9 ms·

Raising capital as a pseudonymous founder

53 points by jger15 5y ago

thom 5y ago
Client side error. Return home. Anyone have an archive?
- democracy 5y ago
  Ha, an archive! I think that just shows what's wrong with web2. If the content was distributed on NFPN network (layer 3.1) using inter-transmission value-exchange HPPT protocol - you would just stake your HPPT tokens on NFPN-enabled DeGaFi marketplace and the highest bidder would then provide his storage/cpu/network resources to serve you hash of the content in the blink of an eye. By having the signed hash you could then easily submit a CNT-UPLNK request to the closest (or fastest) DECON content-farm via NFPN or FRYA protocols and get the content almost for free (assuming your staked FRYA balance can cover the cost of this micro transaction) - so you only pay for the transmission fees. Not that simple with centralised web these days!
  - timpattinson 5y ago
  - emptyparadise 5y ago
    Look, just give me the torrent file
after_care 5y ago
Would anyone here be comfortable using their official identity to confound a company with a pseudonymous cofounder? To me this feels like a gross asymmetrical information disclosure.
- wmf 5y ago
  We all should have learned from the Silk Road that you shouldn't reveal your identity to your boss if he hides his identity from you.
jimhi 5y ago
Honest question, is this satire? The only hint is their mention of "KYC processes." As an investor, I am confused who would agree to this. I would like to hear from someone who has done this. Is there any binding legal action you could take if there is fraud? It says blended teams of anonymous and identified people but then you are just investing in the identified people and will have to go after them. One only has to look at the history of the Silk Road to see how this goes. There was repeatedly tons of "reliable" pseudonymous sellers there who would maintain their reputation until they took a bunch of orders and pulled the rug. Over and over.
- bradleyjg 5y ago
  > Honest question, is this satire? Tom Lehrer once said: "Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize." I feel like with Bitcoin at $40-50k and Tesla at $1T we are in a similar place when it comes to investing.
- jimhi 5y ago
  Upon further research - this was written by a general partner at https://volt.capital https://volt.capital. I assume they are trying to say it is possible to invest in decentralized companies with anonymous founders by their tokens and protocols. Like many do with bitcoin.
- ahepp 5y ago
  I don't think it's satire, but I do think it's one of the dumber ideas I've heard. My best guess would be it's a planted article to try and con someone into anonymously investing in a promising young DAO.
- amscanne 5y ago
  > Is there any binding legal action you could take if there is fraud? It says blended teams of anonymous and identified people but then you are just investing in the identified people and will have to go after them. You can simply encode the full financing agreement (along with all relevant agreements, articles and by-laws) as smart contracts, and perform all company operations exclusively on the blockchain.
woodruffw 5y ago
It could be an incorrect reading on my part, but it sounds like the “capital” described in this post refers to mostly unregulated securities. I think giving an anonymous entity actual capital would probably run afoul of KYC, right?
- rmbyrro 5y ago
  C in KYC stands for Customer. Would this really apply to investor-project relationship?
  - woodruffw 5y ago
    I think it would for traditional capital, since normally you'd have an account with a bank and receive the investment via that account. But unregulated securities do a (probably intentional) end-run around that.
democracy 5y ago
"Most investors will predictably look at a nym’s Github to evaluate code quality and real shipping velocity." What if I'm using self-hosted SVN?
- rmbyrro 5y ago
  And what if you pay 10 freelancers to ship under your name, making you look like a '10x developer"?
  - vnchr 5y ago
    Then you’re a fantastic delegator!
Invictus0 5y ago
This post raises way more questions than it answers. Has there ever been a successful company run by a pseudonymous founder in the history of business? Why is this needed now? How can this legally exist? How is such a founder going to also be a leader?
- JetAlone 5y ago
  Running a company completely online, especially through VR, would make pseudonymous leadership possible. S E E L E 01 S O U N D O N L Y
- sbierwagen 5y ago
  >Has there ever been a successful company run by a pseudonymous founder in the history of business? No. >Why is this needed now? So the founder can commit fraud. >How can this legally exist? I could imagine a few schemes for doing so. Not that it matters, since this company will vanish shortly after receiving funding. >How is such a founder going to also be a leader? You don't need to do any "leading" if you don't hire anyone, and just disappear with the money.
JaggerFoo 5y ago
Businesses in the crypto space are trending to anonymous organizations and suceeding. Take traderjoexyz.com, which does not reveal anything that most businesses do on their web page, such as office addresses, team, etc. Only handle names (Co-founders Cryptofish & 0xMurloc) are given instead of the human names in all documents. Most ethereum based businesses (traderjoexyz is Avalanche based) have at least a white paper with the actual people behind the business/concept. Cheers
zaptheimpaler 5y ago
