Founders Factory Program: My Journey with Superteam UK
(For those interested, I also posted this to my Twitter account here)
First off, why am I sharing any of this? I think it’s important context to how we ended up conceiving of the Founders Factory, and why it is personally important.
Founders Factory has been created to provide all the specialist resources needed to support startups on their journey to unicorn status.
My journey with SuperteamUK started over a year ago when Cap reached out to me about the first SuperteamUK meetup in London. I’d been active in the Solana ecosystem but was somewhat quiet about it. I knew Nikhil and thought very highly of him and his general philosophy, but the Superteam approach was something different and not as familiar to me.
I think I was put in touch with Cap by Tamar from the Foundation. He asked me if I was interested in showing up to their first meetup in London. I thought why not…so I rock up and meet an absolute bunch of legends. Most of whom I’m still in touch with now. I met up with Kash, George from FOMO magazine, Uzi and many others (if I haven’t mentioned you I SWEAR it is nothing personal).
Please excuse my hair, but WOW.
Next I spoke at the Solana Mobile event with Olivier, Max and Abs as Tulle was building a mobile app. Supporting these events was a privilege (I remember how nervous I was to speak at this event, but once we got going, I loved it). Henry was there, he gave me stickers, of course.
I loved what Superteam UK were doing and left these events feeling a renewed sense of vigor and engagement about Solana.
I’d seen what they had done in Germany, in large part thanks to Henry and Chris, and I was excited by what I thought could happen in the UK. On a serious note, big thanks to Henry because I don’t think he has any idea of the influence he had on me deciding to get more involved in this side of the space, mainly because of his mullet.
From there I started attending more events, meeting more people from the Foundation (s/o Pedro for hosting me at the Solana offices in NY) and just feeling more integrated.
Everything just served to get me more involved, in retrospect it was… inevitable.
Cap was brilliant and involved me in everything I could make it to. I was building with NeoSwap and meeting other founders, and general participants in the Solana space was very natural. I’d been to every Breakpoint since inception, but this was different.
I’d also met Alex Hall at Breakpoint 22’, he convinced me to buy an SMB when Sol was $8, he ended up investing in Tulle and we kept in touch, meeting regularly in London and at Superteam events.
We both wanted to help Superteam, and Alex volunteered for the mentoring hours. Alex had scaled his last businesses to 400+ people, and successfully excited. He was now an active angel investor and so started helping businesses with feedback on their pitch, approach to scaling etc.
We both were just continually impressed with the team and the grass roots effort. Seeing Cap, Arch, Jack, Michael and more up-close and how they worked was great. It reinforced to me that these were good people.
We were trying to figure out ways we could support more, but it wasn’t entirely clear to us at the time beyond attending events, showing up, mentoring/being available.
As these things tend to do by sticking around long-enough, ideas emerged. Alex and I ended up talking about doing something together as I progressively took a step back from Tulle(because I felt they didn’t need me as much and I had done my bit).
I wasn’t sure what I was going to do next and was going to take a bit of time. Instead, we ended up setting up BONK Advisory, in collaboration with BONK (that is a wholeeeeee other blog post) in the middle of 2024 and supported the last Solana Startup Village with the first iteration of The Bonk Booth (even the booth was built by Bock from Fidesium). We offered free, no-strings attached commercial and operation advice in-person to founders at the Buildstation. They could book 30 mins with us to discuss anything they wanted!
We felt like it kept in-touch with the grassroots support that Superteam UK had shown the Solana ecosystem AND was a way we could actually help and add value.
All of this led to having a discussion with Cap about how we could do more…well he had an idea he had been noodling around and we just happened to be thinking something similar… and that’s how The Founders Factory Program idea came about.
The Founders Factory is a STUK and Bonk Advisory collaboration designed to provide all the specialist resources needed to support startups on their journey to unicorn status.
Startups will be matched with the best possible support at every stage of the growth journey, be it design, legal, accounting, tokenomics, or more. The right skills in the right place at the right time.
It will be iterative, but right now it’s kind of like a rolling program. It isn’t an accelerator, there isn’t a formal course or start/finish dates. We’re just aiming to continually help people throughout the year.
Our goal is simply to help connect UK start-ups to the right partners at the right time, to give them some helpful advice and create a bit of early-stage magic :)
There is no need for businesses to engage with Bonk Advisory formally, it’s our way of giving back. We’ve invested our time and money into this, Michael Harding (who you all know and love) is going to join as the Community Node and help run the initiative as we continue to learn and improve.
We hope we can encourage and help as many great teams to enter the Colosseum Hackathons as possible, and we’ll be there to support.
Check out uk.superteam.fun for more info on that (or to put your entries in).
Do we hope some companies will end up working with Bonk Advisory? For sure. Do they need to to make this endeavor worthwhile, absolutely not. We’re all part of the culture of Solana and the only way we can make it work is if we all contribute to its future.
It’s funny looking back on things, I think Superteam helped to foster a real sense of community and pride for me that hadn’t been there previously. Feeling like you can really have an impact on a space, or to help people along, no matter how small that bit of help might be, is really important.
So, that’s how Superteam and SuperteamUK pulled me in, how will your story look anon?
