April 29, 2024

SPICE CAPITAL PRESENTS: 🔥 🌶 HOT SAUCE 🌶 🔥 

Here at Spice Capital, we’re focused on making big bets in areas primed for rapid change. To do that, we believe it’s important to stay up to date with what some of the most exciting thinkers and builders are saying day-to-day as well as mixing up your content intake with some fun from the corners of the internet. We know there’s a lot of noise and the space can feel overwhelming. Don’t worry! We’re here to be the Hot Sauce in your bag so you can make sure you always keep things spicy!

We are hosting a Spice Event for NY Tech Week:

Inspiration Unleashed: By Spice Capital, Artist and the Machine, and Neuehouse.

Breaking down the new creator stack: from content creation, through distribution. What are net-new behaviors we can explore and build together?

Join us at the stunning Neuehouse Madison Square, and hear from Spice Capital Portfolio founders alongside operators, investors, and creatives coming together during a16z's NY Techweek to inspire and connect as a community dedicated to the creative, human-centric exploration of technology.

Details

Wednesday, June 5th, 2024 

6pm Arrival & Cocktails, 7pm Interactive Panel, 7:45pm Breakout Groups/Networking

Location: Neuehouse Madison Square

RSVP here: https://lu.ma/65knp9eu

1) Regan from Lattice has been putting out awesome twitter threads that show what many Crypto VCs are thinking -

Crypto Investors in Asia:

Meme Coins:

Front-Running VC Narratives in Crypto:

Though I also believe this applies to traditional Venture Capital to an extent but much slower…

For example - in 2023, after ChatGPT came out - VC’s immediately started funding LLM clones and wrote numerous blog posts about how chatgpt wrappers are uninvestable. 1 year later, the most frequently cited investment thesis is Applied-AI / Vertical AI which is most frequently…a ChatGPT wrapper.

Same thing happened in SMB Tech. That was totally out of favor 2 years ago and is now a hot commodity. Early stage investors must front run the VC Zeitgeist to make $$.

2) The fate of short-form-video?

Ryan Broderick says, “A Pivot To Video tends to arrive in stages, with each stage being more expensive and producing less interesting content as things progress. Usually it goes like this: The experimentation phase, the factory phase, and the bloat phase.” 

3) Stripe Sessions

Coolest takeaway was that gen-z doesn’t use a credit card?? and uses buy-now-pay-later?? I’ll admit that I got fooled by headlines into thinking that BNPL was dead after ZIRP. It’s quite similar to Robinhood or Crypto - once you’re hooked, you’re hooked. Volatility/Interest rates aside..

4) Farcaster Frames

Most of the crypto folks know this and can skip over this link. But if you haven’t been paying attention - there are some big lessons to learn from Farcaster Frames. I think of Farcaster Frames as a embeddable mini-apps. Think Farmville on Facebook but no tech monopoly holding claim.

5) Additional Memecoin Mania

Building on the farcaster video above, there are some other interesting things happening in the Farcaster ecosystem

1. $DEGEN token (on Base + have their own L3)

2. $ENJOY (on Zora L2)

Yash Bora wrote a great article called Farcaster Arbitrage - going through how to find edge on Farcaster

And my brother launched a memecoin trading app - Hype.meme (in beta) with a beautiful launch video featuring my mom:

6) You wanted AI content? Here’s the latest savvy tale (grift).

7) Negotiating a job offer at a startup?

Ankur made a great stock options calculator. Send it to your friends evaluating their next startup role.

8) Have you seen the Donghua Jinlong glycine memes?

9) Startup fundraising Benchmark chatter

Series A: $2M ARR and tripling year over year ? according to mercury’s The Bottom Line

IPO: $700M+ in revenue? Rubrik (RBRK) cleared this threshold so let’s see how the IPO goes!

Spice Capital Features 🌶️

Danielle had some great press on Moonlight - ‘SaaS for Witches’ - if you ever have been interested in a tarot card reading, this is your chance to book a session on Moonlight:

Anon public launch and fundraise announcement from Union Square Ventures.

Ice Spice (one of the fastest growing artists) revealed she is a customer of Symphony !!!!

Tired of Scheduling?

Check out Skej - your very own AI scheduling assistant. Just cc Skej and be on your way!

(Email me to get off the waitlist!)

Looking for monthly passive income?

Check out Bonside.com - they help finance fast growing brick & mortar businesses and give investors passive monthly income.

Interview with CEO Neha Govindraj on Bloomberg

(Disclaimer: I'm an angel investor in Bonside and investor on the platform!)