Gitcoin Accelerator Program -> GTC utility

🧙 🧙‍♀️ Ideas and Open Discussion
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There have been a few discussions about utilizing our capabilities to support the ecosystem and, at the same time, bring value back to GitcoinDAO. That’s really aligned with my view that every organization needs to have a long-term sustainable economic model that creates more value than it consumes and I want GitcoinDAO to have a very strong economic model as many organizations and people depend on it.

And one idea is coming back to me repeatedly: Gitcoin Accelerator Program.

Main reasons why I see so many synergies:

  1. We are funding early-stage projects
  2. We are building our products
  3. We are running Hackathons

Some other reasons:

  1. Many early-stage organizations are reaching out to us to partner with us
  2. We are a trusted organization
  3. We are in the build market

I didn’t detail how all those reasons are connected, as I want to spark the discussion but keep space for everyone to make their own opinion.

The other aspect is revenue and value creation. I truly believe that an accelerator program, if done correctly, can bring tons of value to the organizations participating in it. And if that organization also participates in the grants round, that is an additional “matching round” for them.

We can exponentially increase the value created by Gitcoin Grants funding by including support and advice to those organizations.

And from a revenue perspective, this accelerator program can be sponsored by one of our partners, or we can participate in the success of those projects through token swap or any other mechanism.

If we prove the value of the program, I believe we would be able to set up a sustainable business model for it.

We already have a few partnerships where we ad-hoc advising on projects, but it’s challenging if there is no structure, support, or clear goals. I want to change that and develop a program to create more value for the ecosystem and GitcoinDAO.

What is your view on creating an Accelerator Program, and is that something you would like to participate in?

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I think this could potentially be a good idea post-protocol, and could serve as one way to bootstrap Grants 2.0 if we can get the right matching partners to sponsor an “accelerator” round.

I will say though, having run the accelerator program at Protein and spoken to a few participants of Seed Club’s accelerator program, that running such a program is far from simple. We ran a fairly small program at Protein - only 3 participants in the cohort and $50k of funding, and while we did find that we added value to the projects in the end, we also found that we have so much more to learn to do this effectively at any larger scale. And our accelerator was basically a more hands-on grants program with no expectation of financial return.

During the program, much of the active resources of the DAO were being put towards the accelerator - it’s the same in Seed Club. So while yes, I support this idea in theory if we were still in an abundance mindset (and would love to revisit when we go back there), I think it’s too big of an undertaking for the current climate.

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Thank you for the feedback, I agree, that this will require an investment at the beginning, but can be a great revenue stream for the DAO in the future.

I think Gitcoin has a great potential to run this type of product / ongoing service, but definitely it’s far from being simple and easy