Georgi Koreli

Pretty excited about this one - a team with a remarkable track record across top DeFi protocols, propelled by a clear & effective go to market strategy. The result? Over $300 million in TVL and $2 billion in trading volume within just a few short months. ___________________________ As Blast was gearing up for its launch, the market was flooded with over a dozen different spot and perpetual DEXes seeking funding. At the time, Blast had already achieved over $2 billion in TVL and we anticipated they would launch various mainnet incentives to maintain liquidity within the protocol. Our aim was to identify the team most capable of capturing the majority of mindshare and swap volume from the $2 billion+ of captive liquidity in the ~3 months leading up to the Blast token generation event (TGE). Consequently, we engaged in several discussions and reviewed numerous pitches to better understand how the DEX competition might unfold. We were particularly impressed by the Thruster team and their strategy to attract early attention and liquidity through focused partnerships and integrations. ___________________________ At Futureproof, we invest our own capital, which can sometimes be seen as a limitation in the venture capital space. We do not write overly large checks and cannot invest in all the deals that come our way. However, this constraint sharpens our investment focus. Ultimately, it leads us to invest in those we believe are best positioned to dominate their respective niches, rather than just securing a competitive position. High conviction, high hit rate... betting on the fastest horse. Thruster is exactly that - winning, growing and showing zero signs of slowing down. We can't wait to support them as they staff up and double down on their winning formula to integrate Thruster products and liquidity into other top protocols across DeFi, NFTFi and beyond.

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The latest update from the research team at Primal Capital explains the importance of wallets in the Web3 ecosystem and highlights the evolution of solutions in the market today. These solutions provide greater utility compared to the original Web3 wallets, which was simply to safeguard assets from centralized platforms.

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In 2024, family offices played a significant role in startup investments, with the top 10 family offices collectively making over 150 investments, focusing on sectors like biotech, energy, crypto, and artificial intelligence. CNBC, in partnership with FINTRX, analyzed these offices, revealing Maelstrom (Arthur Hayes' family office) as the most active, with 22 investments primarily in blockchain. Other top players include Motier Ventures, led by Guillaume Houzé, and Thiel Capital, led by Peter Thiel. AI emerged as a dominant investment theme, with 78% of family offices planning to invest in AI within the next 2-3 years. Read More: https://lnkd.in/eKSaYP88 Branded Hospitality Ventures #AI #Biotech #Crypto #Investing Hospitality Headline Newsletter Guillaume Houzé Peter Thiel Laurene Powell Jobs Trust Bernard Arnault Robert Frank Nico Mizrahi

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2024 Halftime – Complicated VC Landscape… There are two important considerations that will frame the venture capital narrative for the remainder of the year: the elections and financial condition of the country. According to Bank of America, 2024 will see national elections in countries that account for 60% of the global GDP and 40% of the world’s population, with the U.S. election arguably being the most seminal. The U.S. election is in 119 days and our national debt is increasing approximately $1.0 trillion every 100 days… Thoughts on what to expect in 2H24… https://lnkd.in/e-5tAPF6 Flare Capital Partners #digitalhealth

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"“European startups tend to rely much more on public funding sources or traditional bank loans,” Meyers says. “Atomico’s [report] also reports that VC and limited partnership funders all have a decreased appetite for investing in Europe. This suggests that we have more and more small startups in Europe, but they are fighting over a pool of increasingly sceptical investors,” he says." #sifted #startupfunding #startups #vc #venturecapital #funding #publicfunding #investors #investmentstrategies #investmentmanagement #roi #europe #policy #eu

