This is Eric Golden and my guest this week is Mike Dudas. Mike started his career at Disney, helped build Google’s payment business, and worked at Venmo before taking the plunge into entrepreneurship and crypto full-time. He co-founded two businesses and is now an early-stage investor at the firm he started, 6th Man Ventures. We cover his career arc and dig into the highs and lows along the way before discussing what has him most interested in Web3 at the moment. Please enjoy my conversation with Mike Dudas.   For the full show notes, transcript, and links to the best content to learn more, check out the episode page here.   -----   This episode is brought to you by OKX. You may have seen OKX on McLaren’s Formula 1 race car or Manchester City’s football kit. But what is OKX? OKX has over 730 spot trading pairs, 280 derivatives markets, and 1000 options markets. It processes 400,000 requests per second with 99.95% uptime. That’s why over 20 million traders and institutions choose OKX when they want to trade. Visit okx.com to learn more.   -----   Web3 Breakdowns is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Web3 Breakdowns, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.   Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here.   Follow us on Twitter: @Web3Breakdowns | @ericgoldenx | @patrick_oshag    Show Notes [00:02:11] - [First question] - Why it seems like he’s so connected across different networks  [00:04:51] - Whether or not he always wanted to be an entrepreneur [00:06:30] - When crypto entered the picture for him   [00:09:19] - Why he didn’t jump in earlier after being fully aware of the potential of crypto [00:10:44] - What taught him the skills he needed to confidently step into the startup space [00:13:29] - Being in the business of manufacturing courage  [00:15:01] - The transition from Button to The Block in 2018 [00:20:54] - Recruiting people to the journalistic side of cryptocurrency  [00:22:24] - Promise-driven sales and having strong convictions that are loosely held   [00:29:34] - Things he said as a Bitcoin maximalist that he regrets [00:30:33] - Selling The Block and what happened in the aftermath   [00:38:11] - What lead him from The Block into venture capital  [00:41:47] - Going from a 7 million dollar fund to a 140 million dollar fund  [00:43:27] - How he sees the pre-seed and seed stage focus in crypto playing out  [00:48:04] - What the most exciting area is today and the deals that come across his desk [00:49:51] - How much of Twitter is a personal outlet for him and how he handles it  [00:54:05] - What he’s most excited to see built over the next six months and six years