BDFL of Quilibrium, ex-Farcaster, ex-Coinbase, always opinionated, never hydrated /quilibrium
247155 Followers
cozy corner
I miss the cozy corners https://farcaster.xyz/cassie/0x40cd6e8e
With the holiday season coming up, I know it can be a harder time for those struggling with addiction. As I post every year, if you want a sober sponsor to vent to/cry with/talk to, my DMs are open.
This week, Q Inc has changed course with speaking with investors. Given I receive a lot of cold opens from investors on Farcaster, I would like to share that change with everyone publicly, and why. Moving forward, we refuse to even begin conversations with funds who have ever (or intend to) engaged in token warrants. It is clear our values and beliefs are diametrically opposed, and this is a far easier filter to save ourselves the time. It has been a long path to fundraising principally because we are operating from a perspective that as a company collaborating on a fair launched project, we can not and will not do token warrants. Despite being upfront about this, this topic has resulted in a lot of time wasted in talking with crypto funds, because they do not believe equity has a path to return for them, and ultimately decline. This is very telling because if they don't believe the company will be successful what use are the tokens, unless...?
Years ago, when I started building a decentralized discord clone, people asked me why. I wanted a communication tool that was truly decentralized, in a way that no state actor was able to gain control over. Signal's design wasn't capable of group chats beyond a certain size. The features only went so far. And it has failure points such that countries block them by firewall and have to rely on the good graces of others to run proxies, which ultimately get shut down or blocked too. App stores do not share in this ideal — their concern is profit, and will bend backwards when forced to by regulatory bodies. Amazon and others are complicit in helping state actors maintain their control of the web, and are profiting handsomely from the arrangement. None of this happened by accident. And I only saw it getting worse. I realized what I was building in this chat application went beyond just chat, and how pressing it was to make this general purpose.