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Li Jin

19 Oct, 19 tweets, 5 min read

@AtelierVentures

Sharing some big news today 🔥

@AtelierVentures and @VariantFund are joining forces!

Together, our partnership will advance a more meritocratic internet, and push towards a future in which users own the products and services they use.

variant.fund/writing/atelie…

Last year, I founded Atelier to invest in the passion economy: new platforms that enable users to monetize individuality.

The mission has been crystal clear since day one: to create paths for economic mobility at scale by lowering the barriers to entrepreneurship.

The passion economy is the clear “what” that we are driving towards, but there is a next chapter of the thesis.

Crypto and the ownership economy—software that is built, operated, and owned by users & participants—presents a “how” for fully realizing the passion economy mission.

Our north star goal and success for us as a fund is achieving a world in which users become owners of the products & services they use.

This is the ownership economy.

Ownership is a cornerstone of financial freedom, and enables greater enfranchisement of participants in the networks to which they contribute their time and energy.

For too long, ownership has been restricted to a privileged set of individuals—whether on the basis of geography, network, expertise, access, or for regulatory reasons.

Think of all of the rideshare drivers who didn’t receive equity in the platforms, or the millions of creators who contribute content to social media platforms without participating in the upside of those platforms.

Crypto tokens represent a revolution in transferring value on the internet, and unlock the ability to build networks that have a more meritocratic distribution of ownership.

As a result, networks and communities can grow bigger, faster bc of incentive alignment w/ participants.

Early examples: Bitcoin and Ethereum’s growth was rooted in their distribution of ownership (in the form of their native protocol tokens, BTC and ETH, respectively) to those who validate and secure their networks.

@viamirror

Now, founders are pushing this more cooperative economic model towards mass consumer adoption, resulting in a wave of new platforms whose participants are more deeply engaged, owing to economic alignment.

eg @viamirror, @withFND, @YieldGuild, @Uniswap, @FWBtweets, & many others

The future of consumer software & the passion economy is crypto, centered around the belief that what users create and the value they engender belongs to them.

As someone who has worked and invested in web2 companies for my entire career, this was not a decision I took lightly.

But I arrived here in full confidence that the intersection of the passion economy and ownership economy is the future I want to work towards, and the area of technology that holds the most entrepreneurial and equitable potential for humanity.

@jessewldn

Together, @jessewldn, @spencernoon, and I will be leading investments in early-stage crypto companies, projects, and DAOs out of our new $110 million fund.

variant.fund/writing/fund-i…

We are a generalist firm comprised of specialists:

Jesse was an early believer in crypto’s consumer potential and gained hard-won insights as a founder of Mediachain, as a research lead at Spotify, and as an investor who's written the playbooks on best practices for founders.

Spencer was an early expert in DeFi; a one of the first crypto investors to leverage on-chain analytics to value the fundamentals of new financial marketplaces at DTC Capital; and was also a crypto entrepreneur, starting Bitcoin on-ramp company BTCity in 2014.

Together with my expertise in consumer marketplaces and platforms, we will bring a diverse and unique perspective to help founders execute on strategy decisions unique to crypto projects, but also to bridge the gap in GTM for crypto’s next leg up towards mainstream adoption.

If you’re a founder aligned with our vision for a more meritocratic internet, we’d love to chat:

variant.fund/contact

And if all of this sounds intriguing from your own career perspective, we're hiring! for both ourselves & our portfolio companies

variant.fund/careers

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Li Jin

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21 Oct

NFT collections would do well to learn from Legos (the toy bricks) 🧱

Here’s why:

Legos have network effects:

1. Each new user who buys them & each new collection purchased ADDS value to existing owners, because they’re all interoperable and composable.

Importantly, the network effects and added utility are even true without additional users:

Even single player mode gets more valuable as you buy more products / have more combinations.

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Li Jin

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Legitimacy is the scarcest resource--and that's especially true in the creator economy. But where does it come from, and how is it lost?

New post on the unfolding legitimacy crisis in the creator economy by me and @kplikethebird

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Like feudalism and divine right monarchy before it, the creator economy is experiencing a legitimacy crisis.

Creators are questioning the terms that govern their relationship with the platforms they utilize—and the right of the platforms to set those terms in the first place.

How the ecosystem responds—what alternatives are proposed, who builds them, and how—will shape the next phase of the Creator Economy.

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Li Jin

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1 Oct

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I want to share the story of how the first analyst I ever hired @AtelierVentures was someone I never expected—an 18-year-old recent high school graduate: @LilaShroff

@peytonkleinpgh

Last fall, I was still in the thick of fundraising, but looking for help with community building, content, and research for my first fund.

Lila had been connected through @peytonkleinpgh, another recent high school graduate whom I had recently chatted with.

After meeting Lila, I was immediately struck by two things: her age and the fact that her resume, just after graduating high school, was somehow more impressive than mine had been when I was 25.

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Li Jin

@ljin18

24 Sep

@skominers

The labor movement has given us many of our current rights, including paid sick leave & protection against job discrimination.

But as work shifts to platforms, what becomes of participants' ability to effect change?

New essay w/ @skominers & @LilaShroff

hbr.org/2021/09/a-labo…

Gig workers and content creators are now reckoning with the fact that their livelihoods depend on the actions of platforms that they have little ability to sway, and to which are locked in given lack of data ownership and portability.

As a result, a new form of labor activism is appearing in the platform economy, which we call decentralized collective action or DCA.

DCA aims to achieve many of the same goals as historical labor movements: better pay and working environments, protection from harassment, etc.

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Li Jin

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21 Sep

Today, it seems inconceivable that for much of human history, people accepted the 'divine right' of monarchs as a legitimate source of power.

Years from now, we may look back on this era and wonder why we were accepting of autocratic companies led by 'enlightened dictators.'

For much of human history, people lived under authoritarian/monarchical forms of government.

In the late 17th century, republican forms of government arose, inspired by conceptions of natural rights developed during the Enlightenment. >50% of the world now lives in a democracy.

The American and French Revolutions were major contributors to the growth of representative governments.

The Springtime of Nations in 1848 was a revolutionary wave affecting 50 countries in Europe, wherein people demanded more participation in government, economic rights, etc.

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Li Jin

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11 Sep

Universal Basic Capital > Universal Basic Income

Income inequality in the US is the highest of all the G7 nations. The wealth gap between the richest and poorer families more than doubled from 1989 to 2016.

How do we change the fundamental dynamic driving wealth inequality?

In a world in which returns to capital outpace returns to labor, we need to give everyone access to owning capital assets that appreciate in value, not just short-term income.

(i.e., those who earn from work can never catch up to those who grow their wealth from investments)

A oft-cited stat is that 55% of US households own stock.

What is lesser-known is that that ownership is very concentrated: the top 10% wealthiest American households own 84% of all stocks. The top 1% of households own 50% of all stocks.

Read 8 tweets

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