Note:

These are my summarised notes for the second cofound.it Q&A. I could have missed some important point or inferred it incorrectly. Feel free to let me know any correction. I do recommend checking out the full video. Use this for a quick overview or for you to go through it again quickly once you have watched the video.

Cofound.it Live Q&A #2, June 28th 2017

Q01. What is the roadmap for july?

One of our main goal is to Hire more people in our team.

Before our crowd-sale we were a team of 5 people. We are 10 today. And we are planning to be 20+ team by end of Sept’17.

We are also working on our definitions and functions of the cofound.it platform.

We have a dedicated team working on Priority Pass (PP) dashboard.

PP Experiment has worked very well from both project side and investor side as well.

PP dashboard is planned to be launched in Mid July.

Q02 How are you going to spread news about cofound.it to new projects?

We are already getting 5 new project applications per day.

We are getting more applications right now then we can process.

We’ll be working on expanding our awareness to new supporters and globally.

David Sabo is working on a plan for our expansion.

He’ll be spending next 6 months or so to decide where to place hubs.

This will help us in tying up with local blockchain startup, ecosystems and discovering places to place our hubs.

It will also serve as a sales funnel for best blockchains startups.

Q03 What about competition?

“If there is no competition there is no market!”

So other competing projects are actually validating the idea of having cofound.it in the first place.

What we want to build is a platform where experts, projects and supporters will meet. No one else is doing that, as it is really hard to build that.

It’s easy to build a simpler version to attract supporters and projects and let them participate and projects either raise the money or not.

Whole cofound.it platform is a much bigger challenge.

So in that way we don’t have any competition (yet).

Q04 Can you please expand on the future plans for Priority Pass (PP)?

It is a bit confusing right now for you as there is no dashboard yet.

Dashboard is coming sometime in July.

Hence we did a bit of a hack just for Santiment ICO.

From July onwards, it’s going to be a really simple system — You’ll link your eth wallet address. If you have more than 5K CFI in that address, You will be eligible for the PP. You’ll also be able to view the upcoming ICO projects, when does it start etc

It’ll make it very easy to invest in CFI project ICOs via PP dashboard.

So hang in there, once the dashboard is live it’ll be much more clear.

Q05 How does ICONOMI investors get access to PP?

Initially it’ll be holding 5K CFI to have PP access.

After each CFI project ICO, we’ll continue to iterate over the definition of what it means to have PP access.

This is still in works and hasn’t been decided yet.

Fine tuning will be done in step by step by talking to the community and will keep iterating over it.

So essentially PP will be a feedback loop from the community and a cycle of iterations to keep improving it.

It is flexible and will keep getting better.

Q06 What about additional exchanges for CFI (WHEN POLO???) ?

Yes we are working on getting it on as many exchanges as possible

There is a general notion that if we hit a new exchange the value will skyrocket, which is not really true.

Our main focus is creating a long term value.

First long term value for CFI token is PP.

If you look at any tokens price in a very short term it’s always based on market psychology. What we are working on is creating actual value it’s a slow process that will take not days or months but years.

Q07 What other projects are coming?

We announce projects based on the requirement of each project, what makes sense for them.

Since they also need to build awareness for their project, how much they are ready, build a bit of hype, FOMO etc.

We have already introduced dapowerplay on our slack channel (Hit the Cofound.it slack to know more)

We’ll be doing more such intros in future as well.

Q08 Currently CFI is focused on Ethereum blockchain, are you going to try another blockchain as well?

We are agnostic to blockchains. We don’t care. We care about great blockchain projects. It does make it easier if the ICO is on Ethereum platform, but not an issue. So yes we are open to it in future.

Q09 On what basis do you accept new projects and support them?

Daniel from our team can answer this better (hit him up on our slack channel, his handle on slack is “daniel”)

In short, we evaluate three things — Idea, Technology and the team that they have. We also see where we can add value to the project. Bring them experts in Legal, Design, Copyrighting, Token strategy etc.

Q10 How do you see projects that are more for opportunity than actually having any value by using a blockchain?

All startups are by definition opportunistic.

What we are looking for — How do we find the team that we can actually work with, do we take them just because of hype?

One of our key criteria after basic filtering is ‘Can this project work with us? Can we add value?’

They should be able to take criticism about their projects.

