Club Bulletin #37
The weekly SEED CLUB roundup.
On Wednesday, we released Drop 4 in our đď¸Witness collection: Revenue and we broke down web3 business models. (Yes! They do exist!) The rundown certainly doesnât cover everything, and weâd love to hear of any innovative business models youâve come across in your blockchain travels that we might have missed. But it should be clear how much potential there is to create sustainable value in crypto if youâre able to build something people want to be a part of.
For all 328 of you who collected Revenue, youâre allowlisted for the next drop. Everyone else collects for 0.023 Î. Find us next week with Drop 5 in the đď¸Witness collection ⢠on the way to ęęŁęŞę¤ę¤ę 2023 đď¸ âď¸ đď¸ And since you asked: yes, there may be some memetic utility for folks who collect every drop in the đď¸Witness collection đŤŁ
ICYMI, Seed Club Ventures announced their $25 million dollar fund. Welcome to the fam SCV. Read their full hello world post below + the scoop on TechCrunch.
This post was originally published on the Seed Club Ventures blog. Visit them at seedclub.ventures for more info.
We are excited to announce Seed Club Ventures, a $25M venture DAO investing in the world of Internet-Native Organizations. Seed Club Ventures is a community of over 60 leading crypto funds and angels. We are born out of Seed Club, the leading network for builders at the intersection of crypto, culture, and community.
Seed Club Ventures supports founders at the earliest possible stages and has already invested in the pre-seed and seed rounds of a diverse set of projects, including Guild, Stability AI, Lens Protocol, Coordinape, and Molecule.
We see the current growth of internet-native organizations as the next step in the evolution of human coordination. We are excited to support the founders who are building the tooling that will serve as the foundation for these types of organizations. And, as we continue to build the infrastructure, we also look to emergent use-cases and applications in verticals where crypto-native tools and principles can be applied, including science, art & music, social, and artificial intelligence.
Internet-native organizations
Historically, fundamental technological shifts have required new structures for collaboration. The Age of Discovery in the 1600s led to the joint stock company and the Industrial Revolution gave us the limited liability corporation in 1850. These innovations were native to the technology and culture of their times and allowed for new types of economic activity and value creation that underpinned huge growth in those periods. Yet since then, there has been little meaningful innovation in these structures. Decades into the Internet Age, in a time of instant digital collaboration, we still grapple with archaic institutions for governing and sharing value online.
Fortunately, technological primitives and foundational concepts from the crypto space offer new ways to approach this. New types of organizations â DAOs, tokenized communities, guilds, squads, metalabels â are now possible. These are true internet-native organizations, with novel properties:
They can be set up in minutes, making it easier to get started and experiment with new ideas. They can flexibly distribute ownership, giving users upside in the value they create. They can dynamically track contributions, creating more adaptable ways to incentivize and acknowledge work. They can be open-source and transparent, cultivating trust within the network and sharing learnings throughout the space. They can automate rules and tasks to run on code, reducing the need for a corruptible centralized intermediary. They are borderless, making it easy for anyone worldwide to collaborate toward a shared goal. They are permissionless and forkable, allowing for entirely new group decision-making dynamics.
Ultimately, internet-native organizations combine a rich new design space for governance, ownership, and incentives with the ability to quickly experiment and learn from others who are doing the same. It is a space well-suited for emergence, and we believe it will lead to radical new approaches for creating and sharing value in our time.
Seed Club Ventures
Creating a world of internet-native orgs will require brave founders building at the edges, experimenting with new tools and best practices. Our focus is offering these builders long-term and values-aligned capital.
We strongly believe that investors in this new frontier must also embody its principles. Seed Club Ventures is therefore structured as a DAO: a community of 60 members, ranging from pioneering crypto funds to passionate builders, all working towards the future we imagine. The combined experience of Multicoin Capital, Delphi Digital, Collab+Currency, Dragonfly Capital, SV Angel, and many others gives us the ability to support our founders with whatever they need.
We also recognize the need to be efficient and nimble in a quickly-evolving industry. Many hours of legal work helped us develop a novel structure that allows for the easy creation of subDAOs ââ small, independent teams that move quickly and allocate capital in their respective areas of expertise. This is our vision for the future of early-stage investing, with the best of all worlds: diverse opinions; a wide network to source & support projects; and functional teams for efficient execution.
Importantly, we have a core team that underpins this structure. They oversee the investing, diligence, and portfolio support processes, and ensure community best practices are upheld. SCV was spun up by NiMA Asghari and Anthony Avedissian, with the close collaboration of Jess Sloss, the instigator of Seed Club. NiMA brings a background in Robotics and AI R&D, as well as time spent starting and scaling community funding at L1 and data protocols. Anthony brings 5 yearsâ investment experience at firms including Amber Capital and Oxford Science Innovation. Six months in, Timour Kosters joined the team, bringing a decade of experience as a startup founder and operator.
Our network and connection with Seed Club adds to our differentiation. Seed Club is the Internet Native Accelerator, and the leading network for builders at the intersection of crypto, community, and culture. Our access to this blossoming ecosystem makes us an ideal partner for founders building the tools that underpin its foundation.
Looking Forward
As the space of internet-native organizations grows, it will continue to speedrun experiments in coordination, and we will continue to support the builders doing the heavy lifting of figuring out how these new types of orgs should function.
But itâs also time for web3 to evolve out of its ouroboros cocoon. While our roots are in the DAO space, we believe the core ethos and tools should be used beyond our space. There are many verticals where they can be useful, including:
Artificial Intelligence, where StabilityAI is building an open and fair research ecosystem, and Spawning is ensuring the fair treatment of artistsâ data.
Art & Music, where projects like Metalabel, Songcamp, and with.fm are upending century-old models for creative collaboration and value creation.
Social, where Lens is enabling data portability for our social selves, and Yup is building a curatorial layer for the internet.
Decentralized Science, where Molecule is building open-source protocols for the future of drug development, and LabDAO is growing a decentralized network of laboratories for life science research.
Cities, where Cabin is creating a new model of the network city.
A full list of our projects & members can be found here.
Final Thoughts
The efforts of our community are part of an ever-growing and flourishing web3 ecosystem. We see ourselves as one part of a grander, unfolding narrative as the world trends toward decentralization. Like seeds in fertile soil, we are growing an intertwined root network that will provide the structure for a beautiful, diverse forest.
We stand on the shoulders of those who came before us: thinkers, investors, and, most importantly, builders. This story is bigger than us, yet we are honored to play a role in its unfolding.
If you are building something interesting in the new paradigm of internet-native organizations, please do not hesitate to reach out on Twitter.
Thank you JR Reed, Vishal Kankani, Steph Alinsug, Julia Lipton, David Phelps, Tom Shaughnessy, Omar Shakeeb, for your thoughts and edits.
