Announcing the kick-off of the University Web3 Entrepreneurship Immersion Initiative

[Farstar]

University societies are increasingly active in exposing students to the possibilities of Web3. For those students, its unique appeal lies in the opportunity to deploy their tech talents to build a more equitable world.

University societies generally rally interest through organising hackathons and meetups. Currently, there’ is demand for more entrepreneurship-related exposure, supporting students in forming teams and setting up businesses.

The Web3 Entrepreneurship Immersion Programme

Immersion is a self-facilitating entrepreneurship programme, created as a public good. This means that the programme is lightweight in facilitation and organization and that its contents are free to use under creative commons.

Immersion focusses on activating uninitiated web3 entrepreneurs. The programme gives an elementary introduction to entrepreneurship, letting participants taste what it’s like to venture in the world of web3. Upon completing the programme, participants are able to decide for themselves whether they would like to continue their venturing journey into web3 (or not).

With this particular angle on activating people to build in web3, Immersion can be employed as a useful addition to other community building initiatives like hackathons and meetups. Immersion thus provides student societies with a new way for activating interest for web3, adding to the mix of options.

Our Initiative

The aim of our initiative is to support University societies worldwide in activating talent for Web3 through the Immersion programme.

In this current kick off step of the initiative we will focus on the following activities:

1. Community engagement to understand university societies’ needs regarding the activation of students and solidifying commitment and secure one society to run a first Immersion programme
2. Building of the programme content
3. Delivery of the programme and handover to the partnering university society

The content for Immersion programme is based on Farstar’s foundation of more than a decade of experience in facilitating peer learning experiences in entrepreneurship. The Immersion programme will be designed to be self-facilitating. No (domain nor facilitation) experience is needed to run the content as the authority and learning dynamics is prompted through the content we build.

Self-facilitating means that after running the Immersion programme together with partnering the university society, it will be equipped to run the next round itself, without dependency on outside facilitation support. This provides the flexibility university societies need in terms of budgetary, organisational and timing constraints to run a programme that gives an easy and effective boost to venture building.

Next steps, after kicking off the initiative

Once we have deployed our first instance of the Immersion programme, we will promote the programme to other university societies, starting with the societies that participated in the initial community engagement activities of the current initiative.

Farstar will place the Immersion workshop content openly accesible so that is available to any university society that would want to run with it.

We also intend to build a community around Immersion, providing guidance in forking content, so that it can be tailored to better fit with other contexts and verticals to foster adoption (eg. including local role models and vertical-specific exercises) without breaking the peer learning pedagogy.

A more long term vision on this community is that it may also provide a way for tracking activity and offering follow-on incubation and acceleration support where it is needed.

Immersion for your Blockchain society?

Are you interested in what Immersion looks like and how it works? Would you like to host an Immersion at your university society? Or do you have any other questions or suggestions on this initiative?

Then let us know in the comment below, or join the Web3 Immersion Telegram group.

[Farstar]

We’ve kicked off the Farstar Web3 Immersion programme for University Blockchain societies and are currently looking into the services and support Uni societies currently offer for people who want to explore the world of Web3. This understanding will help us refine the Immersion programme to seamlessly address the gaps in their current offerings, establishing it as the logical next step.

In this post we want to take you through what we’ve learned so far from our conversations, and the implications for the immersion program.

To date, we have met with the following societies and/or society members:

Kerem and Buse from ITU Blockchain Society in Turkey

Matteo from Uni Michigan Blockchain Society USA

Katarina student and participant in The Hatchery at UCL and Kernel to learn about web3

Lewis, self-taught web3 enthusiast, currently highly connected with multiple blockchain societies in London at Blocktech London

Josh, formerly associated with HomeDAO in Oxford

Jack, Blockchain society exec at London Business School

Simon, formerly resident at HomeDAO

The follow societies/individuals are in the pipeline.

[ ] Oxford Blockchain Society
[ ] Stanford
[ ] Columbia

Insights and lessons learned

What do societies currently offer?

