On November 15, Peter Wang posted a message requesting concepts for a brand new incubator and fund to assist experimental initiatives constructed on the burgeoning Bluesky/AT Protocol ecosystem. 4 weeks later, Skyseed emerged with an preliminary dedication of $1 million.
This turnaround, a velocity underscored by the truth that the fund doesn’t actually have a web site but (it does have a Bluesky profile, although), is testomony to a number of issues: the hype round Bluesky, which is rising as a lifeboat for tens of millions who’ve deserted X (née Twitter). However there’s additionally an nearly tangible hope that by beginning afresh on a brand new social platform constructed on an open, decentralized community such because the AT Protocol, we’d keep away from the ad-driven, walled gardens that permeate social networking immediately.
“The vast majority of Facebook’s revenue is from ads. All the major centralized social media companies are advertising companies, which means they trade in traffic and the users’ attention,” Wang instructed TechCrunch in an interview this week. “The main difference between an open protocol versus a closed one is that the closed ones will never tolerate the existence of applications that take the content of the graph away, and take user-attention away from their properties.”
The decentralized net
Wang is co-founder, chief AI and innovation officer, and former CEO of Anaconda, an organization constructed upon the eponymous open supply Python and R distribution that helps knowledge scientists construct, check, and deploy all their data-driven initiatives.
Individually, Wang has been an avid backer of the decentralized net, offering monetary assist for initiatives resembling Blue Hyperlink Labs, which developed the peer-to-peer open supply net browser Beaker. Official assist for Beaker resulted in 2022, with creator Paul Frazee becoming a member of Bluesky as “protocol engineer” earlier than formally changing into CTO in April.
And this foundational work on Beaker was to Bluesky’s profit. “While the Beaker project is coming to an official end, the heart of Beaker continues with Bluesky,” Frazee wrote in a put up asserting the tip of Beaker. “I hope the work we do will make Beaker’s end a little less painful in the long run.”
Quick-forward to immediately, and Wang is extending his assist for decentralization into a proper seed fund. “I’ve done angel investing, but this is my first time creating a fund and taking responsibility for other people’s money,” Wang mentioned. “I was funding Paul [Frazee] and his team for a number of years. They tried different things to build decentralized web technologies, with middling to low success. But all those lessons learned, I think, have fed into the [Bluesky] design, the protocol, and the apps.”
Whereas the decentralized net is removed from a novel idea, what it has lacked is a significant variety of individuals gravitating towards one thing just like the AT Protocol: an open supply, open standards-based framework that guarantees the power to allow customers to retain possession of their knowledge and shift to different platforms on the protocol.
“There are people who have been in the decentralized web community for a long time, who have really waited for this moment,” Wang mentioned. “We’ve had lots of good ideas; we’ve just not had the users. Now we have the users.”
“Like the internet in 1996”
After posting his request for concepts in mid-November, Wang says he was inundated with individuals reaching out to him with proposals, noting that the keenness reminded him of the web in 1996.
“With all these technical ecosystems, you really need those early adopters and innovators to feel empowered to go and do all the creative things they want to do,” Wang mentioned. “When I started seeing the quality of some of these early things that were being built, it became clear to me that something very good could come out of this.”
Digging into the make-up of Skyseed reveals two core elements: the fund and the incubator. Nearly all of the preliminary $1 million comes from Wang himself, although he says some angel mates have additionally put in six-figure sums. Furthermore, he says the fund has truly grown nearer to $1.5 million, a determine that would stretch greater if present momentum maintains, with potential for formal accredited traders to get entangled.
“It is mostly angels for now, but as soon as I made the announcement, I had maybe half a dozen people express interest in the fund as limited partners,” Wang mentioned. “Just seeing the traction now, I’m thinking there are a lot more ways to deploy capital, and there’s a lot more capital that’s interested in this early-stage stuff.”
Preliminary checks are more likely to be within the area of $100,000, although this shall be directed at initiatives which have “real business models, real teams, and real products,” Wang mentioned, enabling them to get to a sure proof level and lift extra critical follow-on funding.
However how large can Skyseed itself get as a fund?
“I think we could get to $5 [million] to $10 million, especially as we start seeing some proof points here,” Wang mentioned.
Along with making formal fairness investments, Skyseed may even be issuing developer grants (like Bluesky itself is doing), which shall be within the area of $5,000 to $25,000.
“The grants are quite selective, in the sense that I am just turning over money to someone. I have to really trust their technical vision and ability to execute,” Wang mentioned. “So generally, it will be people who already have some tools they’ve put out there that I think have quality and merit — either I’m using them, or I know people who are using them.”
