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This week, Q Inc has changed course with speaking with investors. Given I receive a lot of cold opens from investors on Farcaster, I would like to share that change with everyone publicly, and why.
Moving forward, we refuse to even begin conversations with funds who have ever (or intend to) engaged in token warrants. It is clear our values and beliefs are diametrically opposed, and this is a far easier filter to save ourselves the time.
It has been a long path to fundraising principally because we are operating from a perspective that as a company collaborating on a fair launched project, we can not and will not do token warrants. Despite being upfront about this, this topic has resulted in a lot of time wasted in talking with crypto funds, because they do not believe equity has a path to return for them, and ultimately decline.
This is very telling because if they don't believe the company will be successful what use are the tokens, unless...? 47 replies
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On the darker side: a fund who with a strong presence here whose GP had an openness to equity deals and spoke against the abuses of VCs with respect to tokens, for several rounds of talks, ultimately passing on the round (fine) due to being too ambitious (coded for "they don't think it'll work", a soft no, still fine) – that would be a reasonable thing to say, if it was left there, there's always room for "no". Nos are healthy.
What was not reasonable, was in the same message, a member of the fund _immediately_ following that up by asking for help in running nodes in order to earn tokens and offering a far smaller quantity as an "investment" in exchange. Ironic, hypocritical, unethical – these words do not speak strongly enough to the situation.
But before someone comes here scrambling to defend their fund thinking I've singled them out: I was general in my choice of words describing actions here, because it wasn't one fund that did this. Three did. 3 replies
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Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me thrice, I'm an idiot for continuing to have faith any crypto VC is telling the truth that they're somehow different.
This doesn't even include the number of funds that have cold opened by acknowledging my POV and then following with an offer to buy $QUIL. This also excludes where conversations went with a fund for a year, how they were willing to move forward, how much they believed (all while they were spinning up nodes) and respected the ethos, hoping I would be strung along enough until the money ran out, and, out of desperation, I would agree to a token deal. As they discovered, I would not. 4 replies
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