Crypto Event Summary - Avalanche House

Over Friday and Saturday last week, Avalanche Labs put on their second edition of ‘Avalanche House’ in Brooklyn (with the first one in Berlin). The team attended Friday afternoon’s session as outlined below and shared the following notes and perspectives from the panelists.

1. Strategic Fundraising During a Bear Market
   Lydia Chiu (Ava Labs), Tom Schmidt (Dragonfly Capital), Nina Bambysheva (Forbes), Travis Scher (North Island Ventures)
   

The funding environment has tightened considerably, allowing VCs to do due diligence on deals. This is in contrast to bull markets where VCs had days or sometimes hours to issue term sheets.Advice to founders: ‘Heads down and build, cut unnecessary expenses.’Focus on a particular vector for growth and lean in. Projects that have a product should go to market with marketing spend. Startups that don’t have a full-fledged product should hire essential developers and stay lean. Those who attempt to do both will fail.Recipe for success: ‘Build features, iterate, test.’ Tom draws from his product experience from 0x of shipping and iterating through features and products during bear markets.This focus on what features added the most value to crypto-native users throughout the ‘18 to ‘19 bear ...