Fairmint & the Democratization of Upside

Fairmint is like Kickstarter on steroids, mixed with Carta, embedded right in the products we use and love. They’re building the picks and shovels for founders to turn their equity into the most powerful tool to engage with their contributors.

As large platforms get richer off their users’ personal data and time, people are trying to regain control. We spent the last fifteen years working for gig money, likes, retweets, or follows. The platforms gave us reputation or cash, but no ownership, upside, or voice in its evolution.

Whether they acknowledge it or not, tokenized communities are so focused on token price that they lose sight of why they were created to begin with--the shared values and interests, the intrinsic motivators, the glue that is left when all other bindings are stripped away.

In the same way the internet was a democratizing force that gave everyone in the world the ability to easily create and share information, the next step is to give everyone in the world the ability to easily create and share value.

If companies can provide incentives for early adopters to participate before critical mass is achieved, they’re more likely to pose a credible threat to incumbents. As Charlie Munger said, “Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcomes.” A lot of business models that failed in Web 2.0 will become viable in Web3. The next generation of platf... See more

Better economic alignment between platforms and participants is coming, and will enable the advent of true stakeholder capitalism to give billions of people the opportunity to build wealth alongside the products and services they love and use.

In an excellent post, Kim reflects on the challenges of token-based communities:

This is common with new technologies -- the first iterations focus too much on the technology itself instead of the user experience the technology facilitates.

The Internet is a new way to interact, so it’s only natural that 40 years after its invention, we will come up with digitally native ways to distribute and exchange value, unconstrained by legacy financial infrastructure.