W3 Studio 2024 Plans

When we launched W3 Studio a year ago, we put forth our vision for a nonprofit venture studio program. Our idea is to work with Black, Latinx, and Women founders in Atlanta at the earliest stage of company building. We want to grant these founders $200,000 each, which should be enough cash to get from an idea to a live product with paying customers. We feel this will erase the gap in finding angel investors for these diverse entrepreneurs.

Our hope is to eventually achieve a $1MM annual budget for W3 Studio so that we can work with 4–5 founding teams annually. Today, raising this level of funding is hard, like really hard. We are not giving up on this long-term plan, but we are focusing next year on the ways we can make an impact with the funding that we have achieved. To that end, we are excited to announce our 2024 plan, which builds on our successes from 2023.

First, we will continue to partner with the Atlanta Blockchain Center and its leader Marlon Williams on the Immutable Incubator program. Our goal with this program is to find innovative projects and talent and to help them develop, execute, and scale their ideas. We have completed three cohorts of this program since launching in 2022. 14 amazing diverse-led companies have participated and benefited from being part of this experience. In 2024, we will host at least ten more founders in the Immutable Incubator. We are now seeking sponsors that want to support this effort so that we can issue grants to these diverse founders to help them with corporate set up, product building, and customer acquisition.

Second, we will build on the success of the first Atlanta Web3 Expo, which W3 Studio helped host in September 2023. At this event, 5 companies pitched for a cash prize from a panel of esteemed judges. A further 8 startups were featured in the exhibition with 100+ guests. This was a great event, and we will double down and expand it in 2024. We are currently pursuing sponsors to increase the cash prizes for the companies in the pitch event and to provide grants for the exhibitors.

Third, in 2023 we hosted several community events that brought founders together with investors and ecosystem leaders. Over 200 people attended the Expo and our launch party back in March. Dozens were there at our smaller events including happy hours, a breakfast meetup, and more. We will expand these events in 2024 to serve our growing community. We are looking for sponsors that want to be featured at these events and help diverse founders make critical connections for their businesses.

As we continue to make a positive impact with diverse founders in our Atlanta tech community, we hope to find corporate partners that believe in our mission and can assist us with our 2024 plans and the future launch of our flagship venture studio program. If your company wants to help us support Black, Latinx, and Women founders, please reach out to me to discuss.

Our nonprofit W3 Studio is a 501c3 charitable organization. You can support us by donating online here. Also, check out our list of pitch competitions, grant programs, and other founder resources here.

Follow me on LinkedIn for more frequent updates on web3.

*Thank you for reading this post. If you would like this directly to your Inbox weekly, please subscribe. I would also really appreciate it if you could share this post with someone who is interested in learning about Crypto and web3.*