If during our discussion with the project founders we give them feedback, we also see what do the founders do.

Do they just dismiss it or they think about it? If they can’t work with us we can’t help them.

Q11 Can you talk about the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission in USA) in relation to ICOs?

For cofound.it it is not a challenge as we are not based in US.

But It is a challenge for projects in US working with CFI.

We try to find the best legal structure of ICO to minimise any potential problems for them.

In Europe they have already declared that tokens are not currencies but an asset so it’s not an issue here.

The USA has said nothing like that so it’s unclear and causing uncertainty.

As of now we propose potential solutions on how to conduct ICOs as safely as possible.

In future when USA clears their stand better it’ll more clear.

Q12 If and when will Ethereum fail?

Recent bear run was not ethereum failing.

Actually what everyone really wants to ask is if ethereum totally fails what will happen to CFI?

Answer is simple, If ever that happens we’ll create CFI2.0 on whatever the new blockchain that will replace ethereum and we’ll move the tokens to that blockchain.

So essentially, in the long run there is no effect.

Q13 Recently because of few bad ICO runs, it crippled the network. Do you think CFI needs to address this concern or lead it by example?

Leading by example will address this concerns.

As long as people keep throwing ethereum at projects doing the wildest thing, projects will continue doing the wildest things.

It’s for you and I as supporters need to lead by example to not support projects that doesn’t make sense how they are raising funds etc.

Q14 If any plans for smart contracts that will collect ether pre ICO

Yes we are considering such solutions for PP. But this hasn’t been finalised. We are working on it.

Q15 What projects do you like Jan?

I like looking at different mechanism of different projects.

How they are handling different challenges, ICO etc.

Q16 How many hubs have been open so far and how many are in final stage of planning?

0 Hubs as of now.

Hubs means we rent offices, hire local analysts, local community managers etc

Putting a bad hub would be very bad for us.

So we are taking our time to find out good places for hubs.

There is a game still available on http://build.cofound.it/

We have a PHD student working on the algorithm to come up with a suggestion of hubs to place.

We’ll announce the game result soon.

Q17 How many projects are there for this year?

We are right now bottlenecked on our recourses to process more applications right now.

So in future we might allow PP access to projects that are not part of CFI because there are many great projects out there.

So far plan is 10 this year, it could be more.

Q18 What are the tokens that Jan owns personally?

I personally own Btc, Eth, Aragon, IExec, CFI

Q19 How should new projects get to work with you?

Send your projects to projects@cofound.it to get in touch with us for evaluation phases.

Q20 If market goes bad how do you realistically see startups engaged with CFI being motivated enough to go ahead with their timelines?

For all true entrepreneurs it won’t matter as it is their chance to making or breaking it.

Even if for sometime to the value of the collected ethers fall low, and they were able to quickly able to convert a portion of their collected tokens into giving them a runway for say next 1 yr it’s fine.

We all believe the long term value of blockchain space.

In the end it’ll be really big.

Q21 Let’s say a project fails to deliver, does CFI makes sure they return tokens back to supporters?

We do have an idea about having an escrow and giving it out in portions as they reach new milestones.

But this means we need to keep funds in a smart contract which is not a good solution.

We are open to any suggestions from you on what we should do.

Anything you would like to add?

Topic 1:

The summer is going to be about working in the projects in the pipeline now and building our team. We should be 20~ people by Sept.

Topic 2

With every ICO we do, more elements become clearer. From ICONOMI to CFI to next Santiment and so on.

Example, in CFI we experimented on how to communicate and we noticed what worked and what did not worked.

Soon we will have collected a lot of information on what works and what doesn’t work and we’ll come up with better strategies.

In future, we’ll be a crowd sourced project evaluation platform.

Topic 3

Right now we are looking for projects that are more in Series A stage (not just a whitepaper/website)

They have the technology, they have some small team, they have tested the market somehow.

It also saves our resources since we can filter more projects like this.

But soon we will allow projects at seed state but this will take few months to happen.

Topic 4

As for the recent down run, if you look at the bottom that it hit, it was still at par with what the token value of btc and eth was 3–4 weeks back.

So don’t be worried about the value. Tokens go up and down, it’s a volatile market.

Look at it from month to month trends not on a daily basis.

Topic 5