Who is Katie Haun, The Beginning of the Opioid Crisis, WeWork 2.0, OpenSea hits $13B, and the baby Bulls growing up
Stretch Four Insights Volume 10
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January 8, 2022
Aloha from Honolulu. I am getting this weekly edition out on island time!
For the 10th volume, I am writing to you all from Hawaii, Kahala on the east side of Honolulu to be exact.
Whitney and I are enjoying the island and celebrating together before our little boy comes in April. We are 13 weeks away ; ).
This week I will highlight :
The hottest name in crypto
Adam Neumann’s next act with WeWork 2.0
The LeBron versus Steph Curry legacy debate
The family you’ve probably never heard that maybe started the Opioid epidemic
Last but not least I will highlight my League Pass team of the week.
If you are one of the new here:
Check out my first long-form piece on how I got scammed in my first foray into Web3.
My long-form piece on new startup Column Tax.
With that said, let's get into it. And if you want to hear more or spread the word, subscribe and tell your friends!
Let’s dive in.
📰 📚 Who is Katie Haun?
Not by design, but I stumbled down a rabbit hole on Katie Haun’s rise to the top of the crypto world this week.
Haun is important because she is likely the top venture capitalist exclusively focused on crypto. She became the first female partner at Andreeson back in 2018. She tracked down the early crypto criminals on behalf of the federal government prior to that and has built an unrivaled personal brand.
Why is that important? Haun is on the board of both Coinbase and OpenSea. Haun at one point held nearly $150M worth of Coinbase shares and was early to support the Coinbase team on the policy side of the house.
Last month, Haun also recently broke away from Andreessen Horowitz to start not one but two venture funds which are rumored to be no less than $1B. Her funds will focus exclusively on crypto companies and it is likely she is already writing checks into companies all across the board.
Haun has become a titan in a little less than five years. The story gets spicy as this week OpenSea announced it raised at a $13B valuation and with Haun’s new fund launching only a few weeks ago she likely had to hustle to get a piece of the $300M round OpenSea raised.
Haun got her start by chasing the “digital breadcrumbs” of some of the early crypto criminals. She now moonlights as the leading investor and policy specialist in the crypto economy.
One of the first books I am diving into this year is Kings of Crypto and quite early on Haun is introduced.
She got her start in crypto from the other side. She was a federal prosecutor for early crypto criminals.
She arrived in San Francisco in 2019 as someone streaking to the top of the legal world. Haun had clerked for Justice Anthony Kennedy at the Supreme Court — a ticket to whatever high-paying job she liked. Instead, she had chose to work for the feds. [excerpt Kings of Crypto - Chapter 2]
In the world of crypto, there may be no one more powerful than Haun today, she toiled around chasing down bad guys but eventually decided to join the other side, because she saw more potential investing in the bitcoin economy than chasing down the bad actors.
She sits on the board and advises some of the top crypto companies and it will be interesting to follow her and her newly formed team.
She is not going it alone as the folks below will be helping form her own personal firm:
Rachael Horwitz, the former vice president of communications at Coinbase, joined as a key communications executive and consigliere to the new firm.
Tomicah Tillemann, Andreessen’s global head of policy, is joining the new firm,
James Rathmell, a crypto attorney and one of Haun’s former teaching assistants.
Nick Pacilio, who joined Andreessen Horowitz from Twitter, is also joining the new fund.
The Beginning of the Opioid Crisis
While COVID-19 gets all the press the Opioid Crisis seems to be the sleeping giant and the epidemic is taking out more people in America than anywhere else in the world. Generally, I do not have to look too far to see the impact, whether it is the unavoidable state of the Tenderloin my city of San Francisco, horror stories I hear and read about from rural America, or celebrities’ deaths from drug overdoses.
This week, I dived into Empire of Pain. This mammoth book takes me back to 1913 the year Arthur Sackler was born. Sackler was the champion of what has become the Sackler dynasty one of the most prominent and wealthy families in the world that you have likely not heard of. This last fact is by design. This book sheds light on how the Sackler’s orchestrated their empire to remain and anonymous and secretive as possible.
