Vibe Capital is a $10m Fund that invests in the Web3, AI, and Deep Science sectors at the Pre-Seed and Seed stage.
We seek venture-scale returns by leaning in to the volatility caused by the exponential growth of the Web3, AI, and Deep Science sectors intertwining with demographic shifts and climate change.
Our worldview: The near future = Reformation, then Renaissance
Reformation - 2021-2025
The next 10-15 years will be marked by unprecedented volatility and change. Similar to the Reformation, traditional power structures are being challenged as technological, climatological, and demographic forces expose inadequacies of the current system.
Renaissance - 2025-2030
During any volatile period, enormous wealth will be created, and incumbents will be disrupted.
But just as the outcome of the Reformation was the Renaissance followed by the Enlightenment, the Modern Reformation also presents a chance to usher in a dramatically restructured society: one in which power structures are more equitable, beneficial, transparent and accessible.
We invest in those companies.
Vibe's Portfolio, Aims, and Operations
What are the macro outcomes Vibe Capital looks to support?
Picks and shovels of volatility: Underlying tools, protocols, or infrastructures to build the new renaissance more quickly, equitably, and justly.
Open source, decentralized infrastructure for controlling atoms like bits
Protocol for value accrual to individuals who share their data to power AI algorithms
Amelioration of worst outcomes: Caps downside to the worst outcomes of volatility.
Prevent climate change homelessness
Limit catastrophic wealth loss in failed currencies/countries
Reinforce security of critical infrastructure (water, electricity, etc.)
Amplification of best outcomes: Goes from 0 to 1, or 1 to 1,000,000, of clear wins for society.
Curing a disease
Dramatic reduction in societal ills such as homelessness or poverty
Takes advantage of, or builds, emergent behaviors: Ushers in new paradigms, attitudes and primitives to satisfy either emergent needs of society, communities, or the individual.
Legal solutions for identities created in the Metaverse
Protocol that provides tokenized ownership of a community's (WoW tribe, neighborhood in San Francisco's) data
Reimagining of eldercare utilizing 3-D printed living communities, virtual spaces, and drone/robot assisted logistics
Builds collective intelligence to provide structure and understanding to a rapidly changing world: Structures and processes for coordinating understanding and effort are undergoing complete transformation. New concepts of organization will be necessary for amplification of best outcomes and amelioration of worst outcomes.
Protocol that helps implement Quadratic Voting in local elections
Wikipedia with a blockchain-based consensus mechanism and governance tokens
DAOsaaS (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations as a Service)
What is the risk profile of companies do we invest in?
We are investing in Oysters and Pearls. Oysters are high expected return if you can crack the risk; Pearls are sure fire and high return.
While Tim Urban's axis of "Human Progress" refers to the impact artificial intelligence will have on humanity, we disagree that this is the only technology, or even the only factor, leading to extreme, compressed change.
The past 20 years has seen the alluvial soil of the internet has engulf the globe - and three nascent technology sectors are emerging from that soil with breath-taking force and beauty.
Why Web3, AI, and DeepSci?
Web3 allows a complete re-conceptualization of the accrual and transfer of wealth, value, and trust.
Combine Nakamoto’s innovation - coordination of trust at a massive scale - with coordination of information at a massive scale (the Internet) and the centralized entities who have historically adjudicated wealth accrual, value transfer, and “the Truth” are no longer needed.
This means any individual or group of people can transfer wealth and communicate their message on level footing with any other entity. There's a new player in the game - everyone.
AI and ML provide every human with god-like understanding of the world.
AI and ML enhance humans ability to make decisions and derive meaning from the world - with the speed and mathematical accuracy of a computer.
Human brains are great at a lot of stuff - recognizing other human faces, social interaction, and other highly-specialized skills that helped the species survive in the grasslands of Sub-Saharan Africa 100,000 years ago.
Once we began augmenting our abilities using technology, however, we no longer needed evolution to add new capabilities, and could offload new skills to technology.
The most powerful technology humans ever created is a second brain - computers. While computers excel at things that humans are bad at - like math - they were useless at enhancing a person's ability to understand and derive meaning from the world. Until now.
Forget bicycles for the mind. Dall-E 2, Stable Diffusion, GPT-3, and other AI tools are Iron Man Mech Suits for the mind.
Deep Science transforms the physical world to an information technology - allowing engineering of atoms like software.
Genomics lets humans re-imagine their physical identity and mortality. Human experience has always been a function of our mortality and our physical bodies. This is changing.
We have passed key inflection points in the ability to access, manipulate, and understand the fundamental building blocks of the human body. CRISPR, Synthetic Biology, and bioinformatics are just scratching the surface of engineering biology like software.
If we simply increased lifespan, it would drastically change what it means to be human. But engineering biology gives physical appearance, attributes, mental states, and even identities license for re-imagination - and creativity.
The implications for removing the constraints of our bodies, our lifespans, and our healthspans is unfathomable.
Robotics and Additive Manufacturing remove constraints of physical location and transportation. We’ve hit an exponential inflection point in atom-based innovation, and a fundamental re-thinking of the centering of lives and business around atom-proximity.
The current cost and speed of sending and assembling bits of information is basically zero, and instant. This is hugely different than 40 years ago.
This is not the case for atoms. Atoms - be it humans, food, construction materials, or medicine - have been left out of this exponential innovation.
This is changing. There is a renewed interest in innovating on atom-based technology - enabled by networks of information (the Internet) and networks of value (crypto) to incentivize innovation and to understand (ML/AI) and engineer atoms.
By allowing an order of magnitude deeper granularity with which we can organize, compose, and transport atoms, society’s organization around macroscopic clusters of atoms will disintegrate and reorganize in to wildly different configurations.
Decentralized Science removes artificial constraints on the reproducibility, speed, and breadth of scientific understanding - providing a true exponential knowledge substrate for all other tech. Society can only progress as fast as its scientific method substrate allows it to. .
The current state of “Science” is just as far from a pure scientific method as “the economy” is from a pure market.
Decentralized Science - or DeSci - aims to remove constraints of the scientific method by solving problems with the speed, efficacy, reproducibility, and bias endemic within the entire scientific process.
DeSci’s solutions are done through cryptographic protocols and code, enabling trust, value transfer, and verifiability at the speed of the internet.
By removing centralized, beauracratic, analog restrictions on the rate of human scientific understanding, DeSci can provide the substrate that allows for an unbridled explosion of human scientific understanding.
Climate & Demographic Volatility
Why is climate change a driver of volatility?
In some ways, Climate Change is the perfect parallel to our thesis. Volatility is increasing in the climate on a massive scale, and in a similarly compressed time period.
As you can see above, the pace of a changing climate is very fast - unprecedented in human history. When you compress the amount of time needed to respond to something, you're more likely to make errors, leading to volatile outcomes.
Of course, climate change will not affect everyone on the planet equally. Climate Change will disproportionately affect demographics that are outside of traditional power structures, regions, and age groups.
What demographic shifts are you talking about? What do they have to do with anything?
The final piece of global upheaval is shifting demographics.
Wealth is currently concentrated among older people. These people, naturally, are attached to centralized power structures to maintain that wealth:
This disparity leads to younger generations become increasingly resentful of existing centralized entities.
Not only is there a strong imbalance in wealth in existing demographics; the quantity of global population is increasingly shifting to people who have a strong resentment to previous power structures:
Those humans aren't just younger; they are also predominantly in regions with resentment towards existing power structures (mainly Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia):
