Distributed Autonomous Accelerator

Conduct a research project for a radical decentralized blockchain accelerator that nurtures teams that are worth investing in any context.

For over a decade we've been running entrepreneur incubation & acceleration programmes. We advise startups & co-found fintech ventures.

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Proposers:

• Jo Allum (@yojo)
• Yoram Ben-Zvi (@yogo)
• Robert O'Brien (@wolstaeb)
• Stephen Whitenstall (@swhitenstall)

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Detailed Plan

The existing entrepreneurial start-up scene focuses on fast-tracking the revenue generation of a portfolio, built around a "winner takes all" approach; a hoped-for Facebook or AirBnB Unicorn.

This inhibits under-represented communities, wastes potential and leaves promising projects on the drawing board.

We seek to accelerate and enable projects that intend to deliver public goods with many different kinds of returns, many of which have no place in the current portfolios.

For example, delivering a repository structured to keep an accurate record of a country's laws, maintained as an on-going, foundational, open-source project, for and by citizens, which enables multiple business rules for governments, entrepreneurs, businesses, impact investors and other public-goods initiatives, like 'citizen-ledgers' to be built.

With blockchains, tokens and DeFi/RealFi investment models the community is the store of value and the source of value creation. Our plan is to research and articulate the requirements needed to deliver a Distributed Autonomous Accelerator that acknowledges that fact.

This is nothing less than looking to transform incubation, acceleration, and mentoring.

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Our Team & Experience

Our project team is experienced in undertaking community research, connecting community resources through workshops and meetups, developing feasibility studies and business cases. They have grown entrepreneurial ecosystems, engineered financial market software, led product management and design, tech start-ups, impact investing and quality assurance. Team members are also active in organizing a legal-tech community, the Catalyst Eastern Townhall and contribute widely to the Catalyst Community.

Jo Allum: Designer, Impact Entrepreneur, Ecosystem builder, Co-founder of a community-led coworking space, Entrepreneur Support Organisation (including incubation, acceleration programmes) and a country-wide network of ESO's for Impact entrepreneurs. Contracted to support Angel Association New Zealand's Investor network and member of the committee of New Zealand's Open Source Society. CA F7, F6 Funded Proposer, Challenge Team member at Improve and Grow Auditability.

Yoram Ben Zvi: Impact Entrepreneur and mentor with international board, operations and startup experience and a strong global network of startups, incubators and accelerators. CA F6 and F7, Funded Proposer, Community manager at Cardano4Climate.

Robert O'Brien: Distributed Systems Software Engineer (Financial Systems) and Entrepreneur. Co-Founded three start-ups in Financial Data Analytics, International Trade Payments, and Impact Investing. Plutus and Atala Prism Pioneer. Co-organiser of the Catalyst Eastern Town Hall, a Cardano Catalyst Community initiative.

Stephen Whitenstall: Academic, community and business project organiser with global corporate Test Management and Quality Assurance Management experience (IBM and BNP-Paribas). Develops, maintains documentation and provides technical project management support for Catalyst Swarm, serves on the Catalyst Circle, multiple funded proposals and founder of QA-DAO.

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Our Solution

Venture investing approaches today are based on a common assumption that only a few projects in a portfolio will succeed. A venture capital fund, often with a 10-year lifespan, will achieve a 70/20/10 ratio e.g. 10% succeed, 20% are zombies, 70% fail. The rationale is that a Unicorn will generate such a high financial return that it makes up for the failures. An upstream consequence of this economic model is that  incubation and acceleration organizations only focus on prioritizing the revenue generation potential of their portfolio of companies.

A Distributed Autonomous Accelerator (DAA) flips this model. The current economic model for venture investing assumes a high transaction cost to both discovering new opportunities for investment and coordinating the investments. Blockchains radically change the economics of investing. Project Catalyst demonstrates the ability to "unleash the crowd" (https://clik.vc/unleashing) for discovering new innovations. This lowers the cost and extends the reach of investment to diverse communities.

When combined with low-cost tokens, property (NFTs), smart contracts, continuous investment markets (DeFi) can reward ecosystem participants such as accelerators and mentors. Smart contracts and blockchain transparency heralds new approaches to monitoring and auditing investments.

Taken together we can flip the economics of venture investing. In turn, flipping the economic models of accelerators and mentors and opening the door to a raft of new highly investable assets, ventures, teams, and communities.

