The Generalist

The crypto wallet has won the Solana ecosystem. It’s now coming for Ethereum – and MetaMask’s throne.

The first time I used Phantom’s crypto wallet, I was blown away. Founders Brandon Millman, Francesco Agosti, and Chris Kalani have built a beautiful, intuitive product with leading-edge safety features.

It makes interacting with web3 – whether you’re sending tokens, staking SOL, or buying an NFT – 100x less stressful and more enjoyable. There’s a reason the company has racked up millions of users in less than two years.

After becoming the standard in the Solana ecosystem, Phantom is taking its next big step, expanding to Ethereum and Polygon. This is big news with the potential to positively impact mainstream crypto adoption.

The world’s largest semiconductor foundry is expanding beyond Taiwan, investing $40 billion in a U.S. factory. It’s a move with immense political and commercial ramifications.

If you’re a fintech shooting for “default alive,” fraud prevention should be at the top of your priority list.

Fraud is a huge, growing threat. Last year, losses to scams increased by as much as 70%. Companies that don’t have adequate fraud prevention may find themselves in trouble quickly. Especially now that most fintech scams come from customers that have been “verified.”

One way to combat fraud is to assemble an expensive, dedicated team of experts whose entire job it is to stay one step ahead of ever-evolving fraud.

Another option? Use Sardine.

It’s like having the best fraud team in the world, available as an API. Sardine uses machine-learning, extensive transaction data, and intelligent rules to stop fraud before it happens. Companies like Brex, MetaMask, AtoB, and Blockchain.com trust Sardine to reduce fraud by as much as 700%. Better yet, thanks to its superior risk modeling, Sardine also improves conversion rates, reducing the number of good customers you turn away. Thanks to Sardine, Blockchain.com’s conversion rate improved by 10% (and it’s still going up).

A look back at the highs, lows, and lessons of running a media company.

To succeed as an angel or VC, you need the right platform

Thankfully, Vauban from Carta has you covered – whether you’re writing your first check or running a $1 billion fund. Though there’s a lot of power under the hood, here are three key features investors should know about:

1. Scale your VC. Start by launching a Delaware SPV from your couch and graduate to running a billion dollar VC fund in Luxembourg all from the same platform.
2. Your own team of structuring experts. Have the support of 200+ fund admin specialists at your fingertips, ready to support you through exit and beyond.
3. Papercut-free operations. Top investors use Vauban to launch global vehicles in 5 minutes. We take care of your back office, you focus on being a value-add investor and building relationships.

ChatGPT is the latest step towards a world of infinite, customizable content, all generated by artificial intelligence. Its advent will impact how we create, consume, and commercialize media.

The Ultra-Wealthy Are Falling in Love with This Secure Investing App (Here’s Why)

Masterworks.com, the $1B fintech unicorn, lets you invest in the booming art market. Millionaires love this app, but you don’t need to be one to sign up.

In fact, membership is 100% free. Even better, all offerings are SEC qualified, insured, and vetted by their experts.

In case you didn’t know, contemporary art outpaced the S&P 500 by 131% from 1995-2021 with near 0 correlation to stocks according to Citi.

So, what’s their track record like?

They’ve recently returned a net +21%, +27% and +32% to members. That’s pretty impressive if you ask me.

Investing in art isn’t a new concept. The ultra-wealthy have invested in art for centuries. And while the economy may be shaky, they’re still purchasing art at a record pace.

The $600M fintech grew rapidly by digitizing an existing behavior. CEO Ravish Naresh shares his lessons and why profitability is his new focus.

To succeed as an angel or VC, you need the right platform

Thankfully, Vauban from Carta has you covered – whether you’re writing your first check or running a $1 billion fund. Though there’s a lot of power under the hood, here are two key features investors should know about:

1. Easy SPVs. There are different ways VCs get the capital for their investments. One of the easiest and most efficient is with an SPV platform like Vauban from Carta. Spin up an SPV from your couch, share with your network and start collecting small ticket checks to make your investment in the future.
2. VC dashboard. Keeping track of your investments can become a full-time job in and of itself. Vauban offers an elegant dashboard that helps take care of all the boring bits including legal, compliance, and tax. Better yet, you’ll get the support of more than +200 VC specialists ready to help you win.

Reflections on crypto and trying to make sense of a nonsensical week.

Brought to you by Masterworks

Microsoft Co-Founder’s $1.5B+ Sale Highlights Real Asset Resilience

Last week, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s historic art collection shattered the record for largest ever sale in auction history.

