HackFS Summit 🚀 How Accelerators like GPC help FVM Builders - Gabriel Anderson

foreign [Music] I'm excited to bring on uh somebody that I love talking to I feel like every time I talk to Gabriel I walk away with different ideas different ways of health and they're always very positive so I'm excited to welcome Gabriel from graph paper capitals and chat more about uh the work that they're doing there and and just as James mentioned um the kind of fem cohort that they're bringing through as well so Gabriel welcome to the stage good to see you Jacob uh see you soon yeah life's great yeah okay awesome cool cool uh awesome well I always love being here always loved speaking to the amazing teams that are building attacking at the hackathfest events um so I've got 15 minutes to blow your faces off uh keep moving this a bit out loud actually um but um so I'm gonna try to give you as much value as possible over the next 15 minutes um super excited to be here um today's session title is how to take your hackathon project um and turn it into a sustainable startup um so a little bit about me I'm a previous three-time founder two-time eir um I previously uh was the founder and managing director of a web 3 accelerator called tachyon I'm the last four and a half years I'm back over 90 Founders in Krypton what three it collectively raised about 150 million almost a billion dollars in total evaluations and um having been a three-time Founder myself I made a lot of mistakes along the way uh build Venture scale businesses I've built in one businesses um so I've seen quite a bit um graph paper capital is it we're an early stage monthly accelerator we're a network ecosystem and we really like to back the most ambitious Founders who are defining the future of what three um really helping to accelerate pre-seed and Seed stage Founders within the space with giving them access to Capital Access and insights and we've been working with the um protocol Ops Team for a long time um and so I think one of the things that I I kind of want to um you know help set the context around you know I've had to make the transition from like an early project uh into a venture Scale Company lots of times uh seeing it you know from myself but I've also backed a number of really amazing companies and Founders that got their started at hackathon just like many of you who are here today um so I've flew firsthand tons of amazing teams that have to struggle through making that transition and I've seen Founders really have successfully make that that transition some of them I think are actually sponsors of hack that fast and it's really cool seeing that um and so over the years I've been able to spot the trends and what successful Founders do as they make this transition from a from a project maybe something that you've been hacking on over you know the span of a weekend or a couple of weeks um and I want to share with all of you some of the patterns I've seen and uh you know the big believer that successfully excludes so the the the big transition that you're going to have to make as you go from a hackathon project to whether or not this can be a sustainable startup um is going from building what you think is cool uh to validating with real users that there is real demand there do other people want your building the difference between a project and a company is a customer and as a Founder you're gonna have to get ruthless with finding what's called Product Market fit and the value that you're delivering to users and being able to prove it ASAP everything you do when you make that transition from your product to raising Capital to hiring it is all in service of your users and customers um I I told you guys uh about the you know my three-time founder the three three codes that I've previously found it but I didn't tell you about the six to seven eight nine ten projects in between that were either lifestyle businesses or that just could never again escape velocity I just couldn't find a market fit so I've gone through this you know I a number of times myself so my advice uh for today's session is not pretty radical I've alumnus um and so there's a series of questions that I think you want to start to ask yourself as you're coming out of hack that fast to start to answer um that will help assess if this is the thing that you should spend the next five to seven years of your life building um so let's jump right into it here are basically the five key areas that you should be analyzing as a founder or as a group of a group um to analyze and determine if this is startup worthy or not uh so I'm gonna unpack these one by one time check all right doing pretty good um so first team a perfect product in a perfect Market can still fail with an imperfect team and so like a lot of products come together in add-a-thons uh you know for the the hack um but you know a great team I've seen time and time again that a great team can overcome all the fits and starts uh to make it work so when you come out of hackathon you've got some ideas you've got what might be an early product or you have a feature or something like that um the version that you have today might not end up being the version that ends up being the one that has real product Market fit and so you're going to go through a lot of uncertainty there's this Valley of Death that every feminista has to uh Traverse and you know all those fits and starts and challenges the the question is does this does the founding team the group of you that are that are building and acting together do you have all the critical skills that your business is going to need and if not how do you they're not getting them so some of the questions you want to think about and asking yourselves as you're coming out of hack FS is one like do you have a history of shipping together or did the team just meet up at the hackathon there's nothing wrong with meeting up the hackathon um but before you decide to do something like take on a startup together maybe you want to get a couple of Cycles together maybe do a couple of times together before you decide whether or not you're ready to make that leap um the great thing about hackathons is