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

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.

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.

Crazy journey. So happy to find you here. Constitution DAO was one of the aspirational points to start our company.

Crazy journey. So happy to find you here. Constitution DAO was one of the aspirational points to start our company. 

https://lisafoundation.com

Building MuseKat to help parents & kids make sense of the world through real-time audio stories with Miko

I had so much fun with it. Totally insane experience

Btw Constitution DAO was hands down the most fun I’ve ever had on the internet. It’s what convinced me to quit my last web2 job

I had no idea who started that, I jumped in. It was some of the most fun I’ve had in the space! 

And it continues to be a great conversation starter today 

Glad to be following you here and excited for what you’re doing ￼

Great to re-meet you here!! Excited to follow what comes next

Inspiring journey. Thanks for the writeup and can't wait to find out more about what you're building.