Harmony Meetups SF Event Proposal

Community Events
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Name of Event/Project

[Web 3 Crypto Startups] (https://www.meetup.com/Web3CryptoStartups/) x Harmony

Who are we

We run a thriving and rapidly growing San Francisco-based crypto community of ~900+ members, including highly talented creators, builders, developers, and startup founders.

Currently, we’re doing two types of events. The first is our in-person bi-weekly crypto mixers at the Press Club, averaging 100+ attendees strong. In addition, we bring world-renowned entrepreneurs (e.g., Product Lead @ Uniswap, CEO & Founder @ Gitcoin, Co-founder & COO @ Harmony, and more) to talk to our community via virtual online meetups also bi-weekly.

Proposal overview

We’ve held both an online event and an in-person event with Li Jiang. Based on the excitement of the SF web3 community, we’d like to build out the local ecosystem further in partnership with Harmony!

We plan to do this through four main event types:

Online events:

We currently have online webinars with an ongoing series of speakers covering topics in web3 (e.g., DeFi, DAOs). We plan to add Harmony branding and helpful links to our events with additional funding.

In-person mixers:

The current venue we use only has the capacity for around 100 people. We want to scale these events to accommodate more significant crowds. Also, we believe that we are products of our environment, and our community takes this to heart. So we choose design-forward venues and sustainable spaces that inspire an experience where creativity flows freely, and deeper human connections are made.

We’ll also provide Harmony speakers like Li and others from the community with a 5-minute slot to introduce the ecosystem to our attendees. These will be supplemented with private dinners for folks in our community who are active supporters (e.g., promote our events or create opportunities for other community members).

Job Fairs

We want to provide an in-person space for web3 folks in SF to meet protocols, startups, and established companies looking for talent. We plan to book an event space, secure partners from across the ecosystem, and match them with members of our community. This can also be accompanied by helpful panel talks on topics like how to transition to web3 or DAO-based employment etc.

Special dinners:

We also plan to host highly curated dinners for the most accomplished builders and thought leaders in our community to meet each other and spark ideas. While these folks will initially be selected through attendance at our mixers, we also plan to invite other high-profile web3 folks (e.g., VCs, founders, etc.) along with a suitable representative from Harmony.

Proposal ask

Funding amount requested

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Breakdown of line items:

Photographer: We plan to hire a professional photographer for our in-person events to give our community a higher-end experience.

Canopy events (10 events): we’ve identified the Canopy event venue in SF as our preferred vendor for our larger, speaker-based events (>100 people capacity). The fee also includes food and drink. These events will also include Harmony branding and access for recruiters/biz dev representatives.

Press club mixer (10 events): this is our venue for more casual get-togethers and networking events. These events will also include Harmony branding and access for recruiters/biz dev representatives.

Executive dinners (1 event): these are our highest-end events for the movers and shakers in web3. We’d like Harmony to have a seat at these events

Speaker gifts: we host many speakers across our online and in-person events, and would like to provide some tchotkes to thank them for helping our community

Private community dinners (3): we will hold smaller informal dinners for 10-15 members of our community to get to know them better. We also see this as a crucial way to build camaraderie, as we rely on entirely volunteer labor to keep this community going! We’d like Harmony to have a seat at these events

Marketing: we plan to bring on an external marketing consultant to help us build out a consistent brand image and social media marketing plan. This will help us expand our community and ultimately bring more people into web3.

Grant proposal: we’d like to give projects from our community support through grant funding in partnership with Harmony (structured as 10 x $10k grants).

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reviewing with @ElixirofLife!

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just wanted to confirm that there’s 25 in person events?

  • 10 canopy
  • 10 mixer
  • 1 executive dinner
  • 3 community dinners
  • 1 job fair

and 10 online events?

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Reviewing the proposal now :+1:

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Hi Li- that’s correct!

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Hello @Naman_Gupta and thanks for the proposal! I have a few questions and would love learn more.

  • How many attendees do we anticipate for each type of event (ie Mixer = 50 attendees, Job Fair = 100 attendees, etc.)?

  • Are there any photos you can share here, with the community, showing a successful event?

  • Can you share some information on the team behind these events, their experience, etc.?

This sounds quite promising and like a series of events that could drive awareness to Harmony while providing attendees with useful information and resources. I also personally love the idea of a Web3 job fair and am eager to know more about any past job fairs you might have held.

Thanks Naman and I’m looking forward to hearing more about what you and your colleagues have going on here!

-Rachel

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Also, I’m hoping you can clarify a bit more on the grant funding amount. Can you tell us if any milestones or objectives are tied to these 10x $10K grants? How are the recipients determined and are they expected to participate in the Harmony ecosystem?

Thanks again!

-Rachel

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Hi Rachel- absolutely!

