Over the past few months, I’ve been working on what I’ve affectionately called my Super Secret Project™...

The other week, Ryan Sean Adams, investor and co-founder of Bankless, asked, ‘Why hasn’t web3 social taken off?’ This question set off a wave of conversation in the following days, with reasons ranging from hyperfinancialization and poor UX to web3 products copying their web2 counterparts and not engaging creators and cultural tastemakers. What I found interesting is that many of these problems aren’t unique to crypto but emblematic of the issues within the broader tech ecosystem.

I’ve been MIA for the past few weeks, searching for jobs and working on other projects. Regular newsletter content will resume soon, but in the meantime, here is a “Kickback”, a shorter issue focused on a topic related to culture and the new internet. Hope you like it!

Seed Club's Demo Day last week featured nine incredible startups. As one of the best-known accelerators in the consumer crypto space, Seed Club is a leading indicator of what’s next. In this piece, I discuss the common trends and highlight my main takeaways from this batch.

On April 30th, TikTok creator Megan Broni, AKA Girl on Couch, uploaded a video asking DJs to remix a song she wrote: “I’m looking for a man in finance, with a trust fund, 6’5, blue eyes.” The song went viral, and the rest is history, with dozens of remixes and interpolations of the catchy tune over the past month. Even brands got in on the fun.

Over the past year, there has been much ado about emerging tech - whether it’s blockchain, the metaverse, or generative AI - all predicted to hold the future of tech at various points (even by yours truly). However, as with most trends within the tech community, they eventually fall out of favor. For example, FTX, BlockFi, and Silvergate and the highly publicized backlash to Meta changing its name from Facebook hurting overall perceptions of blockchain and metaverse.

Anyone who has been on the internet longer than five minutes knows that SpongeBob memes are an internet staple. While memes have always drawn from various TV shows, movies, and moments in pop culture, SpongeBob memes have become bigger than themselves, growing into a universal internet language, transcending formats and various social platforms. Given this, their evolution over the years can provide clues to where internet culture is going.  Starting on Twitter with early hits such as Confused Mr. Krabs or Mocking SpongeBob, SpongeBob memes were primarily static text and image posts. Compared to today, SpongeBob memes have expanded into audio and video, coinciding with the rise of TikTok. What all of these memes have in common is the absurdist humor and decontextualization from the original show; what has changed is how that happens. TikTok SpongeBob memes utilize music and video editing to add to the absurdity and now we’re seeing users utilizing the Green Screen feature to insert themselves into the meme. With the recent popularity of AI, meme makers are creating covers of popular songs using the voices of the iconic characters, accelerating as products like Vocify.ai gain traction. Most notably, Black TikTokers have used AI to cover popular gospel songs, such as Never Would Have Made It by Marvin Sapp, to parody Black Church culture.  If SpongeBob is any indication, memes will look more like short cinematic clips, integrate complex video and audio editing, and become more social and immersive as time goes on—this is also shown with the Act Like You’re In a Wes Anderson Movie trend. Despite mainstream criticism of emerging tech, young people’s quick adoption shows that there’s some market for it.

This is an obvious deviation from the consumer tech and web3 content I plan to post on this blog; however, I think this is important enough to make an exception (however, expect the consumer content to come back soon). As a current MBA student recruiting for VC, I was unsure about what’s considered standard pay for an intern. I scoured the internet high and low, and though I found sources that covered VC as a whole, I couldn’t find data analysis around compensation for VC interns specifically. This left me confused and frustrated because I had no baseline to compare to. After talking to my classmates and other MBA students, I realized I wasn’t alone.

TL;DR: Anvyl is uniquely positioned to gain market share because of its streamlined approach to supply chain management and projected growth in the overall direct-to-consumer (D2C) sector. This summer, “supply chain as a service” startup Anvyl raised $9.3 million in Series A funding led by Redpoint Ventures, with participation from existing investors First Round Capital and Company Ventures - a continuation of VCs capitalizing on the shift in tastes from legacy mass-market brands towards smaller direct to consumer (D2C) brands, especially among younger consumers. Anvyl is particularly positioned for success in this space because the platform’s workflow streamlines a notorious pain point for entrepreneurs in a comprehensive and user-friendly way.