by Collin Thompson and Intrepid Ventures
A Letter to our Token Holders
Metabase A blockchain platform to build, scale, and monetize next-generation businesses
v1.2 – April 2018
Table of contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 01 We are Intrepid Ventures. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 01 What is Intrepid Ventures? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 01 Mission . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 01 Build the Future. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 01 Founders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 02 Leadership Roles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 02 Decision Making. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 03 Leadership Model. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 04 Partnership. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 04 Our Culture. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 04 12 Principles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 05 Brand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 05 Asymmetric Innovation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 06 Explore and Exploit. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 06 Economic Development & Inclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 06 Token Holders. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 07 Long Term Sustainability. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 07 Moneyball Moonshots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 07 Token Holder Value. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 08 Reporting & Communication. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 08 Expectations & Limitations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 09 Building the Future. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 09
Introduction We are grateful for your consideration in Intrepid Ventures as a long term partner. We have created this Token Holder’s Manual to help you understand our company, business, goals, philosophy, and limitations.
We are Intrepid Ventures The world is changing, however most businesses are not. This change requires a different kind of organization.
What is Intrepid Ventures? Intrepid Ventures is about systematic innovation creating businesses that prosper through strong leaders and independence. We are a blockchain venture studio. A diverse group of company builders, organized and unified through a decentralized culture that is designed to systematically manage innovation.
Mission We aspire to systematically scale transformational innovations that enable financial inclusion, economic development, and digital prosperity.
Build the Future. We believe strongly that not all innovation or profits are created equal. We hope that by ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to some of the world’s problems, we can make Intrepid Ventures an institution that makes an impact on society. In pursuing this goal, we will always be mindful of our responsibilities to our community, employees, customers, and business partners.
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Founders In the spirit of our logo, we run Intrepid Ventures as a triumvirate. The three of us run the company collaboratively utilizing our unique skill sets, backgrounds, and perspectives to come up with a distinct way of looking at the world, but at the same time, creating a unified leadership style that we believe is most conducive for our model and scale over the long term.
Leadership Roles Zach, JP, and I have worked closely together for the last few years, and we have definitely enjoyed our time together and the journey we have been on. Zach is primarily responsible for what we call “development”; which is a combination of community outreach, events, and team development. His stack of activities and responsibilities provides the necessary visibility, brand awareness, and a touchstone for our company to the broader cryptocurrency and blockchain industry. He is constantly in the field, or on a plane, advocating our core message to key partners, customers, and talent. One of the things that I admire about Zach, and why I’m happy to have him as a partner, is because he has a unique ability to connect with people in ways which I do not possess. Moreover, he has an innate ability to express complex ideas in a very simple manner, which is highly effective, given the nature of what we do. His extensive experience in building innovation teams is a unique professional skill set that works in line with our model and our focus on scaling new technologies. Over the course of the past couple of years, Zach has driven almost all of our business, found many of our key partners and has supported the business even before he knew what it was or what it ever could be. He has been integral to our growth and the culture of the company and I expect that his achievements will continue well into the future. As our Chief Investment officer, JP likes to call himself the “grumpy old man”, it’s the persona he takes on when we’re having our weekly partner meetings, It’s one shade past “devil’s advocate, and it’s his way of finding the synthesis, or “whitespace”, in our strategic decision making. In JP’s role we see “investment” as meaning something very different than in the traditional sense. It spans any investments that we may make in other companies, making critical decisions about people, capabilities, and financial outcomes, but also in our own self assessment of risk adjusted opportunities incorporating our biases, and capabilities. He brings the objective clarity of a jolly Zen master, that can dispassionately look 02
at problems but can still bring the level of innovation that we need in order to differentiate ourselves and create impact. JP’s balance, patience, and critical mind, especially when it comes to analysing our expenditures, both financially and kinetically, is trait that is most appreciated given his very dynamic background as a financial product developer, investment banker, and CEO of a major securities firm. Moreover, as an active angel investor he brings a lot of “real world” experience in an asset class that has many “human dynamics” and irrationality baked into determining successful outcomes. We count on JP to provide a pragmatic and thoughtful consideration to all our decisions and activities, but can also rely on him to have a measured outlook on our how we seek to be different, innovative, and effective in reaching our business goals. As for myself, I lead most of the design and strategic direction for the company within consensus of our triumvirate. I try my best to harness Zach’s energy and empathy, and JP’s reasoned pragmatism when creating our product and strategic frameworks. This balance has been very inspirational in creating models, products, and opportunities that links our organizational design and value proposition to all our stakeholders. Where I add to the other co founders is in my energy and willingness to adapt and learn. My major contribution to the team is my deep passion for emerging technology from the core protocols all the way to how they can be applied in the real world. I’m constantly looking to push the company forward in terms of our design, value proposition, and culture. You could say that I’m the chief cheerleader and the keeper of the faith. Entrepreneurship and innovation is a passion and, should be, a professionalized pursuit, and if I contribute anything to our voltron like team, it is my undying belief that someone is going to build the future, and I believe it can be us.
