WT3 Podcast’s Post

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Jason: We're, we're spending a lot of money and time into R&D, preparing for the bull market. The bull market comes, then you can like show this to investors and raise a bunch of money. Genuinely, you enjoy watching people succeed, in this process, you make a bit of money. Thomas: We have now raised, where, where are those, where should those proceeds go? Jason: Yeah, it depends on the market. If it's like bull market, I'll probably say spend a bit more on our marketing. If it's bear market, I'll probably say, say, spend zero on marketing. Thomas: That's like zero completely. Not just, so where, where does that money go then? Does it go to product or. Jason: Any marketing you do during a bear market, it's going to be at the completely wasted, completely wasted. Thomas: Yeah. I tend, I tend to agree, but where does that money go then? So let's say, I think we have two good examples, right? So let's maybe start with, with the, with the bear market. So, okay. Bear market, no marketing. So where, where does the money like we raised in a bear market successfully, which is crazy, super happy. What are we going to do now? Okay. Not spending it on marketing. That's one. Jason: Yeah, so if there's two ways to do it, right? If you have, you're in the bear market, you should be spending your money either in R&D or product development. Thomas: And by R&D, what do you mean Jason: by R&D? Like R&D as opposed to like, like, like, for example, you know, a lot, like a lot of companies are like spending their money on, Building infrastructure, or researching around infrastructure, right? So not necessarily spending all the money on developing the infrastructure by spending the money to research and to figure out what the narrative. So, more building like, like the decks, like the, the content, like the white paper, the, the stuff that you can like the bull market comes, then you can like show this to investors and raise a bunch of money. Right. So like that type of stuff is much more, in my opinion, much more important. Like there are these, right. Then the product development, but if you already have a product, then you can obviously innovate on top of your product. Right. Like for example, like during the FTX, you know, FTX actually did build a really incredible product that solve a lot of, you know, the funds issues or the OTC and all that stuff. Right. So it's like, then you can innovate on that. But again, the whole point here is they were smart about it too, because You know, during the bear market, they were also spending some time on R and D and then sat to launch FTT. Right. Yeah, same thing with our, some of our portfolio companies that did really, really well. It's like they were, they were investing a lot of R and D into, pivoting into, figuring out how to utilize, you know, NFTs. And so they spent a lot of time building content. And then when the bull market came, They, they, they pitched it to new investors and pitch it to, to new partners and people loved it. And it, you know, it went like 30 X, some of the most under, like, like, I guess a lot of people don't usually do, but I think it's incredibly important, even for us, like, you know, as a fun, like when we're during the bull market, obvious, obviously we're, we're quite active, but bigger bear market, we're, we're spending a lot of money and time into R and D preparing for the bull market for the next bull market. Right. Thomas: So, and then that, yeah, sorry. Go ahead. Jason: And then that ultimately led to our decision to invest in Ornos and decide. Thomas: So, so bears bear, spend your money on, on, on research, do a lot of R and D, less product, no marketing clear. Yeah. So what about, so now the bull, right? So we, we raised a ton of money in the bowl. Everybody's happy. Everybody throws money at everything. Where, where are we going to spend our money? Is it, is it now marketing? Jason: And it's mostly marketing. Yes. Marketing, product, just enough products that they, you know, they, they change is like, you know, you guys have the capability and the tech and the enough capacity to actually build something like this. There's, there's something that's really interesting about this industry. It's like, there's like a, you know, there's like a lot of scam, like there's a lot of scam and there's a lot of memes, right? The way I define a scam is like. You tell people you can do this, but you can't actually do it. And there's a meme is like, you just tell people, there's like, you'll never, you'll never achieve this. You'll never have a roadmap and never have any utility. And, and it's people are perfectly fine with it. And in my opinion, it's like memes are not scams, right? I think it's the, it's the, it's the utility tokens are mostly scams, right? It's like, they tell you that, you know, they'll draw a picture. It's like, and again, like the early days of ICO, right. It was like. It's like you, you're, you're basically selling a dish before the restaurant is even built, and at, at end of day, the, the customers will never even taste that dish. Right? Thomas: Yeah. So, to, to that point, yeah. Memes are very transparent. Nothing will come out of it, but, and if you're okay with that, you know exactly what's gonna happen. Right. That, that's, that's, I think the, that, that the, call it the value of the meme, token. Jason: Yes. But yeah, to answer your question, I think in the bull market you're definitely spending a lot more money on, on marketing forward exchanges. So you get listed Mm-Hmm. , spending a lot of, of, of billing community so that people get excited about your product. Right. Which again, like product, you can have like the worst product ever and you can still get a bunch of users involved because there's like a two erm, like framework or model involved. Yeah. Right. And that's like the unique part of. Of our industry, which is like people generally accept doing like things that are stupid and boring. But then at the end of the day, if they make money, they'll do it. Thomas: Yeah, it's very true. And it's not, that's make my product heart bleed a little bit. I'm like, guys, there's such a nice product. It's like, no, no, no. We're, we're degenerates because we can earn something from this. Yeah. Jason: Yeah. Yeah. Charlie: I'm going to dip in here and rapid fire the last three of the 10 portion, because there's just been so much good stuff coming out that I haven't wanted to interrupt and shove us along. But really the, the meat and where I'm really excited to get to is, is the brainstorming component. So I'm just going to rapid fire these, bullet point them back at me and, and we'll jump into the brainstorming piece. Jason: What is the question regarding them? Yeah. Charlie: Yeah. So there's, so there's three. So the, the investor value adds beyond the capital, what's a green flag for entrepreneurs? When you're looking at an investor and advisor for a Web3 startup. What, what are you, what, what are generally like the bullet points, the criterias, green flags for an investor? Jason: Yeah, so I think a good way to look at it is, you know, obviously there's branding component. There's a lot of investors are also quite generally quite, equipped with