###### tags: `finished project` `word`

# Alliance web3 Accelerator Program Join ALL10

## Company Name*

Folk

## Website URL

http://folk.gg

## Company Twitter URL

https://twitter.com/folk__gg

## What are you building?*

signature economy asset management protocol

## What is the problem that you’re solving?*
#### two paragraphs max

[ 0x(c) ] Traditional IP asset management protocols, from legal entity to copyright, aren't designed to promote originality & innovation within Internet communities. Rather, traditional IP asset management protocols often actively suppress originality & innovation within Internet communities.

[ fork folk ] Some web3 innovations, such as DAOs and CC0 licensed NFTs, offer novel IP asset management protocols that genuinely promote originality & innovation within Internet communities. But these web3 innovations are far from complete, especially the extent to which they can translate into traditional protocols.

## Expand on the product that you're building*
#### two paragraphs max

[ good game ] Folk.gg 's thesis is that ancient 'permissionless & composable' folkways are IP asset management protocols (predating traditional IP asset management protocols such as copyright) that are well-designed to promote creativity & innovation within Internet communities. Big picture, Folk explores folk as a meme that has unlocked and can continue to unlock vast latent potentials within Internet communities (e.g. OSS culture is an already thriving Internet folk community).

[ metaPublisher precedes metaLabel ] Folk is developing a songbook product out of KERNEL's https://sign.kernel.community UX KALI's https://wrappr.wtf IP asset management protocol and Cheerbot's https://github.com/cheerbotme/object.sol onchain FIFO noSQL tree. This is because a songbook is 1) a fixation as simple as traditional copyright management protocols get; 2) a *compilation* of works relied on by secondary copyrights such as sound recordings; 3) one of the few IP assets designed for folkway protocol composability (e.g. song covers / karaoke); 4) only requires text media, which is as simple as onchain media gets.

## Where are the founders located?*


## First Name (1st Founder)*

Kyle

## Last Name (1st Founder)*

Smith

## Role (1st Founder)*

legal engineer

## LinkedIn URL (1st Founder)

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bestape/

## Email (1st Founder)*

[e-mail]

## Summarize your professional and academic background (1st Founder)*

Started with a BBA in music industry from Belmont Nashville, then song catalog M&A at (now) Anthem Entertainment, then JD from Western University, then 'homeschool PhD' specialization in legal engineering via 'Hierarchical Script Database and Database Applications' patent as dissertation. Officially joined Web3 via KERNEL's Block 3 fellowship, then worked for Gitcoin on the first Schelling Point (EthDenver 2022 mainstage) and 3rd comic book (Cheerbot v1 Web3 smart home toy collectibles using Greatest LARP lore), then joined LexDAO's core and started W3M Coalition https://gitcoin.co/grants/4926/web3-music-standards-coalition / LexClinic https://lexdao.substack.com/p/help-lexdao-provide-legal-aid-to , then co-founded the DAO Coalition https://snapshot.org/#/lexdao.eth/proposal/0xd1c6eb4dd0d194b107e2a70f02d09bc976f1273b3a78169f0f022220335be258 .

W3M got DDEX to start a now-active NFT working group and is in chats with Creative Commons about an NFT working group, LexClinic will soon become a first of its kind 501c3 LLC via a *pro bono* top DC web3 law firm innovation (the Clinic is currently getting *pro bono* 'whiteglove' service from https://catapult.xyz as well).

## Describe an instance where you demonstrated exceptional creativity or perseverance (1st Founder)*

After years of creativity & perseverance I merged the Pythagorean theorem with the Golden ratio (necessary to develop the aforementioned 'Hierarchical Script Database' patent) via the '(c-b)/a' formula.

More about the patent at https://youtu.be/Fmu0ETuaA7c and https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO2020160021 , observational geometry proof of the '(c-b)/a' formula at https://twitter.com/bestape/status/1594372855114129409

## First Name (2nd Founder)

Glenn

## Last Name (2nd Founder)

Poppe

## Role (2nd Founder)

decentralized media evangelist

## LinkedIn URL (2nd Founder)

https://www.linkedin.com/in/glennpoppe/

## Email (2nd Founder)

[e-mail]

## Summarize your professional and academic background (2nd Founder)

After an institutionalized start (harvard undergrad, bcg consultant), I joined an early stage adtech company called TrialPay (acq by Visa) and led business development and product management for labs products (incl. a card-loaded offers platform, ultimately spun off as yub.com and acquired by coupons.com). I moved to LA for my partner and joined Upfront Ventures. I've since founded meem.wtf, a venture-backed decentralized media protocol.

## Describe an instance where you demonstrated exceptional creativity or perseverance (2nd Founder)

I'm creating a decentralized whole earth catalog (buidl.fm) as my main creative outlet. In terms of perseverenance, fighting for my kid's life in the healthcare system was the hardest thing I've ever done and she is happy and healthy today.

