On The Brink with Castle Island - Kinjal Shah (Blockchain Capital) and Manasi Vora (Skynet Labs) on DAOs as a New Investing Paradigm (EP.226)

Episode Date: June 28, 2021

Kinjal Shah of Blockchain Capital and Manasi Vora of Skynet Labs join us to discuss their recently launched investment DAO, KomorebiCollective. We discuss: 1) The motivation behind Komorebi and its mission to fund female and non-binary founders 2) The decision to structure the collective as a DAO 3) The cost, transparency, and speed benefits DAOs provide 4) What use cases DAOs are serving well today and could serve as they mature To learn more about Komorebi, you can visit their website and apply for funding. Sponsor notes:  Aave is a decentralized, open source, and non-custodial protocol where users can deposits and borrow digital assets, and earn interest on those assets. Head over to aave.com to experience and learn more about DeFi.  

On today's episode, we had a conversation with Kynjel from blockchain capital and Monsi from Skynet Labs. The main topic of conversation was Komo Rebi Collective, which is a decentralized autonomous organization, or Dow, that Kingel and Monsi recently launched with members of Xi-256 by a syndicate protocol. During the conversation, we talk about the motivation behind Komo Rabi and its mission to fund female, and non-binary founders, the decision to structure the collective as a DAO, the cost and transparency and speed benefits that DAWS provide, and what use cases DAWS are serving well today and could serve as they mature, and a lot more. Kynjal and Monci bring unique angles to the discussion of funding underrepresented founders and building DAOs given their experience in the industry and prior efforts.

to address the gap that female investors and builders face in accessing opportunities and capital across many technical industries, including crypto. I loved this conversation, and I hope you enjoy it too. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping in. to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by

the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing. You print a couple trillion dollars and all of a sudden people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. Bitcoin. Hey everyone. This is Ria.

And today we have Kinjell Shah from blockchain capital and Mansi Bora from Skynet Labs to talk about Comorabi Collective, which is a really exciting. exciting investment Dow that they've launched alongside a few others in the space to fund female and non-binary founders globally. Hi, Kynjel and Monty. It's so great to have you on the podcast today. Thank you for having us. Super excited to be here. Yes, thanks, Ria. Of course. So before we get into Dow's more broadly and their application to Komo Rebbe, I think it'd be really awesome if you could give us a quick introduction about yourselves, how you got involved with crypto and what you're working on right now, and maybe we can start with you, Monzi.

Sure. So my story basically around 2016, 2017, I don't know if you're a familiar, but there was demonetization that happened in India, which was basically overnight Indian government decided that certain denomination of currencies were invalid. And that caused a lot of societal economical upheaval in India. And I was in the U.S. then, but I was watching it really closely and started thinking a lot about what monetary policy means, how, you know, government has such a huge impact on the entire society in countries and stumbled upon Bitcoin and just, you know, fell down that rabbit hole like Olive is here and haven't looked back.

My background, though, is in the financial industry, having worked on Wall Street. a lot of large banks, but I'm glad to have left that behind and jumped fully into the crypto space. And currently I work at Skynet Labs, as you mentioned, we do decentralized data storage, a lot of the infrastructure for the decentralized internet. And I'm also the founder of feminine blockchain, which is an initiative to increase diversity in the crypto space through education and radius of their initiative. Awesome. And, And what about you, Kynjel? Yeah, so I come similarly from financial services background.

I was working at Fidelity, part of the Fidelity Mafia, as we like to call it, in 2017. And I was actually put on a project looking at the broader blockchain ecosystem and use cases that might apply to Fidelity. And so that's where I really started learning about the space and just thought it was so fascinating how it was very interdisciplinary between tech and monetary policy and even just mathematics and economics, I just thought it was really interesting intersection and decided that I wanted to work on this more full-time and look at it more closely. So from there, I came to blockchain capital. We are an early-stage venture firm focused on the entire blockchain ecosystem. So we've been investing in this space for about eight or nine years now, really acting as kind of generalists across the entire industry and