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Here’s a question investors are often asked: When evaluating early stage companies, how much time do you spend on due diligence around future exits? It’s not surprising we hear this question a lot. Also not surprising: it’s got a wide range of answers depending on the firm. Some don’t spend much time here at all. Others make it a point to put meaningful time in as part of their process. Our current thinking: take the time to do the work on public market comps. At Alpaca VC, we spend significant time understanding how public market investors will  realistically value a business based on margin profile, product, business model & TAM. In short, we want to know: how will this company be valued at scale when we get taken out? Yes, we can acknowledge that the journey toward exit is a windy road and that there may be pivots along the way, but there are still public market companies that have a business model similar to the early stage company you're evaluating. And you can always look at gross profit multiples if you think the margin profile will change over time. So we still do the work on the comps. Quantitative metrics we look at when making the comparison to public market comps include EBITDA multiple, revenue multiple, Gross Profit multiple or all of the above. As part of this process, it’s also important to factor in the public market company’s year-over-year revenue growth as this will also significantly impact the multiple it trades at. Simple example: if you have two public market companies with similar business models and similar margin profiles, but one's growing 100% year over year, and one's growing 50% year over year, then obviously the DCF (discounted cash flow) analysis is going to spit out a very different valuation for the one that's growing faster. Why this matters: When you take all of that information into account as you evaluate an early stage business, you can begin to create a realistic picture of how this company will be valued in the public markets at exit - or how an acquirer will value the company for an acquisition. Strategic acquirers may, of course, pay a premium, but we won’t underwrite for that. This allows us, for example, to form conviction around valuation based on revenue and gross profit predictions. If we think they can do $100M of revenue five years from now, we use this diligence process to form a thesis about whether the characteristics above (product, margin, business model, etc.) will cause the company to be valued at $200M vs. $500M vs. $1B at exit. Curious how other early stage investors think about underwriting an exit and how much time they’re spending on public market comps even though these companies are in their infancy.

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Another interesting post from Andreessen Horowitz Web3 team rationalizing the need for Crypto/Blockchain regulations. Christian Catalini co-founder of Lightspark, a Blockchain based payments infrastructure company and head of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab writes: "When regulation arrives too late, policymakers push the best innovators out by failing to provide them with clarity. That’s what is happening in the United States with crypto, and it comes at the risk of the country squandering its lead. It also, ironically, helps projects that are comfortable breaking the law, as we have seen with the FTX scandal. The excuse, at least from the SEC, is that rules written in 1933 and a framework for financial markets designed when we relied on open outcry trading, physical stock certificates, and prices rolled out on ticker tape do not need any updating." He goes on to argue that interoperability is key to disrupting large embedded intermediaries in the financial system and across the web. "Interoperability fixes this. Imagine a world where you can send and receive messages irrespective of the messaging app you use. Same with sending and receiving money, reading updates from your social or news feed, finding the right product or service, or interacting with an AI agent. On a truly interoperable network, consumers and businesses have actual leverage against intermediaries because they can port their business elsewhere without having to rebuild their audience, social graph, or customer base. Developers also won’t worry about their platform becoming a competitor overnight. By injecting interoperability into our digital interactions, open protocols unravel the advantage tech companies have established over the last decades and force them to compete again. This, in turn, drives the type of innovation that helped the United States lead in the early days of the internet." https://lnkd.in/gRUibqtq #Blockchain #Decentralization #Interoperability #FrontierTechnology

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Pro-rata as a service? The concept is quite simple, but a bit more difficult in practice. Early stage investors (pre-seed/seed) typically have limited reserve capital for follow-on rounds at Series B and beyond. Therefore, they need to be selective in picking their winners. Companies like SignalRank, another data driven investor in the market, uses their proprietary algorithms to identify top Series B companies and partner with early-stage funds to get access to pro-rata rights. They deploy capital in the later rounds and share the incentives with the early-stage fund managers who would otherwise forego those rights. A classic win-win scenario 🤝 You can read more about pro rata funds in the full article below!

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Europe unfortunately is a combination of many individual capital markets, some bigger and some smaller, which is keeping the industry's growth modest and never really challenging the US. #vc #funding #startups #privatefunding #privatecapital #investmentstrategies #growth #deeptech #seed #startupcapital

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New post: The big stack game of LLM poker https://lnkd.in/d5mfqgwk I’m sure you read David Cahn’s excellent and provocative piece "AI's $600B Question", in which he argues that, given NVDIA’s projected Q4 2024 revenue run rate of $150B, the amount of AI revenue required to payback the enormous investment being made into NVDIA each year plus the electricity to power GPUs to train and run large language models is now $600B, and we are at least $500B in the hole on that payback. The numbers are certainly staggering… and are just going to get bigger. Unless the scaling hypothesis falters, this is a contest now of “not blinking first”. If you’re a big stack player like META, MSFT, GOOG, or any of the foundation model pure plays, you have no choice but to go all in — the prize and power of “winning” is too great. If you blink, you are left empty handed, watching someone else count your chips. It’s likely hundreds of billions will be destroyed, and trillions earned. For all of us in the startup ecosystem, among many things, it’s going to create a rolling thunder of AI opportunities. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/d5mfqgwk

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What Dave McClure is building resonates well what we are doing with our Siena Secondary Fund. Although one focuses on fund stakes and the other company positions, the journey is the same - need to educate the market about what is #VC #secondary and how to benefit from it...

