Invictus Innovations (Defunct)

Unconquered Horizons Newsletter 03 - December, 2013 If you missed our earlier newsletters you can find them at invictus-innovations.com/news/. You can get all the real-time breaking news on the forum at bitsharestalk.org. This newsletter focuses on strategic news - announcements about what’s on tap for the coming months. What a difference a month makes! Looking back at last month’s newsletter, I’d swear it was from a year ago. Our forum had just gone live. ProtoShares mining was imminent. We were just about to “get some software into the hands of our beta testers”. That’s all. Fast forward 1 month and we have a vibrant forum community of over 1600 members, with over 1.3 million page views of 12,000 posts in more than a dozen languages. That community now has a top-ten crypto currency with over a million shares in circulation and a market cap that has nosed above $30 million on several occasions. ProtoShares are already listed on several exchanges and entrepreneurs of every stripe are emerging to populate the ecosystem. Every historic step along the way is documented in the forum archives, we’ll not recount them here. After all, people read newsletters to find out “what’s next”. Well, a great many events are planned in the months ahead but we’re smart enough not to put a precise dates on things until we are sure of those dates ourselves. Since we are leveraging the efforts of free-lance developers wherever possible, we reserve the right to reshuffle the lineup when necessary. Decentralized development has many benefits, but predictable release dates are not one of them. Still, you can safely anticipate that there will be at least one Big Announcement every single month for the foreseeable future. These are for the coming month: • Dan Larimer will be speaking at the Inside Bitcoins Conference in Las Vegas on Dec 10-11. • Keyhotee 1.0 will initialize its Genesis Block on New Year’s Eve and be available for download at that time. This first version will support sending secure messages to anyone with a Keyhotee ID. Additional features will follow in a rapid succession of subsequent releases. • DAC Angels begin crowd-sourced funding of promising new DACs (see DAC Angels Rising below.) Organizational Upgrades Invictus is now in the process of scaling up its internal organization with new Division Managers for each of our product lines. This month we feature Dan Notestein. Keyhotee Division Manager. Dan Notestein's industry experience includes 14 years of hardware and software development. At Texas Instruments he worked as both a software design engineer and a hardware design engineer. At Burr Brown Corporation, he was project leader for the design of a custom VXI-based test system for high-performance analog ICs. He has been working with Invictus since our inception as a free-lance developer. Visit us at invictus-innovations.com to learn more. 1 We will be adding more division managers as we recruit them. One for every major product that enters development. Currently Dan Larimer is acting BitShares Division Manager and Stan Larimer is incubating our next round of DACs using the DAC Angels development model described below. This month’s featured article, DAC Angels Rising, presents our thoughts about this model for raising capital to fund development of new DACs. Robust funding sources will attract the best and brightest developers to our industry and increase the value proposition of ProtoShares for all investors. DAC Angels Rising When we first conceived the idea of DAC Angels, we thought of approaching newly-wealthy ProtoShareholders to see if some might want to invest in new DACs in order to grow the value of their holdings. We invited those who held 1000 or more PTS to sign up for a new DAC Angel investors newsletter. We were blown away by the number of such investors that exist! Instead of a small group of successful investors slowly pondering how to grow the industry, we were looking at a whole army of investors yelling “I’m in!” Then it occurred to us: this is a decentralized movement developing decentralized products and services. Why were we trying to centralize our investors? Why can’t the owner of a single ProtoShare be a venture capitalist if she want’s to? We should be sharing our ideas with everyone. So we are using this newsletter. We went back to the drawing board. How do we stimulate a self-organizing organism into organically organizing itself? We considered three possible models (there may be more): • The Bitcoin Foundation Model. Interested parties join a ProtoShares Foundation, pay dues and get the right to elect a governing body that will oversee growth. Political government. • The Corporate Board Model. ProtoShareholders could elect a board of directors for ProtoShares who would evaluate & fund good DAC proposals. Corporate government. • The Free Market Model. Why can’t we use a Distributed Autonomous Corporation to supervise the job of raising funds via free market forces alone? Unmanned government. We’ll leave you to speculate on which model we liked best. But first, lets make sure we’re on the same page about why ProtoShareholders should be naturally interested in becoming DAC Angels, however they are organized… Visit us at invictus-innovations.com to learn more. 2 We hold these truths to be self-evident (ok, maybe open to subtile, nuanced discussion): 1. ProtoShareholders benefit from appreciation of their ProtoShares (PTS). 