TLDR: I need 99 people to invest $150,000 by Monday, March 14, 2022 to buy the biggest collection of Black History memorabilia in the world at public auction. [Disclaimer: No money or other consideration is being solicited. If sent, it will not be accepted. No offer to buy securities will be accepted. Any indication of interest involves no obligation or commitment of any kind. Not taking comments or submissions.]
WOW! I paused the Apple TV to digest what I just saw.
Elizabeth Meaders owns most comprehensive Black History collection in the world
This news report spoke to me in so many ways. The Elizabeth Meaders Collection represents hope. A different kind of hope
My name is Hans Marshalleck. I formed a “DAO”/Collective with the purpose of winning the auction. It is my faith move.
I am a startup founder, my bio is here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bndwgntravel
In my life’s journey I have visited many museums. My trips to Black History museums have been a less than stellar experience, filled with featureless, un-exciting and un-compelling exhibits. I want to change that forever.
The Elizabeth Meaders Collection is up for sale on March 15, 2022 at public auction. The auction starts at 2:00 p.m. This “DAO” can win!
https://guernseys.com/v2/meaders_collection.html
It is the most important collection as it represents the “totality of the Black Experience in America” it deserves a fabulous home and a great series of exhibits. I believe that I have the vision, mechanism and will to make this a reality. Please join me in accomplishing this goal.
Sample Pic from Guernseys.com
Sample Pic from Guernseys.com
Sample Pic from Guernseys.com
Sample Pic from Guernseys.com
Sample Pic from Guernseys.com
Sample Pic from Guernseys.com
WHY?
Besides the amount of money that can be made, as stated below, this auction represents a once in a lifetime opportunity to put Black History in a new light, and elevate the Black experience. We need to come together to create an amazing museum experience, celebrate our community show the world the power of crypto.
How to make money — This collection is a goldmine. I estimate (conservatively) that it can 50–100 million dollars over 10 years. For example a Broadway play makes much more money than the corresponding film, due to long term ticket sales. This is how the collection can generate millions. Here is how our DAO would do it:
“Getty like” Photo Repository — 20,000 artifacts need to be examined by historians and the stories behind each article need to be documented. This is best done by photographing each item professionally to allow for 3 dimensional examination and commenting. This can be easily accomplished in New York by contracting the services of BOOM.co and Getty Images. Getty Images has a recently launched HBCU collection. Once this is setup, one can set it up as paid a subscription service.
VR/ and AR Tours of the Collection with Kai XR — My FounderGym cohort mate Kai Frazier of KaiXR has an amazing business Kaixr.com that provides virtual history tours. They recently completed an exhibit called — Explore the Obama Portraits in the Metaverse with Artist Amy Sherald. It can be viewed here:
Her company can be contracted to create a similar journey for the Elizabeth Meaders Collection. Much of the journey for each of these artifacts is already covered in these videos,
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they can simply be redone for a VR audience. The product would be several VR tours to be sold to schools joining Kai XR’s current curriculum.
Traveling Museum Exhibits with Museum Arts — There are over 10 dedicated black history museums throughout the United States. A major long term revenue source for the Elizabeth Meaders Collection would be create a compelling set of traveling exhibits to shown in Museums around the world. Nobody makes more compelling in person exhibits than Museumarts.net in Dallas TX. In a call with them this past Tuesday, we ascertained that for less than $1 million dollars, we could throughly prepare several compelling traveling exhibits which could be sent and shipped worldwide. The profits from individual ticket sales from this venture would constitute the majority of long term cash positive income from owning this collection. Getting a hologram tour of Elizabeth describing her own collection would be amazing! This vision will not necessarily be achieved by owners who are simply seeking to hold the collection and wait for its value to increase. The collection needs to see the light of day and be in as many museums as is possible, as soon as possible.
NFT’s and the Metaverse with Flipkick or Bandwagon — One way to easily “flip this investment for 10X profit? — Put all 20,000 items for sale on Open Sea as NFT’s tied to their physical ownership. Some items like Muhammed Ali’s boots would be worth more than smaller innocuous items, but the market could determine that. A digital contract in the NFT could be structured to allow for physical exhibits in museum with a subsequent ownership transfer after 5 years. The owners of the NFT’s could openly trade the NFT’s and thus the ownership. This article explains it all — https://medium.com/@ArtifactNFT/bridging-nfts-to-physical-assets-e77051d064af. This can be done in conjunction with companies already doing this like —
https://www.flipkick.io
and
https://bandwagonfanclub.com
Pre-Selling the entire collection to the Smithsonian Museum — These goals are ambitious and achievable, however, the collections longevity is best preserved with the Smithsonian over the long term. A wise fiscal policy would be to “extract” short term value and then move the collection to the Smithsonian. To make this a realty, I would pre-sell the collection in two months after it is moved to professional storage, is properly insured and photographs are taken. This would provide a cash positive balance, an immediate profit hit, while preserving the spirit and goals of Elizabeth Meaders.
