The rise of crypto startupschool?
- The startup school bug
- MOOC and motivation management
- Enter Crypto!
The startup school bug
So I was one of the 15,000 startups who applied to YCombinator’s startup school (10-week online course with the chance of getting $10,000 for 100 startups), received a false acceptance email due to their technical glitch (told my friend immediately), received the rejection email, then finally got accepted. That was fun!
Luckily, all the fiasco happened while I was in bed (I was in the European time zone) so I didn’t have to go through the emotional roller coaster like some people went through. I told my teammate Ramesh Nair just before I went to bed and hope he was okay.
It’s very nice of Startup School to decide to let anyone in, though not everyone will have their advisors assigned and now the chance of winning $10,000 out of 15,000 sounds even slimmer (to be honest, I wouldn’t have had a chance to win it at all if it had ended with rejection, so not much to complain about).
To motivate each other, I imagine lots of self-study group will pop up during the course of 10 weeks.
MOOC and motivation management
I remember I either organised one or went to dozens of them when I was working on my last failed startup called “BenkyoPlayer” back in 2013 ( a video caption search site for online courses). My assumption was that watching lots of videos in linear order is quite time consuming (and boring while consuming the content you know, then fades out before it gets relevant to you) so my video caption search should allow people get to the point quickly and hence increase the completion rate (at that time, average completion of MOOCS were around 5~9%).
Boy, I was so wrong! Even if you get to the content quickly, you still drop out if you don’t have lots of discipline. In the summer of 2013, I was luckily accepted to Bethnal Green Ventures and during their incubation program, I organised self study group to go through “How to build a startup” by Steve Blank (surprising enough my app is still kinda working after leaving it for almost 4 years!) . About 10 people from my cohort joined in the first week but it quickly dropped down to just me and another company called WriteLatex (now rebranded to https://www.overleaf.com) who managed to stick around till the end.
The main reason people stopped coming was “too busy”. At that time, I was thinking “Traitors! I should have collected money from all of them and shared with only people who completed so that I would have gotten lots of money”,. Many people sign up to gym or pay expensive tuition more for the motivational reason, but building such an app sounds like too much hassle…
Enter Crypto!
Now we are in mid 2018 and there is a thing called “Smart contract” that allows anyone to write a program that can control the flow of crypto currency. No paypal nor third party payment API integration required. The most famous smart contract platform is called “Ethereum” which some of you may hodl some (called “Ether”).
When I first heard about the platform back in 2016, the first app I made (and still working on it)is called “BlockParty”, a free meetup management site that takes a deposit. If people don’t turn up, they lose the deposit and shared among people who did turn up. I have been using this for my local meetup, pre-conference dinners, and weekend hackathons and it has decreased no-show rate from 50% down to 10%.
Why does this work? It has three reasons. First, people don’t RSVP unless they are sure they will turn up (filtering out all the unmotivated). Second, once they commit they try their best to turn up to avoid losing out money (people are more loss averse than risk averse). Third, people are usually bitter about no shows but that turns into a bit of fun event. I often says “Oh, unfortunately, everybody turn up!” or “Oh, 2 people couldn’t make it. Sorry for their losses”.
In the blockchain world, there is a world so called “Cyptoeconomics” which designs financial incentives for untrusted people to coordinate and BlockParty is one of the simplest use-cases.
I am confident that BlockParty works on single events but would that work if we ask people to commit to the series of events, like book club or MOOC study group (in the area there are no central event organisers)?
Funny enough, I was talking to a couple of my friends on twitter just several hours before all this drama unleashes.
What if people commit to attend all 10 weeks self study group depositing 0.02ETH each up front(0.2ETH for 10 weeks is worth around 50 USD with current rate of 1ETH is USD 258)? This means 500 USD to share among 10 people or 1000 USD for 20 people, seems a lot more feasible than winning the chance of 100x$10,000 among 15,000 startups.
I still don’t know the exact format to do this. It could be a weekly google hangout call or asynchronous cross check among participants. One thing for sure that is that you need Ether to participate. If 10~20 people are interested, I can probably do all the administration work of setting up the smart contract. If unlikely event of getting lots of interests, I may not do all the smart contract setup for everybody. However, my blockparty is open source so I can write an instruction and someone with Solidity (a smart contract programing language) may be able to set up to form their own study group.
NOTE: I strongly suggest that you try out people who have met rather than among the complete strangers as BlockParty has no built-in mechanism to handle these yet.
Are you still with me?
If you are interested, please fill in the following form so that I can get in touch (if there are enough interests).
