In my time in this industry, there have been these dark moments, these dark nights of the soul. You have to look inside. You have to ask yourself, why do I actually believe this? Because everything is moving against me. The entire universe is conspiring to say, 'See, you're an idiot.' You have to believe that something much bigger, much longer term is happening, of which this is one temporary snapshot.
In hindsight, it looks obvious, right? But it was not. I mean, Haseeb Qureshi, the managing partner at Dragonfly, a leading crypto venture firm backing digital asset startups. He's a respected investor and technologist in the web3 ecosystem.
There's so many people I know who came into crypto at the same time that I did who didn't make money. How is that possible that you can enter the industry when Bitcoin and crypto and all this stuff is so low and still not make money? The answer is that you just didn't do the obvious thing which is stay in the market. Just stay in the market. As long as you stay in over a long enough time horizon, you will make money. It's basically guaranteed. But people don't do that.
What does Bitcoin look like when it reaches equilibrium price?
Saturation looks like Bitcoin is very boring. It looks like young people don't talk about Bitcoin anymore. That's something their parents do. That's how you'll know it's saturated. When you are kind of cringe for telling your kids about Bitcoin and they don't even know about it, that is when you're like, 'Okay, we've now crossed the chasm to the point where Bitcoin no longer feels countercultural. It no longer feels like taking a risky bet. It actually feels like the thing you're supposed to do.'
Why are you actively defending Ethereum and Solana, putting on your VC hat, and giving hope to people who lost it?
Hi everyone. This is the little bit that I know none of you like that can help us make a huge difference for this show and we want to take it next. 71% of the people who regularly watch When Shift Happens have not subscribed. And so all I'd ask you if you want to make a huge difference is the following. If you've seen this show before and you like it, help me, help my team, hit the subscribe button and we'll continue to build this show for you. Thank you.
So, I just do it this way. Very easy. I have contact. So, I don't know how many studios now.
Yeah, much easier. You outsource everything.
No, it's nice. I mean, when we're in New York, we always book the same studio for our chopping and block show.
Um there's this place, I don't even remember the name. It's on Canal Street. Um they're just super consistent. I don't remember their name, but they have nice studio, good lighting, very professional, and the main thing is just like it was called WTF Studios.
I always go to this place called Melrose Podcast Studio in New York.
I've been there before. I know on what's that?
It's more like Lower East Manhattan, I think.
Yeah, I think we have recorded there once. I think like if we do it on short notice, sometimes we just grab whatever we can grab. So it's much much better in real life.
Yeah. Way better in real life.
Yeah. Even when you don't have no energy like we don't have today.
Bam. It's there. It comes back. True. It's easy.
Like or if the other one has more energy than you, you just like match the level and
That's right. That's right.
Yeah. I know. It's seriously a Wi-Fi problem.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Somebody drops in the middle of it.
So, what what are we talking about?
Well, you going to surprise me.
Yeah. I mean, I'll surprise myself, too.
I feel good now. How do you feel good? How do you feel in life?
How do I feel in life? Uh tired, man. Very tired.
There's a lot of stuff going on. I mean, obviously the market itself, but that's honestly a small part of it. There's just been a lot of stuff going on internally. Um, there's been a lot all the [__] that people don't see.
They think it's just fun job, fun job. But
no no it it's well the other thing too I was just chatting with somebody that like among so I think most people they think of VC as like a very gentle job that you take the summers off you know you like you do an investment and then you wait for 10 years right what it is
yeah it's like it I mean there's some people do that and I think those people are bad VCs I think those people like they they they lose to us
because we outworked them
and I think the you know somebody was just telling me that like relative to all the other VCs like I am super responsive. I like jump on the phone very easily. I I just I'm constantly doing stuff. I'm constantly out there and um that's just kind of the way it's kind of the way we work at Dragonfly. Um, and that's why we have the right to win in a lot of these cases is honestly because we outwork people
and not everybody does that, especially not for this many years,
you know, and like there's all this quiet quitting stuff if people are that, you know, Kyle Samani quitting Multicoin and all these OGs are leaving crypto and
what's your take on that?
