Everybody realizes how important AI is going to be. The civil liberties around AI are yet to be adjudicated. You are not allowed to say abusive language to Claude. What else is going to be added to this list of things? All of this should naturally well up the human instinct of... You and I will tell you what I will do with my AI. You will not tell me what I do with my AI. Two years ago, we went from failing on high school math to solving the Navier-Stokes problem. The story now is that apparently OpenAI is pointing their lasers at cryptography.
So AI now is about 2021 crypto for you.
Haseeb Qureshi, the managing partner at Dragonfly, the crypto firm, has backed 150-plus companies. A former poker pro. He shares his investment thinking publicly and clearly.
It's more an access thing than betting on the right horse.
Step one, access. Step two, betting on the right horse. There's a ladder of skills that every VC needs to learn over time. At the bottom is deal flow. Then there's analysis. Then there's picking. Past picking is winning.
In VC, the brand plays a role. How do you win if you're the underdog?
The number one thing that is going to make you successful in VC is building a public brand. If you are at one of these big firms, you're basically renting the brand of the big firm. They're giving you a brand that you did not create. If you are not at one of those places, then you got to make the brand.
What would have to happen for you to become genuinely bearish on crypto?
The first is betrayal of our core value. The culture that we have in crypto that no, no, no, you should try things. That culture is very important and sacred. I think if you lose that, that would make you more bearish on crypto.
What's the asset that you have the most belief in right now? The most belief in. You said before the ones that we really believe in are the ones we just don't sell them. If you have to pick one at least right now because it's top of mind.
Hey everyone, one of our absolute favorite things at When Shift Happens is to look at our data to improve what we're doing for you every single week. And one of the things that we notice every week when going through our data is how many of you regularly watch this podcast but still have not subscribed. And so if you want to help us get even better guests every week, take two seconds and click that subscribe button just below this video. Thank you for being with us today and for supporting us every week. And now let's get to today's show.
Yeah, partying is not the best place to like talk about serious stuff.
But for some reason, crypto people love to party.
It's not just crypto, man. Like you go to SF, like the AI parties, like that's what was happening in crypto three, four years ago. That's what AI investing is like right now. It's like super social, no DD, you know, checks flying out the door, like term sheets written on napkins. So it's, um, you know, I don't know what's all like, there's no valuation metrics, you know, it's kind of like these new labs that have just four guys and an idea raising money get massive valuations and billions of dollars. So what's old is new. We went through this.
What's going on? Remind me when you look at that.
Um, it's human nature. It's just like this is what happens when people are really excited about something and they feel they have to get involved. Is the norms around investing are extremely adaptable to the environment and the energy and the mood in society. So it's easy to tell ourselves like, 'Oh man, crypto was so crazy.' And crypto's, we kind of make fun of ourselves a little bit that like, oh, we were just, you know, people reminisce about 21, 22 and oh, we thought we could take over the world and we thought Bored Apes were going to be everything and people could just put their money into some random stupidity and 3x it, 5x it, 10x it, and we all thought we were going to be rich forever for doing nothing. And uh, you go to these kids in San Francisco and they just feel like, of course I'm going to be rich. Of like, I don't even need to ship anything commercial. I just need to be in the right time at the right place. And people feel entitled to, of course I should be able to raise from top VCs and raise a bunch of money and, you know, sell secondaries. I mean, I remember in 2021 being flabbergasted that people started fighting back against vesting.
That's now a thing in SF is people talking about like, oh, why, why do we have cliffs? It just makes it harder to hire people because they have to stay a whole year and staying a whole year for your cliff. There's so much opportunity cost. Who knows, AGI might be here in six months. So like, why would you have, why would you ever agree to a cliff? I mean, OpenAI got rid of their cliffs. They're one of the biggest companies. They got rid of their cliffs.
And that was in response to all the startups that already got rid of their cliffs.
So, and you know, you hear these stories about somebody's a co-founder of a lab and they leave after three months and they go found another lab and leave that after a year. That's it. I mean, I remember all that stuff happening in crypto.
You said this is human nature and like with that, when people want to get involved, how much do you get involved? How much do you want to get involved when you watch all this stuff, but you've seen the movie a couple of times before?