With the amazing new technology of cryptocurrency, you can now give money to people you don't know with no legal recourse in case they rug you or funnel the money to criminals, yay! Governments developed KYC laws beginning in the 2000s so that banks wouldn't inadvertently help criminals by laundering money or providing access to capital. Vancouver is a city dealing with crazy housing prices and a fentanyl drug problem because of illegal money. The government is moving in precisely the opposite direction to the article - to require listing the beneficial owners of land[1], again to expose organized crime and prevent money laundering. Requiring real names is a feature, not a bug. [1] - https://biv.com/article/2021/12/why-are-bc-institutions-hiding-information-money-laundering https://biv.com/article/2021/12/why-are-bc-institutions-hidi...
- simplestats 5y ago
  I think it's an interesting topic. Rather than lumping the author in with criminals and scammers, who would of course love nothing better than to take money from naive people (anonymously or not), try to identify what it would take to make you trust a pseudonymous organization or identity. For example it needs a track record you can validate. Valuable real-world holdings or a business or something else you could take legal recourse against. One certainly wouldn't give anons with nothing but an idea a million bucks quite so readily as people with real identities. But then part of the reason for that investment is the verifiable resume showing skills and experience in the right things. So you'd need some alternative that is similarly confidence-building in some other way.
  - zaptheimpaler 5y ago
    > try to identify what it would take to make you trust a pseudonymous organization or identity. For example it needs a track record you can validate. Valuable real-world holdings or a business or something else you could take legal recourse against Again, we already get all of this with real names and the existing legal system. This is really what a legal name is! Its a "pseudonym" but with enough linkage to the real world that its costly or impossible for someone to abandon it if they do something bad. Why not try to think a bit more about what systems already exist and how they help us before cheering on a new way to reinvent them poorly? I'm not suggesting the author is a criminal, all im saying is we as a society have always needed to build systems to prevent criminals from taking advantage of them, because they will. We all use email providers that block spam and sign contracts for jobs/rent too - its not because i think everyone who emails me is a scammer, its just that some are and this necessitates making the system resilient to them.
Animats 5y ago
What's scary is that this is for real. It's becoming the new normal. Amazon has been a big driver of anonymous business. They don't tell the customer who the real seller is, yet, when sued for liability, they claim they are merely connecting buyer and seller. Even when Amazon doesn't know who the seller is. Amazon fought liability up to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, then finally settled when it looked like they were about to lose.[1] Amazon thus enabled an entire fake product industry. We see this all the time with NFT scams. Especially the kind that are fund-raising operations for something not built yet. Those are public offerings, and when made to US persons clearly require filing with the SEC, with all the usual disclosures and financial statements. The SEC shut down the Initial Coin Offering industry back in 2018 for that sort of thing, but hasn't gotten to the forward-looking NFT industry yet. Probably because the complaints haven't started coming in yet. [1] https://www.law.com/thelegalintelligencer/2020/09/23/products-liability-lawsuit-against-amazon-has-settled-mooting-pa-supreme-court-argument/ https://www.law.com/thelegalintelligencer/2020/09/23/product...
- bernardv 5y ago
  This is only the new normal in the echo-chamber of the wanna-be believers of the net. No significant investor (i.e. Institutional money) is going to go along with this.
seibelj 5y ago
There are many anon teams in the crypto space. More likely to rug but it is a legit strategy. Lyra.finance is a recent one, some off the top of my head are Tornado, Grin, and Whiteheart / Hegic.
wmf 5y ago
Balaji from A16Z is pushing this and I asked myself why. Then I remembered that all tokens are illegal unregistered securities under US law and the SEC is running a crypto death lottery where they choose 10% of crypto startups at random and put them out of business. Pseudonymity allows founders to walk away and start again under a different name if the eye of the SEC falls on them and A16Z is legitimizing that strategy.
carlosdp 5y ago
A lot of assumption in this thread that the only reason to be pseudonymous is for criminality. That's not the case. I've raised a decent bit from a well-known pseudonymous twitter account. If it's a smart contract-based investment, the blockchain secures their investment, not law, so don't need their "real" name for that. Short of needing the name for legal reasons, why do I care what their birth name is? I know they have a certain audience in my target customer base, I know they are knowledgable about my space because I hear them talk all the time in twitter spaces. If they want to remain pseudonymous, let them! In a world where gaining a large online presence essentially rolls the dice on whether you get cancelled for something in the future, are we really surprised people want to reclaim a bit of anonymity on the internet while still being able to build a reputation they can build on?
kenneth 5y ago
I'm a VC; there is zero chance I would ever invest in a pseudonymous founder. That said, that doesn't mean the company and founder have to be publicly announced. I just have to know who I'm dealing with, and do my due diligence. It's totally fine for the founder to adopt a pseudonymous public persona, or for the company to remain stealth. But there is no way I'm dealing with a founder who hides their identity from their investors. Investor-company relationships are based on trust. You can't trust people you don't know.
lr1970 5y ago
Perfect way to become an early investor in an anonymous Ponzi scheme. Get out of jail card for the guilty parties.

