
The Hard Crypto Thesis
Boost VC was the first institutional fund that was brave enough to deploy into crypto back in 2013, and we’re also the first crypto fund that was brave enough to expand the investment thesis to include hard-tech startups as well. Since then we’ve led investments into dozens of companies which are standing up entirely new markets from scratch — from Radiant building mobile nuclear reactors, to Gigamune developing new kinds of in-vivo cell therapies, to Starfish Space pioneering a more sustaina...
Why The Community Is Not the Product
or, The Death of Communities via a Thousand Incentives Before getting into VC a year ago, I spent most of my 20s as a builder in crypto, primarily trying to understand the role that token incentives could play in the successful achievement of community goals. The first product I built and launched was The Bounties Network, which was one of the first Ethereum protocols to grow >$1m TVL. We worked with a lot of your favorite early tokens/DAOs, and the goal was to build an open marketplace (ie h...
The Token Is The Product
There’s an old saying in venture that says “first time founders focus on product, and second time founders focus on distribution”. This describes how product builders often expect that they can achieve growth purely thanks to the quality of their product, rather than by investing energy into creating repeatable patterns that will help them consistently attract attention and users to their product. However, there’s another element here that I believe a lot of crypto founders are missing, and t...

The Hard Crypto Thesis
Boost VC was the first institutional fund that was brave enough to deploy into crypto back in 2013, and we’re also the first crypto fund that was brave enough to expand the investment thesis to include hard-tech startups as well. Since then we’ve led investments into dozens of companies which are standing up entirely new markets from scratch — from Radiant building mobile nuclear reactors, to Gigamune developing new kinds of in-vivo cell therapies, to Starfish Space pioneering a more sustaina...
Why The Community Is Not the Product
or, The Death of Communities via a Thousand Incentives Before getting into VC a year ago, I spent most of my 20s as a builder in crypto, primarily trying to understand the role that token incentives could play in the successful achievement of community goals. The first product I built and launched was The Bounties Network, which was one of the first Ethereum protocols to grow >$1m TVL. We worked with a lot of your favorite early tokens/DAOs, and the goal was to build an open marketplace (ie h...
The Token Is The Product
There’s an old saying in venture that says “first time founders focus on product, and second time founders focus on distribution”. This describes how product builders often expect that they can achieve growth purely thanks to the quality of their product, rather than by investing energy into creating repeatable patterns that will help them consistently attract attention and users to their product. However, there’s another element here that I believe a lot of crypto founders are missing, and t...

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Today we’re announcing that we’re sunsetting the Myco platform, and shutting down all of our operations related to the project.
We started this project two and a half years ago with a number of hypotheses about bottoms-up community building, and we’ve been delighted to experiment with a variety of novel ownership mechanisms that can enable hyper-participatory communities to scale.
Unfortunately, it’s become clear that this space is still quite early, and that a majority of folks are just beginning to appreciate being present within community spaces, let alone desiring to put effort into creating them. The world is simply not ready to DAO-ify itself yet.
While we remain excited for the many bottoms-up community building projects which continue to exist at the intersection of culture and technology (aka crypto), we no longer believe that now is the time for us to build a platform for the adoption of these patterns at scale.
We want to take a moment and thank everyone who supported this project and made it possible — from our investors who took a chance on our vision for the future, to the communities who bravely experimented with some of the new and foreign org patterns that we developed.
We also want to thank everyone who joined the platform and participated as users of Myco. While we never ended up earning any revenue or profit that we could distribute back to our users, we remain extremely grateful for everyone who participated in our weird and beautiful space.
We continue to be excited about all of the ways that crypto systems can create deeper relationships between people and their communities, and we look forward to continuing to explore this space with you all into the future.
Today we’re announcing that we’re sunsetting the Myco platform, and shutting down all of our operations related to the project.
We started this project two and a half years ago with a number of hypotheses about bottoms-up community building, and we’ve been delighted to experiment with a variety of novel ownership mechanisms that can enable hyper-participatory communities to scale.
Unfortunately, it’s become clear that this space is still quite early, and that a majority of folks are just beginning to appreciate being present within community spaces, let alone desiring to put effort into creating them. The world is simply not ready to DAO-ify itself yet.
While we remain excited for the many bottoms-up community building projects which continue to exist at the intersection of culture and technology (aka crypto), we no longer believe that now is the time for us to build a platform for the adoption of these patterns at scale.
We want to take a moment and thank everyone who supported this project and made it possible — from our investors who took a chance on our vision for the future, to the communities who bravely experimented with some of the new and foreign org patterns that we developed.
We also want to thank everyone who joined the platform and participated as users of Myco. While we never ended up earning any revenue or profit that we could distribute back to our users, we remain extremely grateful for everyone who participated in our weird and beautiful space.
We continue to be excited about all of the ways that crypto systems can create deeper relationships between people and their communities, and we look forward to continuing to explore this space with you all into the future.
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