Good day team,
First off, it was exciting to welcome our first team members this past week. Welcome again @flora and @darick.
@mg was on vacation this week and we were focused on closing the round and pulling in the last group of investors for it. Hopefully we are on track to close early this week.
I’m really excited to close the round, focus on building, and continue to build out our team. Looking forward to a great week ahead, hope everyone has a good one.
Hey all! First, I'm so excited to be welcoming @flora (intro post) and @darick (intro post) full time this week! Ever since they signed on a few months ago, we've been anxiously awaiting for this day and here it is! Finally it's no longer just @shanemacgithub and I on this thing and we'll be a little less lonely.
Hi team,
Welcome to the 7th edition of this thing, it's starting to feel exciting as the conversations around our Series A our progressing and our first team members are joining in about a week. On top of that, we've been chatting with some amazing people to join our team and those conversations have been going well.
This week was a bit of a light one as it was just me in the saddle. @shanemacgithub was on vacation for the whole week, which is awesome.
Hi team,
I'm so excited for everyone to start joining on August 1st. This past week made me realize how big and important of a problem it is that we are all going after. It wasn't because I talked to a bunch of "crypto" folks, it was because I told my partner's best friend Cate about what we are up to.
June was an incredibly exciting month for XMTP. Kicking things off, we’ll start with this:
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:
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.
The week started with a coffee and ended with a wine. Aka partner meeting with a16z on Monday and signed term sheet on Friday.
What a week. I couldn’t be more excited to have one of the best firms in the world for crypto behind us.
Hey everyone. It's great coming back from Miami and getting back into the swing of things. Lots of great conversations this last week.
Hi all,
Shane Mac here.
The goal of The Dispatch™️ will be to keep a pulse on the company, with weekly highlights and lowlights, as well as what the next week will hold.
Hey team,
We are so stoked to have this crew on board. Considering the speed at which this came together and the people that are behind us, we feel both humbled and amazed. We are so fired up to build this company and protocol with you.
We wanted to share a few important things and how we could use your help:
Job descriptions are here: careers.xmtp.com
Here are the key roles (4-5) we are looking to hire, all of which can be senior:
We’re just getting started and could really use your help behind the scenes with hiring since we’re not going to make a public statement.
Also it’s just a suggestion but here’s maybe an idea of some things you could say when talking to people about this, to ensure we keep things under wraps for now:
“We just invested in XMTP and they’re building a messaging protocol for web3 and crypto networks.”
“It was started by experienced founders and a team that’s built startups in the crypto and messaging space for longer than a decade. They’ve also got a syndicate of some great investors with deep strategic ties throughout the space.”
Last note, I wanted to make sure everyone is aware that I brought on a co-founder,Shane Mac, who I’ve known and worked with for the last 10 years, and also lived next to each other in SF for a long time. Shane’s first startup, Gist.com (a social CRM) was acquired by BlackBerry in 2009 after which he worked on their Messenger product (BBM). His last startup, Assist, was the leading business messaging and bot platform that built on top of Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Apple Business Chat, and other major messaging platforms and was acquired in 2019 by Conversocial. He brings tons of leadership, operational, recruiting, sales, and messaging infrastructure background and I’m so stoked to have him on board.
Outside of the immediate ask I’d love to invite you to join our investor Telegram. Just click and you’ll be able to join:
Thanks again for your support, we’re so excited to work with you.
P.S. Just so everyone is aware of everyone else, here is the amazing syndicate who we are lucky enough to have backing and supporting us with this round. Leads are in bold. Some participated directly, many via a custom AngelList Rollup Vehicle: