Unbundling the unit economics of venture capital via DAOs

A vision of a DAO native venture landscape

the funding landscape in both crypto and the broader venture capital landscape is composed of predominantly passive capital. 

Founders have no publicly verifiable data on the quality of services investors can provide, nor do many founders conduct due diligence on their investors. As a result, many founders are unable to optimize their investors based on the services they offer.

The lack of quality data on investors has led to a sales-first-oriented venture environment where investors are overpromising and under-delivering.

The original hypothesis of the first investment DAOs (MetaCartel Ventures and the LAO) was that the aggregate network and expertise of 60–100 DAO members (builders & investors) was able to better assess and provide value add to projects than the typical venture fund that is run by 2–3 partners...  But even so, investment DAOs today have be... See more

Rather than starting with a focus on investing, we foresee more DAOs starting first as ‘service DAOs’ — organizations that aggregate high-quality practitioners under one community to provide services to third parties (engineering, audit, design, legal, research, treasury management, etc.) in exchange for project ownership.

While some funds have traditionally offered a variety of services under the same umbrella, we will likely see much more granular pricing of services being offered via service DAOs, and likely at far better unit economics than funds that offer a bundled set of services under their ‘platform’.

With communities often preceding social and technological revolutions, incubation DAOs play a key role in exploring the idea maze of nascent markets becoming the ‘homebrew computer clubs’ of various ecosystems.

From our perspective, we see this increased bottom-up competition for the services radically improving the unit economics of venture capital in favor of founders and communities.  

In the past, there have been many attempts at disrupting venture capital:

• The proliferation of angel investors (AngelList, 2010)


• Enactment and regulation of equity crowdfunding (Jobs Act, 2012)


• Cryptonative crowdfunding via token sales (2013)

While many of these efforts were successful at generating a greater supply of passive capital for founders, the... See more