that you you're forced to ship fast and you're putting these really high pressure pressure situations so you can really vet potential co-founders um you know in terms of being able to keep your cool under stress and pressure you may want to ask yourself you know does everyone actually want to continue on what the best thing that you built uh and uh and potentially get Venture funding or go through an accelerator um do you as a team have complimentary skills you balance each other out do you have a unique insight into the market or the or a set of users in an industry um and if your team is is lacking in any key areas like domain expertise or maybe uh business operations or fundraising or something like that you know what's your plan to fill that Gap can you fill it with mentors can you fill it with you know getting access to some of the amazing resources that James was just talking about or in an accelerator and I'll talk about paper Capital at the end of this uh but these are some things you want to ask yourself if you're thinking about you know the team Dynamic within your project um the single the reason and the reason why I wanted to spend a little bit of extra time on this one is the single biggest risk that we see at these early stages are founder disputes and founder breakups the early days are extremely high risk and high stress and early funding teams are subject to the same interpersonal problems um and higher effective you know governance you know so can your relationship survive and I think that's the that's the thing that you really want to ask yourselves as you're thinking about do we want to continue on with this coming out of um um one question I do get um often is um you know solo Soul hackers uh versus you know forming a team do I need a co-founder et cetera um single Founders may not cover you may not cover all the critical skills and uh really subjects um you to um being able to wear a lot of different hats and so um you know the question is that you want to ask yourself is do you really think that you can do it alone um if not um you know what's your plan to fill some of those skill gaps and I think that's where having access to networks having access to mentors um is a really valuable thing uh in terms of the the team most Founders that we back are highly technical so I'm gonna assume that anybody who's here on academics you can probably build a product um but technical skills alone are not sufficient the founders that I have seen succeed time and time again and at this stage I've raised millions of dollars for some of my companies um I've done the bootstrap thing and gotten to seven eight figures um a 10 million run rate business bootstrap um the thing that I've seen time and time again is in addition to um you know having the strong technical skills uh do you have strong founder market fit in other words do you understand the industry the domain the vertical that you're building in even if it's like a new Frontier web 3 thing um what's the web to uh what's the web to equivalent that you're disrupting and do you understand the pain points of that particular market so do you have strong for under Market fit um two startups are really really hard you are going to have to hustle like crazy and depending on what type of Thunder you are hustling these different things you know can you sell can you build your product you know whatever it is um you've got to have that drive you gotta have the hustle and then finally the founder are really good storytellers you know can you inspire others to come along on this journey with you you are a high risk proposition literally to everybody you speak with in those early days and so in order to overcome that you're gonna need an edge let's assume that you can build the thing that you're building that you're acting on uh here over this week um after that what's your Edge and you're going to need the one if not all three of these okay so that's a team Dynamic um let's talk about the market you you are all building a product that exists in a market with either direct or indirect competitors and so as you start to think about transitioning from a project to whether this is an actual sustainable startup in business you want to better understand your market and the users in that market what are their key pain points what assumptions are you making about these in the market and how can you quickly validate some of those assumptions how big is the market how fast is it growing um that's important to understanding whether this is going to be a project that you Tinker with um a nice lifestyle business and I've built a number of those there's nothing wrong with that um or is the market opportunity large enough that you you want to think seriously about raising money for your idea on and going through like an accelerator so I think there are two approaches to product organ it in what three um when it comes to Market sizing and I've seen both work so the first is can you capture a large percentage of a small but a really fast exponentially growing Market um so a lot of the times this will be like a web 3 native Market um but it's growing by two three four five six hundred percent compounding annual growth um and so you know if you capture a large percentage or share of a small but Square Market then you're just going to ride that growth curve um of that market and be a market leader and then you can start to peel off into anti-layer markets um as you raise and we cover a lot of that during our accelerator um but the second approach is building what I might call a web 2.5 company and using the web3 stack as a key differentiator um across one of the four critical attack vectors and being able to basically out compete web 2 companies using a better more efficient um so either way you're gonna need to build in a very large in-going Market um and the way that you get I literally uh was was mentoring a Founder earlier today um the difference between building a vitamin versus an aspirin yeah the analogy basically is you know an aspirin is relieves pain like I'm in pain I need to alleviate that pain now um a multivitamin is like a nice to have it's like ah I know