seeing it grow from a little, a much smaller space to what it is today. We have about 100 portfolio companies and I really wanted the opportunity to be able to look across the space and identify and research new trends. Everything moves super fast in this space. So it's a really unique perspective, which I'm really glad to have. Yeah. And I think one thing that a lot of people baby don't know is Kintel was part of the original team at Women Blockchee before she moved out of Boston to SF. So strong dyes here. Yeah, we all go way back. So, Monty, you mentioned that you've been involved and actually co-founded women in blockchain and Kinjil. You've also been pretty active in building up women in crypto in pretty unique ways. I remember you kicked off office hours for female founders.

Would love to know what motivated you to be active in this way and what were some of the takeaways from those experiences because I think that's definitely relevant to. of a discussion about Komor Ravi? Yeah, so happy to start here. So I've now been investing in the space for three years, and I keep coming back to this realization, but I've only had conversations with female founders a handful of times. And it's not to say that there aren't amazing women out there building in crypto,

but I know that just from an overall demographics perspective, the space skews a little bit more male. And so I really just wanted to put more, effort into seeking out the, you know, amazing founders that are in a space. And so I started doing these office hours really as a way to seek out women, but also just kind of create a safe space. I think sometimes the whole like blockchain universe can feel a little bit intimidating. And maybe you don't know exactly where to get started or you just have like open questions. And so I just wanted it to be more of a safe space. And the results have been amazing.

I've had basically five to seven conversations every month across a range of different topics, talking to founders who are at different stages, whether they're ideating or they're moving forward with financing or they're just asking questions about connecting with other women in the space. So lots of positive response. And I know when I first joined as an investor, I sought a lot of camaraderie with all the female investors in the space. And they've been super welcoming and warm. And I just want to continue to push this along.

because I think we seek to build out, at least crypto seeks to build out very diverse and open and accessible products and services. And so I want to make sure that the founders that we fund reflects that as well. Yeah, I think I fully agree with what Kinjell said. In terms of my motivation to start women in blockchain, I've written a little bit about this in the past. But it was basically, you know, me trying to learn about the space when I was early on. And the best way I learn is meeting people, going to events, listening to others talk about the topic. And I would go to these events, and I'm sure the experience is pretty much common across the board. I would be one of maybe like two women in a room of like 100 people.

And that was really upsetting to see, especially coming from like the finance background. We've seen the disparities, the gender pay gaps. And I did not want a new space which has, you know, huge potential like the blockchain. space has to have the same problems. And it's so great that we are early on that we can start these conversations and start making a difference right at the beginning instead of 10 years down the line looking back, oh, we need to now focus on diversity. So that was kind of my motivation just to bring in more folks into the space, have a community for people to learn from each other. And like Kintel mentioned, you know, just having a space, safe space where we can ask questions,

we can learn together, work on projects. And that's where we've, you know, facilitated over the last few years with women in blockchain through various educational initiatives, workshops. And what I love about Komurabi, and I'm sure we'll talk more about it later, is, you know, we, with women in blockchain, sheet of 56, we started at the top of the funnel, just educating women, exposing them to this technology. And now I think the time is so right to start investing in them. And we're super excited with what we are doing with Koberabi.

That's awesome. No, I think they're both incredible efforts and even She-256. I remember when I first joined the industry, you know, back in 2018, I immediately applied to the She-256 program. And, you know, I got paired with an amazing mentor, Dan Zeller, and he had such a massive impact on just helping me navigate the space. And I think initiatives like this are super important. And it's been incredible to see the community of just brilliant women in crypto just grow more and more. And the fact that you've launched Komorevi to fund them more explicitly now, I think it's awesome to see. So I'd actually love to take a step back because I don't think we've really had a deep dive on Dow's on the podcast. And, you know, just start off with a quick discussion on Dow's.