What's my take on that? Um, I think a little bit of it is overstated. So, there's always people quitting crypto.
Like, I mean, I I just wrote this tweet that uh I've been told four or five times this week by different people that they think this sentiment is worse than the sentiment after FTX collapsed, which makes no sense.
I think it's complete [__] Complete [__] It's just total recency bias because, yeah, it's happening right now, so therefore it's worse.
And it's like, no, you don't remember what that was like. And how many people do you think quit after FTX collapsed? You just don't remember them. You don't
How many people had not even no choice because they lost everything. So they had to quit.
Industry. Exactly. And like all the people who came in the industry for stuff that never came back anyway. They did not stick around and pivot into some new thing that continued to work in crypto. They did a lot of metaverse stuff. They did, you know, the web3 gaming. They did the consumer. They did all this other stuff that never came back. They all left the industry. Yeah,
you just don't remember them because you've written them off in your mind. Um, but so the idea that like, okay, this is unique that people are leaving the industry. No, people leave the industry every time prices go down. It's normal.
But the other thing too is that, yeah, it there's also a normal tenure to people's careers is that somebody who's been in the space for 10 years, it's normal for them to move on, especially somebody, you know, like Kyle who's made, you know, god knows how much money. M
he's obviously very very successful VC built a huge multi-billion dollar platform for him to move on is just not crazy that happens in every industry you know there's a lot of VCs who built a VC firm and they leave after 10 years um so you can you can read into it and tell yourself a bigger story but it's also another point that I made is that there's a big difference between the pioneers and the settlers they're always different it's like a law of human nature the people who push their way out west to go find California and to go populate the new world are not the same people who will eventually build the towns.
It's a very different psychology, very different mentality, right? Same thing of, you know, the first 10 employees at a startup are very different than the 50th employee and the 100th employee. It's a different kind of psychology that goes into that person, especially the thousandth employee. Totally different than that first or or 10th employee.
So that's normal. You should expect that. That's part of winning.
You know, the the guys who were in the first uh batch at Google who helped build back when they had no idea what they were doing are not the same people who build, you know, uh you know, Google shopping or Google Drive, you know, it's just a very different kind of of of builder. And that's happening to us in crypto now. And that's normal.
How do you last? Um I think you have to have more to prove. I think for somebody like Kyle, right? I mean, Kyle obviously very very successful, he doesn't need more money. I mean, I don't know, maybe he does. I don't know. I don't know what his lifestyle is like. Um, but I would suspect for Kyle that at a certain point, it's not really about the money. It's about having something to prove.
And if you're Kyle, um, I would assume that you felt like you've proved yourself. You felt like everybody doubted you. You know, Kyle, we were just talking about FTX. Multicoin is one of the biggest investors in FTX. That was their near-death experience was after FTX collapsed and their one of their biggest investments, most successful investments went to zero, became discovered as a generational fraud.
And Solana, which was their their darling went all the way from 200 plus to $8 and they wrote it out and they believed that they were right when everybody else is wrong and they got vindicated. That's got to be an incredible crowning career achievement, you know? I don't know what that feels like, but it must feel pretty [__] good to feel that level of I proved that I am the best investor in the space, you know? And to leave after that, I'm like, yeah, I get it. I get why you'd leave after that. You know, if you do if you if you get if you get a couple rings on your finger, like I don't think anybody can begrudge you deciding, hey, you know, I think I'm done with this game. The best drug is not uh the money made is I told you so.
Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And Kyle's had plenty of opportunities to um to feel that. So, and if he feels like, hey, he wants to go play a different game or a bigger game for that matter. Um I think that's totally fair. I don't think it's it's that meaningful of an indictment on crypto
except in so far as crypto has grown up.