I should take vitamins I know I should take care of it yeah I'll get to it when you're when you're trying to figure out is this a hackathon project or is this a potentially sustainable hybrid startup you need to find that high value pain point and be that aspirin in the market by offering a differentiated solution and you are going to need to relentlessly assess if the market you're going after is large enough or that you're making a bet that it will be extremely large um it'll be in the extremely large market and that you can own it um and that's the web 2.5 versus what creative approach okay I want to speed along here it can come running along [Music] and assume all your technical important here you know the world is full of smart motivated people who just can't execute and build and so depending on your audience your objective and the level of complexity of your idea or your MVP your minimum viable product your your product will range from some low Fidelity Bill maybe a no code solution or something like that to test some of your key assumptions like Dynamic ux designs on figma or something like that all the way up to full-blown High Fidelity products that require who are building and coding in hackathons you can and should write code that's exactly what you should be doing um if you're you know if you're technical but once you start transitioning from Project to Startup and especially if I started that has raised money you need to have a strong understanding of the users and your record before you start writing a lot of code you might be incurring a lot of technical debt so like even D5 solutions that require like security audits they can beat the risked or validated with users before taking on the heavy costs and complexity and time commitment of like an audit for example so you really want to assess your riskiest assumptions in your technical grade map and your product uh and the market and then validate those with users and then show that you can prioritize your product roadmap as you increase the believability of your product builds with real users in the market so every version of your product should be getting you closer to hiring higher Fidelity build with real users action Community Building startups do not fail because of a lot of technology I promise you they fail because of a lack of customers and users and so you need to understand your users intimately and in the early days you're really looking for the highest value pain point and you're trying to see if you can solve that pain point and build real demand so you're going to start with your hackathon community that's an obvious place for you to start that's usually where most hackathon projects get their first couple of uses their customers and you know maybe some of you are going to win certain prizes and that would be great um but at some point you kind of finish her out of that community in this community and eventually on into the market and speak with people who don't know you and don't know what you're building and see if there's real signal there and the best Founders in web 3 that I've seen are really good about building in public and harnessing Community the great thing about building a community and building in public is that even if your project pivots and you end up changing you you have this asset this amazing asset that you can bring along with you that that can pivot along with wherever you go um the other big mistake uh that I see Founders um make especially coming at hackathons especially those who end up winning the prizes is they mistake these vanity metrics for real demand things like Discord followers and Twitter followers or you know a bunch of Judges told me that this is great um that that's good but that's not convincing a real user demand so if you're making this transition and thinking about do I have a real startup here in my hand you you need a clear set of early adopters that are ready to use your product not you know some of these vanity metrics and and or you want to be aligned with very clear industry Trends you are you're going with the the puck uh you're skating towards where the puck is going so you don't need to turn the growth in the early days especially coming out of the hackathon but what you want is and need is real signal of user demand so can you show that there are real users love what you're building we're chomping at the bit to actually use your product your your MVP and it doesn't matter like about like raising money or accelerators or anything like that you want to prove this for yourself so you end up spending unnecessary time um chasing a thing that doesn't have real demand um okay and then we get to funding um I am uh I'm gonna we'll do this a little bit I think as a as a web two as a web three founder you have a lot of funding options to you that um even web two companies don't have and so you want to start thinking about does this project that I'm working on or building on does it fit the Venture profile is it in a large and growing Market can it be a billion dollar type company um and the great thing about building web 3 is you have a lot of sources of of capital that you can get access to along the way while you while you hit your next set of Milestones um and so I think I have here we go yeah um so you've got you know this is just a kind of like a a mind map a traditional Venture versus reventure um you you all have access to wonderful uh ecosystem funds non-diluted Brands like this um maybe strategic Angels we've got seeds you've got accelerators traditional DC investment dials um you know you can raise by exiting to your community so you've got a lot of fun options available to you which gives you optionality and unfair competitive Advantage as you're thinking about your uh your project so those are the five tiers that you really want to own in on and think about um as you as you start to think you know is this a project that uh that I want to maybe take to the next level with the next uh set of investment or growth was like an accelerator uh so I'll show just a little bit about graph paper capital for those of you that are interested in something like an accelerator um