Hackathon Continuation Program

[danielo]

@pedrob

Does this mean the hackathon mentors have already committed to working closely with projects?

No. We confirmed the Hackathon mentors only after the hackathon was approved and same here, we would confirm mentors only when relevant/needed. Equally, not all mentors might make sense so this depends on the needs of the projects as they mature. that being said, the approach we’re using is more hands-on support instead of mentorship as we’ve seen in the data that it gives better results, so we have a core team already confirmed to work on regular basis (multiple times a week) with the projects.

@pedrob

I think that if as a DAO we are going to invest directly in projects bootstraping, we need to require binding agreements to at least try to generate onchain activity. Not by tracking their contributions, but by making contributions mandatory.

The projects already had a requirement in the hackathon to use Arbitrum infrastructure in a significant way (e.g. login with wallet is not enough). Those selected will indeed be screened with this requirement to qualify.

@pedrob

What are the legal fees cost for operations?

legal wrapper yearly fees

@pedrob

Why does this program require extra funds for marketing?

it’s part of promoting Arbitrum as a home for builders and promoting the projects. The marketing team will do a bit of work to promote the program but the majority of the budget here is for work that is done with the projects themselves (including outreach to potential customers, storytelling coaching, amplification), and the other significant body of work is that of program reporting (which in our case is handled by the marketing team).

@pedrob

In my opinion, I’d be in favor of the DAO funding the 3 Months development and scaling and then when the projects have tested their product they can get funding through the DAO / Foundation grants programs.

The DAO has no active grant programs at the moment. And the foundation is only funding more mature projects (growth stage). We also had a previous experience with the fellowships we ran, and when plurality labs didn’t get their second milestone we didn’t have extra budget allocated to the program and as such had no budget for the projects coming out of validation phase. As a result we lost 2 of them to other ecosystems where they got funding, another closed down, and a final one eventually got a questbook grant (unavailable at the moment, but even if it was, it doesn’t cover the support part).
Also, in the first 3 months the projects won’t still have much of a product. Phase 2 is to help them get to an MVP. Before that they only have a PoC and there’s only so much that can be tested without a minimum viable product.
So in a way we’re already positioning the projects to potentially receive grants from the foundation or fundraise, but after 6 months, not 3.