Early entrepreneurs need help too. The LAO, in an effort to help funded projects, has brought together a group of mentors who can provide guidance to projects funded through The LAO.
It’s not easy to build and scale a company alone. Even the most revered founders and entrepreneurs had help from someone, whether that be through a mentor, advisor or family member. Currently, many venture capital funds and incubators provide that mentorship and advice through relationships with industry experts to add value beyond just providing capital.
The LAO will be a bit different. As Naval Ravikant noted, many entrepreneurs today have a much better network thanks to the ease of information sharing across the internet through blogs and other mediums. The things that truly matter for an up and coming business are — control, money, and advice, “[t]he more options you have, the more you can unbundle those three things, and get the advice from the people you want and the money from the cheapest source of money, and leave the control behind.” Moreover, as Ravikant notes, these three can eventually (and are increasingly) become unbundled.
We’ve been thinking about the unbundling of control, money, and advice when it comes to creating and supporting entrepreneurs. With The LAO, projects have the ability to get capital through venture financing with Ethereum smart contracts — making capital cheaper, faster, and more efficient to obtain. Capital can be deployed in a matter of minutes, once members decide to make an investment, with the underlying legal documents automatically generated.
However, money is not enough. Building successful projects takes support. And, there’s obviously a ton of value in having help from people who know the painstaking process of building a company.
That’s why we’re launching a mentor program for projects funded by The LAO. We’ll be building a mentor marketplace for projects and advisors to choose how to best work together, decentralizing startup advisory services.
Initial Mentors for The LAO
To get things going, The LAO has enlisted an all-star group of Ethereum mentors, including Ryan Selkis, Ryan Zurrer, Donna Redel, Reuben Bramanathan, Camila Russo, Wong Joon Ian, Andrew Keys, Richard Burton, Eva Beylin, Sam Cassatt, DeFi Dude, Mike Kriak, Alex Masmej, Amanda Cassatt and Matt Corva. LAO funded projects can lean on these mentors and seek advice or short-term help (like a marketing campaign) to help their projects grow.
The extent to which LAO-funded projects want to leverage help is up to them. If a LAO-funded project would like to give equity to establish a more traditional advisory role with a member of the program, they can (of course) do that. It also can be less stringent, the relationship can be on a one-time project basis or for pro-bono advice. The same goes for the mentors. Each mentor is able to help to the extent they would like in a given project.
We’re exploring how these mentors can issue personal tokens to allocate or exchange their work or personal time leveraging token economics. So stay tuned. Using a bonding curve, demand for a mentor’s time can be calculated and then tokenized. Lucky for us, OpenLaw makes the creation of personal tokens, a snap.
Learn More
If you would like to be a mentor, please reach out to us at hello@thelao.io, we’re open to having people from varied experience in the Ethereum community.
If you have any questions, check out our docs, which cover questions about The LAO’s structure and operation, or hit us up via email or telegram.
