Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420]
Episode publishedPodcast: Invest Like the Best with Patr...Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Transcript preview
Preview only
Something I speak about frequently on Invest Like the Best is the idea of life's work. A more fun way to think about it is that I'm looking for maniacs on a mission. This is the basis for our investment firm, Positive Sum, and it's the reason why I'm so enthusiastic about our presenting sponsor, Ramp. Not only are the founders, Kareem and Eric, life's work level founders, certainly maniacs on a mission, they have created a product that is effectively an unlock for founders and finance team to do more of their life's work by streamlining financial operations, saving everyone their most precious
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc. My
guest today is Matt Huang, cofounder of Paradigm, a leading crypto investment firm with over 12,000,000,000 in assets under management. Before launching Paradigm in 02/2018 with Coinbase cofounder Fred Ehrsam, Matt was a partner at Sequoia Capital where he led many of the firm's crypto investments. It is widely reported that Michael Moritz called Matt the only regrettable loss in Sequoia's history. In our conversation, Matt shares his framework for navigating the often illegible frontier of crypto, how his early investment in ByteDance, now worth 10,000 times his initial capital, shaped his ap
Let's see. I would say there's a childhood chapter where probably like a lot of other people, the primary goal I had was getting into college. And in hindsight, I think that's, for a lot of reasons, very depressing and not something I want to bring up in my kids, but that was like a very primal thing in my life. Both my parents were PhDs and professors. And so becoming educated was the family north star. Directive. Yeah. And I was very lucky. They were if you think about stereotypical Asian parenting, they were very liberal relative to what you'd imagine as the caricature, so they were very su
In the chapter one, what is the first time that you remember being consciously aware of this family directive? It's
one of those only in hindsight things. It was just the water at the time. It's funny. I reflect back on family conversations, and my parents would have friends over or introduce me to folks who they worked with. And every introduction would be almost like an honorific. They would say where that person went to college. So very deeply early, it was ingrained that this was something that defined the value of a person. And I think that's deeply mistaken, but was directionally what drove me at the start. Did you enjoy college? Yes, actually. How? So I went to MIT, and in hindsight, super special pl
Aside from meeting your wife, what was the most memorable day at MIT?
Well, the most memorable, it actually flows into next chapters. The startups are so en vogue now. But back then, February, startups were still relatively new. Maybe if you went to Stanford, it was sort of the default thing a lot of people were focused on. But certainly at MIT, most people were the other typical tracks, finance, consulting, HFT. And I remember I had a close friend who was a year above me and told me he was dropping out to join a little startup out in San Francisco called Dropbox, and he was, I think, the sixth or seventh employee there. It broke my world model at the time,
Keep exploring with a free account.
A free account preserves the short preview. Upgrade to Pro for the full transcript and episode chat.