On November 15, Peter Wang posted a message seeking ideas for new incubators and funds to support experimental projects built on the burgeoning Bluesky/AT protocol ecosystem. Four weeks later, Skyseed showed up with an initial commitment of $1 million.
The speed of this turnaround is underlined by the fact that the fund doesn't even have a website yet (although it does have a Bluesky profile), but it does prove a few things. People who abandoned X (nee Twitter). But by starting fresh with a new social platform built on an open, decentralized network like AT Protocol, you can avoid the ad-driven walled gardens that permeate social networking today. There is also an almost concrete hope that it might be possible.
“The majority of Facebook's revenue comes from advertising. All major centralized social media companies are advertising companies, which means they trade for traffic and user attention,” Wang said in an interview with TechCrunch this week. spoke. “The main difference between open and closed protocols is that closed protocols will never tolerate the presence of applications that take away the graph's content and draw the user's attention away from its properties.”
decentralized web
Wang is the co-founder of Anaconda, a company based on the eponymous open source Python and R distribution that helps data scientists build, test, and deploy all their data-driven projects, and is a top AI leader. and Head of Innovation, former CEO.
Separately, Wang is also an avid supporter of the decentralized web, providing financial support to projects such as Blue Link Labs, which developed Beaker, a peer-to-peer open source web browser. Official support for Beaker will end in 2022, and its creator, Paul Frazee, joined Bluesky as a “protocol engineer” and officially became CTO in April.
And this groundwork on Beaker was beneficial to Bluesky. “While the Beaker project is officially nearing its end, the core of Beaker remains with Bluesky,” Frazee wrote in a post announcing Beaker's demise. “We hope that our efforts will make Mr. Beaker's final moments a little less painful in the long run.”
Fast forward to today, and Wang has extended his support for decentralization to formal seed funds. “I've done angel investing before, but this is my first time creating a fund and being responsible for other people's money,” Wang said. “I was funding Paul.” [Frazee] And his team has been working for years. They tried various things to build decentralized web technologies with moderate to low success. But I think all these lessons learned are; [Bluesky] Design, protocols and apps. ”
The decentralized web is by no means a new concept, but what it lacks is a significant number of people drawn to something like the AT protocol. The AT Protocol is an open source, open standards-based framework that promises features that allow users to retain ownership of their content. Delete your data and migrate to other platforms on the protocol.
“There are people who have been part of the decentralized web community for a long time and have been looking forward to this moment,” Wang said. “We had a lot of good ideas. We just didn't have users. Now we have users.”
“Like the Internet in 1996”
After posting a call for ideas in mid-November, Wang said he was flooded with people seeking suggestions, and said the enthusiasm reminded him of the Internet in 1996.
“Given all these technological ecosystems, we really need early adopters and innovators to feel empowered to do all the creative things they want to do,” Wang said. Ta. “When we started looking at the quality of some of the early stuff that was being built, it became clear that something really good could come out of this.”
Bluesky post by Peter Wang. Image credit: Screenshot
A closer look at Skyseed's structure reveals two core components: the fund and the incubator. Most of the first $1 million came from Wang himself, but his angel friends also contributed six-figure sums. He further added that the fund is indeed approaching $1.5 million, a number that could grow further if current momentum is maintained, and that accredited investors may participate. said.
“So far it's mostly angels, but as soon as we announced it, about half a dozen people expressed interest in the fund as limited partners,” Wang said. “Looking at the momentum right now, I think there's a lot more ways to put capital into it, and there's a lot more capital that's interested in something at this early stage.”
Initial checks are likely to be around $100,000, but this will be for projects that have “a real business model, a real team, a real product” and have reached a certain proof-of-concept stage and become more fully-fledged. Funding will be available, Wang said. Subsequent financing.
However, how big can Skyseed itself grow as a fund?
“I think we can go up to $5.” [million] “Especially because we're starting to find some evidence here, up to $10 million,” Wang said.
In addition to formal equity investments, Skyseed also plans to issue developer grants (as Bluesky itself does) ranging from $5,000 to $25,000.
