Meet Skyseed, the venture capital fund and incubator backing the Bluesky and AT Protocol ecosystem
On November 15, Peter Wang posted a message Requesting ideas for a new incubator and a fund to support pilot projects based on startups Bluesky/Protocol ecosystem. After four weeks, The Heaven Seed appeared With an initial commitment of $1 million.
This transformation, the speed of which is underscored by the fact that the Fund does not have a website yet (it does have one) Bluesky’s profilehowever), is a testament to several things: the hype around Bluesky, and it Emerging as a lifeboat For the millions who have Leave X (nee Twitter). But there is also an almost tangible hope that by starting over on a new social platform built on an open, decentralized network like AT protocolWe might avoid the ad-filled walled gardens that pepper today’s social media.
“The vast Majority Of Facebook’s revenue comes from advertising. “All the big centralized social media companies are advertising companies, which means they trade on traffic and user attention,” Wang told TechCrunch in an interview this week. “The main difference between an open protocol and a closed protocol is that closed protocols will never tolerate having applications that take the content of the graph away, drawing the user’s attention away from its properties.”
Decentralized web
Wang is the co-founder and CEO of AI & Innovation former CEO of Anacondaa company built on the open source of the same name Python and Distribution p It helps data scientists build, test and deploy all their data-driven projects.
Separately, Wang has been a strong supporter of the decentralized web, providing financial support to projects such as Blue Link Labswhich developed an open source peer-to-peer web browser cup. Official support for Beaker ended in 2022, along with the content creator Paul Frazee He joined Bluesky as a “Protocol Engineer” before officially becoming CTO in April.
This was the foundational work on Beaker for Bluesky. “While the Beaker project officially comes to a close, Beaker’s heart continues to be with Bluesky,” Frazee said books In a post announcing the end of Baker. “I hope the work we are doing will make Baker’s end less painful in the long run.”
Moving forward to today, Wang has begun to expand his support for decentralization into a formal foundation fund. “I have done angel investing, but this is the first time I have set up a fund and taken responsibility for other people’s money,” Wang said. “I was financing Paul [Frazee] and his team for several years. They have tried different things to build decentralized web technologies, with moderate to low success. But I think all those lessons learned have fed into me [Bluesky] Design, protocol and applications.”
Whereas the decentralized web is Far from a new conceptWhat it lacks is a large number of people who would gravitate toward something like the AT Protocol: an open source, open standards-based framework that promises the ability to enable users to retain ownership of their data and switch to other platforms on the protocol.
“There are people who have been in the decentralized web community for a long time and have really been waiting for this moment,” Wang said. “We had a lot of good ideas; we didn’t have the users. Now we have the users.”
“Like the Internet in 1996”
After posting his request for ideas in mid-November, Wang says he was inundated with people reaching out to him with suggestions, noting that the enthusiasm reminded him of the Internet in 1996.
“With all these tech ecosystems, you really need those early adopters and innovators to feel empowered to do all the creative things they want to do,” Wang said. “When I started to see the quality of some of these early things being built, it became clear to me that something very good could come of this.”
Research into the Skyseed formula reveals two essential components: the box and the incubator. The majority of the initial $1 million comes from Wang himself, though he says some angelic friends have also given six-figure sums. Furthermore, he says the fund has already grown to nearly $1.5 million, a number that could rise if current momentum continues, with officially accredited investors potentially participating.
“Most of them are angels right now, but once I announced, there were maybe six people expressing interest in the fund as limited partners,” Wang said. “Just seeing the momentum now, I think there are a lot of ways to deploy capital, and there’s a lot of capital interested in these things at an early stage.”
Wang said initial checks are likely to be worth around $100,000, though that will be directed to projects that have “real business models, real teams, and real products,” enabling them to reach a certain proof point and spark more seriousness. . Follow up on financing.
But how big can Skyseed itself get as a box?
“I think we can get to $5 [million] “To $10 million, especially since we’re starting to see some proof points here,” Wang said.
In addition to making formal equity investments, Skyseed will also issue grants to developers (e.g Bluesky herself does) which would be in the range of $5,000 to $25,000.
“The grants are quite selective, in the sense that I’m just handing over money to someone. I have to really trust their technical vision and their ability to execute,” Wang said. “In general, it will be people who already have some of the tools they’ve put out there that I think have “With quality and merit – either I use it, or I know people who do.”