53 points by jger15 5y ago

thom 5y ago

Client side error. Return home. Anyone have an archive?

democracy 5y ago
Ha, an archive! I think that just shows what's wrong with web2. If the content was distributed on NFPN network (layer 3.1) using inter-transmission value-exchange HPPT protocol - you would just stake your HPPT tokens on NFPN-enabled DeGaFi marketplace and the highest bidder would then provide his storage/cpu/network resources to serve you hash of the content in the blink of an eye. By having the signed hash you could then easily submit a CNT-UPLNK request to the closest (or fastest) DECON content-farm via NFPN or FRYA protocols and get the content almost for free (assuming your staked FRYA balance can cover the cost of this micro transaction) - so you only pay for the transmission fees. Not that simple with centralised web these days!
- timpattinson 5y ago
- emptyparadise 5y ago
  Look, just give me the torrent file

after_care 5y ago

Would anyone here be comfortable using their official identity to confound a company with a pseudonymous cofounder? To me this feels like a gross asymmetrical information disclosure.

wmf 5y ago
We all should have learned from the Silk Road that you shouldn't reveal your identity to your boss if he hides his identity from you.

jimhi 5y ago

Honest question, is this satire? The only hint is their mention of "KYC processes." As an investor, I am confused who would agree to this. I would like to hear from someone who has done this. Is there any binding legal action you could take if there is fraud? It says blended teams of anonymous and identified people but then you are just investing in the identified people and will have to go after them. One only has to look at the history of the Silk Road to see how this goes. There was repeatedly tons of "reliable" pseudonymous sellers there who would maintain their reputation until they took a bunch of orders and pulled the rug. Over and over.

