Founder & Solo GP at Varrock VC
Check size: $600K–$900K at pre-seed and seed, published on Varrock's live website. The fund targets a small, concentrated portfolio, commonly 0–1 new investment per quarter, to maintain ownership and hands-on capacity rather than spray and pray.
Richard backs concentrated, contrarian pre-seed and seed bets in the future of finance. For crypto-native products, he looks for category creation, missionary founders, power-user retention and continuous zero-to-one product innovation. For crypto-adjacent companies, crypto should be an enabling feature inside a much larger industry, led by commercially strong domain experts with superior distribution and unit economics rather than recent crypto pivots.
Email richard@varrock.vc or use the exact @richardchen39 account; his public bio says DMs are open. State pre-seed/seed round size, why $600K–$900K is the right first commitment, the non-consensus insight and what you learned by doing the work yourself. For crypto-native products, quantify top-user concentration, cohort retention and innovation cadence. For crypto-adjacent companies, show domain expertise, distribution, CAC/LTV, revenue quality and why incumbents cannot add the crypto feature and crush you. Keep valuation compatible with future 2–3x round markups.
Missionary founders who persist when narratives rotate; founders with an earned, non-consensus view of a category; fast iteration and multiple shots on goal; direct use of onchain data to find emerging behavior; unusually high retention among valuable power users; crypto-adjacent operators with deep industry expertise and a unique go-to-market; fundamentally good businesses ignored because they are not fashionable; and teams capable of selling to institutions.
Consensus copies built for accelerator legibility; mercenary founders chasing the latest category or retiring after a token launch; pre-PMF companies raising huge rounds at inflated valuations; growth purchased by incentives with poor retention; crypto-native consumer products without sticky revenue; stablecoin neobanks run remotely by founders who do not understand their local users; crypto-adjacent pivots by teams lacking domain expertise; and yield-bearing credit products marketed deceptively as stablecoins.
Walk backward and forward through the founder's idea maze to see whether conviction and accumulated insight survive a narrative rotation.
For crypto-native products, measure the concentration, activity and retention of the highest-value users; prioritize keeping them over vanity top-line accounts.
When crypto is a feature, require deep expertise in the larger industry, local user understanding, distribution and defensible unit economics.
Size each investment so a rare outlier can materially return the fund, while limiting portfolio count enough to support founders through difficult periods.
Underwrite revenue quality, customer value and defensibility at normalized multiples instead of assuming the current hot narrative will persist.
Before PMF, model the traction required for a 2–3x markup at the next round and avoid a headline valuation that eliminates feasible downstream capital.
Credential and network-based kingmaking steers founders toward crowded, legible ideas, while the best companies often define categories years before consensus has a name for them.
Crypto-native products win by retaining a small power-user base through continual innovation; crypto-adjacent businesses win through industry expertise, distribution and unit economics while crypto stays an enabling feature.
Network progress does not guarantee asset appreciation when institutional inflows, supply dynamics and valuation multiples change, so investors must distinguish ecosystem usage from token demand.
In power-law venture, LPs care about concentration and ownership because an outlier must be large enough to return the fund; a long-lived VC also has to keep reinventing its edge.
Speculative power users can bootstrap new products, but crypto must grow beyond zero-sum casino mechanics into applications that expand the user base and realize decentralized computing's broader promise.