Daniel Barabander
@dbarabander
GC and Investment Partner @variant | ex software engineer/@ycombinator founder, attorney Cravath | casts are not legal advice | I am not your lawyer
Pinned
Most people think the role of stablecoins in U.S. consumer payments will only ever be a backend settlement tool to make credit cards more efficient. But I think they can replace cards altogether.
They can do that by following the same two-step path Visa used to achieve mainstream adoption: (1) lean into intrinsic adv...
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Probably nothing
Pluralis Research
@PluralisHQ
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Almost exactly 1 year ago today Pluralis set out to solve a very difficult problem. We are pleased to announce an update on that problem. We can now combine small consumer devices, connected via the internet, to train giant models. Full paper release in 72 hours. https://t.co/QZHIRDsuWM
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Uber’s driver network is closed. That’s what makes it so hard for new entrants - a competing ridesharing app without supply can’t offer a useful experience.
That’s the cold start problem created by closed supply.
Now imagine if Uber’s supply were open:
- A new app could piggyback on it, solve the cold start problem, ...
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New piece: Agents in a Bazaar
A no fluff view of the bull case of agents and crypto infrastructure.
Check it out:
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If you're attending Accelerate, Variant is hosting co-working with Phantom on May 21 at our office
Ship code and meet other amazing builders
Space is very tight, sign-up here:
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💯- and I think it primarily takes two forms:
1) founders who are thinkers and see the world differently
2) founders who are executors and have data to share about what they tried/learned since we last spoke
Either way the privilege of this job is getting to learn from these amazing founders
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If you care about the future of crypto - SIGN THE PETITION
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AI AND CRYPTO AT VARIANT
GREAT FOUNDERS
GREAT PROJECTS
ME AND @jhackworth
JOIN US
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One way to think about the case for crypto x AI is it’s a bet on horizontal v vertical scaling.
Big tech has mastered vertical - hoard compute, data ,and buy out competitors and vertically integrate them - form a monopoly.
Crypto horizontally scales - high variance in contributions, massive consumer compute, data, et...
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Could not be more excited to announce our pre-seed investment in Plastic Labs, which is solving personalization for any LLM app.
So excited to back Vince, Courtland, Vineeth and the rest of the team as they tackle this enormous problem.
Check out the full announcement here:
blog.variant.fund/investing-in......
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Good crypto x AI projects leverage the features of crypto to overcome limitations faced by AI.
Here are three examples of challenges of AI:
1. Resources. To be competitive as an AI company you need to aggregate significant resources (compute and data) and talent.
2. Composability. Agents cannot reliably chain actio...
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