The first (?) startup fund powered by blockchain?

Humans are bad at and unfair in judging early stage startup ideas. This year, I would like to make $1,000,000usd available to entrepreneurs around the world based on their process, not their idea. Entrepreneurs will have access to this capital, in micro tranches, automatically based on proof that they followed certain steps. No business plan competitions, no pitch decks, no rich uncles or aunts.

One way we are funding this endeavor are raising 1000 Ethereum coins to distribute to founders around the world who are willing to test their startup hypothesis. We are using ethereum as the means to raise the coins and to distribute them. We’ve also been buying ethereum call options.

Our goals are to lower the barriers to entrepreneurship and innovation by…

1. giving more first time entrepreneurs the opportunity to test their very first hypothesis
2. challenge the “business plan” funding structure
3. incentiveize learning, and the sharing of that learning

TL;dr

1. If you want to support the fund and join our community, click here (or give us money on GoFundME and we will convert it)
2. If you are a founder who wants to test a startup idea and has raised less than $10,000usd or equivalent click here.
3. If you want to know why we are doing this read below
4. If you want to help change the business model of global seed stage investing AND entrepreneurial education read below.

“Tomorrow we will unveil our plan for (what we believe to be) the first idea stage fund based completely on blockchain!”

That is what we said on May 23. Here’s where we are now (Jan 1 2018).

INVESTMENT IN (BORING)

FINAL- we are raising 100 coins in 100 days. This translates to a mere $20,000. Paul Pham has been instrumental in our understanding of ethereum crowdfunding and his community has been most welcoming to a newbie:) For the initial raise we will allow folks to invest no more but no less than one coin. This is NOT AN ICO (not that all ICOs are bad though)

Here’s a list of reasons you should contribute!

1. You want to support entrepreneurs who otherwise might not have access to money or mentoring for an innovative idea (think Kiva.org)
2. You want to test smart contracts IRL (see the second half of this post on how we are distributing the funds)
3. You want to support entrepreneurial process (experimentation, ethnographic research etc)
4. You want help launching or supporting an end to end startup ecosystem in your community
5. You want access to our second fund (the ONLY way to invest in our second fund is to support this one)

We were hoping to raise the 100 coins when ETH was trading at $100usd. We are late. The good news is that the fundraising was the boring part of our fund, the fund DISTRIBUTION was and still is the exciting part. Now our plan is to raise 1000 coins in total one at a time, if so we are going to launch something similar to this

That’s obvious — anyone can jump on the bandwagon and raise a fund. Just because we are using ethereum to raise it is not that unique. What is unique is how we are going to distribute the money and to whom.

INVESTMENT OUT (not boring)

What we are doing differently is ALSO USING BLOCKCHAIN and community voting to DISPENSE the funds based on rules set up by the community (based on #leanstartup).

No one will be reading long applications. No one will be judging a old boys club. No “warm intros” will be required. No one will judge if an idea is smart or not. If the rules are met, the funds will be released (of course, in small amounts, — but our goal is to make it so entrepreneurs can unlock 10s of thousands of dollars at a time)

Anyone who does this, will be checked by the community and will be able to take money out on their own.

We’ve been testing this for about a year, basically anyone who completes a certain number of customer interviews, or states a testable hypothesis will be allowed to ask for up to 10 coins to use to test their next hypothesis. If they meet certain binary, non subjective criteria of science, REGARDLESS OF THE IDEA, they get the coins in real time.

Enjoying the GoFundMe experience but 9% is expensive. If we raise 100k that is almost 10k that could go directly to teams if we used blockchain.

• If you are not into blockchain but still want to support democratized funding for ANYONE as long as they identify risky assumptions and test hypotheses, then support our GOFUNDME campaign. That said, 10% is still very expensive and one of the reasons we are moving toward blockchain on the INBOUND SIDE