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Greetings all,

In this week’s episode of Ventures, my guest Eric Chen - co-founder of Injective - and I talk about all-things Web3 and DeFi. Injective is an open interoperable smart contracts platform optimized for DeFi applications. We talk about Eric’s academic background in the cryptography space, the story behind Injective, design decisions for primitives that Injective is advancing, the CosmosSDK, the future of stablecoins in Web3, and the vision for Injective long-term.

Check it out: The Future of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and the Injective Blockchain :: with Eric Chen

Why venture-build? Why invest?

The start of the summer has been a reflective season for me. Coming off a long season of travel the past couple of months - experiencing multiple conferences and earnest entrepreneurs - I find myself asking the deeper question: “Why?”

For the past couple of decades I have been building ventures and, for the past 12 years or so, I have been simultaneously investing in founder teams. I fundamentally believe that all humans - somewhere deep inside - want to help other humans flourish. For me, this is the point of venture-building and venture investing.

I’m inspired by the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard, which “aims to study and promote human flourishing, and to develop systematic approaches to the synthesis of knowledge across disciplines.” The research that the program conducts outlines a framework to promote and measure flourishing.

Not surprisingly, I am more focused this summer on how to orient the work that I do toward not only qualitative “good” in the world, but quantitative impact. Becoming friends with people who are actively moving the needle from various angles in this impact building/investing world is of high interest to me. If you are working in a field directly or indirectly related and would like to talk about collaborating, please hit me up.

Have a great rest of your week!

~Will