Jesse Walden (Variant Fund)

The Slow Hunch · Oct 21, 2026 · 48m

My conversation with Jesse Walden, founder and managing partner of Variant.

Jesse has spent most of his career pulling on one idea: technology is most interesting when it gives people more agency.

That idea first showed up for him in the early internet, through piracy, BitTorrent, and the independent music scene. It later led him to crypto, where ownership, permissionless networks, and composability promised a more open internet.

He first tried to put that thesis into practice with Mediachain (which USV invested in back in the day) and later built Variant around a version of the same idea…