Daniel Jacobs and the price of believing in someone

The first person to invest in Daniel Jacobs’s potential did not ask for equity. He was a high-school wrestling coach, and the investment was a sentence. Jacobs remembers arriving on his first day and announcing that he intended to become a state champion. The coach told him he believed in him. Jacobs, unused to that response, looked for a reason to doubt it. Then he started doing the work.

In his telling, extra running, early arrivals, and repeated practice followed. So did state and age-group national championships. Later, an economics class left him puzzling over a mismatch: the encouragement that had changed his life had involved no financial transaction. Where, exactly, did that value appear?

Today Jacobs is based in Boulder and leads Thrive Protocol, a business concerned with connecting crypto ecosystem funding to verified contributions. His route there includes philanthropic technology, employee learning, and a venture whose product could melt. Across those changes, he keeps returning to the difficulty of making useful human effort visible.

A business you could eat

In 2012, Jacobs tried crowdfunding a chocolate company called Placebo Effect. He was living in Peru with his Peruvian fiancée while they waited for permission for her to enter the United States. He described having debt, an internet connection, and little money for the equipment a chocolate business would require.

The proposed bars were organic and fair-trade, stamped with encouraging words. He and his wife wrote more than 2,700 personal notes asking people to contribute. Many recipients never replied; others declined. The forty-day campaign reached its goal on its final day, raising $12,300 from 195 people.

Jacobs later identified this venture as the roots of Avanoo. The small sums and individual messages matter to the story: he had to persuade people who knew his earlier successes to support an unfamiliar experiment. A five-dollar chocolate bar is an unusually tangible way to explain a founder’s vision. It also requires an actual chocolate bar.

Three minutes to make a value visible

Avanoo brought Jacobs into a different kind of persuasion: helping employees connect with their work. His cofounder, Prosper Nwankpa, had attended Williams College with him. Jacobs’s college years ran from 2000 to 2004. A later speaking biography described his degree as Leadership. The partnership put a longstanding personal connection inside a company concerned with how people learn and act together.

Avanoo’s investor description outlined a combination of assessments, micro-learning, and predictive analytics. The learning arrived in daily three-minute videos, using storytelling to help employees adopt behaviors and strengthen workplace culture. Cisco, Citibank, and Toyota appeared among its named customers. The format was short enough to fit into a working day, with a more demanding ambition behind it: make learning affect what people actually do.

Jacobs had already founded Everywun before Avanoo. His background crossed organizations with philanthropic purposes and the practical business of building technology. That history helps explain his choice of subject. Culture, for him, was connected to performance, rather than confined to the agreeable words companies use to describe themselves.

In a 2019 conversation about leadership, he argued that continual technological change was weakening familiar competitive advantages. Innovations could be copied; the employees and cultures producing them deserved attention. His advice to executives centered on recognizing what was particular about the people in front of them. A borrowed roadmap could miss the very qualities a leader hoped to develop.

He also described communication as something leaders must judge by its reception. If employees heard something different from what the chief executive intended, the executive had work to do. Ask for feedback. Refine the message. A speech does not become clear merely because the speaker has finished delivering it. For someone who sells the usefulness of stories, that is a necessary discipline.

One episode Jacobs recounted makes the idea concrete. During a conversation about company values, he asked a chief executive for an example of integrity involving someone in the room. The executive described a woman who had given a deserving colleague the spotlight when she could have claimed recognition herself. He had subsequently promoted her.

The story supplied what the abstract word could not: an action people could picture and a consequence they could understand. Jacobs encouraged the executive to share it with employees, then find another example the following month. The method depended on attention. Someone had to notice the behavior before a story could carry it through the company.

By 2020, Avanoo had reached No. 683 on the Inc. 5000. That same year, Jacobs was presenting to HR professionals about storytelling and business outcomes. His work had found an audience among people whose daily problem was making organizational intentions survive contact with actual colleagues.

