By Pete Townsend, Managing Director of the Launchpool Web3 Techstars Accelerator

We’re thrilled to announce that Joey Krug, co-CIO of Pantera Capital, is joining the Launchpool Web3 Techstars Accelerator as a mentor. Kicking off in April 2022 in Dublin, Ireland, the Launchpool Web3 Techstars accelerator is working with entrepreneurs building blockchain technology and tokenization protocols driving towards our decentralized future.

Pantera Capital is the first institutional investment firm focused exclusively on bitcoin, other digital currencies, and companies in the blockchain tech ecosystem.

In 2013, Joey built a point of sale system enabling Bitcoin payments with sound and Bluetooth. In 2014, he left Pomona College to co-found one of the first projects on Ethereum, Augur, a decentralized prediction market platform and solution to the oracle problem designed to allow people to speculate on anything. He also started an AngelList syndicate which is now in the top 15 by backing. In 2017, he joined Pantera Capital as co-CIO to help oversee the funds’ various investments.

On November 30th, we had a fireside chat on Crowdcast with Joey as part of the Techstars Web3 Convo Series bringing the mind of the mentor to the masses so the global Web3 founder community can benefit from the insights of some of the leading minds in the Web3 space.  

During this chat (also available as an episode of the MoneyNeverSleeps podcast), Joey shared his insights on how he and his partners help the projects they invest in and work with:

“What we can do as investors depends on the project, but there are a handful of things we can help with. One example is the general strategic advice and help that any startup would want, like when founders are trying to fire someone and they need advice on that, or even a seasoned founder that wants help trying to close a candidate.

“When a founder is trying to hire somebody from a FAANG company, and they're a really senior product manager or designer and they're sold on crypto, but they want to be sure that the company they’re joining is going to be the one that dominates in that field, they want to talk to someone who led the Series A. Why did we put our money in that basket as opposed to any of their competitors?

“There’s also the hands-on stuff like helping projects with technical things. Founders send us their design or architecture or the way they're planning to solve some incentive problem all the time and ask us to look at it and say, do we think it actually makes sense? Do we see any obvious holes in the design that people would try to attack?

“The other areas are similar to the technical side, but it's the flip side, like with regulation. The regulatory environment is very unclear and vague, especially for DeFi projects, or basically anything that's built on top of Ethereum.

“It can be anything from reviewing a legal memo their counsel sent and telling them ‘Hey, your counsel clearly doesn't understand what you're building, you might need to get new counsel’ or just refer them to the right person.

“The last thing is networking, and this is what my partner Paul [Veradittakit] is really good at. If a founder needs to talk to another founder in the space or they want to raise money from a specific investor, whether they’re in or outside of crypto, we can add value on a lot of that because we have a lot of companies in our portfolio.

We’re thrilled to have Joey on board as a mentor for this program, and we’d like to thank him for volunteering his time to take part in this program.  Given his early entry into the crypto and blockchain space, his knowledge, network, and long-term view on decentralization, we know that he's going to be incredibly helpful as a mentor to the founding teams that become part of the Launchpool Web3 Techstars Accelerator program.

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