Runway Series - Venture Capital / Premium: Recent Episodes

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Going to the opening of the Lausanne (Switzerland) Chapter Kick-Off of the "Agent Economy Association", luma.com/w1713cmj.The agent economy is one of the 3 pillars of our thesis "pre-seed everyday finance" at Olive Capital.Will you be there? Let's meet in Lausanne.

Welcome back to the Farcaster Builders Series, where we go behind the code to meet the builders shaping the Farcaster ecosystem.

In this third and last episode episode, we sat down with JUSTIN AHN, co-founder of QUIDLI.

Listen now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts: runwayseries.co

This limited series was recorded at an interesting moment, just before Neynar’s acquisition of Farcaster and its refocus on builders. The timing turned out to be sharp. Inside, we go deep on the strategies, timing, and mental models of the founders architecting the next generation of onchain experiences, with

• EP#1: Kaloh building Indexy: “From speculation to modern (and agentic) portfolio management” (listen),

• EP#2: Atown building Emerge: “The antidote to AI slop, and the future of onchain personalization” (listen), and

• EP#3: for the final episode, we are looking today at the infrastructure layer of social finance with Justin (@ahn.eth) building Quidli: “The plumbing of social finance”.

Who is Justin?

Justin is the co-founder of Quidli, and he has been living on the internet longer than most people in crypto have been paying attention to it, since 1995. He went on to work in corporate finance, then built one of Vietnam’s first nationwide e-commerce platforms, before spending years moving between countries and experiencing firsthand how broken cross-border payments are.

He met his co-founder Guillaume in France’s early Ethereum community. Together, they share a conviction about self-sovereign internet and frictionless payments that has shaped Quidli from day one.

What is Quidli?

At its core, Quidli is a social graph register, a way to bring your social connections onchain and make them portable, interoperable, and ultimately yours.

The problem it is solving is one every internet user intuitively understands but rarely articulates: your audience, your network, your community, none of it belongs to you. It lives on someone else’s server. Change platforms and you start from zero. Get banned or locked out and it is gone. X is the clearest example today: it is hard to leave not because the product is great, but because your network is trapped there.

Quidli’s answer is a register that lets you duplicate your social graph onchain, making it censorship-resistant and portable across any platform you use.

The immediate product built on top of this is a mini-app that lets you send tokens to people using their social handle, no wallet addresses, no seed phrases, no ENS required. If you follow someone on Farcaster, Telegram, Discord, or even email, you can send them tokens directly. You already know their handle. That is enough.

Why this, why now?

The ENS comparison is worth dwelling on. ENS was supposed to abstract away the complexity of blockchain addresses, and in some ways it did. But ENS became, as Justin puts it, a vanity project. A personalized license plate. Knowing that Vitalik is vitalik.eth only helps you if you already know who Vitalik is. It does not help you send tokens to someone you met in a Telegram group.

A social register solves this differently. It starts from the connections you already have, on the platforms you already use, and maps them to onchain addresses. It is the difference between DNS (which actually works) and a vanity URL (which is just aesthetics).

The payment rails follow naturally. Once your social graph is on-chain, value transfer becomes a native feature of your network, not an afterthought bolted onto a wallet interface. That is the convergence Justin sees accelerating: social and finance, at the individual and org level.

Three key insights from this episode

1. Your social graph is your most valuable on-chain asset.More than tokens, more than NFTs. The network you have built over years, across platforms, communities, and collaborations, is genuinely irreplaceable. Putting it onchain is not a technical exercise, it is a form of ownership.

2. ENS solved the wrong problem.Readable addresses are useful but identity without social context is not identity, it is just a label. What builders need is a system that starts from real human connections and makes those the unit of trust.

3. Advice for Farcaster builders: wrap, don’t lock.Farcaster is one channel, not the whole game. Build web apps that can be wrapped as mini-apps and deployed across multiple platforms simultaneously. The builders who will win are the ones who treat Farcaster as an entry point, not a ceiling.

It is a very useful episode for understanding how portable social graphs can abstract away complex blockchain UX to enable seamless value transfer across any platform.

Thanks Justin, and thanks to all three founders who took the time to be part of this series.

