The Evolution of Edge in Crypto

An interview with DefiSquared done by Thiccy

I first met DefiSquared in early 2023 when looking through the Bybit leaderboards. He was sitting at #1 for the year with the username "defisquaredontwitter". He had maybe 300 followers at the time. I messaged him and to my surprise, we immediately hopped into long discussions about long/short ideas on altcoins. He very generously mentored me early in my trading journey and helped me form the foundation of what I know about crypto markets today.

DefiSquared has never had a losing year. He was #1 ranked on the Bybit leaderboards for both 2023 and 2024, publicly extracting over 40 million dollars in a 2 year span with an 80%+ win rate on his trades. What continues to surprise me about DefiSquared is his ability to find edge and ruthlessly beat the competition across market environments and across different sectors of the space.

We conducted this interview over a phone call and transcribed into text

This is your first public interview with your voice.

Yeah, I suppose it is. What better way to do it than in Thiccy's trader series?

I'm honored. I've been following you since basically you started the account in I think January 2023.

Yeah, I think I created it a little earlier, but I really didn't start posting until 2023 which to be honest was not as long ago as it feels like. It feels like I've been on Crypto Twitter (CT) forever now, but I actually was pretty private beforehand.

Did you have another account before this?

Nope, I've been solo in trading for more than 10 years since I started in early 2015. I just was never public about it, generally keeping higher OPSEC (operational security) principles. It was a gradual process of opening up a bit more.

How did you get started in markets?

I originally was a computer science guy. I studied CS at MIT. And so my first start in crypto actually was just writing some trading bots in my spare time. It was one of those things where you just kind of keep hacking away at it day after day, and before you know it it gets quite large. It was originally like a few lines of code little side project, which at first maybe could inconsistently make a few bucks here and there. But by 2017, when Bitcoin had its first bubble that went up to 20k, my infrastructure was very well positioned to do well as volatility increased. It was mostly high frequency strategies such as arbitrage, and as an individual I was doing nearly 2.5% of all global crypto trading volume at its peak. As a solo trader who just started for fun, it was an unexpected development there. I think because of my CS background I'm pretty good at poking around on APIs. And there were some undocumented parts of the APIs on some of the top exchanges at the time that allowed for faster level 2 feeds, giving me a few milliseconds of speed edge on everyone else. I had the fastest execution time in the world on some of these exchanges, which allowed me to arbitrage any price movements between those and every other exchange.

What were the other exchanges at the time in 2017?

Oh man, that was so many years ago. Honestly, I'd have to think a little.

Because they don't exist anymore?

Some of them. I remember I was on Poloniex and hitBTC to name a few that don't exist anymore. Coinbase, Bitfinex, and OKX were very popular then. Binance had only just been created around 2017 and was much smaller. Binance had a lot of funny limitations on it as well. For example, I remember at the time, Coinbase was actually ahead of their time. From the very beginning they offered a FIX API, which is essentially a financial standardization for APIs from TradFi. That was a way better API than any other exchanges had at the time because it allowed up to thirty requests per second per endpoint. Meanwhile, exchanges like Binance were limited to one request across all endpoints per second. How can you properly make markets there when you're just constantly getting limited? So there were definitely some constraints there. Coinbase had its own issues. I remember Coinbase kept running into this situation where periodically when creating or canceling orders, it would just get stuck. I literally would take a full day for them to find and unstuck because they would run some hacky cron job that at the end of every twenty four hour period to unstuck orders. But the problem is like when you're doing HFT and you're creating thirty orders a second, all of your margin just instantly gets caught up in these stuck orders. You go from having plenty of margin to nothing in like a second.

But it was a fun time back then, because for the most part, there weren't really too many sophisticated institutions. And that was the main reason why I was able to get a leg in there in the first place. That changed majorly in 2018. A lot of sudden very serious actors, a lot of races, a lot of very sophisticated TradFi institutions move in. And over the course of that year I lost a lot of my speed edge there. And that was the first point in which I started moving from fully systematic into a little bit more hybrid toward a discretionary approach.

While you were in the heyday of your arbitraging, walk me through a bread and butter setup for readers that might not know too much about it.

It was just volatility and direct arbitrage. Not even any real market making. When prices were moving extremely chaotically, think late 2017 to January 2018, there would just be noticeto price discrepancies between exchange prices.