And to start off with a really high level question, you know, how. would you define a Dow? And if there's any kind of analogy in the traditional finance or traditional non-crypto world that you could give, like what would that be? Yeah, so Dow, you know, Dow stands for a decentralized autonomous organization. And it's really not a black and white type of designation. but what I would say that it's a new framework for coordination, or it is a framework for coordination, where there's a shared set of rules that are enforced by a blockchain typically. And I think one of the more layperson's way of thinking about it

is that it's a community with a shared mission that has an on-chain bank account. So I know I just said a bunch of things, but I would say it's really about coordination, having a way to enforce rules and then more of a grassroots community that defines what a DAO really is. And then if we think about traditional finance and potentially the best analogy there is kind of a cooperative. So co-ops have been something that existed for many, many years.

They're not as popular of a structure today, but it's really more of a grassroots organization where everyone in a co-op has a piece of the pie, so to say, and everyone has a say from the beginning. And so I'd say that's very similar to how DAOs are structured right now. I think I agree. It's basically, you know, community coming together on a shared mission with economics involved, which is new. I think, you know, we've had communities in the Basper, having some economic incentives, having some codified incentives that are, you know, using smart

contracts, blockchain, whatever, the technology that you end up using is super interesting because now there are motivations that go long term instead of having short-term incentives. Yeah, definitely. And I think one thing that Kinjell said that stood out is on-chain banking or community banking via DAWS, I think, is really interesting. And, you know, I think another thing that I've just noticed is from learning about DAO's over the last however long is it's, it's honestly. spectrum, right? Like there's no, as you said, like black and white definition of what it is. There are some DAOs that are definitely much larger, much more decentralized, much more automated. And there are some that are, you know, smaller and are more focused on just coordinating a

smaller group of individuals and focusing on a very specific task at hand. And why do you think that there's been this resurgence of interest in Daos of late? You know, I feel like every week I see some protocol or some new team that's announcing a new Dow. What do you think is driving that? I'm not sure if I have the exact reason why Daos are researching, but I agree with you, we are in terms of, like, we've seen a whole wide variety of, like, smaller communities to just, like, much larger communities coming together.

And I think we are really in the experimentation phase where, you know, people are trying novel things with DAO's. It's interesting to just look back, though, at the history and, you know, seeing the first DAO, maybe the DAO, right, in 2016 on Ethereum, which we all know how that ended. And then MakerDAO is another really good example. And I love what they're doing now, especially with the foundation finally dissolving and the controlfully moving to a decentralized organization. But we did see, you know, after the Dow incidence and, you know, little lower intake our interest overall in the decentralized organizations. And now recently with like NFTs just going off the roof, I think they do go hand in hand. With NFTs, there's the incentives for creators to come together and be more collaborative.

And that's where I think, you know, the Dow angle is. But curious to hear what Kinjell thinks is why the researchers. Yeah, I think you really cover all the points I was going to think about. I think the only other piece I would mention is that defy has really opened the eyes of the community to what a powerful Dow structure can do. You know, I think there's a lot of conversations about scaling Dow's, and we can talk about that. But Defi has certainly proven out that a small community can manage a significant amount of value and provide a significant amount of value to the overall crypto ecosystem. So I think Defi kind of going through their summer last year probably brought about this inevitable shift towards thinking through Dow's and what else we can apply them to.

Yeah. I think, you know, just going along with that point, you know, we've seen this massive increase in treasuries of some of these defy projects. And they're thinking about, you know, how do we kind of make decisions around what to do with these treasuries? and it seems like DAOs have been just a natural extension of that entire trend. And then Monci, to your point, about NFTs, you know, I think what's been really cool is initially only really wealthy individuals or entities were able to purchase and acquire some of these more expensive NFTs. And then you saw like this grassroots creation of DAOs that have been come together. in a really short period of time to invest in really notable NFT projects that, you know, wouldn't have been possible without that kind of organizational structure, which has been really cool to see. You know, you guys touched on this question briefly when I asked you about how

you would define DAO's, but would love to get into it a little bit more explicitly. What, in your experience, are the key benefits that DAO's provide to communities and builders? today. You know, one of the biggest benefits is just how quickly communities can now come together. We compare DAO's to like community banking, but we can also compare DAO's to just organizations. In our example, right, the way we are structured, it's an investment DAO. But if we were to go out and do kind of a traditional, we see fund just the operational and the legal overhead needed. I'm sure we would need a couple months to set this up. But with just this DAO structure, we were able to to do it within, I would say, less than two weeks with lowest possible cause.

