Becoming a venture capital investor has historically been within reach of the select few. Syndicate is building a decentralized investing protocol and social network on the blockchain that lets you and your friends set up one for $10 in less than a minute, per a recent article in Decrypt.

That’s a bold statement, but its literally what Ian Lee, the cofounder of Syndicate said while speaking on a panel about DAOs on Coinshares Conversations:

• “Syndicate is creating a decentralized investing protocol that enables anyone to create an investment syndicate on the Internet for less than $10 in less than a minute,”

In essence, the DAO is a way for hundreds of thousands of people to get access to developing and investing in upcoming technologies and opportunities that otherwise may not be available to them.  Setting up a DAO with Syndicate is “around a thousand times cheaper than any other way of setting up such a fund” per the company’s cofounder Ian Lee. Setting up a fund the old-fashioned way would involve a team of lawyers and financial service providers.

An eye-popping stat:

• Almost $9 billion is currently held by DAOs per DAO tracker DeepDAO

What are DAOs?
One of the partners at Andreesen that is an investor in Syndicate had a good bit on what a DAO is in the investment memo they prepared on the company: 

• “A DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) is a mechanism that enables online communities to form and coordinate economically. It is a new kind of digital and economic entity that runs as code and is owned and controlled by its members. It makes it possible for an online group with members from anywhere in the world to pool capital and hard-code rules — entirely in software — for how that capital will be managed and deployed. Those rules are then enforced by the underlying blockchain.”

Another helpful definition is to think of them as equal parts company, community and guild (like the D&D version for us geeks).  Once upon a time, corporations as we know them today were merely an experiment in how to build an organization, and they have been with us for hundreds of years.  DAOs are a similar, obviously more modern experiment in creating an organization of like-minded people but built upon Web3 philosophies including transparency and openness, decentralization, and permissionlessness.

Characteristics of a DAO
DAOs can take various forms, from small groups that gather their capital, talents and networks to fund early-stage projects, all the way up to an entity that looks and acts like a traditional fund investor.  They are also designed to work globally, so they can include an international collective of investors without having to worry about the legal and operational hurdles that pervade such a grouping.

A DAO’s rules are written in open-source code with the decision-making processes encoded into smart contracts and have governance tokens for members to vote on investment projects.

Moneyweek recently declared the 2020s “the decade of the DAO.”

Syndicate is not the first ‘do-it-yourself’ DAO maker, but it apparently is aiming to be the lowest cost and easiest to use DAO creator. Other DAO creation platforms include Aragon, Colony, Gnosis Safe, Moloch, and DAOStack.

Genesis DAOs on Syndicate’s platform
Syndicate is in a limited beta release right now but there are some DAOs that have already been created:

• Terra Ecosystem Incubator – Community-based incubation platform for DeFi
   
• Komorebi – Investing in exceptional female and non-binary founders
   
• Audacity – Investing in Black and African startup founders
   
• Delphi INFINFT – Investing in protocols and apps in NFT ecosystem
   
• IDEO Founder Collective ­ – new model of community ownership for its portfolio of 30+ founders

Syndicate also announced that it will be working with dozens of new communities, including CityDAO, a relatively popular DAO that wants to democratize access to land.

$20M Series A financing.  To get the beta rollout humming, the company raised a $20M Series A financing led by Andreesen Horowitz and which included over 150 new and diverse investors, notably:

• Bill Ackman’s Table Management;
• BNP Paribas Group-backed Atelier Ventures;
• Coinbase Ventures,
• Ashton Kutcher
• Snoop Dogg Ventures.

Snoop and Ashton are on a mission to help us all get access to the same kinds of investment opportunities that their fame and fortune has gotten them.

Easy peasy to share this story with your peeps