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Let's Buy the US Constitution

 2 years ago
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Let's Buy the US Constitution

ConstitutionDAO, web3, and America

Nov 15, 2021Comment6

Welcome to the 2,079 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since last Monday! Join 86,008 smart, curious folks by subscribing here:

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Hi friends 👋,

Happy Monday! Last week was a big week around here.

On Monday, Mario and I published a piece on Discord. That afternoon, Discord CEO Jason Citron replied to my tweet with a preview of Discord’s first web3 integration. The replies were fierce — I was getting 15 new notifications per second — and Citron pulled back.

While that was happening, I made my first CNBC appearance to discuss Rivian’s IPO (the company closed the week at a market cap so steep, $110 billion, you’d need a Rivian to climb it).

That night, The Economist published a piece that Chris Dixon and I wrote on web3, and on Wednesday, I announced that I’m joining Chris and team as an advisor to a16z Crytpo. Nothing changes here at Not Boring — I’ll still be in your inbox once or twice every week, and Not Boring Capital is full steam ahead — but I’m excited to learn from the world-class team at a16z and work with them to bring web3 knowledge to a wider audience.

Finally, on Thursday night, I crossed 100k Twitter followers, which is a meaningless accomplishment that still felt good. It means a lot to me that so many of you are willing to give me some of your valuable time.

There’s a good chance it’s all downhill from here, but let’s try for an encore.

First, the first Not Boring Syndicate investment, Composer, launches today 🚀 Learn how to get your alpha back at the bottom of the email.

And one more thing…

Let’s buy the US Constitution together.

Let’s Buy the US Constitution

Yesterday morning, I was in the middle of writing a typical Not Boring Monday essay. This one, which I may still write, was about the idea that while people are waiting for “real use cases” for web3, a set of new web3-native use cases is emerging that might be more important than the “real” ones.

I planned to write about the Olympus DAO forks, the ENS airdrop, NFT fractionalization, appraisal, and lending, and this wild adventure that began on Thursday: ConstitutionDAO.

ConstitutionDAO is what it sounds like: a DAO organized to purchase a copy of the United States Constitution when it goes up for auction at Sotheby’s this Thursday at 6:30pm ET.   

I first heard about ConstitutionDAO on Thursday, when Graham Novak, Austin Cain, and Julian Weisser told me about the plan and I joined the Discord. It was a blast, but I was too busy writing to get more involved. Yesterday morning, when Nicole Ruiz reached out and asked if I wanted to help out the contributors, my first thought was, “I’d love to, but I’m busy writing tomorrow’s newsletter.” 

But like three seconds later, my second thought was, “You’re not turning down the opportunity to contribute to a history-making DAO so you can write about DAOs, right?”

Who was I kidding? As Nic Cage said in National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets, “Those who have the ability to take action have the responsibility to take action.” My mind was made up. In the words of Con Air Nic Cage, “Well, Baby-O, it's not exactly mai-thais and yahtzee out here but... let's do it!”

I scrapped the essay I was writing. Instead, I decided to spend the next 24 hours participating in and writing about ConstitutionDAO

As corny as this paragraph sounds, I couldn’t be happier with that decision. It’s 9:18pm ET on Sunday as I type this. The team just opened up contributions. I just committed my biggest ETH purchase to date. Twitter is buzzing. The Discord is buzzing. There’s a sense of non-partisan American patriotism I haven’t felt in a long time, and a feeling of pride that web3 is making this possible.

It’s fucking cool to see a group of strangers on the internet get so excited to make history together. As contributions opened last night, messages like this kept popping up on the contribution page (they’re still going):

And this one, which came in right after I made that graphic above.

One more… 

Sorry, last one, promise: 

I’m not crying, you’re crying. 

Anyway, this won’t be my most well-written piece ever. I’m writing it in real-time. I’m distracted on Twitter and in the Discord. Whatever I write in here today will be stale by the end of the week. But this is by far the coolest thing happening on the internet this week: 

  • It’s the first time a copy of the US Constitution will go on sale in 33 years 

  • It’s the only remaining privately-owned copy and the proceeds are being donated to a non-profit supporting democracy education.

  • The DAO has over 7,900 members in its Discord server, well over $10 million in soft commitments in two days, and $3 million in committed funding on Juicebox in <12 hours.

  • It’s a bridge between web3 and America that should have existed already.

