The Coward Investor

Africapitalist || Super Investor of the Graham & Dodds Ville || Focused on Exporting Excess Time Out Of Africa.

[The Coward Investor @DrCyri]

@Erniechisom @WatcherGuru You for don old finish.😂😂😂

[The Coward Investor @DrCyri]

@winexviv Then they’d japa to saner climes, after your investments.

[The Coward Investor @DrCyri]

@unusual_whales Wahala for who dey hold Intel 😂😂😂

[The Coward Investor @DrCyri]

@cristiannmillo This is what parking the bus looks like.

[The Coward Investor @DrCyri]

Despite the incredible run, it still couldn’t solve their capital needs 10 years after.

Cash flows beat capital gains every time.

[GURGAVIN @gurgavin]

MOST PEOPLE HAVE NO IDEA HOW GOOD OF AN INVESTOR GOOGLE IS

6% OF SPACEX
14% OF ANTHROPIC
75% OF WAYMO

$900M INTO SPACEX IN 2015 →
NOW WORTH $115B

$13B INTO ANTHROPIC → NOW WORTH $140B

WAYMO JUST RAISED $16B AT A $126B VALUATION → GOOGLE’S STAKE WORTH ~$95B.

THOSE THREE BETS ALONE ARE WORTH OVER $350B AND THEY HAVE 100’S MORE SMALLER ONES $GOOGL

[The Coward Investor @DrCyri]

@FinPlanKaluAja1 How many Nigerians agree to it?

[The Coward Investor @DrCyri]

@Ric_RTP 😂😂😂😂😂 I wan die 🤣🤣🤣

[The Coward Investor @DrCyri]

@BaluardResearch @ROIRecruiter No performance targets. Just straight up reward for doing what exactly?

[The Coward Investor @DrCyri]

@ROIRecruiter @Neocloudz 😂😂😂 Matt will shill this stock till his last breath. Warris this 😆😆😆😆

[The Coward Investor @DrCyri]

@roguebits24 @pfau He thinks trees grow to the sky.

[Osaretin Victor Asemota @asemota]

I keep repeating this. The biggest disservice Western culture did to Africans was to sell individualism and resilience as the solution, while the real hack behind the scenes for them was community. It was what we always had, but we gave it away. I need to write a thread on this.

[Geekay @gkbalogs]

In the last 15+ years, I’ve had more than 50 staff try to copy our business, join competitors, or take customers directly from under us, all in the name of “I can do it” or “na we dey do all the work… is it not just juice, parfaits and salads?” Unsurprisingly, most of them fizzled out before they started.

Not because they couldn’t replicate the product, some even used the same suppliers, and had the techincal know-how, but because they didn’t understand the business of building a business. They saw the surface, not the structure behind it.

People often ask me, “How do I protect my recipe?”
My response is usually: you mean watermelon and pineapple juice? There’s a lot more to building a business than the product. Yes, product matters, but it’s only one piece. In many cases, nailing consistency beats having “superior” quality. The ability to deliver the same experience, every single time, across locations, teams, and over time, is where the real work is.

And that’s why, for me, one of the most unserious things you can say as a business owner is: “I don’t want people to steal my idea.” Because ideas are a small part of your success. Anyone can come up with an idea, not everyone can execute.

Another common myth is that you must have a protectable IP or some special “secret sauce” to win., (i don't know why cake people liek to think they have one secrest recipe... 😂😂). It rarely works that way in reality. Yes, where there are clear grounds for protection, take it seriously. Protect what’s worth protecting. But don’t get stuck thinking you need IP to make it big. You don’t.

What you need is the ability to build, and keep building, long after the “idea” phase is over.

Instead ask yourself these serious questions:

- How do I distribute this product at scale?
- How do I systemise operations, so the business runs well?
- How do I build a high performance culture where people take ownership and standards don’t drop?
- How do I keep my brand top of mind in a crowded market?
- How do I acquire customers predictably and keep them coming back?
- How do I manage my finances properly, so I don’t run out of money?

This my friend is where the real work is.

These are what separates a good idea from a sustainable business.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

My net worth peaked at $1.2 million.

None of it was real.

I don't mean that philosophically. I mean it was located on servers that have since been turned off.

I own eleven properties in the metaverse. Three in Decentraland. Four in The Sandbox. Two in Voxels. One in Otherside. And a beachfront villa in Horizon Worlds that I bought for $214,000 because Mark Zuckerberg called it "the next frontier."

The frontier closed last week.

It's a mobile app now.

Last year I mass DM'd 340 people the phrase "you don't understand how early we are." I have since stopped doing that. Not because I was wrong. Because most of them blocked me.

I got into metaverse real estate in November 2021. Everyone was buying. Someone paid $450,000 to be Snoop Dogg's neighbor. In a video game. With no legs.

The avatars didn't have legs.

I thought that was bullish. "The legs are coming," I told my Discord. "Legs are a roadmap item." Three hundred people reacted with rocket emojis.

I called myself a "digital land baron."

I put it in my Twitter bio.

I put it in my LinkedIn headline.

I said it on a podcast that had eleven listeners. Three of them were bots. The rest were my alts.

My virtual property has more square footage than my actual apartment.

My actual apartment has furniture.

Location, location, location.

My most valuable asset was a plot next to a virtual Gucci store. Gucci left in 2023. The store is still there. Nobody's in it. It's like a mall in Ohio but with worse graphics and no food court.

I held.

Diamond hands.

That's what we said. "Diamond hands." It means refusing to sell while your investment loses 94% of its value. We turned financial paralysis into a personality trait.

