Summary of 3rd Live AMA by Cofound.it on 24th Aug 2017

Recently, we had our 3rd Live AMA with Jan Isakovic (Cofound.it CEO). I wrote a summary of their discussion in a Q&A format. Do note that I have rephrased the Q&A in my own words. If you feel there is a mistake or something is unclear just let me know. Also, If you would like to check out the original AMA video (Highly Recommended!) check out this link: 

Q. To begin with, what has changed since the last AMA?

A. Some key points:

• We have grown a lot in terms of CFI as a company since the last AMA. Previously we had 5 full-time CFI employees when our crowdsale ended on Jun 7th. We’re nearing 30 as of today!
• We have also improved our crowdsale process. We have identified what steps to take and when to modify them based on activities in say crypto world or specific project
• Very demanding summer for us but also very fruitful!

Q. What do you have to say regarding cofound.it competition?

A. The VCs say — 

“If you don’t have any competition you don’t have any market yet.”

What it means is that having competition in this space means that there is a genuine problem waiting to be solved. Competition is only validating the space. What we are trying to do is beyond just a few programmers making a cool website that mimics what we are doing. That is the easy part. It will be very hard to replicate what we are trying to do as its much more than that. You have to help projects on many facets to make sure they succeed.Earlier, the VCs had two roles — 

1. They had a large amount of money to invest in projects. 
2. They provided expertise and connections to people who matter to the projects.

With blockchain this has been broken down into two separate entities. Large pool of money now comes from investors like you. While the expertise and connections are provided by people like us who help them raise money by connecting the CFI community, expertise CFI has etc.Also, the investors become the early adopters and evangelist for the project helping them by giving early feedbacks, spreading awareness about them etc.For example, the latest structure of the Priority Pass was built based on all the various feedbacks we got from the community. The community gave a feedback of taking care of both small and large investors. We heard that loud and clear and incorporated that into the new structure of our Priority Pass (Check this link for more info).In this new world, A VC will slowly understand and try to adapt to this new model of crowd funding. Slowly over time, some will come up with their own CFI like company and give us competition. But we will be ahead of them by the time they come into this field. And we are taking this seriously, hence working harder/faster to have the right network effect and rule this space!

Q. How will we prevent Pump & Dump of the CFI tokens post a crowdsale is over?

A. We’ll keep introducing new projects for you to be always looking forward to participating in new crowd sales. 

On that note, I’m extremely pleased to announce an amazing project. We started working with them a couple of months ago. That project is Etherisc — It is revolutionising the world of insurance by putting it on a blockchain. 

They have won the Blockchain Oscar award. They presented their first demo last year at DevCon for insurance of flight tickets. Please check go check them out!

Q. What would be the short roadmap for end of this year, after the 4 crowd sales in sept?

A. We still plan to launch crowd sourced evaluation by end of this year (Dec’17/Jan’18). We are using way more resources in implementing the PP functionality as it was very well received. It will allow everybody to evaluate the projects. In return we will reward good evaluations in CFI tokens that we’ll buy from the open market.

Q. What is the cofound.it company culture like?

A. We originally started with a blank slate. Over a period of time we have developed a couple of guiding principles so far:

• Transparency — We strive to be transparent with the projects we work with and with the community.
• Everything is changing and we should adapt as well — For example, if we give X advice to a project in June, it does not mean that same advice will work for them in Sept. We re-evaluate our opinions, strategies etc constantly.
• Efforts don’t matter, results matter — If you get the job you are supposed to get done in 5 mins, great! You go have fun, we don’t care. We won’t question your efforts but ask our team members to deliver high quality results.
• To keep walking forward — We are working on a shifting foundation beneath us. Many things can go wrong in the future and we have to be prepared for such events and keep marching onwards.

Q. Can you talk about the management fees and incomes of CFI?

A. There are no direct relations between the tokens that CFI gets from the projects and holding of the CFI tokens. Say, you hold 5K CFI tokens, and CFI receives 5% of the project tokens. Based on these numbers you’ll get like 3–5 USD which is not worth the investment. Instead CFI returns value indirectly by selling the tokens we get from the projects as a fee and use that fund for hiring, marketing activity etc. This will result in usage of the cofound.it platforms more, which will result in high demand of the CFI tokens. Over time it’’ll result in a much higher degree of return.