  • We, the People, are going to buy the Constitution

Plus, I’ve spilled a lot of digital ink explaining why web3 is important and how some it it works, but ConstitutionDAO is an in-progress look at how DAOs work and what’s possible with web3: 

  • A Liquid Super Team of 30 core contributors from leading startups and web3 protocols joined forces 

  • To set up a safe and compliant DAO

  • That let’s anyone with an Ethereum wallet contribute to the purchase of the US Constitution

  • All set up in three days thanks to composability, dedication, and vibes. 

And here’s the best part: I’m not just writing about it, you can get involved. We have until Thursday to raise enough money to make a winning bid for the Constitution

If you’re already deep down the web3 rabbit hole, the mechanics will be familiar, the prize is just bigger and more consequential than you may be used to. 

Even if you’ve avoided web3 until now, there’s a good chance you care about the Constitution. This is your opportunity. Watch the onboarding guide. Set up a Rainbow or MetaMask wallet. Join the Discord. And commit to contribute funds.  

I have no financial incentive to write this post. The core team won’t get any distributions, and they’re not paying me for this. If you want to contribute, you should think about it as purchasing a keepsake as opposed to investing in an asset. At the very least, you’ll have a new fun fact for icebreakers and a new icebreaker for cocktail parties. 

So buckle up. In the lightly edited words of National Treasure Nic Cage: 

[We’re] going to [learn about] the [ConstitutionDAO]:

  • Founding Story. Seven days to buy a 234-year-old document.

  • An American Idea. web3 and America are more similar than they appreciate. 

  • How to Build a DAO in Three Days. What it takes to build a DAO.

  • Let’s Buy the Constitution. A guide to buying the Constitution of the USA.  

  • Historical Context. The historical sale of a historical document.

This is an inside, real-time look at how to form a DAO, raise $20 million from thousands of people, and win an auction to win the US Constitution. We may be participating in history. Our story begins either in 1787... or last Thursday. 

Founding Story 

Eleven score and fourteen years ago, We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, did ordain and establish a Constitution for the United States of America.

In Philadelphia in September 1787, 500 copies of the final text of the US Constitution were printed “for submission to the Continental Congress and for the use of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention.” 

Sotheby’s 

Today, only 13 or 11 copies survive, depending on whether you trust Sotheby's website or what its senior specialist for books and manuscripts, Selby Kiffer, told NPR. All but one (or two, again depending on who you listen to) of the copies are owned by institutions, like the government’s National Archives Museum. The one that is going up for auction is owned by Dorothy Goldman. 

In 1988, Howard Goldman bought this copy of the Constitution from Sotheby’s for $165,000 to serve as the cornerstone of his collection of historical American books and manuscripts. When he passed away in 1997, his wife became the custodian of the document. It was in good hands. Dorothy, who serves on the Board of Trustees of the Guggenheim Foundation, is a staunch supporter of arts, culture, and democracy. The proceeds from the auction will go to her foundation, the Dorothy Tapper Goldman Foundation, a non-profit focused on democracy education. 

Kiffer described who he thinks the next owner will be to NPR: 

I think it will be someone who has a sense of the significance of the document - not simply wanting to own it for its own sake but to preserve it. I think this could appeal to anyone who has that collecting gene and someone in particular who has a certain feeling of patriotism.

What Kiffer couldn’t have anticipated when he went on NPR in September is that the someone to whom he referred might be a someones. And in her wildest dreams, Goldman couldn’t have imagined that the sale of her copy of the Constitution would be a lesson in democracy itself. 

Last Thursday, as in four days ago, I got an email from Graham Novak, who I’d met briefly last year. After a quick catch-up-how-you doing paragraph, Graham got to the point: 

We’re coordinating a DAO to buy the US Constitution from Sotheby's, which goes on auction in one week. Call is at 8pm ET tonight. Any interest in joining? 

Eight minutes later, I got a DM from Austin Cain

Three hours later, On Deck’s Julian Weisser, who’d received similar messages, DM’ed me. He was in: 

This movement began with a chance discovery and spread through belief. Earlier that day, after Graham discovered the Sotheby’s auction, a handful of group chats lit up, each putting together plans to buy the US Constitution. Instead of battling each other, they decided to join forces. DMs zipped. Julian tweeted

I couldn’t make the Zoom, but that night, they pulled a strong core team together, established rough roles and responsibilities, launched @constitutionDAO on Twitter, spun up the Discord (which you should join), and hatched a plan.  

The mission: form a more perfect DAO and raise over $20 million in 7 days, start to finish, to buy the Constitution of the United States of America. 