A guy in my Discord paid $2.4 million for a 618-parcel estate in Decentraland. Prime district. High foot traffic. I asked him what "foot traffic" meant when the platform had 38 daily active users.

He said I didn't understand the technology.

I didn't.

I still bought more.

We had a DAO. A decentralized autonomous organization. That means we voted on decisions. There were nine of us. Three never showed up. Two voted on everything without reading it. The other four were me and my alts.

We voted to "acquire strategic parcels."

The vote passed unanimously.

I voted four times.

My portfolio peaked at $1.2 million. I told everyone. I made a spreadsheet. I projected 40x returns by 2025. I made a pitch deck. The pitch deck had a slide that said "WE ARE BUILDING THE DIGITAL ECONOMY."

The slide had a rocket emoji.

That was my entire financial model.

In 2023 I bought a Bored Ape for $189,000.

It's worth $14,000 now.

I don't talk about the Ape.

I still use it as my profile picture. People ask me about it. I say "I'm long-term bullish." Long-term bullish means I can't sell it without crying in a Panera.

My mom asked me what a Bored Ape was.

I said "digital art on the blockchain."

She asked why it cost more than her car.

I said "you don't understand Web3."

She said "I understand you live in a studio apartment."

She's not in my Discord.

Justin Bieber bought one for $1.3 million.

It's worth about $90,000 now.

I felt better about mine after I heard that.

That's community.

WAGMI. We're All Gonna Make It. We said that every day. In the group chat. While the floor dropped. While the volume dried up. While 95% of all NFT collections went to zero.

We're all gonna make it.

None of us made it.

But we said it with conviction and a laser-eye profile picture. That counts for something.

It doesn't.

But we said it did. That's decentralized consensus.

Meta spent $84 billion on the metaverse.

I need to say that again.

$84 billion.

More than the GDP of Luxembourg. More than the GDP of Iceland, Luxembourg, and Malta combined. They spent it on a platform where the avatars had no legs, the graphics looked like a 2006 Wii game, and the peak user count was lower than the lunch rush at a Chipotle in Des Moines.

They just pulled Horizon Worlds from VR headsets.

It lives on as a mobile app.

My beachfront villa is now a mobile app.

Location, location, location.

Zuckerberg renamed the entire company for this. Facebook became Meta. A $900 billion company changed its legal name because the CEO watched Ready Player One and said "I want that."

Reality Labs lost $10 billion in 2021. $14 billion in 2022. $16 billion in 2023. $18 billion in 2024. $19 billion in 2025.

That's not a strategy. That's a speedrun.

They laid off 1,500 Reality Labs employees this year. Shut down three VR studios. Killed Supernatural. Put the entire VR social vision in a casket and said "we're pivoting to AI and wearables."

The pivot took four years and $84 billion.

I pivoted too.

I'm an AI real estate investor now.

I bought a virtual plot in an AI-generated world that doesn't exist yet. The founder said it was "the intersection of spatial computing and large language models."

I don't know what that means.

I gave him $40,000.

He has a whitepaper. It's 47 pages. I read the title and the tokenomics section. The tokenomics section is a pie chart. I love pie charts. They make everything look like a plan.

The project has a roadmap. Q1: "Build community." Q2: "Launch beta." Q3: "Scale ecosystem." Q4 is blank.

Q4 is always blank.

That's where the exit scam goes.

My accountant asked me to value my metaverse portfolio for tax purposes.

I said $1.2 million.

He said "current market value."

I said $6,400.

He stared at me for eleven seconds.

I know because I counted.

He asked if I had any other investments.

I showed him my NFTs.

He stared for longer.

I told him they were "cultural artifacts with long-term provenance."

He asked if I'd considered a 401k.

I told him a 401k was "legacy finance."

He told me to leave his office.

The metaverse is dead.

I don't accept that.

I am a digital land baron. I own eleven properties across four platforms. I have a beachfront villa in a mobile app, a plot next to an empty Gucci store, and a cartoon monkey that cost me more than my actual car.

Location, location, location.

The location is nowhere.

But I'm early.

I'm always early.

That's the same as being wrong except you get to say it with confidence.

[The Coward Investor @DrCyri]

@BellsGoblin @kd_burner00 @FrankCurzio @michelamar3 @DigipowerX Hans didn’t get 45% of DGXX. He got way less than that.

The same insiders you paid for the development, ripped you off of all voting rights while taking a huge cut for themselves and families.

Micro cap investing is risky enough, dealing with a greedy management is riskier.

[The Coward Investor @DrCyri]

@BellsGoblin @kd_burner00 @FrankCurzio @michelamar3 @DigipowerX Dilution would happen either way but not for nothing.

In this case, dilution happened for nothing. DGXX shareholders lost 45% of their business to insiders.

They didn’t even regard you as shareholders with zero voting rights.🚩

Hans didn’t get 45% either.

[The Coward Investor @DrCyri]

@FrankCurzio @michelamar3 @DigipowerX “We took 45% of your company for ourselves because we want to protect you from being diluted”

What an interesting spin.

[The Coward Investor @DrCyri]

@adaptiveai Adaptive

[The Coward Investor @DrCyri]

@InvestorIra When you have to become an overnight lawyer to interpret what management is saying, while watching it do the exact opposite in actions, then you probably should have no business dining with them.

Wish you the best of luck.

[The Coward Investor @DrCyri]

@ChapoGrimey You mean raising capital from insiders in exchange for services?

[Peter Mallouk @PeterMallouk]

"I like to deal with people where I feel a one-page contract will do the job. If I have to have 50 pages in there to protect me against the guy I'm dealing with, I'll always wonder whether I needed 51." – Warren Buffett