Decision Making We discuss our operations regularly, Monday’s-- no matter where any of us are in the world, and we typically make our major decisions on these calls. We make decisions together, but also maintain a high degree of autonomy as we know each other quite well and understand our roles quite clearly. We stay within our lanes and have a very open and honest way of communicating with each other and do not shy away from pushing back or challenging each other on assumptions when coming to decisions that will affect the company.
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Leadership Model Our model is to develop strong founders, supported by our core development and research teams, and allow the founders to run each business, with Zach, JP, and myself in service to them as needed. In building a relationship together over the years, we found a model that we felt was necessary in the market for our particular perspective on technology, innovation, while at the same time harnesses our own unique abilities. Between design, human capital, business development, and strategic finance, our leadership team spans all the necessary skill sets in order to compete and lead in our changing business landscape. We came to recognize that in our business landscape, the needs of entrepreneurs, and incumbent organizations exist in an ecosystem, and a leadership team that is empathetic and equipped to deal with these detailed nuances is the one that will be able to sustain and shape: systematic change, transformation and renewal. Fundamentally, we believe our model allows us more management scale, as we can run things that are mutually independent.
Partnership Although our form is corporate, our attitude is partnership. Zach, JP, and myself think of the people that hold tokens in our projects as collaborators and fellow travellers in creating exciting new platforms. We have a community first company model, that aspires to build strong network effects, sustainability, and stability for our collaborative projects over long time horizons.
Our Culture Our culture is defined by modularity, decentralization, and long term sustainability. When all the fads are over, when all the hot new things are not so hot anymore, we seek to be the last ones standing. Built to last. Sustainable and nimble enough to transform no matter what the landscape looks like at the time. Therefore, we check traditional disciplines at the door. Intrepid ventures transcends known boundaries and disciplines by actively promoting a unique, antidisciplinary culture that emboldens unconventional mixing and matching of seemingly disparate technologies, turning them into real world solutions.
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In order to achieve this level of antifragility, we maintain the following principles in our drive to achieve transformative outcomes.
12 Principles 01 / Antifragility over Resilience
07 / Learning over Education
02 / Outcomes over Theory
08 / Transformation over Disruption
03 / Radical over Incremental
09 / Frameworks over Plans
04 / Imagination over Reality
10 / Communities over Experts
05 / Unknown over Known
11 / Collaboration over Competition
06 / Reform over Compliance
12 / Convergence over Discipline
Brand The obvious definition of our brand can be distilled to Bold and Pioneering, and this is a part of our ethos, especially given the landscape that we operate in: emerging technology and developing markets. We hold as axiomatic that our community is perceptive and smart, and that brand image follows reality and not the other way around. Our company is represented by a solid triband flag that stands for Technology, Humanity, and Equality. At our core, we are about the advancement of cutting edge technology solutions that serve humanity applied to reducing inequality. We do not intend for Intrepid Ventures to be a big consumer brand with related products—the whole point is that the companies developed by Intrepid Ventures should have independence and develop their own identity. We see this as key to their long term viability and to not allow brand creep to dilute the value of each company. The “Powered by Intrepid Ventures” mark will appear across our developments as a signifier of provenance and quality that will hopefully support our projects as a mark of distinction without detracting from the core product’s brand position. We believe that, in the long run, the entirety of Intrepid Ventures will be greater than the sum of its parts, and that unique identities within a unified culture is a more sustainable strategy and future end state.
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Asymmetric Innovation We cultivate innovation by empowering technologists, and supporting them with deep business analysis, a core team of talent, and by providing them with the resources and guidance to rapidly scale. Sometimes, talent and opportunity is not always in the same place. That’s why we have developed Intrepid Ventures as a constellation of organizations, with a hub and spoke model of management that is not a conventional company or one that is easily categorized. We’ve embedded innovation as a core unifying principle by creating an organizational design that is structured for systematic technological re-invention, change, and renewal. We decided in our early days that today’s inefficiencies in organizations and opportunities in markets could be better served by a radically different model that will is more nimble for developing asymmetric opportunities.
Explore and Exploit We’ve long believed that over time companies tend to get comfortable doing the same thing, just making incremental changes. But in the technology industry, where revolutionary ideas drive the next big growth areas, you need to be a bit unconventional to stay relevant. On a pragmatic level our organization is focused on exploiting our existing capabilities and market opportunities, while at the same time exploring for new advantages that will bring sustainable value well into the future.
Economic Development & Inclusion Innovation cannot thrive if there is not a vibrant and efficient ecosystem in order to facilitate its development. The current tide of economic nationalism has also bred a need for technological sovereignty and interoperability in order to be competitive and sustainable, and we see this as an opportunity in an area that has always been considered slow and inefficient. Enabling communities, cities, and nations to leapfrog, is not only well within our capabilities and business model, but a key area of opportunity that we believe is overlooked and underserved. Entrepreneurs and innovators have long been the providers of key infrastructure and progress for nations, and we believe that closing the inequality gap through innovative public/private partnerships is a great legacy to build our community driven business on. 06
Token Holders We want Intrepid Ventures to become an important and significant institution. That takes time, stability, and independence. Because of our emphasis on the long term, we may make decisions and weigh tradeoffs differently than some companies. Accordingly, we want to share with you our fundamental management and decision-making approach so that you, our prospective Token Holders, may confirm that it is consistent with your values.
