In this episode, Ben sits down with Anand Iyer of Canonical Crypo. Anand founded Canonical after a successful career as a founder, angel investor, and venture partner at Lightspeed and Pear VC. At Canonical, Anand invests into core blockchain infrastructure, middleware, and developer tooling. His thoughts on the intersection of AI and blockchain are representative of how these two technologies need each other to maximize their value to the world.

Let's get into it.

Timestamps

3:16 Background and experiences?

6:20 How did you transition from angel investing to running a fund?

8:50 What's Canonical's thesis?

11:55 What's it like being a solo GP and how are you sourcing projects?

15:09 What does the underwriting process look like at the pre-seed stage?

18:23 What lessons and commonalities have you learned from investing at the earliest stage?

21:35 What should founders be prioritizing at different stages of their company's growth?

24:09 Does blockchain need AI and vice versa?

32:55 What needs to happen for AI to impact the end user in their own application use?

35:56 How important is decentralization to the growth and development of AI?

39:21 What are AI agents?

43:01 Why is ZK ML important?

44:44 Why is MPC important?

46:40 Why is fully homomorphic encryption important?

49:19 What makes projects like FrenTech so popular?

52:29 What is your spiciest take within crypto?

55:38 What is your spiciest take outside of crypto?

58:26 Where can people learn more about you?

Resources Mentioned

Ikigai

DeFi Masterclass

Daniel Kang Fighting AI Generated Audio

Sarah Silverman Suing OpenAI and Meta for Copyright Infringment

Connect with the guest

Twitter

Canonical Crypto

Disclaimer

Ben Jacobs is a partner at Scenius Capital Management. All views expressed by Ben and the guests of this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Scenius Capital Management. Guests and the host may maintain positions in the assets or funds discussed in this podcast. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy but only as an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

Newsletter #289: The new arms race (where everybody wins?)