David Pakman brings an unusually deep operating background to crypto venture capital, having served as CEO of eMusic and co-founded Myplay before spending over a decade as a generalist VC at Venrock leading investments in companies like Dollar Shave Club and Nest. He has positioned himself as a specialist on NFTs and crypto-enabled creative economies while regularly engaging in detailed discussions of crypto policy and regulation, differentiating him from more purely financial or infrastructure-focused crypto investors.

• Investing heavily in DeFi infrastructure that acts as the plumbing for the future financial system. He frequently highlights portfolio companies like LI.FI for their cross-chain capabilities and Veda Labs for their yield-bearing vaults, indicating a strong preference for middleware that solves liquidity and interoperability challenges at scale.
• A thesis centered on Gen Z financial behaviors and the shift toward high-risk assets. He connects the economic struggles of younger generations to the explosion of prediction markets, perpetual futures, and online gambling, viewing these not as reckless trends but as rational responses to financial nihilism that entrepreneurs can capitalize on.
• High conviction in stablecoins as a transformative technology that may eventually eclipse Bitcoin in scale. He views them as the essential oxygen needed to transition from niche DeFi to a broader AllFi system, specifically looking for platforms that help enterprises build onchain banking services.
• Focus on consumer-facing crypto applications that bridge the gap for everyday users, often referred to as normies. This includes support for mobile-first, onchain real-money gaming startups like Zoot, as well as projects that make complex technologies like zero-knowledge proofs or cross-chain transfers invisible to the end user.
• Enthusiasm for Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks, or DePIN, which use token incentives to coordinate real-world activities. He points to examples like Raad Labs, which incentivizes drone pilots and weather data collection, illustrating an interest in protocols that use crypto to solve physical logistical problems more efficiently than traditional models.