Would love to hear from Matt about this
Discussion
HAVE SPOKEN TO LUKE AT LENGTH ABOUT THIS. WE ARE ALIGNED. HE IS GOING TO SEND ANY DEVS THAT NEED SUPPORT TO APPLY WITH US.
The hypocrisy has to stop
By running both a VC fund (1031) and Open Sats a 501c you create a bias. You can’t have a fiduciary responsibility to your investors and allocate to FOSS devs without a bias no matter how you structure these entities.
Let me paint scenario where an open source dev is looking to make a 1031 funded company obsolete, would open sats fund it? I have a hard time believing open sats would especially since Odell would be liable for damages for breaking his fiduciary responsibility.
The biggest problem is that Open sats doesn’t fund anonymous developers. That means if Satoshi had come to Open Sats for funding he would have been denied.
Open Sats would be better off creating a list of devs / projects for people to zap / crowdfund instead of being a middleman.
I already know -oUr dOnOrS need tax deductions.
Say it out loud then
The entire existence of open sats is to give donors tax breaks and KYC devs.
cool got it
Down boy, pretty sure Satoshi self-funded. Do you equate anonymous with unknown and without development success? Recognized talent draws benefactors, benefactors don’t produce talent.
Satoshi had several funders supporting his work according to his email correspondence
This is the whole point of Nonprofit organizations in traditional finance, why would we think it'd be any different with Bitcoin? 501c's shouldn't even exist. Because there should be no taxes.
Thanks for the thoughts on this! Something, I will to to consider.
Let me lay out a little on how governance works inside organisations and companies:
Fiduciary duty is just one of the many obligations an office holder has and is not and should not over ride all others. The Milton Friedman school of extreme capitalism that espouses prioritising shareholder returns above all other factors has a large part to play in why public capital markets today are so utterly f’d up
Okay, so what are the priorities then?
Mission
Why does the organisation exist and what is it here for; OpenSats, Brink and HRF all have clear mission statements. Mission is first and foremost
People
Attract and nurture the people aligned to your mission who have the skills and talents you don’t, because they are the ones *who help deliver on the mission *
Profit
In a for-profit venture like a company, you need to get to cash flow positive in order to become master or mistress of your own destiny - as a founder you therefore carefully choose investors who buy into your mission
Ten31, EgoDeath, Recursive, Stillmark, Lightning Ventures etc etc are all Bitcoin only as a core part of their mission and consequently align investment with founders and projects those mission aligns with theirs
Further, it’s also why investors (not just VC forms) want to meet founders and understand what makes them tick; early stage investing is about investing in the people who, just maybe, can bring the vision to life. In the process of doing that they may generate a return for the investors .. but it’s clearly:
1. Mission
2. People
3. Profit
A key point to make in all of these types of organisations is that choices are made carefully because demands for funding (grant requests or startup funding) always vastly outstrips available supply .. and these decisions are not made by individuals but collaboratively
If you’ve primarily worked alone you won’t perhaps appreciate the value that a breadth of perspectives brings to hard decisions. I’ve looked at the board makeup of OpenSats and Ten31 and EgoDeath and i don’t see a single individual in there who’s a “yes” person; smart, brutally objective and unafraid to be combative with pretty much anyone
As you say though - there are other ways to try and the open source funding space would benefit you from creating those too .. get to it đź’Ş