Joining Variant: Geoff Hamilton

I’m incredibly excited to announce that I’ve joined Variant as an investment partner. I’ll be working alongside Jesse, Li, Spencer, and Medha and collaborating with our network of venture partners and builders.

Before joining Variant, I spent over a decade investing in public consumer and technology companies. I was first exposed to crypto by a trading colleague around 2017, but it took a little longer for me to see beyond cryptoassets as speculative instruments and fully appreciate the potential of the technology. Over the last several years, a series of conversations with crypto founders, traders, and venture investors pointed me in the right direction. Inspired by these conversations, I started spending most of my free time reading and learning about crypto. Soon, “most of my free time” became “all the time I wasn’t eating or sleeping,” and it wasn’t long until it was clear that I wanted to focus exclusively on investing in the space.

Builders and creators in Web3 are creating technologies, organizations, and cultural assets that are transforming our world. Whether they intend to or not, everyone who contributes to web3 is taking part in this transformation, which goes beyond building a better internet, or better financial technologies. Thanks to the hard work of many, we’re at an important inflection point in this transformation–a time when many different event paths seem possible.

For me, this is both the “why” and the “why now.” I believe strongly in the power of Web3 to benefit a broad swath of people–to create broad opportunities for wealth creation, to restructure and revitalize work, to enable richer modes of social interaction, and to unleash latent creative potential. Projects in Variant’s portfolio are among those leading the way. For example, Goldfinch is enabling uncollateralized loans that expand access to capital for underserved borrowers in emerging markets. Braintrust, a talent network, helps freelancers maximize their earnings by connecting them with work and by distributing ownership of the platform itself in the form of BTRST tokens. Sound, a music NFT platform, is enabling musicians to develop a new source of income and creating new ways for fans to express their passion. Syndicate is democratizing investing, lowering the barriers for starting an investment fund. And Mirror is enabling communities to raise funds, in addition to providing a publishing platform and other creative tools.

To realize its full, transformative potential, web3 needs determined, visionary, and values-driven builders. And the builders deserve all the help we can provide. I joined Variant because I believe the team is truly committed to supporting founders and the Web3 ecosystem more broadly. The fund is sized for its dedicated focus of seed investing, and every investment we make receives the support and resources of the entire partnership. The partnership is made up of true community builders, who have created some of the canonical educational resources for web3 and early-stage startups. And all of our work as a firm is supported by the Variant Community, a network of 100+ LPs who represent the top builders in the space. I’m inspired by the mission of investing in the ownership economy and humbled to be working with people I view as thought leaders in the space.

At Variant, I’ll be investing in all areas of web3 that align with our thesis and mandate. If you’re working on something that sounds like a fit, hit me up on Twitter or by email at [email protected].