Location: London, UK
Friends & Partners,
Just as we predicted back in 2017 the agentic internet is upon us and converging with crypto. In the process it is birthing a new Web paradigm and fundamentally changing the nature of digital assets and even what it means to be a startup.
What’s new?
It’s never been easier to launch a token. But it’s never been harder to invest.
- LLMs that leverage a decade of learning mean the best founders can now self serve
- There has never been greater regularity clarity in crypto
- There has never been a more permissive environment to innovate in crypto
- Launching a token has never been easier
- As a result digital asset issuance has gone exponential
- Supply has (likely forever) outpaced demand
- Markets (from retail to exchanges and vc) are overwhelmed
- Capital and attention is diffuse
What Next?
Demand needs to find a way to keep up with supply, and curate projects based on fundamental analysis.
- Before there can be any meaningful and sustained alt season there needs to be consolidation into category leaders
- This will take the form of novel M&A based on token gravity and fundamental analysis
- This will be based on ‘index like’ instruments
- Listing and liquid capital allocation must become agentic to keep up
What are we doing about it?
Our function over the last 11+ years in crypto has been research led investment and market curation at first as a venture studio, infra incubator and for the last 6 years as an accelerator. Now the market needs us to go later stage, and liquid, to help categories form based on fundamental analysis.
- We already now have 400+ maturing investments, one of the largest crypto portfolios globally by being the most active investor in ‘23 and ‘24.
- We aim to now shift from ‘volume based acceleration’ at pre-seed / seed (investing in 1% of applications) to no more than 0.1%, with the focus on later stages such as late seed to pre-launch only (with product, traction, basic agentification)
- We believe we will no longer be investing in classic startups but rather agentic systems
- These systems need help to build liquidity, attention and catalyse their networks and ecosystems. They need to be clearly contextualised within their category.
- We believe the best founders no longer need 101 acceleration services’ but advisory that helps outperform in the agentic internet; token engineering, incentive & system design and network catalysis.
- We believe we already have positions in what will become category leaders in DeAI, DePin, DeFi and RWA, with our portfolio effectively serving as an index on where there will be the best performing yield bearing assets and societal impact.
- We will add, soon to launch or already listed, tokens through a liquid fund to augment these positions where a leader is not yet clear or an innovation promises to fundamentally redefine a category.
How are we doing it?
We are consolidating the organization under a next generation team recruited from within OV, headed by a Chief Investment Officer, Dimi, who has served as both Investment Director and Head of Tokenomics for the last 3.5 years, previously going through our accelerator as a founder himself.
His new strategic mandate is;
- Get back to basics; away from operational performance and scale to more focused conviction led and timed investments.
- Help the market understand and invest on fundamental analysis.
- Focus our advisory and value add on token engineering, system design and ecosystem growth and M&A.
- Accelerate our own agentification and where possible help earlier stage founders self serve based on our decade plus of experience.
The consequence of this is a leaner, more agile organization focused on premium only advisory services and high conviction based investing within the Post Web thesis.
Jamie Burke
Chairman and Founder, Outlier Ventures
Need Support?
We’ve helped hundreds of startups get token-ready, from legal structuring to exchange strategy and campaign execution. If you’re looking for funding. Apply to our Post Web Base Camp.
