Arbitrum Growth Circles Event Proposal

[Farstar]

Thanks to everyone for the great engagement. We appreciate the thoughtful discussions and feedback. They seem to fit in a few categories and this is an attempt to cover the majority of them even where we might not have answered every response individually. We also had a fruitful discussion on most of these in the AGC Office Hours yesterday. Please review the recording for deeper explanations or ask further questions here.

Who are the experts:

@GFXlabs

The idea sounds good, but who exactly has a good track record in these topics that will be available to participants? Who would be the instructors for each area, and who is making sure they are qualified to give more than general advice?

We just want to make sure this isn’t paying money and taking time for builders to be given advice by people who haven’t actually don’t things like gone to market. And it’s not as if there’s a wealth of Orbit chain teams available who themselves would be able to give proven advice.

@web3citizenxyz

The target audience outreach makes sense and sounds promising to reach out to protocols building on Arbitrum that might benefit from the initiative. Is there a proposed outreach to secure Arbitrum experts for the virtual clinics and the unconference?

Your concern is valid and addresses a key risk in peer-to-peer learning programs. As a general principle we allow people to only speak out of personal experience, rather than teach what they’ve read about or be taught.

Our facilitators are not intended to be instructors, but instead aid the sharing of recent, practical experiences and valuing both successes and failures, as failures often provide deeper learning insights.

Research indicates that learning from peers who are in their “zone of proximal development,” those just ahead in experience, is highly effective due to the relevance of shared experiences. Given the rapid growth of Orbit chains, from a few to approximately 100 within a year, we can also use it as a chance to identify common challenges and bridge gaps in understanding. Individuals unfamiliar with Orbit chains can still offer valuable insights by connecting its benefits to broader applications.

In fact the very fact that there isn’t a wealth of recognised experts on a topic like Orbit, which is very new, makes it the perfect fit for having the proposed approach. Frontier topics like these are the default environment in which we’ve done most of our work.

We have successfully applied this approach across various industries where often we had less personal expertise to start with (from aerospace to off-grid agriculture) by facilitating the exchange of insights rather than relying on singular experts. We feel quite confident about the current situation.

All that being said, the approach allows us to work with certain well recognised figures to provide social proof and leverage their experience in supporting us to weed out any actors who are not meaningfully contributing to the learning process. More of how we’re approaching the recruitment is visible in the marketing section.

More about our team here. We will share our Go-To-Market experiences in a future post.

Budget

@web3citizenxyz

Analyzing the budget, it would be helpful to understand how you arrived to the proposed numbers. For example, is the 15K$ budget to cover for the facilitators or how is it spent? Same on 1:1 support and Unconference.

The topic of costs and budgets was discussed in the office hours and we feel that this is very welcome towards establishing norms, so different proposals can be compared.

Ultimately I think we should be doing a better job to express both the value as well as the costs involved. We made an update to the explanation of what fits in every category.

How we reached these numbers:

We used time estimates of how long these activities typically take from previous programs we’ve run. In the case of the clinics, here is what’s the work involved:

• Growth Circle Clinics: $15k
  • 7 clinics with 3 facilitators
  • $3k or the initial one + 2k for the next 6
  • 3 facilitators running topic preparation, developing guest expert briefs, providing per and post session feedback, participant engagement to curate topics (incl. reading decks, materials, data rooms, form responses, feedback processing, retro, improvement planning for next sessions) Management of the group chat platform to collect asks, organise P2P support, share useful insights about certain participants to deepen the relationships etc.
• Essentially we have about 32h of work per biweekly session to make it run like intended + a one off effort for 16h around the first one, due to broader team involvement and additional preparation. The team involved in the project is 3 higher time commitment core participants + 4 supporting ones.

It’s worth also keeping in mind that running these activities online is often more costly than doing them in person if you are aiming at the same level of experience. Additionally if you want to have higher caliber participants, the sessions need to be very tight and high value, which also means that the team organising them needs to be more senior and spend more time preparing them. Eg running a 4h session might cost less or the same compared to 2h one if the aim is to achieve the same output.

