Li Jin
Variant Founder Fellowship: Meet Our 2023 Cohort
Watch the project demos from our first class of founder fellows
Variant is always looking for ways to catalyze more innovation and exploration in crypto at the early stages.
While there are many startup accelerator programs out there, we felt early-stage web3 founders needed a tailored curriculum that deals with topics unique to them, including incentive design, community building, and protocol architecture.
Thus, the Variant Founder Fellowship (VFF) was born: a 12-week, cohort-based educational program for early-stage founders in crypto.
From nearly 400 applications, we welcomed 24 projects. These founders spent the summer putting their business plans through the paces, from crafting go-to-market strategies to mapping out back-end infrastructure.
Our extensive Variant Network meant the fellows had access to exclusive guest lectures and firesides from some of the top players in the space: Uniswap founder Hayden Adams went in-depth about building at the product and protocol levels; former Polygon president Ryan Wyatt spoke candidly about business development tactics; former Eventbrite chief product officer Casey Winters unpacked best practices from web2 growth and onboarding; and half a dozen prominent founders dove into emerging infrastructure considerations.
VFF fellows brainstormed with each other, the Variant investment team, and our portfolio founders, receiving feedback that helped them reevaluate and strengthen their projects.
The experience culminated in our first-ever VFF Demo Days on September 6 and 7. Below, you can watch each project’s demo and learn more about what they’re building.
If you’re interested in applying to join our next cohort of Variant Founder Fellows, stay updated here.
Congrats again to our 2023 fellows!
Capsule is an NFT marketplace for kids, teens, and the young at heart to collect customizable digital cards from their favorite character artists and influencers.
Founders: Stephanie Carroll, Frankie Li
Chroma is building a full-stack solution for launching and managing DeFi lending markets.
Founders: Jack Longarzo, Tim van Scherpenzeel, Aaron Xie
Clave uses biometric authentication to turn smartphones into hardware wallets.
Founders: Doğan Alpaslan, Rafi Ersozlu
Dawn is building an Ethereum wallet to help people use apps in the fewest number of taps.
Founders: Isaac Rodriguez, Tom Waite
Latin America-based Digito lets users sign onchain transactions and real-world documents with the same private key.
Founder: Amhed Herrera
Doormat is a key management system for crypto power users.
Founder: Trevor Aron
Born out of an investment club, Forum is an all-in-one app for co-owning crypto assets with friends.
Founders: Peter Ferguson, James McComish
Future Primitive innovates on the ERC-6551 standard (token-bound accounts) to turn every NFT into a smart contract wallet.
Founder: Benny Giang
HashCurve is a platform for community-managed prediction markets.
Founders: Jack Kim, Kristof Lommers, Boris Skidan, Viktor Smits
Blockchains need more versatile compliance solutions, so Heimdall Labs is developing a decentralized protocol for crypto projects to implement their own policies onchain.
Founders: Nikhil Raghuveera, Jesse Sawa
Mezzanine combines the benefits of companies with the best aspects of DAOs to bring corporate governance onchain.
Founder: Graham Novak
Neynar lets devs read, write, and own data from web3 social protocols.
Founders: Rish Mukherji, Manan Patel
Restaurant-owned co-op Nosh connects eateries directly to drivers and consumers, cutting out delivery platform intermediaries.
Founders: Gleidson Gouveia, Mike Perhats
Using natural language processing, Pathfinder is building a human-focused interface for discovering and interacting with onchain applications.
Founders: Cody Born, Isaac Wooden
Ponder addresses the backend pain points of rolling your own indexer or stitching together out-of-the-box APIs.
Founder: Kevin Koste
Poolshark is building advanced tooling for DeFi traders to get the most out of AMMs.
Founder: alphakΞY
Probably Something creates tools to make complex web3 ecosystems understandable to anyone.
Founders: Natalie Meurer, Beth Nakamura
Rocko streamlines the DeFi borrowing process so users can get the best loan for them.
Founders: Jason Camp, Thomas Harrison
Embracing identity curation, Seam is building a web3 social media app that is both nostalgic and new.
Founders: Katy Atherholt, Nick Confrey
Shield streamlines incident responses to help web3 companies quickly get back on track post-hack.
Founders: Emmanuel Udotong, Isaiah Udotong
Studio X is building an onchain crowdfunding platform that leverages NFTs to get artists upfront capital.
Founder: Pooja Nagpal
Via onchain clubs, Troops is forging a new path for collective web3 social accounts.
Founders: Nico Gallardo, Kevin Tjiam
Turbo wants to improve the experience for indie game devs by making an easy-to-learn toolkit and marketplace.
Founder: Josiah Savary
+++
This post is for general information purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice or a recommendation or solicitation to buy or sell any investment and should not be used in the evaluation of the merits of making any investment decision. It should not be relied upon for accounting, legal or tax advice or investment recommendations. You should consult your own advisers as to legal, business, tax, and other related matters concerning any investment. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by Variant. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, Variant has not independently verified such information. Variant makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This post reflects the current opinions of the authors and is not made on behalf of Variant or its Clients and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of Variant, its General Partners, its affiliates, advisors or individuals associated with Variant. The opinions reflected herein are subject to change without being updated.