Q&A with Jared Hutchings of PEER Venture Partners

PEER is focused on investing in early stage companies and tokens in crypto. There are many ways to approach investing in crytpo. It's important to note that we are not providing exposure for individuals to established assets like Bitcoin or Ethereum but rather we are investing and supporting the early companies and projects in the space. PEER could be help be a part of a complete crypto breakfast but we are focused on just the early stage spectrum of this exciting new asset class.

Even crypto firms investing in the early stage crypto projects tend to differ in their approach. PEER is taking a tried and true formula for investing in traditional venture and applying it to crypto. This means we focus on investing in large growing markets, with talented founders, who have reasonable capital requirements, compelling competitive advantages and pursing some truth not yet widely known.

We are investing in crypto based or crypto adjacent companies and token projects. Most of the our investments are directed into companies.

There are three kinds of deal structures we invest in.

1. Company only
2. Company (plus a token warrant)
3. Token only.

Our near term focus is on fintech and gaming. Fintech is an area where the innovation offered by crypto is native and disruptive so it's creating a lot of opportunities. One of our investments to date (notional.finance) for example is a lending platform that connects borrowers in lenders in a way not possible before crypto. Gaming is exciting because of the size of the market and gaming environments are digital. Most games to date have locked the digital features inside the walls of their game but there are exciting opportunities for disruption there. One way of viewing the explosion of interest in NFTs is in the context of gaming.

We will also invest beyond these two categories; the exciting thing about new technology is the possibility of creating things that haven't been scripted yet.

A Rolling Fund is an innovation that creates positive GP/LP alignment. LPs can join the PEER fund by choosing how of the upcoming quarters they want to have exposure to early stage crypto. Most investors sign up for 8-12 quarters and decide how much capital they want to put to work each of those quarters. The total commitment period is treated like a traditional fund commitment in that the total must be returned before the GP participates in the profits.

This also means that investors can decide to renew their commitments based on performance earlier in the process, giving them more control than they would in a traditional fund. If the fund has hit capacity then priority is given to earlier LPs to renew before offering their slot to new investors.

The Rolling Fund on Angel List also gives institutional grade back office support and trusted digital asset custody. When investing in any fund, especially in crypto, compliance and the quality of back office support is critical.