A collection of letters encompassing simple insights and recognition of foundational shifts that any bright minds trapped within the old norms of a VC mindset can use to break free, whether they are just starting their journey or reflecting back on what they wish someone had told them in their early days.
What happens to VC when founders and projects have alternative sources of capital that out-scale traditional debt & equity agreements?
With real web3 in full effect, founders no longer need to go down the winding roads of chasing venture funding, living on the whims of those who finance borrowed time and paper.
Frankly, web3 worthy of its own name is rooted in mechanisms that generate capital at its source, in ways that are independent from external capture and other corruptive factors. It’s a black swan sanctuary with variance swaps embedded directly into the foundational infrastructure of the ecosystem, project, protocol or whatever else you want to call it.
The SOP becomes no longer about powerpoint presentations, elevator pitches, spending time in cafes convincing disinterested parties about new ideas and groundbreaking opportunities using the theatrics of hype and long over-leveraged FOMO to expand exit liquidity, but rather, can the project actually meet the demand of the market and continue to maximise their own in-house and networked productive capacity?
Because, there is always demand for more capital. Always.
The web2 Silicon Valley keynote speaking circuit spin so many fallacies they should take up shop in an old LES tailor’s empty storefront. From lean to agile to sprints better served on unseasonal Olympian CCTV… 🙃 The over regimented hot new business methodologies of the next 15 minutes are all incompatible with nimble, semi-pseudonymous, factorial and wagmi capital within web3.
It would help so many on the buy, sell, trade, and even the VC side to remember a simple truth: buyers aren’t objects. You don’t “have them”. Demand is an action and an appetite. How well do you serve it? And what channels does the creation of capital at its sources route through to get to you or meet demand where it moves in the market?
A project’s success is not determined by a fake market cap or valuation, but rather, by their ability to go head to head in a freely competitive market, directly against other founders, primary producers, entrepreneurs, creators and more.
Unbridled creativity, ingenuity and relentlessly authentic stories will beat your tired, old, boring brand copy anyday.
So now, 2 questions remain.
Number one, how does a producer meet demand?
It’s really obvious, but broadly overlooked and often rejected with prejudice by conventional markets today—a full and enthusiastic embrace of cc0.
It’s actually the only way a project is able to hyper scale and meet global demand.
The default lock down of content by gatekeepers doesn’t merely leave gratuitous amounts of value on the table, it does far worse––it makes it all but impossible for culture and capital to generate factorially to its full potential— the only perpetual motion machine that is really worth the name. With cc0––and even better, cc0 with incentives that inherently advance web3 and creative freedom––producers can meet demand and scale a surplus of it.
No longer a sole producer running limited machines to straining at full throttle, the new creators and merchants of culture leverage and gain directly from self-perpetuating open access network effects of value. Countless teams, individuals, and projects build, derive, remix and repurpose their primary source materials, products and content to in turn add dramatic increases in source, secondary and networked value.
Rather than wasting endless resources and spreading contagions of destructive unintended consequences that result directly from trying to police, shut down, control and perpetuate violence, or the threat of it, producers can liberate themselves through their work, empower others around them, and use incentives through NFTs, crypto and other token economic standards to increase upside for all.
With this new producing, trading and operating procedure, venture capital and venture capitalists as they stand are not needed any longer. That busted old model is broken and there’s nowhere right or left for it to fit.
So, now we arrive at question two.
If VC no longer exists, what is there in its place?
Gardeners.
Individuals, syndicates and communities coordinating through DAOs that strategically deploy capital to the market to patron and support the building out of aligned and interesting parts of a cc0 generated ecosystem, virtual world or other slice of the metaverse.
They water, seed and incentivise parts of the cc0 garden through native web3 mechanisms.
Whether that is via native token launches and fair distribution, massive multiplayer decentralized quests, DAO bounties, decentralised on-chain market making activities, governance and voting activity, exercising the right to strike and stake as the new civic responsibility, and all of what has yet to be discovered or developed in this ever evolving new terrain.
Any value brought in from sales of NFTs minted through this article will be used for building out the F₃M Realm treasury, which will eventually be governed and coordinated by the DAO, furthering to decentralise the web3 fashion capital stack.