So what would it look like? Someone puts in like a big order on Binance and then because you're the fastest on Coinbase, you can just pick off the liquidity on Coinbase before it updates?

Yep, super simple stuff. I mean, this was like the lowest hanging fruit of arbitrage. I was just an individual that was very easily printing money on low hanging fruit there. I remember thinking to myself back in 2017 that this was going to last forever. And since I was getting to keep 100% share of that, I didn't want to hire a team. That turned out to be a big miss on my systematic career there. If I had hired out a full team there I think we could have been similar to the modern day Wintermute. But instead it went down a different route and I had other talents in markets.

Going back to the arbitrage for one moment, how big was the arbitrage back then like how many dollars could you profit per unit of Bitcoin?

It varied pretty widely. In the thick of it in 2017 there were 30% intraday moves, so even if the profit on a single arb was small, they were constant and would add up.

Do you have any close calls where you fucked up inventory management or something similar?

The closest to that was in the very early days of starting. I remember having a situation where I didn't have proper checks in place and the code got stuck in a loop of market buy market sell over and over until it depleted the balance in the account. Fortunately, that was early enough that it was just a few thousand dollars at the time. But being a lot earlier in my career then, even though it was just a few thousand dollars, it had me freaking out. But it was a good lesson to learn very early on with a low amount of capital and not learn that one a lot later.

What did your transition to discretionary trading look like?

It was a slow process. After I started losing edge off a lot in 2018 I had a period where I was focusing on the systematic side a lot longer to build out new strategies from there. But it was a tough time because into 2019 it was quite clear that a lot of my edge was gone. So basically with time and then just seeing more examples of where my systematic stuff just wasn't really working at the time so I started doing a bit of more hybrid approach. From the systematic side, I had already been staring at order books all day just trying to understand how exactly the matching system works, and what order flow typically looks like. Back in 2019, crypto was still early enough and inefficient enough that very simple approaches like watching order flow could still be very profitable. I don't think that's the case anymore today though.

But back then, it was a way easier approach to take. I would do a lot of order flow that was kind of backed by systematic stuff for detecting certain occurrences. An exchange called BitMEX was very popular back at the time. It was the driving exchange in the market where usually price would lead and then other exchanges would follow. One of the biggest sources of edge there was understanding how their liquidation system worked. During periods of large liquidations on BitMEX there were often hundreds of millions of dollars in liquidation queue on their book side. But the way that they would actually surface it is they would just show a block in the order books of ten million at a time, and the actual remaining amount would be hidden. So that ten million block would slowly move down as it fills, the liquidation goes, and replenishing from an unknown amount of liquidations on the backend. I remember at the time there was a trick I was using to figure out exactly how many liquidations were remaining on the backend. And since it would keep pushing more and more aggressively until it runs out, if you knew when it was about to run out that was often the market bottom. I had algos running to buy on these events, and it was an extremely high hit rate.

Another thing BitMEX was famous for was its overload errors. Their matching engine was not well built, so during periods of high volatility when you would try to get an order through, it would say "Sorry, the system is overloaded. Please try again." Some people would try to get through this just by hammering the button. Eventually you could get through hammering the button, but there was a way better trick to game this. Basically, BitMEX gave full priority to people trying to close positions over people trying to open new ones. So if you kept a long and short of equal size open on two different accounts at all times, you would technically be flat, but could close the opposite side position to open a directional trade. Close orders were 100% immune to overload, so you had priority at all times regardless of volatility.

Very clever.

At the time there were many little tricks like this. BitMEX had a massive percentage of total market share at the time so if you could locate all these little tricks on the exchange and put it into a full system, there would be a humongous edge.

How did you find these tricks? Was it just poking around like you said earlier? It's just part of your personality?

Yeah I love poking around with exchanges. There's usually good stuff to find. There's a line to it, though. If it's something that actually exploits a bug or is an actual exploit that they've disclosed, then they're very nice about it. There have been multiple cases in the past where I've actually been given large bounties for reporting exploits, including one on a large exchange that would've allowed draining any user's balance with 2FA bypasses.

It's funny because I know you're still poking around APIs, testing limits of things, actively to this day.

Yeah of course. You always should be. This is how a lot of these high frequency trading firms get their edge. Many of them find little loopholes like this.

How long did these last before other people found out? Were you the only one using these loopholes?

