$48.88M and 88 Investors to build early stage blockchain innovations
Today, I’m proud to announce the final close of $48,888,888 in total commitments for Decasonic, the early stage venture and digital assets fund building blockchain innovation. Since we announced our debut fund in October, founders, investors and other strategic partners have reached out to collaborate. We are honored with the overwhelming interest to co-build in our ecosystem.
My goal in sharing more about our ecosystem is that you too – as a founder, a technical developer, a strategic partner, or a team member – will join forces.
We are blessed with the full stack technical value-add and long term commitment of our 88 strategic investors, all of whom are outliers in their respective domains. With a legacy of building durable businesses for the long-term, The Pritzker Organization (TPO) is an Anchor Investor in Decasonic and Jason Pritzker has joined our Advisory Committee.
Our Decasonic debut fund is augmented with Decasonic Labs, our innovation generator, and our opportunity funds, a similar sized financing facility for our growth stage investments. Through these three vehicles, we provide a full lifecycle of smart capital across a founder’s growth journey. As market cycles gyrate financing windows, our access to permanent capital and iconic operators assures our founders that we engineer flexible and aligned capital for their ambitious operating plans. Decasonic is the long-term value-add partner for outlier founders.
Our focus is to co-build with outlier founders at the early stages of their innovation. We help execute product market fit with value-add funding from Decasonic and our ecosystem. An outlier founder may also join us pre-funding through Decasonic Labs and generate those technical ideas to concept. As the concept matures, early venture and token funding is available from Decasonic. Decasonic also provides specific domain value-add business insights, technical operating frameworks and growth perspectives to unleash the next set of milestones. Finally, as needed, that founder can scale hypergrowth and category creation through our growth stage financing facilities. This works great in bull market cycles and accelerates even better in bear markets.
When we announced our fund launch with $20M in October of 2021, our value proposition resonated with you, our target market: builders of blockchain innovation. Many ex-colleagues from Google, DoubleClick, Yale, NeoCarta and Zynga reconnected with their messages of support. Business leaders reached out to further strengthen Chicago and our nation’s competitive position in this disruptive innovation. Web 2.0 founders sought our advice on how to future proof their growth in Web3. Web3 technologists across Layer 1’s, dApps, exchanges and other infrastructure providers dropped by with some congratulatory words, chats and memes. Founders joined our meetings already aligned on our shared vision and disciplined execution. We saw a flood of incoming world class deal flow, venture co-investors, and technical partnerships.
Across Web3, dApps, gaming, metaverse, DAOs and DeFi, we have deployed our value-add capital to over a dozen companies as an investor, board advisor and in a majority of cases, both. In all cases, Decasonic is an active ecosystem participant in our projects and companies. In all cases, Decasonic is co-building with outlier founders – those who have a winner mindset, do-or-die hustle and conviction in their bold visions.
In the coming decades, when you partner with Decasonic, here’s what you can expect from our ecosystem, through a founder’s journey from idea to exponential growth:
Ecosystem of Outlier Founders and Investors
Full Stack Technical
Accretive Value-Add
Long-Term Partnerships
Innovation for Better
A bit more about these expectations.
- Ecosystem of Outlier Founders and Investors
Decasonic is building an ecosystem of outlier founders and investors. Outlier investors iterate and evolve their financing models to match innovation market dynamics. Their differentiated views empower outlier founders to attract other outlier talent and build their A+ teams. Outlier talent out-executes mediocre talent day after day, week after week and product S-curve after each S-curve.
At Decasonic, to execute world-class venture investing, we comfortably embrace and build in areas of “unknown”: fast evolving markets, complex technologies, ambiguous strategies, emergent use cases, frontier valuation models, innovative growth plans, skeuomorphic designs and nearly endless possibilities. We mitigate risk by locking in on how we can imagine, invent and co-build the future. And even when there are “known” facts, we need to consider that they may manifest counterintuitively, or “counterintuitive knowns.” Tremendous market shifts and asymmetric 100x+ returns result when we, collectively in our ecosystem, drive a differentiated view on how to transform the unknown to the known.
In an area of many unknowns, we lock in this known fact: in frontier markets where talent has a power curve advantage, we invest in and co-build with outlier founders. When we connect outlier founders with other outlier resources, amazing innovations are energized to life. Innovation is the intersection of two domain experts and we continue to accelerate this idea exchange across our ecosystem.
- Full Stack Technical
Decasonic also solves a problem nearly every technologist can relate to: it’s lonely being a coder. In blockchain, it’s usually one technical CTO who crusades by themselves to reach their vision. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
At Decasonic, we have purpose-built our technical capabilities to range full stack: from backend to frontend, Layer 1 to Layer 7, data to insights, and code to use cases with strong product market fit. Underestimated sometimes is the structured and quantitative execution towards the business, community and marketing side of growth, a craft we have honed in at our respective prior Web2 leadership positions. We offer this full stack technical perspective to accelerate innovation ideas and concepts.