The grant must answer a question

When Jacobs publicly described ThriveCoin’s work in 2022, the problems were recognizably human, even if the vocabulary had changed. Decentralized communities needed people to contribute. Members needed to see opportunities, understand how contributions would be evaluated, and receive rewards for their efforts.

A DAO, or decentralized autonomous organization, gathers people around shared rules and collective decisions. The arrangement can let someone contribute from far away without joining a conventional employer. It still needs to answer a conventional question: how does useful work get paid for? Jacobs’s announcement described infrastructure intended to help communities validate and reward contributions at scale.

In January 2023, he appeared on the Making Bank podcast as ThriveCoin’s CEO and a founding member. The conversation covered recognizing contributions, onboarding communities, and the project’s use at BanklessDAO. The emphasis was on thanking people for meaningful participation. His older concern with recognition now had a community treasury attached.

His writing about crypto’s opportunities also examined the distance between decentralized ideals and funding practice. Committees, influential voters, and restrictive agreements could leave builders navigating something that felt much like familiar bureaucracy. Jacobs argued that communities needed better ways to put their members to work and compensate them. The ability to organize people across borders was only part of the job.

By June 2025, he was explaining a more specific funding model in a public Horizen discussion. Ecosystems would agree on the results they wanted. Those results might concern users, transaction volume, revenue, governance participation, or a new use case. Thrive would connect funding to evidence that the agreed value had been delivered.

“We don’t define ‘success’, we think in terms of value.”

Daniel Jacobs, June 2025

The distinction gives each ecosystem a role in choosing what matters. A single universal scoreboard could reward a project for an impressive number that did little for the community paying it. Jacobs described working with ecosystems to set their own performance measures. Verification then had a specific question to answer.

Another conversation that June explored the machinery behind the checking. Jacobs discussed expert reviewers and AI agents, the incentives for reviewers, and questions of accuracy. Funding decisions require judgment as well as a payment mechanism. Adding automation makes the quality of that judgment a continuing concern, particularly when contributions differ in form and complexity.

A program announced in July 2025 put a particular metric at the center. Thrive would administer three million OP tokens over twelve months in a Base-sponsored initiative, distributing 750,000 quarterly. It targeted projects capable of generating transaction volume on Base, including trading interfaces and bots. The announcement tied awards to verified volume.

That choice makes the design legible. Builders know the result the program seeks; the program has something to check. It also makes the choice of metric consequential. Transaction volume is a specified outcome, with its own meaning and limits. The people allocating the capital must decide that it represents the kind of activity they want to encourage.

What the points taught him

In November 2025, Jacobs wrote about an earlier experimental points program. Thousands had participated, and some had found ways to farm points. He treated the experiment as information for designing the next version. The planned Season 1 would recognize different kinds of contribution, including building projects, reviewing signals, and creating community understanding.

Points offer a neat illustration of the difficulty that follows any reward system. People respond to rules. Some produce the intended behavior; others locate the cheapest route to the reward. Jacobs’s account acknowledged that gap. The next design had to learn from what participants actually did, including behavior the initial framework had made possible.

The work continued into February 2026, when ZenChain announced an ecosystem growth partnership with Thrive. The stated plans involved supporting builders and applications and expanding participation. Jacobs described the problem in a compact sentence:

“In the absence of signal, capital follows noise.”

Daniel Jacobs, February 2026

There is also a domestic version of his thinking. In an earlier essay about his daughter learning to walk, Jacobs connected parenting with leadership. Supporting someone required both room to try and practical preparation: pillows, covered outlets, and difficult conversations. The aspiration to help people thrive came with ordinary work and a willingness to hear what they needed.

That combination gives his career its continuity. His companies have changed, and the tools have changed with them. Stories, contribution records, reviewers, and payments each attempt to make something visible enough for other people to respond. The question remains close to the person doing the work: what did you contribute, who benefited, and how will anyone recognize it?

A coach could answer with encouragement. A community allocating money needs agreed conditions and evidence too. Jacobs’s task is to carry the generosity of that first response into a system that can make decisions repeatedly. Belief can begin the relationship. The work that follows gives it something to stand on.