How Avichal Garg Thinks About Winning in Crypto: Belief, Compounding, and the Bitcoin Thesis

In this episode of When Shift Happens, I sit down with Avichal Garg to discuss why most people lose in crypto, what it really takes to survive long enough to win, and the investing frameworks behind backing more than 25 unicorns. As co-founder and general partner at Electric Capital, and an early backer of companies like Figma, Solana, Kraken, Notion, and Bitwise, Avichal brings a long-term Silicon Valley lens to a simple but uncomfortable question: Are you here because you believe, or are you just here for the numbers?

Genius Is Usually Iteration

One of the first stories he tells is about Bitwise. Today, it’s a multi-billion-dollar asset manager, but its early days were far less glamorous.

Avichal had worked with Hunter, Bitwise’s CEO, at Facebook and knew how strong he was. When Hunter left, Avichal wrote a cheque before there was even a clear business. What followed wasn’t instant success, but 12 to 18 months of iteration, including SaaS ideas, Esports experiments, and AI angles. That pattern matters because success stories tend to look clean from the inside. Up close, they’re chaotic and require the willingness to keep iterating until something clicks.

Silicon Valley’s Real Moat: Belief

Avichal doesn’t glamorize founders. In fact, he says something counterintuitive: many successful founders aren’t that different from everyone else. “The belief system that you’re actually capable of doing things is almost always the bottleneck.”

What makes Silicon Valley hard to replicate isn’t just capital or talent but the abundant spread of belief. You see someone you met at a hackathon 18 months ago suddenly running a billion-dollar company. A switch flips. If they can do it, maybe you can too.

That belief compounds culturally. And culture, unlike capital, is slow and fragile to reproduce.

Unlocking 100x Human Potential

Avichal suspects there are “50 to 100 more Elons out there.” The problem isn’t talent scarcity but access.

He points to structural bottlenecks: education, nutrition, capital, and information. The internet distributes knowledge, crypto distributes capital, and AI will distribute teaching. That means many historical barriers are falling.

What remains harder is agency, the internal conviction that you can build. If most extreme talent is still untapped, then humanity’s upside is far larger than we assume. There may be “100x potential left in humanity.”

Investing as Art, Not Just Analysis

Avichal’s own career evolved from founder to investor. After selling his company to Facebook, he began angel investing and noticed something unexpected. His hit rate was unusually high. A third of his first 30 investments eventually became multi-billion-dollar companies.

That forced a realisation: maybe he was better at identifying founders than being one.

Over time, his view of investing shifted. Companies aren’t just business models; they’re extensions of the founder. Their quirks, values, and compulsions become the organisation.

He describes his role less like a trader and more like a music producer. “I think of my job closer to like a Rick Rubin than like a Paul Tudor Jones.” His job isn’t to analyze numbers. It’s to help someone express something authentic in the world.

So how does he decide who to back?

“You have to spend time with people.” At the earliest stage, he says decisions are “80%” about the person. Pre-seed investing isn’t about polished metrics. It’s about asking: Is this the person who has to build this?

He looks for compulsion. A founder who can’t not do the thing. Someone who has been circling the same obsession for years. You can’t use analysis for that, but if you meet enough founders, you start to recognise it.

The Outsider Advantage

Avichal’s perspective is shaped by his upbringing. Born in India, raised in Kentucky and southern Ohio, he grew up as an outsider. He learned early to read rooms, detect threats, and understand that structural authority doesn’t automatically equal moral authority.

That experience shaped his attraction to crypto.

In 2016, he and his co-founder had to choose where to focus: AI or crypto. AI felt like it would benefit incumbents — data-heavy, capex-intensive. Crypto felt different. It felt like “the little guy had a shot.”

He describes AI as power projection. Cryptography, by contrast, is “an asymmetric defensive technology.” It gives individuals tools once reserved for institutions.

Being comfortable as an outsider also shapes how he reads markets. When journalists, celebrities, and hype flood in, he gets uncomfortable. For him, that’s often a sign we’re deep into a bull market. Real returns, he argues, are usually generated before widespread agreement.

Missionary vs Mercenary

The core idea of the episode is simple: missionaries outperform mercenaries.

Mercenaries chase price so they burn out. Missionaries believe in the thing itself, and so they stay.

In volatile industries, survival is the edge. “If you’re the last man standing, you win.”

Crypto makes this hard because it sits at the intersection of three cognitive traps: we don’t intuit exponential growth, we don’t understand very large numbers, and we misprice low-probability events. The result? Our nervous system constantly pushes us to sell too early.

But compounding lives in the back half. The real gains often come 10 to 20 years after, not 1 to 5.

How High Can Bitcoin Go?

When asked how high Bitcoin could go, Avichal presents a very simple framework. Western governments face unsustainable fiscal paths. Cutting entitlements like social benefits is politically toxic, but raising taxes is unpopular. That leaves currency debasement as the politically viable option. In that system, fixed-supply assets matter. Gold. Real estate. Fine art. And Bitcoin.

If Bitcoin simply reaches gold’s market cap, he argues, you get numbers north of $1 million. But software history suggests markets expand when you put assets on phones. Uber didn’t just take taxi market share; it expanded the market.

If digital gold becomes accessible to billions, the total addressable market grows. That’s how you get to $5–10 million per BTC scenarios without abandoning logic, even if it still sounds outrageous.

The Real Takeaway

The episode doesn’t end with a price target but a lesson in temperament.

Most people lose because they can’t hold through boredom, volatility, or social pressure. They underestimate exponentials. They overestimate short-term noise. They abandon belief too early.

If you want the upside of compounding, you have to survive long enough to experience it.

And survival, in Avichal’s thesis, belongs to missionaries.

👉If you enjoyed reading the summary, head over to When Shift Happens on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform to access the full convo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTN7cCY9G-c