GHP #88 - VC #10 - Building Communities & Growing Start-Ups with Chris McCann!

Episode 88 is with Chris McCann, Co-Founder & Partner at Race Capital!

Race Capital is an early stage venture capital fund that lead pre-seed and seed stage technology startups, interested in the enterprise/B2B space, especially anything within the infrastructure layers of the stack. The company prefers the seed stage because it allows for the greatest impact, using a founders’ first, investor second, approach.

Chris is the seed investor in Solana, FTX, Lightning Labs, Zeet, Notifi Network, and many other companies across Web3 and Web2.

Prior to Race Capital, Chris founded and led the community program at Greylock Partners and prior to that, he was the Co-Founder and CEO of Startup Digest – one of the earliest technology focused email newsletters – which he grew to +1M subscribers before being acquired by Techstars.

We talk to Chris about his journey in tech and venture capital. He explains the creation of Startup Digest, how he stumbled into VC, the importance of community, his early investments into bitcoin, Web 3.0 and much more. 

Race Capital
https://race.capital/

Timestamps
  2:55 - Intro to Chris
  6:11 - Chris’ Award-Winning Photography
13:00 - Creation of ‘Startup Digest’
19:50 - Working at Greylock (VC)
25:12 - What is “Community”?
33:32 - Learnings from Greylock
36:50 - Investing as an Angel vs. Investing as a VC
40:32 - Bitcoin and Ethereum
47:05 - Race Capital
51:30 - Securing an Equitable Deal
59:50 - Web 3.0
1:07:30 - Lightning Round