day to day
I am a full time partner and investor at 1kx, a cryptonative venture fund
I joined 1kx in August of 2020 (5+ years ago) and for the majority of my time since then until today, I focus on the firm’s investments into the consumer application layer of crypto (consumer crypto). Since then, I’ve worked to enable 1kx to become one of the most active lead investors for early stage consumer crypto companies and token networks.
80% of my deals involve investing in teams building end-user-facing consumer products, with a leaning towards entertainment which would include areas of focus such as: social networking, games/virtual worlds, creator platforms, collectibles, consumer brands, anything to do with memes and brainrot, and more.
I grew up on the internet.
Anything to do with wasting time on the internet, I’m interested in.
I’m deeply curious and excited about what the future of wasting time on the internet looks like.
20% of my deals are in infrastructure and consumer technologies, where I mostly focus on a team’s ability to achieve immediate commercialization and a team’s ability to build a durable go to market edge. There are smarter people that I work with that focus on the tech, I instead entirely focus on growth.
Regardless, I usually end up working across 1kx’s entire portfolio with support, especially on go to market.
Context: overview of 1kx (tldr; 1kx invests 2-3m at seed, 85% of deals as lead investor esp. for consumer crypto)
actively on the side
hydra ventures is a project incubated by 1kx, that I work on part time. It is the first ever investment DAO fund of funds, which means it makes direct investments into new investment DAOs as well as incubates new ones. Hydra originally raised $10m in early 2023 and has since invested in 6+ investment DAOs and is still actively investing and incubating. All involvement here is via the basis of representing 1kx.
assembly gallery is a collector DAO incubated by Hydra that I am a founding member in and participate in. It focuses on collecting emerging work from artists across various fields such as generative code, onchain art to AI. Formed in early 2024 and has become one of the most active collectors of art on the blockchain. My involvement here is both in representation of Hydra Ventures as well as an individual member.
in the distant past
metacartel ventures launched in early 2020, MetaCartel Ventures (whitepaper) was the first ever investment organization that coupled unchain smart contracts with a legally recognized operating entity (investment DAO). I co-founded MetaCartel Ventures with Ameen Soleimani, and Gabriel Shapiro, and led all efforts with initial fundraising and early investing before transitioning stewardship to Kenny Rowe, Victor Rortvedt and Ben Middleton. From 2020 to 2023, MetaCartel invested $16m+ across over 78 deals primarily focused on the crypto application layer. Highlight investments include: Sky Mavis - Axis Infinity & Ronin (Series A), Arbitrum (Series A), Zapper (Pre-seed) and Seedclub (Seed).
metacartel was the first group chat for application builders community in Ethereum ecosystem. It was initially formed in early 2018 initially as an open source technical working group around Ethereum application user experience. We raised $150k USD as the earliest fork of Moloch DAO in 2019 from Gnosis, Polygon, Nucypher, Spankchain, and many generous individuals. As a community, we distributed that to over 30+ teams building at the application layer at their earliest stages of inception. As a community, we experimented a lot with onchain primitives, some of these experiments include using NFTs as conference tickets for the first time ever on Ethereum (2019), early social tokens (2019), first ever music NFTs (2020) and the invention of social token gating (2020). Companies that have emerged from the MetaCartel community include: Reflexer, Zapper, Collabland, Catalog, DAOhaus, Gelato Finance, Superfluid, Snapshot and many more.
personal investments
Angel investing — Sky Mavis (Axie Infinity), SeedClub, Zapper
LP — Sfermion Fund I, Spencer Ventures Fund II, Coop Records I, Xoogler Ventures, Arete Capital I, Permanent Ventures, Cultur3 + member of Assembly DAO & KRPDM
Also an investor in all of 1kx’s funds
No longer angel investing due to my role at 1kx
Occassionally write small LP checks into new funds