Q. Does CFI retain stakes in the company that it brings to the market?

A. Short answer — No, cofound.it is not a fund management company.Long answer — Let’s say we did. And in the interest of transparency, we’ll share what tokens we are holding and what we are selling. It’ll result in a problem where every investor will come up with a better idea of which ones to sell/hold (A problem ICONOMI faces today with their performance fund).If you look at our business plan we do say that we sell all our tokens at the crowdsale price. But we are looking at how to come up with an optimised strategy. We will be employing somebody to manage these funds better. Our core value proposition is not to manage these funds better but to add value to our platform.

Q. How you are managing security internally and the projects you are supporting?

A. Briefly, In terms of our internal systems, my instructions to our OPS and CTO is to be as paranoid as you can be. Also, we want to absolutely make sure everyone participating in our crowdsale understands different threats during the crowdsale. Please check out this article.That is also a reason why we are shutting down our public slack on Monday, 28th Aug 2017. We are moving our public chat to telegram. However our PP slack will still be operational (as it is invite-only).

Q. How can community help cofound.it?

A. Keep sharing your excellent feedbacks! It’s you the community who are co-founding these amazing projects together! So in a nutshell, keep having these healthy amazing discussion with us and we’ll incorporate those feedbacks and make this a world class platform!

Q. Do you need Priority Pass (PP) to invest in upcoming ICOs?

A. For public crowdsale, you don’t need PP. However, for pre-sale which starts before the public crowdsale, you do need PP. You will need 5K CFI or more, to qualify as a Priority Pass Member!

1. Buy at least 5K CFI from exchanges (Bittrex, Liqui) 
2. Transfer the CFI tokens from the exchange into your personal wallet (Examples of Ethereum wallet that supports ERC-20 tokens are MyEtherWallet, Parity, MetaMask, Mist) 
3. Create an account at https://priority.cofound.it/ and copy-paste your personal wallet address in the blanks shown. 
4. Our system will use Etherscan to check for CFI token balance. A green tick with pop-up box will appear when it is successful. 
5. Warm welcome to the Priority Pass community, do join us at our Priority Pass Slack!

Q. Are there any other benefits for Priority Pass Holders?

A. As of today, there are no other benefits for the current Priority Pass benefit. Easy access to priority pass crowd sales is something we could do quickly. For other features like — Talk to the team directly, get access to news beforehand etc will take some time for us to implement it correctly. But I assure you I want to make the priority pass holders happy. Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you :)PS: If you have any feedback/suggestions/comments/criticism you may have about Priority Pass, please feel to comment Jan (@jan) on PP slack.

Q. What if I sell my tokens after the snapshot? Would I still be able to send?

A. Yes, that loophole will work for now! However, we are working on a bonus system based on how long you are holding the CFI tokens. This bonus will be applied retroactively. So yes you could do it, but I would not recommend it!

Q. Will CFI provide certification of approval for projects to use “Priority Pass” for their crowdsale but not go through the incubator process because they have their own?

A. Yes! Such projects will be called “Priority Pass Only” projects. This is still under development. To know more check out this article by Jan.

Q. After the SEC ruling came out, how is CFI dealing with projects from the USA in general?

A. We have started working with a securities expert who has experience in this field for over 20yrs. He has joined CFI as an advisor and he’ll be also working with the projects in various stages. In the initial stage to fine tune the token to make sure it doesn’t fall under securities legislation. Also, he’ll prepare a legal opinion for the projects to share with the exchanges to prove that these tokens are utility tokens.

Q. Are investors in the USA allowed to invest in your projects?

A. Once we’ll have a setup in place which clearly says some projects are not a security we’ll not impose any restrictions on such projects. Though, some projects may actually fall under security token, for those we’ll have to restrict.

Q. When you add KYC process, will you allow US residents to stay on the platform?

A. In short — Yes!Long answer — We need to understand first why is KYC required? Once projects raise money and try to deposit this large amount of money into their bank accounts, banks ask them about the source of such a large amount of money. This is done for legal purposes. If there is no KYC process, they cannot prove the source of the money and the bank will simply reject them.KYC process will add compliance for the projects to be able to deposit these funds in a legal and appropriate manner. So this is the reason KYC process is coming.Since we’ll have legal opinions on which tokens are utility tokens, we will have no issues in US investors investing in those projects. So yes, we’ll have US investors part of our platform.

