Good morning 👋
And Happy Veteran’s Day to everybody brave enough to support and defend the greatest country on the planet.
Crypto played a big part in this election with The Winklevoss brothers, a16z crypto, and Brian Armstrong all getting involved.
We break down why and what’s next for crypto in today’s piece.
P.S. 💰 Are you a full-time investor AND do you want to get paid more?
Today’s highlights
Crypto’s red wave
The four stages of GTM
Why diversification sucks
AI voice agent market map
TOP
The crypto election 🇺🇸
Last election cycle, Sam Bankman-Fried was spending spending a fortune on political donations and calls for crypto legislation.
We all know what happened to him, but ironically, his vision was only delayed, not denied: 2024 turned out to be America’s first crypto-influenced election.
Only this time, it actually looks like it will bring some change.
When Coinbase launched its "Stand with Crypto Alliance" in August 2023, the bold “50 million crypto voters” figure seemed ... aspirational.
But Coinbase, the Winklevii, a16z crypto, and others quietly flooded battleground races with millions, while often avoiding the word "crypto”.
Trump (who once dismissed Bitcoin as a “scam”) leaned into crypto's deep pockets for his campaign, wooed the crypto community with speeches at a flagship conference, and even promised to commute the sentence of Silk Road’s Ross Ulbricht.
Down-ballot, crypto-backed candidates won decisively, reshaping the Senate and House landscapes in favor of crypto-friendly policies.
Why it matters: If you have talked to anybody in crypto over the last few years, then you can understand the support of a new regime. The current administration has made it hard for crypto companies to do business.
Unclear regulation has forced crypto execs (especially Brian Armstrong at Coinbase) to spend more time in Washington and less time running his business
Gary Gensler (SEC Chair) has had a vendetta against the entire crypto industry
Out-of-touch senators calling for crypto bans
Unbanking people who buy crypto
Institutions blacklisting crypto clients
And the list goes on - the past four years haven’t been great for crypto, and it has resulted in less capital, talent, and new companies across the industry.
But that now may be changing.
What happens next: We’ll continue to monitor the situation, but here’s where we see things going:
Less meme coins / more utility tokens and assets: Short ponzi schemes and long DeFi to build more legitimacy. JD Vance has commented on this.
Wider bitcoin adoption: We won’t go into a longer rant, but especially as a young person, we believe that buying and holding BTC is one of the easiest ways to future-proof yourself.
Wider adoption to moving other assets on chain: The world rewards efficiency. Now that the government looks to operate more friendly towards blockchain businesses, we expect to see more assets and other elements (securities, IP, patents, property deeds, medical records, etc.) to move away from file storage and towards on chain formats.
LINKS
4️⃣ Four Stages of Go-To-Market Strategy: VC Corner dives into each of these stages to share proven tactics and examples of how companies successfully passed the main milestones on their go-to-market journey
😎 Authenticity is Hard but Important: Name a great titan of industry, and none of them tried to be anything but themselves—they leaned into that and created incredible things
♟️ How ZoomInfo Grows: The story, growth motion, and product strategy with CEO and founder Henry Shuck
🤖 I Talk to Robots While Driving: Tomasz Tunguz believes that since our tools have fundamentally changed, so too much the way we work with them
👀 Inside How Perplexity is Disrupting Google Search: The CEO of Perplexity discusses how it builds products, how it scaled to 100M queries a week, and how it will deliver better ads than Google’s ten blue links
TWEET
HEADLINES
Former Raya, Dispo exec has a new fund for the biggest out-of-favor tech: consumer (TechCrunch)
Most-Active US Investors In October: Andreessen Horowitz Takes Top Spot Again (Crunchbase)
These 10 startups creating humanoid robots have raised the most cash (Pitchbook)
MARKET MAP
Sponsor Confluence.VC Weekly
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RECS
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POLL
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- Clay
RESULTS
Here are the results from our poll question in Friday’s piece:
What part of the company building process is the most difficult?
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Finding problem-solution fit (7)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Finding product-market fit (0)
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ Finding go-to-market fit (5)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Scaling (1)
13 Votes