Relationship with AVI

@JoJo

Finally, I am still a bit puzzled of the AVI findings, not only we have to receive all deliverables but I have yet to see a compacted finalized finding. So far I have seen several threads, with several deliverables, and there should be an effort to unify and simplify the findings with then specific follow ups on specific verticals. This is a bit OT here but partially related in the sense that part of the request is tied to the findings of the AVI research.

@Entropy

By funding this proposal, the DAO would be preemptively signaling support of their findings and extending the AVI’s mandate to interact with Arbitrum builders on behalf of the DAO. Before continuing to support the Farstar team and the AVI, Entropy would like to see all of the Pilot’s deliverables and make a judgement on whether this is worthwhile for the DAO to continue spending resources towards.

Additionally, we fully acknowledge the delays with AVI and the shortcomings in how we’ve communicated our work to delegates. Stakeholder alignment and management was more complex than we expected. There have been many efforts to address this, including engaging you and others on this, and strengthening the ability to efficiently align AVI’s work with the DAO is one of our top priorities.

As a part of this effort, we’ve scheduled three follow-up sessions in response to last week’s presentation (the lumas can be found here: Wednesday, Thursday, Friday) and additional AVI Office Hours. We would greatly appreciate your input.

Regarding budget transparency, we welcome a discussion on how our costs compared to other benchmarks and have provided more detailed breakdowns in the main post.

Does this fit as a part of the Events budget

@tamara

Voting against

Would have liked to see this as part of a more holistic approach to recruit/attract and continuously coach/support participants (longer than just 3 months). Also as already mentioned by some it doesn’t fall into the events category

@Farstar

Our market research findings show that founders in the Arbitrum ecosystem, especially the more early stage, want a shared space where they’re encouraged to work with others around a shared purpose with a community of like-minded builders.

I believe the above can be achieved with a much smaller budget (if any). An idea would be to try out “Masterminds”

• bring builders on Arbitrum together (thinking super simple such as tg channels etc)

• brake them into smaller groups based on similarity (size, domain etc)

• set up a call, where for each call someone is in the “hot seat” and shares a topic/area they are struggling with, while the others are there to give advice

Could be a boostrapped way to test some sort of shared space.

In terms of the events category, yes as discussed on the office hours yesterday, we do recognise it might be a borderline case. Thank you for attending and engaging! We were under the impression that it fit under the educational workshops subcategory. That said, we now recognize this has led to confusion about the series, with some perceiving it as a simple speaker event and podcast rather than the more intentionally curated and hands on support initiative it actually is. This was designed with a clear structure, as we’ve watched many informal attempts fail to generate meaningful results.

@danielM

I will vote against.

On the one hand, as I mentioned above, this is a good marketing ploy to attract attention to the Arbitrum ecosystem. But on the other hand, we already have many interesting events, such as: ETHDenver, ETHBucharest etc. We also have Stylus Sprint and maybe in the future Arbitrum audit program.

Of course, I would like to hold this event, but there is not enough money for everyone. Let’s not be overwhelmed by many tasks and events this year. This can lead to poor implementation of other activities due to lack of budget for everyone. But next year, I believe, maybe it will be possible to allocate part of the funds for this great idea.

@EzR3aL

This is my main reason why I am against this proposal, even if the idea might be good.

We as a DAO should have a clear focus on costs this year. Last year the DAO spend millions for initiatives and we haven’t seen any fruits yet.

Draining the new event budget straight from the beginning with an initiative we don’t know the if the outcome will be in any way positive is simply extracting value for other really important events.

We need to focus on less but very high quality events to make sure Arbitrum, the DAO and its delegates as well will be seen as something positive and supportive. This isn’t the case right now, the DAO is seen as a burden and many decide even against Arbitrum because of this.

We should change this.

Going to vote NO.

We agree that we should focus on providing value through the events that are proposed. Since we are approaching the end of Q1 and only EthBucharest has been approved, we believe that these educational workshops fit well within their expressed aims and can provide the value outlined here.

We’d also like to clarify that this is not primarily meant for marketing, though it might be a secondary benefit.

