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What is Electric Capital
Official website: https://www.electriccapital.com/Official
github: https://github.com/electric-capital
Electric Capital is a venture capital firm that invests in cryptocurrency, blockchain companies, fintech companies and markets.
Electric Capital is a web3 venture capital firm based in Palo Alto, California, founded in 2018 by Curtis Spencer and Avichal Garg. Electric Capital raised $110 million for its second venture fund in 2020.
Electric Capital is one of the more active venture capital institutions in the industry . In March 2022, they raised US$1 billion for two funds to invest in early-stage crypto startups. . Some of Electric Capital’s more well-known investments include Frax, dYdX, Near Protocol, Eigenlayer, etc.
Since establishing its first fund in 2018, Electric Capital has made it its goal to become a long-term investor.
Electric Capital and its founders have invested in well-known cryptocurrency companies and projects such as Anchorage, Bitwise, Celo, Coda, Derivadex, Elrond, Mobilecoin, Oasis and NEAR.
One of Electric’s best investments to date is Near Protocol. Since its founding in 2017, Near has grown rapidly and become the third-largest growing crypto ecosystem in 2021, attracting more than 100 full-time developers. Electric invested $500,000 in Near in 2018 and continued to invest in the following years. The initial "bet" of US$500,000 has now doubled a hundred times, and is worth more than US$60 million.
Electric’s recent investment directions are mostly in encryption infrastructure and some tool projects.
According to the official blog of Electric Capital, the five investment trends of this US$1 billion fund mainly include: DAO, NFT, DeFi, decentralized infrastructure and projects that enhance accessible user experience.
Electric team
The team is mainly composed of engineers and uses technical knowledge to influence investment decisions.
Electric was founded by 39-year-old entrepreneur Avichal Garg and 40-year-old software engineer Curtis Spencer.
Avichal Garg began his entrepreneurial career in 2001 when he was still a high school student, co-founding an education technology startup. Afterwards, Garg went on to major in computer science at Stanford University and later worked as a product manager at Google. He has since co-founded Spool with Curtis Spencer, a mobile content caching startup that allows consumers to save articles and videos on their phones. Facebook acquired Spool in 2012, and the two have continued to work at Facebook since then. In 2018, he decided to enter the encryption field and founded Electric Capital.
The two founders can be regarded as serial entrepreneurs. They have previously founded eight companies and sold six of them. They have also invested in Airtable, Boom Supersonic, Color Genomics, Cruise, Figma, Newfront Insurance, Notion, and Threads. and other non-crypto companies.
As mentioned earlier, engineers make up the vast majority of the Electric team. Founder Garg believes that “engineers will eventually dominate all the largest companies,” even in venture capital and capital markets. For example, crypto funds Paradigm and Hack VC, which recently raised $200 million, also have engineering teams.
Most of the software engineers and designers in Electric have backgrounds in “big companies” and prestigious schools, and most of them come from Facebook, Microsoft, Google, YouTube, etc. This is why Electric is able to skillfully use its technical knowledge in investment, analyze a large number of open source codes published on the repository GitHub, and then use these codes and data to estimate the number and quality of engineers in each project, and evaluate which ecosystems develop. fastest. These hard-core data support are very powerful for investment decisions.
Electric Capital Developer Report
Report address: https://github.com/electric-capital/developer-reports
Electric Capital will release a web3 developer report, many people will be interested in this ~
Latest developer report:
https://github.com/electric-capital/developer-reports/blob/master/Blockchain%20Developer%20Geography%20Analysis%202023.pdf
Electric Capital’s latest crypto developer report: the number of monthly active developers has decreased by 27%, and senior developers are still contributing.
Reference URL: https://www.chaincatcher.com/article/2103943
reference
Revealing the secrets of Electric Capital: Launching a ten-year fund plan and becoming a long-term investor
Reference URL: https://www.odaily.news/post/5176814