I think it depended on which one you were looking at. I would bet that a number of sharp people were using the trick of using close orders to enter positions, because after going through a few high volume events, you eventually start to notice that you've never hit an overload on a close order before. Whereas some of the other tricks took a bit more creativity to figure out.

There are still a few traders around now actively trading that used to trade a lot during the BitMEX days but they're few and far between. How is the culture different now?

I think the culture was fairly different back then for a few reasons. One reason was that the liquidity in the space was a little bit different. You could actually move the market pretty significantly back then with a mid-five figure order on perps. Whereas nowadays if somebody throws a 30 million dollar order on BTC perps it won't really affect the markets much. Maybe the market makers break off on a little bit of something but it'll fill no problem. Whereas back then, you could actually legitimately move the price kind of far with orders like that. BitMEX had this chatbox called the trollbox where people could type position or /rekt and it would visibly show the PnL or details of your current open position. It was a fun vice, because you would know who was swinging size without worrying it was fake.

Were there more market manipulation games being played back then?

Manipulation in what kind of way?

Say spoofing.

Oh a ridiculous amount of spoofing back then. The systematic side of my hybrid approach actually did really well with dealing with these. Spoofers tended to be pretty predictable. They would push the books a bit, but as soon as it starts to fill or if it gets too close to get filled, they get pulled. And typically, you can guess that they're actually trying to get fills in the opposite direction. So you could game those a bit. There were a few times that I do remember it worked especially well when a spoofer unintentionally got filled with huge size and had to panic out of their size. But typically isn't really that effective these days, so it's less common.

As long as we're talking about interesting things on BitMEX, one of the most interesting was around the covid crash, where Bitcoin dropped like 50 percent in a day. It started at around $8k and by the end of like a 3-4 hour period, it was down to the $3k range. Every single long above 1x on the entire exchange was liquidated. At that point there was just $10M of liquidity remaining on the bid side down to zero, and BitMEX famously shut off the exchange before the market bottomed (they claim it just crashed, but this is debatable). But the really interesting part was after the exchange came back online and the price was bouncing, the mark price (which determines liquidation price) became incredibly skewed. It was crazy because the mark price was drastically higher than the 10 perps, which meant people were getting liquidated at 10% free increment below their price level. There was never ever ever before anything even remotely happening to such a degree. Basically, people happening open 100x longs that were almost immune to liquidation, people were 100x-buying their entire balance, and a lot of them made generational wealth from just this 1 hour period. This was like such an incredibly black swan event that is not even a once a year kind of thing, it's like a once in a decade type of opportunity. A lot of people lost their entire balance on the way down and then re-deposited and then ended up making back that and even more on this kind of weird situation afterward.

You're mostly trading Bitcoin at the time?

Balances were denominated in Bitcoin, but they also had another interesting contract that was very popular at the time. Right around that time, they had introduced the ETH quanto swap. The quanto swap allowed you to trade ETH paired with USD on there while still having collateral being Bitcoin. A lot of people don't know this, but the ETH quanto swap product actually got ridiculously popular for a short period of time. For a few months, it was by far the highest volume ETH contract globally and most ETH price movements were led from that ETH quanto swap contract on BitMEX.

So everyone that's still around that has XBT in their name usually signifies that they are around during the BitMEX days?

Well, partially. I think some people just add it to their name because it sounds cool. Some got it because of BitMEX. But the XBT ticker existed before then because it was technically an ISO standard.

You've mentioned before that you have a disdain towards TA. Why is that?

I don't have a disdain for it per se. I just don't think it's high EV to use nowadays. But back in the day it worked pretty well since the market was so inefficient back then. But everything was inefficient back then, so that's more just a reflection of the market itself. When it comes down to it, TA and charts are very numbers oriented, and I think it's a game that top trading firms with teams of quants and PhDs are going to dominate any area of the market that is highly quantitative. I just don't really believe it's possible in a more modern / efficient crypto that it's possible for retail to be able to find an edge in technical analysis that these quants aren't finding. That's just my general view of it.

You seem to look at it quite often in your Twitter posts drawing horizontal lines and talking about levels being taken and so on and so forth.

I think it's more that it's a smart hand to have a more comprehensive look. A lot of traders that you take, it's not really one specific thing that gives you an edge there. You're looking at fundamentals, you're looking at sentiment, you're looking at narratives, whatever. It's a whole lot of things combined.

