A founder just informed me that they ran out of runway and have to wind down their business. Paying himself $212k a year, in a bear market, with a pre revenue startup. And somehow it’s “the market’s fault.” Can’t make this shit up. — Simon Dedic (@sjdedic) on X People often ask what makes Silicon Valley culture so special and hard to replicate. It’s not the talent or the capital....
read more
@SemiAnalysis_ recently found something bizarre in the economics of AI coding subscriptions. If you run them at max usage limits, you’re actually paying 20x-70x cheaper than you would buying tokens through the API. Many people looked at this and said: oh my god, look how much the labs are subsidizing tokens, the bubble must be about to pop soon. This is the wrong response. The reason why labs are willing...
read more
I have this bad habit that whenever I accomplish something, I’m compelled to write about how I did it. We just launched Dragonfly Fund IV, a $650M crypto VC fund (at a time that half of the media seem to believe that crypto is dead–again). We have ~$4B under management, we have about 45 people across NYC, SF, and Singapore, and we’re now one of the largest VC platforms in...
read more
We’re a crypto fund. If anyone should believe in crypto, it’s us. And yet, when we sign a deal to invest into a startup, we don’t sign a smart contract. We sign a legal contract. The startup does the same. Neither of us are comfortable doing the deal without a legal agreement. Why? We have lawyers. They have lawyers. We have engineers who can write and audit smart contracts, and...
read more
It’s that time again—as 2025 comes to a close, it’s time to drop 2026 predictions. I think 2026 is going to surprise, both to the upside and to the downside. Organized by category: Macro / Chains $BTC is > $150K by year-end, but BTC dominance decreases in 2026. Despite the excitement around the recent crop of fintech chains, their metrics will underwhelm. Daily active addresses, stablecoin flows, and RWAs—Tempo, Arc,...
read more
I used to tell founders, the reaction you are going to get to your launch is not hate, it’s indifference. By default, nobody cares about your new chain. I have to stop telling them that now. Monad just launched this week, and I’ve never seen so much hate about a blockchain that just launched. I’ve been investing into crypto professionally for 7+ years now. Before 2023, almost every chain I’ve...
read more
Get better at speaking. Do embarrassing stuff like record yourself, Toastmasters, study good speakers and try to emulate them to try out their verbal techniques and see how they fit you. Charisma is the omni-skill. Drink less, or not at all. It will force you to become a better conversationalist. Buy art that your friends make and hang it on your walls. Never lend money to family or close friends....
read more
Here’s what I would do if I was a young person trying to break into VC: Write. Short writeups, on Twitter. Not generic market philosophical thinkpieces, because those will be assumed to be AI slop or regurgitated research. No one will read it unless you’re brilliant, which you’re probably not. Original research, on a specific company or sub-sector. If you want to write about robotics, even that is too broad....
read more
I started shaving my head in my early 20s. I was way too young to be balding that early, and it terrified me. So I decided, fuck it, just go all the way to the finish line. The first time I shaved my head, I thought I looked like a ghoul. In my dreams, I still had hair. It didn’t feel like the real me. It was really distressing. But...
read more
I passed on @solana’s seed round in early 2018 at $0.04. At current prices, that’s a 3,250x. Solana was one of my first ever pitches as a junior VC, and back then I wrote memos for every deal I passed on (adorably naive and overconfident). Re-reading this memo now is peak junior VC cringe. At the time we were obsessed with “Ethereum killers,” consensus protocols, and what was going to...
read more
