magma1 founder residency highlights!

magma's first cohort brought together 24 exceptional founders and developers building at the forefront of the Web3 movement in Africa.

The 12 day residency catalyzed stronger coordination amongst these founders, improved technical / venture decision making through expert mentorship, and accelerated their integration into the global crypto community.

Why does magma exist?

1. To better coordinate the top founders and developers. Despite Web3 solving similar problems in many African countries, the ecosystem remains fragmented. magma serves as a coordination point where those building scalable DApps and protocols in Africa can come to support one another, strengthen their toolkit with top tier advice and mentorship, share direct and honest feedback with one another to elevate each other, and form lasting relationships with others who are building Africa’s economy and finance onchain.

2. To build Africa's economy as legos. African users demand a better financial system and trust infrastructures. We can build faster and better if we build our future economy as legos, with modularity and interoperability across different applications each startup is shipping. magma is serving as a coordination point for high potential applications and protocols can build on top of one another, and bring to market user-centric products and services.

3. To build globally, and be global. magma bridges Africa focused founders with seasoned global entrepreneurs, infrastructure builders, and researchers. This two way street offers the global community some of the most interesting problems to work on and a path to utility-driven mass adoption of Web3. It offers Africa focused builders deeper integration into the global ecosystem, to better leverage leading infrastructure to build with.

Meet the magma1 founders & builders

magma1 had a strong cohort, made up of DApp and protocol founders with a large and growing user base across Africa, earlier stage founders, and talented developers.

Startups: Accrue | Bitpowr | Cr3dentials | Fastagger | Gamic | HaloFi | Kotani Pay | Liquidstar | Onboard | Paycrest | Silicon Kruger | Supermigrate | web3d

Individual builders: Ashraf | Jelilat | Thomas | Okley | Oluchi

magma1 highlights

magma1 created an environment for peer-to-peer support, learning, growth, collective envisioning, and project integrations. The two-week residency included the following activities:

12 peer feedback sessions

Startup founders openly presented a challenge or their roadmap for feedback, and the whole community swarmed around to brainstorm solutions, ideate, and at times mirror harsh realities to learn from each other's struggles. These have led to multiple collaborations and even product integrations.

12 fireside chats with seasoned founders

magma builders got to have intimate discussions and ask questions to world-leading founders in crypto and Web2. Fireside chats included with: Dylan Field (Figma founder & CEO), Brian Armstrong (Coinbase co-founder & CEO), Juan Benet (Protocol Labs founder, IPFS and Filecoin creator), Sandy Peng (Scroll co-founder & CEO), Akshay Kothari (Notion co-founder and COO), Jesse Pollak (Base founder), Antoni Martin (Polygon and PrivadoID co-founder), Rene Reinsberg (Celo co-founder and foundation CEO), Dai Dai (DoDo co-founder & CEO), and Howard Akumiah (Locker Room founder). It was humbling to hear these founders share vulnerable stories of challenging times they went through and failures, their views on AI and crypto futures, practical advice on product building, finding PMF, and a lot of valuable advise to magma founders.

16+ founder-led roundtables

magma builders and founders initiated and led roundtables on topics most pertinent to their work and interests. Here is a peek into some of these discussions:

• Open banking system design for Africa sessions

• Fundraising: lessons and mistakes

• Designing localised payment systems

• Tackling UX challenges for crypto applications

• Incentivising users for web3 products

• Lessons from navigating regulation in Africa

• Tokenomics design in practice

• Leveraging decentralized social and Farcaster meetup

• Building ecosystem in Africa feedback session for global protocols

• DAOs and their evolution

• Building & scaling global communities

• Bootstrapping & building in scarce vs abundant liquidity environments

• Founder therapy circles

• DePIN use cases in Africa

• Personal spiritual journey & how it affects your work

• ZK - African use cases

• Pitch clinic for peer to peer feedback

7 practical workshops

We held 1-2 hour long workshops in targeted areas most relevant for founders. These included:

• Web3 monitoring and incident response training to improve application & protocol security, with Isaac Patka, co-founder of Shield3 and member of the Security Alliance.

• Building with ZK email for African use cases, led by Elo from the Ethereum Foundation Privacy + Scaling Explorations team.

• Real talk on tokenomics, historical download with behind-the-scenes lessons from previous failures and successes with James Waugh from FireEyes (which supported the token launch of projects ENS, Optimism, Rocketpool, and Gitcoin).

• Legal 101 on practicalities of setting up a foundation and decentralizing your project, with Alon Sachar from Horizons Law and Consulting.

• Building communities and distributed leadership session with See Eun (Nonce Community co-founder) and Songyi Lee (Pagoda founder & catalyst, and Gatherings).

• Deploying on Base workshop and Q&A with Ryan Nitz, Base DevRel.

• Fundraising 101 and Q&A with Jane Lippencott, Partner at A16Z crypto.

100+ office hours with domain experts

We had 13+ domain experts who participated in magma and provided hands on support to the magma community. Founders booked one on one sessions to get really hands on based on their needs, including in technical architecture, privacy security, governance and token mechanisms, fundraising and pitching, 1-on-1s with seasoned founders, GTM, building and scaling teams, growing community, ZK Email, scaling, and more. These 1-on-1s carried outside of structured office hours. Domain experts who hosted office hours included Andy Tudhope (Kernel co-founder, Flashbots contributor and Venture Partner at LAVA), Phini (Ethereum Foundation PSE), Perrie (Ethereum Foundation), Tony Olendo, Maya Caddle, Shodipo Ayodeji, Yoseph Ayele (Borderless Africa founder, and General Partner at LAVA), and the workshop leaders from above.

Meet the mentors and supporters

We'd like to share a sincere note of gratitude for the 24 incredible founders and mentors who carved out significant time to support the magma founders and builders hands on. Almost half of them flew into Kenya from all corners of the world to spend quality time with our builders. It is rare to see this level of attention poured into African builders, and the effort has been immensely impactful. Thank you.

We also want to recognize the organizations that took a leap of faith and supported the magma inaugural cohort. Your support has made magma free for all founders and builders to participate, allowing the program focus on the highest quality founders. We want to especially thank our Anchor Partners: Optimism, Base, and the Ethereum Foundation ESP team.

Apply to join magma2

magma2 is happening magma2 is happening September 30 - October 12, 2024 in Kenya! A new cohort of founders and builders, growing the magma community. We plan to have many of the core components from magma1, with the addition of an online demo day to showcase our builders' work with the global community, a more hands on developer track, and compounding value with magma1 and magma2 founders and builders.

Apply to magma2 by 31 August, 2024!