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Introduction to Investment Clubs

Investment Clubs are groups of people who come together to pool capital, share ideas, and invest collaboratively across various asset classes. Investment clubs provide a simple, cost effective vehicle for investor communities and new fund managers to build and activate networks.

Unknown to many average investors, Investment Clubs have existed for centuries (Wikipedia). The most popular investment club that most people will recognize is Jim Cramer on CNBC. However, investment clubs have largely been untapped as a reliable capital formation tool in the 21st Century, due to the following two reasons.

  1. Lack of proper incentives; cannot charge any fees in the US except for adminstrative expenses
  2. No standard operational approach, software-defined framework, or back office provider

Types of Investment Clubs​

In summary, there are two types of investment clubs that the SEC recognizes and chooses not to regulate - the difference lies in how the capital is deployed:

Capital Pooling Clubs​

Investors pool their capital together into a central location which enables collective decision making opportunities.

  • This allows investors to deploy "wisdom of the crowd" strategies, rather than relying on 1-2 General Partners or Managers to make decisions on behalf of the investors. Investors maintain partial decision control over their capital on a capital-weighted basis.
  • Obvious Web3 Use Case: it's possible to tokenize the profit interests of the investment club entity to create liquidity

Non-Capital Pooling Clubs​

The club is typically managed by a gatekeeper (typically with an annual subscription or one-time membership fee).

  • Investors in these types of clubs directly make their own capital decisions, and typically join the club for access to higher quality investment opportunities. Investors maintain full decision control over their capital.
  • Obvious Web3 Use Case: NFTs generally make sense to gate access to the community.

Characteristics of Investment Clubs​

Most investment clubs are member-driven, invite-only, and operated democratically. In the U.S., they're generally unregulated by the SEC if they stay under 100 members, don't charge carried interest, and require all members to participate in decision-making.

Current Challenges​

Investment clubs are hard to set up, legally ambiguous, and built with either legacy systems or untested open source code:

  • Access is gated: Venture opportunities are often reserved for insiders. Emerging investors and operators are locked out.
  • Structures are outdated: Most emerging managers use traditional SPVs which are slow, costly, and not designed for technology-native communities.
  • Liquidity is non-existent: Early-stage VC locks capital for years with little to no flexibility or secondary market.
  • Coordination is messy: Founders, investors, and operators lack efficient tools to collaborate, track investments, and scale networks.
  • Transparency is missing: Critical investment data is siloed or opaque, leaving members with little visibility into how decisions are made.

History of Web3 Community Driven Investing​

Since the early days of digital assets, investors have leaned on one-another to further their own understanding of this nascent, fast-evolving asset class.

Over the years, there have been many attempts at creating community driven investing organizations, with very few success stories. As a first mover in 2017-2018, MetaCartel set the gold standard for what a decentralized venture organization could look like, and also gave birth to the first Fund of Funds focused on investment DAOs, Hydra Ventures. In 2021, Syndicate.io pioneered on-chain infrastructure for investment clubs, providing the bare bones toolkit for Venture DAOs, but it lacked a streamlined application layer for users.

Why Most Venture DAOs Failed​

Besides a small handful of standouts, the Venture DAO space has largely suffered due to:

  • Weakening of the overall DAO narrative: Community driven businesses were forced to shift to sustainable, cash flowing business models.
  • Lack of reliable software infrastructure: With Syndicate.io exiting the space in 2023.
  • Lack of clarity around federal crypto regulations: Pushing DAO frameworks off-shore.
  • Voter Apathy: It isn't simple, nor easy, for no-coiners to stay engaged due to market-wide UX barriers related to voting.
  • Coordination Issues: It is difficult to coordinate and incentivize work in a decentralized manner, especially when the entire team is part-time.

Future of Community Driven Investing​

The rate of technology innovation has increased by orders of magnitude, making community driven investing more attractive, and easier to accomplish. In 2025, there are various tailwinds that support the investment club narrative, including:

  • US crypto regulation outlook appears extremely favorable and innovation-friendly
    • Potential for looming change in accreditation laws helps streamline retail participation in private markets
  • AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is already here to help solve voter apathy and coordination issues by creating frictionless and engaging participation avenues that integrate with crypto rails
    • As web3 and AI technologies begin to work together, investing communities and founders can begin to realize emergent value that is greater than the sum of the individual parts
    • Investment clubs can be fully or partially managed by AGI itself; a notable example is ai16z
  • Real World Assets (RWA) As more exotic traditional assets start to move on chain, this will create a new market for investment clubs to thrive in other asset classes beyond startup investing

Fish Network's Investment Club Model​

Fish Network brings a new sustainable model to community driven early stage investing, while providing the necessary services required to scale seed stage startups. This is achieved through a dual-entity investment club model. Fish Schools pool capital as a Capital Pooling Investment Club, while Fish Shoals coordinate non-investment activities like social events, value-add services, and more through a Non-Capital Pooling Investment Club, also known as a Service DAO. This segregation of P&Ls between group investments and services monetization streamlines community coordination efforts, and offers emerging managers a system and framework to bootstrap an investor ecosystem without reliance on traditional management fees. Reputation is quantified using Fish Points, and transferred across the dual entity structure to incentivize good behavior and penalize non-performance.

Our investor ecosystem structure fosters a transparent, community-driven model that rewards long-term alignment over short-term liquidity. The Fish School members vote to invest in high-potential startups, splitting the upside between organizers and members, and rewarding contributions through either mutually agreed upon, at-cost compensation or Fish reputation points.

"Though tempting, trying to time the market is a loser's game. $10,000 continuously invested in the market over the past 20 years grew to $63,636. If you missed just the best 30 days, your investment was reduced to $11,484."

- Christopher Dixon, General Partner at a16z

By enabling Dollar Cost Averaging(DCA) built into our Fish Network platform, we enable retail investors in private markets to pool capital together to achieve sufficient diversification and build durable portfolios. We provide a new framework for early stage investing; one that invites collaboration over gatekeeping, and active participation over passive speculation.

Key Features​

Service DAO Principles: Modularized roles, transparent governance, and cash flowing verticals integrated into the community to provide unmatched support for founders.

Community-first: A decentralized LLC where every member can build an investment track record, build a lean team as an emerging manager, and help shape the Web3 / AI startup ecosystem.

Web3-Native: On-chain infrastructure for transparency, speed, lower operational cost, and global accessibility.

Compliance-Ready: Structured from the ground up to meet U.S. legal and tax requirements.

Building Towards Liquid Venture: Creating tools to allow investors diversified venture exposure with liquidity optionality.

For more information about Fish Network and how to participate, visit our documentation or contact the team at fish@fishnetwork.co.