VDP-54.3 Expression of Interest: Shine Capital

[Taliskermalt]

Summary

As part of the VDP-54 governance process, we have requested that each strategic contributor provide a memo outlining their interest in VitaDAO and how they see their participation both financial and otherwise.

Below please find the submission from Shine Capital.

Who are you? What is the size of your proposed capital contribution?

Shine (www.shine.vc) is a venture capital firm that partners with relentless, creative, convincing entrepreneurs from the early stages of company, protocol, and network building. We lead Seed and Series A rounds in companies building in web2 and web3, across some of our oldest industries and on the frontier. We invest in people. We are engaged partners. We always work with honesty and integrity. We are currently investing Shine Capital II, a $200M early-stage fund, and Shine Capital Opportunities Fund I, a $100M vehicle to support our portfolio companies as they scale. Some of the companies we have worked with include: Plaid, TryNow, Warby Parker, Kingdom Supercultures, Hivemapper, Notion, Flamingo, Vimeo, Molecule, and IAC.

** Shine Capital proposes to contribute $1,000,000 and help VitaDAO with project prioritization and positioning, capital raising, go-to-market partnerships, and tokenomics design and participate in governance of VitaDAO using $VITA tokens**

Mission

Please describe for us, your view of the longevity and healthspan field, and how you perceive VitaDAO’s role in it.

DeSci can help reduce startup costs and barriers to entry in biotech by empowering a generation of scientific talent to create and accrue value as entrepreneurs. We believe that crypto can bring new liquidity to drug and therapeutic discovery, unlocking previously overlooked or under-resourced research areas and accelerating the process of bringing novel therapeutics to patients.

Given applicability to broader domains ranging from Alzheimer’s disease to infertility, we believe interrogating disease areas through an age-related framing can help solve health problems for humanity at large.

Your Context

Why does your organization have an interest in this field? How does your organization see itself participating to advance the field?

Shine is a venture capital firm that partners with relentless, creative, convincing entrepreneurs from the early stages of company, protocol, and network building.

We are an entrepreneur-focused firm. We back people who have the ability to turn their big vision into an even bigger reality.

We invest from the early stages; we are not afraid to take product-market-fit risk. We manage $435,000,000 across three funds. We lead Seed rounds and Series A financings, and we continue to back our partner companies as they continue to perform. We invest with conviction and for scale.

We invest in companies, protocols, and networks. We invest across web2 and web3 opportunities, and our experience in each informs and improves our work in both. We embrace the frontier; we believe that technology can help push humanity forward.

At Shine, we believe that the time has finally come for software and technology to transform the heretofore highly structured and often exclusionary biotech industry. There is a massive opportunity to use purpose-built software and better systems and processes to bring novel drugs and therapeutics to market with more efficiency, increased transparency, and better alignment between and amongst value chain participants.

Your Thesis

What is your interest in VitaDAO? How do we fit into your operational thesis?

Shine is an investor in Molecule, and VitaDAO is the first great example of what Molecule’s approach can unleash. We believe that Molecule’s framework can transform drug discovery and that longevity is an extremely powerful starting point for the IP-NFT and DTT models given the organic interest in the field from the crypto ecosystem.

We already see the network effects from VitaDAO’s community at work; we believe the DAO has asymmetric information in longevity and will be the catalyst for DeSci to impact even more disease areas over time. We also believe that VitaDAO is one of the best examples today of a decentralized governance model that can effectively organize and incentivize contributors to drive impact.

How do you plan to support VitaDAO, beyond your capital contribution?

Beyond our capital contribution, we believe Shine can bring the most value to the DAO by:

1. Offering strategic guidance around which projects will gain the widest appeal and how to effectively position those projects in the marketplace

2. Bringing our networks to bear as VitaDAO continues to build out and strengthen its base of capital partners, contributors, and go-to-market partners

3. Leverage our financial and business acumen to help VitaDAO build a durable contributor framework with an appropriate and aligned token incentive system

Participation plan

Explain how you plan to participate in VitaDAO. Will you participate in governance (token-based voting)? Do you plan to allocate resources to working inside our working groups? Do you have your own initiatives that you feel would bring value to VitaDAO?

We anticipate working collaboratively with the DAO to align on how Shine can best participate in the DAO and aid in achieving its objectives. The points mentioned above correspond most directly to the Awareness and Longevity-Dealflow working groups, respectively.

[bowtiedshrike]

Being an academic, I don’t always understand business language. Let’s see if I’ve parsed this correctly.

As best I can tell, the pros to this proposal: $1M in capital, prior relationship with Molecule, access to Shine’s capital network

The cons seem to be: “strategic guidance” (in practice, is this telling VitaDAO which projects to pursue despite Shine’s lack of longevity experience?), “contributor framework” sounds like trying to solve a problem VitaDAO has already solved with prior VDPs, and the ‘aligned token incentive system’ sounds like a plan to make VitaDAO worse. Or are the previous two points due to Shine’s prior participation in creating the prior VDPs? Finally, the capital network does not look like it includes other longevity, science or biotech-focused investments, so it’s unclear how access to that network adds value to VitaDAO.

If VitaDAO has a long enough runway, this sounds like it will be more trouble than it’s worth. But maybe I’m missing something here?

[sokosloth]

Thank you for the comment. Perhaps we were not clear enough in our proposal, so we appreciate the push to clarify.

Our first rule as investors is to do no harm. We would never look to tell VitaDAO which projects to pursue, nor would we look to upset the current tokenomics system.

What we can do is leverage our experience across many web3 businesses and DAOs and bring those learnings to VitaDAO as it grows and evolves its community, its structure, and its governance. Our network also extends far beyond our current portfolio; as VitaDAO continues to expand, our network of potential contributors and funders could be quite additive to the DAO.

We see VitaDAO as one of the best case studies for a high-functioning DAO today and are blown away by the caliber of talented contributors. We aim to work collaboratively as a DAO contributor to accelerate the excellent work already being done.