Thanks to Harmony’s extremely generous support, we were given the opportunity to allocate 10 x $10k grants for creators and builders growing the audience for Harmony & crypto. In a space where experience is measured in months rather than years, we believe communities like ours and Harmony’s are crucial to achieving the promise of web3 for everyone. Like Dropout DAO’s announcement, we’ve included the bios of our recipients, as well as what they’ll be building with the grant content. The grantees below collectively total to 10 discrete grants of $10k each.
Geographic Expansion
Through our online events, we’ve realized that the desire to learn about web3 spans continents and national boundaries. While we began as a group for the Bay Area community, there’s so much more value to give in web3 by leveraging our run book globally with talented partners. As a result, we’ve identified 5 strategic cities and initial partners to form the bedrock of a truly global web3 community.
- London: Peta Cooper, senior content manager @ Cointelegraph
- Singapore: Dev Bahl, founder at Galaxy Guild
- New Delhi: Arnav Bharadwaj, Social Media Strategist @ Cointelegraph
- Tel Aviv: Matan Field
- New York: Allen Yang
All of these amazing partners have also demonstrated their quality and commitment to our community. Peta has been an absolute bedrock for our in-person events, serving as a greeter and making new members more comfortable. Dev has been a dynamo across multiple areas and exceedingly entrepreneurial: he’s already setting up a group in Singapore! Arnav reached out to us after learning about the community through Peta, and Matan has already spoken to our audience on DAOs. We’re excited to provide them with the initial funding needed to secure venues, market events, and make sure new members in our community have a great time.
Content Creation
Founder’s School:
While there’s plenty of educational material out there on broad web3 topics, we want to focus on the founder’s journey. What is the difference between web2 and web3 entrepreneurship? How do I think about incorporation, on-ramps and off-ramps, multisigs, community management, and a whole host of other topics?
Luckily, we were introduced to Arjita Sethi and Anshul Dhawan, two incredible teachers who have been teaching folks about the founder’s journey for years through New Founder School. They already have about ~20% of their class intake focused on web3, and we’d like to help increase that percentage even more! Grant funding will go to building out a suite of web3-specific founder content, additional programming, and internship/career opportunities for program opportunities.
Content Creation:
In our community, we’ve heard over and over that people want to “learn in public”: here’s a way to do this. Mandee, a community member, will build out multiple pieces of content across our community, including:
- Podcasts
- Telegram/Discord
- Newsletter
- Videos
- Twitter Spaces/audio
The content will be informed by experts in our community, but created with beginners and intermediate folks in web3. The goal is to create more “accessible” content that might be attractive across different platforms and get new people interested in crypto and Harmony.
Additional services for our community
We also want to expand the scope of services that we provide to our community. Given our focus on promoting web3 entrepreneurship, we’ve identified three products that will further our mission.
Job Board:
We want to help people make a transition into full-time employment at a web3-native company. However, the search process, especially for someone new to the space, can be intimidating and confusing. Moreover, the recruiting process for a web3-native company can be difficult: how do you figure out the talent in web2 that might want to jump to web3? We want to make that process easier by introducing a more curated and customized approach to the web3 job search. For members in each of our locations, we will only list jobs from those that we know are with good stewards of the community. If there are any potential matches, we’ll make the warm introductions between recruiter and applicant. This will be built out with Pallet, and the front end will be constructed by Shoumik Dabir.
Co-founder Search:
At this point, our founding team collectively has 5-10 chats per week with potential founders who just need that one additional co-founder to make the jump to entrepreneurship. However, as our group grows, we want to scale this service to a global community.
The prototype for this service at scale looks something like Cambrian Fintech’s service for the tradfi/fintech community. We plan to group applicants into quarterly cohorts after a screening process. These folks will receive founder programming through our group & special networking sessions to help make the right connections. Additionally, we will work with interested VCs and investors who would like to fund the ideas and teams that come out of our program. This will be developed in partnership with Arjita Sethi and Anshul Dhawan.
Partnership with Stanford/UC Berkeley:
Finally, we will give grant funding to build out further student programming at Stanford and Berkeley. This will include special events, recruiting sessions for Bay Area companies, and networking sessions to find co-founders or engineers. In this, we will work with Dale Satre and Bhayve Ketan
