▶️ Watch on 3Speak --- In this discussion, we sat down with Notalone — a Web3-native fund — to discuss how they approach crypto investing across cycles, structure capital efficiently, and position ...
Transcript
Hi, my friends, welcome to today's episode. I'm joined by Clement Chekhov, co-founder of Not Alone VC, a global Web 3 and AI venture platform, redefining how capital flows into emerging technologies. Clement previously led global programs and events at the Finity Foundation, where he builds the internet computer, ICP community, network across more than 30 countries, and gained experience scaling startups from emerging ecosystems into global markets. He now leads not alone alongside an international team of operators and investors. We'll explore Clement's journey, the genesis of Not Alone, its dual-fund model, and milestones-financed -financed approach, their views on AI, rewards assets, RWAs, and stable coins, how they cut through the noise in crypto-slash AI, thoughts on market cycles and what's ahead in 2026. Hi, Clement, welcome. To start, can you take us back to your entry point into Web3? How was the journey in this industry so far? Yeah, okay, so first of all. Thank you for having me, very excited to chat. So my journey started off very, very organically. That's why I'm saying that is from very far ahead, I knew that the attention has the value. If you abstract everything that happens, how the value creation system works, right? It's our time, our attention, exchange for the resources, right? So I was very fascinated with that concept, though. on its own. That I started looking into businesses of different sort and realized that e-commerce from all the spaces back then, free crypto had a very good pathway of conversion of that attention into transaction and value creation. I got fascinated about that. There's a lot of nuts and bolts metrics that can be measured, and if it's measured, it can be tweaked and adopted for the sake of more efficient business operations. Let's put it this way, right? So I was really nerdy about that aspect. And at some point, I stumbled upon crypto and saw the fact that that pathway is even shorter. And transactions and business made is even bigger per second of time. So then it totally blew my mind and I knew that I need to be a part of this in any safe form in way possible. That was back in 2018 when it was like a flipping moment for me. And back then I only knew that their friends, they're shipping hardware, and they were very much involved and very profitable. He had somehow, I was a little bit more idealistic about life, and I was more interested in doubling down on the hero aspects of it, right, and how we engage with this digital assets class and how we shape our minds and ideas about it. a side value to certain concepts and think that certain concepts do not deserve as much value. So that psychological trick on its own is very fascinated to me to begin with. So that's the prism, how I approach. What would happen next? So that was my entry, a portion of projects that I've gone through, looked into, and realized that there are two things that are still on the table that I... would like to work with and know how it operates. One was the ecosystems, and one was the DC game. I pretty much understood how VC game works in Web 2 because of the clients and e-commerce space that I've been working with and seen closely. How they did, what they did. In our case, on the retail side, you can always blame either DCs for dumping or ecosystems for not pump it. And I wanted to understand those. both sides of the equation from the inside out. So that's how basically I ended up in a great environment of Definitive Foundation at some point where there was a room and need, great need to expand with different models that harvest attention, convert that attention, generate value for the participation, for the participants in the ecosystem from different angles and expectations. What brings us here now after all of that journey, we are arriving to the last chapter of the Curiosity Circle that concludes to the venture and capital allocation, capital formation models that I'm really excited about now after seeing what I've seen from the cycle perspective. And yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense to be where we're at today. Amazing. Thanks for sharing that. And interesting, very interesting. I'm very curious, before we get into Not Alone VC. the last part of this article. You mentioned behavior economics, and I am a fan. Probably you understand this better than I do. I just touch the surface so far, a little bit of Kainman and a reality, but this is an interesting point. Depending on the incentives and how they're perceived, where you're placing, where you're getting the attention, if you're getting the right attention from the right crowd. But there are tons of ifs and buts, probably, but at the same time, it's ever changing. We went from a world that wasn't that much digital, no matter how good technology we had out there. I think the pandemic intensified how people needed to learn and to go digital and now we have this explosion and it's everywhere and started moving really, really fast. And we definitely, from my perspective, at least, we live in an attention economy that is dominant everywhere. And it's evolving. Of course, we're going to also touch AI and what we're expecting for the near future. Did you have any fun experiments throughout the last five years, I would say? Because I felt like it was changing. Like, if you look back to 2020, 2020, probably it's palpable the differences. Oh, what did you try? What did you try that didn't work if there's anything? From the perspective of, and I always advise anybody to check behavior economics because we can't understand a lot of consumer behavior. And I fully agree with you from the perspective that my personal opinion is that. the Web3 experience, the consumer experience in Web3 is the best ever. That's why it's going to take over eventually. Having everything connected in your phone account and the wallet is there, any wallet that you're using, no matter what, which blockchain shows, we're evolving with... We've definitely got potential for having the best reacts, but currently often it's actually the worst. That's true, yeah, but that's because it's coming from, you know, under the hood out. Right? It's figuring out features and better execution until the point that we're going to go, okay, now it needs to look good and be easier to use. But I do think that the ones that worked, like, it's there. You have, you see a product or a service, it's click, click, or just say, yes, I want this, this amount, and it's there