Ian Balina

Ian Balina@DiaryofaMadeMan · 17 小时前赛道影响

One easy research mistake is staying with the market you already know. Our long-only crypto backtests showed little edge in a bear market. Instead of tweaking the same crypto strategies again, we tested non-crypto markets on Polymarket. That's where we found an edge that didn't depend on Bitcoin going up. We're currently testing it with live capital. If the data says your old strategy isn't working, stop forcing it. Test a different market.

AI：偏主题投资表达，释放对基础设施与新叙事的偏多信号。

Ian Balina@DiaryofaMadeMan · 19 小时前观点输出

Building a company made it easy to let my health slide. What helped was treating health like a protocol: measure it, adjust it, repeat it. A dashboard can show the problem. It cannot do the work for you.

AI：延续个人公开立场，强调长期主义、执行效率与行业方向判断。

Ian Balina@DiaryofaMadeMan · 23 小时前赛道影响

One of the fastest-growing things I ever built was a Google Sheet I couldn't keep. IBM Watson trained me to look for patterns in messy data. Over one weekend, I applied that approach to ICO research and started sharing the process live on YouTube. People asked for the spreadsheet. Within three months, more than one million people were visiting it every month. The traffic proved the research mattered. It also exposed the problem: a spreadsheet was never going to scale into the product people needed. So the sheet was sunset. About a year later, the idea became Token Metrics. When a prototype breaks under real demand, don't protect the prototype. Preserve what people are pulling from it and rebuild around that.

AI：偏主题投资表达，释放对基础设施与新叙事的偏多信号。

Ian Balina@DiaryofaMadeMan · 1 天前观点输出

Blue-chip VC backing is a good initial signal. But you can't use it all the time.

AI：延续个人公开立场，强调长期主义、执行效率与行业方向判断。

Ian Balina@DiaryofaMadeMan · 1 天前市场影响

Before I left IBM, crypto had already taken over nearly every hour outside my job. I was documenting the journey publicly as Diary of a Made Man, and the community kept pushing me to go deeper. On a work trip to Boston, I listened. At 3 AM, I launched a Patreon from my hotel room. By 9 AM, enough people had committed for me to take the research full time. That was the turning point. From there, the decision came down to the downside. I had saved enough through crypto to take the risk. Worst case, I lost everything, moved back into my parents’ basement, and started over. That was a risk I could take. So that same week, I told my boss I was leaving and gave one month’s notice. The lesson isn’t to quit your job. It’s to answer two questions before making a big move: Will people support the work? Can you survive if it fails?

AI：偏平台经营与生态扩张，强调交易平台和应用入口的长期位置。

Ian Balina@DiaryofaMadeMan · 2 天前观点输出

A winning record can still hide a losing strategy. Our latest settled signal review went 11 for 16. Sounds good. But a hypothetical equal-dollar basket would have finished down about 5% before fees because the winners did not fully pay for the misses. Before I trust any model, I want the price-weighted return. Win rate alone is incomplete.

AI：延续个人公开立场，强调长期主义、执行效率与行业方向判断。

Ian Balina@DiaryofaMadeMan · 4 天前赛道影响

When young people would rather bet on the future than build one, the problem is bigger than gambling. It means the normal path feels closed. The answer isn’t another lecture about discipline. It’s more real upside from work: skills, equity, ownership, and a believable path forward. People need skin in the game.

AI：偏主题投资表达，释放对基础设施与新叙事的偏多信号。

Ian Balina@DiaryofaMadeMan · 4 天前观点输出

@flyolly @tokenmetricsinc The newsletter

AI：延续个人公开立场，强调长期主义、执行效率与行业方向判断。

Ian Balina@DiaryofaMadeMan · 6 天前观点输出

If your startup can only win by doing the same thing 10% better, the moat is probably weak. The best businesses change the basis of competition. Different product. Different distribution. Different economics. Do not fight harder for the old game. Build a new one.

AI：延续个人公开立场，强调长期主义、执行效率与行业方向判断。

Ian Balina@DiaryofaMadeMan · 7 天前赛道影响

I think that’s where this is headed. But even with great AI, taste still matters. The tools get faster. The bar for judgment gets higher.

AI：偏主题投资表达，释放对基础设施与新叙事的偏多信号。