Original compilation: Biscuit, chain catcher

Original title: "Haseeb Qureshi》

Original compilation: Biscuit, chain catcher

Dragonfly Capital is an encrypted asset investment company with more than $2 billion in assets under management. Its managing partner Haseeb is a multi-tasker, including investor, founder, software engineer, and even a professional poker player.

Enter the crypto industry

Enter the crypto industry

C@S：When did you become interested in the crypto world? Do you remember who introduced you to cryptocurrency?

Haseeb：Many poker players got into cryptocurrencies early on. After "Black Friday", many overseas poker sites were shut down, and online poker games can only be migrated to sites that do not need to settle in US dollars. Therefore, many players have to accept Bitcoin. This is how many poker players first encountered Bitcoin in 2013. I knew about bitcoin for a long time but didn't really understand it, at the time I thought it was just a way for people to pay off their debts when they didn't have access to dollars. The first time I used Bitcoin was in 2015 to buy Modafinil (a drug that improves mental concentration).

C@S：How much are those modafinils worth now?

Haseeb：A lot, this is my personal bitcoin pizza. The first time I actually bought bitcoin was after Donald Trump was elected. In fact, Trump may have been the catalyst for me to delve deeper into crypto. Because when Trump got elected, I thought, "How do you think the whole world is going to fall apart? How do you bet that things are going to go wrong?"

It was Ethereum that really gave me a deeper understanding of cryptocurrencies.When Ethereum started to skyrocket in 2017, I was a software engineer at Airbnb dealing with payment fraud. At that time, Airbnb provided collection and payment services to people in more than 60 countries around the world. As an Airbnb user, when you swipe your credit card, you have this experience, "When I pay with my credit card, the whole financial network knows."

In fact, the global payment system has no backend for processing payments. There are many different payment systems all over the world, most of which do not communicate with each other, all of which were built 50 or 60 years ago. When these payment backends couldn’t keep up with the globalized, real-time, 24/7 digital world, I realized, “We should build a new system for the world we live in today"。

I think this new system should be cryptocurrency. With knowledge of peer-to-peer systems, cryptography, distributed systems, monetary policy, and programmatic approaches, how would you build a financial system today? With all these different ideas being remixed into cryptocurrencies, I see that the way we have money in 2080 absolutely cannot be the way we have money in 1980. it's out of the question. And the way we make money today is the way we made money in 1980. So, this leads me to believe that cryptocurrencies are going to change the world.

C@S：Brian Armstrong started working on the payments team at Airbnb too, right?

Haseeb：Yes, I worked on the same team as him. A few years later, I discovered that Brian's code on the blockchain was completely different from Airbnb's engineering standards.

C@S：How has your view on encryption and Web3 changed over time?

Haseeb：I initially thought bitcoin would go to zero and ethereum would win because bitcoin doesn't really do much and a lot of holders are bitcoin maximalists.Ethereum is very friendly, it is developer-oriented, and it does what Bitcoin can do, and even more. So initially I looked at the crypto world with a developer-first mentality. However, I later changed this view when I gained a better understanding of Bitcoin.

There are also many events that made me change my opinion. For example, at first I thought that the encrypted enterprise blockchain had unlimited scalability, but now I think that the enterprise blockchain is still a BS architecture. Initially I was very bullish on central bank digital currencies, but now I am very bearish on them, and I am also very bearish on corporate tokens (e.g. Libra) now. However, one of the views that has changed the most recently should be NFT.When the NFT track took off at the end of 2020, I firmly believed it was a bubble. It may have been last summer that I changed my mind and started to realize that NFTs would survive, but still think there is a lot of cyclicality and bubbles in the NFT market.

C@S：You call yourself an altruist, how do these beliefs support and intersect with the Web3 beliefs?

Haseeb：I'd say there isn't much overlap in these beliefs, because I don't see Web3 as a moral exercise, more of an inevitability than a moral dilemma. From a utilitarian standpoint, I don't think Web3 has many obvious benefits for the world. Like the way you look at social media, "Is this good or bad for the world?" I think social media is good for the world, and many people disagree with that. But if you're paying attention to the advent of social media, it's coming regardless of whether you believe it's good or bad.first level title

The life of a VC

C@S：Can you tell us how you became a venture capitalist?

Haseeb：This is a recurring situation in my life where I always end up in the unexpected. I grew up not wanting to be a poker player, but eventually got into it and became really good at it. The same thing happened with investing, I was working at a startup from late 2017 to early 2018 building stablecoins.

I was then introduced to AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant, who is also the founder of MetaStable Capital, the earliest fund in the crypto space. He encouraged me to enter the investment industry, "I think you should give up your current entrepreneurship and concentrate on investing. The investment side is more interesting. You can see everything happening in the entire space. You have to predict the future. It's more like an intellectual challenges, and investing is the best place to watch the development of the crypto industry.” My first reaction to his proposal was that I knew nothing about investing. And he said that what a good investor needs is judgment, and he must make the right decision in everything. He can teach me other things such as learning the structure of the transaction and how to sell entrepreneurs.