Our methodology is to co-create solutions with the Catalyst community. We will leverage the global Catalyst network that has evolved into a distributed incubator of ideas with a growing community of passionate, purposeful people.

Many people in our network of networks have 'professional-grade' experience in venture acceleration, incubation programmes, mentoring, investing, financial markets, impact and global networks. This experience has led them to Cardano to seek investment from the Catalyst community's treasury for their proposals. They are already breaking new ground on every level and our initial research has indicated that everyone in the community wants to meet the intention of creating the future we want to see. The talent, energy and will is available to "do this properly", this research project will extract and distill this knowledge and assist the network to formulate a solution.

The accelerator we imagine will create more winners, more often. Taking more successful small steps for the betterment of all, with consistent resourcing and investment, alongside the opportunity for contribution and benefit for all who participate.

What we will do

We will co-create the foundations of the Distributed Autonomous Accelerator (DAA) by:

• Leading the research project, learning, technical requirements, partnerships, collaborations, and enrolling specific expertise, from the Catalyst community.
• Setting up project-management and frameworks to communicate, co-ordinate and enable collaboration.
• Create documentation and knowledge resource repository.
• Describe the roadmap to activation of the accelerator in a paper; "The Betterment Agenda"; in collaboration with funded proposers.

The foundations of the DAA will implement the structure and elements needed for a self-regulating strategic entity together with the Project Catalyst's community. We will facilitate the accelerator collaboratively. An entity (such as a council) will be formed that will communicate, co-ordinate and enable collaboration towards the intention shared by our funded proposal teams, accelerating their progress.

Weaving together the people, their values, activities and funded projects, the tools and processes being experimented with across the Cardano ecosystem we will develop a theory for how the DAA might work. We intend to connect community members, community services and projects to innovate our innovation commons, in common.

Incommons: Betterment Accelerator

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Impact on Challenge Metrics

The DAA will have a significant impact on Project Catalyst metrics defined by the challenge team, only on a different timeline. It will create the ability for Cardano to deliver on one of its core aims to realise the highest potential of human collaboration – the betterment of people and planet.

Scaling the accelerator function, way beyond current incubation and acceleration models, will be made possible by combining the technologies and projects initially identified and referenced below for this proposal.

After producing the paper we'll adopt an impact investing approach to project proposals in collaboration with the community, reporting and measuring the progress towards standing up the DAA.

Deal flow globally will be achieved via adoption of the DAA's protocols, methodology and digital infrastructure by Incubation, Acceleration and Investor networks connected through the proposal team and Catalyst community, for example; Kampul, Seedstars, Techstars, International Business Incubation Association, Capital Institute, Asian Business Angel Forum, Angel Capital Association to name a few.

The diversity of these existing Acceleration and Incubation networks connected through the Catalyst community range from national youth entrepreneurship programmes serving 8-16 year olds, to highly specialized military and border control programmes and everything in between. This diversity brings qualities and strengths which cross not only domain, technological, country and cultural boundaries, but generational ones too. Creating the DAA from within this community enables this community to leverage its network to gain adoption.

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Key Performance Indicators

These are the KPIs for the initial phase:

• Recruitment of initial 10 Catalyst thought leaders
• 12 meetups, 2 After Town Halls
• 20 interviews/discussions with Catalyst thought leaders
• Creation of outline design document
• Creation of a feedback review document (input received and analysed)

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Deliverable

The ultimate objective is to deliver a Distributed Autonomous Accelerator as part of what we're terming Cardano's Betterment agenda. The process to achieve this deliverable will be in multiple phases.

The objective of this phase is to socialise and test the concept of a DAA within the Catalyst community, access the community hive-mind to solicit requirements, perform literature reviews and build a strong platform to deliver future phases. It is envisaged that future phases will lead into each other in quick succession, however, this is predicated on securing funding in future rounds.

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What Success Looks Like

This is our roadmap to deliver a Distributed Autonomous Accelerator.

Delivery will be in multiple phases, with each phase separately funded. The funding requested is to complete phase one.

The design and build is a collaborative effort and we expect up to 100 community members to be active participants (investors, mentors, services, etc.)

