WAGMI=Miami

January newsletter

In partnership with

Previous Miami dinner in December 2024

Dear friends, it might become a good tradition to end a year with an event in Miami and begin a year with an event in Miami (1/25). While some people prefer to be in Davos, the center of Digital Assets is definitely on the East Cost somewhere between New York and Miami.

TL;DR: GoMining sponsors Digital Assets@Duke; we add AI startups & VC’s in 2025, Miami investor soiree - 1/25; Tokyo pitch competition - 2/1; Our 2025 calendar; being a professor is hard;

We add AI focus - Miami

Digital Assets can’t be imagined without AI. I’ve been C-level or founder in 3 ML/AI startups before - biggest achievements are getting a response from Theranos and #2 worldwide in predictive maintenance in locomotives after GE-transportation, so we are adding AI to the focus. We are in negotiation with organizers of an AI Conference in Miami to host our pitch competition in March. Downtown Miami would be one of the sponsors.

What happened in 2025? I’ve been a CEO

It’s already the end of the first month of a new year, but so many events happened in the world and personally. VC’s are coming out of winter hibernation, startups are brushing up their pitches and booking flights.

We already attended a president inaugural ball - it was fantastic, once in a life experience. I already incorporated a new company in Delaware, acted as an interim CEO, and got a purchase agreement from an investor for a 3m$ from Las Vegas, learned about reverse merge IPO. It sounds insane, and I want a vacation already.

I taught already two entrepreneurship classes for 80 french students in U.S. and feel responsible for the future of the innovation in France. Students laugh at my class saying the regulation kills the innovation in France. I am teaching based on case studies, but all of the cases I crate myself around web3 entrepreneurship, kind of like Aswath Damodaran was teaching a valuation course under a finance course description.

One of the hardest concepts to explain to students is a difference between a situation description and a problem description. It’s fun to have discussion with them about that. Lot’s of entrepreneurs don’t see a distinction as well. Their pitches sound like: here is the situation → this is our solution. As a VC or user you are puzzled… so what? why do I need it? What’s the problem that you address?

February ahead

The wonderful Taisu Ventures booked me as an MC for their Hackathon in Tokyo at Keio University. I am a professor after all, so it sounds great to visit another university. It would be my first pitch competition of the year, so please submit your pitches for Japan and become sponsors and judges. There would be SBI, Goldman Sacks, Movement Labs, FlickPlay, Oort, ​Double Jump Tokyo and other great projects, VC’s, and investment banks in the audience. Register.

On 5-7th of February we are back to NC to attend and sponsor Digital Assets @Duke conference. One of our new partners - GoMining is sponsoring the conference (sounds like GoDuke, doesn’t it?). It you want to try, just register here, and send me your user ID, I’ll drop you a 16 TH miner, that is about 7$ per week at current prices. Please have a coffee once a week for that price.

If you want to book me for an event, don’t hesitate, here is my calendar.

CU in Miami in Tokyo soon!

Sergey

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