So that's definitely one benefit. And I think the second benefit is just being able to leverage the network and the community around you and how we can just incentive align everyone so that we have the prison dilemma or the problem of how people can coordinate. And I think DAOs are doing some interesting. There are some interesting mechanisms to look at when we talk about coordination problems. Yeah, I totally agree. I would just add maybe two points is that DAOs are, I think, by default, very global and very open and transparent. You know, all of our activity is going to be

very transparent to the public, transparent to all the members of the DAO, and, you know, pretty much anyone around the world is able to get involved. And just along the same lines of time to launch, there's also just lower barriers to entry, you know, spinning up a DAO, costs a couple hundred dollars versus some longer process that we might have had if we went a different route. Yeah, I think the transparency point is super critical because, you know, I'm part of syndicates, which is like the traditional angel funding route that you do to invest in other, you know, non-crypto companies. And the decision-making process there is super non-transparent. You literally have to trust the syndicate leads in terms of the due diligence that they're doing.

which projects they are investing in, as opposed to what I'm seeing with, you know, Komaribi and other kind of DAOs, everything is out there in the public eye. Anyone can go in and see what, you know, transactions we are making, who contributed, which person contributed. And I think that's super valuable. Like, I don't have to wait for syndicates, I have to wait, like, for their quarterly reports or annual reports to see, you know, what decisions were made as opposed to real time, seeing how DAWS are functioning.

Yeah, it definitely seems like we're seeing massive improvements in speed, cost, transparency, time to market, the ability to, you know, bring people over the internet together in a way that they haven't been able to before and not just invest their time, but their money, I think, has been really fascinating. So, yeah, that being said, let's kind of pivot and talk about Como Rebby because that's why I have you guys on today. So just starting off, you know, what does Como Rebbe mean? Who all is involved in Komorebi? What's the mission? Would love to hear your take on that. Yeah, I think just to preface, naming is hard. It's a challenge that I've, you know, faced at multiple different organizations.

But, you know, when we came together, so Komarebi is comprised of, you know, Kind of, you know, Kindle, myself with women in blockchain. a couple members from Sheeta 56. And the backstory there, like I said, initially, you know, we've been trying to do different things in the space to increase diversity, and we felt this was the right time to come together and also fund amazing founders in the space. So Ian, who is from Syntiquit Tao, which is what, you know, Comeradioucault, collective has launched on top of, brought us together,

and I'm so glad that he did. And we all immediately connected and thought, you know, this is something that we want to spend our time and resources. on. But going back to the name, it's a hard problem. And we spend some, you know, decent amount of time figuring out how we want to name this. And the moment we, you know, saw Comorabi as a term, which basically is a, you know, it's a Japanese expression. It's almost poetic, untranslatable, which means it describes the sunlight filtering through trees. And the minute we, you know, all of his came across this term, we just loved.

the expression and how it, you know, inspires the sentiment that Kumari B is built around, which is to illuminate and, you know, elevate a group of otherwise underestimated originally founders building in crypto. So I think that's how, you know, the story of Komuribi begins. And I just have fallen in love with that term now. Yeah, it's a very evocative term. Like, you can just imagine or immediately get like a distinct feeling when you think about that image that it defines. So very, very deep. I love it too. And yeah, what exactly is the mission? Like, what's your goal, you know, immediate term goal? Yeah. So we've, you know, we've kind of outlined this mission of wanting to see more exceptional founders get funding in the space that are female