So, I left the startup and came to MetaStable, and that's how I started investing in cryptocurrencies. I remember my first week at the fund, I bought the book "Hedge Funds for Dummies" and read it cover to cover. Naval is absolutely right, the hard part of investing is learning how to make the right decisions. If you have the knack, everything else can be learned on the job.

C@S：What specific points do you examine the other party when investing?

Haseeb：This depends on the stage the opponent is in. If we are looking for seed stage startups, it is more about team and insight. Generally speaking, investors look at three cores: team, product, and market.I think what we look for when you're at the seed stage is the team and the insight. Insights are a bit like product inception. So if you have insight, you have some unique perspectives on new areas or new businesses that you want to address. To me this is the seed project to look for. Going to a later stage would require more signs that this thing is actually working.

I think there are two other types of very successful founders in general in the crypto space. One is the traditional type of founder, that is, the YC type. They're smart, high-energy, usually work at well-known tech companies, take part in hackathons on their off-days from college, hack some projects, and maybe start a company by the time they're 15. The other is what I call the "pirate founder." Pirate founders will never invest in anything other than cryptocurrencies. These founders tend to be weird and unlikable. They often don't go out, live only on Twitter, and like to use pseudonyms. They are fascinated by the crypto world and have very unique opinions. It's hard to get along with people though. But they're really, really good at doing encryption.

C@S：Can you give an example of a pirate founder?

Haseeb：An example I would like to mention is Vitalik, who basically did not invest in Ethereum when he founded it. He dropped out of college to become obsessed with creating secure virtual machines on the blockchain. There are many other similar founders who are now very successful. For example, the group of Hayden and 1Inch of Uniswap are also of this type. We tend to favor this type of founder because the early team really matters.

C@S：Do you think the ICO/DAO funding model has changed the way Web3 VCs operate?

Haseeb：Honestly not much different. We also occasionally fund DAOs, but I'm actually a bit annoyed by this complex form of capital. I think over the last five years, there have been narratives of sorts like, “VCs are disappearing because ICOs are distributed fairly.” Now we have DAOs, but VCs still haven’t disappeared. As a result, VCs show that they are filling some important niches and providing valuable services in many different markets. If you think that VC is no longer needed with smart contracts, you may be wrong. Those successful projects have cooperated with VC. That's why VC has been around for hundreds of years, and even the DAO organization that invented the Web3 world can still survive.

C@S：We saw that Dragonfly participated in the founding of BitDAO, can you talk about the mission of BitDAO and why you decided to join?

Haseeb：I'm a bit intimidated by DAOs because of the mainstreaming of the concept. When anything in cryptocurrency becomes mainstream, the fidelity becomes very low. DAO is a good example.DAOs are meant to be Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, but most DAOs today are neither decentralized nor autonomous, and many of them are not even organizations.Now that any group with multisig and a Discord channel claims to be a DAO, I think most "DAOs" will eventually disappear at the end of the cycle.

Having said that, I think DAOs are a great concept. But there is still a lot of work to be done to create a DAO that is truly self-sustaining, censorship-resistant, and autonomous. BitDAO is currently one of the DAOs with the largest cash flow. A complex DAO with a lot of cash flow and many different plans will eventually be broken down into many subDAOs. In addition, almost all large DAOs (like Uniswap and MakerDAO) currently own most of the value in the form of their own native tokens, which are equivalent to a company's unissued stock, not a real part of the DAO treasury, and BitDAO has a huge non-BIT asset library. For this reason, BitDAO is a serious attempt to build a DAO that actually makes sense and has cash flow.

The last thing I want to say is that building a DAO is harder than building a company.There are more restrictions on running a DAO than a company. Companies can deal with business more directly and centrally. If this tradeoff isn't considered, then it's probably not building a true DAO.Almost all cryptocurrencies that have become DAOs (like MakerDAO or Compound) started out centralized and became more decentralized over time. And now that logic has been reversed, it's more of a disadvantage than an advantage for these organizations.

C@S：Can you share with us some of your most successful and most regrettable investments?

Haseeb：I initially participated in Avalanche's seed round, which was a very "thank God" investment. They built it for a very different purpose than the Avalanche is now. At that time, there was no vision of the C-chain, and no one thought that EVM would be popular again in 2017. The original vision of Avalanche was to create a new consensus protocol that would have many subnetworks of other blockchains. Such as BTC Avalanche, Zcash Avalanche and so on. I thought it was so crazy and radical at the time that I wanted to give it a go.As for the second part of the question, I think it is to abandon Uniswap's A round of investment.first level title

2022 Forecast

C@S：Any bold predictions for Web3 in 2022?

Haseeb：The first bold prediction is that there will be no Ethereum merger in 2022, and that Ethereum’s market capitalization will exceed Bitcoin’s when a merger occurs.

C@S：If you could have 8 extra hours in your day, what would you do with those hours?

Haseeb：If I really have an extra 8 hours a day, I will spend more time programming in Web3. This may be a pipe dream, but there will be more meeting time for sure.

C@S：One last question: who is the smartest person working on Web3 right now?

Haseeb：This is a great question.I think it's @samczsun.