right there. Directly connect to your wallet. You don't have five intermediate, you don't need to wait, not even 30 seconds on your screen. I don't know, my experience from this, even if it's in-person events, IRL, it's... better than anything else. And I know that we live, you know, big cities have access to great, high-speed internet, Amazon and Googles and everything that we have, you know, at the point of our fingers. But the baseline of their tax intensity and on average event is high. One and the most obvious, right, given their past five years, given that it was kind of not slack and actually trying to be useful and very productive. during my time at definitive foundation, right? So then, and that there was a need, great need, to flip the sentiment, right? So from the behavioral perspective, that's, like, very abstract concept to how, it's not one plus one equals two. We've got through all the, like, at least me as a part of a team, and then us leading with the friends and partners, the broader team across 30 countries, and all the relationships in those 30 countries on scale in parallel. Why the idea scaled so well is because the reality of it is that there's always a disconnect between good idea and how it's perceived by the market. And then your job as a project is to sell people onto the vision of your idea. And sometimes you try your angle, how would you say it to... yourself, but it doesn't work really, right? You need to find the angles that consumers, the users, the investors understand, right? And that's the polarity in different dimensions of the communication that you need to be aware of when you build a community, right? Because that's how you manage the expectations of each class of the audience, right? And then if you're parking it up, and then you cannot manage expectations that you sold on. you have the sentiment that goes down. If you sold only this little and got a buy-in for the broader segment of a people, and then you deliver more than sentiment goes up, right? So that's one of the mechanics of it, right? So how do you fix it in cases when you burn it? Let's take this case explicitly, right? Where there's a lot of high expectations and high stakes that were burned for years. How do you make people care that there's still something legit going on because there were a lot of... Great, thanks. So you need a social proof. Imagine I'm a random abstract, again, Web 3, somebody from Lisbon. What do I know about ICP or about any project? Let's abstract as well, that applies. I only know that collection of five touch points in my circle, what they think about it. if we ever had a conversation, right? Or what are the five last news that I've heard about this project? This is even easier because that's pure volume gain. So if you can flood the content with the proper sentiment in the proper quantity, that sets the baseline of bandwidth standard. That's the first layer of the hero change, right? The second layer would be, in this case, that worked for us. If you want... developers, developers and developers, right? You want strong projects to create value, then you support with your mothership of a foundation and all the resources available, support to grow into, like, unicorn, right? That's the police that dream and desire for an ecosystem. How do you get them? Simply by doing workshops and hackathons, it's never going to work, right? The average quality there is not, not like, there's a huge gap in between, right? how do you fix that gap, right? By having a bunch of touchpoints, 360 touchpoints with all the target groups that you have, right? You're not only working on developers, you're also doing something with communities, with content creators, with everyone in the market, really trying to add value to all the stakeholders that are around you. Not a market science, you just slizz them down on a piece of paper, and you work through and by adding value. Simple exercise, but works. Yeah, true, but it's not as easy as it's how to need to build a network over time, you need to nourish and nurture a relationship. The intention over a period of time compounds. Sooner or later, we've seen that, like, historically, data evolving across two, three years, right, for us 30 markets. You see how the sentiment changes, right? Because, like, we are just on the ground there 24-7, doing things that other protocols were not doing. Now, all of a sudden, it's really hard for you to call someone a scammer. that you saw 100 times of a period of the last quarter, as opposed to some non-scammy projects, they're legit like top 10, let's say, let's not name names, but top 10, that never been in your city, right? That you have, like, maybe two online touchpoints and once a year and real-life touchpoint, right? So, again, nothing rocket science-y, but, like, that layer. of volume really matters and really compounds and works out. So a great example is, like, I landed in Lisbon in 2022, people were ready to spit in my face because the project that I work with. Then as I spend a longer time there, after two weeks, people were curious, like, you are not as of the reputation as we've heard about the project itself, so there should be a reason why you're doing something there, right? So we're curious now. So if you can ship that consistently with a program, of value creation across the regions, then it's a network of value. Perfect. I really appreciate that because I think, feel like nowadays, just like we're talking, the tension span is shorter and everything is faster, which makes sometimes the strategies and the end, we might get into a little bit of the go-to-market, but I have this perception that some things are... designed to go so fast and okay, we need to experiment a lot and campaign, especially from the marketing side of things, more experimentation, quick decisions, you know, be data driven, is good. But sometimes I think that the core strategy needs a long term, needs building blocks that will be placed there and you keep, like I said, you got to be consistent and keep building over time because it takes time, but the payoff is better. then keep changing, doing something different than being perceived as scammy, even if the team might not be. Okay, I like this question. You already mentioned a few cases, case of Lisbon. Was there any specific industry event? It might be, you know, even Trump being elected, but is there anything that touched you personally or that connects with your view or that you feel that changed things or added up or helped you when you might be in a... turning point to make a decision was anything from this specific industry that pushed you forward? So many things, actually. So let's start to