Yeah. Well, I mean, it's true that it's crazy. It's also true that it's happening for a reason. And that reason is that there is actually a technological revolution happening in the same way that in crypto in 2020, 2021 there was a real revolution happening. Right. I mean, now some of that revolution was... 2021 was the time of Terra and FTX and Bored Ape Yacht Club and OpenSea. There's a lot of stuff that didn't last. 2020 and 2021 was also the birth of DeFi. It was also when stablecoins started going vertical. You know, it was when Bitcoin went past 20k. Like all this stuff was happening at the same time. The same thing is going to be true in AI. There's a lot of stuff that's not going to work or go anywhere. There's a lot of stuff that's going to change the world.
So AI now is about 2021 crypto for you.
Okay. So it gets much crazier.
I think it gets crazier before getting sad for a while.
Oh, it'll definitely get sad at some point. [laughter] I mean, like you just look at the scale of the data center buildout, like the amount of revenue that's going to be necessary to pay back all this debt is massive. And um, you know, you look at the compute commitments that Anthropic has, you know, something like 500 billion that they have to go and buy this compute. If there's a downturn and there's some dip in secular demand, it's going to be very hard for them to uh make the math work.
So you think 2020, 2020. So like, how do you think personally? You think I'm going to throw some more fuel to the fire personally, or I'll wait for people to get wrecked? To then, first of all, when there's this first like big runup, you see like which ones are like the most interesting, and then you have a few ideas of like, this is interesting, this is... And then when everything crashes, you see what survives, and that's usually when like the best deals are happening. How do you play this?
Yeah. Well, I think the answer is largely that all the while there are almost always great investments to be made. And the same thing was true in 2020 and 2021 is that there were a lot of bad assets. There were a lot of things you could have bought in that period that would not have done well. Um, if you look at, for example, Ethena, the seed round of Ethena was in 2022 and um, early before the um, you know, things got, um, you know, before FTX collapsed and all that stuff. Um, same thing was true with Monad. Same thing was true with uh, actually Variational. I think we did their seed round and was it 21 or 20 that we did their seed round. Um, so the answer is that there's always great investments to be made no matter what part of the cycle that you're in. It's a question of how much money you're putting in at what stage and ultimately what assets are you buying. So I think it's when you're investing out of fear of missing out that you're most likely to end up making a mistake, or if you're investing in something you don't understand.
That's the most common thing that I see where people see that Axie Infinity is huge. All the VCs are saying that you should invest in OpenSea. You know, all the money is going into Yuga Labs. I don't really get it, but they must know something I don't. That concept you just see it's so common when you have this kind of market frenzy. Um, and you know, now it's funny because after 2021, 2022, you can sort of go back and do the archaeology, like, you know, kind of dig your way through the wreckage. And um, I've had the opportunity to read some of the memos that people wrote during that time because at the time when they were doing those deals, I assumed there must have been so much work, so much due diligence, so much thinking. There must have been a good reason why they did these deals. You read the memos that people wrote during that time and it is embarrassingly simple why they did those deals and it's obvious, which is because other people were doing them.
Is there any memo that you guys do that you would be kind of embarrassed about thinking about it in the same kind of formal moment?
Have you ever? I mean, absolutely, right? Like I was like probably like... Yes. Do you have an example? Something that worked out well and something that didn't work out well.
That I'm embarrassed by the memo? Um, well, I do. Well, this was not during that period [snorts], but um, I actually, um, back when I first started as a VC, so this was 2017, 2018, um, I for the first roughly year that I was a VC, I would write pass memos. Normally, I only write memos today as a firm, we only write memos when we invest in something, but I wrote memos in every deal I passed. And it was kind of a way for me to learn and memorialize my thinking at the time when I was looking at these deals. And of course, 2018 was very early days of crypto. And so I have pass memos on almost every deal of that vintage of crypto, including Solana. So I have my pass memo on the seed round of Solana and that was, I think, at four cents.
Was four cents the first one?
Yeah. Um, so it was a very bad pass. [snorts] It was, uh, I don't know what that is said.
