Framework Ventures co-founder Vance Spencer recalls the fateful day in 2019 when he and his housemate Michael Anderson went “all in” on their first fund.
Having been into crypto since 2013, the pair were early ETH adopters and scooped up as much as they could afford from $2 while Spencer worked at Netflix and Anderson was at Snapchat and Dropbox.
That nest egg “was certainly a big part” of scraping the money together for the fund, which had just one outside limited partner and also swallowed up the money they’d made from selling their Hashletes digital collectibles business.
“We were all in,” Spencer tells Magazine.
“I remember the day we sold our 401(k)s. I remember the day we sold all our stock in Netflix and Snapchat. And there was basically no Plan B. It was: ‘This was going to work, or it’s gonna be negative net worth.’”
From the beginning, with wildly successful early investments in Chainlink and Synthetix, the firm’s modus operandi was to buy up around 5% of a project’s token supply, roll up their sleeves and stake coins, provide liquidity, trade and try to improve governance.
Spencer says the strategy was born of, “honestly, just desperation. Like we needed shit to work, and we needed it to work in our first fund.”
“Nobody asked us to do it. And frankly, we didn’t know what we were doing half the time, but we learned,” he says.
“The team was two people for the first two years. It was Michael and I [spending] nights at the kitchen table. We didn’t have an office. We didn’t take any management fees from our fund. We just said, ‘Pay us on performance.’”
But with a knack for seeing where things were heading before the rest of the space caught on — too early, in some cases— Framework expanded in 2020 with an $8 million raise that saw the kitchen table work farmed out to Framework Labs, which also ran nodes on Chainlink and The Graph.
$400 million fund for Framework Ventures
When Magazine caught up with…
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