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.
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Appearances
that they're tremendous leverage points. On the open source side, the work that Georgios is doing, that code can be used across all of crypto.
On the mechanism side, the work that Dan Robinson, Dave White, many others on the team, those mechanisms are at the heart of protocols, for example, Uniswap, that serve thousands of people, millions, hundreds of millions, billions, trillions, actually, of trading volume. all from a single mathematical formula. There's tremendous leverage in crypto in getting the mechanism right.
And we think that will not just apply to what we've already seen, but there'll be a frontier of new ones to invent. And so a lot of the team is focused on that, where those mechanisms ultimately manifest eventually in products.
I think the, honestly, the assets I find a lot easier because it's just a number. And I think vol is just a lot less concerning when you have clarity about the long term. If you look at the underlying vol of our belief in, say, Bitcoin or crypto broadly, there are definitely ups and downs, but it's much less amplitude than the price. I think that's comparatively easy.
The organizational effects and the people effects are much harder. You get this actually throughout all of crypto when the easiest time to hire people in all roles at companies and at Paradigm is when crypto is hot and it's in the news.
And if you think about the selection function there, it's also the people who may not be in it for the right reasons or may not truly believe in crypto on a 10-year horizon, but It's the hot thing today. And so that's created a lot of thrash in times of fall.
And so more and more, we were always a bit oriented this way, but much more today, we're very focused on zeroing in on people who truly get it and are in it for the long term.
When it was, was definitely in the aftermath of 22, 23.
On the public assets side, our mindset is point to point. So we're less focused on the interim ball. So a lot of our focus was on this is clearly going to impact the entire private portfolio in runway for those companies' ability to fundraise, employee morale. revenue, et cetera. So a lot of our focus is triaging to make sure that the rest of these companies in crypto would survive.
And then we had a healthy amount of reflection about the 21 era because broadly throughout crypto and also tech, it was kind of a very abnormal time. And so the waking up basically in 22, 23, a lot of the decisions we made in 21 were ill fit for what we thought the next five, 10 years would look like.
I think the trade-off of having a deeply technical, very building and research-oriented team is that we inherently have strong opinions about technical futures. And if you think about maybe the idealized version of an investor would be much more agnostic. That's a conscious trade-off that we always have to navigate.
But I think a fair critique of paradigm would be sometimes they're too wedded to their technical views.
Most visibly wrong is probably us investing in FTX. I actually don't know the right takeaway on SPF. Were there yellow flags? He was a unique and different shaped person, but a lot of the best founders are. And the other thing is like we did identify the core issue that ultimately ended up being the problem, which is sort of the related party nature of the market maker and the exchange.
We actually drilled into that in our diligence and were ultimately lied to. So I think venture is very hard when founder is willing to do that because so much of the ecosystem depends on trust and it's hard to go diligence the lie. And we had no reason to think he was lying.
Yeah, probably in the like immediate days after where we still didn't fully know what was happening.
I think there's probably an inverse correlation between how legible a space is, how understandable it is to others, and prospective returns. Because almost definitionally, the more well understood it is, the more priced in, so to speak, everything should be.
Silicon Valley is an interesting case study because I think it's always kind of the frontier, but in some ways, the ecosystem of Silicon Valley has become very legible too. What used to be bespoke is a bit more factory farming today. And I think maybe the frontier of AI currently remains very illegible and a super interesting space for builders and investors.
Software as a service is no longer illegible. Maybe the phenomenon of Tiger and Kotu and everyone else pricing SaaS multiples to perfection is just the expected outcome. And I think the legibility has very strong gravity. Or put another way, I think to make things legible inevitably reduces the accuracy. So there's this idea, the idea of the map versus the territory.
We come up with legible explanations of things to better understand them, to better communicate and transmit ideas to other people. But they're always approximations of the fully textured version of the reality. I think there's often a temptation. I see this, especially in crypto to like make it legible too quickly. I think there's a lot of value in tolerating the eligibility.
So for example, a lot of people are wondering like, what's the crypto use case. First of all, I think we can get to that, but money and finance are the obvious ones, but a lot of people are wondering, okay, what's after that. And I think there is this temptation of this term web three, for example,
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