Riverstone Quarterly - Q2:26

Before we dive in — a quick note to our readers. This is the first Riverstone update we're publishing in a little while — a lot has moved on our side in Q2, and we wanted to write it up properly rather than push out three separate monthly notes. Many of you we haven't spoken with in a while. If that's you, we'd genuinely love to hear from you — feel free to send a quick, casual message on Telegram to say hi, no agenda needed. Would be very glad to touch base.

Q2 was the quarter Riverstone sharpened what it is: an advisory and diligence practice that also invests, with conviction and on its own account, on a standalone, deal-by-deal basis. Three interlocking arcs defined it — we sharpened how we describe the firm, we deepened our network across two major conference weeks, and we started codifying how we operate internally, with the Riverstone OS and a crypto market intelligence system both moving from idea to build.

1. Quarter Quick Hits (TL;DR)

• A sharper answer to ‘what is Riverstone?’ An advisory and diligence practice that also invests, on its own account, on a deal-by-deal basis — a framing that landed consistently across dozens of conversations in Q2.

• Two anchor conferences, two different jobs. Miami (Consensus + Solana Accelerate) was network breadth; New York (ETH NY) was network depth. Both were about deepening existing relationships.

• Riverstone OS build kicked off. Design phase of our Notion-native operating system largely complete by end of Q2; functional prototype targeted for July. Replaces the Airtable + Granola + Gmail sprawl.

• Crypto Market Intelligence System started. A parallel internal build to publish a running, institutional-grade view of the crypto and Web3 market.

• Advisory & diligence work continued in parallel. Multiple mandates progressed through the quarter. We don’t discuss live mandate or transaction specifics publicly.

2. Firm Positioning

Q2 was the quarter Riverstone worked out how to describe itself. The question we kept getting was some version of ‘so what is Riverstone, actually?’ — and much of the quarter was spent answering it. The framing that landed: Riverstone is an advisory and diligence practice that now also invests, on its own account, on a deal-by-deal basis. Investors don’t need a new mental model; they need to know which existing one applies.

We spent much of the quarter in conversations with funds, family offices, and angels — testing that framing and deepening relationships. The consistent read: the market understands a disciplined, diligence-led practice that occasionally invests with conviction far more readily than a vague ‘boutique BD firm.’

3. Conferences — Miami and New York

Q2 had two anchor conference weeks, each doing a different job:

• Miami (Consensus + Solana Accelerate, May). Network breadth — two conferences stacked in one city as a single continuous push, focused on reconnecting with funds and partners we already know and meeting a few new ones.

• New York (ETH NY, June). Network depth — selective, focused attendance, with warm reconnects prioritised over cold intros. The week itself is overwhelming; showing up with a filter beats showing up with an open calendar.

4. Internal Operations & Team

• Business as usual on team cadence. Weekly team syncs, Asher/Mike syncs, mandate follow-ups, and internal reporting all ran cleanly through the quarter.

• Mike as Managing Partner. Q2 was the quarter Mike’s role formalised into carrying the institutional-finance and diligence load.

• Senior analyst on standby. We have a senior analyst identified and on standby to step into formal diligence workstreams as the workload justifies it — a scalable path without carrying full-time cost prematurely.

5. Product & Tech Experiments

• Riverstone OS (Notion-native operating system). Design phase largely complete in June. Multiple deep working sessions produced a Notion-native CRM replacing the Airtable + Granola + Gmail sprawl — Companies, Contacts, Deals, Intros, Meetings, and Touchpoints, with bidirectional relations, Granola-to-Touchpoints flow, Gmail last-contact tracking, and Notion AI queries across everything. Functional prototype targeted for July.

• Crypto Market Intelligence System. In parallel, we’ve begun building an institutional-grade market intelligence layer. In our own words:

The intent is to publish a running, institutional-grade view that adds durable value to the founders and operators reading Riverstone’s material.

6. Market Intel (What Caught Our Eye)

• The ‘investor’ framing lands. The cleanest positioning is that Riverstone is an advisory and diligence practice that also invests on its own account, deal by deal — a much sharper anchor than ‘boutique BD firm.’

• Capital is concentrating. Fewer but larger cheques, a strong preference for revenue-positive businesses, and more caution on pure-token bets.

• The conversation is more institutional than a year ago. Multi-billion-AUM alternative asset groups, channel partnerships with infrastructure providers, and family offices asking for prospectus-grade documentation before writing meaningful cheques.

• Consumer × crypto is opening up again. Renewed appetite for consumer brands with genuine off-chain distribution and crypto-native origin — a category that looked dead 18 months ago.

• Appetite is warmer than the headlines suggest. Catch-up conversations across June landed better than expected; investors are more actively looking than the general market tone implies.

7. Learnings & Reflections

• 2–3x every timeline for a new process. Anything done for the first time — new documentation, new workflows, new infrastructure — took longer than the initial estimate. Being new to a process is expensive in time. Plan for it.

• Doing it all in parallel is the actual test. The temptation was to pause advisory work while standing up new internal processes. We didn’t. Every workstream stayed live. Harder, but it’s the only way to prove the model.

• Two conferences, two different jobs. Breadth vs depth. Broad attendance produces exhaustion without pipeline; focused attendance produces both energy and results.

• Warm reconnects are the highest-ROI conference activity. Cold intros at a dense event have a very short half-life. Warm reconnects convert.

• Positioning is not a one-conversation exercise. It took an entire quarter of conversations to arrive at a clean answer to ‘what is Riverstone?’

• The system needs to carry more load. The plan going forward is to lean harder on AI and internal systems to make every process more efficient. Scale should come from tooling first, headcount second.

8. Looking Ahead (Q3 Preview)

• Riverstone OS — functional prototype. Ship the functional prototype in July and migrate off legacy tooling in parallel.

• Crypto Market Intelligence — daily cadence. Begin publishing the daily intelligence brief; refine the narrative-tracking loop across the quarter.

• Advisory & diligence mandates progressing. Continue moving active work from outreach into feedback and commitment stages.

• Positioning — externalise it. Now that the internal answer is clear, put the framing into content, deck, and website.

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