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How does crypto work at the highest level? This is the mental model I’ve been using.

There are six key categories of players.

Asset acquirers - these include brokerages, custodial and non-custodial wallets, banks, asset managers, hedge funds, market makers, and lenders. They aim to acquire assets to plunge into the crypto ecosystem. Each acquirer offers a unique value proposition, tempting investors to park cash with them.

These companies might target retail or institutional investors, hawk loans, offer trading of varied assortments of tokens, compete on lower trading fees, share better market information, or reward loyalty with their own token. Many in this group attract investors/users with high interest rates for deposits, which are funded by lending assets to other market participants. Then they plan to cross-sell other financial products, much like a modern bank or brokerage.

Alfred Winslow Jones created the first hedge fund in 1949. He pioneerd the idea of hedging to maximize gains, trading based on stock movements which he called velocity, paper portfolios and a competitive multi-manager model in which individuals ran their own books.

Since that era, hedge funds have innovated roughly every decade or so. More Money than God illuminates each epoch.

In the 1960 post-war boom, pension funds entered the primarily retail-driven market. Bigger orders created inefficiencies in the market, and a fund named Steinhardt, Fine, Berkowitz arbitraged the illiquidity created by big blocks to great success by buying large share blocks at discounts.

Suppose you’ve started a company that’s creating a category. Most buyers in your target market haven’t heard of your business or the kind of software you sell. There’s no budget line item, no Magic Quadrant, no G2 High Performer Award, no conference.

You have an idea, a vast blue ocean in front of you, and a pile of greenbacks stashed in a bank account from your last financing. Do you spend aggressively to create the category or conserve capital, knowing education will take time?

Are we more productive at the office or at home? Researchers from the University of Chicago published data on the productivity trends across 150,000 employees of a large IT services company to answer that question. It’s the first time I’ve seen analysis on the same business through the period. The business had deployed software to monitor employee behavior before COVID and used it throughout.

Quoting from the paper: WFH reduced total commuting time among US workers by more than 60 million hours. So, did we accomplish more by commuting to our kitchen counter instead of the office park?

This weekend, Janet Yellen said the US economy would benefit from an increase in interest rates. The Fed has been struggling to combat historically low inflation. The combination of both the 25% increase in the money supply from last year’s stimulus plus the proposed infrastructure spending should trigger inflationary pressures. What does it mean for venture capital and Startupland?

In short, we should expect some cooling.

The cost of a failed account executive hire is about 8 months of lost productivity. A three month initial search, three months of ramp time, the termination, and then another two to three months of ramp for their replacement.

That’s at the individual contributor level.

What does it cost the organization to hire the wrong executive? In terms of time cost to the startup, a failed executive hire is roughly similar, 9 months. But knock-on effects hinder the organization.

Over the last ten years, the 75th percentile post-money valuation of a cloud software or infrastructure company has grown 11% annually. In 2021, the post-money valuation has spiked 60% from $48.1m to $77.0m. While not as hyperbolic an inflation rate as copper or lumber, the price trajectory of early stage cloud startups does result from a similar supply demand/imbalance. And this isn’t the first time annual valuation deltas have touched this magnitude.

This summer, startups will define how they return to work. In talking to founders and executives, I suspect the answer isn’t universal. But the force that will shape the decision is universal. That force is competition.

A startup has three main activities: (1) recruit a team to (2) build a product and (3) sell and service the product. Competition influences each of those functions.

Recruitment. Most people in Starupland spend more time looking for a parking space than for a job. The market is that competitive. To differentiate, employers find new ways of enticing the best people to come work for them.

Startups used to raise once every 18 months. Today, we joke in Startupland that a startup is never raising and always raising. The implication is the most sought after companies often receive offers, whether they are in market raising capital or not.

Take a moment to think through that statement with me. Venture capitalists and boards used to value a company every 18 months. Then, every 12 months. Now every 6 months or every 3 months some startups receive termsheets valuing their business. We, as an industry, are marking-to-market much more frequently than we used to.

Data privacy has become a skill startups must master as they scale. As they grow, startups often collect increasing volumes of data. With great power comes great responsibility. Regulatory regimes demand greater data security and integrity, and add complexity.

How should companies manage data privacy, especially regulations like GDPR and CCPA? To answer that question, Redpoint Office Hours will host Todd Smithline on Wednesday, April 21 at 9AM PT. Todd is managing prinicipal of Smithline, PC, a San Francisco law firm focusing on technology transactions, product legal review, and open source advisory work. He has taught the video game law class at UC Berkeley School of Law since 2021.