The fact that the blue-chip art market is still setting records amid major drawdowns in financial markets, and macroeconomic turmoil, highlights why it can be such a strong alternative diversifier. In fact, the high-end art market also remained resilient through downturns like the dot-com bubble and Great Financial Crisis.

But this time around, it’s not just the ultra-wealthy benefitting, thanks to Masterworks.

This unicorn investment platform compiles the results of thousands of auctions like this, generating millions of data points, and builds custom indices to find artist markets with the most momentum. Then it acquires works from those artists, securitizes them, and allows everyday people to invest in shares.

So far, seven of Masterworks’ eight exits have realized a net return of +17.8%.

Reid Hoffman, Saam Motamedi, Sarah Guo, Lan Xuezhao, Matt Turck, Leigh Marie Braswell, Nathan Benaich, Rob Toews, Cat Wu, and Michael Dempsey highlight the AI trends to keep an eye on.

Scams only work if people believe they’re real.

Scams hide in plain sight. The email outlining an investment opportunity or the phone call promising paid work may seem like good fortune. But more likely than not, they’re attempts to defraud you.

The sophistication of these scams means that anyone is at risk. Last year, fraud losses increased 70%, suggesting that fraud is outstripping our technological defenses. It’s a problem that is constantly evolving. While people like me and you are at risk, so are companies. Businesses lose billions every year in scams, sometimes without realizing it since they’re often defrauded by “verified” customers.

Sardine protects businesses from such threats. Leveraging sophisticated machine learning, Sardine stops the scammers from winning. You can think of them as the world’s best fraud team that you hire as an API. Compliance, onboarding, transaction monitoring, and fraud detection are all handled through Sardine’s simple API and SDK.

The impact is major. Sardine helps businesses like FTX, Brex, Metamask, and Blockchain improve their conversion rates, raise order values, and lower fraud losses.

The Midas List investor talks about religion, cyber warfare, and David Swensen.

Fraud isn’t a problem until it becomes your only problem.

Getting better at fraud prevention is mission-critical to scaling revenue. That means you need the right tools for customer onboarding and compliance to protect your business while also ensuring a top-notch customer experience.

But doing all these things is hard, and they typically require months of implementation across multiple vendors, which comes with headaches and increased costs.

Sardine was created to scale your business.

Combine risk, compliance, and payment protection to increase your customer satisfaction, trust, and loyalty – all from one API.

The leading fraud prevention and payments provider protects your customers from malicious scammers while improving your conversion rates. Companies like FTX, Brex, AtoB, MoonPay, Autograph and others use Sardine to stop fraud and increase revenue.

The e-commerce and gaming conglomerate was worth more than $200 billion a year ago. It has since lost $177 billion of its peak market cap and is leaving key geographies – but it still has one of the highest ceilings in the business world.

Fraud isn’t a problem until it becomes your only problem.

Scaling your business for growth means strengthening fraud prevention, having the right tools in place for customer onboarding and compliance, and creating better customer experiences.

But doing all these things is hard and they typically require months of implementation across multiple vendors which comes with headaches & increased costs.

Sardine was created to scale your business.

Combine risk, compliance, and payment protection to increase your customer satisfaction, trust, and loyalty – all from one API.

The leading fraud prevention and payments provider protects your customers from malicious scammers while improving your conversion rates. Companies like FTX, Brex, AtoB, MoonPay, Autograph and others use Sardine to stop fraud and increase revenue.

The rapidly scaling startup is more than just a fearsome fraud prevention platform for fintech and crypto. It’s laying the foundation to become a payments giant.

If you’re a fintech or crypto company, you should be using Sardine. It is that simple.

The fraud prevention and payments provider protects your customers from malicious scammers while improving your conversion rates. Companies like FTX, Brex, AtoB, MoonPay, Autograph, and others use Sardine to stop fraud and increase revenue.

The “internet of blockchains” believes tomorrow’s builders will prioritize specialization and sovereignty. It represents a distinct view of crypto’s future and is gaining momentum.

Brought to you by Masterworks

After injecting trillions of dollars into the financial system…What could go wrong? Try the worst inflation in 40 years, the stock market in a tailspin, and a dark crypto winter.

Yet, there are still some asset classes that the Fed can’t print more of.

Like fine art – a $1.7 trillion-dollar asset class that's outpaced the S&P 500 by more than 2x in the last 25 years. A recent Goldman Sachs report also noted that portfolios with real assets like art have outperformed since WWII.

With Masterworks, over 500,000 members are getting access to investments in multi-million dollar art, for just a fraction of the price of the entire work.

The venture firm has succeeded by focusing on geographies in which most investors dare not tread. It is positioned to become a dominant force in emerging markets.

