How to succeed in the Cryptocurrency field without relying on luck? Grasp these three principles

In the emerging field of Crypto Assets, true success comes from technical understanding, continuous learning, and value creation, rather than just pursuing short-term gains. This article is sourced from the When Shift Happens Podcast, compiled and translated by PANews. (Background: Dragonfly Partner: AI Agents are just chatbots with meme coins attached and will eventually die) (Context: Dragonfly partner warns that the "AI agent race" will lead to catastrophic losses for everyone: encryption+AI is mostly just moving web2 onto on-chain) In the field of Crypto Asset investment, finding the next hundredfold return opportunity is the dream of every investor. As a top global Crypto Asset investment fund, Dragonfly is known for its unique investment insights and deep technical understanding, with its investment portfolio including numerous star projects such as Avalanche, Near Protocol, Monad, and Athena. In this episode of When Shift Happens Podcast, Dragonfly Managing Partner Haseeb Qureshi shares his legendary journey from professional poker player to top Crypto Asset investor, and how to build lasting influence in this rapidly developing industry. This episode covers the most critical topics in Crypto Asset investment: how to turn Crypto Assets into a team sport, why money can't buy happiness, how to deal with imposter syndrome, and common mistakes made by new investors, etc. PANews provided the text translation for this episode of the podcast. Personal background Haseeb: I'm Haseeb Qureshi, currently serving as the Managing Partner of Dragonfly Fund, a globally-oriented Crypto Asset investment institution managing assets worth billions of dollars. Speaking of my career, it can be described as quite dramatic: starting as a professional poker player, transitioning to a software engineer, then becoming an entrepreneur, and finally entering the VC industry for more than six years. Among all my professional experiences, although Crypto Asset investment is the most challenging field, it is also the most valuable and meaningful choice for me. Host: What prompted you to eventually give up your poker career? Haseeb: It was a very chaotic time. I had built a considerable reputation in the poker world, but my reputation suffered a severe blow due to an incident involving cheating by one of my students. At the same time, I was becoming increasingly weary of poker. I didn't want to look back on my life at 50 and realize that I had spent my whole life playing cards and taking other people's money. That's not the meaning of life I wanted. I made a radical decision: I left myself only $10,000 for basic living expenses, and either donated the rest or gave it to my parents as retirement funds. I wanted to force myself to start over in this way. I was 23 at the time, returning to school to study non-technical disciplines such as English and philosophy. As the oldest student in the class, my resume contained nothing but "professional gambler," which indeed made me panic. This decision gave me a new perspective. As a software engineer in Silicon Valley, my annual income was about $100,000, much less than when I played poker. But interestingly, my sense of happiness didn't change much. Because the real satisfaction comes from learning new knowledge, achieving personal growth, and establishing genuine connections with people around me. Differences between poker and VC Host: From a professional poker player to a venture capitalist, this is a significant transition. How do you view the differences between these two fields? Haseeb: The fundamental difference between venture capital and poker lies in the length of the feedback cycle. In a poker game, the correctness of a decision is verified within an extremely short period of time. For example, when you judge that an opponent is bluffing and choose to call, the result will be revealed immediately. In the field of venture capital, the situation is completely different. The success or failure of an investment decision often requires waiting six to seven years to truly clarify. Just as we often see: a startup company appears to be smooth sailing from seed round to Series A, but may suddenly encounter a fatal crisis in Series C. This latency-based feedback mechanism places extremely high demands on investors' judgment. It is worth mentioning that relying on rigorous judgment, we successfully avoided projects like FTX, BlockFi, and LUNA, which ultimately collapsed. Host: It sounds like the feeling of making the right judgment is also very different, right? Haseeb: Indeed. This difference is very clear. In the fields of poker or trading, the rewards of making correct decisions are immediate and intense, producing a direct dopamine pleasure of "I won." In venture capital, however, success is a gradual process. It's more like nurturing a tree: there are no dramatic climactic moments, but it requires continuous patience and dedication. You will see the growth of a startup company step by step: each round of financing brings a steady increase in valuation, continuous improvement in operational indicators, and collectively seeking solutions when facing challenges. This process requires investors to have extremely strong patience and perseverance. Unlike the rapid judgment of victory or defeat in poker, venture capital is more like a marathon, testing the spirit of long-termism and the ability to create continuous value. It is this progressive growth process that makes venture capital work particularly meaningful. Investment judgment In the field of venture capital, judgment of people is often more critical than analysis of business models. Although investment pros like Naval Ravikant or Chamath Palihapitiya often emphasize breaking stereotypes, the actual judgment process is much more complex. As an experienced investor, I found an important paradox in this. Junior investors usually need to go through a cognitive process: understanding business models and technological innovation indeed requires continuous learning and in-depth research, often requiring the construction of a systematic analysis framework through studying the history of technology and business. But interestingly, understanding human nature is an innate ability for us. Our nervous system is naturally capable of interpreting others. When you feel distrust towards someone, even if you cannot pinpoint the specific reason, this feeling often stems from the synthesis of many subtle signals you receive. However, junior investors often overlook this intuitive judgment and overly rely on surface evidence: "Perhaps my experience is insufficient, and my judgment is not accurate." "This founder has an excellent resume and a well-thought-out business plan." "He is endorsed by so many well-known partners." With experience accumulation, you will gradually realize: you need to learn to trust your intuition. The key is to see through the surface social validation, to perceive the essential characteristics of a person, and to consider the choices he may make when facing pressure, uncertainty, and ethical dilemmas. In most cases, your first intuition is often correct. Stereotypes Venture capital is fundamentally an industry about people. Although the field of social psychology is facing a "reproducibility crisis," the "accuracy of stereotypes" is one of the most robust research findings. For example, when you feel that extremely aggressive people often lack reliability, this judgment is usually accurate. The human brain is a system of continuous statistical learning. Although contemporary culture emphasizes...