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@VannaCharmer There is a funny tension at echo between (1) wanting to expand access as much as is legally possible and (2) wanting to deliver founders the best quality investors, avoiding the intellectual midgets where possible. These motivations obviously run contrary to each other. I think community-based investing can be very powerful, and think it has been great for eg. MegaETH who had a real inflection point in their supporter base IMO. But it requires founders making an active effort to do mgmt and comms work for this community group. And the reality is that if you raise from community, you get a handful of people who flip out and cry about everything, and fud in public. They demand A, B and C. I guess we have all seen the “when marketing? when exchange?” discord bobbleheads. So community fundraising can also be damaging if you are not able to properly manage expectations. Investors are part of a marketplace, and projects will go back to VCs 100% of the time if the choice is between VCs who just leave you alone and let you take your best shot vs. a few hundred people that greatly demand your time and attention on low importance things and will attack you publicly if you do not cave to their demands. Being a good investor is hard on two fronts. (1) picking the right investments is very hard. (2) supporting them even when their interests diverge from your own is very hard. But that’s what you sign up for, and community investors are by far the worst at (2), so I can see why projects may consider this model less in the future - a classic story of the few ruining it for the many. Not sure how echo should handle this from a product POV tbh, because the product is less useful to new investors if we prioritise giving access to the “best investors” who will actually support projects unwaveringly.
Library as of 2026-10-22