Keep pulling the thread on Howard Lindzon.
Social Leverage's first fund invested $100,000 in Robinhood's seed round at an $8 million valuation.
Howard Lindzon proposed a monetization strategy to Twitter to delay its public feed by 30 seconds and sell the real-time data stream to financial firms like Goldman Sachs, Reuters, and Bloomberg.
StockTwits invented the "cashtag" (e.g., $AAPL) to filter financial conversations on Twitter.
Options trading constitutes approximately 90% of the profits for retail brokerages.
The primary investment thesis for Robinhood was the arbitrage between its near-zero customer acquisition cost (CAC) and the $150 CAC of incumbent brokerages like Charles Schwab.
Index Ventures led Robinhood's Series A round with an $11 million investment at a $65 million valuation.
During the GameStop trading frenzy, Robinhood nearly became worthless due to a surge in volume that exceeded its capital reserve requirements from clearing firms.
Howard Lindzon's "Degenerate Economy Index" has returned 170% since its creation three years ago, outperforming the NASDAQ 100's 94% return over the same period.
Hyperliquid is a decentralized perpetuals trading platform with a valuation of a couple billion dollars, run by approximately 12 people out of Singapore.
Howard Lindzon is bearish on the venture capital industry in a 6% interest rate environment, believing public markets offer better opportunities than tying up capital for 10 years in private companies.
The Web 2.0 era provided an opportunity for non-technical individuals to achieve scale for free on platforms like Facebook before the dominance of algorithms and paid distribution.
The success of companies like Uber was dependent on pre-existing infrastructure built during the dot-com bubble, including Google Maps, the iPhone, cloud computing, and fiber optic networks from firms like Global Crossing and Metromedia Fiber.