we're extremely bullish on the um I've been uh in partnership with file coin political labs and for years now um I think FM is probably one of the most exciting spaces to be building and hacking in um right now um so this is a little bit about graph paper Capital uh I think the the thing that we really seem to do is is give our Founders um we specialize in seed and Seed stage Founders I think that's where we're really good just myself having been a three-time Founder I guess four time now um two-time eir um and and then uh our Network in our ecosystem is tremendous with with relief stage Founders and so we give you team Capital um we try to build infrastructure around your startup I don't want our Founders having to reinvent the wheel especially if you're a first-time founder so we give you during the course of 12 weeks travel tested tools resources playbooks Frameworks the things that we've used to successfully build companies as you look for product Market fit within web three and then this amazing network of fellow Founders and Builders um the great thing about having uh you know a strong Network um is uh is not only do you have sources of capital that could be potential Angels or seed investors um but typically Founders who are also early stage investors are some of the best early beta users they give you the absolute best feedback and our network is made up of a lot of Founders that we've previously got um I think it's one of our entire competitive advantages as an accelerator and ecosystem um our emphasis zero to one stage finding product Market fit how do you take the a web 2 Playbook and layering the unfair competitive advantages that you have of finding product Market fit within one three and then the other thing is fundraising preparation I'm teaching you the founder how do you actually go about launching and running a successful fundraising process the fundraising market right now is extremely difficult especially if you're not being Crypt out um and I see a lot of Founders that just don't actually know how to run a fundraising process this is different than the demo Day by the way which we do have as well um but yeah again again for those of you that are building Athena ecosystem I think this is probably one of the most exciting ecosystems to be building in right now we're certainly excited about that GPC um I think for two reasons one fem um is anchored to real storage demand uh real demand and sticky uh Revenue so before I was telling you about the you know size of the market are you competing in a large and growing Market on the Pam or the total addressable Market uh of something like at the end is anchored to real world use cases and so I think not only do you have as this open data economy starts to expand within the Ethan landscape not only do you have this massive Market that will be growing and continue to grow uh but it's anchored to really understand so it's not like you're building a startup in you know in an ecosystem where you're trying to you know make it more efficient to put a monkey gate bags for example and no disrespect to anybody uh for being with jpegs by the way uh it's a lot of fun but um but you want to be building in an ecosystem where there's real world demand and I think the other thing is is that I think we're going to see a lot of um first mover advantages in fvm and that will give your startup a defensible note and allow you to capture a market and be a market leader in a large and growing ecosystem so we're very excited to upset um I think drafty for capital is probably the and highly biased when I say this but we are probably the smartest highest average money on account table at the preseason Builder um so we'd love to see any and all of you apply to the spring 23 cohort you can just grab a snapshot of this QR code uh to head to our website which is XYZ if you're interested in applying um and it's just a little bit about our Network I think our network of founder investors is probably one of the most um uh unparent competitive advantages that we have um you know at any startup Founder's Journey you need access and you need insight and and uh and so um our 12-week program is really geared towards creating um rigor and surface areas to give you exactly that we've designed to accelerator that to surface your biggest challenges as a as a Founder as a company and then we design these High Fidelity interactions and touch points with people within our networking ecosystem to help unlock that access or that Insight that you need so we'll be working closely with uh 10 to 15 startups for our screen cohort um it will run uh June through September we will have a remote demo day we will have an IRL investor day where we invite vetted investors from our Network who we know we've done deals with previously um all all in uh um all in in a position to really try to help our Founders uh accelerate extremely fast and then get them ready for that next stage of investment and growth um okay I think that's everything really appreciate being here um love the East Global community and because some love being here and being able to speak to amazing hackers and Builders um and you can come find us at graph papercapital.xyz if you have any questions Jacob I might have gone a little over and I apologize sir that's all right that's right I'll forgive you I'll quicker I mean I I took a lot from that we covered a lot of topics like I think the main thing I you covered so much valuable stuff but the main thing I covered was the difference between a project and a company as a customer and I think one of the cool things is this is a three-week hackathon too right so there's plenty of time to find those first customers even during the hackathon and get feedback as you're building early stage and then yeah as a Next Step go down the accelerator Pipeline and join graph paper capitals accelerator and there's just so much support out there so I think you know very excited to uh savviered Happy chatting um and and for sharing the the work that you're doing again YouTube with everybody hacking uh have fun uh yeah I would love to see some amazing projects apply amazing thank you Gabriel cheers