• Mostly introductory things to Web3, for example on how market makers or uniswap works, focus/interest groups on particular languages, tokenomics, reading white papers, etc. They also support students to join hackathons, sometimes even with reimbursements to travel and expenses.
• The bias of interest is on web3, either in the money behind it or the technology itself (depending on the geography interest tends to converge to one or the other). There is less awareness on for whom the technology might be and what the technology needs to solve. Infusing thinking with customer centricity (for who is the tech and what does it solve for them) is rare
• If someone wants to learn about web3, societies or specific online communities offer one web3-specific place. If that someone also wants support in venture building and entrepreneurship, they need to go to another (non-web3) place, as both are not integrated thus far in conventional programme offerings.
• Prestigious universities find it easier to attract capital for venture building, which fosters more social initiatives for team formation and startup creation compared to other institutions.
• Most programme content at societies is self- created and delivered by students/society members on a pro-bono basis

Who do societies target and attract and what are members’ reasons/goals for joining?

• The main audience for societies are students with an interest in Web3. There are 4 categories of people who associate themselves with a society: (1) part-time active traders, (2) developers who want to discover the opportunities of blockchain, (3) students that want to start a (non-developer career) in Web3, and lastly (4) people with a general (emerging) interest into web3 that want to explore potential for application of blockchain to real world needs.
• Generally you see a conversion towards motivations that align with actual use of blockchain technology in the longer run. Notably a subset of traders convert to builders that want to build blockchain-based applications.
• There is also a minority of people who are blockchain natives. They join the societies (generally in a visible and active role) to benefit from the network and to bolster their CV.
• Members tend to dive into roles in working groups or committees. There is not a lot of mixing and mingling of people across those groups.
• For people who want to learn about web3 it is hard to assess the credibility of a course that is offered on web3. Linking a course to a university might help boost that credibility.

What are societies’ budgets and how do they work?

• Societies work with tight budgets. Budgets mostly cover for event spaces and for snacks. Sponsorship is sought for bigger events or for events like hackathons that might require travel and lodging expenses. Speakers for events are requested to contribute without remuneration
• Societies have a high turnover rate on the executive boards because students graduate or move on to other priorities and responsibilities. The consequence of this for the planning of education throughout the year is that societies need a couple of weeks in the beginning of each academic year to get settled and plan for the months ahead.
• Governance work for DAO’s covers a substantial part of the society’s budget. Some societies get a minor contribution from their university

How will this help us frame the Immersion programme?

• Blockchain societies tend to emerge from the engineering corner at university. There is not that much activity relating to entrepreneurship. There is a wish to broaden the scope of reach to people who are not necessarily already blockchain or tech-focussed. An entrepreneurship programme can support to introduce these people together and initiate collaborations between multiple disciplines at university, not just engineering

A lot of people in web3 are self-taught on web3. That is positive on the one hand in terms of the motivation levels of people. On the other hand mindsets don’t shift that easily with self teaching, and there is a risk of staying stuck with the dominant trading/gambling mindset. The Immersion program will address this gap by bringing people together around real world challenges by:

• Offering easy ways for people to mix, mingle and socialise between disciplines.
• Drawing in the people with domain knowledge and a product vision, as well as the web3 natives that can build the needed product. This mix will encourage innovation by avoiding the tendency for people to default to their existing, siloed, way of collaboration.
• Additionally, if the mixing is successful there will be a higher likelihood that people will converge to blockchain natives
• There is a lot of technical support relating to blockchain being offered in society programmes. But the “how does entrepreneurship work” in the space is not covered (beyond the odd entrepreneur speaker that might be invited to talk at a society). This also implies that any content that is used to educate people on entrepreneurship in web3 should be created by individuals with web3-specific entrepreneurship experience. We will address this gap by:
  • Offering materials created by individuals with built-in credibility and established reputation as web3 entrepreneurs.
  • Focusing on societies that have the bandwidth to try something new - just because a society doesn’t offer anything relating to entrepreneurship to offer doesn’t imply they can fit it into their current scope of activities.
• Relating to the point above, Web3 appears to lack social structures that mitigate risks relating to venture building like experience in team selection and formation, mentorship from experienced founders and advice from peers who are walking the same path. This is tied to the early stage of the industry as a whole.
  • We will be exploring ways of addressing these topics in the Immersion programme (though we can realistically only make a start on it given the focus of the programme on the early, idea stage of ventures)
• Budgets at societies are tight. With this in mind, the programme will be designed based on a budget that covers the minimum of venue and snacks.

Once the workshop content is finalized, Farstar will make it publically available, allowing any university society to implement the programme. We also aim to grow a community around Immersion, providing advice on how to customize the material while preserving the peer learning pedagogy.

Immersion for your Blockchain club

Wondering how Immersion operates and what it can bring to your society? Interested in hosting, or have ideas and questions to discuss?

Then connect with us in the Web3 Immersion Telegram group!