I need to reintroduce myself.

I’m about to publicly launch a new company called 
@MezzanineLabs but most people only know a tiny, tiny part of my career... and usually it’s that I started ConstitutionDAO or that I was on the team that acquired Grindr

I studied econ and cs in college. As a sophomore, I started NomadX, an apartment rental company for digital nomads. We expanded across several countries and aggregated tens of thousands of units. Our goal was to create a global network of "host cities" where nomads could live for 1–3 months at a time. (Dare I say, an early network state?)

One of my first customers in Lisbon introduced me to bitcoin in 2017. That fall, bitcoin hit $20k for the first time and the term “DeFi” hadn’t been coined yet. I tried arbitraging Litecoin and Bitcoin on a Zimbabwean exchange called Golix, where prices had 50%+ premiums. That’s where I learned about market depth and how hard it is to make money in illiquid markets.

Building Mezzanine, started ConstitutionDAO

A few years later, I learned to invest at 28th Street Ventures, the family office of Michael Gearon Jr., former owner of the Atlanta Hawks. I was the #2 guy on a bunch of deals I probably had no business being involved with: the $600m acquisition of Grindr, an investment into leading Asian fintech Atome, and a 100+ megawatt solar project in Chile. Within a year, I also started a crypto fund.

The family office allocated $10M to a portfolio of crypto assets that I ran. I found myself researching crypto nonstop. I loved the debates around consensus mechanisms. PoS was still controversial and Ethereum hadn’t transitioned yet. I lived through “DeFi Summer” in 2020 and watched dozens of protocols like Uniswap and Aave redefine finance while hundreds of others started copycats with increasingly unsustainable incentives.

In The Arena

@spindl (acq’d by @coinbase)

Previously: Head of Partnerships @ Polygon | started ConstitutionDAO | ex-TradFi

Juicebox is a protocol built on Ethereum that helps you fund, operate, and scale your project onchain.

After ConstitutionDAO, thousands of DAOs launched. Some were solid. Some were scams. Most never got off the ground. I was a little disappointed at the lack of iteration and further innovation. I kept getting pitches for "let’s raise a ton of money to buy X," but I’d already done that. I was more interested in what came next.

To me, a "DAO" was always a subcategory of something bigger: an onchain organization. Just an organization with a transparent, programmable operating agreement.

DAOs have problems. "Autonomous" is often a misnomer—most DAOs need tons of human involvement. "Decentralized" usually just means that they're vaguely distributed ownership (or pretend). DAOs are often messy organizations governed by votes that very few people participated in.

You probably know how it ends. We lost the auction to Ken Griffin from Citadel (of Game Stop antagonist fame). The monolith defeated a large democratic organization for control of the constitution. Sigh.

Unlike most crypto projects, we didn't take a single penny. Refunds are still live. Ironically, no one wants them anymore—the token now trades well above the contribution value. It’s become a piece of history, a meme, a collectible, and somehow even a currency in some apps...?

People only talked about the spectacle of ConstitutionDAO. But there were some other cool aspects about what we did. We managed emulate the mechanism a SPAC, which is just a pool of money that tries to acquire something and offers full refunds if they fail. But a SPAC normally costs MILLIONS to set up and takes months... we had zero overhead, a few days, and some smart contracts. The process for joining, getting your stake, and getting your refund were explicit and deterministic. That's the power of smart contracts.

In 2021, I hopped into the arena. I started ConstitutionDAO. If you're new to the industry and haven't heard of it, we pooled ~$45M worth of ETH in just a few days to try and buy the U.S. Constitution. 

The first person I messaged was @austincain, a friend in Atlanta. Within 12 hours, we hosted a kickoff call with a ragtag group of talented shitposters, crypto fanatics, and internet trolls. Within a week, we had a legal structure and tens of thousands of people from around the world sending millions of dollars worth of ETH into a @juicebox smart contract.

Juicebox’s key feature was a way to return money: if we lost, everyone would be able to get a 100% refund.  It gave the people of the internet a risk-free way to collectively own and govern the Constitution. We planned to vote on decisions like where it would be displayed. It was a democratic experiment using one of the world’s most democratic documents.