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You're now reading The Brief by Introduction.com.
The private digest for entrepreneurs, operators, and investors shaping the future with technology.
In this industry, the ceiling isn't talent, it's access.
Success is defined by the hands you shake and the company you keep.
We exist to streamline that proximity, ensuring the "best of the best" are never more than one connection away.
Join a private network of leaders from a16z, Goldman, NBA, Coinbase, Stripe, and more.
A proud moment for the whole family.
Arcadia, our parent company, was just ranked by Inc. as the 93rd fastest-growing private company in America, and the 3rd fastest-growing in media, marketing and advertising.
Introduction.com and Arcadia are one team and one network. Arcadia was built four years ago on a simple belief: that trust, attention and influence were shifting away from traditional media toward creators, social platforms and internet-native communities. Introduction.com was built around the people shaping that future.
Today Arcadia is a team of 30 partnering with some of the world's most ambitious companies to shape how their products are understood and adopted at scale. Its campaigns have generated nearly $500 million in client revenue, and the media ecosystem it operates drives close to 300 billion impressions a year.
When they win, we win. And we are just getting started.
September 9. New York. Today.
The room is set. The guest list is locked.
Curated seat by seat, every name hand-picked.
Introduction.com, XDC Network and Plug and Play Ventures.
One afternoon. Two forces about to collide: AI agents and blockchain.
Behind closed doors.
The hard part is done. Now we enjoy it.
To the lucky few already on the list:
you'll get the guest list, the debrief, and any dealflow that follows.
Didn't make the cut this time?
It's planned, it's curated, and it's closed.
Good luck charming your way in now. 👇
🌟 Member Spotlight 🌟
Meet Ishan Goyal 👋
Congrats on the new role as GTM at Tempo, building payments for AI.
→ GTM at Tempo
→ Former GTM Lead at Paradigm
→ Earlier: Business Development at Coinbase and Venture Partner at Orange DAO
Ishan just joined Tempo to lead go-to-market, after running commercial growth across the Paradigm portfolio.
Tempo is a new blockchain built for one job: payments. Founded by Stripe and Paradigm, it is a bet that AI agents are becoming real economic actors, software that earns, spends and settles on its own, and will need rails fast and cheap enough to keep up.
As GTM, Ishan brings developers and partners on board. His read: the shift is already underway, from agent-led growth at Supabase to Stripe's $7B buy of OpenRouter, the money is following the agents.
This is what our network is all about. Keep building.
This week: our members-only meetup at Stablecon.
Off the floor, off the record. National Harbor, DC.
Introduction Member Meetup @ Stablecon
Thu Sep 10, National Harbor, DC
Assets & Access Miami @ Better Days
Thu Sep 10, 6:00 PM ET
Assets & Access SF @ Rickhouse
Thu Sep 10, 5:30 PM PT
Assets & Access Tampa @ The Copper Shaker
Thu Oct 1, 7:00 PM ET
This is what membership looks like.
Introduction.com runs on three things.
Community. Knowledge. Opportunity.
Rooms you can walk into.
A network in your pocket.
A Speaker Series from the people building.
Live dealflow and a members-only job board.
One membership. All of it.
Apply to join 👇
Top Raises
Member Activity
Acquisition
Circle acquired Tazapay for $400M in an all-stock deal. Tazapay connects stablecoins to local bank rails across 100+ markets, and Circle is folding it in to make USDC a default rail for global payments.
A win for Circle is a win for us LFG!
Seed
OpenReserve raised $25M in a seed led by a16z crypto. It is building a 24/7 blockchain-native bank (deposits, lending, payments) and its own rUSD stablecoin, and has already won preliminary OCC approval for a US bank charter.
Almost used to seeing Pyrs Carvolth here every week! a16z stays building.
Series A
Diameter Pay raised $10M in a Series A co-led by CMT Digital and Lightspeed Faction. It gives banks and fintechs stablecoin payment rails (dollar accounts, on/off-ramps, compliance) and says it has moved over $10B this year.
Massive shoutout to Shaun Johnson and the Diameter Pay team on the raise. Big wins!
Non-Member Activity
Bank-backed
Cari raised over $30M in a first tranche backed entirely by banks, including First Horizon, Huntington, KeyBank and M&T. It runs a bank-owned network on a permissioned Ethereum L2 for tokenized deposits and instant 24/7 settlement, with 30+ banks already on board.
A $100,000 Fee Emptied the H-1B Lottery
A year ago Washington put a $100,000 fee on every new H-1B petition, and the first full filing season under it just closed. Applications fell about 38% overall, and at the Indian IT firms built on the visa the floor gave out: Infosys down 91%, TCS down 95%, IBM down roughly 96%. The tell is that a decade of political noise never moved these numbers, because none of it touched the economics, and one fee did it overnight.
The outsourcing model runs on billing a US client for a worker who costs far less than a domestic hire, and a six-figure surcharge erases that spread in a single move. The fee is being challenged in court and may not survive. It almost does not matter: the petitions for this cycle are already gone, the work is already moving offshore or to US hires, and no one rebuilds a labor pipeline around a policy they expect to keep swinging.
Women Got Every New Job
The August jobs report added 162,000 positions, and by the payroll count 158,000 went to women and about 4,000 to men. Over the past year the gap is wider: women gained roughly 870,000 jobs while men lost about 1.5 million. The tell is that the split is structural, not a fluke of one month.
The hiring left in this economy sits in healthcare, education and government, which skew female, while the shrinking side is manufacturing, construction and the entry-level desk work software now does, which skews male. Unemployment reads a calm 4.1%, but underneath it the economy is retiring one kind of worker and creating another. The headline says stable. The composition says otherwise.
The Real Breakthrough Was Boring
This week the loud version of AI drug discovery went viral: a Harvard chemist released PAC-3310, a schizophrenia compound he says ChatGPT designed and he made in a home lab, and Insilico Medicine reported an AI-designed molecule that moved patients' biological age markers back three to four years. The tell is the fine print. One has never been in a human and the other came from 42 patients over four weeks, so both are discovery demos, not proof.
The milestone that mattered landed quietly the same month. Moderna and Merck's personalized cancer vaccine cleared a 1,137-patient Phase 3 in melanoma, cutting recurrence when added to Keytruda, by sequencing each tumor and letting an algorithm pick up to 34 mutations for the immune system to hunt. That is the split to watch: the garage compound trends, the Phase 3 changes medicine. Believe the AI drug that survived the trial, not the one that went viral.
