Meet Skyseed, the VC fund and incubator that powers the Bluesky ecosystem and AT Protocol

On November 15, Peter Wang wrote a message soliciting ideas for new incubators and funding for experimental projects built on growth Bluesky/AT Protocol ecosystem. Four weeks later, Skyseed appeared with an initial commitment of $1 million.

This change, the speed that is determined by the fact that the bag does not have a leaf (it has History of Blueskythough), is evidence of several things: the hype surrounding Bluesky, which is emerging as a lifeboat for the millions who do left X (on Twitter). But there is also a bright hope that by introducing a new open social network, open as AT Protocolwe can avoid the commercialized, fenced gardens that exist on social media today.

“Great many Facebook’s revenue comes from advertising. “All major social media companies are advertising companies, which means they sell traffic and user interest,” Wang told TechCrunch in an interview this week. , and take the user’s attention away from their products.”

A decentralized website

Wang is co-founder, chief AI and innovation officer, and the past CEO of Anacondaa company built on the eponymous open source Python and R distribution which helps data scientists design, test, and deploy all their data-driven projects.

Personally, Wang has been an active contributor to the Internet, providing financial support for projects such as. Blue Link Labswhich created a peer-to-peer browser Beaker. Beaker’s official support ends in 2022, with the manufacturer Paul Frazee joining Bluesky as a “protocol engineer” before becoming CTO in April.

And this early work on Beaker was beneficial to Bluesky. “Even though Beaker’s career is coming to an end, Beaker’s heart continues to be with Bluesky,” Frazee said. he wrote in a post announcing the end of Beaker. “I hope the work we’re doing will make Beaker’s demise less painful in the long run.”

Fast-forward to today, and Wang is expanding his support for decentralized finance into an official seed fund. “I’ve done angel trading, but this is my first time making a fund and being responsible for other people’s money,” Wang said. “I was helping Paul (Frazee) and his team for a few years. They tried different things to develop Internet technologies, and they went very well. But all these lessons, I think, went into the design of (Bluesky), the protocol, and the software.”

While the distributed network is away from the old ideawhat is missing is a sufficient number of people who are attracted to something like the AT Protocol: an open source, open standard protocol that promises the ability to help users keep ownership of their data and move to other platforms on the protocol.

“There are people who have been in social media for a long time, who have been waiting for this time,” Wang said. “We have had many good ideas; We have not had any users. Now we have users. “

“Like the Internet in 1996”

After sending out his request for ideas in mid-November, Wang says he was inundated with people reaching out to him with ideas, saying the interest reminded him of the Internet in 1996.

“With this whole technology ecosystem, you really need adopters and innovators to feel empowered to go and do whatever they want to do,” Wang said. “When I started to see the quality of some of the old things that were being built, it became clear to me that something great could come out of it.”

Digging into Skyseed’s design reveals two main components: the bag and the incubator. Most of the initial $1 million came from Wang himself, although other angels are said to have invested six times as much. In addition, it is said that the fund has grown close to $ 1.5 million, a number that can grow if it goes well, and the possibility of accredited investors to participate.

“It’s mostly angels at the moment, but as soon as I announced it, I had about half of the people who expressed interest in the fund as a few friends,” Wang said. “I see what’s going on now, I think there are a lot of ways to send money, and there’s a lot of money that’s interested in these early things.”

Initial checks should be in the region of $100,000, although this will be directed to projects with “real businesses, real groups, and real things,” Wang said, making them reach for more evidence and raise more. follow money.

But how big can Skyseed itself be as a fund?

“I think we can reach $5 (million) to $10 million, especially as we start to see some evidence points here,” Wang said.

In addition to making capital investments, Skyseed will also provide financing (eg Bluesky himself is doing it), which will be in the region of $5,000 to $25,000.

“Funding is a good choice, because I only give money to someone. I have to trust their technical vision and their ability to do it,” said Wang. “So, a lot of times, it’s going to be people who have tools that they’ve already put in that I think are good and relevant — either I’m using them, or I know people who are using them.”

