Matt Huang
speaker
205 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Matt Huang’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
But a lot of the high standards are unspoken. They're the habits and rituals that you see everyone else embodying of like $100 million investment outcome. I was expecting everyone to celebrate. Instead, everyone's like, this company is kind of a waste of time. Why did we waste six years for this middling outcome? And so that just rubs off.
In some ways, it's daunting because the bar is so high, but in some ways it's liberating because it's much easier to determine where it's not worth spending time. And I think as an investor, the temptation to good over great in terms of every level of Zoom, ways of spending your time, making an actual investment, company or founder quality is extremely great.
And so unless you have very, very high standards, you can spin wheels for a long time chasing things that won't end up mattering.
There's a lot of different personalities at Sequoia, but there's also a very impressive level of consistency along some key dimensions. Another takeaway back to your prior question from my time at Sequoia, which was, I think it was the first time that I realized very intuitively that there were many paths to greatness, whatever you want to call it.
Because at Sequoia, there are many, many great people who, if you just looked at their track records or what they've accomplished, it's insanely impressive. And yet... They're very, very different styles. That was very liberating for me, the realization that I can find my own way and do it the way I want to do it. And that's actually like a flavor of thing I think is really fascinating to follow.
Like you see it in athletes or performers of all kinds. You can sometimes read in their interviews the moment that they realized that they didn't have to follow some existing mentor or some book of orthodoxy. but that they could figure it out themselves. And that ultimately being the catalyst for the greatness.
So I first encountered Bitcoin right when it launched. in 2010, yeah, the white paper. I was in college at the time, and I internalized it as just like a really beautiful idea. It sort of hits the intersection of computer science and math, economics, game theory, the kind of history of money. And it caused me to go down a bunch of rabbit holes learning about some of the tributary ideas.
Because if you look at the citations in the Bitcoin white paper, people have been thinking about this for a long time. It references a lot of old work. So it was fascinating. And I didn't have capital at the time. And it didn't seem like an investment. It seemed like a toy. My next encounter with it was in 2013. And I think that's the first Bitcoin bubble that I participated in.
And I think there's a deep point here about the cohort adoption of Bitcoin. You almost need to lose money or be stupid the first time. Then I find this is certainly true for me. You give up on it, maybe write it off. It's dead. And then when you see it come back, then you start to wonder because there are lots of bubbles and tulips and all this stuff.
But the tulips did not have multiple successive bubbles over time. Beanie Babies did not have kind of a second and third and fourth cycle. It's a key point. And so there's like a time-shifted cohort adoption curve, if you think about the adoption of Bitcoin based on encountering it. So 2013 was that first cycle for me. I think I was not a professional investor.
I was day trading on my Coinbase account, bought it at $200 or $300, it rode up to $1,000. And I've crashed back to 600 and then slowly ground down from there. Actually, right around that time is when I joined Sequoia. So this was right before that. And I remember thinking that, I mean, it was a topic I was fascinated with. And I was interviewing at Sequoia.
They asked me to put together, part of the interview process was put together a one pager on a company you think we should invest in. And I picked Coinbase, and I think it was seven employees at the time. This was pre the A16Z investment, so just Union Square and Ribbit. And I had a strong belief that it would be an interesting space, and this was probably the best company in that space.
But after joining and after the crash, I kind of tuned it out. Bitcoin was just an asset, and there were some companies serving it, but it wasn't clear that it was this really generative software platform. And so it wasn't until a couple of years later that I reengaged once seeing the activity happening on top of Ethereum.
I had tuned out crypto. I still owned some Bitcoin and I still followed a couple Twitter accounts that would post the Bitcoin price every now and then. And I think for a couple of years, they stopped posting the price, or maybe I missed those messages. But as it started to pick back up, I started to see those again. Oh, there's actually signs of life in this ecosystem.
And then I also noticed the activity happening on top of Ethereum. It wasn't just another digital asset like Bitcoin, but there were actually these projects like Augur, which was an early prediction market. I thought, okay, it's not just an asset. It's now an entrepreneurial platform. And so I started to spend time there. And Sequoia was very supportive of that.
And we, on behalf of Sequoia, made a bunch of, I think, interesting crypto-related investments at the time. And honestly, I think what makes Sequoia great is the kind of multi-generational team that, for any given tech idea, there are 12 opinions involved. And there's this intellectual sparring to find truth. And that was just lacking in crypto.
And so I ended up going outside the firm to find thought partners that could test my thinking and I could learn from them. And Fred was one of those people that left Coinbase at the beginning of 2017, started Angel Investing. We ended up looking at a lot of projects together. And just in that process, found both someone. The first, I'm sure you experienced this. I sat across from him.
And started talking to him. And as soon as he started to articulate his thinking, I had a deep sense of this feels like someone I'd want to work with in some way. I don't know. Definitely wasn't thinking, let's start something. But maybe I'd try to invest in whatever next project he was going to do. And it was from there that the seed of Paradigm was born.
First of all, I don't know about whether that's true. I do know that it was very hard for me to leave. I remember a very intuitive sense that when I got to Sequoia, experienced the culture, all the great personalities, the extreme high standards, the excellence that everyone strove for, I thought, wow, I could be here forever. This doesn't feel like a job.
This feels like a place I could retire from. And then ultimately, I became obsessed with crypto. I mean, that's the simple answer. And I really developed a strong sense that this would be one of the most important technical economic trends over the next couple decades. And that it was very important for humanity to develop this technology from a financial freedom standpoint.
Showing 61–80 of 205 · page 4 of 11
← Previous
Next →