What was the reason why I passed? Um, so if you read my pass memo at the time, it's interesting because my pass memo is very technical. So I point out very specific claims that they made in their deck. I think they claimed that they were going to be something like, you know, 10,000, uh, or no, I think it was 100,000 TPS. No, sorry, I remember now. 600,000 TPS was in their deck and they were claiming that they were going to use hardware acceleration to have a super fast blockchain and, you know, all these things that my memo was just picking apart a lot of individual claims that they were making in their deck. Um, it was in a way very emblematic of a junior investor in that I was taking what they were saying extremely literally and also almost treating this investment question as a homework problem and like, well, okay, if I show my work, I will get full marks on the homework problem, which is that, you know, here's what they're wrong about this, they're wrong about this.
And to prove everything wrong separately, to then have like a summary that's basically like wrong, right, negative.
So, you know, I've long had this joke that, um, like, you know, the worst thing you can be as an investor is to have all of your, like, your work right and the final answer wrong. You know, when you're in math class, if you have all your work right and you have the final answer wrong, you get partial credit.
Right. But having your work right and getting the answer wrong in investing is zero credit for that. Doesn't matter. If you're really smart and you look like a genius, if you get the wrong answer, you're wrong. [snorts] That's the beauty of investing and entrepreneurship. I would say I remember being at school and at school you have, if you're competitive, you're thinking, oh, well, maybe I do this math problem and then if I'm lucky, the teacher or professor will like recognize that part is right and I'm going to get some things even if the answer is wrong. But then maybe you are doing like a French or an English literature thing and the person just doesn't like you. He's gonna give you a bad grade. It's basically like, and it's just, it's just random, right? And I was always thinking like I wanted to have the best grade. I was like, how can I show that I'm better than the other people?
Well, I need to become an entrepreneur and I need to invest. Yeah.
Because ultimately whether your business works or your investment works, well, there's only one possibility, right? You were right.
Yeah. And there's no like professor to say I don't like this guy's glasses or tone and then therefore I'm going to hit him like a grade.
Yeah. [laughter] That's right. That's right. There's no ambiguity.
You know, there's no politics. There's no, well, you know, you look like this or you came from this family or you have these friends or this social group or whatever. It's just like you right or you wrong.
And the universe is going to tell you very quickly if you're a good investor or a bad one.
So I very much agree. At the same time, you know, venture is unique compared to something like hedge funds because hedge funds, everybody has access to every instrument, right? If you want to go invest in Tesla, you want to go invest in SK Hynix or Micron or whatever, everyone can invest in anything. It is truly a level playing field. VC is not like that. VC, you know, you can sit at home in the bleachers and say, 'Oh, I knew that this company was going to succeed.' Uh, that was, it would have been so easy to make all this money because like, oh, you know, Sequoia's, I bet I could, you know, they did FTX, I would have known not to do FTX. Um, but the reality is that most of the difficulty of VC is getting the right to do it in the first place. And it is in a way different from hedge funds. Um, you have to be this tall to even play the game in that if you don't have access to a deal, it doesn't matter if you know which company.
It's more an access thing than betting on the right horse.
It's, well, it's both. Step one, access, step two, betting on the right horse. Um, so the way I map it out for people within Dragonfly is that as an investor, you know, if you're coming in, you're a junior investor, you're like, 'Okay, what am I going to be judged on as a VC if I'm making my way through the ranks?' And what I tell them is that there's a ladder of skills that every VC needs to learn over time. And as you get up the ladder, those skills become more and more valuable. So, you know, at the bottom is deal flow. So, just can I find deals? Can I talk to people and figure out what's happening? Okay. Uh, then there's analysis. So, can I do the due diligence? Can I write the memo? Can I break out, you know, what are the upsides and downsides of this business? Um, then there's picking. Okay, that's like, okay, this one, not this one. This one's going to win. That one's not going to win. This is only halfway up the ladder. This is not that high on the hierarchy of the most important skills in venture capital. There's a lot of people who can pick.
Um, past picking is winning.
It means winning the deal.
Ah, winning the deal. So there's a lot of people who can recognize OpenAI is going to win.
Yes, there are. Sequoia can recognize it too. a16z can recognize it too. Benchmark can recognize it too. So just because you can recognize it doesn't mean you get a seat at the table. The seat at the table comes from winning.
That is always different for everyone.
Except if you have a big, big brand, right? Think about like consultancies. You have the guys, McKinsey, they win because of this mega brand and like charge like crazy. In VC, the brand plays a role. How do you win if you're not like the, if you're the underdog?
