June was an incredibly exciting month for XMTP. Kicking things off, we’ll start with this:
a16z Leading our Series A
Yes, you read that right. Last week a16z made a pre-emptive offer to lead our Series A with a ~$15M-$20M round, at a $60M post-money valuation, and gave us a term sheet to that effect. After some back-and-forth on terms, we’re excited to report that we signed the term sheet last Friday.
We first met with them in the days that followed signing our first docs for the seed round. They were extremely intrigued with what we were doing, and felt like something like it would be inevitable in the market. Each week we dug in just a bit deeper, which culminated in a partner meeting a week ago. We’re encouraged by their shared enthusiasm for XMTP, and believe they’re the absolute best partner for our Series A. All of this has happened quite quickly, and I wanted to make sure to share our thought process behind doing this now:
- a16z is one of the biggest investors in the space, and their participation will lend not only credibility to what we’re doing with XMTP, but also partnership opportunities amongst their portfolio
- They have a deep bench that will help us with recruiting, community engagement, the protocol and its consensus mechanism, and token economics
- Raising what we need for years to come now means we can focus entirely on building the protocol and setting up for our eventual mainnet launch, without the distraction of a capital raise
- A larger bank of capital means that we’ll be able to hire a few more people in the early days than we would have been comfortable with on just a seed—accelerating our short-term road map
- Crypto as an industry is extremely volatile and bear markets can eat companies alive (as was my experience before)—capitalizing now means we can avoid any issues around that for a long time
- Some of the senior talent that we’re hoping to attract can tend to be a bit hesitant when something has only been through a seed round, and adding the additional capital can help to ease that issue
All in all we’re stoked to be working with Ali, Chris, Katie, and the rest of the a16z team as we move forward. We’ll keep you all up on how things progress with the process.
Hiring
We’ve got a number of great candidates in the pipeline for more engineers, but as we’d like to have 6-8 on board by the end of the fall we’re still aggressively pursuing more.
Right now we’ve got three open opportunities for different engineering focuses (protocol, distributed systems, full-stack). If you’re open to sending out something about them, you can link to them here: https://careers.xmtp.com. We’re also blogging a lot about what makes XMTP an ideal company to work for remotely here: https://blog.xmtp.com.
Lastly, we’re going to be opening up some other types of roles soon, one in particular being a product manager. If you know of someone who is a rockstar product manager that we should poach, we want to know!
Highlights
- We’ve put out two offers for team members that have since accepted and will be joining us in August! More on them in an upcoming update.
- Days after we closed our seed, a few parties came along that wanted to invest and we felt would be a great fit. So as an extension to the initial seed, we’ve added a few new investors to the mix here at XMTP. Each of which had a unique strategic value that they brought to the table and we’re excited to have them as a part of the story:
- Coinbase Ventures
- Alchemy (including its founders)
- Naval Ravikant
- Balaji Srinivasan
- Aaron Batalion
- Shishir Mehrotra
- We’ve been continuing to work through the architecture of the protocol and have made significant progress in solving some of the challenges that were previously open questions—specifically some issues around long-term storage of messages. More on this as we gather the 0.1 spec to share amongst this group.
Building our community
Thriving communities are the lifeblood of crypto projects. While we’re still a ways out from opening up to the public, we’d like to start seeding those places with our investors. These channels will be active with our team, some selected community contributors, our investors, and our advisors. We’re inviting you to these spaces early, and would love it if you’d sign up:
- XMTP Community (Accept invite here)
This is our primary asynchronous communication platform. Where long-term discussions and decision making will exist. - XMTP Discord (Accept invite here)
Our chat platform. Discord is really popular in crypto circles, and we’ll hope to foster a thriving community here. - Investor Telegram (Accept invite here)
This is a chat exclusive for our investors. Join if you’re not in already! - XMTP Twitter (Follow here)**
Self explanatory, we’d love the follow!