Lucas Mateu is the co-founder and CEO of Vent Finance, a community crowdfunding platform for blockchain projects. He sat down with Jessica Abo to clarify how Vent works and why people call his company the Kickstarter of crypto.
Jessica Abo: Lucas, tell us about your organization.
Lucas Mateu:
Vent Finance is a multi-chain launchpad and accelerator. It is a platform run on the Web3 space that takes projects and brings them to interested investors. It allows us to take the complexity of constructing tokens and taking them to market and dilute them right into a very, quite simple to know concept and platform to accumulate and buy these tokens. We work with every kind of projects from games, to platforms, crypto tokens, and anything you can think on the market. And we be sure that they’ve the best metrics, the best technology, to have the ability to return to the market.
Your organization feels like it is the Kickstarter of crypto. Is that how you concentrate on it?
Mateu:
That’s the core of what we do. The difference is the involvement that we now have with the businesses. Kickstarter is more of a gateway within the sense that they’ve a panel, they’ve a gateway to pay. And so they process the bank card after which principally send you the funds each time we reach that threshold. That is not what we do. Our platform has a layer of trust. And that level of trust actually comes from the upvotes from the community, from the governance. And what meaning is projects must be referred to us, often through partners or through the community members. After which we actually have to guage whether or not they’ve what it takes to return to the accelerator.
There are two kinds of projects we work with. Either projects that we incubate ourselves and we call them Vent originals or projects that really have already got a very high-level quality. What we’re doing is just connecting them to the resources that they need. But there’s definitely a high level of value-add as an organization or as a project, where a Kickstarter is far more about scale. We have launched around 13 projects to provide you an idea within the last 10 months, whereas a Kickstarter can have launched a whole lot of projects in the identical time-frame.
Why do you’re thinking that there’s all the time this separation between blockchain and the remaining of tech?
Mateu:
When you concentrate on big tech, these are very central corporations which have, I’d say very hierarchical boards and directives. And that is exactly what plenty of people in crypto do not like, and we would like to construct something that does not rely upon anyone like these people. So once we take a look at our product, as a technology, we definitely need to bring the simplicity of any Web2 products like Uber or every other app that you simply would use like Instagram. But we want to leverage the technology and the ownership of this type of gig economy/Web3 space. It’s still the identical technology. We’re still using the identical devices, it isn’t like all of that has modified. What we’re changing is who owns the infrastructure. After which we’re also changing who’s constructing on top of it. What are the foundations? Are there shareholders, does that idea even apply to this space?
And given your expertise, how do you’re thinking that entrepreneurs should make a choice from enterprise capital and crowdfunding?
Mateu:
I do not think one removes the opposite mostly since the racing appetite could be very different. If you happen to ask yourself, would you place, I do not know, $10 towards a novice idea that you simply saw on Kickstarter? Possibly you are like, you recognize what, I believe it’s an incredible idea. I’ll put $10, but when I asked you to place 20% of your savings into an organization which may or may not make it. You would be like, you recognize what, possibly that is not exactly what I’m on the lookout for. But a enterprise capitalist that is doing that professionally and understands how you can evaluate and how you can follow up. And that has insurance and all these other tools that perhaps they’ll take that risk. And so I believe a mixture of each is basically vital.
What has sort of modified with the crypto and Web3 space is bringing together so many individuals and having this digital asset as a tool, a token. It just permits you to really give that sense of ownership or that sense of distributed funding, to an extent that is way beyond what you’ll have the ability to do with the crowdfunding platforms that exist on the market in the normal space. And so for me, it’s the mix of each getting some really good VCs that consider in your idea and that support you long run with high risk. After which as soon as you possibly can, and as soon as you’ve got something tangible you can go and say, ‘Hey, community, that is what I’m constructing.’ Then they understand the complexity of the product. And so they’re like, ‘cool. I need to be a part of this.’ And you possibly can ask for something in return.
