YouSaid · the spoken record

Nick Tomaino

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60
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2023-10-30
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2023-10-30
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  1. “Good question. And I'm talking about some things I haven't talked about really publicly, but okay, so I was working at Coinbase, but still in business school. I had all my money in Bitcoin on Coinbase. That's how much I believe I basically emptied my bank account, put it all in Bitcoin. This was before Coinbase had two-factor authentication, right? Literally like two weeks before Coinbase added two-factor authentication, there was a fairly sophisticated phishing attack on a number of Coinbase employees and other people associated with Coinbase. And I was one of them. I remember, you know, the morning it happened. I was like, you know, groggy. I was like, this, I was in business school at the time. Groggy from a night out or something and woke up, got an email from what, you know, appeared to be a Coinbase email, but it wasn't. I wasn't careful.”

    2023-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Should Large Crypto Funds Give Money Back to LPs | What Will the Next Generation of Crypto Funds Look Like | What Should Happen with FTX; Who Should be Held to Account | The Future of NFTs & What Happens to Opensea w/ Nick Tomaino @ 1confirmation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I think it was about 90% skill, 10% luck. It's politically correct to say, oh, there's a lot of luck. I think a lot of really successful people say that. But I feel like I made my own luck in a lot of ways. I feel like I had a lot of bad luck that I persisted through. It was my determination and kind of grit more than anything. And that is a big skill. Determination and grit and belief, having self-belief is a skill and it's not having these unique traits that I think anyone can have, but you need to have belief first and foremost.”

    2023-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Should Large Crypto Funds Give Money Back to LPs | What Will the Next Generation of Crypto Funds Look Like | What Should Happen with FTX; Who Should be Held to Account | The Future of NFTs & What Happens to Opensea w/ Nick Tomaino @ 1confirmation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Is right, but timing is important. And I think there are a lot of things that kind of came together for me. It was Runa. It was Token Summit. It was me continuing to believe in crypto and kind of build a brand. All that came together to help me raise, as US, how did I raise it, $26 million fund? That was kind of how I was able to do it.”

    2023-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Should Large Crypto Funds Give Money Back to LPs | What Will the Next Generation of Crypto Funds Look Like | What Should Happen with FTX; Who Should be Held to Account | The Future of NFTs & What Happens to Opensea w/ Nick Tomaino @ 1confirmation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “What helped in between was after Coinbase, I ended up joining Runa Capital. Not a super well-known venture fund, but really good Russian entrepreneurs that founded a few multibillion dollar companies. So I joined Runa. That was kind of my bridge while also doing a lot of stuff personally, you know, like I started a newsletter called The Control at the time where I was writing about the space a lot. I also founded an event called the Token Summit. It was a 400-person event and there was so much demand. The tickets were selling on Craigslist for like four times the price that we were selling them for. A lot of what I've learned in my career is like you need to be at the right place at the right time. It's like timing for both entrepreneurs, for venture for whatever it is, like timing is really important. It's not luck. You can use your knowledge and learnings to assess what a good time is.”

    2023-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Should Large Crypto Funds Give Money Back to LPs | What Will the Next Generation of Crypto Funds Look Like | What Should Happen with FTX; Who Should be Held to Account | The Future of NFTs & What Happens to Opensea w/ Nick Tomaino @ 1confirmation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “No, I don't have any. I didn't have any really rich friends. I had built a strong personal brand while I was at Coinbase, and I think that helped a lot, right? To me, like working at Coinbase, it was more than working at a company. I was like working for an industry. Crypto was very early, obviously when Coinbase started. And Coinbase was kind of leading.”

    2023-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Should Large Crypto Funds Give Money Back to LPs | What Will the Next Generation of Crypto Funds Look Like | What Should Happen with FTX; Who Should be Held to Account | The Future of NFTs & What Happens to Opensea w/ Nick Tomaino @ 1confirmation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And I thought, I know the space really well, and I see what's going on and I understand products better than anyone, why not start a fund to invest and help the founders that I'm investing in? And that's kind of how one confirmation came to be, I guess. There was obviously a lot of other stuff, but at a high level.”

    2023-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Should Large Crypto Funds Give Money Back to LPs | What Will the Next Generation of Crypto Funds Look Like | What Should Happen with FTX; Who Should be Held to Account | The Future of NFTs & What Happens to Opensea w/ Nick Tomaino @ 1confirmation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah. Well, frankly, I mean, I got pushed out of Coinbase. Like, I wasn't a great employee, I think, is the truth. I think I did a lot for Coinbase in the early days. But when Coinbase got to a certain point where I wasn't great at kind of office politics and following rules and directions and stuff like that, I technically, you know, left and that was how it was framed to the company and things like that. But I effectively got pushed out. And at the time, that was very painful. Probably one of the lowest points in my career, I would say, because I believe so much in the space and the company. It was a great thing ultimately because it just wasn't the right fit. But at the time, I was like, shit, what am I going to do now? I love this space. I know Coinbase is going to be a billion dollar company. Did I just fumble the bag? What the hell am I going to do next? You know, it was at that point that I decided the venture would be what I could be world class at.”

    2023-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Should Large Crypto Funds Give Money Back to LPs | What Will the Next Generation of Crypto Funds Look Like | What Should Happen with FTX; Who Should be Held to Account | The Future of NFTs & What Happens to Opensea w/ Nick Tomaino @ 1confirmation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Was created by Satoshi Nakramoto, the founder of Bitcoin. And I saw on Bitcoin talk that, you know, the media narrative is one thing, right? Talking about this magic internet money being used for illegal stuff. But the reality was very different. I saw kind of this community of people from around the world. They weren't aligned by physical location, but they were aligned by shared belief system and economic incentives. After spending some time on Bitcoin talk, that's kind of what led me down the rabbit hole and decided I wanted to make a career out of the space.”

    2023-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Should Large Crypto Funds Give Money Back to LPs | What Will the Next Generation of Crypto Funds Look Like | What Should Happen with FTX; Who Should be Held to Account | The Future of NFTs & What Happens to Opensea w/ Nick Tomaino @ 1confirmation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “So, I've always been an internet person in middle school. I was really interested in sneakers. I was buying and selling and collecting Jordans and Nikes. And I played a lot of basketball. So I was super into sneakers. I was spending a ton of time on Nike Talk, which is kind of the early sneakerhead forum. So I've just always gravitated towards the internet, more so than the physical world around me in some ways. I think I'm kind of unique in that sense where, you know, when I first heard about Bitcoin, it was this wired article talking about this magic internet money that was being used to buy guns and drugs on Silk Road, right? That was kind of the early media narrative. If I ask the people in the physical world around me, what they thought, like everyone else at that time, they would have thought I was stupid and they would have told me not to spend any time on it, right? But I wanted to see who was on the internet talking about this. I stumbled across Bitcoin talk, which was the first online forum for Bitcoin.”

    2023-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Should Large Crypto Funds Give Money Back to LPs | What Will the Next Generation of Crypto Funds Look Like | What Should Happen with FTX; Who Should be Held to Account | The Future of NFTs & What Happens to Opensea w/ Nick Tomaino @ 1confirmation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Way too much money was raised. People raised billion dollar funds that just had no unique insights that they had a brand name and access to institutions and institutions just had FOMO and wanted to deploy. Are they going to give money back? Are they just going to milk management fees and deliver poor returns to LPs? The truth reveals itself in time.”

    2023-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Should Large Crypto Funds Give Money Back to LPs | What Will the Next Generation of Crypto Funds Look Like | What Should Happen with FTX; Who Should be Held to Account | The Future of NFTs & What Happens to Opensea w/ Nick Tomaino @ 1confirmation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source