And thanks for reading,Raph | Founder, Olive Capital

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit venturenotes.substack.com/subscribe

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Welcome back to the Farcaster Builders Series, where we go behind the code to meet the builders shaping the Farcaster ecosystem.

In this second episode, we sit down with ATOWN, the founder of Emerge.

Listen now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts: runwayseries.co

The core thesis: personalization vs. slop

In this episode, we explore a powerful convergence: AI agents + diffusion models + crypto rails.

Atown shares the epiphany that sparked Emerge: people are tired of generic AI content (”AI slop”), but they love seeing themselves reflected in trending media. By building on Farcaster, Emerge created a primitive where users tag an agent to inject their own digital identity into memes and trends in real-time. As A Town puts it, “The antidote to AI slop is personalization.”

What we discuss

The conversation goes deep into the mechanics of building a consumer crypto app that feels nothing like a crypto app.

Key takeaways include:

• The mechanics of onchain virality: how Emerge uses “mini-apps” to turn every user interaction into a discovery engine. When a user generates content, they share it back to the feed, creating a viral loop that traditional apps struggle to replicate.

• Escaping the ‘crypto echo chamber’: while Farcaster is the perfect MVP testing ground, Atown discusses the hard truth about venture scale: you eventually have to leave the nest. We cover their roadmap to go “upstream” to platforms like X, using crypto purely as invisible settlement rails for revenue sharing.

• The token dilemma (funding vs. friction): Emerge used Clanker to raise initial runway, a game-changer for bootstrapping. But Atown offers a sober warning to new builders: launching a token solves funding but creates immediate pressure to engineer utility. His advice? Prioritize content proliferation over token gating. “I don’t want to stifle that by saying you have to hold my token.”

Why you should listen

This is a masterclass for anyone navigating the intersection of Gen-AI and web3. If you are trying to figure out how to monetize attention without ruining the user experience, or how to pivot from a “vibe coding” project to a viable business, this episode provides the playbook.

Thanks for reading,Raph | Founder, Olive Capital

9 calls booked but I can still accommodate one 15min 1:1 on March 12.Book the last 15min slotI’ve opened up my calendar on that day for focused conversations:

For LPs in Venture Capital: let’s discuss your investment thesis, your challenges, and what we’re building at Olive Capital

For Pre-Seed Founders: I’ll provide direct feedback on your pitch

One requirement: come prepared with specific topics.No generic questions or casual chit-chat, let’s make every minute count.

To book your slot: https://app.cal.com/rpghrc/15

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Hi,

I am launching the Farcaster Builders Series, a limited podcast run dedicated to understanding the strategies, timing, and mental models of the founders building the next generation of onchain experiences within the Farcaster ecosystem.

This first episode was recorded prior to Neynar’s acquisition of Farcaster. That shift toward a builder-centric ecosystem validates the timing of this conversation perfectly.

In Episode 1, we sit down with Kaloh, the founder of Indexy (read until the end for an exclusive investment opportunity).

Listen now: Spotify | Apple Podcasts

From speculation to modern (and agentic) portfolio management

The crypto market is often defined by volatility that churns out newcomers before they can become long-term adopters. Kaloh argues that the ecosystem lacks a “safety wrapper”, a structured way for users to gain exposure without the binary risk of single-asset betting.

Indexy is solving this by converging Traditional Finance (TradFi) mechanics with onchain assets.

The conversation explores three critical themes:

The “safety wrapper” for mass adoption

Kaloh notes that new users often exit the ecosystem permanently after a single bad trade. Indexy utilizes indexing not just for analytics, but as a retention tool. By offering diversified exposure and historical benchmarking, they provide the stability required to onboard the next wave of non-native users.

2026 roadmap: the transactional layer, and AI agents

While 2025 was dedicated to analytics, 2026 marks the shift to execution. Indexy is moving toward a transactional model where users can invest directly in strategies.

Crucially, this roadmap includes “Agentic Indexes”: building the infrastructure for AI agents to design, maintain, and allocate capital using emerging standards like ERC-8004 and x402. The vision is for Indexy to become the primary coordination layer where both humans and AI agents deploy capital into hybrid portfolios of crypto and Real World Assets (RWAs).

