You can also watch on DFINITY YouTube

Featuring

Dominic WilliamsFounder of DFINITY

Mike ButcherEditor-at-Large of TechCrunch

Learn company-building tips from founders leveraging the Internet Computer to build the next big open internet startups, and the venture capitalists enabling scale.See the full event recap here.

Startup Spotlights

FleekSelling Shovels During the Open Internet Gold RushFleek has raised $4 million to make it easy to create websites and apps on the open internet. The idea is similar to that of Cloudflare or Netlify – but built for the open web: permissionless, trustless and free of centralized gatekeepers. Co-founder Harrison Hines discusses the unique advantages of network scale and geo-agnosticism for startups that decide to build on the open internet, and details an exciting 2021 product roadmap for Fleek.

TacenLaunching a Decentralized Exchange on the Internet ComputerTacen is one of the first startups building a decentralized exchange on the Internet Computer – and they have raised $2.3 million to date. In this panel, Tacen speculates on whether DeFi startup trends will pattern match the rise of fintech, including how much venture capital funding DeFi startups actually need. Tacen also comments on outages and issues Robinhood and Coinbase have faced, and how Tacen, as an early-stage startup, is learning from these pioneering mistakes.

CapsuleHow a Founder Scored $1.5 Million From a TweetWithin weeks of tweeting his intent to build a decentralized social media platform, Nadim Kobeissi found himself with $1.5 million in funding and TechCrunch coverage of his nascent startup. Funding put Capsule at a post-money valuation on paper of $10 million. To Kobeissi, this early traction underscored the appetite for decentralized social media. But in the age of content moderation challenges and deplatforming of political figures, how can we build decentralized social platforms at scale? In this talk, Kobeissi discusses how Capsule is approaching these challenges.

LinkedUpClaiming Self-Sovereign Identity in the Brave New Social WorldLinkedUp started as a demonstration of an open professional network built on the Internet Computer. A team of developers is now using the open-source technology to bring a new application to market. In this interview, the LinkedUp team talks about self-sovereign identity as a solution to enabling users to claim ownership over digital identities, and the process of turning open source code into a startup.

Polychain CapitalHow to Pitch Your Open Internet Startup to VCsOne of the first questions on a founder’s mind is how to secure venture capital. In most cases, the first step is formulating your pitch. Polychain Capital general partners Olaf Carlson-Wee and Tekin Salimi discuss how open internet founders should explain TAM, how the process of exiting a crypto startup is different from a traditional startup, and how equity translates back to founders and investors. In this panel, you’ll get advice on what not to say during a pitch, how to make your first early hires and where to prioritize capital deployment once it’s secured.

OpenChatTechnical Demo: Open ChatEarlier this year, there were concerns around WhatsApp's updated privacy policy, which required users to accept that their information may be shared with other Facebook-owned properties. This resulted in the privacy-focused messaging app Signal being one of the most downloaded apps on Android and iOS, as well as messaging platform Telegram surpassing 500 million active users, with 25 million new users signing up for Telegram on the App Store within a period of 72 hours. The market opportunity is clear. In this demo, Hamish Peebles and Matt Grogan will preview an open, decentralized chat application that they've built, and explain how developers can deploy apps by hosting the apps' front-end and back-end architecture on the Internet Computer.