segment it. 2025 feels like, like Trump launched in his token feels like forever ago, you know? Feels like 10 years ago while it was in 2025. It was like 11 months ago or something. Yeah. So, like, the volume and amount of things that happened within the year in the space is just expanding, right? It's not, it's not slowing down. For me, that was the, that was the point, the ticket point, that markets mature, or, like, it's very obvious for me in 2025 that markets mature to the level that, like, it's not as easy for retail to take the advantage of liquidity and efficiencies, right? Like, same thing with AI. Like, that also clicked to me that I don't see enough people being enough, like in Web 3 can start them out because we are concerned about so many things. But paying attention to AI fixing the shell and the UI becoming the layer of experience in between blockchain and people. That's going to be so much better than us clicking buttons, right? And then us changing the wallets and bridging tokens and staking with, like, signing transactions 10 times, right? I love that, Jess. This is the first cycle where we actually have that, not as an idea, but as working MVPs in the market, that's going to be flooded. And I think these are the seeds that are going to raise up in an X three to five years, right? And then this, even space can be so much different. So always DGEN mechanics, sniping, all of this. It's distracted, it's disrupted forever by definition, like. period, forget about it, right? It's like already going to be a different game starting now on, and we don't feel it yet as much or realize it as much. So that was the second point. The third one was really, and the reason why we have a drive to do what we do at Not Alone Ventures, you know, is how isolated the incentives were. for the previous cycles where if you think about startups, right, startups outside of Web 3, right? They settle down in certain locations, areas, and time, because they want to have an upside on their network where they're at, who they can raise from, right? Who can they work with, right? And that is a natural selection, right? We have the same in Web 3, where you decide and settle down in specific ecosystem. The interesting thing is that... It's still going to take you like two, three years to get serious and ship something meaningful. But because attention span and value creation and exchange in crypto is faster, you get a false positive impression that you're all of a sudden more successful just because you got money faster, right? Because you can't launch a token like in 24 hours after your project creation, right? It gives you false positive creation and a huge gap in expectations with the people that are buying into because... in any other startup outside of crypto, like that participation for retail and financial upside would be delayed up until when the product is actually generated some revenue and not just a shell of a token creation. So that is really inefficient, and we see that there is a better model for Mentor to be created in this space. and it involves the same principle as we built and scaled across 30 countries with hubs network, right? That you first add value in wherever you are, and that it's so, that it works as a sonar system where it basically bounces back, right? And then you can, when someone is doing VD on you or the idea or the project that you represent, right, they would hear certain things that you projected before from different... personas and then it becomes your indirect sort of way of doing BD, just by doing the right thing. And that's the concept of BD that we believe in, that we operate. And just because you're operating multiple locations that need to communicate and reproduce content, at least register photos of, you know, relevance, there is a better... online footprint that sometimes a team of dev that is, you know, gathering, going to a lab every, every single day, but it's not actually putting anything publicly out there. There's not an easy perception of the roadmap to that point. So let me see if I got it right, because I have, there are a few nuances that I want to ask you about your perception on this. I'd fully agree. Trump coin is, was a divisor, I would say, that enable, because I have the ceiling. Maybe that's because where I am in the world, that a lot of experimentation and new projects were held back or people changed their minds into experimenting with anything that would involve mainly a token, not necessarily blockchain technologies, but crypto in general. In North America, at least, but probably also in Europe, and we have good teams. And most of the technology was born in these regions. But I feel like because some people were prosecuted even two years after their projects were out, they're saying, oh, this was an improper fundraise. they held back. And with Trump coin, not to discuss all the rest, not to discuss, you know, Genius Act and the Clary Act stupendi, that felt like time to experiment again. It's not everybody that's going to be prosecuted because now we have a different history. Yeah. And you made a fantastic connection with how AI is improving this. Because again, back to how the UX is not fantastic. whenever you need to see long hash addresses or you need to go through many hurdles to, you know, basic staking or just, you know, bridge between the bridges are still sensitive and I'm happy to see it's getting better. Yeah, yeah. And final thing, in Web3, fundraising is usually faster than usual. There's an easy... access to get a proper fundraise that enables a good team to work for a few years. And it changes because if, I think, if a founding team is not swatting their shirts to get an idea of cash flow, monetization of how that product or solution is going to actually work in the world that we are living in and not perceiving the changes that might work or competition, just having access to that might think, yeah, I can do whatever because now we have, we raised enough. We can survive for five years. I'm thinking about my employees, I have talent. Anyways, I'll reach a point that I have a solution that works, and that might not be true after a while. It's always like that, right? That's the journey. We is a new and upcoming fund, right? We're in between the rock and our place and we put ourselves there on purpose, right? And it'd be in fundraising for the concept and idea and the models and the experience and the takes, right? And proving that this model works already, right? and it works like chicken and egg. Yeah, we got a few valid points, proof of concepts in Q4 last year. They were good. But even from that good returns, even from that data sample, we see that, not…