To be fair to Paul Bucheit this was before the "peak crypto grift" period. As a point of reference, the (now) much maligned (on this forum) a16z crypto fund wa

To be fair to Paul Bucheit this was before the "peak crypto grift" period. As a point of reference, the (now) much maligned (on this forum) a16z crypto fund was announced only 3-4 months prior to this interview. A lot of tech angel investors who cut their engineering teeth in web era look for the "what are young nerds like me interested in now" signal that resembles the startup buzz of that early web period. And a lot of talented young people at the time viewed crypto as technically interesting and potentially world changing, with Vitalic as their prophet -- before it was completely taken over by grift. Now you don't necessarily have to believe these technically talented but politically naive and financially ignorant youngsters will successfully usher in a utopia in order to bet on them. You just need to believe that with this many smart kids throwing shit at the wall, it's likely something of lasting value will emerge rather soon. One of my favorite YC videos is Bucheit's Investor Day talk, which covers some of the same ground in this interview, but goes into other topics and has more meat to it [0]. And if you can find it, his post about the passing of his brother and the birth of his child was also rather moving as I recall. Having said that, these days a lot of YC veterans seem to be infected by the political social media circus and don't seem crosscheck their migrating political positions with robust devil's advocate arguments. You have the president of YC posting seemingly more about SF politics than anything startup-related, or at least enough for someone to question their priorities. Even paulg is randomly retweeting videos of SF crime etc. There's a lot more "Don't expect someone to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it" level commenting on current events masquerading as objective thoughtful takes from this group for some reason. It's probably very presumptuous of me to say this, and I'm going out on a limb, but I don't think Google employee #23 era Paul Bucheit would go as far as boosting an abjectly cringeworthy cardboard political candidate pandering to the lowest common denominator, who proclaims his #1 most important "TRUTH" commandment to be "God is real". [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSbPXrQ9Wf8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSbPXrQ9Wf8