2023 roadmap early preview- SuperModular Incubation Program (SIPS) ☕️

General
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SIPS is the SuperModular Incubation Program.

(Important disclaimer: this is an early preview and could be subject to change until finalized)

Goals

We aim to continue to discover, facilitate or deploy impactful solutions for cutting edge communities in the spirit of prior successes like Gitcoin and KERNEL .

By doing so, we serve our purpose – to cultivate a more regenerative digital frontier.

The SuperModule Incubation Program (“SIP”) supports this purpose by cultivating new regenerative web3 projects - meaning projects that trend toward self-sustenance and positive-sum outcomes. The goal of the SIP is to build a well-oiled market opportunity evaluation & capital allocation machine that lucidly upregulates high ROI market opportunities & downregulates low ROI market opportunities… Over time, the SIP will produce a supermodular ecosystem of massively valuable ventures (both to investors + to humanity). Supermodularity refers to a pluralistic state where projects are incented to build increasingly more diverse and positive-sum outcomes for the ecosystem they serve.

How do we define ROI?

Return

  1. Find new venture scale opportunities.
  2. Build the public good of the ecosystem.
    1. (and avoid public bad)

on Investment

  1. Money, Time, Attention, Social Capital, or other Resources

How will we know if the SIP is successful?

You know it when you see it. What will it look like?

  1. We find new venture scale opportunities.
  2. We find new public goods that attract user interest.

Signs of a successful supermodule:

  1. Investment interest
  2. User interest
  3. Glowing testimonials & Increased Social Capital
  4. Strategic complements with other supermodules
  5. Cultivates a more regenerative digital frontier
  6. path to sustainability/independence

Where are we now? Where do we want to be?

We are in a search space in which we are trying to find the maximum of f(x) = public good + venture return.

We have found a local maxima (Gitcoin), and are now searching for a global maxima (a valuable portfolio of supermodular regen web3 ventures).

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SIP Architecture

SuperModular is about 3 months off of its full disaffiliation from Gitcoin. During this time, and in the space away from responsibility over Gitcoin, we have had an opportunity to evaluate a handful of different models for building a SIP. We explored:

  1. Building an accelerator.
  2. Hiring an in-house product team.
  3. Hiring product studios.

In the end, we decided that building a full accelerator would be too capital intensive. We decided that growing an in-house team would not offer the flexibility that we sought. In the end, hiring a team or leveraging product studios for each new venture will give us the flexibility to take multiple experiments from 0 to 1.

Supermodular Design

Each supermodule will have its own

  1. Market hypothesis
  2. Roadmap
  3. Budget
  4. Human Resources

The market hypothesis of each supermodule will be evaluated against the project progress from running an iterative succession of monthly OODA loops.

Iterative Design

Outer Loop

  1. Sept 2022 - November 2022 - Design Program
  2. December 2022 - January 2023 - Interview Vendors & Evaluate Market Opportunities
  3. January 2023 - Select which projects will be funded & ratify budgets.
  4. January - July 2023 - Build Ventures
    1. Each Venture will run through an OODA loop (the inner loop).
    2. We will have monthly demos of their progress.
    3. At the end of this period we will make a call about which ventures to double down on + which to spin down.
  5. August 1 2023 - Supermodule graduation ceremony / spinout.
  6. August 5 2023 - Retrospective.
  7. (evolve + repeat - GOTO step 1)

SIP Market Opportunity

We will be evaluating supermodule opportunities in two ways,

  1. Top Down - through engagements with experts, a priori reasoning, experience, and market data.
  2. Bottoms Up - Embrace and extend existing protocols from Gitcoin.

More details

Checkout these posts which describe how we are thinking about building a more regenerative web3 in Q1 2023:

High level

What is Supermodular + what are we focused on?
SuperModular 2023 Market Exploration

Cohort 1 (2017 - 2022)

SIP Cohort 1: Existing Supermodule Alumni

Cohort 2 (2022 - 2023 )

*Note: we are evaluating these opportunities and have not committed to any of them yet.

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this is an important update!

a few early memes about SIPS.

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this one is by @rachaelplz

SIP
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Amazing post(like always). It’s just great seeing things tru K. Owoki vision. Everytime I read your posts I feel like such a newbie, even tho I’m around since 2017… I think that SIPS is an amazing solution for a huge issue in web3, namely there is not a lot of “pure” web3 capital. I’m sure regens see different opportunities to change the world and it’s great to see that they have SIPS to rely on.

I believe that over 80% of the cohorts posted above can grow into amazing opportunities. My favorite are:

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Could we and should we have a thread in the OpenData Community to help nominate projects for your review?

Plus the arrow could point in the other direction - from Supermodular to ODC. For many of your projects perhaps the ODC could be a supportive open community that could contribute awareness & even code & of course data analysis.

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Could we and should we have a thread in the OpenData Community to help nominate projects for your review?

Sure!

Plus the arrow could point in the other direction - from Supermodular to ODC. For many of your projects perhaps the ODC could be a supportive open community that could contribute awareness & even code & of course data analysis.

What services does the ODC provide? I think most sybil resistence things we do will be through Gitcoin Passport. Feel free to email me kevin at supermodular dot xyz

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Sure, to be clear the OpenData Community doesn’t really offer services per se in the sense of packaged offerings. Our primary personas are the project creators and the data analysts rather than for eg grants round operators that w/d like use for example Passport backed by a Supermodular or FDD for eg.

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Have two small questions:

  • Is it possible to submit an opportunity for a cohort?
  • if yes, is now a good time to submit an opportunity?
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feel free to email me kevin@supermodular.xyz and say more. looking forward to learning about your idea