Partner
Hack VCCheck size: No personal or standard ticket is published. Hack VC is an earliest-stage investor and its articles identify the firm as leading rounds at pre-seed, seed and Series A; announced round leadership does not reveal Rodney's individual check authority.
Rodney backs technical infrastructure that removes adoption bottlenecks for high-value crypto use cases. His work favors modular, open AI stacks that solve data, compute and availability; stablecoin chains that make the payment asset itself the gas and abstract crypto friction; and DeFi ecosystems whose consensus, liquidity and incentives align applications, validators and users. He looks for strong teams, correct problem selection and evidence of compounding ecosystem traction.
Published criteria include the right hard problem, technical depth plus community credibility, pragmatic product instincts, modular integration, clear execution capability and visible traction in usage, developers, integrations and ecosystem partners. For later follow-on conviction, he looks for momentum that expands the original opportunity.
His theses imply resistance to closed AI systems that centralize data and compute, monolithic architecture that forces unnecessary migration, stablecoin UX requiring separate gas assets, liquidity systems with misaligned participants, and early teams that cannot convert research vision into shipped product and community traction.
Lead with the bottleneck and why it matters now. Show architecture and modular interfaces, latency/cost/reliability benchmarks, developer adoption, integrations, community evidence and incentive alignment. For stablecoin products, map gas, bridging, on-ramps and merchant UX end to end. Explain what milestone would justify Hack VC following from pre-seed into seed or Series A.
At pre-seed validate problem selection and team depth; at seed and beyond demand measurable network usage, developers, integrations and momentum that expand the initial thesis.
Let developers adopt storage, compute, execution or data availability independently through familiar interfaces, then deepen usage as applications reach production rather than requiring an all-at-once migration.
Inspect gas assets, finality, wallets, bridging, on-ramps and developer tooling together so underlying crypto architecture disappears from the payment or application experience.
Decentralized AI needs a modular, production-capable backbone for storage, compute, execution and data availability, backed by a technical team that converts early problem selection into measurable ecosystem traction.
A stablecoin-specific, EVM-compatible chain can remove payment friction through fast finality, USDT-denominated gas, gasless transfers and integrated bridging, wallets and on-ramps.
EVM-identical modular architecture and incentive alignment around liquidity can improve performance, capital efficiency and ecosystem coordination without abandoning Ethereum tooling.
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Rodney Yesep is a Partner at Hack VC. Previously, he was on the venture team at AngelList and was the first employee and operations lead at Angle Health.