Adventure #4 - Kinetix.tech

Welcome to the 4th issue of web3adventures where I shed light on web3 businesses.

We’ll use a simple framework that covers:(1) the company(2) the founding team(3) hiring and funding(4) why the business excites me

Disclaimer: None of this is sponsored, I choose what to write about. This is not financial advice either!

Today we're looking into Kinetix!

The company

What does the company do? You guessed it - 3D animations.

I tried it and it was so fun! Registered with normal email (not wallet integration yet) in 2 minutes. The UI is great, the tools are easy to use as well

You click to start a project and off you go! You can use different characters too!

Overall, it's pretty cool. You can add different backgrounds, characters, items, movements etc. Let's just say this is the closest I've ever been to creating a game😄

^Pretty cool eh? And this is just bare bones. I'm a very animation-illiterate person, yet managed to put something together in less than 5 minutes.

It's nothing impressive really - my guy jumps into action, kicks the air and then dances bachata 💃 You can see it here (10 seconds) - EDIT: the video isn't working anymore ;(

The founding team

Yassine Tahi (CEO) - ex Google, has previous experience in startups as well as venture capital.

Henri Mirande (CTO) - has decent amount of exp in machine learning and deep learning (had to google that 😅).

Philip Belhassen (head of Engineering) - 20+ years of exp in 3d animation, he's ran his own studio and produced over 20 games!!

Anyway, here's their team's LinkedIn page if you want to stalk them more

Hiring and Funding

A) HiringLinkedIn says they're hiring and they've got a few open roles on their website

Hiring on discord too

B) FundingLast May, the team raised $11 mil in a seed round!

Why this business excites me

The main reason why this business excites me is because of the rise of the Metaverse! I know I know, we're very very early but that's great timing.

I think as the Metaverse becomes more of a thing, people will seek ways to customize their character and overall experiment. This business will allow them to do just that.

One more thing - IP building! Think of all the NFT holders who want to build out the IP around their NFT (e.g. an ape). With the ease of usability, this platform might just be what gets utilized to do great IP building and storytelling!

Favourite meme of the week

Quick market thoughts

DeGods and y00topiaDeGods is slowly but surely making waves 🌊 It feels like this collection has a real potential of waking people up to Solana and its community.

y00topia (by the founders of DeGods) have been moving along really well with their marketing campaign and we've seen a decent amount of Eth OGs apply for and receive their yootslist (WL). It's been a great marketing case study.

EZU and its mintEZU struggling to mint out - quite the opposite of y00topia to be fair. Despite being all the rage week and a half ago, EZU's mint is going fairly poorly as of right now the floor is at 0.19 (25th August) which is slightly below the mint price of 0.2 -> tricky

At the current conditions, 15k supply at 0.2eth mint is quite the stretch, despite all the hype. With this mint price, I think this can really drag on. Not a good move on Voltura's side for sure. Buttt, it'll be interesting to see how (and if) this will get dragged out of the mud. I'll be following closely 👀

Update: mint was paused at 5.2k and the rest will be airdropped to holders of EZU and PA. That's pretty clever, I liked that approach.

RoyaltiesCreator royalties are once again a conversation. A great discussion at 6529's QT of 0xfoobar's substack on this topic.

Ragnarok and capital lossSo this is an absolutely ridiculous case of poor financial management👇

When founders are presented with the money upfront, they also unwillingly become a fund manager.. That can be really tempting and not even in a malevolent way. The fella above just wanted to secure some extra $$ by betting on a safe asset like ETH.

There's another fundamental flaw in the way founders receive the compensation upfront.. In his substack memo, the founder explains how his monthly compensation is $50 000.

In what world does a founder get such a high salary so quickly after starting a business... Sometimes people go years before making a profit.I've proposed a potential solution below👇 It's not perfect but could be a starting point

My on-chain activityI think I'll be airdropped an EZU this week. Besides that, no on-chain activity :/

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Anyway, hope you've enjoyed this and will tag along for next Sunday's adventures.This issue is #4 and marks 1 month of this newsletter. I'd love to hear your feedback - what have you liked, disliked etc. Any suggestions are welcome too.

Here's an anon feedback form or you can DM me on Twitter

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If you liked this issue, here are my previous two adventures:1) Cheq.xyz - Stripe but for crypto2) reNFT.io - Rental infrastructure for the Metaverse3) Bull v Bear - On-chain bets on the price action of NFTs

Wishing you a productive week ahead!- Mitko