

It’s a little bit of a network game - can you get access to a partner at the firm such that they trust you? So in theory, this is a way to allow for an open, honest, transparent process around letting anybody have that potential access.” “To be a scout for a traditional venture firm, you have to know somebody. “That’s not been democratized that way before,” Kurzweil told me.The original deal scout and the governance committee’s votes will be recorded on the Ethereum chain, and deals that pass will be brought to Bessemer to invest (which it expects to do most of the time, Kurzweil said). Any member of the DAO can scout a deal and bring it to the governance committee (currently 11 people in the Steel DAO), which will debate and vote on it.Its first initiatives are going to be Bridge, a talent collective, and Links, what it’s calling its on-chain scouting network. The BessemerDAO is now the Steel DAO (a nod to Bessemer’s Carnegie family-office origins) and will be using Syndicate’s investment club technology to help power the DAO. It’s part of a bigger rebrand and a push to decentralize the group away from Bessemer’s stewardship, said Bessemer partner Ethan Kurzweil.T his week, it launched its first project: a decentralized scouting network that turns DAO members into potential scouts for the firm.

But would that lead to real innovation in venture? At the very least, it was a statement that Bessemer was taking crypto seriously and wanted to build a Web3 community. When Bessemer first unveiled its BessemerDAO six months ago, it was purposefully a little vague on what exactly the DAO was going to do to decentralize venture capital.