The descendants of the Sackler family own one OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma LP. This book chronicles the life, legacy, and controversy about how this family built the dynasty. So far, I can’t put it down on our vacation — and it is a pretty good option to go down a rabbit hole of how big pharma works, is marketed, and how entrenched these drugs are in our society for good and bad.
📰 One Article:
WeWork Co-Founder Adam Neumann Is Becoming an Apartment Mogul | By Konrad Putzier and Eliot Brow
Adam Neumann captured the news this week for purchasing over 4,000 apartments in all of the fastest-growing post-COVID cities in the US. Neumann, who somehow accumulated hundreds of millions of dollars in wealth while his company WeWork currently tanks on the public market and lost SoftBank over $7b and counting has been strategically purchasing apartments in cities like Nashville and Miami in the past 18 months and has plans to build WeWork 2.0 but this time he has become an outright landlord (he’s invested his own money) into swanky residential apartments renters as opposed to co-working tenants in major cities like New York and San Francisco.
📻One Podcast:
The Curry-LeBron Legacy Battle, Ja’s Mega-leap, and Jabari Smith’s Lottery Rise | By Bill Simmons, Seerat Sohi, Rob Mahoney, and J. Kyle Mann
This podcast kicked off with an interesting debate and is an NBA nerd’s delight. Simmons kicked it off posing the question around the legacy of LeBron James and Stephen Curry. It’s quite interesting, and I think this is a pivotal year for the debate with the Lakers seemingly looking average-at-best and the Warriors seemingly starting a brand new phase of their dynasty. You have to wonder, how many more titles can LeBron get? Simmon’s says he’s done getting titles and makes the argument that with health the Warriors are set up to compete for championships over the next 3-4 years and that Steph can extend his prime and end up with more titles than LeBron.
🏀 NBA League Pass Team:
The Chicago Bulls
This is the week I am officially jumping on the Chicago Bulls bandwagon as my surprise favorite to make a deep run into the eastern conference playoffs and potentially upset the Bucks or the Nets to represent the eastern conference. I caught a few games this week, and Demar DeRozan had back-to-back buzzer-beaters and the first time that has ever happened in the NBA. The Bulls have run off eight straight wins as of Friday and their team is fun to watch. I’ll keep an eye out to see if they can keep up this high level of basketball.
What's Next?
Winding down our time in Hawaii will have us returning to SF on Monday and back to work.
ModernTax
It’s a builder’s quarter for us as we look to kick off at least two new deals this month, launch our new website, and make some key hires. If you or anyone you know is looking here are the three roles:
Chief Architect: This role is someone that is #1 technical, but also understands how to architect solutions in a way that developers can easily use the products. At ModernTax, our goal is to make consumer tax flow like running water through financial products like mortgages, insurance, and credit. To make this happen, we need someone who can architect our product to fit various use cases with one end-point.
Jr UX / Product Designer: This role will help us create visually appealing front-end and back-end designs for our users. On the front-end, some companies do not have developer resources to implement so we need no-code components they can use to access tax data. For developers, we need well-designed API documentation and websites that clearly communicate what we are doing. Additionally, our SDKs need an upgrade as we get more data on where users break down in sharing their tax data.
Principal Engineer: Here we are looking for someone with front-end and back-end skills to ship features while maintaining a high standard for security. We believe, tax information is vital to most financial decisions, but because of the highly private data set it is we need to have clear security definitions and protocols with how users share their data and how our business customers access it for only specific purposes.
Stretch Four
I am working on another long-form piece on a crypto company that is building the “$20 dollar bill of digital money” and I have a few more planned this quarter on new startups.
I have a shortlist of specific companies I plan to write about this quarter. If you have a company that fits the bill email me at matthewaparker@icloud.com.
Lastly, if you found this newsletter interesting and know someone else who would, please forward it to them or tell them to subscribe here. It would make my day if you do!
Back to the trenches or back to the beach for the next 72 hours. Happy weekend everyone.
Best,
Matt