Some developer grants shall be doled out by the tip of the 12 months, with the principle fairness capital more likely to start trickling out early within the new 12 months.
“I’ve already got my eyes on a few projects that are obviously great. They’re not gonna be too capital intensive, and if I can get someone off of ‘ramen mode’ just to build and focus, then that’s fine,” Wang added. “A lot of these projects don’t need a lot of funding to get far, because they’re just one person, or maybe a small two-person team working in their spare time.”
On the incubator aspect, in the meantime, Wang says that Skyseed will function as a mechanism for like-minded individuals to bounce concepts off one another, with a view towards collaboration — significantly the place complementary initiatives exist.
“It will be a fairly active mentorship, and it’ll be a network where they’re helping each other,” Wang mentioned. “What I’m seeing is that there are a lot of projects in different spaces, which have similar things they want to do. So some of this is also going to be founder matchmaking.”
Dunbar’s quantity
Bluesky, on the finish of the day, is simply one other app, and it’s already going through a few of the identical moderation challenges that X has confronted nearly since its inception, and promoting would possibly land on the platform, too. However this highlights a few of the potential advantages of a correct ecosystem cropping up off the again of the AT Protocol.
Dunbar’s quantity is an idea from British organic anthropologist Robin Dunbar that implies a cognitive restrict to what number of people can stably exist inside a given social context. That quantity is 150. Social media performs fast-and-loose with that determine, propelling billions of individuals into the identical social sphere, with chaos in scorching pursuit; large-scale social networks pressure individuals to have interaction with individuals who they’d possible keep away from in actual life. The AT Protocol upends that, permitting all method of area of interest and micro-networks constructed on the identical underlying framework.
“We don’t have to all fit inside the same, one-size-fits-all app,” Wang mentioned. “The whole point of the protocol is to build many different kinds of apps, and let a lot of different kinds of user experiences flourish.”
Within the few days following the launch, Wang says he had within the area of fifty initiatives are available in, and although he was unable to substantiate what initiatives will finally get funded, he did share a few of his concepts on the sorts of instruments which may emerge if the AT Protocol is given the area to breathe.
Alternate options to Bluesky itself are positively on the agenda so far as the AT Protocol is worried. This might be extra of a child- and family-focused incarnation, with child social graphs branching off of oldsters’ social graphs and granular controls over knowledge privateness, for instance. Or it might be one thing centered on dissident journalism or whistleblowers, or possibly one thing for marginalized communities.
Equally, it might be one thing akin to a Reddit clone, or socially infused options to the likes of SoundCloud, Bandcamp, and even Google Maps. “Some folks have built photo-centric apps similar to Instagram, others are looking to build event-coordination platforms like Eventbrite or Partiful that are social graph-infused,” Wang mentioned.
Whereas it stays to be seen how such merchandise would possibly truly look, they might additionally function the infrastructure for a completely new ecosystem of apps to develop on. And this will get to the center of what Wang is striving for together with his fund.
“So all these things that currently exist in the beating heart of all the big social media companies might now invert out, and become pieces of an ecosystem that is modular and which other people can build on,” Wang mentioned.
Importantly, this doesn’t rule out ad-supported networks or subscriptions — it simply provides choices.
“You absolutely can have advertising-supported things, but you have to do it in balance as a business model,” Wang mentioned. “The unfortunate thing about the big social media companies is that they stumbled into advertising and the attention economy, and by that time it was too late, they already owed billions of dollars to investors. So that’s the primary difference. We’re just going to try a different evolutionary path.”
Forked off
Regardless of all of the brouhaha about openness and decentralization, there’s no ignoring the elephant within the room: Bluesky, controllers of not solely its personal app but additionally the underlying open supply protocol, is a privately held firm with the standard array of VC backers. And as we’ve seen numerous occasions by way of the years, open supply isn’t at all times everlasting.
Put merely, there’s loads of scope for issues to go sideways, each at Bluesky and the protocol on which it’s constructed. However Wang doesn’t see this as an issue.
“In almost all open source ecosystems, users are the final jury,” he mentioned. “If a big company decides to strip-mine an open source project, if none of the users use it, then it doesn’t matter. And if users rebel against it, then they can make a fork and use that. You always have this right to exit and do alternative innovation.”
Whereas a whole lot of the initiatives which may get funded shall be spare-time aspect hussles, the identical may be mentioned about Skyseed itself. All of it seems like a hell of a whole lot of work, with no managing companions or admins at the moment on the books.
“It really is something I’m doing on the side,” Wang mentioned. “But there are a lot of allies, and a lot of people who are hopeful that this will go well. I’ve been unapologetic about grabbing their time. Part of what I’m going to be doing here over the holidays is getting some of that structure set up.”