Yeah. So that is always the conundrum in venture is that look, if you're assuming that you're not at a big platform, if you're not at a16z, you're not at Sequoia, if you are at one of these big firms, you're basically renting the brand of the big firm, right? So if you're at a16z, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz and Chris Dixon and all these guys have created this brand and you're borrowing from their brand to go win this deal, right? They're giving you a brand that you did not create. If you are not at one of those places, then you got to make the brand. Um, there's always multiple ways into a deal. And of course, it depends on how big is your check. What are you asking for? What's the counterfactual to me taking your money? If you are a massive fund, then I have to beat a16z to get into this deal. But if you are a medium-sized fund or small fund, then who you're replacing is maybe just a couple angel investors or maybe some strategic investor, in which case the value you have to bring to the table is lower in order to earn that seat at the table. Um, but almost always you have to bring something that the founder finds to be uniquely valuable, uniquely compelling, or just that they have to like you and they have to want to go to bat for you and make a trade-off that would not otherwise be easy. Now, there's some people who their strategy is, look, I'm not a deal winner. And so my angle is going to be to go into things and find them early before they're competitive, before a16z and Sequoia are at the table. And that works. It's harder to go through that strategy, but it works. Um, it's sort of like, uh, the different ways to think about it is that there's the heat-seeking missiles that try to find the hot deals and try to find their way to get in. And then there's the truffle hunters. And the truffle hunters are going and finding things out in the forest that nobody else is looking for. And that can work. It's hard to scale that, but it's a strategy that often can, especially for smaller funds, can be successful. Um, but the number one thing that is going to make you successful in VC is building a public brand, right? Building the legend. Why do people want to work with this person? Why do people want to work with Marc Andreessen? Why do people want to work with, you know, um, Vinod Khosla? It's because the legend, right? They've built up all these entrepreneurs who will say, 'Yeah, Vinod is crazy, but like he's the guy.'
And they're also out there a lot.
Which is why you're out there a lot. Yeah. I would guess.
Doing all these podcasts, you, I mean, personal brand, right?
That's right. That's right.
Yeah.
It's a, um, it's a people business more than anything else. And even if, look, uh, a lot of times you might think that a16z is a bigger brand than, you know, some, you know, Menlo Ventures or something. Um, but very often when it comes to a real competitive deal, it comes down to not the brand but the person because at the end of the day there's going to be somebody sitting on your board. There's going to be somebody who's calling you, um, trying to help you think through problems and that person oftentimes can win over a brand that's bigger based on their personal connection or their ability to win trust with that founder. So there's all sorts of stuff that people do to try to win deals of, you know, throw these big dinners or fly people out in a private jet or do some, you know, these big kind of romantic gestures. I often like to call them, you know, like these kind of moments of, uh, trumpets blaring of like, oh, I'm the one. I've done this thing for you. It's so amazing. But I think for founders, um, especially people who are very serious about building their companies, oftentimes it's not how deals get won. Deals more often get won through understanding and trust and somebody really feeling like you're the guy I want to build this with.
On most trading platforms, crypto lives in one app, stocks in another, and commodities such as gold and oil somewhere completely different. Variational puts it all in one: crypto, equities, commodities, FX, and even pre-IPO names in one single account with zero trading fees on every market at any size. Visit variational.io to see why Variational has quickly become one of the largest on-chain trading platforms. Big thanks to my friends at Bitwise Asset Management for backing today's conversation. Bitwise is a global crypto asset manager with 11 billion dollars 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.
Yeah, the personal brand is so important everywhere. Now, all these, uh, yeah, I'll invite you to this, uh, F1 Grand Prix or dinner or party or whatever. Like, this is not cutting it anymore. It's the old way of doing business.
Yeah. Yeah, that's right. I mean, and you got to be adaptable to what that founder is looking for, what ends up impressing them. So, like there are people who, you know, you buy them a fancy dinner and you take them to an F1, you know, bring them to the paddock and they're like, 'Wow, this guy's, I love this guy. That's so awesome.' Um, there's a lot of founders, especially you talk about technical founders who, um, that's not how you're going to win them over. Um, so I think both in, you see this a lot in crypto and you see it a lot in AI as well is that, um, very often there's a different vector of competition than just, you know, throwing money around and flashing somebody the way that a banker might.
