Mike Dudas (6MV): Pump.Fun, One of the Greatest Seed Investments Ever

**Mike Dudas** (0:01)
You're now plugged in to The Delphi Podcast.

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (0:07)
Welcome everybody back to The Delphi Podcast. I'm your host, Tommy Shaughnessy, and today I have a friend, Mike Dudas, who's managing partner of 6 Man Ventures. Mike, how's it going?

**Mike Dudas** (0:17)
It's going well. Thanks for having me on, Tommy.

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (0:19)
Thanks for joining our Venture Series, man. Excited to run this back and for you to start it off. Indeed.

**Mike Dudas** (0:25)
I'm super excited and a lot of fun working with you over the last couple of years. Excited to talk about it.

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (0:31)
Yeah, likewise. Mike, you're most well-known recently for an incredible investment in Pump, and it hit the timeline and everybody thinks this is a recent thing. But in reality, you invested years ago with a specific thesis and a story and conviction. Let's go back in time a bit. What was that pitch like? What got you excited? Because it's probably somewhat different from what we have now.

**Mike Dudas** (0:59)
Yeah, absolutely. The Pump team, it was very clear from the minute they first reached out and first met them that they were different. As a VC, you know this, I know this. It's hard to tell good different and bad different. You can be either. But they were really unique in their outreach. They had reached out to hundreds of people, cold, relentless. Some of the things that were different were how fast they were iterating through ideas. I think Pump, they've said this themselves, was their eighth idea, which can be a negative signal in some cases. But it was pretty clear from the minute we got together with them that it was good different. Basically, they're like, look, we're just not going to send you a deck. There's like no materials, just use the product. Me, my partner, Serge, Kazar, John, Carl, we all basically use the app. They just said, launch a coin, guys. Test it out yourself.
We each did. It was a magical moment and you just see the liquidity.

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (2:09)
That was a harder regulatory environment. It was a little iffy, launch a token.

**Mike Dudas** (2:12)
It was. Then I went into some group chats and told people, hey, I launched a token.
The reaction was so polarizing. People were like, scammer? Like, what are you doing, man? Others were like, that's cool. So basically, I think all of us just one, knew the team was special in a certain way, used the product and found it magical to see instant liquidity behind a coin, haven't announced it or talked about to anybody. Then the polarizing reaction, it wasn't like people were just like, okay, another one of these, it was like, I hate this or I love this. So we moved really quickly, but we didn't know the team to sign a term sheet in a week, I think a little more than a week, and it was pre-revenue. But the one maybe advantage that we had, I think other VCs didn't at the time is, I had helped launch a meme coin about a year prior called Bonk on Solana with about 20 other people at the bottom of the bear. So I knew how coins that had memetic value, community value, you name it, but didn't necessarily have the look of a traditional VC-backed coin, or a DeFi coin, or revenue or profit tied to them, that there were other kinds of value that people were interested in. I think I understood that, so I just had a predilection to be receptive to the idea, and move fast and decisively on it. So anyway, the rest is history. We ended up investing, and the thing hook off like just wildfire within a couple of weeks of us investing. I think it was below $1,000 in revenue a day in March, and we started talking to them of 2024, and then a month later, they were getting hundreds of thousands a day.

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (4:01)
I mean, it's got to be one of the best seed investments ever.

**Mike Dudas** (4:06)
It's up there. I mean, the joke is, and people made this funny joke online, that I'm like the Jason Calacanis of Cricut, just talking about that one investment. So I have to make sure that as a firm, we keep-

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (4:19)
Here's my second, third best play.

**Mike Dudas** (4:21)
Exactly. We've invested a bunch of other great projects, protocols, and companies.
But yeah, I mean, just the speed with which it generated revenue, I think it changed. It had a material impact on kind of changing people's perception around what's valuable in a protocol and a token, and helped move us towards valuing revenue and fundamental businesses that operate on chain, as opposed to promises and big engineering things. And we can talk about that more later. Yeah.