Founding Partner at Collider Ventures
Check size: No personal or standard Collider check-size range is published. A disclosed $6.7M seed round was the total financing for one company and must not be treated as Avishay's personal or firm-wide check range.
Avishay is a founder-first, contrarian crypto investor who treats decentralized systems as political and economic networks, not just software. He looks for leaders who can align the four constituencies he identifies—technical purists, traders, builders, and storytellers—while building real utility and defensible businesses. His recent thesis has shifted toward institutional distribution, revenue, risk management, token value accrual, and infrastructure that incumbents need but cannot readily build themselves.
Be direct and crypto-native. Explain the entrenched power structure you are changing, the coalitions you must assemble, and what each of the four groups—technical purists, traders, builders, and storytellers—gets from the network. Show live usage, revenue, distribution appetite, token value accrual, emissions, liquidity, risk controls, valuation discipline, and a moat that survives open-source copying.
Crypto-native founders with conviction, radical transparency, skepticism, resilience under pressure, technical mastery, political skill, and the ability to unite competing stakeholders. At the company level he values strong moats, real utility, revenue, institutional adoption, reasonable valuation, healthy emissions, supportive communities, liquidity, and disciplined risk management.
He explicitly rejects low-float, high-fully-diluted-valuation vaporware built for a retail pump, useless governance tokens, ghost-chain narratives, founders optimizing to please investors, products built without speaking to distribution partners, and token projects lacking value accrual, liquidity, risk controls, real usage, or a moat in an open-source environment.
Map the technical purists, traders, builders, and storytellers around a protocol; identify each group's incentives, veto power, contribution, and reason to remain aligned with the mission.
Evaluate crypto-native commitment, independence, charisma, radical transparency, skepticism, detail orientation, crisis performance, and political skill rather than optimizing for polish or investor agreeableness.
Interview banks, payment firms, brokers, and regulated market infrastructure; identify what they fear, cannot build internally, and can adopt through existing workflows.
Assess moat, team, real usage, revenue, token value accrual, institutional adoption, valuation, emissions, community quality, liquidity, risk management, and total market opportunity together.
Ask what remains defensible when code can be copied: distribution, liquidity, network effects, proprietary data, regulatory integration, security track record, community legitimacy, or superior execution.
Institutional distributors, not speculative retail alone, will drive the next adoption phase; investable products therefore need real utility, revenue, moats, token economics, liquidity, and risk management.
Programmable block construction can give Ethereum applications execution certainty and align sophisticated traders, builders, protocol purists, and institutional users.
Founder selection matters more than timing a narrative; exceptional crypto founders combine independence, conviction, transparency, skepticism, pressure tolerance, and political skill.
Crypto founders must align technical purists, traders, builders, and storytellers into a coalition because open networks expose, rather than eliminate, political incentives.
Shared security can reduce the cost and time needed to bootstrap new distributed services when developer tooling makes verification networks simple to deploy and operate.
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