Jesse Walden (Variant Fund)

Jesse Walden (0:00)

One of the most exciting opportunities with agents is that they just collapse the cost of composing things. Within crypto, there was this view that composability worked because everything was totally open, permissionless, the agentic world that we're moving to forces more APIs open, because if your API is not open and accessible to agents, like, do you even exist? We may get the composability that crypto promised by way of agents because they just collapse the cost to doing it.

Nick Grossman (0:27)

I really hope you're right. If that is true, we have a shot at getting the world that I think we've both been trying to invest towards for the last 10 years.

Jesse Walden (0:35)

That's certainly the hope.

Nick Grossman (1:04)

Jesse, welcome to The Slow Hunch.

Jesse Walden (1:06)

Thanks for having me.

Nick Grossman (1:07)

Great to see you, as always. Maybe first, why don't you introduce yourself, and then we can talk about the idea you've been pursuing.

Jesse Walden (1:13)

Sure, I'm Jesse, founder, managing partner at Variant, which is an early stage focused fund founded in 2020 And we just announced a new fund and a new thesis, so we'll get into that.

Nick Grossman (1:25)

All right, amazing. So maybe that's the place to start. What is the framing of the new thesis, and how do you think about that in its arc?

Jesse Walden (1:32)

Sure. So the key word is autonomy. We're going to unpack that. Variant, I think, has this, I guess now it's a tradition of trying to find a single word to encapsulate our focus. And when I started the fund, the single word was ownership. Ownership as the core concept was inspired by public blockchains. And the key idea was public blockchains enable you to own digital assets.

And today, I'd say the framing has evolved a bit in that we're seeing ownership of this pillar in a much larger tent, where ownership is one way to enable autonomy. There are other ways that we're interested in too. And so maybe I can start by just defining autonomy. Yeah, what do you mean by autonomy? So to me, it means agency. And maybe I should call out from autonomy, it sounds very similar to another word that is very, well, it's very different from, which is automation. Yeah. Right. And so we're living through this period of unparalleled advances in automation.

But automation does not equate to autonomy. You can have automation that does the opposite of enable agency. And I like to give a concrete example is, I would say TikTok is a concrete example. TikTok uses automation and its algorithm, right? But it does so in a way that I would argue, like completely strips the user of agency. Like you don't know what you're going to get on TikTok. It's just forcing it down your throat.

Nick Grossman (3:04)

Right. You don't have autonomy at all. It's the opposite. You just hit your wagon to the TikTok train. Right. And it takes you where it takes you.

Jesse Walden (3:12)

And that's for both the consumer and the creator. Like you talk to creators on TikTok and, you know, some of them have figured out ways to crack it, but they're totally beholden to whatever the algorithm decides to do. And so that's, I would say, like a concrete example where we draw the distinction between automation and autonomy. And the thing we've always been interested in is, you know, who does automation serve? And when the answer is the user, right?

That's the set of things where we think, you know, there's more agency enabled and that's what we want to invest in. And historically, public blockchain's crypto, I think was one, you know, domain where that was happening and where we focus. And today, like, much more of the world is becoming reliant on autonomous systems. We think a lot of them can enable more autonomy.

Nick Grossman (3:57)

It's, you mentioned crypto. I also think of the original web as something high in autonomy in the sense that it's kind of open source and DIY and anyone can take it and make it and shape it. So I think the idea has been around for a long time. And I want to get back and look at the beginning of the whole story, but before we do that, let's just talk more about really what do you mean by autonomy and what do you mean by agency and like not just in what it's not, but really what it is.

Jesse Walden (4:34)

Sure.

So actually inspired by the USV tradition of trying to distill. You guys try to distill down the thesis into one sentence. I tried to distill it down into one word. It's not easy. But it's not easy and so I did unpack it and I tried to come, force myself to come up with the one sentence version and I think as written, it's autonomy enables more agency in the form of access, knowledge and ownership. Got it. So unpacking that access, I think you could consider it as just access to finance, access to permissionless markets, access to new tools. What we want to focus on is like, is this enabling more agency for users? Are they able to access things they weren't able to previously learn things, gain knowledge and own things, where ownership is defined as aligned economics or control?