S11 Planning: Finance

Announcements Season Planning
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Hello everyone,

My name is Alex and I am the Planning Steward for the Finance working group. As part of Season 11 Planning, I would like to share details about our plans for the upcoming season. If you are unfamiliar with the Season Planning process at the Celo Foundation, I would recommend taking a look at the forum post introducing the Season Planning Process.

With this post, our goal is to introduce more transparency into the work we’re doing at the Celo Foundation as well as ask for your feedback on the plan and activities listed below.

Working Group Purpose

The purpose of the Finance working group is to optimize the allocation of capital to help Celo ecosystem achieve its mission.

A view of the the last season

  • Win: We generated a network of 6 key investing partners to help the Celo ecosystem, including TKX, Unicorn Growth, Echo VC, Flori, Lightshift, and Draper Dragon, focused on different geographies to help mission aligned projects in the long term.
  • Win: We launched the Celo Scouts program from inaugural scouts, including SaveChain and Covalent.
  • Win: The Celo community after governance proposal approval launched the cUSD-USDC pool on Mobius and cEUR pool on Curve, and supported the Uniswap v3 launch.
  • Win: Celo community support the launch of Wormhole bridge, becoming one of Celo’s most popular bridge by volume.
  • Miss: USDC native listing on Celo was canceled as there wasn’t enough organic demand.

Looking outward

  • We reviewed and updated our top goal to growing transaction volume on the Celo network as a proxy for network activity.
  • The current bear market meant re-considering the Foundation budget and runway assumptions. This means being more selective in the areas we’re focused to ensure our budget aligns with projects and builders that are most aligned with the Foundation’s ReFi mission.
  • Successful launch of Verda Ventures to nurture and amplify the next mature and innovative decentralized ReFi app on Celo by 12/31/2022.

Goals for the upcoming Season 11

  • Continue to engage with external partners and ecosystem supporters such as , the fund-of-funds, direct contributions, and Celo angels, who collectively help fundCelo ecosystem projects, which can impact 1 billion users.
    • Utilize treasury and strategic investment partnerships to advance key initiatives, including the stability and utility of the CELO native asset and natural capital backed assets, while maintaining a 24 months cash-budget runway for the Foundation.
    • Focus on supporting Regenerative Finance (ReFi) efforts, including projects around climate and open finance (for a definition of ReFi, see here).

Your feedback

We would love your feedback on this post. Please share your thoughts on the areas that we’re working on, what you think we should be doing more or less of, and how we can improve. We truly believe that we can get better with the inputs from you all in the community and we look forward to it.

Thanks,

Alex

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A small piece of feedback:

It would be great to have a clear understanding of how fundraising support can be activated – namely:

… and other Foundation contacts. There doesn’t seem to be a streamlined process here from the outside looking in – more of a “talk to this person and they’ll intro you to this person” type of affair. There’s different ways to accomplish this:

  • A form with 48 hour turnaround on the Celo website (ideally feeding into a pipeline on your end)
  • A Twitter account that can be DMed
  • A specific contact email, again with a guaranteed turnaround time
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Hi @papa_raw, thanks for the feedback, have you checked out the fundraising section of Celo Docs (Fundraising | Celo Documentation)? It gives an overview of the different fundraising options.

Per the fundraising page above, the dedicated contact email is celoinvestorecosystem@celo.org

There are intake forms, but I agree we need a consolidated one that helps people sort through the options (we’ll follow-up on this one and include in the fundraising docs, thanks). Regarding pipelines, the data feeds into a hubspot repository.

Let me see how we can get better access to @celoorg twitter handle messages to follow-up on. BTW, my colleague Amit has been hosting bi-weekly Twitter Spaces AMAs, highly recommend checking out that too.

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If I can give some feedback: placing an impersonal contact email at the bottom of a page in Celo’s docs isn’t a good way to provide clarity to the team handling inbound as to how to respond, give clarity to the folks generating the inbound, or increase the amount of inbound received (which I imagine is a goal for you and your team). Coincidentally, an intake form shouldn’t live in docs either – if you go to Polygon’s homepage “get funded” is the first option under their “Build on Polygon” button – it’s very high in the information hierarchy for their ecosystem.

Something to consider!

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