and non-binary and, you know, support them in many ways that we can. And so that's really the mission of the of the collective right now. And we have, you know, 30 plus members within the collective all with their unique perspective and their unique networks and areas of expertise. And so we're all kind of coming together trying to source some, you know, amazing founders and hopefully give them their first or one of their first checks so that they can kind of get started and get things going. So we're, we're really investing at the, right now, we're thinking about investing primarily at the earlier stage of the market and potentially be, you know, one of the first checks in for some of these founders. Yeah. And I would add, I guess, like, in terms of mission, it's two pronged. One is to change the

landscape of, like, just funding in the space and then change the landscape of, like, founders in the space. And what I mean by that is, you know, we all know the data around how female founders are funded. It's really a tiny percentage of total venture capital funding that goes towards them. But on the other hand, we also wanted to empower women investors to come together and invest in women founders. So we brought together some amazing investors, founders, women and allies both, which is what Comorabi Collective was made of, which is, you know, 31 of members plus the core team. That's awesome. Monzi, you hinted at this, and I think you wrote about it a little bit in your post announcing Komorebi. But one thing you talked about is that very few female founders get funded despite, you know, pretty significant data that shows the outperformance of teams that have women in leadership positions and that have more diverse teams.

Have you guys thought about why that is? Why is there this gap despite the data that, you know, there is outperformance with a more diverse structure? I think some of that has to do with accessibility. And just like anecdotally, I'm speaking to one of the funds in the space and just about Komarebi and the deal flow that we are seeing. And they immediately mentioned, like, oh, your pipeline is much stronger than what we've seen in the last few years. And we've just been doing that for like two weeks now.

And I think a lot of it is because maybe, you know, female founders feel that they can reach out to us and you know we just come across as more accessible as opposed to some of these larger funds in the space but that's just a guess yeah i would i would definitely say i think that plays a role and then the other piece is i think there are founders there if you are looking for it right i think like there's this notion of well you know the percentage of female founders that are getting funded is lower because there aren't as many founders which like it might be true, but I don't think it's necessarily true in the case of like, are you actually going out and seeking out these founders who may not be in the right network

or place or whatever it may be to actually make the connection with you? And when I say you, I'm just talking about funds in general. So I think just like putting a foot forward and like saying this is what we represent, this is who we want to talk to, has allowed us to see a lot of the deals that potentially other funds might not see that are that are founder, female founder focused. Yeah, that definitely makes sense. And then how does the investment process work right now? You know, who is doing the sourcing, the diligence thing, the deploying funds? You know, I think you said you have about 30 members of Komorebi. Like what portion of those members is actually doing the day-to-day work associated with Komorabi? Yeah. So, you know, I think similar to what we were

talking about earlier, about how this is, it's definitely a spectrum in terms of how these styles work. So we've started out with V1 of our process where the entire collective helps us source the deals. So, you know, we're really relying upon the collective to bring in as many female founders as possible. And then we have a sort of core operating team who comprises of, you know, myself and Monci and then a few members of She-256, who are primarily doing the diligence and talking to the teams on a more weekly basis. And then sort of at the end of the process, we have the entire collective discussing investment opportunities and then doing an on-chain vote for every investment. So really trying to make sure that they're involved in the process,

but not also make it a huge time commitment for everyone involved as well. But it's very transparent and everybody has access to the entire process and can be as involved as they want to with the diligence, it's really just that they don't have to absolutely do that if they can't. Yeah, I think this is a bigger question around governance with DAOs. And, you know, as DAO scale, how can you make sure that each member of the DAO contributes in some way or the other? And, you know, we have to accept the fact that not everyone will contribute equally. And now we've started to see with certain DAO's farming the core stuff and then just contributors and members and just this like tiered approach.

where decision-making has been on a spectrum, which is interesting to see. And that's kind of what Kintel mentioned with B-1. We wanted to keep it low-weight, low effort for our collective members. So, you know, the core team, as we call it, does majority of the work with everything being super transparent. And then the final decision still wise on the collective. So we have a multi-sig where MFN have to, you know, approve on a certain transaction for the founder to be funded.

