Meet Skyseed, the VC fund and incubator that supports Bluesky and the AT Protocol ecosystem

On November 15, Peter Wang a message soliciting ideas for a fund to support new incubator and developing experimental projects Bluesky/AT Protocol ecosystem. Four weeks later, Skyseed appeared With an initial commitment of $1 million.

The turnaround is a speed underscored by the fact that the foundation doesn’t even have a website yet (its one Bluesky’s profilethough), it’s testament to a few things: the hype around Bluesky, that is emerges as a lifeboat for the millions of people who are Abandoned X (née Twitter). But at the same time, there’s an almost palpable sense of hope starting over on a new social platform built on an open, decentralized network. AT Protocolwe can avoid the ad-driven, walled gardens that permeate social networks today.

“Wide majority Most of Facebook’s revenue comes from advertising. All the big centralized social media companies are advertising companies, meaning they trade on traffic and user attention,” Wang said in an interview with TechCrunch this week. “The main difference between an open protocol and a closed protocol is that closed ones will never tolerate the presence of applications that take the content of the graph and distract the user from its own features.”

Decentralized web

Wang is co-founder, chief AI and innovation officer past CEO of the company Anacondaa company built on the eponymous open source Python and R distribution it helps data scientists build, test and deploy all their data-driven projects.

Separately, Wang has been an enthusiastic supporter of the decentralized internet, providing financial support to projects. Blue Link Labsdeveloper of a peer-to-peer open source web browser Glass. Official support for Beaker ended in 2022 with the creator Paul Frezee He joined Bluesky as a “protocol engineer” before officially becoming CTO in April.

This ground work on Beaker was to Bluesky’s advantage. “As the Beaker project officially comes to an end, the heart of Beaker lives on with Bluesky,” Frazee he wrote In an inscription announcing the end of Beaker. “Hopefully what we’ve done will make Beaker’s end a little less painful in the long run.”

Fast forward to today and Wang is expanding his support for decentralization to an official seed fund. “I’ve done angel investment, but this is the first time I’m raising a fund and being responsible for other people’s money,” Wang said. “I was funding Paul (Frazee) and his team for a couple of years. They have tried various things to create decentralized web technologies, with moderate to low success. But in my opinion, all these lessons learned feed into (Bluesky) design, protocol, and implementations.

Although it is a decentralized web far from a new conceptwhat it lacks is a significant number of people leaning toward something like the AT Protocol: an open source, open standards-based framework that allows users to retain ownership of their data and migrate it to other platforms in 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 have a lot of good ideas; we just didn’t have users. Now we have users.”

“Like the Internet in 1996”

Since publishing a request for ideas in mid-November, Wang says he’s been inundated with people reaching out to him with suggestions, noting that the enthusiasm reminds him of the Internet in 1996.

“With all these technical ecosystems, you really need those early adopters and innovators to feel empowered to go and do all the creative things they want to do,” Wang said. “When I started seeing the quality of some of these early things being built, it became clear to me that something really good could come out of this.”

Examining Skyseed’s makeup reveals two main components: the fund and the incubator. Most of the initial $1 million came from Wang himself, though he said some angel friends also put in six-figure sums. Moreover, he said that the fund is actually close to $1.5 million and this number could increase further if the current momentum is maintained and officially accredited investors can be attracted.

“Right now it’s mostly angels, but as soon as I announced, I had half a dozen people interested in the fund as limited partners,” Wang said. “Now that I see the traction, I think there are more ways to deploy capital, and there’s more capital interested in these early-stage things.”

Initial checks are likely to be in the region of $100,000, though this will be aimed at projects with “real business models, real teams and real products,” Wang said, allowing them to reach a certain point of proof and achieve more substantial results. subsequent funding.

But how big can Skyseed itself become as a fund?

“I think we can get to $5 (million) to $10 million, especially as we start to see some proof points here,” Wang said.

In addition to formal equity investments, Skyseed will also provide developer grants (eg Bluesky does it himself), will be between 5000-25000 US dollars.

“Grants are quite selective in the sense that I’m just handing the money over to somebody. I have to really trust their technical vision and ability to execute,” Wang said. “So generally there will be people with some tools that have quality and merit — either I use them or I know people who use them.”

