Written by: Founder & Managing Partner, Graph Paper Capital (Ex-ConsenSys, ex-VaynerMedia)

I’m excited to announce the launch of Graph Paper Capital. GPC is an early-stage accelerator and networked ecosystem. We're a network of experienced founders and builders with a proven track record of helping pre-seed/seed stage web3 startups find PMF.

Our key differentiator is our highly-curated and high-impact network. We recognize that even 15 mins with the right mentor can be a game changer for your startup, providing you with unparalleled access and insights. At GPC, we’re optimizing for just that: Creating multiple high-impact touchpoints within our network to help founders get momentum.

Why and how we’re doing this? Let’s dive in.

The Big Why

After investing in, mentoring, and advising 90+ startups as the MD of Tachyon over the span of 4 years, here are things I learned:

• Founders need Access and Insights: When it comes to early-stage startups, financial/passive capital is the most commoditized. Founders need highly strategic, smart money on their cap table. They need insight into the market and users, something that you can leverage to make your product truly differentiated. Additionally, they require access to people, capital, and resources that can help them iterate fast.

• The quality of mentorship matters more than the quantity: In the 4 years of building Tachyon, we built a network of over 450 participants, ranging from investors, and founders to domain experts. In any cohort of 25 companies, we’d have 50-75 mentors that would actively contribute to the cohort. 5-10 mentors would always emerge as being extremely high impact and high-value-add in the exit surveys with founders.

• Verifiable, meritocratic decision-making is more impactful: While knowledge and ideas should be crowdsourced, decision-making should be centralized to individuals with domain expertise and skin in the game. In this case, the centralized body is the GPC core team, which works closely with founders to surface their challenges and route them to domain-specific mentors. This approach increases the speed and efficiency for founders to get unstuck and maximizes the time value of investment from our network mentors.

• Strong incentive and re-engagement mechanisms are needed to create a high value-add community: At the end of the day, we’re a crypto-native accelerator and believe in sharing the financial and social capital with our network. We believe this is a strong incentive to create a positive sum game.

Drawing on these insights and learnings from having previously built an accelerator, we are now innovating startup acceleration and capital formation at GPC.

The story behind Graph Paper Capital

The story of Graph Paper and Engineering notebooks is an interesting one. These tools have been used for centuries by engineers, scientists, mathematicians and designers to create and document their ideas. They are the simplest, yet most versatile tool for launching a new idea.

At Graph Paper Capital, we believe that all great ideas start with just a pen, a piece of paper, and that initial spark of inspiration. It’s the first physical manifestation of an idea, a blueprint for what's to come. Founders end up spending years of their lives creating, raising capital, and building their companies based on the ideas on that first piece of paper.

We know that to be true because we are founders ourselves. We understand the importance of that initial piece of paper and the power it holds. We also strongly believe that web3 technologies will massively transform society and founders are the best suited to accelerate the innovation and adoption of these technologies. Backing founders is the highest leverage public good. And that’s why we’re on a mission to back the most-promising web3 startups with financial, social, and knowledge capital.

Our Secret Sauce: A High-Leverage Network with Shared Economics

We've curated an alpha launch network of over 50+ experienced founders and builders who have a proven track record of building and helping web3 startups to achieve success.

Our program design and in-program tools are meant to surface the biggest challenges our founders face and route them to strategic network mentors, based on their domain expertise and how they’ve opted to be involved to leverage their respective superpowers.

We are incentivizing high-impact interactions between founders and members of the network. To do so we’ve set aside a portion of the accelerator economics into a community-carried interest pool. During our program, our impact evaluation mechanism surfaces high-impact contributions from our network. The result is a reputation matrix that surfaces valuable signals for founders and other members of the ecosystem. We use a retroactive funding model to amplify the financial incentives from the community-carried interest pool to reward the most impactful contributions.

We’ve taken inspiration from Optimism’s Retroactive Public Goods Funding and Prize Competitions by Hypercerts to design a novel mechanism that increases the rewards our network can earn based on their impact on founders.

It’s like taking 150 of the most high-leverage people in crypto and putting them on your cap table.

Unlike Venture DAOs, our structure combines a traditional venture fund structure with an accelerator and networked ecosystem. This enables us to crowdsource domain expertise from our network while keeping a centralized body (i.e. the core GPC team) that works closely with founders and mentors to create high-impact touchpoints while sharing the fund economics with our network participants.

Our goal is to become the most engaged and highest value-add network of founders and experts, dedicated to helping early-stage web3 startups succeed.

Our value-add to Founders

For pre-seed/seed stage web3 founders, we seek to be the most valuable money on your cap table. In addition to capital (see our FAQ for more details), our tactical 12-week program is geared towards gaining traction and mountain evidence of getting PMF, leading up to fundraising kick-off with investors. Our key focus is on:

• Validating core assumptions with real users: Our veteran startup builders in the space are your alpha/beta testers and can give you extremely valuable technical, product, market, and g2m feedback.

• Battle-tested tools and resources: You can probably piece resources together from around the web, but we’ve pulled it all together for you, it’s been battle-tested so you can ask questions and get tailored feedback from the core team and members of the GPC network. Additionally, our in-program rituals bring an accountability structure that keeps founders focused on TOMTM (the one metric that matters)

• Fundraising Preparation and Kick-off: Many members in our network are strategic capital, and for our VC network, we understand the type of investments they’re making and what kind of startups they like to fund. In addition to providing you access to early-stage investors, we give you specific fundraising tools and prepare you for a successful fundraising process.

Our value-add for Network Participants

Our program is designed to route high-caliber founders to you, based on how you opt to be involved that leverages your superpowers. For network participants, our focus is on:

• Unlocking access to invest alongside us: Through our membership NFT, you are white-listed to invest alongside us at our investment termfs and to get early access to proprietary deal flow.

• Rewarding impactful contributions with community carry: We help you engage with founders in ways that leverage your superpowers and are most scalable to you, giving you opportunities to help founders out and earn a portion of financial upside via our fund’s community carry.

• Strategic BD opportunities: We proactively connect you with other high-leverage, high-reputation individuals in our ecosystem enabling more business opportunities within the GPC network

We’ll be announcing our Membership NFT alpha drop soon. To learn more or apply to join our alpha network, click here.

Why us?

Turning engineers into entrepreneurs.

The GPC core team and our advisors have collectively been building and mentoring startups for almost 40 years and spent the past decade in crypto and web3. Our combined expertise has a proven track record of helping early-stage web3 companies go from 0 to 1 and find PMF.

Founder Testimonials

Apply to Join the Network

The GPC network is ideal for:

• Web3 founders and builders

• Early-stage web3 Investors

• Web2 domain experts who can leverage their superpowers to help early-stage builders

We’ll be launching our membership NFT which will unlock access to a range of opportunities, including contributing to the Spring ‘23 batch to earn a portion of the carried interest pool, investing alongside us, and access to other members of the network. To join the GPC network, apply here.

Apply for our Spring ‘23 Batch

If you're an early-stage crypto founder with an ambitious idea and a piece of graph paper, we’d love to hear from you. Click here to apply for our Spring ‘23 batch to get backed. Here’s everything you probably want to know before applying: GPC FAQs

Concluding thoughts

I am thrilled to announce the launch of Graph Paper Capital alongside our partners and we couldn’t be more excited to back some of the most promising founders in the web3 space. If you want to contribute or be a part of what we’re building please reach out. You can DM me on Twitter (@gabrielanderso) or TG (@gabrielanderso).

We will be sharing more details about our networked ecosystem and accelerator in the coming weeks. To keep yourself up to date, Subscribe now!

wagmi,
Gabriel