I just finished experiencing my first Miami 🌴 Tech week and here’s what I observed…

1. Hennessy and Jo Merse Marley, Bob Marley’s grandson, are amazing. We co-hosted an event with one of our LPs, Top Tier Capital, to kick off the week and send some good vibes to all.

   

2. Miami 🌴 became Sand Hill Road or SOMA for a week - seems like every investor from the west coast and NYC and beyond descended on Miami to figure out what is happening here.

3. If you’re a founder wanting to network with some of the leading firms, I’d suggest coming next year. The VC to Founder ratio was 5:1. One founder said he couldn’t walk 3 feet without bumping into someone who wrote checks.

4. The late stage market is on pause for now unless you’re a crypto company.

5. Seed and Series A markets continue to be on 🔥 as many of the growth funds are squarely pointed at the earlier stages.

6. If you’re a crypto infrastructure company, there is lots of 💰 flowing into the space since many funds are still leery of holding tokens and infra investing is an easier bet closer to traditional venture investing. It’s funny as I remember how hard it was for our portfolio cos like Blockdaemon and Amberdata to raise capital a few years ago as all of the crypto investors did not want to invest in anything without a token and all of the traditional infrastructure VCs did not want to invest in anything with crypto. Amazing how the world has changed.

7. The energy was electric and while many of these events were great opportunities to network, I hope that Miami 🌴 is also taken seriously and not seen as one huge party. We do need more builders here, and I hope to see more founders joining us in the warm weather.

8. It will be interesting to see how the Miami Tech ecosystem evolves over the next few years. This is one grand experiment in ecosystem building as Miami is starting with the capital instead of the engineering talent and founders. Some who visited think it’s just a novelty that will eventually be forgotten while others like myself believe this is the beginning of the next great place to be. Only time will tell…

As always, 🙏🏼 for reading and hope to see you in Miami soon!

Scaling Startups

1. Solid lessons 👇🏼

   Ryan Breslow @theryanking

   ALL companies, large and small, are messy.  Like, REALLY messy. And we all learn WAY more from sharing the mess than the success. Yet so few do. Here’s our TOP 10 mistakes at Bolt over the last eight years, and our learnings from each one:

   April 16th 2022

   320 Retweets2,229 Likes

2. Bootstrapping to success…

   Alex MacCaw @maccaw

   Last week my company reflect.app launched. Reflect is bootstrapped. Opposite approach than my last company Clearbit where we raised venture-capital and now have a ~200 person team. Let me tell you about the ups and downs on our bootstrapped journey... 🧵👇ReflectReflect keeps track of your thoughts, books, and meetings.reflect.app

   April 18th 2022

   26 Retweets238 Likes

3. Following up on my Quality over Quality post last week…

   Jon Kuperman @jkup

   I cannot overstate the value of sitting down with real users and watching them use your product.

   April 22nd 2022

   17 Retweets264 Likes

4. So good…

   Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom

   Non-obvious traits of winners:

   April 16th 2022

   2,250 Retweets11,386 Likes

5. 💯 seen advisor shares given up too easily for connections but no value beyond that…way too many times

   Paul Graham @paulg

   It's a common mistake for founders to hire or give stock to someone for access to their Rolodex of powerful contacts. The value of such lists is always exaggerated. And if you build something great, the powerful will seek you out anyway; that's how they got to be powerful.

   April 17th 2022

   107 Retweets872 Likes

Enterprise Tech

1. This is the beginning of something huge and while still just USDC stable coin Stripe “plans to add support for additional rails and payout currencies over time.”

   Stripe @stripe

   Introducing crypto payouts: stripe.com/blog/expanding….

   

   April 22nd 2022

   1,331 Retweets5,796 Likes

2. 🤯 Crypto…(The Information)

3. More 💰 needed for dev tooling and infra…let’s go

   Blockworks @Blockworks_

   How Coinbase Ventures invested in Q1 2022:

   

   April 21st 2022

   78 Retweets403 Likes

4. Developer experience still has a ton of room for improvement…

   Brandon Dail @aweary

   I’m starting to think that every product org should have at least one senior+ engineer who isn’t beholden to a roadmap and who just goes around making little quality of life improvements everywhere

   April 22nd 2022

   872 Retweets8,888 Likes

5. Much of the hard core enterprise blockchain use cases don’t need blockchains…at all 🧵

   Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz

   Blockchain, applied in the real world with a case study: To handle the ‘staggering’ amount of data of 500K loads per year (~1,500/day), Walmart Canada contracted an innovative blockchain solution using a private cloud, running 600 VMs to handle thousands of transactions per day.

   Richard North 🇺🇦 @whichrich

   @GergelyOrosz So, 600 VMs for ‘thousands’ of transactions per day 😐 https://t.co/BOaQRLqsgw

   April 19th 2022

   360 Retweets1,382 Likes

6. Smart contract error leads to this…

   foobar @0xfoobar

   $34 million, or 11,539 eth, is permanently locked into the AkuDreams contract forever. It cannot be retrieved by individual users or by the dev team. The refund processing, which is complete, sets each bid status to 1.

   

   April 23rd 2022

   1,846 Retweets7,218 Likes

7. Who’s doing the dependency mapping and analysis on these? Lots of opportunity for defi security startups…

   The Verge @verge

   Beanstalk cryptocurrency project robbed after hacker votes to send themselves $182 million theverge.com/2022/4/18/2303…

   

   April 18th 2022

   46 Retweets216 Likes

Markets

1. The free fall continues

   Jamin Ball @jaminball

   This week in enterprise software: Top 10 #SaaS #Cloud multiples as of today's market close. New post covid lows for cloud software (median multiple)

   

   April 22nd 2022

   18 Retweets86 Likes