Crypto needs less investors and more builders

Crypto needs less investors and more builders

In the age of Wall Street Bets, tech IPOs, and token listings, the power of ownership in generating wealth is now well understood. As a result, more and more people are choosing to invest instead of build. And we don’t blame them.

Investors have a rich ecosystem of legal structures and financial tools available to them. They can use portfolios to make multiple bets simultaneously. They can protect those bets with financial innovations like pro rata terms, transfer rights, liquidation preferences, the list goes on.

Meanwhile, makers have to choose between betting all their time on one company, or contracting for cash with no ownership upside.

Something feels broken here. There’s no reason top talent shouldn’t be able to diversify their bets, or invest their time in a portfolio of projects like investors do.

Enter Vector DAO

Vector DAO org structure

Vector DAO is a decentralized collective of designers, brand experts, and creatives pioneering a new way of working that tilts the scales back towards builders.

We’ve built new org structures that make it seamless for contributors to earn equity and tokens for their work. Being compensated in illiquid tokens can be risky so we protect our members by distributing the risks and upside of any one project by pooling these tokens into a portfolio shared by all our members.

To start, we’re tackling three main challenges:

Ownership, not cash
Wealth is generated not through selling time, but by owning assets with asymmetric payoff.

Vector DAO only accepts equity or tokens as compensation in exchange for services provided. We’ve found that this aligns incentives between project and contributor significantly better. In startups, where speed and flexibility are critical, hourly compensation penalizes these qualities when we want to incentivize the exact opposite. Vector DAO handles the paperwork and legal structures required for our members to earn equity and token compensation. Members simply have to show up and start contributing.

Diversification
Today, acquiring ownership through work means betting years of your life on a single startup in the hopes it becomes a unicorn. Meanwhile, investors can build portfolios to diversify risk and increase exposure to multiple successful companies.

Vector DAO provides members exposure to a diversified portfolio of projects through its seasons model. You can think of a Vector DAO season like a venture fund (e.g. fund 1, fund 2 etc). Contributors to any deal within a season will own “carry” in the entire season’s portfolio proportional to their contribution as well as feedback from their season’s peers (inspired by Coordinape). This allows a contributor to scale their time to earn ownership in a diversified portfolio of projects instead of just one.

Schedule flexibility
The idea of 9 to 5 employment is a relic from the industrial era. Knowledge workers are like athletes, meant to sprint and recover.

Members sign up for the level of commitment they deem best for themselves. Vector DAO works with both full and part time contributors. If members choose to take time off and skip a season, that’s ok too. Unlike traditional startups, there’s no cliff with Vector DAO.

Opening applications for Season_01

Vector DAO just completed Season_00 where we worked with and invested in projects like Hashflow, Solend, Gallery, Spearbit, and Saber. We view ourselves like early stage investors except we help founders build their vision instead of simply providing capital.

We’re opening up Season_01 to new projects and contributors. The application to apply as a member is here. If you’re a founder who wants to bring their idea to life or an established project interested in using our services, apply here.

We’re excited to build a future where building is the most effective and accessible way to generate wealth.

If you’re a designer, visual artist, or creative we’d love to have you in our community.

A few words from our past projects:

“I’m one of those founders that obsesses over design and will spend 3 hours to find the right shade of blue. Design is core to Hashflow’s success and having a technical design partner who shares the same obsession to get things right is a rare commodity. Luckily Jon and Co at Vector DAO are that team! Hands down one of the best design teams I’ve worked with!” — Varun Kumar, Founder of Hashflow

“Vector DAO bet on Gallery when we were just a side project with a handful of users. They felt like a co-founder, jumping on to user interview calls, helping brainstorm our product roadmap, and rapidly prototyping ideas to test out. Vector DAO has been absolutely indispensable in our journey. As a design-led product, their work has been core to our success.” — Mike Wen, Founder of Gallery

“For early stage products, speed is critical. Even moreso in crypto. Vector DAO quickly understood our technology and distilled it down into a simple user experience that delivered exactly what we wanted, all in the first go. Vector DAO is the perfect design partner.” — Omar Bohsali, Founder of Spearbit

FAQ

If you only earn equity and tokens, how do you expect members to pay the bills?
Long term, we hope to find a way to provide a base salary option where members can choose how much of their total comp comes in the form of ownership vs cash. In the meantime, we think Vector DAO can be a part time way for designers to earn equity in promising crypto startups they otherwise wouldn’t have access to.

What type of roles do you have?
We have two types of roles: leads and contributors.

Leads are responsible for bringing in deal flow, staffing and managing projects, and ultimately serving as a quality back stop on work delivered. In addition to senior+ level design skills, leads are expected to have entrepreneurial and leadership skill sets and actively contribute to building out Vector DAO.

Contributors are highly skilled individual contributors and domain experts responsible for executing design work. We’re looking for motion designers, illustrators, brand designers and product designers.

How do Seasons work?
A Season is a portfolio of projects. Each Season aims to have a target dollar value of tokens/equity in it at current project valuations. Members who contribute to any project within a Season will earn a slice of every project in that Season. Members must continue contributing to new Seasons in order to earn ownership in those Seasons.

How do you determine when to sell out of a season’s investment positions?
Similar to early stage investors, when we choose to partner with a project, we intend to be long term holders. Ultimately how we manages our ownership in projects will be determined through governance.

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