The Chopping Block: In Defense of Exponentials – Haseeb Reads His Viral Essay - Ep. 965
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Hey, everybody. This is Seed from the chopping block. And today, I'm gonna be doing a little bit of a special holiday episode. It's Thanksgiving weekend. And I recently published a piece that I got some requests to do a reading of. So I thought it might be a nice little gesture, little break from this market to have a little bit of a kind of deep dive article. So this article is titled In Defense of Exponentials. I used to tell founders, the reaction you're gonna get to your launch is not hate, it's indifference. By default, nobody cares about your new chain. I have to stop telling them that n
it mean about the psychology of the market? The cure is worse than the disease. Forewarning.
This is gonna be the vaguest blockchain valuation post you have ever read. I don't have any fancy metrics or charts to sell you on. Instead, I'll be arguing against the zeitgeist of crypto Twitter, which for the last couple of years, I've been constantly on the opposite side of. In 2024, I felt like what I was arguing against was financial nihilism. Financial nihilism is the belief that none of these assets matter. It's all memes at the end of the day, and everything we've built is inherently worthless. Thankfully, that's no longer the vibe. We've broken out of that spell. But the zeitgeist no
go to zero. That's how
the math works. It turns out markets are pretty good at doing math. Binary outcomes are priced on probabilities, not on run rates or moral turpitude. It's the shut up and calculate school of valuation. I really don't think that's an interesting question to write about. 5% chance to win? No way, that's clearly a 10% chance. Markets, not articles, are the best way to assess that for any individual token. So here's what I am going to write about. Crypto doesn't seem to believe anymore that chains are valuable. I don't think this is because they don't believe new chains can win market share. We ju
is bullshit. I don't believe it, and you shouldn't either. So I felt like I had
to write a smart person's manifesto on why general purpose chains are valuable. This post is not about Monad or MegaEve. It's really in defense of ETH and SOL. Because if you believe ETH and SOL are valuable, the rest is straight downstream. Defending ETH and SOL valuations is generally not my job as a VC. But fuck it. If nobody else is willing to
do it, then I'll write it. Feeling the exponential
My partner, Bo, experienced the Chinese Internet boom firsthand as a VC. I've heard how crypto is like the Internet so many times now that it doesn't even register for me anymore. But when I hear his stories, it always reminds me how costly it is to be wrong about these things. A story he often tells is about when all the early ecommerce VCs, it was a small group back then, got together for coffee in the early two thousands. They debated how big is the market for ecommerce going to be? Is it going to be mostly electronics? Maybe only techies will use PCs. Could it ever work for women? Perhaps
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