TLDR- Welcome to the vc life lol My no.1 advice for new early stage investors is that don’t waste time blaming others when deals go bad. It won’t get your money back, reduce your aura and affect your social capital if the deal is shared with good intention. Key is to learn from these failures For example, Anatoly can endorse many projects on Solana that went to zero, can we really blame Anatoly? No, the lesson is Anatoly tweets anything that contributes to the Solana activities so if you are bullish on certain narratives on Solana, maybe buying sol might be safer for your principal than buying the trench coin if you keep losing money buying them! Also trusting any opinion leaders is a tricky thing because past performance doesn’t indicate future success especially when past performance can be fabricated or hyped beyond reality 2nd piece of advice is to really understand what you invest and build a conviction. Like what Cobie mentioned, if you feel comfortable if the projects not launching for over 2 years, feel free to proceed. Otherwise don’t put yourself in such a vulnerable position! This is one of the main reasons we slow down on our VC investments. We used to think that even if a project doesn’t have as strong fundamentals, it doesn’t stop it from doing a good token launch. We lost money on most of the bets, some performed 10-20x at launch but slowly bleed down to our entry price; some weren’t able to launch or launched poorly due to lost momentum and flopped entirely The VC market has changed a lot this cycle. We used to have 10-100x. It’s really rare now due to lock up, valuations, exchange listing requirements and many other factors I still believe investing as a VC makes sense but only in the context of a strong bull market. And to survive until that (god knows when it comes), we just gotta back strong, long-term projects. That ties back to my second point: invest with a long-term mindset. Exercising the above wisdom should reduce drama and give you more time to shine. We got it! Love from your battle-wounded VC bestie Belinda 💌