Investing in Towns
Lisa Cuesta and I are proud to announce that Credibly Neutral, our new early-stage venture fund investing in protocols, infrastructure, and crypto SaaS, invested in Towns’ Series A led by a16z with participation from Benchmark and Framework Ventures.
What’s wrong with web2 communities?
*Gestures wildly at everything*
Walled gardens, inconsistent moderation, self-serving business models, API revocations, lack of data and social graph portability, bots, the nightmare that is ad infrastructure, and so much more. How do you even begin to tackle this mess? You have to start from the ground up — core infrastructure.
Towns is a group chat protocol and app designed for online communities to build better hometowns on the internet. Towns allows a community’s members to truly own their town squares — and communicate freely — with a fully decentralized, end-to-end encrypted chat protocol owned by the people.
Towns empowers communities to create programmable, self-governed gathering spaces to communicate. Any group can use Towns to assemble and chat freely in a space designed to their needs — without ever having to worry that some organization will change the rules, profit off their activity, or take away their rights.
Towns is what Discord or Reddit could have been if they were crypto-native.
We already have several attempts at building secure, decentralized communication channels, such as Matrix (which Towns leverages!). The reason many fail to gain traction is because of the UX sacrifices they make at the altar of perfect decentralization. In order to compete with Discord, Reddit, Facebook, and all other web2 community forums, you cannot have lagging UX, no matter how many other novel features you include.
This is why the founding team’s background is so critical. Ben Rubin, the CEO of Here Not There Labs (creator of Towns), previously co-founded Meerkat and Houseparty, reaching hundreds of millions of users. Brian Meek (CTO) was previously general manager of engineering for Skype, and had a user base in the billions. If there’s anyone that can create a crypto-native product with a sufficiently good user experience, it’s them.
But there’s one more interesting bit. Shortly after Meerkat launched, Twitter kneecapped the team by cutting off their API access to the Twitter social graph before acquiring Periscope, a competitor. As Houseparty was getting huge, Facebook copied their product (as they’ve done with Snapchat and many others) and used their wide distribution to overtake it. This team knows personally what happens when centralized platforms change the rules on developers.
This is the first time that web2 platforms will have a competitor that they cannot easily kneecap or copy because it is built fundamentally differently from the ground up in a way that is incompatible with existing tech stacks and revenue models of web2 platforms. I can’t wait til Towns is live.
Towns will onboard early users to their alpha soon and look to launch the full product by end of year. If they execute well, there’s a good chance Towns will be the breakout app that onboards hundreds of millions of users into crypto. We’re incredibly proud to support them. Click here to sign up for their alpha and follow them on Twitter to stay up to date on their progress!
