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Storyline

Ten31 & Matt Odell's Portfolio

Ten31 is the Bitcoin venture capital firm run by Matt Odell, and in the Bugleverse it functions less as an investment vehicle than as a machine for converting limited partners’ money into anecdotes. Its portfolio of record includes a coalition of typewriter-armed letter writers, a co-working space for basement miners, a robotaxi that will not let you turn the podcast off, and a beef tallow sexual lubricant whose sole customer was arrested. The Bugle has never reported Ten31 making money, and its hosts have stopped treating that as an accident.

Who’s in it: Matt Odell · Rod Palmer · Richard Greaser · Marty Bent · Pledditor · Whit Gibbs · Greg Foss · Evan Kaloudis

Henry’s note: this page was previously seeded from a sweep of headlines. The sweep’s reading of the 2024 bets holds up against the record; its dating did not. The arc does not close in October 2024 — Ten31 is still being invoked on the show in April 2026, and the span has been corrected accordingly.

The 2024 bets

The firm’s public phase begins in advocacy rather than venture. In February 2024 Ten31 heads up the “Bitcoin Typing Coalition” — BTC for short — an alliance of Bitcoin companies formed to sign angry letters to FINCen and the EIA, escalated to typewritten mail after agency whistleblowers were found summarizing the letters with ChatGPT rather than reading them.1 Marty Bent declined the strategy in favour of non-compliance and foul language, an approach the paper judged flawed on the grounds that it does not involve typewriters.2

The venture bets follow that autumn. In September Ten31 backs WeHash, a “WeWork of Bitcoin Mining” launched by Greg Foss and Compass Mining co-founder Whit Gibbs, offering cubicles, outlets and server racks in downtown office buildings to miners whose wives have complained about the noise.3 Nine days later Odell announces on Rabbit Hole Recap that the firm is funding a Waymo and Uber competitor that forces riders to listen to Bitcoin podcasts, on the stated rationale that “We want to make it easier for everyone to get their 40 hours a week in of listening to Bitcoin podcasts.”4

Diddy Tallow

The write-off is broken on Bugle Weekly 31, and Rod Palmer breaks it before the paper has printed it: he has a leaked letter from Odell to Ten31’s limited partners, and says so on air while the story is still unwritten.5 The disclosure is a total loss of $2.5 million on a beef tallow-based sexual lubricant startup pitched as an upgrade on seed oil lubes. Its go-to-market was one man. “plan was to partner with Diddy and to sell the beef towel to Diddy for Diddy parties,”6 with Bitcoin conferences, Swan sex cult parties and yacht parties as the secondary channels. Diddy was then arrested, and the thesis with him.

The Bugle’s own report the following day names the company Diddy Tallow and quotes Odell conceding the diligence: “we may have gotten a little too caught up in the hype surrounding their ‘Diddy-centric’ marketing strategy.”7

The story was durable enough to survive translation. In Bugle Weekly 31’s TLDR, read back by outside HR specialists who understood none of the surrounding lore, the reviewers still land the fund, the sum and the mechanism intact — “A Bitcoin venture capital fund called ten point three one invested”8 — and preserve the load-bearing detail: “they were planning this big marketing push with Diddy. Oh, wow. But then Diddy got arrested”.9

The fund as a running joke

After the write-off, Ten31 stops being a news subject and becomes a unit of measurement. Rod Palmer’s summary of Bitcoin venture capital, offered when Erin Redwing explains why Bitcoin products never get good UX, is that the money is not chasing returns at all: “Matt Odell and Marty, I don’t think they ever ever invested in a profitable company but they keep doing it.”10

The show tests the proposition on live founders. When Evan Kaloudis lays out a business plan that is an unembarrassed rug — “We get the good folks at the bugle just singing our high praises, and then we rug.”11 — Richard Greaser responds not by objecting but by using Ten31’s involvement as an Odell defense: “anybody that’s being critical of Matt Odell needs to chill.”12 Rod’s counter is the show’s reflex on the subject, and it is about temperament rather than money.

Ten31 is also the fund Pledditor watches. Rod’s question to Kaloudis is how you structure a scam the snitch will not find — “these deals so that they don’t get outed by Pledder? Because Pledder is on the case.”13 Greaser later asks Kaloudis how many Ten31 rounds a company can take before an HR department becomes compulsory, a question Kaloudis heads off by hoping to exit first: “And fuck HR. Zeus doesn’t have an HR department, so that’s just working in our favor too.”14

Odell answers for the fund himself on BTP 23. Handed a joke about Ten31’s Twitter account bullposting through everything, he declines to take it and shills the account straight: “through the noise, the ten thirty one Twitter account is really is really there for the pubs.”15 The same episode gives his standing grievance against Pledditor: Pledditor posted that Ten31 was evil for dumping Fold stock on retail, the document he was reading was a credit deal, Ten31 had not sold any Fold stock, a Ten31 intern told him so, “and he just, like, completely ignored it.”16

By April 2026 the fund has become an all-purpose alibi. When Odell fails to answer something, Rod builds the excuse out of the portfolio without being asked: “He maybe he was buried, maybe he was very busy 10:31,”17 — chasing founders, companies not making money, bear market.

irl: Ten31 is a real Bitcoin-focused venture firm and Matt Odell is a real person. Diddy Tallow, WeHash, the Bitcoin Typing Coalition and the podcast-enforcing robotaxi are inventions of The Bugle.

