Jay Meattle

I need to reintroduce myself. I’m about to publicly launch a new company called @MezzanineLabs, but most people only know a tiny, tiny part of my career — and usually it’s that I started @ConstitutionDAO or that I was on the team that acquired @Grindr. This is my attempt at an abbreviated story about how I’ve spent the last ~ten years. In college, I studied economics and computer science. After my sophomore year, I wasn’t much of a student (at least not an attentive one) because I was building a company. I started NomadX, an apartment rental company for digital nomads. This was back in 2017, before COVID, when remote work and digital nomads were relatively fringe. We expanded to nomad-friendly cities across several countries and aggregated tens of thousands of units. Our goal was to create a global network of "host cities" where nomads could live for 1–3 months at a time. (Dare I say, an early network state?) One of our customers in Lisbon introduced me to bitcoin (which, in retrospect, isn't shocking at all). That fall, bitcoin hit $20k for the first time and the term “DeFi” hadn’t been coined yet. I tried arbitraging Litecoin and Bitcoin on a Zimbabwean exchange called Golix, where prices had 50%+ premiums. That’s where I learned about market depth and how hard it is to make money in illiquid markets. A few years later, I learned to invest at 28th Street Ventures, the family office of Michael Gearon Jr., former owner of the Atlanta Hawks. I was the #2 guy on a bunch of deals I probably had no business being involved with: the $600m acquisition of Grindr, an investment into leading Asian fintech Atome, and a 100+ megawatt solar project in Chile. Within a year, I also started a crypto fund. The family office allocated $10M to a portfolio of crypto assets that I ran. I found myself researching crypto nonstop. I loved the debates around consensus mechanisms—Proof of Stake was still controversial and Ethereum hadn’t transitioned yet. I lived through “DeFi Summer” in 2020 and watched dozens of protocols like Uniswap and Aave redefine finance while hundreds of others started copycats with increasingly unsustainable incentives. In 2021, I hopped into the arena. I started what became one of the most widely known projects in all of crypto: ConstitutionDAO. If you aren't familiar, we pooled ~$45M worth of ETH in just a few days to try and buy the U.S. Constitution. The first person I messaged was @j_austincain, a friend in Atlanta. Within 12 hours, we hosted a kickoff call with a ragtag group of talented shitposters, crypto fanatics, and internet trolls. Within a week, we had a legal structure and tens of thousands of people from around the world sending millions of dollars worth of ETH into a @juicebox smart contract. Juicebox’s key feature was a way to return money: if we lost, everyone would be able to get a 100% refund. It gave the people of the internet a risk-free way to collectively own and govern the Constitution. We planned to vote on decisions like where it would be displayed. It was a democratic experiment using one of the world’s most democratic documents. You probably know how it ends. We lost the auction to Ken Griffin from Citadel (of Game Stop antagonist fame). The monolith defeated a large democratic organization for control of the constitution. Sigh. Unlike most crypto projects, we didn't take a single penny. Refunds are still live. Ironically, no one wants them anymore—the token now trades well above the contribution value. It’s become a piece of history, a meme, a collectible, and somehow even a currency in some apps...? People only talked about the spectacle of ConstitutionDAO. My biggest takeaway wasn’t discussed in the headlines (usually bc it's boring to most people). We managed emulate the mechanism a SPAC, which is just a pool of money that tries to acquire something and offers full refunds if they fail. But a SPAC normally costs MILLIONS to set up and takes months... we had zero overhead, a few days, and some smart contracts. The process for joining, getting your stake, and getting your refund were explicit and deterministic. That's the power of smart contracts. After ConstitutionDAO, thousands of DAOs launched. Some were solid. Some were scams. Most never got off the ground. I was a little disappointed at the lack of iteration and further innovation. I kept getting pitches for "let’s raise a ton of money to buy X," but I’d already done that. I was more interested in what came next. To me, a "DAO" was always a subcategory of something bigger: an onchain organization. Just an organization with a transparent, programmable operating agreement. DAOs have problems. "Autonomous" is often a misnomer—most DAOs need tons of human involvement. "Decentralized" usually just means that they're vaguely distributed ownership (or pretend). DAOs are often messy organizations governed by votes that very few people participated in. Life after ConstitutionDAO, life got weird for me. @kimbal invited me to a party at @AntonioGracias’ Miami penthouse. I went on some podcasts. I had people offer to fund the next DAO or wire me millions to invest. I started modeling mechanism designs for programmatic capital structures. I went to the infamous @FTX_Official conference in the Bahamas. I didn't really know what to do with my career. I loved my job at 28th Street Ventures, but it was clear crypto wasn’t going to be a core part of that role long-term. And the success of ConstitutionDAO like a sign from the universe to double down on the crypto industry, where my interests had been pulling me for years. So I joined a new crypto venture fund being formed by @AKlokus and AJ Scaramucci (yes, @Scaramucci's son). SALT was loosely affiliated with Skybridge, but also managed its own VC vehicles—including a ~$40 million crypto-specific fund that I invested out of. I focused on the intersection of regulated capital markets and crypto. My specialties included stablecoin infrastructure, tokenization of real-world assets (treasuries, credit, equities, real estate), blockchain infrastructure (L2s, oracles, middleware), decentralized infrastructure (onchain marketplaces, data networks, physical infrastructure), and programmable financial products. I spent as much time with founders as I did with lawyers. I was a regular attendee at @Orrick 's roundtables, joined meetings and calls with regulators from both the U.S. and Europe, and went deep on the gritty details: securities law, fundraising exemptions, KYC/AML, bank licensing, disclosure rules, and the nuances of financial reporting. I wasn’t just interested in investing—I wanted to understand the legal architecture beneath every product we backed (like @m0foundation ) On paper, it sounded like the perfect role: comfy cash comp, carry, the VC title (ooh). But there were problems. Two were ego and ethics. There was also misalignment. I found myself frustrated that I couldn’t force through high-conviction investments—like early rounds of @eigencloud or @meshpay —even though I had the title of Partner. I also couldn’t help getting overly involved with founders, meddling in product and strategy. I realized what I really wanted was to build again. This brings us to @MezzanineLabs. I've been thinking about the future of banking, programmatic payments, legal mirroring, stablecoins, and onchain organizations for YEARS. It has been a labor of love to build something that I think the world really need. I've got a whole slew of announcements lined up for July, when we publicly release the platform. More soon.