Ask Christopher Gulliver about his background in tech and he’ll tell you he is a serial entrepreneur.
“I really enjoy creating things that solve people’s problems,” he said. “My entire background has been pretty much wholly user focused.”
For the first decade of his career, Christopher worked for some of his favorite entertainment software companies, including Midway Games; id Software; and Disney. IPs he worked on include Marvel, “Toy Story,” Mickey Mouse, Call of Duty, and James Bond.
“You don’t get much more user-focused than video games.” Christopher observed.
In the process, Christopher learned a lot by concentrating as an entrepreneur on what matters most: product creation, development, and delivering the product to market.
“This gave me a front-row seat to see how to build software at scale, with millions of passionate customers,” Christopher said. “I saw what worked, what didn’t, and which technology stacks were used.
“I got to see how communities were managed; how quality was guaranteed; how to run a team into the ground; and how to manage teams effectively without burning them out. I also learned how determined and passionate people can pull off what seems like impossible results.”
This work helped propel the launch of Christopher’s own company, Lonch.
The startup is a social marketplace that generates royalties for users who trade insight, skills, and connections. Lonch provides what amounts to digital office space that serves as a catalyst for global contributors looking to connect and collaborate. Royalties create a democratic and merit-based, collaborative ecosystem that encourages innovation and lowers barriers for all innovators, regardless of their net worth.
“This concept, Lonch, has been something that’s been on my mind over the last 20 years or so, when my brother and I noticed the potential for a platform like this.” Christopher reflected. “I’ve been waiting for the right technologies to come along, and the right opportunity, the right timing to build this thing out. I have put a lot of energy and effort into it.”
The flagship feature of Lonch is its crowd investment platform.
This function allows anyone to contribute skills, create, validate, and launch innovative products with negligible upfront costs. Infrastructure and tools provided to startups reduce risk and uncertainty for democratic policies, tokenization, and federated systems.
Lonch leverages Web3 technologies to build a more traditional Web2 solution. Christopher calls the approach “Web2.5.”
The platform employs a privately provisioned blockchain and smart contracts to tokenize individual user contributions in the form of project-specific royalty tokens. These tokens represent royalties to be paid to the token bearer. Royalty tokens can be sold directly to users and exchanged in a token marketplace.
Christopher’s Web2.5 solution affords the best of both worlds: a distributed source of truth, the security of both a distributed and centralized solution, trust, and transparency. It also provides a springboard to open the gates to Web3. Lonch uses Web3 and AI technology, but is not a blockchain company.
“Yes, we use blockchain,” Christopher said. “But that’s limited to taking the good parts of Web3.”
Future plans for Lonch include a formal launch in 2024. But the release of its first mobile app prototype could come as soon as the end of 2023; with the Lonch web experience to be unveiled later.
The entrepreneurial path that Christopher took to community building can be traced back to when he was a kid, killing time in his parents’ office and finding solace in a typewriter.
“Like any kid, I was always bored,” he said. “So using the typewriter, I tried to figure out how to build a community of people who wanted to join a ninja club. I was big into Ninja Turtles at the time. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it—I was just trying to get people involved. That was one of my first, ‘dipping my toes’ moments in community building.”
Another aspiration Christopher had was to start a company.
“Something that was going to change the world in some meaningful way,” he said.
That’s what led Christopher to develop Lonch, which he says “is kind of a paradigm shift of how we work, how we perceive work as people who are contributing to projects.”
Chris detailed how work right now basically consists of a 9-to-5 job secured after obtaining a college degree.
“You go out into the workspace, you put your time in and you get that paycheck,” he said. “But if you aren’t consistently delivering, then you don’t get that money. Maybe you lose your job, or maybe you are killing it, but the company has a downturn and you still lose your job.
“Lonch is this change in this concept of ownership and risk. We want you to be able to have real value and real ownership of what you’re contributing. And as a result, we also want you to get that back. If you did something and that something had a material impact on the product, then it seems fair that you should get some sort of royalty.”
Christopher also wants to ease the process of launching a startup. Instead of spending time with logistics—filling out paperwork and finding partners and investors—he designed Lonch so accessibility takes priority over everything else.
As far as acquiring tokens is concerned, whoever in the Lonch community pitches in, and earns royalty tokens (think of these as fancy IOUs), will maintain the value of the token—when it increases, for example—even after they stop contributing.
If the product is successful, the individual continues to receive periodic payouts from the royalty tokens held. Conversely, in a traditional business, those paychecks would have stopped when the employee left the company. The Lonch strategy enables people to build investment portfolios based on how they contributed ideas. This enables them to take breaks without worrying about going bankrupt; it gives people freedom.
Lonch also understands that not every startup idea is going to generate a billion dollars. If it generates $5M, and five people worked on it, that’s a solid return of $1M a head. But no product with a $5M lifetime value would ever be funded in the current market.
“We’re changing the way the world does business,” Christopher said. “We’re changing the way we think about that standard process of raising capital. I see Lonch as an off-ramp from traditional business, a paradigm shift that is imminent.”
And Christopher sees trust as a critical component of the digital age.
“We want to take the parts of Web3 that solve real problems,” he said, “and bring them into our platform, so we have that transparency, the ability to audit the system and make sure that everything is on the up-and-up. Unlike any other social platform, we also validate that the users are who they say they are.”
Lonch is building its early adopter community by incentivizing the recruitment of the first 150,000 validated users through an affiliate bounty program. That program is potentially worth up to $30M over the next 10 years.
“The community is the biggest part here,” Christopher said. “Everything we’ve pitched is a tool to enable people who can connect and work together.
“But we need to get those people, who believe in our vision, to join our platform. Just like everything else on Lonch, it’s the community that does the hard work and we believe they should see rewards proportional to their contributions.”
Visit lonch.io to learn more.
