Podcast

Stephen McKeon is the Co-Founder & Managing Partner at Collab+Currency. Collab+Currency is a crypto-focused venture firm and one of the most prolific venture investors in Web3. Their investments in companies, DAO’s, and protocols include AllianceDAO, Arbitrum, Polygon, Seed Club, http://Sound.xyz, Superrare, & more. In this episode we discuss Collab+Currency’s latest thesis (including thoughts on AI/Crypto intersection), his most accurate predictions and his past narrative misses, founder advice (from the other side of the table) for surviving and thriving in crypto, & much more.

Zac Williamson is the Co-Founder and CEO of Aztec. Backed by Variant, a16z, & more, Aztec is a first-of-its-kind hybrid zkRollup supporting both public and private smart contract execution. In this episode we learn how Zac got into crypto from his past life as an Oxford researcher in particle physics, his perspective on the practical uses of privacy (and the implications for the future of the internet), the limitations of blockchains today (compared to the past), the advice he would impart to his earlier self from his present self, & much, much more.

John Linden is the CEO of Mythical Games. Backed by a16z (and recently achieving unicorn status), Mythical Games is a game technology studio at the intersection of blockchain and games. In this episode we discuss his past work as Studio Head for the Call of Duty franchise, the past and future of blockchain gaming, what unique unlocks are enabled by web3 for games, and an announcement about their work building an EVM-compatible chain (in anticipation of the Merge). Show notes here.

David Aronchick is CEO and Co-Founder of Expanso. Backed by General Catalyst, Hetz Ventures, and Array Ventures, Expanso, simplifies data governance with an architecture that streamlines management and control of data flows without losing functionality, delivering compute over data. David discusses his journey from big tech firms to co-founding Kubeflow at Google, leading innovative startups and now building Expanso, where they are revolutionizing distributed data processing, enabling edge computing to help organizations innovate and scale quickly.

Omar Yehia is the Head of Investments at Matter Labs, creators of zkSync. Backed by a16z, Variant, Dragonfly, & more, Matter Labs is scaling Ethereum with zero-knowledge proofs to accelerate public blockchain adoption. In this episode we discuss zkSync’s evolution from testnet to mainnet alpha, the breadth of the ecosystem (and Omar’s opinion on most exciting directions), how he thinks about capital allocation on behalf of Matter Labs, and his predictions for the various possible futures of the crypto space.