Atelier Ventures and Variant Fund are joining forces

The ownership economy has the opportunity to address one of the biggest and most morally troubling issues of our time: economic inequality. As the wealth gap continues to widen to levels not seen since just before the Great Depression, the best way to combat this is to enable everyone to become an owner of wealth-building assets.

As I was starting Atelier, Jesse Walden was working on Variant Fund, a seed-stage venture firm focused on the ownership economy thesis, backing software that is built, operated and owned by users themselves. I first met Jesse Walden when we were both working at a16z: he was on the crypto team, and I was on the consumer team. In those days (2018), t... See more

Now, founders are pushing this more cooperative economic model towards mainstream consumer adoption, resulting in an avalanche of new platforms whose participants engage with the products and services they use in deeper ways because they’re aligned with their economic success. The future of consumer software is crypto, centered around the belief th... See more