Gaby Goldberg Invests In Passion

Jess sits down with Gaby Goldberg of TCG Crypto for the latest episode of Building At The Edges.

Listen to our latest episode of Building At The Edges, hosted by Seed Club instigator Jess Sloss. Be sure to subscribe in your fav podcasting app ✅

Investing In Passion

Having survived the last transition from bull to bear, today’s community-owned networks are discovering the merits of curated communities aligning around shared passion. In the latest episode of Building At The Edges, Jess explores the future of value creation through the lens of passion with guest Gaby Goldberg.

Gaby is an investor at TCG Crypto, an early stage crypto fund. TCG Crypto’s emerging thesis of “investing in passion” could be described as shorthand for the intimacy and connection that comes from building intentionally with small groups of dedicated people. Rather than pursuing a more traditional thesis of investing in new market opportunities, investing in passion shifts the focus to teams building new experiences. This is an undeniably crypto-native investment thesis; crypto uniquely enables the ability for more people to participate in something that would previously have taken 20+ years of career experience to access.

The idea of investing in passion is directly connected to building enduring community-owned networks. Gaby argues that while much of the crypto space incentivizes people to get out, fork, or rage quit, the most promising web3 products and experiences will come from communities where people are incentivized to stay and create. 

This relates to Jess and Gaby’s bull case for NFTs as the preferred community token. They point to an NFT’s ability to capture identity and culture, which is core to building enduring communities. The relative illiquidity of NFTs is also a key component. That being said, secondary sales remains a critical health indicator — but not in the way we might assume: high secondary sale volume often indicates community churn and dilution.

The work of building enduring communities that incentivize connection is not necessarily suited to high velocity growth. Farcaster is a great example of this: by onboarding a fixed number of users per day, the intimacy of this emerging network remains high. Connection is an intentional design feature. 

Gaby surfaces insights from her 2021 experiment with DAMN, a primitive for the potential of decentralized autonomous media networks. While the project had a successful Mirror crowd raise, Gaby shares her hypothesis that the project might have found continued success had they pursued a more niche topic where people share significant passion. She also points to the evergreen crypto challenge of “IPO-ing” too soon, a common DAO and community token pitfall where fixation with token price and liquidity eclipses core community interactions. The idea of investing in passion in web3 can be summarized by this question: are you creating a collectible, or are you creating a community?