TLDR: Join our private community (only 20 spots total) if you want to research interesting questions in crypto with other smart people to incubate projects and investment thesis. How it works:

1. Andy or David lets you join
2. Deposit up to $2k USDC into our syndicate (shared investment pool)
3. Vote, propose, and discuss research questions
4. Research a question you successfully proposed and deploy community funds using insights you find during your research
5. Share profits and lessons learned with the rest of the community and read about what other people learned

We are bringing together the smartest people we know to research, invest, and incubate together in crypto. Working as a team, we can find new insights we could not have found on our own so we can create new projects or investment ideas. We can learn faster and earn more together by building a knowledge base of crypto research and shared readings. We want our members to explore their curiosity and to explore questions most interesting to them. Members should propose their own questions to choose something they would like to learn the most about. This could mean questions like:

• Who is actually investing in NFTs right now? What contributes to NFT project success?
  • Then, going on to build and test a NFT investment strategy
• What arbitrage opportunities exist through interchain defi?
  • Then, going on to deploy capital and code to perform this arbitrage
• How do yield aggregators work?
  • Then, going on to test an existing aggregator or making a new aggregator and sharing results
• How are ZKSNARKs being used?
  • Then, going on to create a prototype for a new use case or investing in projects using them.

The institute operates as a DAO. The goals of the DAO are to:

• Fund research questions collectively
  • We want DAO members to propose a question and to create a profitable strategy
  • We want DAO members to work in teams and to help support each other’s work
• Win together
  • Profits and losses from running strategies are shared equally with other members in the institute
• Learn together
  • Each research question will have a thorough writeup to share lessons and insights with other researchers
  • Researchers will share readings and links to create a collective knowledge base

Here’s how the DAO works (in detail):

1. Members deposit their funds through our Syndicate going into a gnosis safe. We ask for a $2000 maximum investment from each member. (We ask for $2k as a shared commitment from all members to creating quality work and for the sake of learning with real outcomes.)
2. Members are then added to a private Discord section (We will have other interested crypto members in public channels in the server)
3. Research questions are proposed and voted on Snapshot in seasons. Each season will last 1 months with 1 week of proposal time between them.
4. Investment strategies are executed by fund managers if possible. Otherwise, funds are distributed to proposer to carry out their strategy.
5. Investment outcomes are reviewed and written up to share for the group. These reports are private to only researchers in the group as a perk. Public memos and blog posts may be shared at a later time depending on the researchers’ preference.
6. Funds can be withdrawn at any time during the time between seasons. (When funds are not deployed in strategies)

We expect you to:

• Contribute and answer novel research questions
  • During each season, we expect you to either be 1) leading a strategy as the original proposer or 2) helping a proposer execute a strategy
• Help curate interesting reading lists and projects you find in the Discord
• Write and share your learnings in the Discord
• Invest up to $2,000 in the research institute
• To work with us and be flexible. This is not a traditional fund structure and we will be experimenting to maximize learning and returns for fund members.

Next steps:

• If you were directly invited, text one of us back to confirm your spot in the fund
• If you found this somewhere online: dm us or email us at friendsandfamilyf@gmail.com to apply (send us info about yourself about why you should be in this group)
• Get your wallet / metamask setup. You will need USDC to send to our Syndicate account.
• We’ll share you the link to deposit funds and an invite to our discord.

About us:

• Andrew: cs @ stanford. quant trader and swe by background. working on a startup + defi.
• David: cs @ stanford. pm and robotics engineer by background. works on a startup during the day, builds in defi / trades NFTs at night. got into crypto with $100 in dogecoin in 2014.

Future: If this works out, we will look to provide more trading capital and turn this into a fund or sell reading access to this group to better support our researchers and their work.