Thread by @kaiynne

Do you like weird origin stories? You do? Good here is great one.
Early August I get an unsolicited email from a purported SNX holder. This happens pretty regularly, no idea how they get my email, probably @garthtravers’s fault…

So I was thinking it was a pitch, which it kind of was, but with a twist, it was pitching Synthetix to take an idea for tranching risk in the debt pool. I had actually been thinking a lot about risk swaps at the time. Probably withdrawals from @matt_levine being MIA.

Thus the concept was super interesting to me and I was confident it could be taken and rolled out in a generalised fashion for a bunch of projects, my response “I have negative infinity bandwidth right now lol, but if someone pitched me this idea I would 100% fund it…”

I get an email back an hour later saying a few people have responded the same way, and maybe he will try to put together a team to execute it. I said awesome happy to help with funding or just ideation on the idea.

A few days later, I get another email asking if I could jump on a call with a few new team members, and I am thinking like wtf? Did we not just talk about this yesterday?

So I jump on the call, there are four people on it including an engineering lead who has worked on some awesome projects. So now I am like wow these guys move fast. Call goes well, they promise to send some more info soon.

The next week I get a google doc with a bunch of documentation on progress around hiring and with some very clear and detailed diagrams about how the early phases of the project will function. I was kind of blown away.

We spent several more sessions going through capital formation etc, I introduced them to some investors and then I was like look I have put a ton of time into this over a month I have other commitments. But you can have as much money as you need from me.

They say don’t worry we have self funded everything up until we get the network launched.

I go dark for a few weeks, they come back with the entire launch process, distribution, value accrual that factors in essentially all of the current learnings from DeFi to that point. Not saying it will be work, but they had made an incredible effort to synthesise it all.

And now I find out they have over $100m TVL in the contracts before the start of the distribution! Most people have probably already worked out it is @barn_bridge.

There are a few lessons here. The first is there are still so many things to be built. The second is myself and people like @StaniKulechov @AndreCronjeTech @haydenzadams @rleshner @fcmartinelli love to help new projects so don’t be afraid to ask.

The final point I will expand upon in another thread. But it relates to founder alignment. I think we are kind of fucking this up. Tyler had a great consulting business and no time to invest in a somewhat moonshot idea of launching a DeFi protocol.

It is pretty easy to imagine him just parking the idea… If we want great founders to take the leap and start building new projects we need to make sure incentives are aligned. I think we can do better here. TBC.