but on individuals taste in individuals, standards for yourself. They aim to operate at such a high level that I think Tyler Cowen has a blog post on this of like one of the free lunches is raising the ambitions of the people around you. I do think cultures of high standards are this version of putting surplus out in the world. If you expose someone to that, you impermanently alter their standards for everything.”
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 absurd statistic of 20% of the NASDAQ. So I think that helps when your track record includes those things, even something that would seem like a great success to anyone else would be smallball. So there were many days when there were multi hundred million dollar outcomes that would be kind of viewed as a mediocre success. I remember day two of me joining was the WhatsApp acquisition getting announced. And there was this very awkward champagne celebration in the lobby. Like they called everyone out there. There are all these glasses. Everyone raises a glass. Nobody drinks. And five minutes later goes back to their desk 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
“It was definitely profound. I'd say the biggest thing is probably exposure to high standards. It's probably the highest standard place I've ever experienced, inclusive of startups that I'm involved in and inclusive paradigm, their ability to maintain extremely high standards. I think it helps to have the legendary history of Apple and Google and Cisco and”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, I was interested in investing, but I wasn't sure whether I wanted to do it, but I decided to join almost purely based on the strength of the team”
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 sitting at Twitter one day in a random email appeared in my inbox, which was a recruiter reaching out about and opening at Sequoia. And I had no actually ambition or intention to become an investor or venture capitalist. So I actually initially thought the email was spam mistake. Why would they send that to me? Wouldn't they be looking at, I don't know who feeds into, yeah, exactly, an investor or maybe like a banker or something that might feed into the investment world? I didn't have real understanding at the time of the varied backgrounds that end up in the space. But I was intrigued and ended up taking the call with Pat Grady, who I think you know. As he was telling me about Sequoia, I just started to get very interested in it. And I met more and more of the team. And I still think it's one of the highest quality teams and cultures on the planet.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. If I had to guess, it would be bite dance Bitcoin Ethereum. And these are personal or including the fund. One I deserve no credit for is Uniswap, which we talk about more. And then there's some normal tech ones like Instacart, for example, I was part of the seed round.”
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 is weird. Yeah, I find him increasingly zen about it, but let's not pretend that it was some great act of skill. I think I had some intuitions and it was a good investment, but like a lot of early stage investing, it's saying yes once.”
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 have the full adjusted for dilution math in my head, but secondary today is trading around 200 to 300 billion. The simple math is that's a ten thousand x. Let's say it's a 5,000 x. If a US company had those numbers, it'd be worth one or two trillion. So it'd be worth another ten X.”
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 have held most of it. Well, it's a weird thing where it was mostly illiquid most of the way. So, I mean, in contrast to crypto, it's a lot easier. And I think by the time there were robust secondary markets and it was possible to sell, I don't know, I wasn't comparing it to the basis. It sort of comparing it to its future potential. And at those points in time, it was always, this could be on track to be the biggest company in China. As an investor, it definitely messes with your head, though, in the sense that, I mean, it's probably the best investment I'll ever be a part of.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then it took me longer to fully grock it. But yeah, the clarity and the aggressive ambition, I think from day one, he was very focused on building an international business, which at that time every Chinese company was a Chinese business, even Tencent Alibaba. And so the audacity to even believe that you can do 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
“He had a very, very high clarity on what he was trying to build and why. I was recently rereading Elon's two thousand six Tesla Master Plan. And if you read that document, there's just a tremendous amount of clarity on what the business strategy is. And Eming had that for this personalized news idea. And personalized news undersells it. I think he saw it as what it ultimately became, which is the global marketplace for attention and media. Like, could we get in front of you the most relevant thing that you're going to want to see at any given point in time instantly? Pre algorithm, maybe you use social, pre-social, use newspaper editors to do that. But this was sort of the HFT version of the media marketplace. And he saw that back then.”
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 at that point in my life, he might have been the most, and you must experience this a lot, the most impressive single person I'd ever spent physical time with. Would read about a lot of impressive people. And that was very inspiring and kind of addictive now as a venture investor. You basically get to do that all day.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Left the trip and I chatted with a handful of other folks who were mutual friends with the ambassador who set us up. And the takeaway I had from the trip was that's the one. And so then that group basically begged the existing VC to figure out some way to let us in. They were really kind.”
