Tag: Chaotic

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Finance Internet Culture Media Politics

Day 219 and Crypto’s Publicist

Most industries have interest groups. Publicists, lobbyists, and spokespeople weave together stories, talking points and preferred legislative agendas. Anyone or any group is free to discuss why their preferred business or issue is worthwhile and convince others of their view. We have a marketplace of ideas. Sure, not all interests are good but anyone is free to promote what they believe in. So why aren’t we doing anything for our cause in the crypto community? I say it’s time crypto had a publicist.

Not every country allows for this. The crypto community has an obligation to recognize that when we fight for our own interests it isn’t just we who benefit. The entire world benefits from open, decentralized and permission-less systems. What we do benefits everyone who wants to live in a freer world. It’s time crypto had our own activist DAO to protect and promote our values.

I am proposing the formation of an activist DAO promoting the use of crypto. Our goal is to advocate for positive popular culture narratives about crypto. We vote on our issues, stories and key initiatives through the DAO’s native governance tokens. The DAO will hire publicists and communication professionals to promote our stories in mainstream media along with commissioning content meme-ers and creators to share opinions. Policy is crucial but public perception is faster and pushes the right policy down the right.

As place holder I’ve purchased CryptoCommsCoalition.org. The Crypto Communication Coalition. I am working on a shared collaboration doc in Google Sheets to collect input, feedback, and priorities. Anyone who is interested can participate in our effort. Email me Julie @ crypto comms coalition dot org or DM me on Twitter.

We need DAO creation specialists, legal experts, memers, streamers, Reddidters, governance folks, publicists, lobbyists, fundraisers and a thousand other specialists I haven’t thought of yet. This won’t be easy but it’s an eating our own dog food moment for crypto. We can use our own tools to advocate in a participatory, transparent and open way for our own interests. If banking and big oil can can afford publicists then so can we. gmi.

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Chronic Disease

Day 207 and Doxycycline

I don’t have a thesis or a point in mind so I’m just going to get started and ramble. I’ve felt like shit for most of July. Must have picked up some kind of infection on top of my usual bullshit autoimmune nonsense. I finally caved and asked my doctor if I could just try good old fashioned doxycycline. Six hours later I felt like a million bucks.

Sometimes it’s the simple shit that makes a difference. I don’t know if that is an Occam’s razor thing but I’m a little pissed that just tossing an old faithful antibiotic at me did the trick. But then I could be throwing some cool bias at this problem and be equating a bunch of causality that just isn’t there. Humans are prone to that.

Like did you know Occam’s razor was actually a justification for miracles? No shit. Occam was a friar and so into simplicity that he figured God was the easiest explanation. It absolutely blows my mind that there are logicians out there who will stomp on complex answers and holler “Occam’s razor” on your ass when the dude was saying my bias says probably miracles because that’s easier.

I don’t have anything more useful to say than that but this meets my daily criteria to write something every single day. So I’m calling it. Maybe tomorrow will be better. Which it might be because doxycycline!

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Finance Startups

Day 181 and Thesis Trends

As I was putting down scratch notes for Chaotic.Capital’s thesis yesterday on the types of businesses we like I thought I’d do a bit more stream of consciousness writing to discuss some of the mega-trends that I see driving returns over the next decade.

Embedded Functionality

We think more and more businesses will be born of the embedded functionality inside protocol layers or data sets. Many protocols have functionality embedded across different layers of utility and functionality. For instance, the new consumer bank is an API at heart. The protocol layer is the API and the embedded functionality is the financial services layers enabled through the protocol or application layer. Need another example. Retail sales data and demand trends give rise to fashion retailers. Think of StitchFix, the clothing brand is the embedded functionality of its aggregate trend, recommendation and demand data set.


Unbundling Trust

Trust based networks rule businesses like insurance, retail banking, law and financing. But what if trust was unbundled from institutional nexuses of power. What if we built trust from value creation instead of value extraction. DeFi wants to build permission-less trust based on a protocol. Its entirely possible we bundle trust back into the wisdom of crowds and markets. Wall Street Bets is an aggregate source of unbundled trust. Figuring out what layers can be stripped away for more efficiency and what layers we need for safety and peace of mind are unsolved problems.


Data Ingestion Is Value Creation. The more capacity we have for data collection the more demand we will have for data ingestion and processing. While we can say sure businesses rely on the protocol and data and that unbundles trust, that’s not the full picture. We will need people who make sense of the chaos for the muggles. Ordered systems give the impression of serendipity for their users (an introduction on a social network, a recommendation for a loan, an outfit customized for you) but the work required to intake and order the data to create value for users is a big hairy problem. And there is a lot money to be made in those. Centralization may come at this layer especially in user experience.

Flexible Asset Weighting.

We are also interested in businesses that know where they stand with capital needs for their business. If you are executional business you need a thin layer of assets to succeed. To quote Roy Bahat “hot swap” startups are executional businesses. A slim horizontal physical layer to take advantage of low financing costs means return on equity is greater for these asset light businesses. If it’s deep innovation then you can be asset heavy. We like those just fine too. But knowing where you stand and anchoring your business case on your asset weighting can give you an edge. That lets you be capabilities based and find opportunities, particularly as debt as is in a commoditization cycle.


