0xPrepop

Thoughts on building a company alongside a token that already exists, coming from someone that did exactly this with @CadeMarket: I want to start off by saying that in my opinion, 99.9% of founders should NOT fair launch a token to bootstrap the company. We have seen way too many cases of founders with the inability to scale a business whilst treating their holders with respect. For the 0.1% of founders that want to do this, study how I built @CadeMarket, and how @ConejoCapital built @clawpumptech. I'm sure there's more examples, but these come to mind first. This post should not serve as encouragement for you to go out and launch a token immediately. The goal of this is to almost serve as a warning, and tell you what you can expect by bootstrapping your business with a token. 1. The playbook is entirely different than starting a company in a traditional manner. 2. It most certainly is NOT for every founder. 3. It is substantially harder to scale into a venture backed business, but it *IS* possible. 4. Your early token holders should be held to an extremely high regard. These people allow you to bootstrap your business via trading fees. For me, this was a little over $100,000 from my token's Pump Fun creator fees. This money should be used to support you as you build your MVP and explore product market fit. 5. You have to give people a reason to trust you through continuous communication and explanations of how the token fits into your product. Your product needs to built around the token, not the other way around. You should not treat the token as a memecoin. 6. In many cases, creating a venture backed business is not your original goal. This was the case for me. The token was launched for a side project, but eventually the side project became my sole focus. 7. You will have a significantly harder time fundraising. There's no way around this. It's very non-traditional for VCs to have a token already trading in the open market. This is ultimately a problem that you NEED to deal with. You decided to launch a token. It's on YOU to deal with it, not your community. 8. You will have VCs that may love the product but pass on investing purely because of the live token. 9. You will have VCs that are willing to write a check if you abandon the token. This was VERY common for me. My pre-seed round could have been closed within a week had I listened to them and abandoned the token. Instead, it took 6 months. 10. Launching a new token is *NOT* the end of the world, contrary to the reactions you're seeing from CT regarding Percalator. If you do launch a new token, you need to take care of your holders though. You should have a migration plan that favors them. They supported you early, they deserve a very generous allocation of the new token. 11. After raising venture capital, you can not abandon your holders. If you fair launched a Pump Fun token, like I did, you should consider doing an ACE round (from @MetaLeX_Labs). This allows you to offer token holders the option to swap tokens for equity via SAFE. The same equity that your venture investors have. In the case of Cade, I had 1.5% of the supply at launch. I wanted it to be truly fair launched and community owned. By doing ACE, I was able to accumulate some of the supply for the company.

cyberRaise now takes a founder from "which instrument?" to a live investor page compare a SAFE and a priced round by what each pays out in a sale or a shutdown token projects get the same comparison for SAFTs, token warrants and ACE set only the terms your instrument needs, with a live summary preview exactly what investors will see before you sign anything then final review, sign, and the investor link shows up once the offer is confirmed onchain

Jeff drank a bit too much of his own Kool-Aid in this recent Odd Lots clip. I think it's important to clear up a distinction that makes all the difference. Democratizing access to wealth creation is NOT the same as democratizing access to speculation. Many of us genuinely want broader participation in attractive investment opportunities. The growing wealth inequality produced by the current system is tearing at the seams of society, something I've spoken about many times. But let's be clear: listing pre-IPO perpetual futures does absolutely nothing to democratize the wealth being created in private markets. I've seen this misleading narrative pushed repeatedly by perp DEXs lately, and it needs to be called out. A pre-IPO perp creates ZERO underlying wealth. It's a zero-sum contract before costs, and negative-sum after them. No capital flows to the company. No ownership changes hands. No new economic opportunity is created. Every long has a short. There is no free lunch in simply going long something before its IPO, and funding costs can even determine the outcome more than any price moves. TRADING access is NOT INVESTING access. In fact, in many ways pre-IPO perps are almost the antithesis of democratized access: They create the illusion of participation in private-market wealth creation, while actually offering retail a speculative instrument whose mechanics they are often poorly equipped to understand. The result is a playground for the FEW sophisticated traders who understand funding, oracle design, and liquidation mechanics to extract value from the MANY who don't. To give credit where it's due, Robinhood's efforts toward sourcing actual employee shares, placing them into SPVs, and tokenizing genuine spot ownership are much closer to meaningful democratization. That can unlock real economic value by allowing employees to exchange some of their expected upside for liquidity, while giving new investors actual economic exposure. A legitimate financial trade-off, without the funding-rate and liquidation shenanigans. I'm strongly aligned with expanding access to investment opportunities. And I believe advances in AI and blockchain can dramatically lower the barriers to discovering, structuring, and distributing them. But let's not BS ourselves that launching another zero-sum casino contract is moving the needle on wealth inequality. What would actually move the needle is bringing real capital formation and ownership onchain. Giving investors access to productive, illiquid assets like data centers, GPUs, and select startup investing, where capital can actually finance growth and share in the resulting value creation. These opportunities are harder to structure, underwrite, and bring to market, and we haven't seen many compelling implementations onchain yet. Hopefully this will change soon and, as the industry matures, we can direct more of our energy toward actually expanding access to wealth creation. Clip below. Was glad to see @tracyalloway push back on this framing, and to Jeff's credit, after this he does seem to walk back his original position somewhat.