Presenting Tectris.vc: a Web3 in Travel Accelerator
The Web3 Travel & Hospitality space is getting its own native venture capital
TLDR;
We launched a Web3 Travel & Hospitality startups global competition and the winners will get up to €100,000 in funding.
1. What
Since the beginning in 2017, the Trips Community journey has been best described as “let’s go roughly in that direction, and we’ll learn along the way”.
What guarantees did we have, this may bring to something valuable?
None, but we, the humans, are explorers.
That’s how we discovered new lands and went beyond the first caves, didn’t we?
The initial intuition was:
“crypto will change the web at its core, thus everyone in the travel industry will need to adapt”.
Or in a more linear way:
the whole travel industry lives on the internet
the internet is adding new features and evolving
the travel industry will need to evolve
This was 7 years ago, and this is still the main thesis today.
Since the beginning, the most usual reaction to me saying:
- “We are working on the intersection between crypto and travel”
was:
- “Oh, OK, so pay hotels in Bitcoin, right?”.
This, astonishingly, still is what most people ask me.
“Pay hotels, or rather apartments, in Bitcoin” was my thesis back in 2014, and for a few years we accepted Bitcoin as a method of payment, but we stopped that when it became obvious it wouldn’t work.
Anyone who has ever spent Bitcoin to pay for something back then knows what I mean.
You paid something worth $100, which is $10,000 in today’s prices.
I did this for domain names, a salad in Chiang Mai and a few other things.
As Bitcoiners started to realize this and saying themselves, “I am never going to spend Bitcoin anymore!”, that thesis died.
Fast-forward to 2017 and Ethereum starts becoming a thing, with all the infinite possibilities promised by smart contracts, DAOs, tokens and so on.
Since my easy digital-nomad-before-digitals-nomads life abruptly ended with Airbnb doing what I did but just 10,000 times better, I had a strong incentive to come back to them.
Hence, the “decentralized Airbnb” idea, which encouraged me to create the Trips Community DAO.
A few years later, that thesis died too.
It was just too early because the tech nor the adoption were there.
Today, we can safely say that the tech is ready, but the adoption is still not anywhere near to where it needs to be.
We then entered a fun period of pure experimentation: first NFT booking in the world, first PFP in the travel industry and so on.
Then the crypto crash, loss of interest from the general populace, and the rise of Web3 in travel startups.
A growing number of them, trying to find an entry point in the travel industry.
As we watched this, the question was: “What next?”.
I did not want to create a startup, raise capital, grow for the sake of growth, and so on.
I was busy, the other Trips Community members too, and we all had other things we were doing.
You see, no one has ever been paid by Trips Community to work, meaning we need to do something else.
Some of us got involved with other crypto projects and monetized the learnings.
Remember the “let’s go roughly in that direction, and we’ll learn along the way”? It worked.
We learned a lot, and many of us sold that knowledge.
For me, Trips went from “I have no idea what to do rather than that because I am hooked to interesting things only, so 90% of my time goes to Trips, the rest in crypto”.
to
“OK, they are paying me to do very interesting stuff in crypto and AI, and I am learning along the way and I can bring back to Trips what I learned, so I’ll give Trips 50% of my time”.
But the question remained: what’s next for Trips?
I always wanted to create something open and immutable which everyone in the travel industry could use, like Uniswap.
A travel protocol.
One of the hopefully many protocols, which will be the foundation on which the travel industry will upgrade from its outdated tech stack.
I had, and have, several ideas, but it never felt the right moment to start.
Why?
Because while the tech now is there, the adoption is not.
If you want to believe in crypto, go to a bank, and you’ll come out angry and ready to sell your fiat money for some dog tokens, as they at least live in the 21st century, onchain.
But what to do if you want to stop believing in crypto and time travel back 20 years?
Go to a travel conference.
Crypto is just not on their radar.
Not that their radars are very functional, otherwise they wouldn’t have let themselves be captured by the OTAs and other oligopolies.
It’s just that travel is an industry where you make money mostly for being in the right place.
It’s not dissimilar to extractive industries like oil, where what matters, is that you have the oil.
The tech? We’ll figure it out or call in some experts to do the dirty work.
I am from Venice and I know this very well: when the masses are at your walls, desperate to get it, no matter how badly you treat them, you are not exactly losing sleep thinking about how to make their lives easier.
You are thinking how to milk them to the max.
It just did not feel the right moment to launch a protocol.
More than once we felt that we should do something, just not to lose momentum.
This is exactly what we did since 2017: let’s do something and learn.
But at this point we had learned, and while there is always something new to learn, we were getting demand for that knowledge.
Until a certain moment, the demand was from outside the travel industry, until I got contacted by Beat Blaser, a VC.
His fund Falkensteiner Ventures had already invested in some web3 travel companies, like Chain4Travel, and he was looking at creating a fund dedicated to Web3 and travel.
He is a listener of my podcast Web3 in Travel and thought I may be a good prospect to work with.
I immediately found this interesting, mostly for two reasons:
- I can learn a lot. I have never been on the other side of the table, and perspective is everything.
- This is where we can add value as Trips Community. We are uniquely positioned for that.
Long story short: we are launching a global call for web3 travel startups this year, and if we see that there are good ones, we may go on to raise a fund next year.
Now, this is news, isn’t it?
THE TECTRIS GLOBAL CALL
- Tectris is a partnership between Trips Community, Falkensteiner ventures, ennea.vc and Chain4Travel
- We are launching a global call for startups who want to build in Web3 in travel, raise funds, reach the travel corporate world and get help.
- The program is remote.
- The semi-finals will be the Web3 In Travel conference in Umbria, Italy in September. Finalists will have most travel expenses paid by the sponsors.
- The finals will be in a location to be defined.
- The sponsors are Austria Werbung the Austria National Tourist Office with over 20 offices worldwide, and Verkehrsbuero, a tourist group founded in 1917.
For details and to apply go here.
FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS
If this global call surfaces good quality projects, we will consider raising a fund and make this a long term project.
In that case, the crypto travel space will have a dedicated VC for years to come.
FINAL THOUGHTS
I’ll leave it here for now, there’s a lot to digest.
In the meantime, if you are a startup and want to know more, join the Tectris Discord. See you there!
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