Quidli
Quidli is a blockchain protocol for equity transfers. Tokenization of ownership allows companies to distribute equity in a click.
Intro to Quidli
Digitization of work has kicked off growth in entrepreneurship and startups, in remote working, and in freelancing. But platforms in this space don’t address the challenges of ensuring fair compensation and motivation - companies define ownership and remuneration only in financial and legal terms, and labor is forced to define trust and enthusiasm in the same way.
Equity can be a powerful solution against such misalignment. But it’s highly illiquid and gatekeepers (financial, legal, etc.) create friction. Quidli uses automated distributed ledgers to disrupt the asymmetry that makes equity agreements obstructive (time, money, effort, etc.). Moving equity on blockchain creates flexibility, so actors on the supply and demand sides of the work equation can be incentivized as much, or as little, as is necessary.
The Quidli protocol enables easy, fast, and flexible single equity transfers. Equity transactions can be seamlessly integrated into compensation agreements regardless of an entity’s industry, size, or geography. Unlike traditional methods, smart contracts automate the process and can be adapted to each case. Results are realized via human-readable contracts, electronically executed by all related parties and digitally stored in accordance to relevant territory regulations.
Our Vision
Quidli was born from the realization that the “brilliant” startup ideas we have often fail to materialize because we view cash (to develop, to hire, etc.) as a major roadblock to success. But our collective entrepreneurial experiences inform us that conviction and passion can be leveraged to overcome this roadblock. We remove the financial and legal friction from equity-as-compensation to help companies facilitate greater incentives to take risks so more people are empowered to exchange inspiration and services on their own terms.
Quidli is more than just a product or a service - it’s empowerment to pursue ideas and projects that aren’t necessarily mainstream or obvious. Our purpose is to aid the serial entrepreneur who doesn’t need validation and wants to work smart to achieve their highest goals. But it’s also for businesses that want to be sustainable and don’t necessarily want to scale beyond what they can handle. And it’s also for people with full-time jobs who daydream about moving on and starting their own company. Ultimately, everyone wants to work on projects they feel passionate about, and Quidli wants to help you with that.
We want to rework work. Come work with us.
- Other (Please Explain Below)
- The Flex and Gig Economy
Quidli uses blockchain to: 1) Remove frictions in the equity transfers in order to bring liquidity to equity; and 2) solve the trust issue in participants compensation for decentralized teams/projects.
The Quidli protocol uses blockchain technology to simplify equity transfers. Today, any equity transfer between two parties is centralized on the company (who needs to write the transaction in its registries) and needs the intervention of middle-men such as lawyers and accountants. Blockchain allows the parties to remove all intermediaries and make equity transfers happen only between the two involved parties, even if they don't know each other, thanks to its decentralization properties.
- ICO by Q4 2018 to finance the next two years of protocol and platform development
- Have our token listed on exchanges at a stable/growing price
- 100% crack the legal use cases in France and the USA
- Offer a functional MVP and have the first 10 clients on-boarded
What Quidli offers is not simply a product or a service. It’s a work culture. The best way to get the best effort from people is to reward them accordingly to the successes of the projects they work on. We believe that this will become the new norm and so our effort is to rework the work industry. It will be the post-capitalist era, with doers becoming owners.
- Adult
- Non-binary
- Urban
- Upper
- Europe and Central Asia
- US and Canada
We acquire our first clients by:
1. Leveraging the ICO community - we're currently building a community that believes in our vision. This is important because we need supporters not simply interested in just short-term profit but who're willing to hold our tokens and communicate about our product to help us grow.
2. Targeting accelerators - we can benefit from the network effect in established startup communities.
3. Partnering with freelance platforms - they source workers and with our protocol we can provide them an alternative solution to fiat money payments as compensation.
- Skylights, Florent's former company, was built on a work for equity system from the beginning. It’s been in use for four years now
- Quidli is built on the same principle. In only five months, we gathered a team of 17. Everyone is working 100% for equity.
- Our core target is early stage startups, between seed round and series A, crossing valley of death and struggling in the cash vs acceleration dilemna.
- Today we are building an MVP of the platform and protocol. A list of 10+ interested clients are waiting for a finished MVP to be released.
In the short term (1 year), we focus on our core segment (early-stage/seed to series A startups), in our first market (France). That represents nearly 10,000 startups.
Over the longer term, we've yet to evaluate what scale and speed we need to target, but here are some market sizing figures:
- 13.6M new businesses are created each year globally
- There are 50M freelancers in the USA alone. Globally, corporates spend over $300 billion on external and freelance talent
- In the global work force, more than 3.3 billion people are employees working under someone else
- Non-Profit
- 15
- Less than 1 year
Justin and Florent are serial entrepreneurs. Florent founded a startup that participated in Y Combinator in 2016. Justin has built e-commerce and SaaS startups in both Asia and Europe.
Narjis and Gagan are talented full-stack developers. Narjis has worked in both large corporates and startups. Gagan is a seasoned blockchain developer who's already participated in other ICOs.
Today we are a team of 15. By using our own system, we benefit from a super-low burn rate while growing based on the competencies we need. In summary, we can accelerate while spending nearly no cash.
Quidli is a non-profit. Our target is to be sustainable, not profitable.
We follow a "classic" ICO model: We will do an ICO in Q4 2018 that will provide us the resources necessary to finance the product and business developments and reach sustainability over the next 5 years.
Over the long term, Quidli will generate revenues taking a small fee of each equity transaction happening via its protocol. Those fees will be used for maintenance, servers and further developments.
We are addressing a beautiful vision (raise happiness and fulfillment at work) but the challenge is big. As we've stated, one of our key competitive advantages is: By using our own system we can onboard talents without immediately needing cash and can accelerate quickly. The challenge then becomes more about finding the right talent rather than immediately paying for talents/competencies.
Our aim via the Solve community is to bring Quidli more visibility to highly talented people. And we expect to be able to leverage this system by recruiting those talents and growing our team, both in terms of quantity and quality.
We address a massive global market with nearly no barriers to entry. This space is certain to end in a "winner takes all" result where the first player to reach a critical mass of users becomes the standard.
We have a first mover advantage today but are still under threat of a bigger player coming into our market. Solve can help by exposing us to potential contributors for Quidli's development - people to take on positions/missions; create introductions to talent and organizations with collaboration points; opportunities for fundraising; anything to help accelerate and more quickly build our community.
- Peer-to-Peer Networking
- Organizational Mentorship
- Technology Mentorship
- Connections to the MIT campus
- Media Visibility and Exposure
- Other (Please Explain Below)
C0-Founder @ Quidli
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