RnDAO Venture Memo
About this doc:
This is an analysis and thesis for the venture builder concept
Introduction
The idea is to take “what we already have” from RnDAO and create a unit that will be in charge of creating / facilitating the creation of new businesses.
It's not clear yet how this would exactly look, which is part of the purpose of this paper.
Goals & Questions
Goals of this mini paper are 1. Create an overview between models, 2. Look at assets and aptitude for RnDAO, 3. Make recommendations and in general create a basis for discussion where 1 and 2 fit
Lessons Learned - Models
There are different models in creation of new ventures, many of which have become commoditized as methodologies like lean startups have become common knowledge.
The new ones are focusing more on community building and team building.
Here a brief overview
The accelerators
You come in with a basic team and company idea already, or can be a growth startup.
- Y-Combinator - the gold standard with the best network. The biggest value is its network, having successful founders in their rolodex.
- Techstars - the biggest in volume, exists worldwide and has verticals. Biggest value is its network & methodology.
- SOSV The Accelerator VC: Runs different topical accelerators and provides customer acquisition services or deep knowledge from industry experts.
The mixed models You can come in as a single person or as a team, with an idea or without one.
- Entrepreneur First (EF) which will take care of matching you with a cofounder and in case with an idea, give you a stipend for 3-6 months and then invest $80.000 in your company for 10%.
- OnDeck: has several tiers including OnDeck Founders which helps you start a company and OnDeck Scale which helps you go from scale up to IPO, when you go through one of their programs they give you preferred access to ODX which gives you 150k for 7% of your company.
- Latitud: Similar to OnDeck very focused on generating value through community.
- YC Startup School which generates pre-qualified leads for YC with content that comes from YC partners and mentors.
Company builder / venture studio model
- Rocket Internet: World's biggest company builder. Mostly building copycat products in new locations. They are structured centrally with a Global CEO, Global CMO etc who is the boss of the venture CEO / CMOs and is globally also responsible for the results of ventures. They take a large % of the ventures but also take on most of the risk.
- Next Big Thing: Developing their own idea or an idea that is coming from outside, taking 20% or more to develop the product together.
- Blazar Capital : Building brands that don’t have high tech costs where branding and partnerships can be leveraged.
- AppSumo Originals is an offshoot of Appsumo which is a marketing company, in order to market they built some software themselves and sell them now as “Originals”
The web3 accelerators
- The Blox runs an early and a growth accelerator program focused on Web3.
- Outlier Ventures runs accelerator programs together with chains and focuses on different verticals like luxury, decentralised web, Polygon using startups etc.
- Cointelegraph Accelerator provides media advisory and exposure for the participating startups
- PYRATZLABS provides tech support for the startups that go through their program.
- Alliance DAO is a DAO of founders, funds and founders who run an accelerator program - once you graduate you become part of the community.
Venture building can be divided into pull and push approaches.
Pull approaches are the majority of accelerators which need a pull to attract external talent which can be
- Money
- Customer acquisition
- Expertise
- Brandname
- Community
etc
Push approaches are the more operational ones that can be some operational VCs, venture studios and company builders. They require bigger manpower but also have a chance to build in house things faster.
Lessons Learned - RnDAO Value Proposition RnDAO like any organization must provide value in terms of know-how, network, community, execution etc for the creation of new ventures. Value we can add includes:
Research
- Research mentorship (deep expertise in user research and also value prop validation)
DAO and Operational expertise:
- Strategy support on how to run a DAO and how to use DAO tooling
- plus modules for team operations: conflict resolution, decision making, compensation, etc. These are all hard questions that teams spend hours figuring out and we can fast track that with our templates and helping implement them
Business Development & Fundraising
- customer access and networks (RnDAO as testing ground and warm intros to many DAO founders for customer development and/or partnerships)
- fundraising support for grants (we have a respected brand in the ecosystem and a process to apply for grants that we have developed through a lot of trial and error)
- recruitment support (we have a talent funnel)
- marketing channels (RnDAO doesn't have a huge number of followers but the the people who follow us are DAO geeks and influential in the ecosystem)
Recommendations
- Explore Company Builder / DAO model
RnDAO has a lot of experience in building and running DAOs. Living its authenticity and living what it believes in which is why it should use its expertise to power its ventures.
For this reason I believe that setting up an operational team that can build products is interesting and having a DAO around it helps with supplying talent, decision making and advisory in exchange for having part in the ventures themselves.
Imperative for this is to start ideating on types of products or actual products that we ourselves would like to have built to see what MVP team we would need and just start building on one. Examples of simple products with reach are meetwithwallet.
What products would we ourselves build if we could?
What would a company building DAO incl operational, advisory and investment roles look like?
- Create content flywheel that drives interested founders into our sphere of influence for company building or venture studio
RnDAO has expertise and needs to attract people that align with the values of RnDAO. For this I suggest something akin to “Y Combinator Startup School” but focusing on building an ace startup/DAO team. This will start a “pull” effect to RnDAO for both founders (who can be mentors or investors) and potential founders or collaborators (for new ventures or the company builder team)
What curriculum would we like everybody to go through to have better functioning teams, organizations and DAOs and what do we need to build it?
- Explore open innovation events to attract dealflow, talent and possible partners
RnDAO could run an open innovation hackathon with a focus on easy to make yet useful products that could be sponsored by other web3 companies. The special sauce would be to integrate some of RnDAO “technologies” e.g. decision making etc in the organizational part just as it includes technologies from polygon or ethereum foundation
What online/offline events could we organize to attract the people we want to play a role in the company builder / DAO as sponsors, investors and operators?
Notes (Mel)
VC/Company Builder:
Value Creation
Value Capture
DAO, which are we:
Innovative Process
Innovative Technology
Core Expertise
Reference
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SOSV - https://sosv.com/- The Accelerator VC
The Accelerator VC. They focus on creating value for startups in different verticals and make themselves competitive like that
- HAX - premium Hardware Accelerator
- Indiebio - Life Sciences
- MOX - mobile app startup development
- dlab - decentralization and blockchain
- china accelerator - market entry to china