The Full Stack Investor — Principles to be a successful investor in the Crypto age
Community
Create & moderate your own community or thoughtfully contribute to the leading communities like Coinfund’s Slack community or Spencer Noon’s private group.
Validation
As crypto networks transition to Proof of Stake investors stake your holdings directly or assess the competence of professional validators like Chorus One or Staking Facilities.
Delegation , Monitoring
As utility token models mature and correctly integrate ‘keeper’ models to secure and bootstrap networks participate in delegation and network keeping functions like Jake describes for Livepeer , ( 🚀 one of the most well thought out , constantly iterating and shipping).
Hardware Mining
Assess the efficiency of ASIC manufacturers , downstream and upstream determinants like energy costs , cooling , tariffs and regulation.
Get the latest information from manufacturers and relay it to portfolio projects to help them deal with hash rate changes smoothly.
Research
Filter through and assist academic research on Cryptography, Distributed Systems and Economics like Niraj + the research team at Polychain capital
Off-Chain governance
Participate and contribute thoughtfully in shaping community consensus through project calls , conferences , forums and mailing lists…
On-Chain governance
Stay informed and vote on latest decisions and canvas others to support positions with a longterm outlook for the project.
Education & Content Creation
Write data driven blog posts preferably on Steemit and cross posted on Medium.
Tweet a mix of data driven , vision re-enforcing and memetic tribe re-enforcing tweets.
Get on the best podcasts or create your own in a specific niche , same goes for newsletters.
Events
Create small , well curated events bringing together a good mix of core developers and researchers , dApp developers , cryptographers , economists & full stack investors.
Attend high quality conferences and hackathons like ETHCC , Zcon , Build on Bitcoin, ETHBerlin , I’ll be mentoring at ETHBerlin , hope to see you there !
Token Model
Guide teams on finding a sustainable business model . Suggest integrating a native token only if necessary and give your feedback on how to optimally do so.
Distribution
Recommend distributing tokens widely and permissionlessly. Allocate directly to initial target users / stakeholders like Numerai or through fair mining either PoW like Bitcoin or through Merkle mining like Livepeer.
Ecosystem funds / Grants
Advise portfolio projects to be aggressive with grants and funds.
Treasury / Transparency
Advise projects to maintain healthy runway and be transparent with treasury holdings and sales.
Mining / Buying / Locking tokens
Buy or mine tokens of projects that do not offer discounts in pre-sales and offer a large % to the public. Be transparent with your portfolio holdings and vest tokens for similar timeframes to founders.
Buying Equity
As the market matures buy equity in companies building on the layer above dominant protocols like Castle Island Ventures.
Trading
Improve your technical analysis and trading processes to enable better entry and exit.
Hedge your long positions with short or arbitrage strategies.
Incubate
Incubate projects to build on the layers above and below portfolio companies.
Traditional Functions
Help projects with hiring , partnerships , marketing , PR.
Additional Reading / Listening
Check out Notation Capital’s post and Jake Brukhman tweets.
Venture Stories on generalized mining + crypto funds
Look forward to engaging with you all on twitter & mastodon.
