WeTheFounders is a Social DAO created as a protocol to collect and commercialise survey data from Australian start-ups and scaleups. The goal of WeTheFounders is to form a base “data layer” for Australian start-ups and scaleups which fully rewards contributors for their participation, which could then be used for Due Diligence and Cohort analysis, providing a consistent data framework “protocol” on which other economies can be built and connected. Data will be owned by its creators, and access will be sold in aggregate to government, corporates and any other start-up ecosystem members who want to use it for their own commercial purposes. Proceeds, beyond the cost base, are split between the start-ups who provided the survey responses. Over time, WeTheFounders hopes to become the arbiter of start-up and scaleup data across the entire ecosystem. The DAO will use any funds as directed by the community to pay for infrastructure costs, and then: a) distribute proceeds to contributors, and / or b) provide grant funding for DAO projects, and / or c) channel funding into a gated Investment Fund to further support the ecosystem development These outcomes act as a flywheel to drive ecosystem growth and develop “real world” economic assets by seeding project teams, all of whom are “transforming Australia into a sustainable tech driven economy”. WeTheFounders is a community-driven project and all of the Core Team have come directly from the community inspired by the ethos of building in the open. The genesis story of the project has attracted collaborators who align with our vision of community-run, decentralized data pooling for ‘public good’.