“Grants are very selective in the sense that you're just handing someone money. You really have to trust their technical vision and ability to execute,” Wang said. “In general, the tools that I think have quality and merit are those that already have tools out there. I use them or I know people who use them. ”
Some developer grants will be disbursed by the end of the year, with major equity capital likely to start trickling out early in the new year.
“I'm already seeing some great projects that are obviously not very capital intensive and if you can get someone out of 'ramen mode' just to build and focus, then that's fine,” Wang said. added. “Many of these projects don't require a lot of money to be successful because they are small teams of just one or sometimes two people working on them in their spare time.”
Meanwhile, on the incubator side, Wang said Skyseed acts as a mechanism for like-minded people to bounce ideas off each other with a view to collaboration, especially if complementary projects exist.
“It's going to be a pretty active mentorship and network of mutual support,” Wang said. “What I'm seeing is that there are a lot of projects in different spaces that have similar things they want to do. So some of this will also be founder matching.”
dunbar number
After all, Bluesky is just another app, and it already faces some of the same moderation challenges that X has faced almost since its inception, and ads may also appear on the platform. there is. However, this highlights some of the potential benefits of the right ecosystem emerging behind AT protocols.
Dunbar's number is a concept by British biological anthropologist Robin Dunbar that suggests a cognitive limit to the number of people who can stably exist within a given social context. The number is 150. Social media is rapidly changing this number, pushing billions of people into the same social sphere and aggressively pursuing disruption. Large social networks force people to interact with people they would avoid in real life. The AT protocol reverses this and allows all kinds of niche and micro networks to be built on the same underlying framework.
“We don't all have to fit into the same, one-size-fits-all app,” Wang said. “The whole point of this protocol is to allow different types of apps to be built and different types of user experiences to flourish.”
In the days following the launch, Wang said nearly 50 projects had been received, and although he could not confirm which projects would ultimately be funded, he did note the types of tools that may emerge. He said he shared some of his ideas about. If the AT protocol is given room to breathe.
As far as AT protocols are concerned, alternatives to Bluesky itself are definitely on the table. This could be child- and family-focused, for example, a child social graph that diverges from the parent's social graph, and granular control over data privacy. Or it could be something that focuses on dissident journalism or whistleblowers, or for marginalized communities.
Similarly, it could end up being something akin to a Reddit clone, or a social-embedded alternative like SoundCloud, Bandcamp, or even Google Maps. “Some people are building photo-centric apps like Instagram, and others are looking at building event coordination platforms that incorporate social graphs like Eventbrite and Partiful,” Wang said. .
It remains to be seen what such a product would actually look like, but it could also serve as the infrastructure for a whole new app ecosystem to grow. And this goes to the heart of what Wang is aiming for with his fund.
“So all these things that currently exist at the heart of all the big social media companies could now be flipped and become part of an ecosystem that is modular and allows others to build on top of it. '' said Wang.
Importantly, this does not exclude ad-supported networks or subscriptions, it just provides the option.
“It's definitely possible to create something that is supported by advertising, but you have to balance it as a business model,” Wang said. “The unfortunate thing about the big social media companies is that they got tripped up by the advertising and attention economy, and by then it was too late. They were already billions of dollars in debt to investors.” That's the main difference. We're just going to try a different evolutionary path.”
branched
Despite all the fuss about openness and decentralization, the elephant in the room cannot be ignored. Bluesky, the controller of the underlying open source protocol as well as its proprietary app, is a private company with the usual number of VC backers. And as we've seen many times before, open source isn't always permanent.
Simply put, there is plenty of room for things to go sideways, both in Bluesky and its underlying protocols. But Wang doesn't see this as a problem.
“In almost any open source ecosystem, the users are the final judges,” he said. “If a big company decides to strip mine an open source project, but no users use it, it doesn't matter. And if users rebel against it, they can fork it and You have the right to withdraw at any time and make alternative innovations.
While many of the projects that might receive funding would be side hustles in their spare time, the same could be said for Skyseed itself. Now, without a managing partner or administrator, everything seems like a lot of work.
“That’s actually what I do on the side,” Wang said. “But there are a lot of allies and a lot of people who are hopeful that this will work. The part is to set up some of that structure.”