The VCs Who Chased Crypto Are Gone. He's Still Here.

In 2021, crypto VCs were walking into LP meetings with 84x returns. Token launches were minting millionaires overnight. Fund managers who'd never seen a full market cycle were being celebrated as geniuses.

Marlon Nichols watched it all from LA. Three funds. $600 million under management. A portfolio that included Gimlet Media (sold to Spotify), Pipe (150x paper gain), and a growing bet on African startups.

His LPs started asking questions. Why aren't we in crypto? Why are we leaving money on the table?

His answer: "Have you followed up and seen where those funds are now?"

They're all gone.

The graveyard funds. One fund deployed, no second fund raised. Just sitting there, waiting for outcomes that will never come.

Marlon is still here. And he's making a bet most VCs are too scared to make.

THE SEVEN-YEAR TRUTH

When Marlon joined Intel Capital, his managing director told him something he didn't want to hear.

"It's going to take you like seven years to actually get good at this."

Marlon thought it was crazy. He was already good. Obviously.

"But over time, I understood what he meant. You have to get the reps. You have to see it. You can read all the books you want. You can talk to as many mentors as you want. But until you see a bunch of different business models, until you see businesses growing, failing and succeeding, you won't know what to look for."

Intel Capital was deploying $200-300 million per year in Series A and B companies. That's a lot of reps. A lot of pattern recognition. A lot of conversations with partners who'd seen things fail before he even started.

"What is it about this deal? I think this deal is great. Why don't you like it? Oh, well, because when we saw company XYZ and they were presented with the same challenge, it was hard to overcome. And this is why."

You take that on board. It doesn't mean it's gospel. For every company that failed that way, there's probably one that succeeded. But you process it. You start creating your own lens.

Seven years later, you're finally dangerous.

Most people quit at three.

THE DISCIPLINE TEST

2021 was the ultimate test.

Crypto VCs weren't just winning they were humiliating traditional venture. 84x returns made 10x look like failure. The narrative was clear: the old guard doesn't get it.

MaC Venture Capital had university endowments, pension funds, and state treasuries as LPs. These institutions didn't invest in MaC to gamble on tokens. They invested in a strategy.

"Venture is risky, but what you just described is even riskier. They invested in our strategy, not that. So we just stayed the course and did what we said we were going to do."

The result? Three funds in four years. $15 million to $110 million to $250 million. While the crypto tourists became cautionary tales.

"There's a difference between being a good investor and being good at operating a fund. The skill sets are very different."

Being a good investor means access to deal flow, being a good picker, and winning deals. Being a good fund manager means running a business. Making hard decisions about sectors, hiring, talent development, operations, legal compliance, LP reporting.

"Once we got to a certain size, we hired a COO. I was like, okay Jennifer, you do all of that. I don't want to do any of this anymore. I want to go do the thing that I think I'm pretty good at the investing side."

Most of the 2021 VCs never understood this distinction. They thought picking winners was the whole game. It's not even half of it.

THE ENERGY THESIS

Now Marlon is making a bet that sounds boring until you think about it for five minutes.

Energy.

"Our grids around the world were built to withstand a certain capacity. With AI, you're going to pull more compute power, which means you're actually going to pull more power as well."

He paused and looked around Lagos.

"How many times does the grid fail here? And you're powered by your gas generator?"

Then the part that should wake everyone up:

"The same thing happens in Dallas."

This isn't an African problem. This is a global infrastructure crisis hiding in plain sight. AI requires compute. Compute requires power. The grid wasn't built for this load. And it's already buckling.

"If we sit around and wait for governments to rebuild the grid, it's not going to happen."

So Marlon is funding the companies that won't wait. Nuclear. Solar. Batteries. Software that optimizes energy distribution across fragmented systems.

He just committed to a battery optimization company all software, leveraging AI. The moat? Proprietary data from energy providers.

"They're working with all these energy providers and each of these providers has their own data sets. You're collecting data every day from these individual sources and bringing it together. Unless OpenAI gets access to that proprietary data, they're never going to be able to compete."

Everyone is chasing AI applications. Marlon is chasing what AI can't run without.

THE CULTURAL THESIS

Before energy, before Pipe, before any of it—there was a thesis that made Marlon's career.

Culture drives markets.

"The one thing that the through line between consumer products and business products is people. And the thing that people do is they act, they behave. So if you think about what is popular culture—it's literally a group of behaviors that have become social norm."

This is how he invested in Gimlet Media in 2015. Podcasting wasn't mainstream. Most VCs thought audio was dead radio was dying, why would people listen to shows on their phones?

Marlon saw behavior. Commuters with earbuds. Gym-goers who wanted entertainment without screens. A shift happening in plain sight.

"They were building what I called HBO of podcasting. Sure, they had conversational shows, but they also had mysteries and science fiction that presented as if you were watching a movie, but you're listening to it."

The check was small maybe $500K from a $15 million fund. Spotify bought Gimlet for $230 million. The thesis was proven.

But here's what most people miss: the thesis isn't about being early to trends. It's about understanding why behaviors change.

"What we try to do is identify how are people behaving? What are the trends we're seeing pick up in different parts of the world? And come up with a perspective. Do we think this thing is going to have staying power? If it is, how do we think it's going to manifest itself down the road? And where should we start to invest so that we can capture that?"

18 to 24 months before Sand Hill Road catches on. That's the window. That's where the returns live.

THE FOUR NON-NEGOTIABLES

When Marlon evaluates founders, he's looking for four things. No exceptions.

