Former Polychain Partner Charts Radical Course for New $125M Venture Fund
Tekin Salimi, has a twist on the venture capital fund: it should convert to a DAO
Tekin Salimi | Source: dao5
key takeaways
- The “dao5” fund will target seed and pre-seed stage startups and sports a host of high-profile crypto names among its advisors
- Participants, including the founders of portfolio companies, will eventually receive a stake in the VC firm’s profits through DAO tokens
These days, nine-figure venture capital funds are a dime a dozen, but the latest spin on the VC model from Tekin Salimi is that it should morph into a DAO.
Salimi, a former general partner at Polychain Capital, says his new fund, dubbed “dao5” has raised $125 million from crypto-native investors, earmarked for seed and pre-seed startup rounds. His plan is to help incentivize the founders of the fund’s eventual portfolio companies by giving them direct participation in the dao5 fund’s success through a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) structure using tokens that represent the fund’s profits.
This structure is novel in that it actually dilutes Salimi and his co-investor’s stakes, but it encourages the founders of the companies they back to collaborate in ways that benefit the collective as a whole.
“We believe that cross-pollination is essential to fostering a collaborative founder community,” a document outlining the fund’s principles states.
For now, though, this plan is very much still on the drawing board, and will only be implemented in roughly three years, after 70% of the fund’s capital has been invested.
Notable among the avowed principles is a respect for pseudonymous participants. The fund “works closely with pseudonymous advisors, and invests in tokens launched by pseudonymous founders,” the principles document states.
Among the advisors are a who’s-who of crypto executives, investors and builders, including Do Kwon (Terraform Labs), Emin Gün Sirer (Ava Labs), Ben Fisch (Espresso Systems), Ivan Soto-Wright (Moonpay), Meltem Demirors (CoinShares), and the pseudonymous 0xb1 (founder of Fodl and an NFT curator) and Cuckqueen (Femboy Capital).
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