It's it's evolved. It's we're playing a bigger game now, but it's also a more mature game and it's just different.
You mentioned recency bias. What are some other biases that for investors are trying to trick our brains but actually are not helpful at all?
Um, that's a good question. Um I mean I think as an investor the most insidious is status quo bias which is the preference or the expectation that the status quo is going to continue because you know if it if it wasn't resilient why is it not why is it the status quo uh today I think it's harder to find people who are very status quo aligned because the the the mood in all of technology is that everything's changing. You know like I think the AI revolution has really gotten people feeling like oh my god anything could change whereas I think just a few years ago there was a sense that you know maybe nothing ever changes
that you know there was this all this talk about the great stagnation you know Peter Thiel very famously had this piece about how there's so much innovation in bits but no innovation in atoms I think we have broken through that malaise to some extent you know now there's all this sense about oh longevity and and um you know CRISPR gene editing and we've got AI now, we've got drones, we've got quantum, we've got um you know nuclear reactors. It does feel like all of a sudden there's this sense of movement again
in science and in technology. And that's really good. That's very very healthy for society. Um but still, I'd say the most common thing that you see that's a failure mode among investors is not believing that things can really change.
Quick one. I want to thank our partners who help us make this show possible. Thank you, Trezor. my favorite cold wallet to store my Bitcoin and crypto and make sure I sleep well at night. If you want to sleep well at night, too, you can order your Trezor wallet with my promo code WH10 and get a 10% discount. Check out my Trezor link in the description down below. Big thanks to my good friends at Bitwise Asset Management for backing today's conversation. Bitwise is a global crypto asset manager with 11 billion in client assets and more than 70 crypto solutions. That includes ETFs, index funds, SMAs, custom option strategies, staking vaults, and more. However you want to invest in crypto, the experts at Bitwise have you covered.
You spent a lot of time in the Silicon Valley.
What did you learn there that you could not have learned anywhere else?
Oh man, it's hard to even describe. It's like it's it's not propositional knowledge. It's not like this set of facts that you can't learn anywhere else. It's a way of operating, a way of thinking that Silicon Valley uniquely has. There's so many cities around the world that talk about we want to be the next Silicon Valley. And almost anytime I hear that, it's always a joke.
Like, you know, I remember uh you know, in Germany, uh people tell how can Berlin become the next Silicon Valley? And it's like, dude, you're so not even like don't even start. Because the thing about Silicon Valley that's so unique and I think it's really only ever been replicated in probably two places. Um I think it's been replicated in China and it's been replicated in Israel.
But very few other places can figure out how to build this. And the thing what is the this that we're referring to number one is celebration of failure is that failure is normal and it's not pathized in any way in Silicon Valley. Right? Right. In Silicon Valley, you can fail upwards. And in most places, this is unheard of.
In most places, they would tell you, 'Yeah, yeah, it's good. You can fail.' But actually, people are like, 'Uh, you're a failure.' Exactly.
You're a failure. Right. Exactly.
That's right. People feel like, 'Yeah, we can kind of celebrate you, you know, we can create give grants and whatever all this stuff.' But the reality is you're taking a huge amount of career risk if you absolutely go do a startup. And especially if that startup fails is a pock. Why did you go leave your great job at, you know, Deutsche Bank or whatever or SK Telecom, right? Why did you leave this great job in order to go start a startup?
And um this mentality obviously is the wrong thing. It's obviously the wrong way to create a vibrant startup ecosystem. Um the other thing about Silicon Valley that again a lot of people don't understand is that it's extremely high trust. M
like it is not despite the fact that it's in America and America is a classically litigious society. Um there's not a lot of litigation that goes on in Silicon Valley. There's not a lot of people suing each other. There's a lot of people getting into big fights. And the reason why is that we kind of understand is that it's this bubbling cauldron of ideas and there's going to be people stepping on each other's toes. There's going to be people stealing each other's ideas and it's okay. M
