Maverick is proud to be a summoning partner for Hydra Ventures - the world's first dedicated investment DAO fund of funds. The Hydra team has built something bold and radically crypto-native that reimagines what early-stage investing could be.
Hear it from them: In addition to being a first check partner of investment DAOs, we aim to take a hands-on approach to support investment DAOs in all aspects, from community coordination, investment practices, organizational design, incentive design, and back-office/ops. Our mission is to proliferate the movement of investment DAOs and further help establish new market standard practices for how investment DAOs are operated, structured, and designed.
Out of all the investments we look at in both public and private crypto markets, I can sincerely say that Hydra holds a special place close to my heart. It's a meta bet on the vision that the future of investing (and really of capital formation and resource allocation) should be more decentralized and democratized, more bottom-up, and less top-down, more emergent and less imposed. Despite many capable players with good intentions, big brand venture capital firms with immense scale of capital, pressure to deploy, and incentives to expand and eventually monopolize are at odds with the decentralized and permissionless nature of crypto in the long run. I've written about this since the launch of Maverick.
It's our belief that crypto is fundamentally a decentralized and decentralizing tech. It empowers freedom-loving individuals and value-aligned tribes to have a 10x impact by tapping into global permissionless systems and capital leverage. In fact, I'm often nostalgic for the old ICO days and fond of fair-launch, community-driven projects. But I understand the practical difficulties with bootstrapping early-stage network effect and the importance of having committed partners with true expertise and value-add through those extremely volatile early days. There could be a middle ground. Well-equipped, well-capitalized investment DAOs consisting of brilliant individual contributors that each complement one another are, in my opinion, a refreshing solution to this tension in crypto markets.
Let's not be naive about it, though: getting investment DAOs to work properly is very difficult. We knew it, which is why we didn't directly structure Maverick Crypto as an investment DAO from day one, despite having seriously considered and debated the pros and cons of doing so. Hydra is our way of experimenting with that vision. There are few people that I'd trust more to push towards this paradigm than Peter and the Hydra team - their track record and first-hand experience in summoning and running investment DAOs speak for themselves.
I have high hopes that Hydra will become a formidable force in pushing the crypto investment landscape toward this exciting new paradigm.
Author: Simiao Li
CIO, Maverick Crypto
Twitter: @simiao-li
Telegram: @SimiaoLi
DMs are open.
Team:
Twitter: @GMMaverickCap
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