Meet Skyseed, a VC fund and incubator backing the Bluesky and AT Protocol ecosystem

On November 15, Peter Wang posted a message requesting ideas for a new incubator and fund to support experimental projects built on the burgeoning Bluesky/AT Protocol ecosystem. Four weeks later, Skyseed emerged with an initial commitment of $1 million.

This turnaround, a speed underscored by the fact that the fund doesn’t even have a website yet (it does have a Bluesky profile, though), is testament to several things: the hype around Bluesky, which is emerging as a lifeboat for millions who have abandoned X (née Twitter). But there’s also an almost tangible hope that by starting afresh on a new social platform built on an open, decentralized network such as the AT Protocol, we might avoid the ad-driven, walled gardens that permeate social networking today.

“The vast majority of Facebook’s revenue is from ads. All the major centralized social media companies are advertising companies, which means they trade in traffic and the users’ attention,” Wang told TechCrunch in an interview this week. “The main difference between an open protocol versus a closed one is that the closed ones will never tolerate the existence of applications that take the content of the graph away, and take user-attention away from their properties.”

The Decentralized Web

Wang is co-founder, chief AI and innovation officer, and former CEO of Anaconda, a company built upon the eponymous open source Python and R distribution that helps data scientists build, test, and deploy all their data-driven projects.

Separately, Wang has been an avid backer of the decentralized web, providing financial support for projects such as Blue Link Labs, which developed the peer-to-peer open source web browser Beaker. Official support for Beaker ended in 2022, with creator Paul Frazee joining Bluesky as “protocol engineer” before formally becoming CTO in April.

And this foundational work on Beaker was to Bluesky’s benefit. “While the Beaker project is coming to an official end, the heart of Beaker continues with Bluesky,” Frazee wrote in a post announcing the end of Beaker. “I hope the work we do will make Beaker’s end a little less painful in the long run.”

Fast-forward to today, and Wang is extending his support for decentralization into a formal seed fund. “I’ve done angel investing, but this is my first time creating a fund and taking responsibility for other people’s money,” Wang said. “I was funding Paul [Frazee] and his team for a number of years. They tried different things to build decentralized web technologies, with middling to low success. But all those lessons learned, I think, have fed into the [Bluesky] design, the protocol, and the apps.”

While the decentralized web is far from a novel concept, what it has lacked is a meaningful number of people gravitating toward something like the AT Protocol: an open source, open standards-based framework that promises the ability to enable users to retain ownership of their data and shift to other platforms on the protocol.

“There are people who have been in the decentralized web community for a long time, who have really waited for this moment,” Wang said. “We’ve had lots of good ideas; we’ve just not had the users. Now we have the users.”

“Like the internet in 1996”

After posting his request for ideas in mid-November, Wang says he was inundated with people reaching out to him with proposals, noting that the enthusiasm reminded him of the internet in 1996.

“With all these technical ecosystems, you really need those early adopters and innovators to feel empowered to go and do all the creative things they want to do,” Wang said. “When I started seeing the quality of some of these early things that were being built, it became clear to me that something very good could come out of this.”

Dunbar’s number

Bluesky, at the end of the day, is just another app, and it’s already facing some of the same moderation challenges that X has faced almost since its inception, and advertising might land on the platform, too. But this highlights some of the potential benefits of a proper ecosystem cropping up off the back of the AT Protocol.

Dunbar’s number is a concept from British biological anthropologist Robin Dunbar that suggests a cognitive limit to how many humans can stably exist within a given social context. That number is 150. Social media plays fast-and-loose with that figure, propelling billions of people into the same social sphere, with chaos in hot pursuit; large-scale social networks force people to engage with people who they would likely avoid in real life. The AT Protocol upends that, allowing all manner of niche and micro-networks built on the same underlying framework.

“We don’t have to all fit inside the same, one-size-fits-all app,” Wang said. “The whole point of the protocol is to build many different kinds of apps, and let a lot of different kinds of user experiences flourish.”

In the few days following the launch, Wang says he had in the region of 50 projects come in, and though he was unable to confirm what projects will ultimately get funded, he did share some of his ideas on the kinds of tools that might emerge if the AT Protocol is given the space to breathe.

Alternatives to Bluesky itself are definitely on the agenda as far as the AT Protocol is concerned. This could be more of a child- and family-focused incarnation, with kid social graphs branching off of parents’ social graphs and granular controls over data privacy, for example. Or it could be something focused on dissident journalism or whistleblowers, or maybe something for marginalized communities.

Equally, it could be something akin to a Reddit clone, or socially infused alternatives to the likes of SoundCloud, Bandcamp, or even Google Maps. “Some folks have built photo-centric apps similar to Instagram, others are looking to build event-coordination platforms like Eventbrite or Partiful that are social graph-infused,” Wang said.

While it remains to be seen how such products might actually look, they could also serve as the infrastructure for an entirely new ecosystem of apps to grow on. And this gets to the heart of what Wang is striving for with his fund.

“So all these things that currently exist in the beating heart of all the big social media companies might now invert out, and become pieces of an ecosystem that is modular and which other people can build on,” Wang said.

Importantly, this doesn’t rule out ad-supported networks or subscriptions — it just gives options.

“You absolutely can have advertising-supported things, but you have to do it in balance as a business model,” Wang said. “The unfortunate thing about the big social media companies is that they stumbled into advertising and the attention economy, and by that time it was too late, they already owed billions of dollars to investors. So that’s the primary difference. We’re just going to try a different evolutionary path.”