Macauley Peterson

<div id="highlights-block_623b548e3c09e" class="highlights">
 <ul>
 <li>The “dao5” fund will target seed and pre-seed stage startups and sports a host of high-profile crypto names among its advisors</li>
 <li>Participants, including the founders of portfolio companies, will eventually receive a stake in the VC firm’s profits through DAO tokens</li>
 </ul>
 
</div>



These days, nine-figure venture capital funds are a dime a dozen, but the latest spin on the VC model from Tekin Salimi is that it should morph into a DAO.



Salimi, a former general partner at Polychain Capital, says his new fund, dubbed “<a href="https://dao5.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">dao5</a>” has raised $125 million from crypto-native investors, earmarked for seed and pre-seed startup rounds. His plan is to help incentivize the founders of the fund’s eventual portfolio companies by giving them direct participation in the dao5 fund’s success through a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) structure using tokens that represent the fund’s profits.



This structure is novel in that it actually dilutes Salimi and his co-investor’s stakes, but it encourages the founders of the companies they back to collaborate in ways that benefit the collective as a whole.



“We believe that cross-pollination is essential to fostering a collaborative founder community,” a document outlining <a href="https://dao5.com/principles.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">the fund’s principles</a> states.



For now, though, this plan is very much still on the drawing board, and will only be implemented in roughly three years, after 70% of the fund’s capital has been invested.



Notable among the avowed principles is a respect for pseudonymous participants. The fund “works closely with pseudonymous advisors, and invests in tokens launched by pseudonymous founders,” the principles document states.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">“We believe that individual privacy is an inalienable right in the cryptoverse. We do not invest in surveillance technologies.”</blockquote>



Among the advisors are a who’s-who of crypto executives, investors and builders, including Do Kwon (Terraform Labs), Emin Gün Sirer (Ava Labs), Ben Fisch (Espresso Systems), Ivan Soto-Wright (Moonpay), Meltem Demirors (CoinShares), and the pseudonymous 0xb1 (founder of Fodl and an NFT curator) and Cuckqueen (Femboy Capital).



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