## First Name (3rd Founder)

Adam

## Last Name (3rd Founder)

Lieber

## Role (3rd Founder)

spacial web & web3 + XR creative director

## LinkedIn URL (3rd Founder)

https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamlieber/

## Email (3rd Founder)

[e-mail]

## Summarize your professional and academic background (3rd Founder)

My foundations were laid with a fine art BA (University of Cape Town) and I simultaneously moved into music, composition, DJ, performance and running large scale music & cultural events for up to 5000 people. Then a scholarship at Fabrica in Italy 1.5 years - installation, experiential & music/sound across time based media. Followed by a Masters in Communication Art & Design at Royal College of Art in London and 15 years in music supervision, film & directing.

I was taken with the spatial web/VR and 'meta'verse building via social VR around mid 2020 and simultaneously web3 and early ML diffusion models. My deeper dive into web3 & thinking around public goods came with Kernel in KB5 early 2022.

## Describe an instance where you demonstrated exceptional creativity or perseverance (3rd Founder)

Rallied a team and built a social VR experience which was in official selection of Venice Film 2021. Currently building a podcast which looks at open IP models and investigates a history of copyright, why it fails us and stifles innovation.

## Add details on any other company founders not mentioned above.

Holly Grimm [https://www.linkedin.com/in/hollygrimm](https://www.linkedin.com/in/hollygrimm)

Charles Blass [https://link.bar/cb](https://link.bar/cb)

Charles Blass is a curator-activator and mapper at the intersection of movement weaving, system and network transformation, community wisdom gardening and interoperability flow. Author, founder, producer, broadcaster, archivist, oral historian, and nonprofit director, Charles is based in Zurich, Switzerland.

Frances Miller [https://twitter.com/thisisfrances](https://twitter.com/thisisfrances)

Frances is an Ethnomusicologist and PhD candidate at York University in Toronto. Her dissertation focuses on interpersonal synchrony and entertainment in community music making. She is a vocalist, guitar player and composer working on independent music projects, commercial projects, and commissions for contemporary dance. Miller worked as an operator and musician on Songcamp's CAMP CHAOS, a web3 music project and headless band that has been featured in Billboard Magazine. 

MacEagon Voyce [https://www.maceagonvoyce.com](https://www.maceagonvoyce.com)

MacEagon is a music head. He's got a B.A. in music (composition + vocal performance) from Carleton College and has lived lives in radio, music journalism, and music tech. He spends time building Grey Matter (a platform-agnostic community layer for music), writing about the intersection of music + web3, composing on his guitar and beat-up old piano, and building a new, less extractive, folk-driven internet.

Brennan Mulligan [https://www.linkedin.com/in/bmulligan56/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/bmulligan56/)

Brennan Mulligan is a network leader, mechanism designer, and complexity wrangler cultivating systems of coordination in service of human flourishing and the common good.

## When and how did the founders meet? Have you worked together in the past?

We met in KERNEL! We have worked on projects together in the past (some of us here, some of us there). This is the first project where all of us are working together on the same thing, and we're having a lot of fun together.

## What is the equity breakdown between each founder?*

1/7 $FOLK tokens each at http://dao.folk.gg . We plan to expand into SporosDAO type sweat tokens when ready, if advisable. The supervisors & students of LexClinic will help us throughout, from legal entity to IP license innovations. If we follow Sporos's lead, those who help us in LexClinic will get sweat tokens. Perhaps House Post-Sovereign will research some legal questions that arise along the way.

## What ecosystem are you building on?*


## Are all founders committed full-time to the startup?*

If Folk becomes the Schelling Point for web3 folk cultural development or gets sizable seed funds, then yes the majority of us will likely commit full-time. In part, because some of our other projects like Cheerbot will be absorbed into Folk. The meme to rule all memes kind of scenario.

At this point, Folk needs the talent and skills offered by the network effects of our members contributing to other important projects. For instance, Folk could not hope to quickly 'songbook' innovate on musical rights legal engineering issues if it didn't have its members also operate LexDAO / LexClinic and contribute to KALI's wrappr legal entity NFTs.

## When did you start working on this idea and why did you choose it?*

For KERNEL's Block 7 expo, a group of us musicians got together to discuss a project for the expo. We all desired to share our songs on web3, but each of us felt lost about how to go about doing it successfully (artistically & economically). We each have our own unique web3 specialties, and the conversation was naturally guided by those specialties into how folk cultures around the World already exhibit many of the virtues espoused by KERNEL's signature economy.

The main catalysts for us were 1) realizing that being able to 'permissionlessly' cover a song via compulsory licenses is very unusual in copyright but (besides the license part) very common in folkways, so songbooks are a great jumping off point; 2) Unix philosophy, onchain EVM limitations / strengths (e.g. lootverse) and historical copyright law are all based on (low latency) text as the universal interface / record (not audio or video).