Long Term Sustainability How long is long term? We expect projects to have some realized benefit or progress within a year or two. You can expect us to be rigorous in our business analysis and research, as well as our professional and instinctual assessments of a project’s viability, and that we will scale these up as fast as we can, while maintaining our core ethos and quality. We build innovations for where the world is going, not where the world is now. We build the future, bring that future to the present common person, and aim for massive scale. We are trying to look forward as far as we can, but with the pragmatic view on creating solutions that people will need, love, and provides measurable value. We see this as the right ambition when trying to create technological discontinuities that have the potential to change industries and society.
Moneyball Moonshots While “Moonshots” are sexy and create big outcomes, they also come with extreme risks, and big failures. The current adage in technology is to aim for these types of innovations, but we believe the contrary, that a better practice is to play “Moneyball”. What this means is to be optimized, efficient, analytical. It’s our ambition to create “moonshot” like outcomes, as it relates to dynamic shifts in markets, but we realize that innovation and company building is a process and not a panacea or silver bullet. We will make bold rather than timid project decisions where we see a sufficient probability of gaining scale, break out velocity and strong network effects. Some of these projects will be successes, others will not, and we will manage these downside risks pragmatically, and either way we will have learned another valu07
able lesson in achieving optimal outcomes. We will share our strategic thought processes with you when we make bold decisions, to the extent competitive pressures allow, so that you may evaluate for yourselves whether we are making rational long-term leadership decisions that are in-line with your values.
Token Holder Value We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the Token holder value we create over the long term. Our focus on high usability, a broad network base, high adoption, and ease of use for all participants. Our decisions have consistently reflected this focus. We first measure ourselves in terms of the metrics most indicative of industry leadership: usability and community growth, the degree to which our community continues to use our tokens to develop next generation businesses, and the strength of our brand. We have invested and will continue to invest aggressively to expand and leverage our community base, brand, and infrastructure as we move to establish enduring networks.
Reporting & Communication As a contributor to our community and projects you will constantly have updates regarding our progress, as well as investment opportunities, as our partnership develops over the long term. We will try to give all Token holders as much value- defining information as can be conveyed in a website such as this, and we will make it as visual and interactive as time allows. We will also have “analog” versions or PDFs of our reporting to you, for those who prefer a more tangible way of understanding business information. We would prefer not to be asked to make predictions, and if asked we will respectfully decline. A management team distracted by a series of short term targets is as pointless as a bodybuilder peering into a mirror, or stepping on a scale every half hour. We also believe candor benefits us as managers, as Warren Buffet proclaims: “The CEO who misleads others in public may eventually mislead himself in private” At Intrepid Ventures you will not find any fancy Silicon Valley “blitz-scale” metrics, or accounting maneuvers.
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We are somewhat traditional in our concept of what makes a good business, especially in the era of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology and we will only report to you the metrics that fall in line with our commitment to token holder value as it pertains to creating long term sustainable platform technology. Despite our policy of candor, we will discuss our activities in crypto-assets only to the extent that it addresses any misunderstandings or to provide more context to our strategic perspective. As mentioned above, we prefer not to be asked to make any predictions regarding crypto-assets, and if asked we will respectfully decline.
Expectations & Limitations Our business environment changes rapidly and needs long term investment in skills and community development. Intrepid Ventures is organized around the ability to attract and leverage the talent of exceptional technologists, designers, social scientists, and business people. We have been very lucky, even in our early days to be able to recruit many innovative, empathetic, hard working rockstars. We hope to recruit many more in the future. We will not hesitate to take action on promising new opportunities, people or communities, wherever they may be. Although we cannot quantify the specific level of risk we will undertake, as the ratio of reward to risk increases, we will launch projects and initiatives that we feel provide disparate amplification to our current projects or platforms. This being said, Zach, JP, and myself cannot promise or guarantee you results. However, the partners have invested substantially in the company, and we are all in. This is our passion, our full time pursuit, our life’s work, and we aim to make this venture the last of our careers.
Building the Future As I said earlier in this letter; Intrepid Ventures is a community driven company. We will optimize for the long term rather than trying produce short cut results. We will support selected “moneyball Moonshot� projects and engage with our community as if it an extension of our core team. We will run the company collaboratively based on our values and objective decision making. We are conscious of our roles in the larger blockchain and cryptocurrency community, and we take this responsibility seriously. 09
We will continue to strive to attract creative, committed new employees, and we will continue to develop and inclusive community that wants to build next generation businesses or simply just learn about the capabilities of blockchain technology. We will live up to our “Build the Future� ethos by staying vigilant on our mission to enable financial inclusion, economic development, and digital prosperity. An we hope you will join us along the way.
Collin Thompson Co founder and Managing Director
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