Weekly Roundup: Red Flag Alert 🚩

Happy Friday, DVC! Tax season is upon us, and this year there’s a new pilot program that lets you file for free directly with the IRS. But, to be eligible you need to have a simple filing status (like being a W-2 employee).

So if you happen to be one of the billionaires using a 943-year-old shell company to evade your tax obligations, maybe just stick with TurboTax…

Startup Discussion & Special Edition Survey:

If you’ve been paying attention to the crypto-verse, you may have seen that high schoolers and professional traders alike are in a frenzy of “minting”, “pumping”, and profiting off thousands of meme coins on the Solana blockchain.

If you have no idea what that means, all you have to know is:

1. I envy you, and;

2. Chronically-online people are making absurd amounts of money buying/selling digital coins with names like “DogWifHat”, “BOME”, and “SLERF”.

While I can 100% see the appeal of making a full year’s salary on a single trade, I personally don’t have much interest in placing my financial future in the hands of dopamine-fueled subreddit financiers. And, for what it’s worth, neither does Solana’s founder.

However, all this market insanity did get me wondering about what makes people want to make an investment.

And, perhaps more importantly, what makes people say “no” to an investment (especially while battling FOMO).

It should go without saying that investing in anything named “DogWifHat” (or the newer version: “DogWifCat”) should be a pretty huge red flag on its own, but startups unfortunately can be trickier to decipher than crypto.

So, here’s our question to you this week…

What are your “Startup Red Flags”? 🚩 🚩 🚩 

We want to hear from you directly and crowdsource a list of investing “Red Flags” from our community.

Whether you’re a new investor or a seasoned pro, what’s one thing you look for in a deal that would make you say “No way!” to investing?

We’ll share the results next week and turn this into a free resource for the community 🙂 

Last Week's Results:

Last week we asked you for your thoughts on the proposed changes to the “Accredited Investor” rule in H.R. 2799… and 50% of you said “Makes sense - approve it now!”

Interestingly, the other 50% was evenly split between those who think the rule should be eliminated altogether and those who think the changes would be harmful to retail investors.

Clearly it’s a contentious issue, but feel free to forward this email to your Senator as definitive statistical evidence of what the people want 🤷 

Vote for New Deals:

Help select DVC's future deals! Please view the options, upvote your favorites, and suggest your own!

New companies suggested this week:

• Madly Hadley, Gobe Kids, Jbrds, Contractor+

Deal Review #77 Update:

Over the past 2 weeks we’ve been looking at Sholder - a startup providing peer-to-peer mental & emotional support for high-burnout employees.

In the nick of time, we just received some very thoughtful responses to our Q&A questions and outreach from Sholder’s founder, and it’s now looking like we’ll be able to get a live founder discussion in the first week of April!

It’s a bit of a change-up to our bi-weekly deal cadence, but here’s a schedule for the weeks ahead:

• Tuesday, March 26th: We’ll release our Deal Review for KingsCrowd and hold a live discussion with CEO Chris Lustrino at 12pm EST (Register in Discord)

• First week of April (TBC): We’ll host a live discussion with Sholder founder Rett Kearbey!

In the meantime, we’ll keep the Sholder Deal Review and Venture Pool (for Investing Members) open until after our live founder discussion.

Should be an exciting couple weeks! Stay tuned in Discord for more updates 📣 

DVC Portfolio Updates:

Overplay (Deal #55) - Cuban’s In:

Gaming startup Overplay made its “Shark Tank” debut last week and Mark Cuban invested! It’s about time the Sharks joined us on the cap table 😏 See full update.

Personal AI (Deal #75) - AI X DC:

Personal AI - a startup making, well, personal AI’s - has been in Washington, D.C. this week meeting with dozens of politicians, reporters, and tech leaders to promote responsible policies around AI safety and security! See Suman’s (founder) update here.

Thank you for reading & participating! Have a great weekend and see you for a new DVC deal next week!

Sincerely,

Team DVC