All of this is to say we are thinking across a number of system level problems to unearth startups that will give flexibility to individuals, organizations, industries and hopefully the entire economy. Incumbents won’t see who is coming to beat them because they won’t recognize the new predators. They prioritize value systems that at won’t remain true as systemic chaos erodes inefficient businesses and institutions.

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Finance Startups

Day 180 and Thesis

As I see more pitches and work with more entrepreneurs I am finding it helpful to have my thoughts codified on paper. That way if you are interested in working with me you have a chance to vet me. Knowing what I want to see in a deal and what just isn’t a fit saves entrepreneurs time. So I’m going to doodle a bit on what I do and don’t like.

Chaotic.Capital has 4 key investment areas. But they are really just different levels of working with an uncertain future: at the individual level, the organization level, the systems level and the planetary level.

  • Personal Flexibility is critical when it’s harder to make long term lifestyle decisions (housing, health, children) – how do we allow people to make those decisions without anchoring themselves to place or time horizons that limit optionality. Businesses like marketplaces, preparedness, personal safety, service & product exchanges, health tech, longevity, and alternative credentials.
  • Organizational Agility is a differentiator for businesses in rapidly changing landscapes, so we invest in software and tooling that provides leverage for small teams to have a bigger impact or bigger teams to act more discretely and independently. Businesses like software as a service, cloud infrastructure, collaboration & coordination software, DAOS (decentralized autonomous organizations), automation software, and memetic and organizational aids.
  • Systemic Arbitrage opportunities are even greater in chaos. Working through systems level chaos helps individual and organizations protect against cascade and systemic collapse risk, mitigate political chaos, regulatory uncertainty, memetic crowd and mob behaviors, or medical chaos, just to name a few. Businesses like intelligence, decentralized finance tooling and exchanges, cryptocurrencies, bots & analytics.
  • Climate or planetary risk is an existential risk that is already fucking with our world – we like companies mitigate the chaos of climate change while profiting on the risk. Businesses like mobility, insurance, green tech.

What I don’t like to hear are pitches for things that are tangentially related or a forced connection. Sometimes folks will try to get us excited about a problem they’ve already solved and are scaling but we are looking for longer time horizons. There are plenty of amazing startups that have great returns but aren’t a fit for us. We really do want the crazy weird stuff that is going to take a while.

We don’t need you to know where you are going. We want to see ten or twenty year out timelines. What would life look like without school? How about a world where we didn’t pay taxes based on our geographic location. How about a world where we automate how our attention is allocated. Or a world where our financial power isn’t rooted through centralized trusted powers. We want 1000x leverage on change.

I’ll write more later this week about the types of companies I don’t want to invest in. Not because I don’t like them but because they just don’t match what this fund is meant to do.

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Finance Internet Culture Startups

Day 151 and The New Capital Networks

A lack of network has generally meant capital constraints if you were an entrepreneur. Being hooked up with capital allocators was crucial to being a good operator. Access tended to compound over time like interest. Which is why we make “funny because it’s true” jokes about how successful founders usually had a head start in a few areas. I’m not saying that is going away, but decentralized finance is fucking with some of the consensus knowledge around how capital gets raised and deployed.

And what convinced me we are moving towards an inflection point, over the next decade, where capital allocators and operators decouple, wasn’t my tony Silicon Valley network. No, I’ve had access to the minds of those players for years. What clicked my mind into a position to take action? I spent an hour and a half getting a tutorial from one of my anon reply crypto friends on yield farming and liquidity mining. I don’t want to blow up their spot but Alpha Ketchum dropped a lot of knowledge on me today. And it shifted my energy from belief into understanding. From there action will be seen in my investments.

I’m still chewing through a lot of the details but I’m going to make a bet that scaling DeFi is going to require significant institutional capital and the support of experienced operators to realize its full potential. Thats why I’m invested in folks like Cambrian and Martin Green and would love to get my dollars into Arca and David Nage. That’s why, of my four thesis areas I’m pursuing in my own fund Chaotic Capital, two are explicitly dedicated to both organizational and systemic flexibility and how it plays out across new business opportunities.

We’ve seen capital decoupling from traditional centralized authority systems and trust based networks. The perpetual fundraising machine of tokens, coins and market making techniques like yield farming, are funding everything from esoteric art projects and to the next generation of insurance. Thing about that, the innovative companies that drive growth won’t have their capital needs met just on Wall Street or Sand Hill Road. If you don’t believe me look at what has already been built

Exchanges → SushiSwap, Uniswap, Bancor, 

Insurance → NexusMutual, Cover

Derivatives → Perp Protocol, Opyn,

Credit Markets → Aave, Compound, Maker

Middleware → Chainlink, Grt, 

Asset Management → Enzyme, Yearn Finance

Aggregators → 1inch and Matcha