After One Month (Phase 1):

• Recruiting of initial cohort of Catalyst thought leaders
• Socialisation of the concept of a Distributed Autonomous Accelerator to wider community
• Literature review completed, analysed and documented
• Conceptual ideas for design and build of a Distributed Autonomous Accelerator outlined
• Collaborative activities (workshops, meetups) completed with initial cohort of Catalyst thought leaders

After Three Months:

• Recruiting of wider cohort of Catalyst thought leaders
• Collaborative activities (workshops, townhalls) completed with wider cohort of Catalyst thought leaders
• Development of main hypothesis and outline design of the Distributed Autonomous Accelerator
• Map of community services/solutions/platforms to be part of the accelerator
• Website and content (blog posts and video content) developed to help explain the DAA
• Execution plan developed

After Six Months:

• Establishment of the investment DAO MVP
• Detailed design of DAA, processes and programs
• Distribution of detailed design (workshops, townhalls)
• Feedback documented and recommendation to design published

After Twelve Months:

• Finalisation of detailed design
• Building DAA
• Activate beta accelerator program with 10-20 projects

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Licensing

Published content will be licensed under the Creative Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike International (CC BY-NC-SA) License v4.0. The specification will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-ND 4.0) license.

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Budget

The team will dedicate the next 3 months to working with the community to deliver the phase 1 deliverables.

The resource of 2 full-time equivalents will be needed as follows:

• Project co-lead @ 100% – Jo Allum
• Project co-lead @ 50% – Yoram Ben-Zvi
• Project key support (i.e. financial models, tech tools) 25% – Robert O'Brien
• Project key support (i.e. community, Github) 25% – Stephen Whitenstall

Total funding requested $55,000

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Affiliated proposals

The initial list of proposal teams and communities to connect with and engage in this project (not dependent on funding being allocated to their proposals). Note: The proposers are already connected and have reached out to, or are working with, teams on all of the following;

F7: Catalyst Accelerator & Mentors

• Proposals Mentors Marketplace - Cont
  (https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Proposals-Mentors-Marketplace-Cont/382926-48088)
• Roadmap to Creating a Legal Entity
  (https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Roadmap-to-Creating-a-Legal-Entity/382258-48088)
• Acceleration Program in Africa
  (https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Acceleration-Program-in-Africa/383966-48088)
• Accelerator in Emerging Markets
  (https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Accelerator-in-Emerging-Markets/383963-48088)
• FinancialTimes Startup Competition
  (https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/FinancialTimes-Startup-Competition/383446-48088)
• Catalyst Excubation Programme
  (https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Catalyst-Excubation-Programme/385150-48088)
• i3 Innovation Program in Bermuda
  (https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/i3-Innovation-Program-in-Bermuda/384034-48088)

F7: Boosting Cardano's DeFi

• Retroactive Funding User Experience
  (https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Retroactive-Funding-User-Experience/385032-48088)

F7: Catalyst - Rapid Funding Mechanisms

• Retroactive Financing Experiment
  (https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Retroactive-Financing-Experiment/384995-48088)

F7: Nation Building Dapps

• Regulation/legislation as code repo
  (https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Regulation-legislation-as-code-repo/382500-48088)
• Citizen's Ledger
  (https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Citizen-s-Ledger/382503-48088)

Previously funded proposals

F6: Proposer outreach

• Connect East Asian Entrepreneurs
  (https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Connect-East-Asian-Entrepreneurs/369120-48088)

F6: Developer ecosystem

• Retroactive Project Funding SDK
  (https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Retroactive-Project-Funding-SDK/369011-48088)
• Proposals Mentors Marketplace
  (https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/369749-48088)

Challenge teams and ultimately proposers in Fund8 including

• Boosting Diversity in Catalyst
  (https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/ideas/top/labels/label-edited)
• Improve and Grow Auditability
  (https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Improve-and-Grow-Auditability/383480-48088)
• Women of Cardano Involvement
  (https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Women-of-Cardano-Involvement/384448-48088#idea-tab-comments)

Catalyst community governance projects

• QA-DAO
  (https://quality-assurance-dao.gitbook.io/quality-assurance-dao)

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Expert resources

• Aligned Venture Capital / Angel Investing innovators
• Multi-capital reporting expertise (R3.0)
• Strategic foresight and strategy expertise (Wardley)
• Sensemaking and Validation (Snowden)
• Community/Warm-data research (Bateson)
• Corporate Innovation expertise (Capital Institute) (https://capitalinstitute.org/course-introduction-regenerative-economics/)
• Cardano Native programme expertise

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References

The Future of Distributed Finance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzsUSG5CSj0&t=180s

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Requested funds

55,000

Launch of project (phase 1)

February/March 2022

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