Thanks for your feedback Elad, we’ll try to address all of your discussion points in this post.
Celo Camp budget and diversification: The success of builders in our ecosystem has always been and will be a team effort. It starts first and foremost with the founders themselves, supported by hackathons, events, the Celo Foundation, programs like Prezenti, VCs like Flori Ventures, Kolektivo, Regional DAOs, Climate Collective and many other great initiatives. All these organizations and programs contribute to the success of founders in the Celo ecosystem and the Web3 space as a whole by offering diversified avenues for founders to grow. Our team is always making an effort to collaborate with other initiatives, make our list of graduates public, share each cohort’s stats, hosting public demo days and actively connecting founders with other initiatives and opportunities in the ecosystem.
This proposal was mapped based on numerous discussions with ecosystem contributors, including @LuukDAO. Our proposed budget and scope was significantly reduced in order to make room for other initiatives in the workings, as well as help keep the ecosystem budget nimble before the L2 transition.
To your point “the Celo Public Good budget for supporting projects currently stands at $300k + 100k CELO. Upright is requesting the entire budget,” it’s important to clarify that based on the “Celo Public Goods” budget, there are multiple funding buckets earmarked for initiatives (i.e., Regional DAOs; Celo Grants; Requests for Proposals; etc.) designed to support projects in the ecosystem. Our proposal requests 325k cUSD and 100k CELO (under the “Celo Project Incubation” category) out of the total budget of 1.45M cUSD and 600k CELO. Our proposed budget represents the minimum budget that we believe is necessary to achieve a successful cohort of Celo Camp.
In addition, as previously mentioned, our proposal includes the operation of the Startup Pathway program which offers free online learnings, accountability and mingling opportunities for founders who didn’t make it to the ongoing camp cohort or prefer a self-paced program. The program also allows us to stay connected with these founders and extend the support we provide.
Survivability: General survival rate of startups is low. A figure that is often cited is that 90% of startups fail. This is why accelerator programs are so important as they can increase the survival rate of startups up to 50% (in their first 5 years) in some of the world’s top accelerators. These statistics put the numbers you presented in perspective and while checking the figures, we found that out of 190 alumni → 145 are w/ a website (76% of alumni) and 57 of these “mention Celo” (30% of alumni), which are well within these figures.
Another factor to keep in mind is that the cohort size has great effect on survival rate metrics (when measured in percentage out of the total graduates) and while our curation process puts a high weight on sustainability there is an importance to balance that out to make sure the cohorts are inclusive, diversified and provide opportunity for a wide variety of ideas and cultures. This is one of the reasons our cohort size is presented as a range of 15-30 teams. We recently took the approach of adjusting the batch size based on a review of the cohort applicants and the addressable market while balancing these factors. In addition, our curation voting process always includes at least one outside organization to make sure we bring a variety of opinions to the discussion.
KPIs: The success metrics that we believe to be appropriate for the upcoming cohort are:
Celo Camp batch 9
- At least 150 applicants.
- Between 15-30 teams will be selected for camp.
- 80% of Celo Camp graduates will demonstrate their integration with MiniPay and/or Celo.
- Net promoter score (NPS) greater than 60.
Startup Pathway
- 100 signups
- 15-30 participants
- Releasing a new MiniPay track.
10-20 open source Git repo submissions from Celo Camp and Startup Pathway.
The KPIs will be collected and made public at the end of the cohort.
*These success metrics are how we envision a successful batch and what we believe to be achievable based on our past results. Having said that this specific program is fairly new and achieving these KPIs is not fully under our control and may vary based on market conditions, go-to market and the actual start date of the event among other factors. Our team as always will do its best to maximize these KPIs.
Staff Costs: The “operations and staff section” in the budget does not only represent the staff salaries but also includes the overhead and operation costs required for the staff to complete its goals.
Budget Duration: Thanks for pointing that out. The 6th month is dedicated for wrapping up camp and Startup Pathway which includes selection of winning teams, due diligence and distribution of prizes, feedback collection and reporting, connecting teams with VC’s and other initiatives as well as curation and promotion of founder stories and videos.
Planning Phase: As mentioned in the proposal, in this stage we make updates to the program’s curriculum, update the Startup Pathways materials, set up the program’s campaign and messaging, onboard new mentors and partners, implement learnings from previous batches and soft launch the application phase.
Marketing: Our program’s marketing efforts doesn’t end at the application phase but continues throughout camp (Demo Day, Founder stories, winners announcement, Startup Pathway etc.).
Ensuring Sustainability - equity participation: Good point, our team has been actively exploring the possibility of transitioning camp into a fund model which can secure a long term sustainability model, we think this transition is realistically possible by H2 2024 / H1 2025.