Let's talk about a bunch of these people that you identified early on. Let's start with Near. Yeah, very early. Very early. When did you invest in Near and why?
So I co-led the seed round of Near a long time ago. This was 2018 and, um, at the time it was actually called Near AI. So Near was founded by Illia, who was one of the co-authors of the Transformers paper. And at that time, the Transformers paper was just a paper. There was nobody who was talking about 'Attention Is All You Need', Transformers, all this stuff.
Did you know that the Transformer paper was basically what would become a GPT or you didn't know, right? Invest based on that?
No, of course not. None of that stuff existed at that time. This was like just an esoteric little architecture thing that was published inside of Google Research. So, um, so no, that was not at all the reason why we invested and it would have been anachronistic to claim that because it genuinely wasn't true. GPT-2 wasn't even existent at that time that we made the investment in Near AI. So, um, so no, I, uh, it's funny because actually I'm remembering the story. I met Illia and his partner Alex. Uh, they were co-founders at the time. Sorry, not partner, co-founder. Um, they were building a new blockchain. Originally they were working on AI and they pivoted to blockchain. And the reason why they pivoted into blockchain was because they saw what Ethereum was doing and they were like, 'This is so bad. This is so amateurish.' Like these guys have clearly never worked on a distributed system before. Uh, so, uh, Alex, he worked I believe at MemSQL, which was, uh, an early in-memory store database. So these guys were very, very hardcore low-level engineers and they were like, this blockchain thing is a joke. The engineers here are terrible. Uh, we're going to build something way better. And so I remember me and, uh, my then partner Ivan, we sat down with him and we walked through his pitch and he sketched out for us, I think on a piece of paper, uh, their protocol that they were going to call Near. And the idea, this was very popular at the time, the idea that they're going to do a blockchain that can be validated on mobile phones because everybody was freaking out about, oh, it's decentralization. You have these nodes and you can't verify them on your phone. So nobody cares about this anymore, but at the time, this was like a big thing. So he showed us this protocol. And I remember me and Ivan, we looked at it, we were like, 'Okay, well, this is very cute, but this is broken. This doesn't work. This isn't going to work. There's no way this is going to scale. This part makes no sense. Nobody cares about this. Um, I don't think this is a good protocol.' And we basically passed in the initial meeting. [snorts] And the next day, him and Alex email us and they were like, 'Hey, thank you for your feedback. We have a new protocol for you.' And they send us a new version of Near that addressed every single thing that we pointed out in one day. Uh, and to be clear, the new version of Near was not great, but I was like, 'These guys are good. These guys are clearly super high horsepower.' And at the time most of the people who were building blockchains were scientists. So there was this, you know, at the time the notion of professor coins where there were all these academics that would come out and they would build protocols and chains. And these were the first guys that like, no, no, these dudes are just cracked engineers, like these Eastern European just super, um, you in the weeds. And what would happen if guys like this built a blockchain? That was a thesis and that's why we ended up, uh, seeding Near.
What was the seed round price? You mentioned four cents. Yeah. You passed. Yeah. What was the seed round price?
I don't even remember to be honest. Um, it was certainly less than 50 million, but I don't remember.
Isn't 15... 50 less than 50, but I don't remember. I'm going from memory.
What is Near eight years later? What is Near eight years later? Explain simply.
Yeah. So Near, their primary product, because at this point there's a constellation of things that Near does, but the main thing that Near does is Near is a cross-blockchain exchange. So it allows you to use every single blockchain from one account or one address and be able to trade assets or perform financial transactions anywhere privately.
Obviously when you invest as a VC you have this vesting, right? But it's probably not a vesting over eight years, I would guess.
Does Dragonfly still hold Near today?
I think, well, I mean, if you look at the price chart of Near, you can see that Near has gone through a lot of ups and downs in the time that we've been investors in Near. But the answer why we hold our Near is because we believe in the team. We believe in the technology. And, uh, you know, there's times when you have to really decide, do I believe in this team and what they're doing and what they're building? And for not every protocol is the answer yes. For a lot of them we decide that like, hey, either, you know, one of two things: either one, we've lost confidence in this direction, this team, this plan, or two, we have confidence but like the vision is realized. They said they were going to do X, they did. Great, you know, it's time to cash in our chips, like we did it. You know, kudos to us. Um, for Near, it's both the case that we have total confidence in this team and the job's not done. And so once that job is done is probably the time when it's time for us to get off the ride.