Signal vs. noise in builder feedback

Perhaps the most actionable insight for fellow founders is Kaloh’s approach to feedback. In an environment dominated by token prices, feedback is often distorted by short-term speculation. Kaloh’s playbook involves ruthlessly filtering out “price noise” to focus exclusively on the “power users”, those who rely on the product’s utility rather than its hype cycle.

Investment opportunity in Indexy

We are currently gauging interest for an investment round in Indexy. Olive Capital is preparing to establish an SPV to facilitate this allocation, betting on the convergence of onchain assets and the agentic economy.

If you are an accredited investor and interested in participating in this SPV, please reply directly to this email to learn more.

Thanks for reading,Raph | Founder, Olive Capital

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit venturenotes.substack.com/subscribe

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Hej Venturers, new episode dropping this week, you can already listen to a quick excerpt already today in this email. As usual when published on the main streaming platforms, you’ll get 10min free and the full episode will be available for our premium members. If you’re not a premium member, you can today until April 2nd, 2023, become premium for 50% off (€45/y vs €90/y normally). Next on the show:- Lightweight ZK-centric Layer 1- Enterprise-grade staking- Wallets as an API. In this episode, we meet a “legacy” Middle-Eastern private bank that has a large wealth management entity in Switzerland that launched in 2019 digital asset services for its Ultra-High-Net-Worth Clients a.k.a UHNW, including custody, trading, staking, cryptoart collecting and very soon DeFi.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit upcomingvc.substack.com/subscribe

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Listen now | Since 2017, Arianee has put NFTs at the core of their tech, before anyone else did.

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Hej Venturers,

Before moving to the show today, quick message & offer from us.

June 1-3, 2021 was a real blast with the Runway Series Summit.I am still high two weeks later…

Why?

39 guests, 13 talks, 3 days of high level convos..

For those of you who did not get your tickets, we’ve got your covered.

We’re pulling together the 13 audio replays + detailed shownotes in English 🇬🇧 in a separate & dedicated Substack.

With promo code OFFVN50 you get 50% off on the full & exclusive access to the audio replays including the detailed shownotes (€ 15 instead of € 29) for the 13 conferences.

And now let’s go to today’s agenda.

This is an exclusive 🇫🇷 episode of Product Stories that Axel Sooriah* and I co-hosted back in October 2020 with Jean de La Rochebrochard, Managing Partner at Kima Ventures.

• Axel Sooriah is the creator of the “Product Squad” Community and host of the eponym audio show (also in videos now). He is doing a fantastic job bringing People to Product and Product People together, with a strong focus on DI&B.

What «Product Stories» is.

As usual since mid-May, we now publish a short version of each episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, while sharing with you, Venturers, the full-length one on Venture Notes!

On Product Stories, founders and VCs detail how to create high-performance products that scale, meaning that create user-centric and product-centric experiences, while excelling in distribution.

This Product Stories episode is part of a mini-series of 3 to 5 episodes which will be produced by Axel and me in a 100% opportunistic and occasional manner.

What you’ll learn in this first episode.

It's really a fascinating Product Stories episode with Jean, we were really delighted to welcome him to discuss the weight of a user-centric / product-centric culture when a VC is considering an investment.

In particular:

how a VC identifies, in a founding team, the sensitivity to the dimensions of user and product centricity

whether this culture is acquired or innate

the common traits of companies that stand out at the product level by their business model

how to recruit with a product / user centric culture, best practices

a recent example of an investment by Kima in a startup with a strong product / user centric dimension

how this culture evolves between primo and repeat founders but also from pre-seed to later stages of funding

the implementation of OKR or frameworks to set Product objectives

the “Product Led Growth” a.k.a. PLG model

geographic differences between VCs…

.. and a few other topics.

Enjoy this Product Stories episode!

Quick and sweet today ;)

Speak soon,Raph, Founder @UPCOMINGVC®

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Listen now | With Jeff Clavier, VC @ Uncork // Runway Series Summit: Replays & Shownotes!

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🎧 The two key reasons why we're launching our 3-day Summit.

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Listen now (3 min) |

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