Does WeWork’s Adam Neumann really deserve his second chance?

Chain Reaction
174 Episodes • Last Episode: March 29, 2024
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Plenty of entrepreneurs have used the crypto boom to plot the next step of their Silicon Valley character arcs, but few of them have an active television series chronicling their misdeeds.

This week, Adam Neumann made his post-WeWork debut, co-founding a blockchain-based carbon credits market, and — more impressively — raising $70 million in funding for it, about half of which came from VCs with the other portion coming from a private token sale.

The news of the deal, led by Andreessen Horowitz, made waves on Twitter, so naturally we had to discuss it this week…

Hello and welcome back to the Chain Reaction podcast, where we unpack and explain the latest crypto news, drama and trends, breaking it down block by block for the crypto curious.

This week, we dove into the Neumann news while also dissecting Andreessen Horowitz’s latest crypto mega-fund, which has quite a few zeroes. The $4.5 billion Crypto Fund IV doubles the size of the firm’s last fund, which launched less than a year ago. It comes at a pretty turbulent time for the industry — tokens are crashing, blockchains are imploding, investors are getting liquidated and the outlook is grim. But crypto companies are looking to find ways to weather the storm; this week we talked a bit about FTX which announced its foray into stock trading.

Our guest: Grace Isford of Lux Capital

In our interview this week, we sat down with Grace Isford. Isford is an investor at Lux Capital where she backs crypto startups focused on scalability and security. In our wide-ranging conversation, we talked about this biggest scaling issues facing web3 and how consumers can stay safe and embrace risk at the same time.

Chain Reaction podcast episodes come out every Thursday at 12:00 p.m. PDT. Subscribe to us on AppleSpotify or your alternative podcast platform of choice to keep up with us every week.

Adam Neumann’s blockchain-based redemption story now sponsored by a16z

 

Chain Reaction

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Lucas Matney

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Anita Ramaswamy

Reporter, Crypto and Fintech

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