In November 2023, we introduced Social Graph Ventures.
A lot has happened.
Farcaster has become a unicorn and grown in orders of magnitude. Lens has had a similar trajectory. Hyper-financialized apps have had booms and busts.
We went from a handful of projects building on the social stack, to hundreds (or even thousands).
We've deployed into 17 companies, from analyzing hundreds.
We're reintroducing our thesis and operating style in this post.
Our Thesis
Our thesis has remained unchanged. We want to back the best founders building apps and middleware that support mass adoption of consumer and social apps that reverse the largest problems of social.
Web2 social is generating brain rot. The web3 tech stack and philosophy is able to reverse this:
Data Ownership: This word is thrown around a lot, in simple terms, we believe users should be able to carry their social data into different apps. If a user does not align with the decisions of app A, they can close their relationship there and move over to company B without losing the well earned social capital.
Fair Creator Economy: Creators are getting screwed by platforms. The creator economy is an ever growing, inefficient market. The biggest sign of inefficiency is that a creator's income usually comes from secondary sources. Web3 has the power to align incentives through token economies. Platforms will tokenize attention, and distribute it more fairly. In turn, creators will flock to publish where they earn more. Creator tokens (shares, tickets), tokenized attention, treasuries, revenue shares, staking, memes. All these concepts will intertwine to create efficient creator markets. Cutting the middleman between creators and users.
Collecting: Collecting is a human behavior that can now move to the digital space. Fans can support creators by collecting their content, and cryptographically proving they own it. Video, audio, text, anything. Creators can recognize their true fans, and reward them accordingly. This feedback loop was never closed before.
Ephemerality: Shortening attention spans makes it harder than ever to create the next Tiktok. This gives space for apps to be ephemeral, and successfully monetize early. It’s going to be increasingly easier to launch new experiments and solve the cold start problem over and over again.
Our Operating Style
SGV is a legally wrapped DAO, with members ranging from institutional funds, networks, angels, and builders.
We partner as investors with pre-seed and seed founders.
When we decide to partner with a founder, it's not only the capital, but the support from a group of 50+ , all with a shared passion of changing the current social paradigm.
Our investment size and relative value add allows us to be a small but mighty plush toy living along a sea of sharks.
We help connect founders with relevant partners in the space. Whether it’s integrating the right infrastructure or finding capital for the next round.
We help founders learn the best practices from other builders, being a DAO allows us to have a wide array of operators of different expertise and verticals.
We help funnel downstream capital.
We do stuff that most funds can’t.
We're always happy to meet new founders. Our DMs are open.