So it's like a weak signal for you and you'll never trade on it alone, but it is something?

Yeah, that's accurate. To be fair there is still a lot of weight that's put into things like liquidity zones where a lot of people's liquidations might be, or where a lot of people's breakeven prices are. There's a reason that a lot of traders or even market makers may look at those levels. And that technically is related to technical analysis. So has a very weak correlation, I think.

It sounds like at the time everyone was rewarded for these degenerate risk management principles putting on 100x leverage. The field was soft enough for it to get rewarded. What do you think about how the meta has evolved with leverage? Because it sounds like BitMEX was a very leverage heavy meta.

I mean, you still have exchanges offering 100x leverage today, and to be honest, the risk limits being offered are still pretty high. Are you asking if you think that people in high leverage are getting liquidated more than they used to back in the day or something like that?

How has your perception of when to apply leverage changed? I'm sure it must've been affected by what everyone else was doing at the time.

I think leverage has always been kind of the same beast. You can make a lot of money on it, but 99% of people are probably going to end up losing money on it. You'll hear a lot of good traders say that if you have a case that's extremely asymmetric, like a full port type of trade, then you want to size up. I think there's some justification for using a bit of leverage in some cases like that. But I'm talking single digit multiples of leverage. It really depends a lot on your size. If you're trading institutional size or have a very large portfolio of prop capital, you obviously don't want to be using much if any. Retail kind of falls into this trap of where they have only a small balance and they think that in order to make a bigger size, they need some leverage early on. And then they just end up becoming victims to market makers who are more aggressive and hunting positions like that. Markets are very, very often just a transfer of wealth from these low balance traders who are trying to be more aggressive in their sizing to people who are trading 1x or spot.

Some time in 2020 you migrated on-chain because your name is Defisquared. Where did the name come from?

I was very big on-chain into the Defi boom. The first thing I'll say about that is that I feel like that was the golden age of on-chain crypto. I really think that a lot of the Defi primitives that were invented there are some of the coolest on-chain decentralized applications ever made. And a lot of them continue to be the coolest in my mind today. So I was very big into that. I also loved the governance farming going on at the time. They often had protocols that offered 10,000% APY to farm (deposit money into the protocol). I was really big into the Curve ecosystem. I was an early large voter, like Convex for those who remember that. Huge fan of Defi in general. The DefiSquared name had kind of a funny origin. I kind of went side project mode at this time, doing pool work all the time. And when I first started my Twitter, I wanted that name "Defi" just because, you know, I felt like some of the meta of my Twitter handle, naming stuff, was that I still had a little bit worried about OPSEC (security), so when I created the name, I figured I would add some distinction by pretending to be a team of 2 people, instead of an individual. That's where the "squared" in DefiSquared came from. So a bunch of my early posts are "we" and "us", but to be honest after a couple weeks of posting I was like, man this is extremely tedious and I just got tired of it and switched to first person.

What did you like so much about Defi? It must have been a shift for you going from trading perps on Bitmex to trading on chain on these Defi protocols?

It was just genuinely fun. When I talk about these 10,000% APY farms, it was the kind of thing where you would drop some money into it and you would say, when I wake up tomorrow, it might just be zero, but it also might be significantly higher. So you just kind of it in, closed your eyes and just waited to see what happened. And everything in that era felt creative and fresh. It felt like there was no limit to what could be created in decentralized finance, unlike this cycle where there wasn't much innovation.

At the time did you believe that it could have actually replaced traditional finance or did you just view it as like oh these are some ponzi's that are on chain everyone's betting on?

Well, it's not about replacing traditional finance. It's about augmenting it. And I still think that's the case, even right now. I don't see any reason to not believe that's the case, even right now. Some of the biggest focuses of institutions right now are stable coins and RTXN. And if you think about it, increasing stable coins usage and increasing tokenized assets is going to continue to push DeFi primitives. So I'm still a huge believer in DeFi. When it comes down to price action, that's kind of a different case. Before I believe in DeFi does not necessarily mean at all times that I'm a believer the price going up. I have a lot of feelings on this, but a lot of the meta of 2021 was about tokenomics as well. Pretty much all the projects that were launching at that time were trying to design the optimal tokenomics to encourage participation and increase in TVL without having a clear inflation of the token that drops the price. Because of course, if you're emitting tokens, some portion of the farmers are just going to go ahead and sell them.

