Delegate Mission Request: Startup Support - Optimism as Venture Studio

[opjulian]

Delegate Mission Request: Optimism as Venture Studio

Application Link

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Delegate Mission Request Summary
This mission aims to provide new business support for projects within the Optimism ecosystem, including projects with approved grants in previous governance seasons. This program will focus on delivering support for major back-office and dev concerns faced by new startups, things such as legal counseling, dev agency work, business formation, tax prep, and so on.

S6 [Intent 22](https://gov.optimism.io/t/season-6-intents-ratification/8104): Intent 3

Proposing Delegate/Citizen:
Jackanorak

Total grant amount
100k OP

Should this Mission be fulfilled by one or multiple applicants:
Multiple

How will this Mission Request help accomplish the above Intent?

Imagine the kind of support a startup incubator provides to startups; startups need this support, and the incubator has the size and resources to offer it. We can offer this kind of model.

Take a highly promising project led by a handful of independent builders. They have some funds but not much—and, more importantly, they lack time and other resources to build out their project beyond what they are individually capable of managing.

There’s a lot they have to take care of or fund: audits, RPC costs, deployment costs, yes, but also business formation; legal preparation; payroll; fundraising. If they are deploying a token, there’s liquidity, treasury management, regulatory concerns, etc. The list goes on, but what unites these areas is that they are essential to new projects and often prohibitively resource-consuming. Audits, for example, are essential and expensive enough that many projects turn to fundraising specifically to afford them.

There are also business concerns that could, under the right circumstances, be addressed as part of this Mission: new venture strategy; business development; hiring; marketing, etc. Our bar is especially high for service providers in this sphere; there are many who claim to offer these services, but few can at the level we’d hope to be able to offer, which is at the top of our industry. It is of course also very difficult for a DAO to oversee this kind of service.

All of this is to say that proposals should consider, in concrete terms: who is the builder we’re targeting with our offer? How would our in-kind support help this kind of builder? What about this service we are offering is important or helpful enough for this builder to come deploy on Optimism or consider Optimism the best place to build? Do we have evidence that many new projects need help with this service? And, finally: are we the demonstrably the best at what we do?

What is required to execute this Mission Request?

Applicants should provide a commitment to providing some high-quality service in exchange for granted OP. These will include but are not limited to:

– Free RPC coverage

– Back office help, e.g., taxes, business formation, legal assistance, banking

– Short-term agency development work

• Plans should provide a well-defined mechanism for compensation: for 50k OP, we will provide X, Y, Z.
  Distribution of these subsidized services to selected project grantees

• Applicants must be understood to be at the top of their respective fields. It is essential that we offer through them the kind of professional support that is time efficient and longitudinally beneficial for us as an ecosystem.

How should governance participants measure impact upon completion of this Mission?

Milestones:

• Number of projects supported
• Number of external parties (e.g., lawyers) engaged

Metrics

• Number of projects successfully deployed and resulting transactions + users from them
• Market value of services provided
• NPS from projects

Impact

• Depends on what service is provided, but in general this should relate to some sort of expected market-based service that has been defrayed, enabling the use
• Number of projects not requiring investor funding

Has anyone other than the proposer contributed to this Mission Request?

No

Which metric will the success of this Mission Request be evaluated against?

The North star metric against which this Mission Request should be evaluated is the total amount of gas fees generated from the grantee’s contracts, because this Mission Request sets out to increase the aggregate demand for blockspace on the Superchain through a larger program. The total gas fees generated from this program act as a healthy indicator of its combined downstream performance. This metric was suggested by the Foundation and approved by the Grants Council.