At Cuddle, our primary goal is impact (and cuddling…)
This is the reason we are allocating at least 50% of the first NFT series to the Impact Fund.
We want to drive change and that’s why we’re looking at it differently.
Once you reach a certain level of monetary wealth (a few of our co-founders have), you have two choices.
- Continue wealth accumulation because that’s the only thing you’re good at in life. Some people call this greed but in our opinions it’s a bit more nuanced. We think a lot of people just don’t know how to do anything else and they need to continue working. They’ll never spend all the money they have but they continue down the same path rather than doing something new that they could even fail at. Think most Forbes Billionaires (especially non-US based ones).
- Leverage those resources to drive as much impact as possible.
And that’s exactly our goal — to drive impact with our resources.
This includes both our financial and our social resources.
Our social resources include our community and network, which can be leveraged to motivate people to do good rather than to just pump and dump NFTs.
Our financial resources are our NFT sales. This is why any NFT we sell from the first series, we are allocating 50% of it directly to our Impact Fund.
Mission: Driving targeted impact.
This Impact Fund will carefully select what it will devote it’s resources to in order to maximize impact.
We’re not one of those organizations that pledges its funds to charities that have 80%+ overhead costs.
Instead we connect with our partners to:
- know them personally to be able to do our due diligence regarding the impact they drive
- help them via our know how (for example, onboarding shelters with accepting crypto & then sharing via our social media channels); and,
- leverage their communities to spread the #CUDL movement
Let’s discuss the actual partners that we focus on where we think we can drive significant change.
Partners & Causes We Support
Medicine
We see a huge need of getting medicine to doggos and kitties where it’s not available.
Sometimes it’s because big pharma blocks the effort (like in the case of Remdesivir & FIP with a 90%+ mortality rate).
We have a personal experience about FIP and it’s one of the reasons we started this project…
Other times it’s because no one invests money into these much needed medicines because there is not enough money to be made. Luckily our philosophy is Impact First.
We see this as the highest leverage way we can help. If we think about it costing on average $5,700 per year in the US to own a dog then we can help 35 dogs for 5 years with $1,000,000 or 350 dogs with $10,000,000.
Now if we take that money and help a company get a new cancer treatment or FIP treatment out with programs to make it affordable for those who do not have the financial resources, then we can help thousands of pets at a minimum.
We do see many of these high leverage opportunities but these take both financial resources but also a dedicated effort from our own team to implement properly so that direct impact can occur.
Shelters & Charities
When we think about shelters, we’re thinking about how to make them more sustainable in terms of their funding.
We’re happy to give them money but we go by the philosophy that you should “teach a man how to fish rather than give him a fish.”
And the thing is there are a ton of people (especially in crypto) that want to give. But the friction of “giving” actually prevents them.
Imagine your super rare Stoner Cat takes off! It’s suddenly worth 30 ETH! There is a shelter down the road and you would love to give them this NFT to support them!
So you go to their website and see the contact form. Ok so now you have to:
- Reach out to them and wait for a reply
- Most likely give them an additional call
- They will follow up via email with their bank account information
- You then have to send your crypto to an exchange
- There you trade it for USD/EUR or whatever currency you need
- You withdraw it
- You wait sometimes up to 3 days
- Then you log into your bank account (if it doesn’t get frozen because of the link to crypto) and finally transfer to the shelter
Now imagine if they had a BTC or ETH (…or Dogecoin!) address.
You send the NFT or crypto and within minutes they have your funds.
Just like crypto eliminated friction in terms of payments & assets, if we can eliminate friction for shelters & projects with good causes, we think many more people would support them. But people just don’t have time…
So as a stipulation when giving, oftentimes we force shelters to onboard or work with them to figure out a system that we can help them execute so they can accept crypto donations.
Veterinarians
Same as with shelters, we force vets to onboard with crypto.
However, one key difference is we work with them to select families that can’t afford to treat their sick pets.
I just spoke to a vet today. She told me that she wished she thought of me when a family came to her two weeks ago. They had a sick cat and the little kid was in love with the cat.
The vet had the perfect medicine for her. But because it cost over $1,000 to treat the cat and this family didn’t have the finances, the mother decided to have the cat euthanized. The mother didn’t want her daughter to see the cat relapse again into sickness and be sad…
I wish they had called me. I would have been thrilled to personally cover the costs out of my own pocket, especially knowing what type of impact it would have on this family.
In most of the world, insurance for pets is not common. So you can imagine the result…
We love supporting these types of situations because they make a direct difference.
Other Random Causes
Although we look for primarily partners connected with animals, medicine or both, occasionally we will see a mission that we think is going to change the world.
Something crazy, something out of this world.
Something a person is willing to die for.
These causes don’t come around everyday but when they do, we’re thrilled to be able to support these causes as well.
