How can the Stacks Accelerator propel the Stacks Ecosystem?
A behind-the-scenes story with the Stacks Accelerator managing partner Trevor Owens
This article is an interview between myself (tyrn.btc) and Trevor Owens, the managing partner of the Stacks Accelerator. It is part of the “Behind the Scenes challenge” where Freehold community members get the chance to interview the Stacks community from behind the scenes.
In my previous Behind the Scenes interview series, I managed to interview Patrick Stanley, the founder of Freehold, and Peter Ponton, the co-founder of Risidio. I was once again lucky this time as I got the chance to interview the managing partner of Stacks Accelerator, Trevor Owens, on how can the Stacks Accelerator propel the Stacks ecosystem. The Stacks Accelerator is a mentorship driven-program to propel the Stacks ecosystem and introduce new technologies. The interview was conducted via Discord voice call and has been edited to ensure that there is fluidity and cohesion and coherence.
Good day Trevor, once again thank you very much for giving me the chance to interview you. Getting straight to business, you are the managing partner of Stacks Accelerator, can you tell us more about this program?
Trevor Owens: Stacks Accelerator is a 3-month program for early-stage startups to validate their markets, get tech support on the Stacks blockchain, and get support from a community of users, mentors, startup experts, and investors. Our team and our community work hands-on with every startup, giving them feedback, promoting their products, coaching them, and helping them with their most pressing challenges. The program concludes with a Demo Day where each startup gets to give a 5-minute pitch to an audience of more than 100 investors.
What was the motivation behind you joining Stacks Accelerator?
Trevor Owens: I was an advisor to the managers of Stacks. I followed the progress of the team for a very long time. With the launch of Stacks 2.0, I looked more into it and I fell in love with it since I am a developer myself.
For me, it became clear that while Ethereum has a large community, I believe Stacks has a much superior technology. The Stacks community is growing quickly and as a developer, I am quite experienced. For me, I am not afraid to join a smaller community that’s growing quickly and learn myself the hard way when I see that the technology is the most superior in the market.
So I learned more about Stacks and thought this is the future like one year from now, we will see that Stacks will grow tremendously and I want to be part of the team to help Stacks grow further. Given my background as an investor, I approached the Stacks management with the idea of the Stacks Accelerator. Together we decided to start the program.
What are the main objectives of the Stacks accelerator?
Trevor Owens: Our goal is to help attract founders to Stacks because I think Stacks has a compelling technology that needs more support. Other ecosystems already have accelerators or programs to attract startups, so our goal is to create the best accelerator in the blockchain industry and the world if we can. So if we can do that, then we can attract great founders and companies and we can create a cycle where the more great applications we create on Stacks, the more new founders want to come into Stacks and then those great applications and companies also want to hire more talent and raise venture capital so they bring in more resources. Our goal is like for every dollar we spend for Stacks Accelerator, we can bring in ten more dollars to the ecosystem.
How is the Stacks accelerator going to benefit Stacks community members (STX holders)?
Trevor Owens: Fundamentally more applications are going to be built on Stacks and this is going to increase the network activity which will cause retail market investors and token investors to want to buy more Stacks which shall make Stacks more valuable, so for the current holders their value is going to go up a lot.
In addition, it is also an opportunity for them to invest in these startups. They may want to invest if they have the capital, or they may want to write about these companies or learn about these companies, it’s taking a very community-based approach. The program wants to involve the whole community in supporting these startups. STX holders can gain personal enjoyment and satisfaction by using the services of these companies or even working for these companies.
Apart from propelling the Stacks ecosystem, does the Stacks accelerator in any way impact the crypto space at large?
Trevor Owens: I think Stacks itself impacts the crypto space at large because they are many ways in which you can use Stacks and proof of transfer and develop new applications that create new functionalities that are not possible in Web 2.0 or on other blockchains. For instance, if you look at what Arkadiko are doing, they are creating a stable coin based on collateral and they can stack your Stacks for you in a secure vault which gives a loan in which the stable coin is going to pay the principal by itself. This is something that will be much harder to do on any other blockchain and would not be possible in Web 2.0.
In addition, Stacks has the potential to make Bitcoin much more valuable and as we know Bitcoin has a large market cap of which Stacks can make Bitcoin ten times or a hundred times more valuable. Bitcoin has the potential to increase the benefit of the entire ecosystem of crypto tremendously. The ability of Stacks to make Bitcoin programmable makes Bitcoin not just a store of value. It is also a source of truth through being a settlement layer. There are going to be ways that people can use decentralized applications without touching Stacks, but only through Bitcoin making the potential huge. Stacks can further the crypto ecosystem and Bitcoin specifically at large.
I understand 25 startups are under the Stacks Accelerator program and they recently held their first cohort, can you give us a brief breakdown of the main startups?
Trevor Owens: We have seven NFTs startups, twelve decentralized finance startups, and six private data ownership startups. We want to focus on:
- NFTs
- Decentralized Finance
- Data ownership
Many of our NFTs startups and data ownership startups can leverage decentralized finance in their applications as well. The DeFi startups that we invested in are building blocks that other applications can use for example we have Sigle who has been in the community for a long time. Sigle is allowing you to subscribe to your favorite writers and pay them in a way that you are not like paying them. All you do is stack your Stacks leveraging proof of transfer and you can give your BTC rewards to a writer that you want to read. So that’s a way of utilizing DeFi as a part of a business model and DeFi almost can function as a business model and we have a lot of decentralized applications.
In the future can we expect more startups?
Trevor Owens: Yes absolutely, we plan to invest in a hundred companies for the next three years. So far we have twenty-five already, we are moving pretty fast and we will see another group of exciting companies as well in the next cohort.
Is there a benchmark on how the success of the startups is going to be measured?
Trevor Owens: Yes ultimately. The success of the startups will be determined by the following:
- Whether the startups are profitable or not
- Whether the startups are growing or not
- Or they have been acquired by a bigger company
For our initial cohort, we are measuring success on how successful they are in raising money from other investors since if they can raise the capital it means they can reinvest that capital into the growth and building of their teams.
Are new investors and mentors welcome, if so how can they contact?
Trevor Owens: Yes absolutely, so we have an application on our site, if they go to www.stacks.ac they can apply to be a mentor and if they are investors, I would say apply to be a mentor too, this way we will be able to engage.
With this, I say thank you very much for your time, any last words?
Trevor Owens: Yeah I think it’s exciting what is happening in the Stacks ecosystem and I’m excited to be part of the Stacks community. We are going to take Stacks to make the vision of creating a new internet where we can own our data to reality, so I’m very excited about that, and thanks so much for your interest in what we are doing, David.