Five years after Masayoshi Son’s $100 billion fund shook the financial world, Softbank’s venture firm is crumbling. Can it be saved?

Brought to you by Fintech Nexus

London Calling! Join Fintech Nexus for its Merge conference October 17-18 at Tobacco Dock in London, and witness the impact web3 is having on financial institutions and fintechs. Hear from industry leaders and innovators as they reveal how they’re thinking about — and implementing — web3 solutions to gain a competitive edge.

In partnership with 11:FS, Merge brings together a stellar lineup including, Lawrence Wintermeyer (GBBC Digital Finance), Lex Sokolin (ConsenSys), Jess Houlgrave (checkout.com), Claire Calmejane (Société Générale), Keith Grose (Plaid), Curtis Ting (Kraken), Pavel Matveev (Wirex), Jehangir Byramji (Lloyds Banking Group), Haydn Jones (PwC), a member of Parliament, and more.

With over $5.6 billion in total value locked, Aave is one of DeFi’s most dominant players. Its ambitions extend far beyond lending, with stablecoins and social media in its sights.

Brought to you by Masterworks

The near-zero interest rates and sub-two percent inflation that fueled the record bull market of the last ten years are gone. In their place, volatility and fear rule. How can you prepare?

Ultra-high-net-worth investors are increasing their exposure to an asset class that outpaced the S&P 500 by 164% over the last 25 years: blue-chip art. Because of this demand, Deloitte expects the asset class to grow nearly 60% in 3 years.

But investing in multi-million dollar art by names like Picasso and Banksy isn’t just an opportunity for the elite anymore.

Thanks to Masterworks, the award-winning art investment platform, 500,000 other members and I have already discovered the potential of this wealth-generating asset. In fact, since inception they’ve delivered a 29% average Net Realized Return to investors across six exits.

FTX’s CEO shares his thoughts on management, staying focused, keeping up with the competition, scaling himself, hiring mistakes, and building a generational business.

Brought to you by FTX US

The firm has spent billions attempting to transform itself into a tech company, exploring lending, savings, investing, and beyond. The initiative shows the opportunities and challenges of innovating from within.

When I first wrote about FTX in The Generalist, I said the company was building an “everything exchange.” One comprehensive platform to invest in different assets spanning crypto and traditional finance.

With FTX US’s launch of stock trading earlier this summer, that’s truer than ever. From the company’s secure and intuitive app, you can invest in more than 900 different stocks and access your favorite cryptocurrencies. If you’re already holding stablecoins, you can fund your account with them seamlessly, saving you the trouble of selling back into dollars. FTX US is charging no fees on stock trading until September 30th and does not get paid for order flow.

The $5 billion football club is amidst a high-risk transformation. Its strategy reveals the tricky economics of running a sports franchise and the potential teams see in web3.

Brought to you by Masterworks

Solve your “zero return crisis” with this fintech platform realizing 27.9%

Vanguard, a $7.2 trillion money manager, calculated that stocks will return as little as 3.4% over the next ten years. With 8.5% inflation, that means negative real growth on your money. Yes, less than zero. But there's hope.

Personally, I’m continuing to diversify into alternatives like contemporary art. It’s outperformed the S&P by 164% over the last 25 years, and demand is so high that Deloitte expects the art market to grow nearly 60% within three years.

The smartest way for everyday investors to get in on the action is Masterworks. Despite covid, historic inflation, and the beginning of a recession, their last six exits achieved an impressive 27.9% average net return.

Fifteen investors share crypto's highest-potential projects featuring Cosmos, Toucan, Farcaster, Maple Finance, Axelar, and many more.

Brought to you by Eco

Eco may be one of the most innovative startups in the world. It’s not just improving the customer experience, it’s revolutionizing the financial system from the ground up. Built on a sophisticated crypto-native backend, Eco offers a simple way to spend, save, and earn money.

The result is a product that operates like a checking account but

with 50x better rates than the national average – up to 5%! That’s combined with unlimited 5% cash back at in-app merchant partners like Amazon and Uber and no minimums or fees, ever. Even better, as you use the product, you accumulate Eco Points, which the company intends to make the rewards currency of the future.

In this new series, we ask the most interesting, unobvious questions we can think of to one of tech’s most fascinating people. Before founding crypto company LayerZero, Pellegrino played professional poker, sold a machine-learning tool to a Major League Baseball team, and published AI research.

Brought to you by FTX US

Last week, FTX’s CEO Sam Bankman-Fried summarized the company better than I ever could. He said...

Right now on FTX you can:

a) invest in stocks

b) invest in crypto

c) make credit card deposits

d) get an FTX card, spend directly from FTX

e) make direct deposits

f) make peer to peer payments

what else do people want?

