As the saying goes, we shape our tools; thereafter, they shape us. Today, our tools make it hard to invest capital together, so only the privileged few can do it. What if there was a more free, fair, and open way to invest together on the internet?
Syndicate is a series-A crypto company that was founded to revolutionize venture capital—that is, how the future gets funded.
Since then, the company has pivoted to focus on delivering that same underlying tech in developer APIs that let anyone, including some of the internet's fastest-growing communities and culture-defining brands, build their community on crypto rails.
I joined Syndicate as employee #1. Less than 6 months later, we closed >$28M from VCs like a16z and scaled the company to over 30 people around the world. As Head of Design, I’m responsible for the core pillars of product design, research, brand, content, design ops, and a pillar we like to call “economies”, so called because we don’t just design our product—we’re designing entirely new economies and a fledgling industry.
Syndicate is a series-A crypto company that was founded to revolutionize venture capital—that is, how the future gets funded.
Since then, the company has pivoted to focus on delivering that same underlying tech in developer APIs that let anyone, including some of the internet's fastest-growing communities and culture-defining brands, build their community on crypto rails.
I joined Syndicate as employee #1. Less than 6 months later, we closed >$28M from VCs like a16z and scaled the company to over 30 people around the world. As Head of Design, I’m responsible for the core pillars of product design, research, brand, content, design ops, and a pillar we like to call “economies”, so called because we don’t just design our product—we’re designing entirely new economies and a fledgling industry.
A quick note about financial product case studies
The designs below are concepts that include fake data for illustrative purposes. The names and numbers in these designs are completely made up at random and do not reflect any person, company, or group’s past, present, or future plans. Even where a group or person's name may bear similarity to a real-life group or person, the numbers and other data associated with it are random. Any similarity to real life events are purely coincidental. Nothing contained herein is or should be construed as investment advice, legal advice, solicitation or encouragement to conduct any financial transaction, or an ad for any current or future offering of any token or security.
Designing a more open world
Our world is built by three things:
- People (and usually, groups of people, since no great work is done alone)
- Their dreams
- And the resources it takes to make those dreams a reality
Since the dawn of time, people have been organizing and gathering resources (raising capital) to make things happen. Syndicate is built at this intersection.
But despite how fundamental this story is, it's still shockingly difficult to do this. Exclusive networks and closed-door deals cut most people out of the "room where it happens". Regulatory complexity and fax-machine era tech (no, really) means it can cost thousands of dollars, weeks of work, lawyers, and yes, a fax machine, to simply create a legal entity that can do this.
Here's one example: today, if you're a startup founder, one of the biggest things that can determine success is your proximity—physically or socially—to this road, right here:
This dynamic cuts billions of people out of opportunity. Talent is equally distributed, but opportunities to leverage it are not. Once upon a time this was practically insurmountable; physical and cultural distance were too significant a factor to overcome.
But today, the worldwide internet makes it possible to organize people and capital regardless of location. Moreover, web3's new distributed ownership paradigms take this even further, fundamentally expanding opportunity to what gets built, by whom, and for whom.
What would previously take tens of thousands of dollars, weeks of work, and a lot of expertise, can now be done by anybody in 5 minutes for less than a sixth of a US cent.
A more free financial system
At the core of Syndicate is the ability to group people into communities and capital into funds. We needed a common architecture to do so to make a complicated process effortless.
At the top of each syndicate page is a 2-column layout:
We designed a step-by-step accordion component that could handle an arbitrary number of action items, each enabled by a prior step being marked as complete.
Each step reveals one or more "action cards" that let you do something.
We set out to build foundational infrastructure and it quickly proved just that—foundational. In less than 3 weeks, 10% of all DAOs ever had been created with Syndicate:
Deals
Deals came out of a lot of in-depth research (shout out to Sida Li and Adam Lukasik for their incredible work on this). Through numerous qualitative user interviews, we used low-fi mocks to quickly and collaboratively experiment with economic design.
That yielded three key findings that informed our work on Deals:
- It continues to be really hard to quickly collect funds, especially in a decentralized way; while our existing capital collection product was a good start, it was too hard to spin these up on a case-by-case basis.
- It’s really hard to know which deals are good; as a result, people rely too much on accessible-to-few social signaling.
- Deal creators (GPs) need to overcome inertia by getting capital commitments but backers (LPs) are reluctant to part with funds before they absolutely have to, particularly when they're among the first movers.
The deal "x-ray"
Some deals are grassroots efforts. Others involve a few big whales.
We knew we needed some kind of graphic to communicate this difference. How might we illustrate what was happening at a glance?
We looked to inspiration sources like displays for sonar, ground-penetrating radar, and other information-dense, heatmap-style visualizations:
This became the “deal x-ray” or “spectrograph” concept—a multi-dimensional data visualization that combined volume of contributors, contribution amounts, time, and more in a single graphic that could give you a sense of a deal and its traction at a glance.
We called this approach “spectral maximalism”.
Might we use such a heatmap as the image on the NFT representing your contribution?