That impossible timeline lit a fire. The core team got to building, and the community grew. When Jack Raines published We the Peopl3 on Saturday, the Discord server had grown to 2,611 members and the @ConstitutionDAO Twitter profile had picked up 2,600 followers, all in 36 hours. 

By Saturday night, Julian sent an announcement to the Discord with the progress that the group had made. 

ConstitutionDAO Discord

Among other updates: 

  1. Syndicate DAO was working on legal formation. 

  2. Juicebox Protocol was spinning up the contract to fractionalize ownership. 

  3. The core team had established a direct line of communication with Sotheby’s and with museums like the Smithsonian and New York Public Library who might be willing to display the Constitution.

  4. FTX tweeted that it was standing by to help facilitate the purchase.

Unannounced was the fact that, through a simple Google Form that had been up for less than a day, the still-unformed DAO had garnered over $10 million in soft commitments

The energy was palpable. This was an idea whose time had come. 

An American Idea 

Nothing else in the world… not all the armies... is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.

-- Victor Hugo, The Future of Man 

DAOs are not a new idea. Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder and unwitting figurehead, contemplated Decentralized Autonomous Organizations in the original Ethereum Whitepaper in 2013. The DAO, a doomed decentralized venture fund, launched and folded in 2016. DAOs have been on fire this year within the web3 community; becoming a DAO is the de facto long-term fate of any sufficiently serious protocol. 

(Pause: don’t know what a DAO is? I wrote about it here and Mario & Friends did here.)

In October, a16z led a $10 million round in the popular DAO Friends with Benefits. A couple weeks ago, PleasrDAO bought a 1/1 Wu-Tang album for $4 million. Last week, the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) became a DAO and airdropped $2 billion worth of ENS tokens on anyone who’d bought a .eth domain over the past few years. Many people received $10s of thousands just for being an early adopter. 

But despite the early bright spots, most people have never heard of a DAO or bought into web3 yet -- it’s still very early. There’s still a struggle going on between web3’s fans and its skeptics, including many members of the US government. That’s not how it should be. America should be the home of web3, as @punk6529 eloquently laid out here: 

What’s more American than permissionlessly pulling together We the People to buy one of our nation’s foundational documents and own it together?

Buying the Constitution as a group is the fastest way to reset the conversation, welcome more people into web3, and begin building a path forward. It’s the perfect medium for the message.

That’s part of the beauty of ConstitutionDAO: there are two layers, memes and meaning

ConstitutionDAO has spread from a handful of people on Thursday to over 7,900 now on the back of memes, specifically Nicholas Cage memes. 

Nic Cage, of course, starred in National Treasure, in which he stole the Declaration of Independence. Close enough. Memes are the quickest way for information to spread online, and this one has taken flight more quickly than Nic in Con Air. We’ll get back to the memes. 

Right now, we’re talking about meaning. 

The Constitution is the key foundational document on which the United States was founded.  It’s one whose importance every American, those born here and those who chose to come here, as well as hundreds of millions of democracy-loving non-Americans around the world, appreciates. Web3 is giving thousands of people the tools and opportunity to come together to own a piece of this historic document and add to its story by creating a new relationship with it through collective ownership. 

Or, as Morning Brew’s Alex Lieberman put it in a DM: 

Plus, this idea is big, like a good American idea should be. If we win the auction at the ~$20 million price Sotheby’s anticipates, this will likely be the largest crowdfunding for a physical item in history and the largest purchase ever of a physical item on-chain. 

Already, in the idea’s infancy, press inquiries are overwhelming the core ConstitutionDAO team. When we win this thing, it’s going to be a national story that hits just in time for Thanksgiving. If your aunts and uncles and parents were asking about crypto at Thanksgiving 2017, they’ll be asking about that DAO that bought the Constitution this year, starting, of course, with what the hell is a DAO?

How to Build a DAO in Three Days

A DAO is the worst form of governance, except for all of the others that have been tried.

 -- Winston Churchill if he were alive today, probably.

Until you experience one, a DAO is an abstract concept. I’ll try to explain it here, but again, you should really join the Discord and contribute to buying the Constitution, even just a little bit, to get the full flavor for yourself. 

When the Constitutional conversation started on Thursday, it came with built-in urgency: the auction was just seven days away. (See, this really is like a Nic Cage movie...)

When we left our heroes in the Founding Story section, they had gotten off the ground and started making real progress. Now, I want to break down what they needed to do. 