When is job done? Like how big can this thing get?
I think a lot bigger than it is today.
Uh, yeah, so to be clear, the Near story has transitioned a lot over time, right? So back in the early days, Near was one of this generation of Ethereum killers. It was using, um, a bunch of advanced cryptography and sharding to compete with Ethereum 2.0. If you remember, ETH 2.0 took a very, very long time. They were saying that they were going to get ETH 2.0 live in 2017, 2018. It took until well after 2020 for them to get ETH 2.0 live. And Near got there first. Near implemented sharding and implemented a lot of the, you know, ETH, we still don't have sharding, you know, sharding just never came. Um, and so their whole idea was that look, we're just going to front-run and build this thing before anybody else is able to build it and hopefully you build it, they will come. Um, it turns out that was not the way in which they were going to succeed. And this is one of the things too that I think you see from great teams is that they're adaptable to the way in which the market changes over time. Um, teams that are too myopic, they're ultimately going to say, 'Okay, well, I came in this to build NFTs and NFTs aren't working and so I guess I better go down with the ship.' Instead of saying, 'Hey, okay, I came in to build this, but like look, the market's pulling that out of me and I'm going to follow the gradient and move in the direction of building something valuable.' You know, and actually most of the successful projects in crypto have pivoted.
Which means very low ego.
That's right. Another [snorts] one you identified early is Ethena.
Because Luna happened in 2022.
The whole Ethena thing happened before.
Why did you invest in Ethena right after Luna and when everyone was having crazy anxiety and PTSD from this disgusting Luna experience?
Yeah. I mean, people thought at the time that obviously DeFi is not investable now, but especially stablecoins, like you have some kind of on-chain stablecoin like this thing. Are you serious? You're going to try to raise money for this? Um, so he got a lot of nos in the seed round and most people did not really understand the mechanism, they didn't really understand why this thing was interesting. Um, so with Ethena, part of the reason why we ended up getting to know Guy and part of the reason why he wanted us as an investor was that we actually invested in the predecessor to Ethena. Um, there was another protocol before it called Lemma Finance. And Lemma Finance was trying to do the Ethena model of doing the cash and carry trade, but it was trying to do it in DeFi.
Instead of doing it using centralized exchanges. And the problem was that in DeFi, perps were not big enough yet. Now today it might be a different story, right? At that time it was just dYdX and, you know, GMX and a few other things. But, um, you know, their bet was that, oh, well, obviously perps are going to get bigger on-chain and like we believe the same thing. We've been investing in perps on-chain for like seven years. You know, we've kind of all been waiting for the moment that just only recently arrived where perps are now ubiquitous on-chain. But it was obvious that perps were going to grow on-chain. It's just a question of when. So we invested in Lemma Finance. Lemma Finance didn't work. There just wasn't enough open interest on-chain for them to build something of scale. Um, and it was actually through Guy coming to us that he was like, 'Look, I looked at, I saw what Lemma Finance did and here's what I think their mistake was, was that you just, you cannot sit around and wait for open interest on-chain to catch up to be able to expand stablecoin supply. But you have to be able to find a way to go off-chain. And going off-chain means that you need to find some way to solve the counterparty risk problem.' And the counterparty risk problem was getting solved because of the fact that once all of the exchanges started worrying about all these outflows that happened as a result of, you know, what happened with Terra, uh, as well as Three Arrows and then eventually with FTX, is that all of them started getting pressured to offer third-party custody. So like custodying things through Fireblocks, custodying things through Anchorage. If you're a big institution now, you don't have to have your assets sitting on the exchange. If they don't sit on the exchange, you're not taking counterparty risk. Mhm. That was only possible at that moment in time. A year earlier when Lemma Finance was doing this, that was not a thing. And so he realized something in the market structure has changed that allows me to do this now and solve the problem that Lemma Finance was facing. And that like he sort of squared the circle for us. He's like, 'Aha, you're absolutely right. The moment has changed. You've identified exactly this opening in the market and you're the founder to do it. You've got the pedigree. You've got the ability.' Um, and I think most investors, they did not have that picture. They just didn't understand the prior art and they didn't understand why something fundamental about the market had changed. That's why we ended up leading their seed round.
