Current musical mood: https://open.spotify.com/track/7HVs5agwO9oSU40FgtmBU3?si=3a1b33b83b9941f8
Character index
- Karthik Raju: General Partner (GP) of Polychain
- Fernando: Karthik’s “intern”
- Avichal Garg: Managing Partner (MP) of Electric Capital, Eugene’s “boss”
- Kid: My friend, person who introed me to Karthik, ex founder of a Polychain-led company which got acquired
- InfinityVM: Company/ecosystem founded by Karthik
- Luke Pearson: Another GP at polychain who is a massive rival of Karthik and they really hate each other
Journal
Holy fuck it’s been an absurd week. I’m pretty tired and I have an all important meeting tomorrow with Karthik.
This whole saga started when I was at an event during SF Tech Week (it feels like every week is tech week in SF, but this particular one was organized by EthGlobal, a crypto hackathon organizing nonprofit). I was at an event for Morph, one of the companies I wrote an angel cheque for. I was sitting on the sofa browsing my phone when the only other asian person walks into the room, and we have a great conversation for a couple hours. He mentions he has a dinner with Paradigm by the end of it, and that his friend who was going didn’t make it to the states, so I could go in his place. So I pretended to be some guy with an Arab name, and tried avoiding talking about what I did for work and being super cagey. Turns out I knew a lot of people there so it really wasn’t possible, but we had a great time eating some of the best chinese food I’ve had. His name was Kid, and he was the founder of Particle.trade, an AMM for lending on Blast. He had nothing to do at the time because he’d just sold his company to Chinese billionaire Justin Sun, so we were both super unemployed and bored.
I eventually mentioned I wanted to do something like EIR because I was dead set on being a founder. So he introed me to his lead investor, Polychain.
Long story short, I turned down EIR at polychain at first because I thought that they couldn’t be particularly helpful idea or guidance wise, and everyone I talked to told me that they were predatory with early shares. Timeline wise, I met Kid in early October, and had polychain discussions in November.
My current plan is that I’m going to first ask about his level of commitment. I’m going to bring up Luke’s deal with one of their incubated portcos and how he was fulltime for a number of months in order to get a double digit allocation to it. I’ll ask him about his expected commitment, especially that he’s already a cofounder for
He’s a very shrewd negotiator so I’m trying to anticipate what he says. Maybe something along the lines of
The TLDR so far
- Fernando wanted me to build a wallet for InfinityVM
- I flew out to NYC
- Karthik had brunch with Fernando and I and explained he wanted to cofound the wallet
Details
- Massively insanely sick
- I thought i was screewd after that meeting
- Kid talked about political influence deng xiaoping; tier 1 swiss bank funded by ICBC, he’s down to cofounder, thought i could get leverage from avichal
- I was quesitoned super hard by avichal on intentions, didn’t even pitch idea
- Meeting dima made me feel better about it
- Simultaneously trading Bitcoin futures
- Questioning myself a bit after avichal’s comments; maybe my greatest downfall is that i am really good at rationalizing things to myself and i’m not very good at being honest to myself.
- Kid made me feel like I had really interesting stories because he has insane stories and yet he still tells me my stories are insane.