Multicoin's Kyle Samani gave up on Ethereum in 2017 after its leadership failed to present a clear scaling plan. He perceived a culture that was "to their core culturally oblivious" to the urgent need for a solution. This perceived failure in execution and focus, at the peak of Ethereum's dominance, directly motivated his firm to aggressively seek alternatives.
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Anthropic's team of idealistic researchers represented a high-variance bet for investors. The same qualities that could have caused failure—a non-traditional, research-first approach—are precisely what enabled breakout innovations like Claude Code, which a conventional product team would never have conceived.
During Ethic's long build phase before traction, the founder found it crucial to ignore external validation signals like other companies' funding announcements. The key to surviving this lonely period is a relentless daily focus on execution and solving customer problems, not chasing industry hype.
Startups often fail to displace incumbents because they become successful 'point solutions' and get acquired. The harder path to a much larger outcome is to build the entire integrated stack from the start, but initially serve a simpler, down-market customer segment before moving up.
Kyle Samani is "intellectually short" Bitcoin because he sees it as an unproductive asset. He argues platforms like Ethereum and Solana offer the same core benefits—a fixed, code-defined supply—while also being economically productive. This makes them a superior long-term asset class from a first-principles perspective, despite his firm holding some Bitcoin financially.
Multicoin's conviction in Solana came from underwriting its founder, Anatoly Yakovenko. Unlike competitors focused on academic breakthroughs, Yakovenko prioritized shipping code and explicitly avoided trying to solve unsolved computer science problems. This pragmatic, execution-focused approach was the key differentiator that earned Multicoin's bet in the crowded Layer-1 race.
When evaluating revolutionary ideas, traditional Total Addressable Market (TAM) analysis is useless. VCs should instead bet on founders with a "world-bending vision" capable of inducing a new market, not just capturing an existing one. Have the humility to admit you can't predict market size and instead back the visionary founder.
When OpenSea faced rampant NFT theft, the team shifted focus from mitigating symptoms on their platform (a 'whack-a-mole' problem) to addressing the root cause with external wallet providers. This ecosystem-level thinking led to a far more impactful, lasting solution.
The mantra 'ideas are cheap' fails in the current AI paradigm. With 'scaling' as the dominant execution strategy, the industry has more companies than novel ideas. This makes truly new concepts, not just execution, the scarcest resource and the primary bottleneck for breakthrough progress.
Multicoin's central thesis is that crypto's ultimate purpose is creating "Internet Capital Markets"—the ability to trade any asset, from anywhere, 24/7, via any software. This broad vision of permissionless, programmable finance is seen as the most significant long-term impact of blockchain, destined to supersede more niche consumer applications or "Web3" concepts.
Kyle Samani has completely abandoned the thesis that crypto's future lies in non-financial consumer dApps (Web3). He now believes the thesis is "just wrong." Instead, crypto's primary role in developed nations will be as invisible financial plumbing, while its main user-facing application is for international users who need access to stablecoins.