And that's why you saw a lot of ecosystems like Curve's experimenting with ve-tokenomics and all that. And there were a lot of derivatives created around those types of tokenomics like offshoots of the ve-tokenomics. I think ultimately, part of the reason that we haven't seen any focus on tokenomics to that level since then is because I do think people kind of reached the conclusion that if you're emitting a lot of tokens, the price is going to go down no matter what. Certain tokenomics models may delay this long enough to bootstrap an ecosystem, but there's no model that's going to really stop it from causing the price to go down.

Do you think that you were one of the only people that understood the dynamic at the time?

No, no, definitely not. There were plenty of people who fully understood it and knew it was unsustainable but played the ponzis anyway. My favorite euphemism was when people called the curve tokenomics a "flywheel". Flywheel is of course just a nice name for Ponzi, but in a bull market it's great because it can propel itself upward for a longer than people expect.

What do you think caused you to navigate this sort of dynamic better than other people?

I think part of it was having a capital base to start with. If you had capital, you had the cushion to gamble a bit. But I also think it was even more a sort of there being no replacement for screen time. DeFi season was all about research, and to have edge you had to know what the newest and best protocols were almost daily. Sometimes meat being able to escape rugs quickly, and know which ponzis would be good early on. And there were some very good Ponzi primitives. Like I said, Convex was one of my favorites. They called it the "VeCrv Meta" because people were looking their CRV into Convex and as a result, it ended up controlling like half of Curve's voting power which gave it a lot of value. I think I rode up a liquid 20x gain on CVX. It was just a good time all around. It was my PVE and many people were making money together for a long period.

How did you avoid drawing down in 2022 when everything reversed quite quickly?

I took a little bit of a drawdown. I remember Convex going from six to like five dollars at the peak, which was a 6 billion fully diluted value. And I remember everybody was kind of looking at that and saying that this was kind of sketchy how high it was. But most people just locked their Convex for 6-8 weeks in the yield farms. At the time, Convex didn't have great tracking markets so you couldn't easily short it. I remember a lot of people were looking at this saying that they wished they could exit, but were locked. I was lucky enough to unlock maybe somewhere around the mid 40 dollar range and sold out of everything. But I certainly didn't catch the peak on that, which I wish I could have.

There were actually a lot of signs it was topped. Abracadabra, another protocol, had a huge amount of Convex as well, and I remember they started creating single sided liquidity orders in the book, basically a one sided sell order kind of deal. People were looking at that and saying like, hmm... a lot of these projects are trying to exit their positions right now too. I was extremely thorough about on-chain analysis at the time, and tracking what projects and whales were doing with their balances. You could get a pretty good idea of how everything flowed and how the holder base was distributed. At that time, I was just in front of the screen all day. Seeing projects starting to see is really not a great thing when price is extremely reflexive in both directions.

Permanent top?

Hey, you never know, man heh.

Did you have the idea that it didn't look good locally so I'm just going to sell now and to buy later? Or did you actually think like, this could be the forever top, I'm getting the fuck out and I'm re-evaluating.

I think you'll find that in any case where somebody makes a lot of money on one specific coin, they tend to hold onto a small forever stack. After selling most, I definitely kept like a few percent that I just never sold and rode down 99%. I do remember a couple of times on the way down trying to buy back in and then like a day later just being like, you know what? It looks like shit. I'm just going to get rid of this again. When you see a drawdown from 65 to 5 for the first time, you are kind of saying to yourself, well, even if it's a Ponzi, surely it should have some bounce.

There is always the paradox in crypto that the people that end up with the most money are like the staunchest believers and they almost always ride it back down to zero. So it really is like a feat to be able to ride something up so high and actually get out near the top.

I don't know if I'd fully agree with that, though. I saw cases of both. You see cases like that whale Tetranode. He had a public goal to hit 300 million dollars in DeFi at its peak or something and ended up rounding/dumping the majority. There were some Ohm guys who legitimately did sell the top. They just dumped their whole stack near the top and left with nine figure worth.

I knew this one Convex guy that was such a staunch believer, and had written up an entire multi-page white paper on his Convex thesis. He sold nothing even at like 65 or almost 60 and immediately offloaded 100% of his portfolio into precious metals and bonds. He went from max degen to like the safest possible assets he could find which I thought was hilarious. He pretty much just won and just left forever.