Our investor syndicate includes many accomplished engineering leaders: technical founders who have achieved $B+ exits, technical CEOs who have led publicly traded technology companies, and technical executives who lead large engineering teams. We tap into this collective knowledge in our ecosystem when executing on our investment and operating plans. They challenge each other and challenge themselves to push the frontiers of what’s possible. We foster shared knowledge and sustain game-changing innovations.
- Accretive Value-Add
Next, with outlier talent locked in and innovative technical ideas underway, we draw on the passion from our ecosystem to co-build with our founders.
The innovation floodgates are open. The world today is flooded with capital. Every smart investor is increasing their investment allocations towards exponential technology, and in particular, blockchain. The world is flooded with ideas. Every smart entrepreneur is diving deep into blockchain and tinkering with Web3, whether on the side or in full force. The world is flooded with entrepreneurial aspirations. Across universities around the world, students are energized around dreams of how the new world will impact their generation.
In this world of capital, ideas and talent accelerating into our markets, how does Decasonic win?
Execution. Not just any execution, but world-class, leading-edge execution at Decasonic. We expect this from our founders and investors and we operate day-to- day no differently.
I have experienced this investment environment before, during the euphoric bull market cycles in Web 1, Web 2.0 and now in Web3. History rhymes. Some funds and their companies will continue to crush it, while others will overextend themselves, invest too quickly and get crushed. Some leaders in the prior era will be slow to adapt, as we are clearly seeing this with the fast iterating Web3 VCs like Decasonic – out-executing, out-innovating the old guard dinosaurs.
Disruptors versus disrupted - the crushers vs the crushed - will come down to execution in fast evolving unknown markets: Outlier founders who can execute on product market fit; the VCs who can iterate their models and deliver category defining value-add; and their fund investors who have the resilience to see outcomes for decades.
Non-stop, we continue to improve our execution capabilities. We’re grateful that the innovation trends today align with our prior decades of operating experiences. There is a massive expertise shortage of the areas where we have superpowers: in obvious areas of technical expertise, along code & prototyping and product & growth, but also in non-obvious soft areas, around talent and partnerships. We are grateful founders appreciate our perspectives and seek to make room for us in their oversubscribed rounds.
- Long-Term Partnerships
Decasonic is a journey for me over two decades in the making. This is a lifelong dedication to disruptive technologies, both as an investor and an operator. And as much as technology markets present rapid upheaval and wash out the short-term tourists, one known aspect endures: the power of long-term.
I have been investing and operating in blockchain since 2013, battle-tested through market cycles. As I curated our investor syndicate for this debut fund in 2021, I focused on similar long-term investors, like TPO and Jason Pritzker.
Our fund syndicate balances an optimal mix of technology executives, other founders of successful growth businesses, experienced traders and long-term asset managers. Over 1 in 2 in our investor base resides in Chicago, an ecosystem bursting with expertise in trading, market structure and importantly digital assets innovations. Over 1 in 5 in our investor base are my ex-colleagues in leadership positions across all of Web 2.0 and Web3 technology, gaming, media and fintech. We value broad thinking, personal connections, and long-term decision making.
Other top-tier technology investors with similar long-term approaches have joined our ecosystem as fund investors, either through their investment entities or as individuals. In this fund, I’m honored to be in the company of Drive Capital, Corazon Capital, Motivate Ventures, GTG Capital Partners, Generator Ventures, Distributed Ventures, and Hibbard Road Partners, among others. These groups are joined by super angels whose seed stage track records mirror their world class operating excellence.
Some of our fund investors also manage other long-term institutional capital for sovereign wealth funds, family offices, endowments, corporations, blockchain treasuries and other alternative asset funds. Some trade and market-make large volumes of crypto, equity, commodity, bond & index derivatives. Our crypto-focused fund of funds investors, KeenCrypto and Bridge Alternatives, help drive connections with their extended reach into other top tier blockchain venture teams.
We are dedicated to the long-term adoption of blockchain and believe blockchain in 2021 is the Internet in 1998. More about how we think about our long-term operating principles can be found on our website.
- Innovation for Better
To build durable growth businesses, we are also explicit with our values. Disruptive innovations often present a multitude of ways to create value and thus for an investor to make money. Also, in such situations, oftentimes, regulation may need to adapt to how new technologies can impact society as a whole. What was consensus “right” and “good” yesterday may need to shift to “better” for tomorrow.
We focus on people who do the right thing in these evolving situations, much like our fund investors who hold executive positions at Croke Fairchild and NFP. I have found them to help convene the ecosystem with direction towards “better.” The Decasonic ecosystem aligns with this perspective of innovation for better. Over the long run, this approach sustains success.
As we build the frontiers of how blockchain impacts society, I think about how we develop and productize use cases for better. When you align positive sum growth for everyone in our ecosystem and in our broader world, innovation for better endures. In the coming years, you’ll continue to see us develop code, ideas, concepts, prototypes, Web3 infrastructure, data, innovations in VC, and use cases to further bring innovation for better to the mainstream.
Reach out. We’re hiring at Decasonic. We’re exploring partnerships with other strategic partners. And of course, we’re co-building and funding outlier founders. Come join the Decasonic ecosystem.
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