Launching and sustaining a successful DAO, like launching a company, requires doing a bunch of things well, all at once, while everything is moving and growing and breaking around you. We’ll call that set of things, both tangible and intangible, the DAO Stack. In this case, that has a bunch of components: 

  • Ambitious Goal. Buy the Constitution in seven days ✅

  • Narrative With Multiple Layers. Why it’s important that we buy the Constitution as a group with web3 technology.

  • Core Group of Builders. Every DAO has a core team, at least in the beginning until it’s fully decentralized, doing all of the things a normal company would need. 

  • Iconography and Memes. The group needs to have its memes, its acronyms, and its emergent references. 

  • Comms Channels. Discord and Twitter DMs. 

  • Legal Structure. This has to be buttoned up and done right. 

  • Tech Stack. Particularly with web3, when transactions are irreversible, it’s important to choose the right pieces of the tech stack upfront. 

  • Tokenomics, Treasury, and Governance. Who owns what and what does that ownership let them do? 

  • Fundraising and Bidding Strategy. How to raise more than $20M in 7 days, and how to ensure that we win the auction. 

  • Infrastructure. There are unsexy things here, like setting up banking relationships, building out an org structure, writing answers to FAQs, and setting rules.

  • Partnerships. Getting the right external partners lined up and comfortable working with a DAO is crucial. In this case, Sotheby’s and a museum are key. 

Since ConstitutionDAO only has seven days, focus is of the utmost importance. It’s like a startup on steroids: limited resources, limited time. So it’s focusing everything it has for now on two main goals: 

  • Purchasing. Getting enough money in the wallets to be able to win the bid. 

  • Finding a Home. ConstitutionDAO doesn’t know how to store valuable historical artifacts, so it needs a partner, like a museum or library, to display the Constitution. 

For now, we’ll focus on areas that impact those two goals. 

Core Group of Builders 

The project’s core contributors don’t want the individual glory, so I won’t list them out, but I will say this: ConstitutionDAO is the best confirmation of what I wrote in The Cooperation Economy that I’ve seen yet. This is a Liquid Super Team of people who would be almost impossible for any company to hire full-time -- many are founders themselves -- but who are taking the time to build on the side because this is something they’re passionate about doing. 

This is literally what the smartest people are doing on the weekend.

Iconography and Memes 

A DAO needs to walk a delicate line between building up a shared language that the in-group appreciates and understands while remaining welcoming to new members. Since ConstitutionDAO needs to raise enough money to buy the Constitution in seven days, memes are crucial to spreading the message far and wide and to creating cohesion. 

In this case, there were three core pieces. 

Nicholas Cage. We discussed this briefly, but I want to express just how many Nic Cage memes there are flying around. Search ConstitutionDAO on Twitter and scroll for a bit, or join the memes channel in the Discord to get a flavor. Of course, Nic can be remixed with other memes, like the popular midwit meme:

lieu in Discord

Nic Cage has become the face of this faceless movement. No Nic Cage memes, no Constitution.

(📜,📜). A couple of months ago, (3,3) started popping up across Twitter and Discord, a symbol that the bearer was in or supported the Olympus DAO, which is trying to build a crypto-backed reserve currency. Since then, the (x,x) meme has been remixed by offshoots of Olympus, like Klima (🌳,🌳) and Wonderland (🎩,🎩), and by projects that have nothing to do with Olympus’ model, like ConstitutionDAO (📜,📜). Putting the (📜,📜) in your Twitter name tells other people that you’re part of this movement. It’s permissionless, anyone can do it. You can go do it right now (hint hint). 

wagbtc. A spin-off of the popular wagmi, which stands for “we’re all gonna make it,” wagbtc means “we’re all gonna buy the Constitution.” It’s a short, 6-letter rallying cry. 

These memes, acronyms, and symbols create cohesiveness within the group, a bridge to other communities, and a way for members to identify themselves to each other across the internet and reinforce each others’ enthusiasm. 

Legal Structure 

A DAO isn’t just a loose collection of strangers. It’s a legal entity, and like a company, it can get in trouble if it’s not set up the right way. In this case, Syndicate co-founder Will Papper, whose company establishes DAOs every day, figured out and implemented the right legal structure. 

Tech Stack

In a couple of days, the core team needed to build a website from scratch and pick a partner to run the crowdfunding. One team focused on the front-end website, while another evaluated partners. On the smart contract side, they needed a contract that could take in funds, issue tokens, allow funds to be used in an off-chain auction, and easily handle refunds and overflow in the case of a loss or in case the DAO raised more money than it needed. 

They ended up going with Juicebox, which is also used by SharkDAO, a DAO established to buy Nouns NFTs. 