Q. Will you provide dividends?

A. No. As soon as you provide dividends you are categorised as a security token.

Q. Will future projects be using CFI tokens for crowdsale?

A. No, we will not be using CFIs to fund the crowdsale. Reasons:

• It complicates the smart contract.
• It’ll cause extreme volatility of the CFI tokens which is not what we want.

Hence, for crowdsale projects on ethereum we are accepting Ethereum only!

Q. Will you accept projects based on other platforms like IOTA, Neo etc?

A. Yes, we are agnostic of platforms. Currently, Ethereum is mature enough for holding crowd sales. We would be happy to accept projects who want to host their crowdsale on other platforms.

Q. How are we coordinating with the projects for their crowd sales? What we do for them, what we don’t do for them?

A. We are not just advisors to our projects. We actually sit down and walk through them the whole process. However, we cannot help them in something that is core to their project. We do help them with blockchain related issues, contract programming, token mechanisms etcFor example, Earlier we had underestimated the effort required for projects to communicate well — blog posts, social media, crafting the message etc. We have setup a project communications team that are totally focused on that specifically. We hope to make that team an in-house agency for our projects so that they can focus solely on problems core to their own project.We help projects with writing blog posts, press releases, business plans etc. We also bring business expertise, share recommendations on how to tokenize their business model etc

Q. Do projects who approach you for crowdsales have to developed token legal models in advance?

A. No! What you should have is something tangible developed (beyond just a white paper i.e.) Either a prototype, existing service ready to be tokenized, interesting partnership etc. The team should have some idea of how they’ll tokenise their product as well. And we’ll help them with developing the legality around their models as this comes much later. We don’t accept projects who have only a white paper to show case as it’s much easier to do that.

Q. Can you start sharing name of the projects you have rejected?

A. There are two reasons why a project is rejected:

• A project does not pass our basic criteria— Has a working prototype, has a proven team, been working on the idea for a while etc.
• If we can’t add value to a project — Our advisors and expertise may not work our for the project. Maybe the synergy between the two teams is not there, the trust factor is missing etc.

Hence, naming such companies publicly will not be correct as there can be many reasons why a project was rejected. Rejecting a project does not necessarily mean that it is not good enough.

Q. How long is your evaluation process?

A. It’s typically a couple of weeks. We have a few calls and try to understand the background of the team. We reserve the rights to stop working with a project even after we have accepted them for a number of reasons. For example, recently a project we were working with, had a massive change which made them unfit to work with. So in future, it could happen that we announced that we are working with a project but discontinue later. It Doesn’t mean it’s not a good project anymore but something is a misfit and best to part ways.

Q. Are you looking to start cofound.it meetups so that different people can potentially come up with ideas and present to them to a local leader?

A. Excellent idea! Please get in touch with David Sabo (Head of global hubs at CFI). Email him for any such ideas at [email protected]

Q. Can we get into multiple ICOs via one single transaction?

A. No, as a transaction is the basis for issuance of the tokens.

Q. Why was there a bump in market cap of CFI in the coinmarketcap website?

A. Recently there was a bump in CFI market cap and many people got confused why is that. It is because earlier coinmarketcap was not considering all the CFI tokens supply. In the beginning, they were only considering tokens that were part of the crowdsale but not other tokens (Which went to ICONOMI and were used to purchase Cashila). Now it is correct.

Q. More exchanges coming soon?

A. Recently exchanges have become stricter in terms of their criteria with the recent SEC announcement. As most of the large exchanges are based in the US they are being more careful now. So it’s taking time. Having said that we are working with a couple of partnerships that are all aimed at providing greater liquidity to CFI tokens. If all goes well, you should hear some news about this sometime in September.

Q. Are there any Koreans exchanges on the radar?

A. If you have any connections with people inside exchanges, please reach out to us! And we’ll do our best to get CFI listed on these exchanges.

Q. Are you thinking about using X8 tokens (which is a stable currency) instead of Ether?

A. Yes, it is a great idea! But they are not ready yet. You can ask the X8 team directly for the roadmap.

Q. Are you guys looking for new offices already?

A. A month ago our offices were too big. Now they are too small! So yes, we are looking for bigger, better offices. You can check out our Instagram to follow our quest of finding a new office space and other daily activities we have 🙂. For example, we have our brand new cofound.it Tshirts! 😃

Let them know your thoughts!

For More info check out our Official Cofound.it website

Note: This is a community post by firesofmay