@JoJo

I am not mentioning the aboves to just criticize full around, but I am mentioning it to explain why protocols and builders won’t come to us. We are not starting from an advantageous point, as a DAO, and the approach to me should be the opposite: we, as a collective, should start chasing some protocols, likely a very few (and most important ones) at the beginning, understand what they need and understand how we can give them what they need compared to the goals we have as a DAO. And after we create these successfull initiatives, we enlarge the scope out to the point we - hopefully - turn the table in term of reputation, so that builders see us a value added for the chain and not value extracting.

@JoJo

To conclude, I think the AVI team is well intended. And I don’t want to question their expertise here nor the network that they have build in the last year. But I just think the approach should be different: if we embark in a 3, 4, 6 months adventure in this sense, we will lose valuable time and so we will lose opportunities in a market that is getting narrower and narrower.

We agree that short-term strategies matter, and we also need to think long-term. As a DAO, we have the ability to do both. That being said, we wholeheartedly disagree that the sentiment is all negative, there’s a segment of founders that build on Arbitrum because the tech works and they are barely aware of the DAO or have hardly interacted with it or the social media discussions around it (some never have).

We should focus on identifying lanes that make sense long-term, not just because they are trends, but because they align with Arbitrum’s ability to generate real ‘on-chain GDP’ and strengthen its core assets. This is the foundation of the AVI thesis. If we limit ourselves to competing on what might become zero sum games in an oversupplied infrastructure market (where 50k developers have 100 chains to choose from, many indistinguishable) we risk stagnation. A more balanced approach ensures both short-term traction and meaningful long-term differentiation.

Misc.

@Entropy

Even though it’s mentioned in a comment, we also encourage the proposal author to make it explicitly clear, preferably at the top of the proposal, that funds are being requested from the 2025 Events Budget. This is to reduce that chance that delegates are misinformed and believe a Tally vote is required.

Thank you for pointing this out. We’ve corrected it on the forum, with an emphasis on highlighting the information about the lack of Tally.

@mcfly

We’re voting AGAINST this proposal.

As builders in this space since 2017, we’ve seen that serious teams find their way without managed networking events or facilitated workshops. The reality is simple: if a team can’t navigate basic documentation, join Telegram groups, or network within existing channels, they likely lack the fundamental capabilities needed for successful protocol development.

The $67.2k budget effectively subsidizes basic research and networking that competent teams already do as part of their development process. Quality builders naturally gravitate toward resources and connections they need - it’s a core competency, not a service to be outsourced.

True ecosystem strength comes from teams who demonstrate initiative and resourcefulness from day one. Let’s focus our resources on direct protocol development rather than creating artificial support structures.

McFly, some of what you’re saying has merit. However, many people would agree that YC’s $0.6T+ in portfolio value has been at least to an extent enabled by their support, while certainly some of these companies would have made it otherwise too. And furthermore they’ve been able to capture a lot of this value. In a competitive environment where Solana is doing an excellent job of already doing a lot more for application layer builders there’s merit in the Arbitrum ecosystem helping itself to be even more competitive.

@web3citizenxyz

Is there a final report where we can see output from Phase 1 and results that can help us see the need for the program and proposed structure?

I would suggest including more metrics you would track on the proposal above if these apply or metrics beyond meeting their target relationship development, attending meeting and qualitative feedback that are tied to the primary outcomes. Let me know if i’m mixing writeups that don’t relate to the proposal, i’m finding it difficult to keep up with which AVI posts apply here.

We’re glad to see people engaging with the materials on the forum and your attention to metrics is appreciated. While there isn’t a final report for Phase one yet, if you attend the AVI thesis events (found here: Wednesday, Thursday, Friday) you can get more insights and meet with some of the parties interested in collaborating. While objective metrics are possible in the long-term, meaningful insights rely on a high-context, high-integrity stakeholder group with skin in the game. This is why we are pushing the AVI Snapshot related to the Interim Experts Council.

In the meantime, we aim to:

• Develop a logic model that challenges our assumptions about what drives impact on key outcomes
• Keep things simple and encourage DAO participants to engage, make intuitive judgments based on anecdotal evidence, and remain open to refining their understanding over time

@web3citizenxyz

Also, can you post the office hours recording here?

The recording of the office hours can be found here and we’ll link it at the bottom of the main proposal post.