From Venture Investing to Intellect Investing
Announcing grants for decentralized apps (dApps) & our evolution as a VC firm.
At Compound we’re constantly thinking about where the world is going and what change is needed to get there. In our latest fund, this has manifested itself in companies surrounding decentralization, automation, machine learning, computational biology, and more.
Our core goal as seed-stage investors is to find human outliers early, and help them go from the proverbial 0 to 1. Sometimes this culminates in us making a seed investment into their company. While we think we do these things better than most, these concepts aren’t incredibly unique and there are no shortage of VC firms touting their value-add that they bring to the table.
As part of our ideation process about the future, we’re also constantly thinking about what our place as investors is in that future. In a world where traditional “venture capital” is commoditizing, our greatest fear is becoming part of that commoditization. To constantly evolve, much like the founders we invest in are forced to, we began strategizing on how to avoid becoming a commodity.
We realized that as we build Compound, the concept of “venture capital” needs to evolve beyond investing in just companies and include investing in the development and commercialization of the intellectual capital that gets spent to push forward an industry or technology. We call them “intellect investments.”
Step 1: Intellect investments in decentralized apps (dApps)
Our first intellect investment initiative relates to our previous and future investments in blockchain-related startups.
As blockchains allow developers to use economic incentives for social coordination, we’re at the brink of an explosion of decentralized services and applications. As we invest in the these projects, we want to support the infrastructure and protocols that we are investing in. We have a strong belief that engineers, builders, and designers will dictate which of these protocols ultimately win, and we want to back those willing to build on the protocols we believe in most.
That’s why we’re committing a pool of additional, non-dilutive capital (up to $25k per application) to any person, group of people, or company that is building decentralized applications (dApps) on the protocols that we have invested in. We call these intellect investments and they function similarly to grants.
We’re very excited to back those building on the Blockstack protocol, as well as other investments that will be announced in the near future. If you’re building on this protocol (or any others found here) feel free to email us at dApps@compound.vc to tell us what you’re working on and we’d love to explore working together.
Steps 2+ : Continuing to be intellect investors
In addition to dApps, we’ll also be launching a few other intellect investment initiatives in related areas that we are interested in. If you’re looking for capital and time to help you think through commercialization of research or a special project in any category, please email us at partners@compound.vc.
Venture Capitalists roles have always been to enable innovation, and we view this as an evolution to our natural role in the ecosystem.