One: You have to be an attractor.

"You can't name me one company that had a multi-billion dollar outcome that was built by one person, run by one person. Or built and run by subpar talent. You need exceptional talent to build these companies."

Solo founders can work. But only if they pull A-players into their orbit.

Two: Someone has to know how to sell.

"You can't have a product company and not be able to move the product."

Most technical founders think the product sells itself. It doesn't.

Three: Someone has to understand product management.

"You can take a thought and turn it into a thing. That's a science and an art."

The gap between idea and execution is where startups die.

Four: Someone has to be technical.

"If you outsource talent to build a thing, most of the time you end up building the wrong thing. Now you just spent two million dollars building the wrong thing. And that took time. And it also took capital."

They don't have to build it themselves. But they have to understand what's being built well enough to guide whoever is building it.

THE FOUNDER RED FLAG

I asked Marlon what turns him off in a pitch.

"The know-it-alls. You should have a very good grasp on the thing you're making, who the competitors are, what's going on in the space. You should know that way better than I should know it."

But there's a flip side.

"There are other things about business building that I may know a little more about than you do. And the founders that are just arrogant and can't take a step back and listen? I don't have to be right. Maybe I'm not. But if I'm going to partner with you, I need to know that we can have those conversations."

He's seen what happens when founders can't do this. He told me about a co-founder conflict in his portfolio. A woman called all the investors saying her male co-founder had to go. She hadn't talked to him first.

"We said, well, have you talked to him? No. Well, you should talk to him. And actually you need to talk to him within such and such time because we're going to have to talk to him if you don't."

She talked to him. The first thing he did? Emailed all the investors with her on copy: "We're having a challenge. Give us a week to resolve it."

He worked with her through that week. She left the company. He resolved it.

"That company is doing amazing. He was decisive. Not just decisive—he was an adult."

The investors didn't have to intervene. The founder handled it. That's what you're looking for.

THE KITCHEN TABLE

Before MaC, before Intel Capital, before any of it—there was a kitchen in Jamaica.

Marlon's mother was a cosmetologist. She started as a nanny, putting herself through cosmetology school. Then she did hair in their kitchen. Then she rented a booth at someone else's salon. Then she owned her own salon.

"I just saw her take nothing and turn it into something that basically provided for our household."

That salon paid for Catholic school. That salon created options.

"Even before I realized that I admired it, I always admired it. And wanted to be a part of that journey in some way."

His career has been three acts. Operator, tenth employee at a startup that expanded into the UK. Consultant advising executives but never seeing if the ideas actually worked. Then venture the Goldilocks zone.

"I do get to go on the entrepreneurial journey with the founders as their partner. I do get to tap in from time to time to help them create strategy and think about operations. But I don't have to own it."

The entrepreneur in him wants variety. Different challenges. Working with multiple startups gives him that.

"The ups and the downs. All of it. I enjoy it."

THE AFRICA BET

Marlon has been investing in Africa since 2015. It started with a friend's friend building a company in Nairobi. The stipulation: join the board and come to Nairobi at least once a year.

"That was a blessing in disguise. I got to meet other entrepreneurs, other investors, ecosystem players. It made me more comfortable to invest in that environment because now I knew who the players were. And I knew I wouldn't just be going it alone."

Then a Nigerian LP found him at a conference in Portugal. Random. Marlon was in the green room trying to work. This guy sat down and wouldn't stop talking.

"After a while, I was like, he's not going anywhere. So I close the laptop, start talking to him. He invited me to dinner. I hung out with him for three days straight. Then he flew to San Francisco, met my partners, and decided he was going to invest."

That LP required the same thing: come and experience Nigeria.

"I think I came three or four times that year. Meet one entrepreneur, meet another entrepreneur, meet other investors, bank heads, the head of Endeavor Global. All of it."

Now he's backing companies like Shackle Mobility, a Nigerian startup building what he calls "an auto dealership in your pocket." Lending to secondhand car dealerships. Letting dealers trade with each other across the country. Sourcing cars internationally. Providing auction access, repair services, storage.

"Everything you need to run your dealership right on your phone. They're profitable already. It's a global business that started in Nigeria."

And Carrot Credit, letting Africans leverage their crypto and equity holdings as revolving credit. Because traditional collateral requirements don't work when the average age is 18 and nobody owns a house.

"Revolving credit doesn't really exist here. The mobile carriers offer small numbers. The others require physical collateral a lot of money in the bank or a home. A lot of people don't have that."

The pattern: African problems require African solutions. Not Silicon Valley templates applied to Lagos.

THE QUESTION

Marlon's been at this for over a decade. He's seen the cycles. Watched crypto VCs rise and fall. Watched the funding winter kill good companies.

His managing director was right. Seven years to get good.

But here's what nobody tells you about those seven years: they're not just about learning what works. They're about surviving what doesn't.

The VCs who chased crypto are gone. The ones who'll chase the next shiny thing will disappear too.

The ones who stay? They're the ones who understood something simple:

Discipline compounds. Hype doesn't.

Marlon is still here. Still backing founders. Still betting on energy, on Africa, on the unsexy infrastructure that makes everything else possible.

The question for everyone else: Will you be here in seven years?

Watch the full episode

Marlon breaks down how he spots trends 18-24 months before Silicon Valley, why he passed on crypto at 84x returns, what kills most founder relationships, and why the energy crisis is the biggest investment opportunity nobody's talking about.

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Chika & Eche
Co-Hosts, Afropolitan Podcast