Ten habits of some of venture capital’s most successful firms.

This piece is brought to you by FTX US.

It’s been a tough year for the markets – crypto is no exception. Amidst the mayhem, FTX and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried have been quietly executing and stabilizing. For example, FTX provided a $250 million credit facility to BlockFi to help steady the market.

It is one of the more remarkable examples of a new business taking on an industry leadership role.

Nova Labs’ Internet of Things network is one of crypto’s greatest achievements. In its next chapter, it’s pursuing an even more audacious goal: to provide the infrastructure for 5G, WiFi, VPN, CDN, and other networks.

This piece is brought to you by Stytch. 

Want to boost conversion and drive growth?

Stytch makes user authentication and onboarding seamless and secure. They offer customizable, out-of-the-box authentication with magic links, one tap social logins, biometrics, one-time passcodes, session management, and more. They’re your all-in-one platform for authentication.

With their API and SDKs, you can improve user conversion, retention, and security, while saving valuable engineering time. Current customers have seen a 60% increase in conversion after spending just one day on the integration.

The weapons manufacturer has scaled revenue at record speeds, reaching a rumored valuation of more than $7 billion. It may be one of the most important companies of our era.

This piece is brought to you by FTX US. It’s been a tough year for the markets – crypto is no exception. Amidst the mayhem, FTX and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried have been quietly executing and stabilizing. For example, FTX provided a $250 million credit facility to BlockFi to help steady the market.

It is one of the more remarkable examples of a new business taking on an industry leadership role.

YC has more weapons than any other player in venture.

This piece is brought to you by FTX US. 

We have raised a $12.25 million fund designed to help a small number of founders maximize the power of narrative.

The New York-based venture firm has one of the industry’s most remarkable track records. Its success comes from deep thinking and unusual discipline.

Michael Grinich has built something close to magical: an API that expands the TAM of the companies it serves. Some of its investors believe it’s the next Stripe.

The CEO of Gojek shares his lessons of creating a principled culture, managing organizational debt, and building true moats.

The promise and peril of social tokens.

The $8.7 billion used car marketplace became Mexico’s first unicorn by focusing on data. Next stop: the rest of the world.

Christina Cacioppo’s company is the established leader in automated compliance monitoring. Its ambitions span the web.

Chris Dixon has called blockspace the “best product” of the 2020s. We ask a16z’s head of crypto to explain why that’s the case and where we’re headed.

The $8 billion freight forwarder has succeeded by bringing tech to an archaic industry. It has designs on a bigger prize: owning the data layer for global trade.

Crypto’s leading analytics platform is a tamer of blockchain information. It’s also a portal to a new kind of economic empowerment.

The co-CEO of investing unicorn Public shares his lessons on fundraising, hiring and finding focus.

How do you create a successful corporate venture capital firm (CVC)? TDK Ventures shows that invention can come from within.

The Colombian company grew 70x over the past two years by giving low-income women a way to augment their income. By pioneering this social form of e-commerce in Latin America, Elenas could be the continent’s answer to Pinduoduo and Meesho.

How do you find the next Solana? In the final part of our trilogy, we examine where Multicoin is looking for future fund-returners, exploring emergent themes and groundbreaking startups.

The trick to being a great venture capitalist is being non-consensus and right. Multicoin Capital is a perfect example. In Part 2 of our trilogy, we explore how the fund reasons from first principles and remains disciplined.

Multicoin Capital may be the best-performing venture fund of all-time. The crypto investor has won big by making highly concentrated, non-consensus bets on Solana, Helium, The Graph, and others.

After publishing over half a million words on some of the world’s most innovative businesses, these are the 10 lessons I come back to again and again. You’ll find tactics from Stripe, FTX, Tiger Global, OpenSea, and other exceptional organizations.

AngelList Venture is now worth $4.1 billion. That makes Naval Ravikant’s company a unicorn and a creator of unicorns. It may just be getting started.

The megafund might look like Tiger Global, but it's operating a very different playbook. Coatue’s performance has been built around strong in-house research, astute data analysis, and a stellar network. Its greatest weakness may be its own culture.

The virtual world has grown its users by 3,300% over the past year and reached a peak market cap of $12 billion. It may prove the best challenger to Meta’s long-term ambitions.

Tiger Global is venture capital's winning machine. The near-$100 billion crossover fund moves at a pace that no other firm can compete with, allocating around the world, on virtually a daily basis. To the casual observer, Tiger seems to run on a dark blend of hedge fund bravado, inflated valuations, and fast-twitch hunches. It's a lot more complicated than that.