VISION: a vision driven investment platform
For those who have been following my progress in the past weeks/months know that it has been a struggle. What was the struggle? Well it seems like investing money in a way that has a real life impact and generate returns is not really a thing the current system wants us to do. Whether it is the costs of legally raising funds and investing them (paying lawyers, notaries, banks etc) or the legal obstacles (FINMA regulations in Switzerland/ SEC in the US) waiting for you at every stage of the process.
Well when a problem or 10 show up, you gotta solve it/them right? So here is what I could come up with for now: VISION: a vision driven investment platform that could allow investment networks such as HANI to achieve its ultimate goal. Read on mfer…
(What follows is a brief introduction to VISION. I would give it to investors or to potential cofounders for instance. It wasn’t written for the newsletter but gives a nice overview of VISION.)
What is your vision for the world?
VISION allows for people to come together, invest money, and produce meaningful returns based on their vision of the world. A vision is the projection of oneself into the world, everyone does that naturally. Vision based investing is the simplest approach to investing there is. People are just missing a vehicle to translate their vision into an investment.
Example: consider HANI
HANI is a group of 50 individuals that invest together. Let’s call it an investment network. HANI’s goal is to allocate money to projects that it considers the most useful for humanity while generating returns for its network participants. HANI aims to have a larger impact on the future of humanity then any other investment network in the world. To be effective and successful HANI will need to repeatedly go through some mandatory steps. To execute individual steps some tools currently exist.
Steps and tools:
1) Within the interest of progress of mankind, HANI is following an investment vision which is initially defined by one or a few people. Over time the power of changing and defining the vision shifts to a larger and larger network. The nature of this network needs to be dynamic (entry and exit), clearly defined and safe from all kinds of malicious attacks. Representative existing tools: tokens.
2) Over time the vision adapts to the changing world. One could also imagine the vision to split up into multiple vision over time. Representative existing tools: Wiki.
3) A main activity within HANI is to identify ideas, make decisions on which ideas to follow and which not. It needs to discuss ideas based on the participants knowledge and perception of the world. Representative existing tools: discussion forums, social networks & other communication channels.
4) The network participants need to agree on which ideas are the most relevant for HANI’s vision and make an investment decision. Representative existing tools: older and newer coordination tools such as reddit type ranking, quadratic voting & prediction markets.
5) Money needs to be allocated to the corresponding projects. Representative existing tools: Ethereum ecosystem, MultiSig, DAO infrastructure.
All this is needed for HANI to continuously allocate money to places that match their vision of the world.
Back to VISION:
As you might have understood through the example above, VISION does not intend to define visions for people, decide what good or bad projects are or predict what good or bad investments are. VISION is the environment, the unique structure which allows people and technology to come together, form investment networks and figure the world out together.
By building VISION we will:
1) First, attract the “purpose driven money” that does not care that much about returns in the short term but cares about making a change in the world. Once returns start to emerge, the “greedy money” will follow and suddenly the potential market becomes “all the money”.
2) Disrupt traditional investment funds since investment networks will be able to more successfully allocate their money by following their vision of the world.
How will we test VISION:
1) I’ve been working on an investment vision for 2 years now. I will be first and I have people willing to join my investment network.
2) Decentralized communities continue to explode over the internet, these communities are ready to create a future together based on their vision. This includes investing their money, together.
To finish off, why do I want to create VISION?
Money is power and power is necessary to create change. Allocating money based on your vision allows you to shift the power within the existing system. The current financial system is rigid, complex, and full of contradicting incentives. It does not allow average Joe & Jane to easily allocate money to what matters to them. We need to go back to first principles and ask ourselves what we want our money to do. Define your vision and let your hard-earned money do some meaningful work for you. We need a new vehicle for vision driven, young and hungry people, ready to change the world.