Portal VC Founder: How To Invest In A Post-AI World (Huge Changes)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
All right, guys, welcome back to Tokenization Tower, episode number 39 of our AI Supercycle show, our premier weekly AI show, powered by our friends at Nier. Visit nier.com to learn more about what they're doing in the AI sphere. I'm here with Evan Fisher on Tokenization Tower. Evan, great to have you, man. Welcome to the Tower, New York City Empire State Building. Happy Friday. Good to be here.

**Evan Fisher** (0:20)
This is great. I mean, so I was at Goldman out of undergrad, and so I can see the office all the way downtown, which is wonderful. And we'll get into it, but so many people have talked about how excited the suits are about crypto. This week, I got lunch with the Goldman Digital Assets team on Tuesday, and the suits are exciting.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:38)
So they are. It's an institutional bull run. It's a token bear run almost. It's like a token bull, institutional bull, token bear.
You are an investor at Portal, the co-founder of Portal Ventures. You guys have a massive portfolio across crypto, fintech, adjacent industries. Today, I wanted to have this conversation about what it means to be a venture investor, an investor in general, in this world of AI. Just thinking about how it affects your theses, how it affects the way you are assessing founders, assessing industries, sectors, and more. Before we get into it, I just want to give you a chance. What is Portal? What's your long-term thesis here?
And just give us the quick and dirty there.

**Evan Fisher** (1:20)
Yeah, the quick and dirty. Well, so all we do is pre-seed first check-in blockchain investing. It's awesome to be in this office. We were the first investors in Plume back in two and a half years ago at this point.
I started Portal four and a half years ago. I was at Insight Partners before that, spent three and a half years there, helped invest 600 million across global fintech, internet, and software. And I was looking in 2021 at Protocols. I said, wow, everyone thinks these are just random tokens, complete speculation. And they were at the time. But I said, I think you can build interesting income statements on these things. And so I wrote an article for Bankless in 2021 that was titled, How MakerDAO Makes Money. And we built an income statement for it. So I built the fund on that thesis. We said, how do we invest in protocols that are used to be profitable and be interesting businesses? Fast forward four and a half years, we've built a reputation as one of the best pre-seed investors in crypto. We managed 120 million across the two funds.
Great mix of investors, institutionals and large single family offices. And we're doing more of it. We're still excited about the category.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:35)
Yeah, awesome. Yeah, man, I mean, 2021 was pre-AI, it was pre-ChatGPT, it was also pre-a lot of like this like revenue fundamentals outlook that the space currently has in terms of like where we're at in that kind of view and in that sector.
When you're looking now into the investing landscape, pre-seed, first check in, again, kind of like the thematic here being investing in the era of AI, we've seen different iterations of crypto companies kind of come and go. And now there's this kind of like big narrative overhang and investing overhang in the AI category over crypto. But these two are kind of coming together. And so, talk us through just like very broad and then we'll get into some of the nuances of like, what does it mean to be a venture investor in the post AI world? What changes do you investors have to make to their theses, to their understanding of the world, to their world views, to adapt to this kind of AI first world?

**Evan Fisher** (3:37)
Yeah, a lot changes. I think a lot of people talk about what changes. I mean, for instance, you can build code faster, code bases and as defensible. You can ask hard questions. You can be an expert on anything.
I'm, my job is to figure out what doesn't change, frankly. And so, for us, what doesn't change? Well, we think there are huge problems to solve, specifically across finance and other categories with blockchain. One of my takes is I don't think crypto is a financial technology. I think that's wrong. So huge problems to solve.
And the founders that go really deep with an unfair advantage on understanding that problem, it's a unique insight. They're using an inflection point technology. That doesn't change. That's still the same. And so part of being a crypto investor and being in this AI bubble that we're in right now is we're familiar with it. Yeah. We've seen it before. And what it is, is everyone gets excited, eventually we'll enter a trough of disillusionment. And a lot doesn't change. And so even in the software world, I don't think that much changes.