The team was quick to point out that they chose Juicebox because it was the best for their specific needs, including: 

  • Refunds. If we (somehow) don’t win, there needs to be an easy way to get money back to people without manually sending the ETH. Juicebox has a built-in mechanism to handle that scenario. 

  • Bidding Off-Chain. Juicebox can be used to pool funds that can be used in an off-chain auction, like Sotheby’s. 

  • Overflow. If we raise more than we need, Juicebox can allocate tokens on a pro rata basis and return any remaining funds to people. 

  • Low gas. Juicebox is optimized for low gas fees. I only paid $43 for my commitment, which sounds like a lot but is very reasonable compared to most other products. 

  • Speed. The Juicebox team was willing to move quickly, roll-up their sleeves, and work all weekend.

  • Fee Waive. Juicebox proactively passed a resolution to waive their 2.5% fee before reaching out to ConstitutionDAO. No fees = more money to buy the US Constitution. 

The result is that in three days, the team built a product that handled a swell of thousands of commitments worth over $3 million in the first few hours post-launch. So far, so good. 

Partnerships  

Early on, the team engaged Sotheby’s to make sure they knew our bid was coming and that they were prepared to handle it. Yesterday morning, Alice Ma sent a note in the announcements channel saying that not only was Sotheby’s cool with us, they were excited!

Constitution DAO Discord

She also laid out key points, like whether a museum would bid on our behalf (probably not), whether Sotheby’s would accept an ETH balance as proof of funds (they will!), and whether Sotheby’s can hold the Constitution after the auction while we find it a home (they can for 30 days). 

Finding that home is another important piece of the partnerships puzzle. The group is currently in talk with top museums and libraries who would provide good homes for our Constitution. There are two requirements: 

  1. That the Constitution is displayed somewhere that it’s ideally free for the public to visit.

  2. That they’re willing to include a link to ConstitutionDAO’s website on a placard so that people who visit the Constitution can learn about web3, the story behind the projects, and have a chance to buy tokens in the DAO and own the document themselves. 

That’s about a quarter of the work that’s gone into making this happen. There are many people I haven’t listed who have made invaluable contributions, a thriving community that needs to be managed, and many, many more moving pieces. And again, all of this in three days

It’s important to acknowledge that there are trade-offs with the DAO structure. Distributed ownership and governance are valuable for many reasons, but it’s also harder to coordinate without a clear leader. Yesterday afternoon, the core team had a ~2 hour long call, most of which was spent figuring out organizational items, like who would be in which working group and who could make which decisions. Two hours once is a hell of a lot less time than most organizations raising $20M+ would spend on org design, but it’s still a challenge. 

We’re just getting started. Raising the money to buy the Constitution and building out all of the infrastructure required to support the purchase is a huge challenge, but it’s the first step. When we win, the DAO will need to shift its focus to the next set of priorities, ones that might be familiar to the Founding Fathers: how to govern once you’ve won. Or as George Washington told Alexander Hamilton… 

That said, this has been an incredibly well-organized experience and a shining testament to what DAOs can do when they work together thoughtfully. I continue to be blown away. 

So how can you get involved? 

Let’s Buy the Constitution

Joining ConstitutionDAO is as simple as committing funds and joining the Discord to stay up to date. Before we go on, though, I need to make a disclaimer: 

THIS IS NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE. IF YOU WANT TO PARTICIPATE, DON’T COMMIT ANY MONEY YOU’RE NOT WILLING TO LOSE AND TREAT THIS AS IF YOU’RE PURCHASING A PIECE OF THE CONSTITUTION AND THAT YOU MAY NEVER BE ABLE TO GET YOUR MONEY BACK.

OK, sorry for yelling. We’re back. So how do you get involved? 

If you’re new to web3, welcome! This is a perfect excuse to set up your wallet and start playing around. Luckily, Jonah Erlich created a video on how to contribute, from getting your first ETH to making your contribution, here:

Watch the Guide

Once you have some ETH and a wallet, the process is simple. 

Go to the ConstitutionDAO website and click Send Money.

That will take you to Juicebox, where you can connect your wallet by clicking connect, and then enter the amount of ETH (you can do less than 1) and click Contribute.

You’ll get this message: 

Scary, but it’s OK. There are no guarantees, but the ConstitutionDAO team has triple-checked everything and Juicebox has handled thousands of ETH. You can click “I understand.”

You’ll then get this popup with details, and a chance to add a message. Add a message! 

