This is pretty perverse - strangely enough we're not begging voluntarily or through greed. I'm not sure the fact that we need to pay our rent should turn you off the protocol...
It's not the fact that you need to "pay rent", it's your approach to doing it. As it stands now, I actually quite like the sound of Matrix on paper but I can't present it to my CTO as an alternative to our current comms platform if the first thing he's going to see is begging - it makes it look like the project is dying.
There's obviously a smart team behind this, and the protocol obviously has a lot of potential - I'm positive there are other ways you could fund this.