I would like to advocate a general investing / funding philosophy of casting a wide net.
When considering a proposal, we should of course do due diligence. But instead of over-evaluating the prospects of the idea or even the plan, we should focus more on the character and background of the principle people involved.
I advocate this wide-net approach because the most successful investment capitalists of the San Francisco Bay Area invest in many, many projects. Ycombinator is particularly famous for making a machine out of their process. Also, there is no fixed formula to successful early-stage investing. There is even some speculation that star investors are more lucky than skilled, that their success is somewhat random. The top investors are investing in so many starts, that it is only a matter of probability that one or two should become Google.
But random-seeming luck may actually be more of a skill than something mystical. I would like for the community of The DAO to have lucky behavior, which is, essentially: openly seeking opportunity, try to see what the proposers see, learning from each start, and iterating on that process. But of course avoiding obvious pitfalls.
Some other things about wide net investing:
- invest in stages, allowing many, many projects to get angel funding, fewer making it to the next stages
- keep good records on the projects and the people involved, experienced and ethical leaders and engineers should be favored, possibly even fund postmortems
- not limit ourselves to ethereum, perhaps projects should only have to reflect the values/goals of ethereum rather than use ethereum
The DAO