## What is your unfair advantage in solving this problem?*

Our collective legal engineering, entertainment industry (especially music), web3 backgrounds and social networks are impressive. We have insider / contributor relationships with the early-stage projects necessary to make our MVP songbook product.

http://folk.gg / http://fork.folk.gg builds on top of the https://kali.gg DAO protocol. Working within both communities, Folk is combining the rights management innovations of https://wrappr.wtf with the signature economy innovations of https://sign.kernel.community to develop Internet native folkways. Folk also relies on the http://lexdao.coop / http://lexdao.clinic and https://build.meem.wtf communities (more informally, https://creativecommons.org , https://ddex.net , https://pluriverse.wtf and https://www.metalabel.xyz/magazine/spotted/55630078 )

## What other companies are solving this problem today or could if they wanted to? Why will you succeed against them?*

We're excited about our first product in part because essentially no other web3 music projects are exploring the music publishing base of the music industry. We can't understate how exciting this temporary window of opportunity is!!

Not only are we exploring what really should be the first step of establishing the long-term web3 music industry given the fact history tends to rhyme, we're doing so in a way that respects web3 OG text and pixelart 'lofi' cultures (by songbook gamifying fan fiction hifi / derivative expressions).

It also doesn't seem like web3 has yet to explore how it embodies future-folkways, and we look forward to being $FOLK avatars of this powerful meme's vanguard.

## What does your founding team believe in that very few people agree with you on?*

The open source, free software, CC0 and copyleft communities are, especially within the long arc of history, subcultures of Global folk culture.

If done right, adding signature economy flywheels to these communities will unleash new & exciting prosocial sources of revenue for all stakeholders.

## What’s your current traction?*

Not launched yet.

## If your startup sells to businesses, do you have any large, recognizable customers? If so, who?

We're discussing building a [ less gamified ] petition version of the songbook product for Lobby3.

## What unique insights do you have about your users?*

For the songbook, our thesis is that they'll want to sign a songbook as if it's a guestbook of sorts and that some of them will want to share their covers of the songs within the songbook (covers are a folksy kind of 'signature' or perhaps an intimate type of seal).

## What's your distribution strategy?*

To start, we'll likely do something similar to StemsDAO (good friends!) where we team up with artists and get the community to softcompete.

We're developing a podcast that'll explore "what is folk to web3?" with experts from numerous fields. I'm very excited about this podcast.

Judiciously exploring what the folk meme is and how it relates to web3 is an important aspect of Folk self-actualization, and we theorize it will provide valuable word-of-mouth / social media distribution.

Soon enough, we'll publish academic articles (newsletter), a manifesto for people to sign, perhaps a couple of petitions.

W3M will help us attend and perhaps speak at the Music Biz conference, pursue other related opportunities. There's a good chance traditional music publishers will be open to licensing songbook rights to frequently covered songs.

## How big could your product become?*

This is very early stage, but the folk meme could become a Global part of web3. The standardized licenses we help develop could become important *infra* for the space. Our protocols could become common, a mainstream-sized cultural impact DAO.

The https://seedtreedb.com aforemented 'Hierarchical Script Database' patent could produce a lot of value internally and in license, especially for event-driven web3. (We are open source, but consider patents open source if the license is done right.)

For now, we'd like to get a songbook going that successfully gamifies signature economies and provides a protocol for meaningful community expressions.

## If you failed 5 years from now, what would be the reason(s) why?*

Right time, right place. But the way we're doing it, we'd be surprised if none of our artifacts become valuable. If our DAO structuring is done correctly, much of what we do should be modular & liquid enough to flow into more long-lasting entities if our particular folk meme fails to catch on.

Though the DAO may perish, let its protocol live on.

## Tell us about your fundraising history and future plans.*

Haven't thought about it too much, but KERNEL is full of investors and we already have grant offers reaching out to us.

If there's frothy investor demand, then we're happy to move fast with funding to ensure we take the lead with this exciting first product 'music publisher' web3 entertainment industry opportunity.

We are open to include the https://cheerbot.org , http://seedtree.io products / IP in our valuation given we plan to include them in Folk anyway. More about Cheerbot at http://2minutepitch.cheerbot.org , http://3minutepitch.cheerbot.org and http://yeet.cheerbot.org .

## Which Alliance track applies to you from an investment perspective?*


## Why are you applying to Alliance? Are there specific areas you're looking for help with?*

Applied last time for Cheerbot and this time Simon Chamorro emailed me a few times asking if I could apply again for Cheerbot.

Given the bear market, RPi supply issues and the Folk opportunity that hopefully subsumes Cheerbot, Cheerbot is on a healthy simmer for now.

## Did any Alliance member submit an internal referral for your application? If so, who?*

Mike Wawszczak and Dane Lund have a house in LexClinic. It would be fun to strengthen our friendship at Alliance too.