Some developer grants will be distributed by the end of the year, with major capital likely to start flowing early in the new year.
“I’ve already got my eye on a few projects that are obviously great. It’s not going to be capital intensive, and if I can get someone out of ‘ramen mode’ to just build and focus, that’s fine,” Wang added. “A lot of these.” Projects don’t need a lot of funding to get far, because it’s just one person, or maybe a small team of two people working in their spare time.”
Meanwhile, on the incubator side, Wang says Skyseed will serve as a mechanism for like-minded people to exchange ideas with each other, with the aim of collaborating – especially where complementary projects exist.
“The mentorship will be quite active, and it will be a network where they help each other,” Wang said. “What I see is that there are a lot of projects in different spaces, which have similar things they want to do. So part of this will also be a matchmaking between founders.
Dunbar number
Bluesky, in the end, is just another application, and it’s already confronting Some of the same challenges of moderation Which X has faced almost since its inception, and Advertisements may land on the platformalso. But this highlights some of the potential benefits to the healthy ecosystem that emerges off the back of the AT protocol.
The Dunbar number is a concept from British biological anthropologist Robin Dunbar that proposes a cognitive limit to the number of humans that can stably exist within a given social context. That number is 150. Social media manipulates this number, pushing billions of people into the same social sphere, with hot chaos in pursuit; Large-scale social networks force people to interact with people they would likely avoid in real life. The AT protocol turns this on its head, allowing all types of ad hoc and small networks built on the same basic framework.
“We don’t have to all come together within a one-size-fits-all app,” Wang said. “The primary goal of the protocol is to create many different types of applications, and allow many different types of user experiences to flourish.”
In the few days following the launch, Wang says he received nearly 50 projects, and while he couldn’t confirm which projects would ultimately be funded, he shared some of his thoughts on the types of tools that might emerge if the AT protocol was given room to breathe.
Bluesky alternatives themselves are certainly on the agenda regarding the AT protocol. This could be a more child- and family-centred incarnation, with children’s social graphs branching off from parents’ social graphs and finer controls over data privacy, for example. Or it could be something focused on dissident journalism or whistleblowers, or perhaps something for marginalized communities.
Likewise, it could be something similar to a Reddit clone, or social alternatives to the likes of SoundCloud, Bandcamp, or even Google Maps. “Some people have created photo-centric apps similar to Instagram, while others are looking to create event coordination platforms like Eventbrite or Partiful that have social graphs,” Wang said.
While it remains to be seen what these products might look like in reality, they could also serve as the infrastructure for a whole new ecosystem of apps to grow on. This gets to the heart of what Wang seeks to achieve with his fund.
“So all of these things that are currently at the beating heart of all the major social media companies may now flip and become parts of a standard ecosystem that others can build on,” Wang said.
Importantly, this doesn’t rule out ad-supported networks or subscriptions – it just provides options.
“You can certainly have ad-supported things, but you have to do it balanced as a business model,” Wang said. “The unfortunate thing about the big social media companies is that they got stuck in the advertising and attention economy, and by then it was too late, and they were already billions of dollars in debt to investors. So that’s the fundamental difference. We’re just going to try to follow a different evolutionary path.”
forked
For all the hype around openness and decentralization, the elephant in the room cannot be ignored: Bluesky, which controls not only its own application but also the underlying open source protocol, is a privately owned company with the usual standards. A group of VC backers. As we have seen countless times over the years, Open source is not always permanent.
Simply put, there’s plenty of room for things to go sideways, both in Bluesky and in the protocol it’s built on. But Wang doesn’t see that as a problem.
“In almost all open source ecosystems, users are the final jury,” he said. “If a big company decides to strip an open source project, if none of the users use it, it doesn’t matter. If the users rebel against it, they can make a fork and use it. You always have that right to go out and do alternative innovations.”
While many of the projects that might be funded will be spare-time side hustles, the same can be said for Skyseed itself. It all sounds like a hell of a lot of work, with no managing partners or administrators currently on the books.
“It’s really something I do on the side,” Wang said. “But there are a lot of allies, a lot of people who are hoping things will go well. I’ve been unapologetic about taking up their time. Part of what I’ll be doing here over the holiday is setting up some of that structure.”
