📜 WTF is ConstitutionDAO?

Joel Hansen

Nov 19, 2021 • 6 min read

GM Builders,

What a crazy week for everyone with internet access. Taylor Swift shook up the music world, Constitution DAO raised $40m like nobody's business and parts of Western Canada (ie. Vancouver) rainstorms have left people stranded w/ nothing to do but film tik tok videos of kayaking to work.

Let's get down to business:

How a DAO Tried to Buy the U.S. Constitution
Ripe Opportunity in the ESG World
Startup Headlines to Riff On

Let's ride: 🏇🏼

📜 How ConstiutionDAO Raised $40M in 1 Week

If you missed the buzz this week, we'll catch you up. Last week, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO as the cool kids say) rallied together online to buy a copy of the U.S. Constitution. Last night, they attempted to take home the winning bid during Sotheby's Auction at 6:30pm, but the winning price was just outside their grasp. 🇺🇸

Here's what was impressive about the effort:

The ConstitutionDAO raised over $40m from 17,437 random supporters
They built an amazing groundswell on discord and live-tweeted every hour
It broke records for the highest crowdfund of a physical object and most money crowdfunded in 72hrs
Since they lost, everyone gets an automatic refund
The median donation size was $206.26

The bottom line: this was a wild ride. And this trend is inevitable here to stay. The big question is, where are they gonna strike next?

Sold on DAOs now? Great. B/c we're looking for someone to build this startup idea titled CoffeeDAO. Got a startup idea that includes using DAOs?, Post it here.

🌎 Ripe Opportunity in the ESG World

Co-Founder of Baobab, Tara Jafarmadar, has been stirring up attention this week. And it's for good reasons. She's building a tool that helps businesses navigate, manage and report on their social and environmental impact. If you read that right, you know it's a hot topic.

Here are some stats Tara shared to prove there's an opportunity here:

👥 Employees: Millennials will make up 75% of the workforce by 2025 and over three quarters would be willing to take a pay-cut to work for an impact-driven company.

💵 Consumers are growing more sophisticated regarding what they look for when shopping from brands. They are demanding more action instead of lofty commitments.

🏦 Investors are pouring money into ESG portfolios and investing in data standardization for impact metrics. The ESG data market is on track to approach $1 billion this year with 20% annual growth.

⚖️ Regulators, starting in the EU, and now in the US, are beginning to require ESG disclosures.

With this in mind, she's already started running customer interviews with folks. Not just anyone, but decision-makers at purpose-driven brands (consumer product or software companies) with less than 100 employees to get feedback on their prototype to solve this ESG data problem.

FOUNDER ASK: If this is you or if you know of companies that could be good candidates, connect with Tara. You can email her at tara@baobab.eco.

HIRING OPP: Tara's looking for a technical partner and paid interns to help with data visualization and copywriting. Please email her if you'd like to learn more.

Read more about her startup concept below:

💲 Crypto Wallet 101

With all the chatter around DAOs and NFTs, we thought it was time to drop a little crypto wallet education on you. But instead of writing it ourselves, we linked up with Peter Yang and Jieyu for the alley-oop.

They created a great write-up on crypto wallets from their Creator Economy newsletter so we decided to reshare it here for your convenience.

Here's the link to the 10-min read. If you're new to this, take your time, ask questions and get comfortable with the material. Once you're set up, you'll be off to the races.

Community CTA: Got a newsletter, podcast or partnership offer you'd like to team up on? Send us an email. We don't bite. 👋

Startup Goodies:

🐦 Viral Twitter thread: on the top web 3 tools you need to have on standby.

💰 Meta has made: 5 clever acquisitions in 2021. All been metaverse connected.

☕️ Crypto Predicto: Here's an avg day in 2030 according to Greg Isenberg.

🍿 Weekend show: Netflix's new site says users spent 149 million hrs soaking up Reynolds and the Rock duke it out on Red Notice.

📹 VC Gossip: Slow Ventures invested $1.7m into YT personality Marina Mogilko in exchange for 5% of her creator earnings over the next 30 years.

📩 Invite a Founder to Kernal:

Know someone with too many startup ideas? Text 'em an invite to share it.

✨ Featured Startup Ideas ✨

Some of our freshest startup ideas shared this week by Kernal users:

🥁 Meme of the Week

Read this and tell us it's not spot-on? If it is, DM Matt to thank him.

Thanks for reading. Go have an amazing weekend.

💚 The Kernal fam

P.S. If you smiled or cried reading today's newsletter, let us know below. Happy readers = happy Kernal team.

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