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  1. Home
  2. /VCs
  3. /Fred Ehrsam
  4. /Briefing
Pre-Pitch Briefing

Fred Ehrsam

Co-Founder & Managing Partner at Paradigm

SeedSeries ASeries BDeFiGovernanceNFTsInfrastructure

Their Thesis

Protocol-level investments and new financial primitives. Open-source money, programmable economics, governance, mechanism design.

How to Pitch Them

Fred values strong technical teams with novel mechanism design. Show how your protocol creates new economic primitives.

What Excites Them

Novel mechanism design, protocol-level innovation, governance experiments, new economic primitives

What They Pass On

Forks without innovation, governance theater, projects that could work without a token

Key Frameworks

Governance Minimization

Best protocols reduce governance surface area over time, becoming more credibly neutral

Composability as Moat

Protocols that are most composable become the hardest to displace

In Their Own Words

“Developer tooling adoption is the best leading indicator for ecosystem health.”

— Medium

“The goal of governance should be to make itself unnecessary over time.”

— Blog

“NFTs are the Lego blocks of the ownership economy.”

— Blog

Recent Writing

NFTs and a Thousand True Fansblog

NFTs enable direct creator-fan economic relationships

The DeFi Stackblog

Breaking down DeFi infrastructure layers

The Future of Token Distributionblog

How projects should think about distributing tokens

Governance Minimizationblog

Best protocols minimize governance over time

Blockchain-based Machine Learning Marketplacesblog

Blockchains enable open markets for AI training data and models.

Podcast Appearances

Building Paradigm — Bankless
Paradigminvestingcrypto
The Future of Money and Crypto — Tim Ferriss Show
coinbaseparadigmcrypto future
Governance Minimization — Bankless
governanceprotocols

Paradigm Portfolio

Top Sectors

Infrastructure6
DeFi4
NFT/Gaming3
L1/L23
Exchange2

Stage Distribution

Series B7
Series A5
Seed4
Early Stage2
Strategic1
Orbital space defense
Blockmesh operating system
Standardeconomics
Cross-border payments app
ZK-based Layer 2 blockchain
Zero-knowledge infrastructure
Shared security protocol & marketplace
Synthetix
Synthetic derivatives protocol
Tax & accounting software

+ 226 more investments. View fund →

← Full profile@FEhrsamLinkedInParadigm website