Introducing The Open Web Collective— A Blockchain Founder Lab
NEAR is excited to announce the launch of OWC, a protocol-agnostic collective, dedicated to championing and developing promising blockchain founders.
A New Approach to Building: Collaborate, Research, Experiment, Build & Iterate
Though the hype of decentralization may be over, the technology has finally arrived. The recent launch of NEAR, Polkadot, and Celo’s mainnets has enabled higher volume and speed, lower-cost transactions, and better usability and scalability — giving founders the ability to expand on blockchain use-cases and move closer to adoption. Yet our protocol-specific ecosystems have created knowledge and resource silos and pushed founders to build prior to collaborating, researching, and experimenting. These silos and disparate ecosystems have prevented knowledge transfer and collaboration between founders and encourage a build-first, validate-second approach to entrepreneurship.
Protocols have asked founders to select a smart contract platform before understanding their product, and product-market fit or what protocol(s) might best suit their customers’ needs. In our mission to create a competitive, lucrative and open blockchain ecosystem — all we have accomplished thus far is add to the endless cycle of side-projects and toy-like apps. The bottom line is this: to make blockchain real for the world, we need to better equip and serve founders. Thus, the OWC Founder Lab was born, a protocol-agnostic, industry/vertical inclusive, user-centric, and metric-driven community.
The Open Web Collective’s approach to supporting founders is hands-on, user-centric, and analytical. Our founders are promising pre-seed and seed-stage startups from around the globe. They will learn and work with leading entrepreneurs, corporate partners, and investors such as IDEO, Deloitte, and The World Economic Forum to validate/invalidate business ideas and decisions, build a product, define and grow KPIs, develop product-market fit, and fundraise.
Together We Can Build The Open Web
It’s time to build alongside our founders. Together we will:
- Highlight the growing maturity of layer 1 protocols in areas such as scalability, usability, and interoperability
- Bring web 2.0 players not only into the conversation but into the hands-on work and development of new emerging technology
- Change the perspective of blockchain and expand on use-cases
OWC is a community of over 100+ founders across over 10+ industries/verticals and 40+ countries pioneering the revolution of the Open Web. Our goal is to provide our community with the resources of an accelerator without the fixed application periods, short-lived connections, and resources. As part of this, our accelerator program will focus on intense hands-on work over 12 weeks to validate/invalidate ideas and business decisions, define and grow KPIs, develop product-market fit, and raise capital.
Join The Collective
Founders can join our community and/or accelerator program. We look for teams in the pre-seed or seed-stage — you have a startup with a few users, or you’re early in your entrepreneurial journey and recently launched a prototype.
We accept applications based on the team, market, progress, and idea. The best thing you can do to strengthen your application are:
- Round out your team with business, technical, and other necessary skills
- Make quantifiable progress on your prototype or product
- Demonstrate early traction or provide data points on your core assumptions
- Demonstrate a market-first approach to entrepreneurship