Reading those messages, which I shared up top, has been one of the coolest parts of this experience. Let ConstitutionDAO know that you’re a part of the Not Boring family. (Again, I get nothing for that, I just want to see us turn out!) 

Then, you’ll get a pop up from your wallet telling you how much gas you’ll pay -- it should be between $20-60, and if it’s higher, try again in a little bit. Then click Confirm and wait a few minutes and the transaction should go through. 

Once it does, below the graph, you’ll be able to see how many $PEOPLE tokens you have access to and will be given the chance to redeem. 

You can redeem now or after we’ve won the auction. I’m choosing to wait just in case, because you’ll have to pay a little gas again to claim. These tokens represent your governance in the DAO. 

While nothing has been established yet -- the priorities are winning the bid and finding a safe home -- tokens in other DAOs are used to facilitate governance (i.e. you get to vote on certain decisions proportionate to the amount of tokens you hold) and are tradeable on exchanges (not Coinbase, for a while at least, but DEXes like Uniswap and SushiSwap). More details will follow in the Discord when we win the auction. 

From there, you’re in. Join the Discord, and follow along starting on Thursday night at 6pm ET to watch as we try to make history. 

If we win, you can claim your $PEOPLE and add them to your wallet. If we have more funds than we need, you’ll get a pro rata amount based on your commitment, and the remaining unused ETH will be returned to your wallet (or the DAO will keep the funds in a Treasury and use it to buy more historical artifacts for the DAO). If we lose, the full amount (minus gas fees) will be returned to your wallet. 

But we’re not going to lose. wagtbtc. 

Historical Context 

When Beeple sold his Everydays NFT at Christie’s for $69 million in March, it lit the NFT world on fire and kicked off the explosion in the growth of NFTs that we’re still experiencing today. 

I think that if we win the Constitution, if We the People can come together and outbid institutions and the wealthiest collectors that normally win these things, it will set off a similar chain reaction in DAOs. The world will be watching, and this auction will be proof that DAOs can come together, responsibly and passionately, to collectively own everything from historical artifacts to art to real estate to physical collectibles. Hell, DAOs might start acquiring and decentralizing entire companies. (Maybe my dream of forming a DAO to buy Twitter will come true.)

As importantly, this will be a signal to the general public and to the government that web3 can be a force for good. Who’s going to argue with a group of people coming together to purchase the Constitution, and then giving it back to the people by putting it on display for free? This is democracy in code.

I genuinely believe that this could be one of those moments that the world looks back on in a decade as a turning point in web3, a moment when the world woke up to the fact that it was about a whole lot more than speculation or Bitcoin. Web3 isn’t a panacea, but its primitives, like NFTs, tokens, and DAOs, give us new ways of collaborating and distributing ownership. It lets us pool resources to do more together. And it makes the internet a more fun place to be. 

So now, like me, you have a decision: watch from the sidelines or get involved. 

I say we buy the Constitution of the United States of America. 🇺🇸

Let's Buy the Constitution

Composer Launches Today!

Last summer, we did our first syndicate deal ever for Composer, started by my good friend and former colleague, Ben Rollert. I wrote up a memo, and 38 brave Not Boring souls invested in the company’s pre-seed. Earlier this year, First Round led the company’s seed round, and today, Composer is launching! They’re live on ProductHunt right now (check it out and show them some love!) and you can go sign up and start trading today. 

Composer is an automated trading platform that allows you to build a portfolio of hedge fund-like strategies. Here’s how it works. 

Most of us aren’t professional traders, so we pick stocks that we like, maybe sell if things change or we need the money, and try futilely to time the market. If you picked a basket of companies that I’ve written about since launching Not Boring, you’d have underperformed the Nasdaq over the past year: 

But with Composer, you can pick stocks you like, build automated strategies around them, and let the robots do all of the trading. For example, if you took the companies I’ve written about and invested in the one with the best 5-day performance each month, you’d have outperformed the market dramatically. 

Each strategy is called a Symphony, and you can follow your favorite investor’s, pick from Composer’s hand-made set, or build and implement your own as easily as you’d buy a stock. You can run back-tests, paper trade them to see how they perform live, and connect your brokerage to put real money behind your Symphonies. See for yourself, go check out the Not Boring Symphony.

If you’re an investor but not a trader, like me, you’re probably missing out on that sweet, sweet alpha. Go get your alpha back. Sign up for Composer today: 

Get Your Alpha Back

How did you like this week’s Not Boring? Your feedback helps me make this great.

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Thanks for reading and see you on Thursday,

Packy


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Joyk means Joy of geeK