Got it. Yeah, I think, you know, the tiered approach, I've seen that in practice in a few places. I think the Friends with Benefits community kind of launched explicit tiers of participants in their version three as they kind of transitioned to more of a Dow model. So it definitely seems like people are iterating on that in real time.

You both mentioned syndicate Dow as, you know, something that you use to launch Komorebi. Could you talk a little bit more about syndicate protocol and what they've enabled and kind of the problem that they're solving in this space? Sure. So I think syndicate DAO's kind of mission is more specifically focused on investment DAWs. So there can be, you know, multiple types of DAWs, creator DAWs, investment DAWs. It's just a DAO that comes together to invest in either companies or NFTs or other digital.

goods. And so syndicate's mission is to enable these communities to come together and launch investment dollars. And where they help is basically two, it's two prong. One is, you know, just the operational aspect of it, managing the inflows of funds, managing how things get funded, the transactions, all of the on-chain stuff. And the second component is this like social network that they are building, which is what we launched on top of, which basically reverages the syndicate community to be both investors and then also sorts of like D.U.F. So I think it was really beneficial for us to launch and syndicate all the support that they've provided has been amazing. And that's, you know, kind of goes back to the point of being able to launch a Dow in two weeks as opposed

to being able to launch a VC firm in multiple months with, I don't know how many of, uh, of thousands of dollars of overhead. Yeah, that's exactly what I was referring to earlier. I feel like every week, you know, I see syndicate, the syndicate team announce like a new project that they've, they've helped launch and how quickly they've been able to do that and for significantly lower costs. So that's been really cool to see. Are there any additional tools you're using at this point in time, or is it kind of just too early and, you know, you're just, is it not as necessary at the this point in time to use additional tools. Because I've seen some kind of development of like data and governance platforms. And I imagine it's more helpful for larger scale DAWs. But yeah,

definitely curious to hear whether there's anything else you're using or your thoughts on some of those other tools that are available today. Yeah. So I think right now we're just using NOSIS safe and then syndicate. And that's that's really the stack at this point with the social component of how we actually communicate with the Dow is really being run through Telegram. So I think that right now it's a little bit early for us to use some of the tools that are out there. But I'm super excited about all the Dow tooling. There's so many interesting players that are trying to build dashboards and reporting and treasury management services, so on and so forth. And I think the social layer and the social component is going to be really important

moving forward and just sort of seeing how Dallas can scale that experience. So yeah, I'm really excited about this landscape. And I think that we'll definitely be open to trying out new tools, but just hasn't been required so far. Got it. And how the first few weeks been, you know, you talked about this a little bit, but what has deal flow been like for Komorebi versus, you know, kind of especially versus traditional VC and your experience at blockchain capital. Yeah. So the deal flow has been great. I mean, I think like you definitely get a little bit of an initial surge with any sort

of launch, right, especially a public launch. You know, people start sharing your information. So I think the reception has been just great from the community in general. But then the other piece that I would say that's been great is just seeing like the Dow come together and source deals. So we've had many of our members source deals and send them over. And the flow has just been pretty consistent over the past couple of weeks. I'm very excited about that.

I've met more female founders in the past few weeks than I have in three years, which is crazy. So they're there. You just have to, you know, go and look for them. So, yeah. I love that. I love that. And honestly, I think that's another kind of benefit of the doubt is, you know, you can leverage the network of the members,

which is, of course, with women in blockchain, shoot a 56, we have a strong network, a lot of deal flow coming through just over the last few years of the communities that, you know, both these organizations have built. But on top of that, we have some amazing founders, some funds backing us, some investors, journalists, just a wide range of members

who are really plugged into the crypto space and can, you know, bring us some strong deal flow. So super exciting. Yeah, I think it's, it definitely also must be the fact that you guys have been so explicit about your mission. And I feel like that really attracts like-minded people and it probably attracts founders that are like, oh, I feel seen, I feel heard. So that must be awesome to see, you know, so early on. And are there any specific categories that you and the collective are especially excited to invest in? You know, what have you seen so far? And, you know, what have you seen so far?

