[REDACTED] 2024 | Empowering Founders The NEAR HZN Incubation Journey

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1. 0:00

   good afternoon uh my name is Jared Barnes I the other Jared at the near Foundation you heard from Jared Thompson earlier today uh I have the privilege of leading our founder success team we essentially are the front door to the near ecosystem we focus on ecosystem growth and meaningfully engaging with all the founders and builders on near really excited to share with you today what we've been up to over the past year some of the impact that's been created

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   by Builders uh but more importantly where we're going as well so just to give you snapshot of some of the Milestones that collectively we've been able to achieve um and this is something we are incredibly proud of we've had over $100 million in external Capital raised uh by Founders building on near definitely not something uh uh to uh uh to downplay we've been able to engage a wide range of Builders so many of them

3. 0:50

   through this hackathon here at redacted and something that we are deeply proud of are the number of projects that we've been able to be really Hands-On with getting the weeds help them work through problems uh particularly through our incubation programs uh as well and you you saw Ilia uh share this ecosystem map earlier today you know and I'll be honest with you all uh this didn't exist

4. 1:13

   six months ago uh and and so we have been uh very focused on growing the number of teams in the near ecosystem but really meaningfully uh engaging teams building it all layers of the stack at the intersection of AI and web 3 uh but I am standing up here today as myself but really it has been an incredible team effort if you aren't familiar with our founder success team um we have some new faces uh who many of

5. 1:38

   many of them are here today uh but it has truly been a team effort as we have grown and scaled uh this ecosystem um but I really want to help clarify because a lot of times you may be uh on Twitter and saying well what is uh near Horizon do uh what is the focus and I want to clarify that for you we focus on three key things the first is our incubation programming right this is really the core of what we do and kind

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   of the glue of what holds together um a lot of our initiatives right that shows up um in uh working with teams directly one-on-one and shows up in running cohort-based programs the second is really ecosystem growth there's a lot of different buckets in that um ranging from Partnerships uh to uh our community efforts to even um some of the things we're doing on technical success in partner engineering and then the last is

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   actually some things that I'm excited to unveil today um in our Capital deployment efforts as well and so how that shows up again just to create a little bit more clarity when we say incubation programming what does that actually mean we run three to four cohorts a year uh typically every quarter we started this in-house uh by our our team collectively running incubation programs we're now scaling that through a wide range of Partners

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   Deli Labs which is a pretty notable VC Fund in beta Works which is a venture studio in New York city in the US have been our first two partners and we're going to be continuing to run sub quent cohorts uh throughout the year typically We R engage about 40 to 50 projects uh and really Target uh not external Capital raise as a vanity metric but to show the quality of programming to show

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   the velocity of uh development that these teams are really um uh experiencing through the program on the ecosystem growth side what that really looks like um are thinking about what are the right partners that we want to engage and how do we continue to serve Builders at all levels right whether you are just starting out in your first hackathon or whether you've already raised the seed round right and you're meaningfully looking to grow in scale um

10. 3:36

    uh as well and then continuing to be intentional in our community efforts um that we've started very much at a Grassroots level um and excited to continue to partner with other folks across the ecosystem and then lastly and I'll share a little bit more in depth about this in a moment on our Capital deployment what we really think about is what are the right sustainable incentives to retain Builders it's

11. 3:58

    already hard enough to build in the space how do we make that uh as easy as possible and decrease that barrier entry and truly just become rocket fuel for for Builders um and so despite all of that Builders still face challenges we listen uh to to folks across the ecosystem there is a Grand Canyon or mile wide size gap between uh you participating in a hackathon and maybe you uh becoming a venture-backed Founder that is no small Chasm to just cross right that's very real we often celebrate our Venture backs Founders but

12. 4:31

    there are a lot of Builders out there out there in the world um and typically what we've seen and why does this happen is that often times on this journey a builder may be really really excited about an idea um they may deploy something on mayet or testnet right um at a hackathon uh but there's a lot of barriers to actually building in the space right and typically we see builders stop uh post hackathon there's a pretty high uh churn rate right as

13. 4:56

    well and so these are some of the things we found along this Builder journey and so as we've thought about that how do we how do we actually alleviate that Gap through sustainable incentives and actually drive Builders um to keep building keep shipping and keep creating value across the ecosystem so really excited to actually unveil something we've been working on um for the past few months called protocol rewards what is protocol rewards it is a objective

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    metric-based reward system uh that rewards you based off of the impact you create how does that actually show up well what we've done is we've built a very straightforward analytics SDK um that you can integrate with a few lines of code that tracks both onchain and offchain activity um from a onchain perspective we look at the value that you're driving from transaction volumes the number of uh daily active users um that you're engaging um and essentially your retention of users on your platform

15. 5:53

    from an offchain perspective we look at your GitHub activity we look at are you actually shipping are you uh driving commit are you closing PRS are you having more contributors um engage with your product um we aggregate that data we verify that data um and distribute rewards off of that so uh have been very very excited um to unveil this um uh just literally published the mpm package uh at like 3:00 am. this morning so um please somebody create a PR and fix this

16. 6:23

    for me um uh but no in all seriousness really really excited about this just to make this a bit more real and put some numbers um we're testing this out as a pilot we're going to be working with about 50 Builders um if you want to be one of those 50 Builders to test this out please uh come find us at the booth um but what we look at is uh we set aside at 50k for our rewards pool

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    initially um uh your earning scenarios could range anywhere from $100 if you are simply just adding one commit a day uh we want to reward and recognize that progress to actually a high the highest level of activity um uh up to 10K per month uh for yourself and or your team that you could earn simply just based off of doing what you already wanted to do right um in shipping and building and adding value to the ecosystem um we

18. 7:12

    deploy 50% of that immediately and 50% of that is actually invested over six months largely so that we have a sustainable consistent drip and not just a one-time dispersement that's probably one of the biggest insights we learned in deploying grants in the past is onetime dispersements can be great but uh if not used sustainably you may find yourself in the exact same situation that you previously were and so what we want to do is drive a sustainable set of

19. 7:37

    value to the ecosystem um so very very excited about this um as well and I'll leave you with this I've been brief but it's because we're uh very excited about things that are going on if you're interested in applying to our next cohort um please come find us we love to talk to you we're going to be kicking off our next cohort in q1 of next year um between uh February and March and then if you're interested in signing up for that protocol reward W beta uh please scan if you need another QR code

20. 8:02

    I know a lot of QR codes but please scan that QR code very simple form taking 10 seconds of your name email and wallet address I would love to speak with you as well um but again thank you all we are here as a uh team that is four builders four Founders in the ecosystem we want to be the front door but we also want to be with you as you progress along your journey so if you have any questions please come find us at the

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    booth outside uh but thank you for your time and thank you all for coming out to redact did