The Patreon of Crypto is Coming

Moment, raised $8 million in round led by Multicoin Capital

July 31st, 2022 4:45 PM MONTREAL, CANADA

Hey Guys,

What is Moment?

There’s currently a race in how Creators will be paid with crypto. While Patreon itself is exploring how to do this, Moment, a startup similar to Patreon intended to facilitate subscriptions via cryptocurrencies, is going to begin to scale.

While Patreon and Substack did great during the Covid-19 lockdowns, how will they fare in a crypto winter and subscription, video and Newsletter overload in 2023?

Further reading:

1. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/after-the-hype-miami-startup-founders-investors-aim-to-show-substance-of-tech-scene

2. https://www.businessinsider.com/13-top-vcs-investing-funding-raise-creator-economy-startups-2022-7

You can see Moment’s stealth website here. Their employees (LinkedIn) have good pedigree.

Back in October, 2021: While Patreon allows creators to share personal investment stories or advice, its guidelines currently prohibit coins for the purpose of the direct financial benefit for a creator or patron, coins offered as part of an investment scheme, or any explicit incentives to purchase or obtain cryptocurrency.

However as we learned in April, 2022, even Stripe will allow payouts in crypto, and some altcoins soon.

Multicoin

Multicoin itself helped seed or fund many of these Web3 projects early—The Graph, Solana, Torus, StarkWare, and others—out of our first venture fund. Now on July 12th they announced their new fund.

• They invest $500k to $25million in early-stage Web3 growth startups.

• That they have chosen Moment does not surprise me.

• Their ideas on Creator Monetization most interested me.

They invested in Nervos, among others. The strongest part of their portfolio is definately DeFi and Open Finance.

But what exactly will Moment become?

The correct Crunchbase is actually this one, a lot of companies called Moment and Moments.

The Enigmatic Lucy Guo the Miami Web3 “Party Girl”

Lucy Guo appears to be the key in understanding this company. This is not the first time I’ve come across this startup.

Lucy Guo (Hiring Engineers & Designers) @lucy_guo

Early tech career advice: 1. Intern or work 6-12 mo at a big name company (can be private) 2. Join a Seed-Series B startup. Email VCs asking for their top portfolio companies - they have insider knowledge. 3. Repeat (2) or start your own company.

The startup has ties to Carnegie Mellon University, but their HQ is of course based in Miami. As Web3 startups begin layoffs and crashing, this won’t be one of them.

If the NY Post can do a spread on you, hyping Miami Web3 startup culture, what does it even mean? It certainly does capture a moment in the hype and euphoria that was Web3 when Bitcoin was at its peak in 2021.

Companies like Patreon will definately be reinvented for a younger audience. They will partner with their Web3 peers differently. They will be influencer-economy native companies and startups.

They won’t take a cut in the ownership economy in quite the same way as a Patreon or a Substack would. They will have more flex payments and ways to empower their Creators.

“Every white guy looks the same to me, so I have been in the elevator with David Beckham a few times and I didn’t know it was him,” the tech developer, designer and investor told The Post.

Lucy is 28 now and paid $6.7 million for her condo, it’s time to get down to business.

Even the SCMP was boasting about how rich Lucy Guo was recently.

Photo: @nomadictechie /Instagram

Her Net worth is believed to be around $440 million. (Forbes)

So why is she so rich?

• Before launching her start-up Moment, the Scale AI co-founder pursued the Thiel Fellowship by PayPal’s Peter Thiel and was Snapchat’s first female designer.

• According to a New York Post profile, Guo learned how to code when she was in second grade. While some parents might encourage their children to pursue what they love, this was not the case for Guo, whose parents are both electrical engineers.

• Guo eventually studied computer science at Carnegie Mellon but dropped out to pursue a Thiel Fellowship, founded by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.

So Moment is her new baby. GenZ women don’t actually want kids (around 20-25% won’t end up having children).

The wealth, culture, network and ability Lucy Guo represents will means Moment will also be different.

“Picture yourself in a boat on a river
With tangerine trees and marmalade skies
Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly
A girl with kaleidoscope eyes” - the Beatles

Lucy in the (Miami Web3) Sky with Diamonds

Lucy also just has really good timing. Before co-founding Scale AI, she worked at Q&A website Quora and would become Snapchat’s first female designer.

She’s not even 30 yet, she’s just getting started. She might as well be the Princess of Web3 Miami.

She wrote a blog post about how she hires for her (still small) team.

Can this young Millennials break into Web3 and disrupt the likes of Patreon?

In 2019, according to Forbes, she co-founded early-stage venture firm Backend Capital. In April this year, she launched tech start-up Moment. As per its website, Moment is backed up by Antifund, a venture capital fund founded by Geoffrey Woo and Jake Paul.

You can read the manifesto of Antifund here.

You can follow Lucy on TikTok here. She came out to her parents that she’s bisexual.

Lucy likes to run (and work out), but is she focused enough to be a CEO in the heart of a crypto winter? The 8$million is the right timing to scale her startup methodically. She wasn’t trapped at the peak of FOMO, she got in at just the right time. Hopefully Moment can become something different for Creators.

It’s not entirely clear on what it is yet.