2. ProtoShares appreciate as more PTS DACs are announced by credible developers. 3. More PTS DACs would be announced if credible developers could find funding. 4. Sources of funding generally expect shares in the businesses they fund. 5. The mining lottery method of distributing shares dis-incentivizes such investment. 6. Investors divert their money from helping developers to unproductive mining activity. 7. A new model which incentivized investment would benefit developers and investors. 8. Consumers of DAC services would benefit from a well-funded support system. 9. Entrepreneurs and volunteers would benefit from bounties and funded piece-work. 10. Something-for-nothing participants, small or large, won’t care - they’ve already sold. The point of this essay is that the unmanned company metaphor extends beyond dividends and capital appreciation of ownership shares. It also applies to how capital is raised to launch the company and how people are motivated to invest. Let’s get concrete and specific: The ProtoShares Venture Capitalist Cookbook Here’s what we’ve come up with as an (almost) unmanned way to raise funding from the ProtoShareholder “DAC Angels” community of newly wealthy experts and evangelists. 1. New DAC ideas are already under discussion on the forum, pick one or invent your own. 2. Announce you are developing a DAC and publish an Unsolicited Proposal on the forum. 3. Publish a PTS “Angel Wallet” address where we can bid for allocated shares in your DAC. 4. If the response is good, fund development by selling the ProtoShares in the Angel Wallet. 5. When your DAC is ready, launch it honoring all block-chain recorded deposits to the Angel Wallet address according to the social contract you defined in your Unsolicited Proposal. To invest in a new DAC, send PTS to its Angel Wallet address and get Genesis Block credit for your percent of its allocated Angel Shares — just like ProtoShareholders get theirs. The more PTS are bid for the shares, the greater the established market value of all shares at launch. That’s it. Totally decentralized DAC crowd sourcing already built into ProtoShares. Note that Invictus Innovations plays no special role in this process. We will invest as Angels and even submit unsolicited proposals for DomainShares, LuckyShares, and VoteShares to prime the pump and serve as examples for others. The evaluation process is totally public and decentralized on the forum and any ProtoShareholder, large or small, can participate. Visit us at invictus-innovations.com to learn more. 3 Some Practical Advice for Proposers While the process really is that simple, there are a few thing you might want to do to increase your chances that someone will actually send ProtoShares to that wallet address of yours. 1. Put together a credible proposal that the forum can evaluate and, frankly, tear apart. 1. How will the DAC make money for its shareholders? 2. How many shares are set aside for Angels and ProtoShareholders out of the fixed total? 3. What do investors get for their money (e.g. how many DAC shares per PTS invested?) 4. What is your technical approach, projected cost and milestone schedule? 5. Who are the technical and management teams and what are their qualifications? 6. What is your DAC’s social contract? (PTS holders get x%, investors get y%, z% is mined out over N years along this curve, etc…) 7. What is your refund policy if interest in your shares is insufficient by a set date? 2. If you are not yet trusted by the community, get someone they do trust to act as the escrow agent for that ProtoShares wallet address. They can serve as as your “contract manager.” 3. Show evidence that you have the project management skills to develop software to a budget, or get an established company to manage the project and hire you help develop it. 4. Once you start developing, show the community evidence you are making progress so you can continue to attract more investors - all the way up until Genesis Day when investors will get their social contract shares just like ProtoShareholders get theirs. 5. Convince all investors that you have a viable plan for the full life cycle of your DAC. How will it fund its own maintenance and support? What if you get hit by a proverbial bus? That’s enough for this month. Come discuss these ideas with us on the forum. Help us build a consensus, but don’t wait for anyone to give you permission to start. This revolution will be decentralized. Thanks for your interest and support. Stan Larimer, President Invictus Innovations Incorporated Visit us at invictus-innovations.com to learn more. 4