#13 Tings Newsletter 4
Bill Gurley's phenomenal speech, Erik Voorhees' "this is why we're in crypto", and more
Who am I? I’m Tze Donn. I’m a Web3 investor at Tioga Capital. I love all things tech, finance, and Web3. Every month, I send out a newsletter about investing, crypto, life, and random tings. Hit “reply” or comment if you wanna chat about anything below.
Tech & Investing
GOATed speech by Bill Gurley from Benchmark VC on regulatory capture. This is one of the best speeches I’ve seen, anyone should watch this whether you care about tech and investing or not.
ASML: A Monopoly on Magic. The $300 billion Dutch firm is the most important company you’ve never heard of.
Business physics mental frameworks for evaluating tech companies by Chris Paik from Pace Capital, an early-stage VC firm in NYC with $400M AUM. Prior to Pace, he was Partner at Thrive Capital, where he led investments and served on the boards of Twitch, Patreon, and Unity.
A TikTok Competitor Is About to IPO — And It’s Deeply Suspicious. Triller, the IPO’d Tik Tok clone you’ve never heard of.
The Great Online Game by Packy McCormick. We’re all playing it.
Amazon’s $43B ad business, explained. Amazon is the third largest ad business in the world and likely the largest profit centre at Amazon, even comparing to AWS (estimated $6.6B operating profit from AWS vs $10.7B from Ads)
Wiz: The fastest startup to reach $100M ARR (in 18 months) and reached $10B valuation in 3 years.
Crypto
Understanding Crypto in Africa by Patrick McCorry. I’ve always wanted to live in Nigeria or Kenya for a month just to see how different financial infrastructure is. Super interesting.
The Proto-App Thesis by David Phelps. We’ve exhausted the 5 major categories of online expression: Long-form video (Youtube), short-form video (TikTok), long-form text (Reddit), short-form text (Twitter), and image (Instagram). New categories such as live audio (Clubhouse) and live image (BeReal) went viral but were not sustainable because they violated the golden rule of social: You should be able to interact with as much relevant content as possible whenever you tune in. The “Proto-App Thesis” says that every app is a protocol and anyone can build a service on top of your app, just like Lens Protocol or Uniswap v4.
Capitalism Onchained by Not Boring. Capitalism is good, capitalism evolves, and crypto can make capitalism more effective.
Phenomenal opening speech by Erik Voorhees that got the entire crypto conference on their feet. This is crypto’s “This is why we play”.
Life & Misc.
I came across this app called Clutch, which is basically the badminton version of Swing Vision. The app was an absolute let down as it crashes upon opening it. There’s surely a sizable audience (myself included) who would pay to use something like that, especially if you bundle it into a RacketPal-like app and add on matchmaking ratings and court bookings!
When was the last time a non-mainstream sport got mainstream adoption? The context of this is Pickleball which has gained so much steam that my friends and I have jokingly said we want to start a “Pickleball VC fund”. Or is it just a fad?
I recently started walking dogs and dog-sitting via Rover. I absolutely love the fact that they’ve created a market for dog-caring and there’s a market clearing price for your time (i.e., if you’re getting too many deals, you can increase your price until demand drops). It’s a healthy way of going out to walk while earning £12 for 30min of walking!
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Thanks for reading!
Donn