bradleyjg 5y ago
> Honest question, is this satire? Tom Lehrer once said: "Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize." I feel like with Bitcoin at $40-50k and Tesla at $1T we are in a similar place when it comes to investing.
jimhi 5y ago
Upon further research - this was written by a general partner at https://volt.capital https://volt.capital. I assume they are trying to say it is possible to invest in decentralized companies with anonymous founders by their tokens and protocols. Like many do with bitcoin.
ahepp 5y ago
I don't think it's satire, but I do think it's one of the dumber ideas I've heard. My best guess would be it's a planted article to try and con someone into anonymously investing in a promising young DAO.
amscanne 5y ago
> Is there any binding legal action you could take if there is fraud? It says blended teams of anonymous and identified people but then you are just investing in the identified people and will have to go after them. You can simply encode the full financing agreement (along with all relevant agreements, articles and by-laws) as smart contracts, and perform all company operations exclusively on the blockchain.

woodruffw 5y ago

It could be an incorrect reading on my part, but it sounds like the “capital” described in this post refers to mostly unregulated securities. I think giving an anonymous entity actual capital would probably run afoul of KYC, right?

rmbyrro 5y ago
C in KYC stands for Customer. Would this really apply to investor-project relationship?
- woodruffw 5y ago
  I think it would for traditional capital, since normally you'd have an account with a bank and receive the investment via that account. But unregulated securities do a (probably intentional) end-run around that.

democracy 5y ago

"Most investors will predictably look at a nym’s Github to evaluate code quality and real shipping velocity." What if I'm using self-hosted SVN?

rmbyrro 5y ago
And what if you pay 10 freelancers to ship under your name, making you look like a '10x developer"?
- vnchr 5y ago
  Then you’re a fantastic delegator!

Invictus0 5y ago

This post raises way more questions than it answers. Has there ever been a successful company run by a pseudonymous founder in the history of business? Why is this needed now? How can this legally exist? How is such a founder going to also be a leader?

JetAlone 5y ago
Running a company completely online, especially through VR, would make pseudonymous leadership possible. S E E L E 01 S O U N D O N L Y
sbierwagen 5y ago
>Has there ever been a successful company run by a pseudonymous founder in the history of business? No. >Why is this needed now? So the founder can commit fraud. >How can this legally exist? I could imagine a few schemes for doing so. Not that it matters, since this company will vanish shortly after receiving funding. >How is such a founder going to also be a leader? You don't need to do any "leading" if you don't hire anyone, and just disappear with the money.

JaggerFoo 5y ago

Businesses in the crypto space are trending to anonymous organizations and suceeding. Take traderjoexyz.com, which does not reveal anything that most businesses do on their web page, such as office addresses, team, etc. Only handle names (Co-founders Cryptofish & 0xMurloc) are given instead of the human names in all documents. Most ethereum based businesses (traderjoexyz is Avalanche based) have at least a white paper with the actual people behind the business/concept. Cheers

zaptheimpaler 5y ago

With the amazing new technology of cryptocurrency, you can now give money to people you don't know with no legal recourse in case they rug you or funnel the money to criminals, yay! Governments developed KYC laws beginning in the 2000s so that banks wouldn't inadvertently help criminals by laundering money or providing access to capital. Vancouver is a city dealing with crazy housing prices and a fentanyl drug problem because of illegal money. The government is moving in precisely the opposite direction to the article - to require listing the beneficial owners of land[1], again to expose organized crime and prevent money laundering. Requiring real names is a feature, not a bug. [1] - https://biv.com/article/2021/12/why-are-bc-institutions-hiding-information-money-laundering https://biv.com/article/2021/12/why-are-bc-institutions-hidi...