are beyond like yeah, any specific categories that have been really exciting to you. I guess I can just say, you know, one of the areas that I'm spending a lot of my time on and I've actually, I think we've seen a good amount of, you know, deal flow in this area has been around Dow tooling, Dow governance tooling and then just broader Dow tooling and then the NFT space and how we think about the experience of an NFT. You know, I think we had like their big surge of NFTs in the past few months and things that have really calmed down. But in the background, I think we're going to start to see some really interesting projects emerge where they answer the question, you know, now that we know how to create NFTs and trade NFTs, like, what do

you do with them and what does that experience look like? And is it going to be social? Is it going to be experiential? Is it going to be in the metaverse? Those are all questions that I'm thinking about and really excited about. And I think we're going to continue to see some great deals in that category. Yeah. And I don't think as a. fund, we are focused on a specific category. We are really open, you know, across the broad crypto spectrum. But apart from like the flashy stuff, like the defy and the NFD space, I think particularly, you know, I'm super excited about non-financial applications, like social applications. How do we come together as a society and coordinate? How do we, you know, move away from the

Facebooks and the Twitters of the world and create, you know, newer, much more intimate communities? And then on top of that, the other thing that excites me particularly is just the infrastructure behind all of this. And I think we've seen this transition where, you know, in the last year or so, cryptos just gained so much momentum, so much, you know, wide range of use cases that now finally we are starting to realize that there is a need for the infrastructure also, which, you know, can mean identity solutions can mean, you know, decentralized data is what I work on, day in and day out, but just so many infrastructure solutions to build these applications and decentralized, truly decentralized applications instead of still, you know, using login with Facebook or using Google Cloud in the background. So I think that's, you know, apart from all the

flashy and exciting stuff, I think that's what excites me in particular. Yeah, I think that's been a really interesting driving force for some of these infrastructure applications and even, you know, like layer two scaling solutions. Like I feel like there are teams that have been working on this for so long. And they didn't get traction until the applications came. And the fact that the applications are here and are seeing significant adoption and usage is really driving continued investment in the infrastructure. So it's kind of like creating this flywheel effect, which has been really awesome to see.

100%. And I think just everyone's talking about that. Salvador news, which is great, exciting. But I'm super curious to see how, you know, that translates into funding the actual infrastructure to connect 6.5, I believe, million Salvadorians. How can we funnel all of that excitement to building that infrastructure and how can that, you know, that large of a population can connect to Bitcoin in that example? So definitely, you know, this flywheel effect that you talk about. I'm seeing a lot of like usage and interests and I want that to be translated into building and building really strong

foundation. Yeah, definitely. And then just beyond investment clubs, are there any other killer apps for Dow's that you guys are excited about today or maybe that you haven't even seen today but would like to see? I think other than investment does the like I mentioned, other kind of DAUs that I've seen. One is just the protocol level Dau's like MakerDAO. Like that's an amazing example of like a decentralized community or organization coming together and basically managing a protocol which is super critical in the Ethereum infrastructure layer.

But then there are DOS like PleaserDAO which invest in NFD. So, you know, the whole story about behind PleaserDAO is super interesting because there was someone who was not. not have the money to buy the entire NFD that they wanted to buy. So they just like form this collector where you can leverage a larger group of people and much more capital to now invest in digital goods. Other than that, like what I would love to see is maybe DOWs that are focused on initiatives that usually don't get funded. Funding is usually, you know, tied to profits and return. So we'd love to see more DAOs that fund underfunded research or just underfunded initiatives.

Because now with these DAO's, communities can come together on mission and values instead of just like pure monetary gains. I love all of that. I think like we're going to see a lot more in funding sort of even charitable or nonprofit structures through DAOs, which I think will be a very interesting use case. And then the other piece that I'm really excited about is actually using DAOs for like freelance collectives. So I think we're starting to see this where, you know, maybe there's a media DAO and that's like, you know, a journalism organization or a design DAO where members of the DAO basically do freelance design work for a number of the protocols or products in the crypto space. You can kind of see this so on and so forth.