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 remember having this very deep sense of this is an extremely competent, obsessed person that is also somehow balanced and not crazy and going to blow himself up, but also extremely aggressive and take over the world. I think that's a rare mix to find. I also hated the idea, which was a personal news. This was pre-TikTok Doin, so pre-video, and their primary business and what built the company was a personalized news app. And I just remember that being an idea that basically hadn't worked in the US. Lots of people tried it. I have like a post hoc understanding now of why it worked in China. But at the time, I hated the idea, but I came out of that meeting feeling like, holy crap, I got to figure out some way to get behind this person.”
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's really interesting, we have a mutual friend, Graham Duncan, who talks about interviewing and referencing and kind of observing people. And reflection is a very unique experience where he would say something, and I wouldn't really understand what he was saying. And then the translator would translate and I could understand. But while he was talking, I could just. intellect is all of the nonverbal.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“at the time there was like a lot of enthusiasm about startups but even then the culture was a little in some ways complacent and so that was very inspiring and so I went from meeting to meeting not expecting to make any investments but just trying to learn and I met the dropbox of China and the X and Y of China and I remember rolling up to the bite dance this apartment complex split across two apartments I had a translator with me we go up the elevator and very unassuming wood floors I get pulled into like a little kitchen where you imagine like a really old refrigerator looks like it'd be dirty inside and a very simple Ikea like kitchen table with some stools and I'm sitting there with the translator and the founder”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Give it a shot. If you visualize back in 2012, every U.S. venture capitalist and company was trying to go to China. China was entering Hollywood. It was very much globalization at the forefront. And I thought maybe that's where I should spend time. I took vacation from Twitter. So this was like a week-long vacation. I had some mutual friends with folks who were VCs or tech people in China. And so they helped me set up a bunch of meetings. And so I land in Beijing and I had been there before the summer before MIT. I went to do some language learning. But even in just that time, which was basically six years, the whole city was transformed. Like you land and it's a massive, massive city, very gray, but I just remember feeling the energy on the ground of this is a culture that feels like it's experiencing hypergrowth. Whereas Sicilic Valley”
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 the underlying space. And I thought, hey, I'm Chinese American. Maybe I'll have an advantage there. When I took the trip, I realized, no, I'm not actually Chinese. It's a very different thing, but that ended up leading me to the Binance investment. And we can unpack that. But when I came back, the next time I felt like there was that underlying multi-decade potential to compound with tailwinds was crypto.”
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 knew I wanted to be in technology and building things. I was definitely not sure whether tech Silicon Valley was the ideal place to do that. That actually connects to I toyed with the idea for a little bit of going to build something in China because this was 2012 now, Silicon Valley. I felt at the time was somewhat saturated. Obviously it wasn't, but the iPhone was released in 2007. You had a lot of mobile apps get built. I think 2012 was the year Instacart and Snapchat were started. Those were probably the last two big consumer outcomes that were mobile first. I'm probably missing something. And that's what I was interested in. Enterprise is not really, I think it's super interesting for some people. It's not interesting for me. And so China felt like the place where you could have that level of compounded annual growth.”
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 MA process. This was the era when they weren't acquiring the business, they were acquiring us. It was a talent acquisition. We interviewed their Airbnb and Palantir. Ended up choosing Twitter probably the least well run of the three companies. I would say the most important takeaway for me, I don't think there's a lot of things to learn from failure or a failed startup on a substantive level. But I think there's certain lessons I certainly learned this now much more experience this now much more as a parent. Some things you have to learn by experiencing them. You can read all you want. You can think that you understand them. But the aha doesn't really happen till you're in it. And I think the ambiguity of trying to create something new from scratch and the loneliness of the founder journey and kind of all the founder empathy stuff was probably the main takeaway. I think that's the biggest thing that has helped me from that experience.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. So went to YC and raised some angel and seed money and continued to build and eventually just wasn't working the way we wanted. So we pursued acquisition opportunities and ended up getting acquired by Twitter. And that itself was an interesting chapter.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source