At the time what were your thoughts on crypto in 2022 after the Defi bubble?

I just saw it as another cycle, and figured it would come back again soon enough with another meta. This was around the point where I moved more from on-chain back into perps trading where you could short the market so there was plenty of good price action to get there. A lot of my big trades then were large shorts over long periods of time. It matched my trading style well.

I remember when your first claim to fame on your Twitter profile was when you posted a screenshot of a 14 million dollar short on Aptos and pulled out eight million. You had already gone public and it was number one on the leaderboards in 2023.

Yeah, I got a little lucky with the Aptos timing on that one. My average entry on that APT trade was like $9.50 which was extremely close to where it peaked out. It's hard to catch the top of coins that are advancing parabolically, so I'll definitely attribute a fair bit of luck to that entry there. But that was one where I was legitimately convinced it was going to have a 90%+ or more drawdown. I held some variation of that position for nearly half a year. There would be times where during some intraday period it would go down a lot and I would cut a bit out and then after it had a small bounce I would re-add to it but I think I literally had that position open for six months.

What gave you the confidence? Usually when people post about shorts with large positions relative to the open interest they're just asking to be hunted.

I just didn't have that many followers back then. I didn't think that would be the kind of thing that anyone would notice and try to hunt, which fortunately seemed to be correct at the time. But it's like a whole different game these days. These days, I actually have to be pretty careful about what kind of trades or content I post because there are a lot of people who have algorithms running that are trying to frontrun or counter trade my positions.

Your edges have had an interesting progression. You went from systematically arbitraging to trading Bitcoin order flow to Defi and then in this recent era long/short altcoins.

2023 and 2024 was definitely a period where if you can catch the narrative early, you could absolutely be early to it and you can make multiples on it. It has been getting harder at the end of 2024 into 2025. But I think narrative trading will always be a thing. Partially because it's a lot harder to quantify and plug it into some algo - and of how much people are looking at this or does it seem to be growing- but I feel ultimately narratives are one of those things that people are still a lot better than algorithms at recognizing currently.

It's amazing how you have been able to adapt so well to the different regimes, different roles, and different games. You always seem to find edges in every single regime that give you a leg up over everyone else. Just from listening to you speak you have a genuine curiosity and excitement about the different sectors of the industry. How have you been able to maintain that fun spirit and genuine enthusiasm around what crypto has had to offer through the years?

You've gotta be like a kid with it. A genuinely loving curious spirit. I think a good part of it is realizing, in crypto there are infinite things to look at. In any area, you can poke around and find some new primitive, some new narrative brewing, some new tokenomics model or some new technology that's going to be the next big thing. If you're looking hard enough and you're sharp enough to recognize what's important and to separate the signal from the noise you can get a crazy edge even as an individual in crypto. It's an extremely competitive person and any game that is associated with money is ultimately going to become some of the most competitive games in the world. Everybody's going to be doing everything to the peak of their ability to try and win that game. And so when you do well in trading, it's not that you made money, it's also like that feeling of beating everybody else in the world at this game. It's fulfilling.

Having watched you trade closely for a good amount of time you are one of the best scalpers I've ever seen. What's your secret?

I still think it goes back to just years of experience. Like I said, I used to just stare at the books nonstop and have practiced a lot of order flow kind of stuff. I think that for scalping, a lot of it does come down to intuition and gut feeling. It's like a black box. Oftentimes the decisions are based on a lot of real-time that you're seeing, but you're not even consciously recognizing. I'm a strong believer in trader intuition.

What's next? You've been trading solo for years and years at the top of the leaderboards. What else do you want to accomplish in your career?

I'm actually launching a new liquid fund soon, with the goal to institutionalize my trading by building out a full team to optimize resources, execution, and liquid deal flow. I think it's the obvious next progression from being a solo trader, in order to continue to compete against other well funded trading teams with extensive resources. I regretted not building out a team for my systematic trading in 2017 which I think is a good lesson to remember here. For this, I've teamed up with another trader who is currently top 5 on the Bybit leaderboards and comes from an extensive institutional/trading background. The two of us have never had a down year in trading since starting in crypto 10+ years ago, and are committing 8 figures of our own capital in addition to any external raise. It should be a lot of fun- as you've already figured out, I'm constantly evolving my edge, and I think this is a very intuitive step.

Is there any advice you'd give to people starting in this space?

There is no replacement for screen time.