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This should come in handy: The VC Debulshitter https://lnkd.in/deAwaGCX

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A few reflections (#21): 🪙 VC: net new funds are slowing down, reserves on old funds are running out, and capital is hard to come by for companies (unless you're OpenAI or adjacent). Tangentially, in gaming especially, 🎮 I’ve noticed top-line success doesn’t always translate into strong margins. Businesses struggling to hit 40-80% gross margins need to become more efficient. 📅 2025 = more 2024... These Fed rate cuts won't be felt by the VC market for at least 12-24 months. Near term optimism is misplaced and will not be reflected for a while (2025 likely to feel a lot more like "2024 continued") 📲 Voicemails: it'd be a cool phone feature if we could interrupt a voicemail in real-time (read the text of it play out in real time and pick up the call before it ends). That'd be helpful if Apple built this into the next phone. 🚥 In down markets, irrationality is everywhere and unfortunately common place. Fear, not prudence, is driving much of the behavior we are seeing from investors, advisors, founders, and others. Emotions are fueling a lot (obviously not all) of the volatility. 📈 Tech is still in the realm of trading on profitability margins + revenue growth premiums rather than unprofitable revenue multiples + user growth. This is now common place and not going away any time soon (especially for Series B+). 💲"Printing money is time theft." I heard Jack Mallers, founder of Strike, say this at a conference in Chicago and I now can't unhear this. #VentureCapital #Gaming #2025

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Insightful look into bioplatform strategy, and what it takes to raise a Series A from my partner, Omri Amirav-Drory: https://lnkd.in/dFv7GbF6

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At our VC firm, we don't just fund companies, we fund your existential crises. Every investment comes with a complimentary philosophy book. #vc #startups #investment

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Dan Primack had some pointed criticism for #VC yesterday in his Axios Pro Rata newsletter (a daily must read IMO 😤). In short, the model doesn't work if it can't produce exits for LPs. Don't blame public markets (which are at all-time highs) for the lack of liquidity either. 📈 💸 Instead, this is a "liquidity drought of your making" where "...swinging for the fences on every pitch, rather than taking the single or double that's available" is the only way out when you invest at "sky high valuations." 😰 "A whopping 37% of "unicorns" are being held for at least nine years by VC funds, including 13% that are past the 12-year mark." 😳 ⌛ Is he right? Is VC at a dire inflection point? Or is Primack prematurely hitting the panic button? 🚨 https://lnkd.in/dts92pXr

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Worldwide VC firms are slowing down their fundraising plans. In Q1 2024, only 36 funds closed, raising $11.7 billion, a 56% decrease compared to the same period last year. Major funds like Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz are also adjusting their strategies. For instance, Sequoia reduced its new capital target from $12 billion to $9 billion. The average size of new funds has also declined, dropping from $185 million in Q1 2023 to $125 million in Q1 2024. Experts cite economic uncertainty and a more cautious approach by investors toward riskier assets as key reasons. This trend is expected to continue in the coming months, impacting the venture capital market. https://lnkd.in/eYhuMebP

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Juniper Square recently released their look back at the state of venture in Q2 2024, and the data is interesting. 👉 The liquidity drought continues to stifle fundraising, with $37.4B committed to 255 funds YTD. 👉 In the current climate, established managers are securing 77% of fund value YTD, the highest concentration in the last decade.  👉 Over 63% of capital raised in 2024 so far is in funds of $500M+, the second-highest percentage in the last decade. 👉 Q2 reflects an uptick in US venture deal momentum, with quarterly deal count climbing to the highest level since Q2 2022. 👉 Q2 data shows a third consecutive upward quarter in both exit value and the total number of exits.  👉 Q2 hit a 9-quarter high in total number of exits, and the total exit value recorded was the second-best quarter since Q1 2022. The data shows that the landscape is especially competitive for emerging managers. When it comes to generating returns though, a fresh perspective can help find the most interesting deals. I wrote a bit about this last week, if you’re curious to dig into stats on unicorns at the seed stage, and the funds they’re raising from. You can check out the full report from Juniper Square here: https://lnkd.in/eN6VnY-k #emergingmanagers #stateofvc

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