  1. For mixers/canopy events, we typically expect 80-100 attendees. It’s hard to say in advance how large the job fair is, but I’d estimate ~200 (assuming a 20% conversion from our community of ~900 and at least 15 companies with 2 recruiters each). Executive dinners and community dinners are each ~10-15 attendees. Finally, online events are typically around 50-60 attendees, although we expect this number to increase as we put in place marketing resources
  2. Here’s a picture from our mixer of 2/14 (apologies for the dark lighting! This is a snapshot of about half of the crowd in attendance)
    2_14_mixer
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  3. Our core team consists of three members: myself, Josh Hurst, and Alex Horne. For myself, I spearhead crypto gaming at 2K Games (the publisher of NBA 2K, Bioshock etc.), and have led the planning for our 10+ events to date. Josh has done the entire end-to-end process before through his other 2 groups, Cloud Native @Scale, and AI Startups (now deactivated). Alex has domain knowledge of DeFi through his day job at HSBC, and has hosted virtual events for us this year.
  4. On job fairs: we have been facilitating jobs for our community virtually for some time now (through introductions or spotlighting recruiters at our event). We’d like to scale this up by using a venue to host web3 protocols in the Bay Area, and provide a Schelling point for all web3-adjacent folks to come find jobs!
  5. On grants: we would structure these grants using the milestones Harmony typically adopts (e.g., allocation %'s based on testnet deployment, mainnet deployment, and # of user thresholds). We would assess recipients based on their contributions to our community to that point, as well as from conversations with our industry & VC partners on promising founders that they meet at our events.
  6. Finally, while we certainly would promote Harmony as a platform to build on, something like an exclusivity arrangement cuts against the ethos for our community. Instead, we’d likely adopt an arrangement for windowing/sequencing of protocol deployment.

Naman

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Great @Naman_Gupta!

Thank you for taking the time to respond and provide the requested details.
It sounds like you have a solid & qualified team to efficiently roll out this project!

We have reviewed and determined that this proposal is aligned with our event guidelines & we support the funding of this proposal :+1: We just ask that you clarify how you propose to determine grantees & what is the grantee recipient criteria (How will they bring value to the ecosystem?)

Once we have the grantee criteria clarification, we are gonna go ahead and approve this proposal & proceed with funding.

Thank you again @Naman_Gupta, and I look forward to seeing your contributions to our community!
:blue_heart:

-Rachel

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Hi Rachel,

That sounds great- thanks so much! On grantee recipient criteria: we plan to assess this first in partnership with the web3 experts in our group, and then more broadly across our community through voting.
In general, given the focus of our community, we will prioritize grant-giving to projects that seek to improve the overall onboarding process into web3 and further extend the scale/scope of the community. For example, we’d like to support content creators focused on entry to intermediate-level web3 topics as well as technical improvements to product UI/UX.

Hope this helps!

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Hi @ElixirofLife ! Just wanted to follow up here- any other information I could provide?
Naman

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Hi there @Naman_Gupta!

After clarifying your grantee criteria, I just want to be sure that I understand: When you say “onboarding into Web3”, are you referring to new developers coming into the space, or Web2 users coming into the space (those unfamiliar to Web3), or both?

Just curious what this will look like for us, and would like to gain more insight to the process.

Thank you again for taking the time to respond. Your proposal has been approved and I have directly messaged you a link to our funding form via Telegram. Please fill it out when you get the chance so we can proceed with funding this proposal!

We look forward to seeing what you all accomplish!
Sincerely,

Rachel

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Hi Rachel,

That’s right! We want to facilitate both new developers (technical folks) as well as new users (probably non-technical). To help contextualize the latter: we want to help support educational resources, including podcasts, newsletters, videos, or other forms of support

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we’ve funded the $50k for 25 events portion. Harmony Blockchain Explorer

for the 10 grantees - could you write out their backgrounds like dropout dao did here: Harmony X Dropout DAO Grant Recipient Announcement!

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Thank you @ElixirofLife and @lij ! We’re working on getting these finalized now.
Naman

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@ElixirofLife & @lij : grant funding announcement is up here. Thank you again for supporting us!

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How did it go @Naman_Gupta ? Share some tweets, photos, links, decks, etc. Would love to hear how this turned out. If you have metrics which you’ve measured, even better!

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Hey @Jacksteroo,
Lots of good news to report. Some high-level bullets on what we’ve accomplished so far:

  • Held our first speaker event with Formfunction in early April (nearly ~60 attendees). Here’s a link to some photos of the event.
  • We are nearing completion of our branding + platform work (e.g., websites). Here’s an example of what our final vision will look like
  • We held 2 executive dinners with high-quality people in SF, with a third scheduled for late May.
  • We’ve opened our chapter in Singapore with 2 events done already. We’re also in advanced stages of finalizing a chapter in NYC. [Note: actual member count in SG is larger as that geography primarily uses Luma for RSVPs).

Looking forward, we plan to have 2 events a month (speaker + mixer) throughout the remainder of the summer and into the fall. We’re also working on some of the other deliverables like a job fair and career events, and hope to have more updates there soon. Here’s a link to our page with upcoming events.

Here are some tweets from our community:
Mixer

Thank you again for all of the support to the Harmony community!
Naman