[MISSION REQUEST] Startup Support - Optimism as Venture Studio

Governance Fund Missions 🏹
1

Delegate Mission Request Summary

This mission aims to provide new business support for projects within the Optimism ecosystem, including projects with approved grants in previous governance seasons. This program will focus on delivering support for major back-office and dev concerns faced by new startups, things such as legal counseling, dev agency work, business formation, tax prep, and so on.

S6 Intent 22: Intent 3

Proposing Delegate/Citizen:

Jackanorak

Total grant amount
100k OP

Should this Mission be fulfilled by one or multiple applicants:
Multiple

How will this Mission Request help accomplish the above Intent?

Imagine the kind of support a startup incubator provides to startups; startups need this support, and the incubator has the size and resources to offer it. We can offer this kind of model.

Take a highly promising project led by a handful of independent builders. They have some funds but not much—and, more importantly, they lack time and other resources to build out their project beyond what they are individually capable of managing.

There’s a lot they have to take care of or fund: audits, RPC costs, deployment costs, yes, but also business formation; legal preparation; payroll; fundraising. If they are deploying a token, there’s liquidity, treasury management, regulatory concerns, etc. The list goes on, but what unites these areas is that they are essential to new projects and often prohibitively resource-consuming. Audits, for example, are essential and expensive enough that many projects turn to fundraising specifically to afford them.

There are also business concerns that could, under the right circumstances, be addressed as part of this Mission: new venture strategy; business development; hiring; marketing, etc. Our bar is especially high for service providers in this sphere; there are many who claim to offer these services, but few can at the level we’d hope to be able to offer, which is at the top of our industry. It is of course also very difficult for a DAO to oversee this kind of service.

All of this is to say that proposals should consider, in concrete terms: who is the builder we’re targeting with our offer? How would our in-kind support help this kind of builder? What about this service we are offering is important or helpful enough for this builder to come deploy on Optimism or consider Optimism the best place to build? Do we have evidence that many new projects need help with this service? And, finally: are we the demonstrably the best at what we do?

What is required to execute this Mission Request?

Applicants should provide a commitment to providing some high-quality service in exchange for granted OP. These will include but are not limited to:

– Free RPC coverage

– Back office help, e.g., taxes, business formation, legal assistance, banking

– Short-term agency development work

  • Plans should provide a well-defined mechanism for compensation: for 50k OP, we will provide X, Y, Z.
    Distribution of these subsidized services to selected project grantees

  • Applicants must be understood to be at the top of their respective fields. It is essential that we offer through them the kind of professional support that is time efficient and longitudinally beneficial for us as an ecosystem.

How should governance participants measure impact upon completion of this Mission?

Milestones:

  • Number of projects supported
  • Number of external parties (e.g., lawyers) engaged

Metrics

  • Number of projects successfully deployed and resulting transactions + users from them
  • Market value of services provided
  • NPS from projects

Impact

  • Depends on what service is provided, but in general this should relate to some sort of expected market-based service that has been defrayed, enabling the use
  • Number of projects not requiring investor funding

Has anyone other than the proposer contributed to this Mission Request?

No

Which metric will the success of this Mission Request be evaluated against?

The North star metric against which this Mission Request should be evaluated is the total amount of gas fees generated from the grantee’s contracts, because this Mission Request sets out to increase the aggregate demand for blockspace on the Superchain through a larger program. The total gas fees generated from this program act as a healthy indicator of its combined downstream performance. This metric was suggested by the Foundation and approved by the Grants Council.

5 Likes
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Exciting idea! It might be key to identify some verticals which we want to cover and split the budget between 2-3 teams that cover most of these vertical together!

As Superchain Eco / Kolektivo Labs we have significant Design, Strategy, Product and Events resources available - which we would love to offer to OP chains and OP projects at a reduced / free rate.

4 Likes
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I think this is a much-needed project, I´m only afraid that if it’s centralized in one sole “venture studio” a lot of the OP would you to its administrative support, or will be for the on-top fees over the actual service providers, would love to see what the community sees as top priorities from the ones mentioned above and see collectives apply. ex. a non-big law firm can’t see all the required jurisdictions projects may need.

1 Like
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A North Star Metric has been added at the bottom of this Mission Request in an effort to enable the Collective to make data-driven decisions. By using a single metric for each Mission Request, the Collective is better able to evaluate the performance of all the Season 6 missions in a standardized manner, which will be critical when the Collective makes decisions about Intents, budgets, or other critical components of governance.

5

Is Venture Studio looking for specialists functions or general business (advisory)? Wrt to say legal structuring, an example of specialist would be an entity generator like KaliDAO where you can form an separate entity for cost of gas (effectively ten’s of dollars). However, this requires a one-off capital charge to craft the docSet (cf TechStars seed docs) for the major jurisdictions (US, EU, UK-commonlaw, perhaps CN/IN?). Whereas a generalist is basically an ongoing service charge/fee (hundreds to thousands). So the budget is quite different for a capital investment (eg special-purpose vehicles for digital asset holding … input parameters and turn the crank=factory) vs business overhead (incl monitoring regulatory shifts).

PS having mentored at JFDI (singapore’s premier accelerator) I’d point out the skill in selection (opportunity costs) way outweighs the back-end office functions unless you do a portfolio approach where statistically if you punt on hundreds of ventures, then it approaches unity of not losing $$ and a certain chance of getting 2-3x).
Coop-capital

6

Should governance of a L2 network involve itself in providing advisory to external projects?

Stuff like legal counseling, tax are external to Optimism L2’s functionality. Why should L2 dedicate its resources towards this?

Even if projects need this, they should not depend on the L2’s treasury for funding these activities. The comparison with a venture capital firm offering this is not accurate IMO as VC firms are looking to build the valuation of their portfolio companies, while OP is looking to get more users, developers and activity on its network.

Moreover some of the proposed services like legal would cost way above the earmarked funds of 100k OP.

This can potentially open up OP to unwanted liabilities down the road.

7

I’m trying to apply to this mission requests but charmverse seems broken (doesn’t allow me to submit saying a form response is invalid. I triple checked them… and can’t find the issue)

Any other way to apply?

8

Hey @danielo, could you leave a link to the app so we can check it? (It won’t be accessible by anyone who is not the author or part of the Grants Council)