Disputed

The record does not agree on why Ten31 loses money.

Odell’s account, given to his own LPs and to the paper, is ordinary venture failure aggravated by hype: he “sheepishly admitted” the diligence lapse and allowed that “In retrospect, perhaps we should have done a bit more risk management.”7

Rod Palmer’s account, delivered on air minutes after breaking the same letter, is that the losses are the product. He resolves the write-off into doctrine — the purpose of a system is what it does, and if the fund is losing money he assumes that is the purpose of the fund, keeping its limited partners unable to afford their taxes. Greaser’s verdict on the scheme was “That’s really smart”.6

The TLDR reviewers, reading the episode cold, record the theory but flag it as a joke: “they speculated Tongue in cheek, of course Oh, of course. That maybe ten point three one was intentionally racking up losses for tax purposes.”18 Whether the tax reading is Bugle canon or Bugle banter is, on the present record, unsettled.

Related: storylines/matt-odell-arc · storylines/pledditor · storylines/folds-spin-wheel · storylines/samourai-wallet-saga · storylines/revolution-wont-have-good-ux · storylines/beefsteak-carnivore-culture · storylines/compass-mining-whit-gibbs · storylines/war-on-bitcoin-mining

Footnotes

  1. Bugle News, 2024-02-01 — “Bitcoin Companies Form Coalition To Coordinate Angry Letter Writing”. ↩

  2. Bugle News, 2024-02-01 — “Bitcoin Companies Form Coalition To Coordinate Angry Letter Writing”. ↩

  3. Bugle News, 2024-09-18 — “Greg Foss Partners Whit Gibbs, Ten31 To Launch “WeWork for Bitcoin Mining"". ↩

  4. Bugle News, 2024-09-27 — “Ten31 Announces Investment In Waymo Competitor That Forces Riders To Listen To Podcasts”. ↩

  5. Bugle Weekly 31 @ 37:30. ASR: “Matt O’Dell”. Rod flags the story as unpublished at 37:06. ↩

  6. Bugle Weekly 31 @ 38:15. ASR renders “beef tallow” as “beef towel” here and “beef to aloe” moments earlier; the fund is variously “ten thirty one”, “10 ‘31”, “$10.31” and “country one” across the segment. Rod’s purpose-of-a-system reading runs 41:16–41:26; Greaser’s “That’s really smart” at 42:07. ↩ ↩2

  7. Bugle News, 2024-10-22 — “Odell’s Ten31 Writes Off 2.5 million $USDT Stake In Beef Tallow Bitcoin Start Up Linked To Diddy”. ↩ ↩2

  8. Bugle Weekly 31 TLDR @ 2:23. ASR spells Ten31 as “ten point three one” and “beef tallow” as “beef tylo”; the $2,500,000 figure falls in the following cue. Odell is not named anywhere in this episode. ↩

  9. Bugle Weekly 31 TLDR @ 2:39. ↩

  10. Behind the Podcast 14 @ 59:44. ASR: “ten thirty one”. “Marty” is Marty Bent. ↩

  11. Scaling With Paper Bitcoin @ 15:11. The quote spans several cues; “and then we rug” is its own cue at 15:14, followed by “And that’s when the investors are made full again.” ↩

  12. Scaling With Paper Bitcoin @ 16:16. Set up at 16:11 — “so the ten thirty one’s giving you money to sponsor the the samurai fundraiser” (ASR writes Samourai as “samurai”). Rod’s answer at 16:21: “Shut up. He’s not grumpy. He’s not grumpy. He’s not grumpy.” ↩

  13. Scaling With Paper Bitcoin @ 17:24. This episode mangles Pledditor five ways — “Plenator”, “Pledger”, “Pledder”, “Pleb Predator”, “Plebitor”. Resolved from content, not spelling: he has read every SEC filing back to 1934 and, per Rod at 17:30, “he’s very critical of 10/31”. Not Matt Odell, who was the subject a minute earlier. ↩

  14. BTP 18 @ 1:36:04. Greaser’s Ten31 question (“ten thirty one”) at 1:36:41; Kaloudis says Zeus has taken only an incubator round and hopes to “exit before the time Zeus needs HR”. ↩

  15. BTP 23 @ 22:07. Quote begins mid-sentence; the prior cue is “if you want the signal signal”. “pubs” is ASR for plebs. ↩

  16. BTP 23 @ 29:04. The charge at 28:22, the credit-deal correction at 28:45, “we hadn’t sold any Fold stock” at 28:49; Odell’s moral at 29:20 — “I think it’s fine to be wrong, I think, but you should own it.” ↩

  17. Bugle Weekly 104 @ 1:00:28. ASR renders Ten31 as the clock time “10:31”. ↩

  18. Bugle Weekly 31 TLDR @ 3:19. Attribution to Rod Palmer and Richard Greaser is by role only; neither is named in this episode. ↩