Token Sale and Community expansion on Republic/WeFunder/StartEngine. If the 100 members of DAO are able to purchase the Collection on March 15, then an additional $5 million dollars could be raised by selling part of the collection on Republic as a Regulation A crowdfund. This would allow an expansion of the community and provide community buy-in from the wider community because they could have ownership of the collection. The $5 million raise could be used to pay for the museum exhibits and provide an endowment to manage the collection. I personally am a micro-investor on all three platforms and graduated from Republic Academy Cohort1 (a 2 day workshop on crowdfunding in 2018). The most important thing would allow someone to feel a part of this collection by actually owning a piece of their own history. It goes beyond symbolic
The owners of this Collection would split the profits from the ideas above. According to ALTS.co the premier alternative investment website https://alts.co/insider/ Art and culture memorabilia collections are quite valuable.
A HYBRID DAO/COLLECTIVE -(or how to reach an auction deadline without massive gas fees)
https://syndicate.io
It’s not enough to dream. So, I made a Twitter account, founded a Discord channel and even made a TikTok video.
I got zero traction. Well about maybe a trickle.
Turns out it is not as easy as I anticipated it to be. (Twitter was a bust. TikTok only 950 views, (I guess its the algorithm. lol) .
Even getting crypto to get the governance — is exceedingly difficult. NY does not support crypto. No to Abra and quite a few wallets, lots of exchanges not working due to various reasons. Coinbase has a cap on ETH purchases and a multi-way timeline on approvals. When I did get the approvals, then the bank called to block the purchase. Lastly getting to Metamask did not hep cause you need ETH to pay the gas fees to buy ETH. — Sigh…With a little help. I got it done.
The importance of crypto cannot be understated. Without crypto, the entire fundraise is not really possible. Crypto provides votes via tokens and a framework for governance. We chose Syndicate.io. It allows anyone to create a Web3 investment club of up to 99 people by connecting their wallet. It presents the best user experience on the market today. This opens up the auction to everyone. To actually pay for the auction, I came up with a hybrid solution — starting a Collective using fiat currency on Open Collective. I would honestly use Open Collective for everything, but they do not have a DAO token structure yet.
OPEN COLLECTIVE equals transparency and refunds!
Syndicate.io + Open Collective for the win
Enter Open Collective. The plan. Buy a low cost token for governance on Syndicate.io. with a rider to pay for your share on OpenCollective.com. This token has no value and cannot be traded. The token owner is bound to pay $150,000 to Open Collective so we can cut a check to the auction house. No token purchase no vote on what to do with the collection.
This is a novel approach. It is necessary for transparency, taxes and security. Token based DAO’s are famous for governance breeches and asset theft. Forcing everyone in this “DAO”/Collective to use fiat currency for this auction solves a lot of problems. Open Collective allows the moneys to be returned in the event of failure. It ensures that each persons $150,000 will only be applied to the auction, legal fees, insurance and storage.
It’s not enough to win the auction. The collection needs to be stored and insured. Provisions must be made to account for those costs and must be taken out of the collected amount.
THE NUMBERS GAME: (Will $14,850,000 be enough? Maybe not.)
This auction starts at $1 million dollars. One would still have to transport, store and catalog the entire collection. A collection of this magnitude can only be stored in a few places to monetize it quickly. New York City is one of those places. Keeping the collection in NYC allows us to maximize the opportunities for creating content within the first year. The collection would not make any money for at least 1 year while all preparations are being made.
The collection has been professionally accessed at between $1,000,000 to $10,000,000. according to written estimates which have removed from Guernseys website. You can get the formal valuations directly from them, however, the auction has attracted massive interest, so their decision to withold the estimates are valid. Truthfully the collection is priceless. But the value is secondary to what one actually does with collection, IMHO.
If $10,000,000 is set aside for bid, it leaves $4,850,00 for taxes, storage, insurance and legal fees and special projects (NFT’s, Metaverse, Pictures, Exhibits). Taxes alone will run above $370,000 for the sale. Storage in NYC is estimated to run about $50,000 per year. A single Metaverse experience would cost approximately $100,000 for story creation and filming. Insurance comensurate with the value of the bid is not expensive, but is a real cost.
The scary thing is that we can be easily outbid at the top range of the $10 million dollar assessment.
If we bid $14,850,000, there is no room for taxes and we would “fail”…(I personally think feel like a win since It would prove that BLACK HISTORY is valuable!)
In the event we do not win the auction the moneys would be returned to each token’s holder $150,000 would be returned immediately.
The money to pay the auction house has to be there on March 14 allow us to formally bid, and the reserve is necessary to insure, move and store this collection properly. Preparing the exhibits will take 6–12 months and the collective will need time to decide next steps and organizational structure.
A team would have to be hired to execute any ideas outside of the ones state above.
I would love to be apart of that team. — Hopefully I can be kept on the project!
The Fight to Govern a DAO
The NY Times article below describes how regulating a DAO has become is increasingly hard. — https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/08/us/politics/cryptocurrency-dao.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage§ion=Technology
I only thought of doing this because of Constitution DAO. Just winning would be amazing and proof that this could actually work. I am hopeful that the stakeholders would fulfill the spirit and mission of Elizabeth Meaders in taking care of the collection.
So Internet! Do your thing!
I was going to say “Now go to Syndicate.io with your USD to buy your token now for 0.1 ETH and proceed to OpenCollective.com with your $150,000 for each token. You will have to accept the legally terms — which simply means you will pay for our lawyer to formulate the formal entity — BUT I ran into A ROADBLOCK — See chapter 2
[*Note if you try to go and find our Token it will not be available. See the disclaimer above. The DAO is actually an investment group]