(2021-10-27) A16z Investing In Friends With Benefits - a DAO

Carra Wu: Investing in Friends With Benefits (a DAO). Programmable blockchains are interesting for the same reason that innovation on smartphones spiked after opening up development to third parties via app stores.

What comes next is hard to predict, but DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) are likely to have an enormous impact on the adoption of web3 products.

Venice is known as a focal point of the Italian Renaissance, but almost none of the most groundbreaking inventions of the age originated there.

What Venice did have—and became renowned for—was a radically elevated merchant class with ownership and representation in government, which enabled them to assemble the best of the world’s resources. New ideas, concepts, and inventions could be combined, organized, scaled, and sometimes even reinvented in Venice. The result was explosive: in the 13th century, Venice became the richest and most powerful city in Europe

In addition to borderless resource assembly, DAOs also enable bottom-up innovation and community building, from which new ideas can be incubated and scaled

Like Venice did for early modern Europe, web3 is redefining how global talent pools their knowledge and work together.

Until recently, DAOs were used mostly to secure DeFi protocols, and DAO members consisted primarily of highly technical contributors. FWB (Friends With Benefits) represents a new kind of DAO. Founded initially as a token-gated Discord server, FWB has become the de facto home of web3’s growing creative class.

By aligning the incentives of the next generation of artists, creators, and builders, FWB is enabling a different kind of renaissance for the next evolution of the internet. Fittingly, they describe themselves as a digital city.

We have long believed the creative class is among the most under-monetized talent pools in web2.

The average American consumer spends a third of their waking hours streaming music, and yet only 1% of music artists are able to make a living through streaming.

Since its humble beginnings as a social experiment in September 2020, FWB has grown to nearly 2000 members and its community has driven an outsized portion of the cultural value in web3.

Their next venture, FWB Cities, aims to scale the DAO’s IRL footprint, partnering with city-specific spaces, communities, and experiences to bring real world benefits to the FWB membership. In this way, FWB Cities offers a glimpse into the very first IRL metaverse and will make the entry fee even more accessible to more people.