Chris Camp
Chris was an early team member at two successful crypto companies: Blockchain and Coinbase, and an early investor in Bitcoin, Ethereum and a number of other crypto projects.
Chris received a JD from the UC Davis School of Law and a BA in economics from Occidental College. He is, happily, not an attorney. And never has been.
https://twitter.com/christophercamp
Operating procedure
- Do the work
- Share everything
- Invite everyone
- See what happens
“My attitude toward money has always been, ‘I don’t have very much of it but if I use it in a very audacious way, it multiplies it. If you have $1,000, but you’re willing to use it, really not caring of risking, you can make it feel like $10,000.” Francis Ford Coppola, Hearts of Darkness
Mission
Do stuff that is:
- Fun
- Makes the world better
- Other people aren’t likely to do
- May not work, but if it does it will be huge (asymmetric bets)
Background
Previously at @Blockchain, @Coinbase (very briefly), @CooleyLLP, @MofoLLP and a short, glorious internship with the fine folk at the Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics.
UC Davis School of Law - 2010 (not a lawyer, never was)
Occidental College - 2000
Contact:
chris@ugly.ventures
Quotes
“When we look at modern man, we have to face the fact that modern man suffers from a kind of poverty of the spirit, which stands in glaring contrast with a scientific and technological abundance. We’ve learned to fly the air as birds, we’ve learned to swim the seas as fish, yet we haven’t learned to walk the Earth as brothers and sisters.” MLK
“I’m a fallible human being and I’m constantly fucking up.” Terence McKenna (HT Tao Lin, Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation and Change.)
“When we spy our technological fate in the distance we should not reel back in horror of its inevitability; rather we should lurch forward in preparation.” Kevin Kelly
"A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don't know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there." Meister Eckhart
—
William James
“Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.”
“We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.”
“I confess that I do not see why the very existence of an invisible world may not in part depend on the personal response which any one of us may make to the religious appeal. God himself, in short, may draw vital strength and increase of very being from our fidelity. For my own part, I do not know what the sweat and blood and tragedy of this life mean, if they mean anything short of this. If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight,—as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and fears. For such a half-wild half-saved universe our nature is adapted. The deepest thing in our nature is this dumb region of the heart in which we dwell alone with our willingnesses and our unwillingnesses, our faiths and our fears. As through the cracks and crannies of caverns those waters exude from the earth’s bosom which then form the fountain-heads of springs, so in these crepuscular depths of personality the sources of all our outer deeds and decisions take their rise. Here is our deepest organ of communication with the nature of things; and compared with these concrete movements of our soul all abstract statements and scientific arguments—the veto, for example, which the strict positivist pronounces upon our faith—sound to us like mere chatterings of the teeth … These then are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact. The ‘scientific’ proof that you are right may not be clear before the day of judgment (or some stage of being which that expression may serve to symbolize) is reached. But the faithful fighters of this hour, or the beings that then and there will represent them, may turn to the faint-hearted, who here decline to go on, with words like those with which Henry IV greeted the tardy Crillon after a great battle had been gained: ‘Hang yourself, brave Crillon! We fought at Arques, and you were not there!’”