Block Zero Stage | Introducing the Web3 BUILD Incubator Fellowship

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1. 0:01

   all right we got finished a little early but I'm going to announce the next speaker it's Max Mitzy from uh Major League hacking I'm used to saying mlh and not everybody knows what mlh is especially from the US so um max come up on stage we're uh gonna be talking today about the web 3 build incubator Fellowship that uh mlh did with near Horizon and then after that it'll be followed by a panel with some of the fellows actually so welcome thank you

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   Bianca let me just get set up here all right so as Bianca said here to talk about uh a partnership that started this summer between the near Horizon um group and Major League hacking so I will dive straight into it let's see which way takes us forward here awesome so the web 3 incubator Fellowship it's been known by a few different names over the last few months months um but it's all the same program the idea is to engage

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   um with early career developers and bring web three ideas to life um so I'm just going to skip forward real quick and just talk about the the major league hacking of the mlh community um not everyone uh knows about us we have about 150,000 active members um and we think about active members as people each year who are attending mlh programs events hackathons workshops um and some of the more immersive programs um like like this um fellowship program uh we do a

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   lot of co-contribution programs as well as the hackathons that were're well known for um and through all of that have built the world's largest community of early career technologists uh spanning over 95 countries 4,000 universities one in three new computer science grads in the US um and a huge amount of diversity uh you know both across the world in terms of people from different backgrounds uh one of the

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   really interesting stats that I want to share here is that within our community um in the last year about 15% that's 5% have built an app in web 3 um that's not very um enthusing really for this kind of community but there's another stat that comes with that um that I think paints it in a very different light which is that about 60% of our community want to build their first web three app

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   in the next year so there's a huge un tapped potential of these student and early career developers to bring them into ecosystems um you know really be their first experience um in web 3 in the blockchain world so jumping back quickly um the what is the mission of the partnership um what this partnership was all about in in in the world of Jared Barnes um to harness the talent and creativity of early career and student developers to grow the near

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   developer base and convert Builders into Founders and ultimately taking you know ideas from the student Community to the main net all right let's get into how we do this this program really consisted of of of kind of two main parts the first part um is a hackathon um it was a weekend long uh virtual hackathon event with you know talks and workshops and lots of Engagement um from the near team from the from the near Community um and

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   pulling in lots of the mlh community um that hackathon was your application process to get into the three-month incubator program um so four winning teams the the best of all the projects that we saw throughout the throughout the hackathon um got into the fellowship program which is an immersive 12we program um folks were spending you know 20 30 plus hours each week working on their projects in their teams with

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   mentorship with pod Leaders with talks with workshops and lots of different opportunities um and then you know post program like what happens next the the idea of this program is to bring people into the community bring people into the ecosystem and provide them opportunities once they've built out um you know a formal kind of prototype and and an early product to really stay in the community and continue to um to do other

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    activities one of them being um neon you know a lot of people say where where are the founders now and I say they're right here they're in this room they're they're in Lisbon they are here to um to continue building their networks continue shaping their ideas and we're going to hear a lot more about that uh later so let let's dive into these two components of the program uh the web three build hacker Thorn so you know

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    this is this is the the bread and butter of of of mlh running hacker Thorns um we had around 900 people registered their interested in the hacker on um onboarded over 300 new web 3 developers into the near and boss ecosystem something that we're very proud of um and you know as well as being a great event to bring new developers and hackers into the ecosystem this is also a huge um marketing and and brand building initiative right tens of thousands of

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    mlh community members heard about this event not only that it was taking place but also the outcomes of it the winners the prizes huge Spotlight put on all of that work done um we had over 30 project submissions throughout the weekend completed project submissions that met the criteria and through a judging process we we identified all of the right people and all of the right ideas to take through that incubator program people who had the right commitment who

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    had the right ideas had the right technical knowledge and um you know who had that that Innovative spark that between mlh and and the near Horizon team we're looking for so who who who should uped this hack on um well the average age was 22.5 um so you know a really young crowd spread from kind of you know 17 18 through to like mid 20s um about 80% undergraduate um student level um and about 75% of people opted in to to you