For example, we saw a platform built on Arweave that is looking to bring open communication and an anonymous social platform to jurisdictions like Cuba where freedom of speech is suppressed. I know the team has their heart in the right place and they’re looking to drive change.
These are some of the categories that we already actively support. It’s not just theory, but we do this on a daily basis both in terms of funding and in terms of driving some of these causes. Financially, we’ve deployed over $1,000,000 of personal capital over the past year into such causes.
We will add more categories and causes as Cuddle grows but the key is results.
So now that you know how we select a partner, let’s discuss how we actually think about it to drive results.
Impact Maximization Strategy
Impact First.
The goal is impact.
For example, we are currently working with a biotech company that has an innovative cancer treatment. This cancer treatment can be potentially used to help dogs & cats with terminal cancer.
We have been working closely to help them figure out the fastest way they can get their product to dogs & cats in an ethical way. Normally, clinical trials (even for dogs & cats) take an estimated 4–6 years or more and cost between $3-$7 million.
That being said, we’ve identified for this company how they can do it instead within a year and potentially help actual terminal patients (rather than the standard, in our opinion unethical, way of buying 20 pre-breed beagles, infecting them with a tumor & then killing them just for the data).
In return for funding, we’re asking for a commitment that if they can get the proper approvals in place that they will onboard at least 50 patients (and we think they’ll do much more once this is kickstarted).
Normal biotech funds only look at ROI. When we are looking at commercial partners, we sit down with them and figure out if their number one goal is impact over profits and how we can help them achieve this.
Additionally, we are looking for partners where we might be the primary driver of change. If it wasn’t for us, they might not have certain opportunities. For example, Tesla & SpaceX have great missions but even if we gave either of them $100m it would have little to zero impact — they just don’t need it anymore.
Ethos Over Legal.
If founders & the core team have the right mindset, we can trust them to do everything in their power to maximize their positive impact.
If we can trust them then they are likely to make the right decisions.
For example, they would feel bad about some crazy overhead margin. They have principles and they stick to them.
If it’s anything to do with medicine, we want to find founders that have a “patient first” mentality rather than a fiduciary duty to shareholders to maximize profit.
When we do this, good things seem to happen.
But if you select the wrong partners, no amount of legal paperwork will ensure that they are going to do the right thing when hard decisions are to be made.
Commercial Enterprises Often Drive More Impact
While it sounds noble to support academic projects, for example, oftentimes we see these non-profit charities, organizations & academic institutions being run like a communist country rather than to maximize impact.
When you are not forced to be long-term sustainable, you often get lazy. We see this in academia all the time. Researchers publish just for the sake of publishing but never translating that research to anything tangible results (such as a medicine that actually helps our little furballs).
Or budgets being spent because if you don’t spend the entire budget then surely your budget is going to be cut next year. This is just like during communism when people didn’t work hard because if they worked too hard they would be expected to work hard next year as well.
When enterprises are commercial they can deploy capital in a smart way with social causes as the number one driver while also doing so in a way that their business model is sustainable over the long run (rather than relying on external donors as their only source of capital).
Think Elon. He thinks getting us to space is the only way to save humanity and arguably he’s driven a significant amount of impact. But he didn’t do it with charities — he was able to do it by creating smart pro-profit enterprises.
The key regarding commercial enterprises though is the point regarding ethos. The challenge is that most people have money as their number one goal when they are at the workplace even though privately almost everyone tells you that money is NOT their number one goal.
No Time Restrictions
When you have to deploy funds in a certain period of time, it forces you to make bad decisions.
Because the Impact Fund might grow to a large pool of capital, if we put a time restriction, we might be put into a position where we need to scramble to find organizations to deploy funds into.
Instead, we want to be smart & carefully choose our partners. If that takes us time then so be it. But deploying this money properly is a responsibility that we take seriously so we want to do it correctly.
Make Loans and/or Equity Investments into “Impact” Companies Rather than Donations.
This allows the Impact Fund to actively participate in the companies that it selects and also creates a model with long-term feasibility versus a strict donation structure.
Certain impact-driven companies might need the Impact Fund when they are starting out. But after a few years they might achieve profitability and finally have a sustainable (and still impact first) business model.
If that happens, our philosophy is, why not get our funds back so we can find other partners that need our help at that point in time.
That being said, we don’t have strings attached. We give the project flexibility to be able to carry out its mission. For example, we’re not going to give a loan with a one year maturity and then force the project into bankruptcy because it can’t meet its obligation. That’s vulture investing.
This also allows us to be long-term sustainable with our own business model rather than having to close up shop once all of our funds are deployed.
Conclusion
Change.
We want to be a catalyst for change. In addition to sharing our philosophy with the #CUDL community, we want to share it with the world.
Maybe a billionaire here and there will read it as well. Maybe they will say:
“Well I already have $3bn so why not creating my own Impact Fund with half a billion. I can’t spend it. I can’t take it to the grave. But maybe, just maybe, I can cause some change.”