simplestats 5y ago
I think it's an interesting topic. Rather than lumping the author in with criminals and scammers, who would of course love nothing better than to take money from naive people (anonymously or not), try to identify what it would take to make you trust a pseudonymous organization or identity. For example it needs a track record you can validate. Valuable real-world holdings or a business or something else you could take legal recourse against. One certainly wouldn't give anons with nothing but an idea a million bucks quite so readily as people with real identities. But then part of the reason for that investment is the verifiable resume showing skills and experience in the right things. So you'd need some alternative that is similarly confidence-building in some other way.
- zaptheimpaler 5y ago
  > try to identify what it would take to make you trust a pseudonymous organization or identity. For example it needs a track record you can validate. Valuable real-world holdings or a business or something else you could take legal recourse against Again, we already get all of this with real names and the existing legal system. This is really what a legal name is! Its a "pseudonym" but with enough linkage to the real world that its costly or impossible for someone to abandon it if they do something bad. Why not try to think a bit more about what systems already exist and how they help us before cheering on a new way to reinvent them poorly? I'm not suggesting the author is a criminal, all im saying is we as a society have always needed to build systems to prevent criminals from taking advantage of them, because they will. We all use email providers that block spam and sign contracts for jobs/rent too - its not because i think everyone who emails me is a scammer, its just that some are and this necessitates making the system resilient to them.

Animats 5y ago

What's scary is that this is for real. It's becoming the new normal. Amazon has been a big driver of anonymous business. They don't tell the customer who the real seller is, yet, when sued for liability, they claim they are merely connecting buyer and seller. Even when Amazon doesn't know who the seller is. Amazon fought liability up to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, then finally settled when it looked like they were about to lose.[1] Amazon thus enabled an entire fake product industry. We see this all the time with NFT scams. Especially the kind that are fund-raising operations for something not built yet. Those are public offerings, and when made to US persons clearly require filing with the SEC, with all the usual disclosures and financial statements. The SEC shut down the Initial Coin Offering industry back in 2018 for that sort of thing, but hasn't gotten to the forward-looking NFT industry yet. Probably because the complaints haven't started coming in yet. [1] https://www.law.com/thelegalintelligencer/2020/09/23/products-liability-lawsuit-against-amazon-has-settled-mooting-pa-supreme-court-argument/ https://www.law.com/thelegalintelligencer/2020/09/23/product...

bernardv 5y ago
This is only the new normal in the echo-chamber of the wanna-be believers of the net. No significant investor (i.e. Institutional money) is going to go along with this.

seibelj 5y ago

There are many anon teams in the crypto space. More likely to rug but it is a legit strategy. Lyra.finance is a recent one, some off the top of my head are Tornado, Grin, and Whiteheart / Hegic.

wmf 5y ago

Balaji from A16Z is pushing this and I asked myself why. Then I remembered that all tokens are illegal unregistered securities under US law and the SEC is running a crypto death lottery where they choose 10% of crypto startups at random and put them out of business. Pseudonymity allows founders to walk away and start again under a different name if the eye of the SEC falls on them and A16Z is legitimizing that strategy.

carlosdp 5y ago

A lot of assumption in this thread that the only reason to be pseudonymous is for criminality. That's not the case. I've raised a decent bit from a well-known pseudonymous twitter account. If it's a smart contract-based investment, the blockchain secures their investment, not law, so don't need their "real" name for that. Short of needing the name for legal reasons, why do I care what their birth name is? I know they have a certain audience in my target customer base, I know they are knowledgable about my space because I hear them talk all the time in twitter spaces. If they want to remain pseudonymous, let them! In a world where gaining a large online presence essentially rolls the dice on whether you get cancelled for something in the future, are we really surprised people want to reclaim a bit of anonymity on the internet while still being able to build a reputation they can build on?

kenneth 5y ago

I'm a VC; there is zero chance I would ever invest in a pseudonymous founder. That said, that doesn't mean the company and founder have to be publicly announced. I just have to know who I'm dealing with, and do my due diligence. It's totally fine for the founder to adopt a pseudonymous public persona, or for the company to remain stealth. But there is no way I'm dealing with a founder who hides their identity from their investors. Investor-company relationships are based on trust. You can't trust people you don't know.

lr1970 5y ago

Perfect way to become an early investor in an anonymous Ponzi scheme. Get out of jail card for the guilty parties.