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    know to to hear more and to stay part of the of the near Community one of the really interesting things that we saw here and tied back to the fact that you know only a small percentage of people have already Ed building in web 3 is that on a scale of 0 to four the average rating of familiarity with web 3 was 1.5 which is really interesting right people were coming to this event not

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    because they're experts not because they're you know they're going to win big bounties and and they've been doing this for years but because they they wanted to get their start they wanted to go from like you know a one out of four to a two to a three out of out of four and really build their familiarity and understanding of web three so what happened next we took four programs and 14 four projects and 14 Founders from the hackathon into this uh

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    into this incubator style program um it's a 12we immersive incubator program that provides a real world environment for these teams and Founders to shape their ideas build out their projects and lay the groundwork um for them to launch Ventures everyone who came into this program program um you know was really thinking about themselves as a Founder for the first time understanding what that means thinking about Building Technology from you know the scrappy kind of project that wins a hackathon

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    through to a product that you can sit down with uh you know with a VC and pitch for funding that's a huge shift and journey that people had to go through uh four components to the program that supported people going through that Journey there's a lot of facilitation so we have a pod leader structure you know regular standups weekly uh like Sprint planning office hours async troubleshooting all of the

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    ways that that typically in this kind of ecosystem people would be building their projects a whole bunch of resources um project grants access to Horizon credits Business mentorship technical mentorship um training uh so asynchronous you know lms-based training as well as talks coaching online learning PS all the things that people really need to get from you know to get from their first attempt at at at building out a web three Pro uh project through to having something that that

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    you know they can pitch and demo the last piece is really about feedback and iteration we're big Believers in this kind of cohort based Project based learning um model that people need regular engagement and feedback so we structured a lot of the program around having monthly demos where all of the teams should sit down and actually demo what they've worked on get feedback use

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    that for their Sprint planning you know treating a lot of the the near Horizon team almost as their early adopter customers right finding out what they wanted to see next which I think was hugely valuable in steering and Direction setting and all of the kind of pivots that that the team's work on that we're going to hear more about uh later on so quickly introducing the projects uh two of the projects are here to to

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    speak for themselves uh right after this this intro uh and two others we're going to we're going to cover this of the mlh team who are here um so the four products were medbridge transpack storehub and Trad Min some of them have even changed their branding and names throughout the program so so some some real startup experience here it's really interesting that we saw a very wide mix of different um you know web three and

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    blockchain use cases from you know deploying smart contracts to manage um you know to manage like contractual agreements and processes through to uh data storage and and security through to e-commerce um you know through to almost like trade Finance so a lot of the use cases that you've heard about throughout this event have actually been quite organically um identified by a group of

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    of of hackers as um as interesting areas to deploy um web 3 and blockchain Technology I'm not going to introduce everyone here in person uh some of the folks are here in the audience some of the folks are here um on the panel shortly if you see any of these any of these people around you know make sure to say hi to them at the event um we had fellows from all over the world so so spanning from Egypt to India to Hong

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    Kong to Canada to us to Nigeria um you know a a huge breath of of people from across the mlh community being part of this program um you know not only you know being hackathon winners but actually completing uh you know all 12 weeks of the program um six countries represented NPS of 83 which represents you know not only the work that that we at mlh have done but also all of the support and engagement from the near and near Horizon team 100% of the individuals and

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    projects completed the program which is phenomenal you never see 100% completion scores on these sorts of pages and there's 100% interest from all of the participants in continuing to build on near um again lots of lots of folks are here lots of people are working out how to take their Ventures forward working out what um you know what Ventures they're going to work on next so you

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    know going back to that kind of that mission and ambition of building awareness of of the near um ecosystem and the blockchain operating system tick right over 900 people were so interested they signed up for an event over 300 new um developers on boarded we've uh We've identified and nurtured some really high potential student entrepreneurs and taken them a significant way on their Journey you know towards becoming uh you know the startup founders of the future

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    um I'm going to I'm going to stop with the the monologue here I think you know the best way to bring this to life is to bring some of the folks on stage um have a conversation about the program The Experience the projects that they've built um you know and what they're going on to do next other than um having made the journey from three different continents um to be here in in in Lisbon and speak to you all today so uh thank

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    you very much for listening um I'm going to welcome my uh my panel onto the stage and uh and we'll get into a much more interesting discussion then uh than I can cover on my own