Our Investment in Carma

The Web 2 Marketing Stack

Picture this: you’re on the internet, you click a Google ad, you end up on a website, and you share your personal email with a surfboard company.

What happens next? Well, you might get a 20% discount on your first surfboard purchase, but in the background, you’re added into a CRM, your data is enriched, and your data is used to predict future purchasing behavior. Now your (and your sister’s) Instagram feed is filled with relevant ads for surfboards and surfing accessories. It’s almost like “they” are listening to you.

Simply put: Web2 marketing infrastructure is incredibly sophisticated and powerful…sometimes to the point where it feels intrusive.

The Web 3 Problem

In the Web3 world, email is no longer a unique identity, and most of a company’s users are pseudonymous.

The relationship between project (i.e., company) and its community (i.e., customers) is fragmented. People might join a Discord server, hold a project’s NFT on OpenSea, DM via Telegram, and use MetaMask to authenticate sign ins or receive airdrops.

As a project owner, it’s nearly impossible to get a real time view of your community.

There needs to be a piece of infrastructure — akin to a CRM / CDP — that embraces Web3 principles. A modern marketing tech stack that gives projects the tools they need to launch, grow, analyze, engage, and reward their communities.

Enter Caitlin & Timmy

While we have been thinking about community software for several years, we never bumped into the right team. Then, karma struck (yes, pun intended).

When we first met Caitlin Leksana (CEO) and Timmy Galvin (CTO) through our friend and frequent co-investor Rob Biederman (thank you, Rob!), we were blown away.

Caitlin has a background working with one of the largest Web2 CRM & email marketing software companies. It was there she initially saw the gap for a Web3-native marketing stack. She decided to pursue her MBA at Harvard Business School to scratch her entrepreneurial itch, where she met Timmy in her first year section.

Timmy is a MIT-trained computer scientist, who spent 6 years as a nuclear submarine officer before becoming a cybersecurity professor at the US Naval Academy. Together, the duo started exploring opportunities to bring the sophistication of Web2 marketing to a Web3 world.

With a little karma and a lot of hard work, Carma was born.

Hello Carma

Carma is redesigning and building a Web3-native marketing tech stack. The product gives Web3 projects the tools they need to launch, grow, analyze, engage, and reward their decentralized communities…all from a single platform. Carma makes community management easier by streamlining and automating manual tasks, all while providing a better UX for members that want to be involved in their communities and rewarded for their contributions.

‍

But this is just the beginning.

In the future, Carma will act as the source of truth for identities, empower Web3 projects to find new members, and provide the rails for communication between projects and members. Caitlin and Timmy’s collective vision is to help Web3 projects scale with ease, and empower the next one million project founders to bring Web3 to the masses.

The product is live and already being used by some notable Web3 projects. If you’re running a Web3 project and if what you read so far resonates, try out the product, or reach out to us for an intro to the team.

Carma x 2048vc

We are excited to support Caitlin and Timmy as they build a generational company. We are fired up to be leading Carma’s pre-seed round, alongside an epic syndicate of friends, including Flybridge, Vulcan Partners, and awesome angels including Mike MacCombie and Rob Biederman.