Investing in Superdao, the all-in-one DAO platform

Aligned incentives are the fastest way to build and grow. When everyone gains, everyone contributes. Yet traditional corporate structures divorce private companies from their largest potential source of assistance: their users. Beyond paying for their products and perhaps enjoying the fuzzy benefits of network effects or early adopter prestige, customers gain little if the companies they love succeed. Unless they apply to work for them full-time, or wait around for them to go public, customers are largely locked out of helping build or earning returns.

Web3 erases the line between customers and teammates. With DAOs, or decentralized autonomous organizations, outsiders can quickly become insiders. Tokenomics allow them to be commensurately rewarded for contributing even small denominations of capital or labor. Your cult following can become your collaborators. In an age of COVID isolation, remote work alienation, and secularization, the chance to participate and find a sense of belonging is tantalizing.

That’s why we’ve seen DAOs form to build startups, launch social clubs, invest at scale, create media, and work on philanthropic projects. In the future we expect DAOs to take on many additional forms that we can’t even fathom yet. That includes TAOs, or transformed autonomous organizations, where traditional companies create DAO-like subsidiaries to participate in Web3 alongside their customers or even just pay employees or contractors in crypto. By aligning incentizes with a large crowd of community members, DAOs hold enormous power to direct labor, capital, attention, and impact. They’re the new organizational structure that allows groups to transact with cryptocurrency and provide token rewards to their allies.

But to launch a DAO, fund a treasury, organize a workforce, and vote on governance proposals, it requires piecing together a fragmented set of infrastructure tools built for hardcore blockchain engineers. You have to know what tools exist, which ones work best, and how to stitch them together alongside Web2 components (such as Discord and Google Sheets) that were not meant for this use case, all while hiring hard to find smart contract engineers to handle much of the governance pieces. And that’s before you even get to the sociological challenges of managing a large group of people!

This all creates unnecessary barriers blocking participation in a rapidly emerging economy. To empower a more diverse set of builders, we need tools that abstract away the complexity so communities and organizations can focus on what they uniquely add to the world.

When Shopify combined intuitive commerce tools with attractive storefronts, a new generation of merchants emerged. Making something people want to buy was hard enough without having to build or jigsaw together your own software stack. But what if you want to start a movement?

Superdao is building the Shopify of Web3 – an all-in-one, no-code DAO creation and management suite for organizing people to make an impact.

Superdao lets anyone launch a DAO in a few clicks without having to vet and master a mess of siloed point solutions. Meanwhile, it helps sophisticated DAO operators scale their organizations by letting them seamlessly stitch together Superdao’s native features with their favorite existing blockchain infrastructure.

With Superdao you can:

• Legally incorporate while launching your DAO on the blockchain
• Crowdfund a secure treasury for transactions and paying contributors
• Build a member directory with varying roles and permissions
• Communicate through internal feeds for organizing tasks
• Vote on governance proposals using vetted templates and smart contracts
• Monitor activity and tokenomics through your DAO’s dashboard
• Decentralize ownership with tokens, NFTs, and equity options
• Integrate with leading third-party infrastructure apps
• Recruit talent and capital through Superdao’s discovery marketplace
• And a lot more soon – this is just the alpha launch

You can sign up here to get early access!

While Superdao is designed to be dead simple for users, it’s a compound startup that requires building a suite of pioneering tools in parallel. Web3 moves ridiculously fast, so Superdao needs a leader with super-human ability to ship product.

We found that in Yury Lifshits. After earning a PhD in Computer Science from Caltech and teaching cryptography at a leading Russian university in the mid-2000s, he launched one of the country’s first co-working spaces. We met Yury while he spent the past few years building OpenLand, a full-fledged alternative to another essential Web3 tool: Discord. Yury builds and deploys products with insane speed and clarity. He’s an astounding organizational mind that’s able to recruit and apply talent to get things done quick. Yury has already assembled a world-class team creating the building blocks that will power the future of DAOs. We’d never encountered an early-stage founder with such exacting plans for who he wanted to hire, how to structure the teams, what he wanted to build, and how he planned to go-to-market.

Yury’s precision and horsepower convinced he could shoulder the complexity of making DAOs simple. That’s why SignalFire is leading a $10.5 million seed round for Superdao. Yury predicts we could see 1 million DAOs formed by the end of the year, and Superdao will provide their picks-and-shovels. The deal continues SignalFire’s specialization in funding world-changing infrastructure companies like Alchemy for blockchain and NFT infrastructure, Tapcart for mobile ecommerce, Planetscale for databases, and Bubble for no-code app development.

Superdao’s goal is to be the leading B2B infrastructure provider for DAOs. They’ll allow everyone from crypto-native communities to relative novices to operate DAOs as Hollywood, Wall Street, traditional tech, and other sectors get involved. Superdao will bridge the gap between users and builders, letting anyone tap into the power of tokenomics to create a unified community where customers become co-owners and co-conspirators. 

DAOs will take a variety of forms including classic blockchain protocols and DeFi projects, groups of strangers looking to do a single transaction (ie purchase an expensive item, plot of land, etc), Web3 companies with their own tokens, Web2 companies looking to pay individuals (employees, contractors, freelancers, etc) in some form of cryptocurrency, and social experiments that will surprise and excite the world. We can’t predict exactly what they’ll do or how they’ll work, but with a team as agile as Superdao, we know they’ll have the tools they need.

Want to build your own DAO? Wish yours ran more smoothly? Sign up for early access to Superdao.