Some of the plugin fees will be paid at the end of the year, and the main fees will start to drop at the beginning of the new year.

“I’ve already looked at a few projects that are obviously very good. They don’t have a lot of money, and if I can get someone out of ‘ramen mode’ to build and look, that’s good,” added Wang. “A lot of these things don’t need a lot of money to get that far, because it’s one person, or a small team of two people working in their spare time.”

On the incubator side, Wang says Skyseed will serve as a way for like-minded people to brainstorm ideas, with a common goal — especially where there are complementary jobs.

“It’s going to be a quick consultation, and it’s going to be interactive while they’re helping each other,” Wang said. “What I’m seeing is that there are a lot of jobs in different areas, that have similar things they want to do. So some of these could be match makers.”

Dunbar’s number

Bluesky, at the end of the day, is just another app, and it’s already facing up some of the same regulatory challenges what X has experienced almost since its inception, is advertising can reach the platformtoo. But this shows some of the potential benefits of the nature behind the AT Protocol.

Dunbar’s number is a concept from British biologist Robin Dunbar that provides a limit to how many people can sustainably exist in a social environment. That number is 150. Social networks play fast with that number, making billions of people enter the same situation, and confusion in hot pursuit; major social networks force people to socialize with people they would avoid in real life. The AT Protocol leverages this, allowing all types of niche and micro-networks to be built on the same foundation.

“We don’t have to all agree to the same, one-size-fits-all program,” Wang said. “The whole purpose of the protocol is to create a variety of applications, and allow for a wide variety of users.”

Within days of its launch, Wang says he’s come up with in the neighborhood of 50 projects, and while he couldn’t confirm what funding would be available, he did share his thoughts on the types of devices that might appear. if the AT Protocol is given a break.

Some of Bluesky’s own methods are actually on the AT Protocol list. This can be more child- and family-focused, with children’s social graphs separate from the parent’s graphs and smaller controls on data privacy, for example. Or it could be a focus on unbiased or whistle-blowing journalism, or some on underserved areas.

Likewise, it can be similar to a Reddit poster, or other ways to integrate into the likes of SoundCloud, Bandcamp, or Google Maps. “Some people have created apps that have similar images to Instagram, others are looking to create event coordination platforms like Eventbrite or Partiful that are entered by people,” Wang said.

While it remains to be seen what such a thing would look like, it could also serve as the basis for a new ecosystem to grow. And that gets to the heart of what Wang is trying to do with his fund.

“So all these things that are currently available in the big social media companies can be disruptive, and become pieces of the ecosystem that are sustainable and that other people can build on,” Wang said.

Most importantly, this doesn’t block ad networks or subscriptions – it just provides options.

“You can have things that are followed by advertising, but you have to be successful as a business,” Wang said. “The sad thing about the big social media companies is that they stumbled with the business and the economy of attention, and at this time they were late, they owed billions of dollars to investors. So that’s the first difference. We’re going to try another way of evolution.”

It has been removed

Although there are many problems related to openness and fragmentation, there is no ignoring the elephant in the room: Bluesky, the controller not only of its software but also of open source, is a private company that has always been there. group of VC backers. And as we have seen countless times over the years, Open source is not always.

In short, there is a lot of room for things to go wrong, in Bluesky and the protocol it was designed for. But Wang does not see this as a problem.

“In almost all open source environments, users are the final judges,” he said. “If a big company decides to strip an open source project, if there are no users, then it doesn’t matter. And if users rebel, then they can make a fork and use it. You always have the right to come out and do something new.”

While most of the projects that can be paid for will be temporary, the same can be said about Skyseed itself. It all seems like a lot of work, with no directors or directors on the books.

“It’s something I’m doing on the side,” Wang said. “But there are a lot of allies, and a lot of people who hope that this will go well. I’ve been worried about taking their time. One of the things I’ll be doing here over the holidays is implementing some of these things.”