And I've talked to a few folks who are thinking about this and thinking through the structure where, you know, Dow is really the killer app. that it allows you to finance something, distribute value to the users, and govern a mission and community. And so I think with those three pieces, you can apply them to like the future of work in a whole new way that is relatively under explored to the state. And so I'm so excited to see how work evolves. And as, you know, members of different DAOs start working full time via the structure, we've already seen it in some ways, but I think we're going to see it in a much bigger, bigger scale moving forward.

Yeah, I was just thinking about this earlier today and this idea that, you know, it's, I've never freelance, but from the people that I've talked to that freelance and just use the traditional structures available to them, it's not like an easy process to find work, to get paid. But it definitely seems like that's something that has the potential to be disrupted and significantly augmented within the crypto ecosystem. And then, you know, both of you mentioned this. but I think this idea of applying the framework to charities could be really interesting and really game-changing because it just seems like there's a significant lack of transparency there, a lot of intermediaries that are sitting in the middle and taking rents. So very excited to see that as well. Yeah.

And I think lack of transparency is such a good point when it comes to charities. Like, I would love to donate if I can see where that money is actually going, right? Like that's just a strong incentive to continue to donate and contribute to some of these. Like if I can see real time impact, real time, like how these transactions are making a difference, I think that's going to be super interesting in terms of motivating people. Yeah, 100%. And then, yeah, just as a last question, you know, you guys said that this is V1 of Komorebi. You know, what would you like Komorebi to accomplish this year?

And then what's just the longer term goal? Like where do you envision this going over time? So I think one thing I've been thinking about and I think we would all definitely support is just, you know, I think first we want to see more female founders, female and non-binary founders in the space. And as Monzi said, change the landscape of what that looks like today. And then I think the second is taking this notion of like a safe space or safe environment for female founders. and hopefully Colmarie can kind of be a shelling point for that where, you know, founders can talk to one another and hopefully find some camaraderie and some advice and just create this shared network

where they have this thing in common and, you know, we can provide resources and access to the broader ecosystem that way in the community. So I'm excited about that, but I think first things first is definitely focused on investing and kind of changing the landscape there before we can move on to the second piece. Yeah, 100%. And I think that's our mission with V1 and whatever versions that come after just like changing the landscape of what, who are the founders, who's getting funded in the space. But I think complementary to that is also thinking more about how do we empower others to invest in female founders. How do we get more female investors in the space too? And Komarebi is just, I would say, an example.

We would love to see more DAOs come out like this who have similar. missions who are trying to do something on the lines of what we are doing. Just like even if it's like the exact copy of what we are doing, I think that's an achievement because we've, you know, inspired them in some way. So I think there's a lot of different things we can go after. But like until said, first and foremost is getting female founders funded. Awesome. Well, it's been an absolute pleasure having you guys on the podcast.

I think this is a really exciting and important initiative. and I'm definitely going to stay tuned. What is the best way for people to, you know, stay on top of what you guys are doing, get connected with you, get connected with Comorabi, you know, share maybe potential interesting founders or deals that they're seeing?

Yeah, like everyone, we are super active on crypto Twitter. So, you know, personally, as well as through Comorabi, so you can follow us at Comorabi Fund. We would love to hear about other female founders in the space. We would love to see connections made theirs. And we have a public application link. So you can go to our Twitter and there's a link that you can apply and get connected to us.

And personally, yeah, same. Twitter is that I'm the most active and I'm sure Kinsul's active there too. Yep, same here. Twitter is great. And, yeah, I mean, DMs are open. So would love to hear from anyone. Awesome. Thank you guys so much and excited to just see what you guys accomplish. Very excited for you guys. Thank you, Rio. Thank you so much for having us. This is a lot of fun.

Thanks for listening to another episode of On the Brink with Castle Island. To find out more about Castle Island, visit castle island. Visit castle island.vc.com. To listen to all of our podcast episodes, please go to On thebrink dashpodcast.com or just click on the tab in our web. website. Thanks for listening.