Some developer grants will run out by the end of the year, with the seed capital likely to start disbursing early in the new year.

“I’ve already had my eye on a few projects that are great. They won’t require a lot of capital, and if I can get someone out of ‘ramen mode’ to build and focus, that’s good,” Wang added. “A lot of these projects don’t need a lot of funding to go far because they’re just one person, or maybe a small team of two working in their spare time.”

Meanwhile, on the incubator side, Wang says Skyseed will act as a mechanism for like-minded people to bounce ideas off each other toward collaboration, especially where there are complementary projects.

“It’s going to be a fairly active mentorship, and it’s going to be a network where they help each other,” Wang said. “What I see is that there are a lot of projects in different spaces and they have similar things that they want to do. So some of that will also be a founder match.”

Dunbar’s no

Bluesky, at the end of the day, is just another app, and it’s over-the-top some of the same moderation issues that X has encountered almost since its inception and advertising may fall on the platformalso. But it does highlight some of the potential benefits of the right ecosystem emerging from behind the AT Protocol.

Dunbar’s number is a concept by the British biological anthropologist Robin Dunbar and suggests a cognitive limit on how many people can stably exist in a given social context. This number is 150. Social media is playing fast with this number, pushing billions of people into the same social space, and the competition continues; large-scale social networks force people to connect with people they would otherwise avoid in real life. The AT Protocol enhances this by allowing all types of niche and micro-networks built on the same underlying framework.

“We don’t all have to fit into the same, one-size-fits-all program,” Wang said. “The main purpose of the protocol is to build many different kinds of applications and allow many different kinds of user experiences to flourish.”

A few days after the launch, Wang said that 50 projects have come up in the region, and although he could not confirm which projects would eventually be funded, he shared some ideas about the types of instruments that might emerge. If the AT Protocol is given room to breathe.

Alternatives to Bluesky itself are definitely on the agenda when it comes to AT Protocol. This could be, for example, child social graphs separated from parents’ social graphs, and data privacy controls more child- and family-focused. Or it could be something aimed at dissident journalism or whistleblowers, or something for marginalized communities.

Likewise, it could be something akin to a Reddit clone, or socially infused alternatives like SoundCloud, Bandcamp, or even Google Maps. “Some people have built photo-centric apps similar to Instagram, while others are trying to build social graph-driven event coordination platforms like Eventbrite or Partiful,” Wang said.

While it remains to be seen what such products might actually look like, they could also serve as the infrastructure for a whole new ecosystem of applications to grow. And that’s at the core of what Wang is aiming for with his foundation.

“So all of these things that are currently at the beating heart of all the big social media companies can now be transformed and become parts of an ecosystem that is modular and that other people can build on top of,” Wang said.

Importantly, it doesn’t rule out ad-supported networks or subscriptions – it just gives options.

“You can have things that are completely ad-supported, but as a business model you have to do it in a balanced way,” Wang said. “The misfortune of the big social media companies is that they stumbled into the ad and attention economy and by then it was too late, they owed billions of dollars to investors. So this is the main difference. We will just try a different way of evolution.”

Forked

For all the talk of openness and decentralization, the elephant in the room can’t be ignored: Bluesky is a private company with regular software, the controllers of not only its own application, but also the underlying open source protocol. Row of VC backers. As we have seen countless times over the years, open source is not always permanent.

Simply put, there’s a lot of room for things to go sideways, both in Bluesky and the protocol it’s built on. But Wang does not see this as a problem.

“In almost all open source ecosystems, users are the final jury,” he said. “If a big company decides to take down an open source project, it doesn’t matter if none of the users are using it. If users rebel against it, then they can make a fork and use it. You always have the right to go out and make an alternative innovation.”

While most of the projects that can be funded are free time activities, the same can be said about Skyseed itself. It all sounds like a hell of a job, with no managing partner or admin on the books right now.

“It’s really something I do on the side,” Wang said. “But there are a lot of allies and a lot of people who hope it goes well. I didn’t apologize for taking up their time. Part of what I’m going to do here over the holidays is build some of that structure.”