the knowledge to build tokenomics. A lot of investors, that's like the general kind of like That's just general skill set, right? They'll be like, Hey, take our money because we have good brand. We can help you with tokenomics. We can basically be the consultant or the advisor without actually, you know, taking additional tokens or USD. And so we're like, you know, we're the expert in, in finance and tokenomics. Right. And even in fundraising, right. It's all that stuff. But beyond that, it's definitely the, you know, the, the, the investors that can provide a lot of community, like real organic growth,m, in, in, in your product. And, you know, I'll, I'll give you an example. So, you know, we, we invest in, again, like in a lot of Bitcoin layer ones, like part of our job is to get. A lot of good developers a lot of good projects built on top of that chain and not that protocol in order for them for the community to see that just alpha going on, right? There's like you're basically building alpha for the for the for the retailers for their community, right? That's important, I think that's important because There's no alpha on on on the protocol that people are not gonna want to build There's not it's like a chicken egg thing, right? it's like you got to have community users or users or Followers first before we can Before you're able to kind of track like more developers into equal system. So that's what we do a lot You know, we we we try to not just from a A product perspective, but more from an equal ecosystem perspective, like a Bitcoin layer one is so early right now. Like we don't even care if you're just building on BRC 20 or tap or runes or rings or whatever, right? As long as you're building on Bitcoin layer one is a win for Sora Ventures. And so the way that we do it is we've hosted a conference. So, you know, last, last, last year we did a conference called Sora Summit in Taipei. end of the year. And this year, we're, we're bringing it back again, two days. We're flying in VJs. We're expecting more than a hundred speakers just on the Bitcoin side. It will most likely be the largest Ornos conference in the world. And so if you guys ever want something crazy, where it's like everything Ornos and, you know, You know, you can get runestone and stone everywhere like that is the conference to attend it's going to be end of end of end of year So like these are things that you know for a fact that like it's tangible, right? It's it's it's there, right? It's like real. It's real and so like when an investor is able to do something like that It not only shows that they have they're willing and able to bring in a lot of resources for you But more importantly, it's like they understand that, you know, they're not like this one individual who just are here You you know just to make money, but you also care about Um the the ecosystem and that is very important because every Investment firm almost any every every investment firm in our industry in web3. They're all called avc. Everyone's called avc yeah, but It takes a very specific trait like a very positive like a very unique trait and character To be a true VC, you know, like for example, you know, in the, in the, in the, in the traditional finance in the world of finance, there's VCs, there's PEs, there's hedge funds, right? Hedge funds look at numbers, right? PEs, they look at numbers, right? They look at a lot of tractions, look at a lot of things like VCs is by far the ones who generally don't look at numbers the most out of the three, right? But in, in, in our industry, there are going to be VCs who, who only care about paper money. Who doesn't even care about if you're going to make it or not. They just want to get the paper money. You know, the five X, 10 X on paper. And from their perspective, they're okay with, you know, investing in higher valuations because they're able to get a two X return, but it's going to be like a 10 million return. Right. And there's going to be VCs like us who cares more about like the a hundred X return, the 50 X return. Right. And then just like, but then they're all called VCs. Right. That's a funny thing. They're all, all both VCs, but then they have entirely different business models. Right. And there's also VCs who are just like, we're just here to pump and dump. Right. And there's like a lot of that. Right. And there's this only VC, there's also VCs who are like, during the bull market, they're like, we're in, we're in, we're investing everything and then spray and pray. Right. And then during the bear market, they're like, We're not even here, but hey, they're also called VCs, right? So it's like, there's so many types of different investment firms out there. They're called VCs, but entrepreneurs do not realize like, like these VCs are, are not actual real VCs. Like most of these VCs are just here to make money. And so in order to be a real VC, you got to be a giver. You got to be a very genuine giver where you believe because the VC model is. In order for you to make a dollar, your portfolio company will mostly have to make a hundred dollars, right? So you're only, you're, you're only getting the X amount of a small amount of a profit based on the overall success of your, of your portfolio company. Like that's how the VC model works, right? And what business does it require? Like anyone to be like, Hey, you make a, you make it a hundred X for your portfolio company and only get like 1%. Right. So you have to be a true giver. You have to be a true giver. You really like genuinely, you enjoy watching people succeed. And as a process, you make a bit of money to stay sustainable. But like, that's how the VC model works. Not all people are like that in our, in our industry. Thomas: Absolutely not. I mean, this, this is one of the first times I hear the narrative of how I personally look at VCs so well explained by somebody in the, in the industry, because it's very often the other way around. Right. Jason: Like, oh, for sure. Yeah. Thomas: That's the biggest. I always joke with Charlie and with some of my friends that are in the same industry is like, you know, VCs aren't necessarily evil. But they aren't if, if you're a true giver, because now, now they become support, now they become help, right? But very often it's, it's, they're necessarily evil because you need their money, but they, they will not add any value or they steer you actually in the wrong way. Jason: Especially in Web3, you know, especially Web3. Thomas: Yes, especially Web3. Jason: Yeah, yeah. I tell my friends who are in this industry, they, they, they look at us as like, oh, you guys make a lot of money. I'm like, you guys don't know like how complicated and how complex and how shady this industry is even after so many years, right? Yeah, it's it's 99 percent scammers regardless of your project or VC and you're 1 percent the giver. Charlie: Yeah, there's a lot of takers in this. Jason: Yeah, a lot of takers 99 percent takers, right? A lot of takers like extremely cost scammers, but generally there are 99 percent takers 1 percent giver. Yeah. And so it's, it's really, really hard to look for VCs who are genuine about what they do, who are genuine about growing ecosystem, who actually enjoy watching people grow more than themselves.