11 days left to apply for magma - a founder residency for top African entrepreneurs building onchain! borderless.africa/magma Happening 3-15 March 2024 with @borderlessaf magma is a peer-to-peer coordination point for founders building Africa’s economy and finance onchain, and offers top global support. 25 founders. 10 global mentors + supporters. 12 days on a mountain peak in the heart a nature reserve 90 minutes outside of Nairobi, Kenya. Who is magma for? Exceptionally talented founders who have a live application/protocol onchain or on path to be onchain. If you are on a mission to build financial and economic tools+services for the African market, magma is for you. We are also accepting really talented individuals who are not yet building a venture (technical and non-technical). Why join magma? 1. Spend time with quality founders to learn from each other, workshop your ideas, build partnerships, and form a community of peer support. A billion+ Africans have massive economic and financial needs still unmet, everything from basic financial services (savings, payments, credit, insurance, etc) to identity, reputation, and trust. Africans are flocking to crypto in masses, and the real world use of crypto at scale is still in Africa. But the best tools specifically for the African market are yet to be built. It's going to be really tough to build all these in-house [monolithic] and make them successful across Africa which has 54 countries and 1.4 billion people who speak 2,000+ languages. So... we need to coordinate better as we build more interoperable + modular applications that provide simple and user-friendly services. Web3 is uniquely positioned for composability and coordination at this scale. And Africa is at the frontier of making crypto actually useful for a billion+ people. 12 days together is a starting point in this direction. 2. Get quality and hands on support from global experts who live and breathe the mechanics of making decentralization work. Joining magma are security experts who spend their time finding critical vulnerabilities in major protocols and making them more robust, Zero Knowledge Proofs and smart contract researchers, product builders from some of the top protocols in the space, tokenecononmics designers who worked on Aave, ENS and Gitcoin, DAO experimenters, and more. Leading Layer 2s and global protocol builders are coming along. Top tier Web2 and Web3 founders are joining for open discussions on the founder journey. It's incredibly riddiculous how most African builders can't join crypto events globally because they can't get visas. So we are bringing hand picked folks to come to the continent and offer real value to our builders. It's a two way street of learning as we all figure out real world functionality of decentralization tools, and the biggest value here is the relationships that get forged. What to expect during magma? magma is built for super busy operators in Africa and beyond. The 12 days are a mix of structured and ample unstructured time to co-create together. Here is what is in store: - peer-to-peer workshops, product demos, feedback sessions, roundtables, all led by the founders joining. - Workshops, office hours, and fireside chats with global mentors. - ~4 hours a day of heads down work time, calls, and one-one-one meetings with other participants. - community building so we can support each beyond magma. How did magma come about? For years I have been inspired by @ycombinator. It’s probably the most effective coordination platform of founders and startups in tech. We borrow aspects from YC. But magma is free and no equity for participation. We are starting from different principles, and crypto lends itself to new fundamentals for coordination. Building the @EHFNewZealand over 8 years, I have witnessed the power of network effects in highly curated cohort-based communities, and the value of intentional IRL gatherings. magma applies those principles to compound value for builders overtime. And last year, with @borderlessaf I led trips across Africa with @VitalikButerin, @AyaMiyagotchi from the @ethereum, and leaders from @Optimism, @Scroll_ZKP, @arbitrum, @ETHGlobal, and dozens of builders at the forefront of the crypto revolution. We met 1000s of builders in crypto, 100s of devs and founders. It was inspiring and energizing! But I left each session wanting to go deeper, roll the sleeves to build together, and get our global friends’ hands dirty with our African builders. magma was born to facilitate that, in small numbers, focused, and more hands on, while also targeting builders who are operating at a scale that is impactful. magma cohort 1 is the first experiment, with plans to run a new cohort twice a year, and compound the value to founders and respond to the needs of builders. I am 100% bullish on Africa using crypto to build new economic tools for a billion+ people. However, if our builders get really good at leveraging what each other are building to meet users' needs and geography isn't a barrier to the global crypto community, Africa will be at the forefront of merging the crypto economy and real economy at a scale never seen before. Join magma cohort 1 and let’s build together 🔥
