Venture studio for Optimism projects, offered by Pollen Labs - General communication thread

Greeting builders & citizens,

We are Pollen Labs and were recently awarded a grant in season 6. We are posting this update as a general communication thread and will start inviting project leads to collaborate with us. We leverage our skills to accelerate and incubate your innovations.

A little background: We have previously worked within the Privacy and Scaling Exploration team at the Ethereum Foundation. In the early days, we have been incubating projects that use PSE’s primitive to design and build applications; the most famous ones are Unirep.social and Channel4, along with a handful of product discoveries. While this mission was exciting, we realized that we could leverage our skills with other innovators; that is when we started to collaborate with team Next Billion; we have collaborated with VoiceDeck and are currently developing the Enaleia hub, which contributes to the marine environment in the Mediterranean Sea.

Since we were awarded in season 6, we have been scanning through all the past grantee projects and what builders are doing in the community. Today, we would like to invite you to this adventure. Please reach out if you are building on optimism and need a hand!

What we can help with are;

  • Business design & strategy
  • Product design
  • Application development
  • Go-to-market strategy
  • Brand design
  • Marketing & Community growth

Sometimes, it’s hard to know if you need help like the one mentioned above. We encourage you to chat with us so we can guide you!

Skip the form, just shoot us a message at:

Discord #builder-lobby

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We are thrilled about this mission and will share updates regularly as we progress.

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To maximize our efforts to generate the most impact for the ecosystem and, most importantly, in the social impact setting, below are the questions we will ask to evaluate the potential projects for our collaboration; remember, this evaluation is to evaluate the impact we can generate with the projects, not on the project’s potential itself.

First, let’s revisit the statement from the mission request:

“This mission aims to provide new business support for projects within the Optimism ecosystem, including projects with approved grants in previous governance seasons. This program will focus on delivering support for major back-office and dev concerns faced by new startups, things such as legal counseling, dev agency work, business formation, tax prep, and so on.”

Second, we want to mention the team’s desires. As mentioned in the previous post, we have collaborated with team Next Billion since Q3 203; we are particularly interested in helping projects that contribute significantly to social and environmental contexts. Therefore, we will be weighing the factors related to this desire heavily.

We will meet early & mid-stage projects that are interested in collaborating with us. Here are the question and its weight for our evaluation.


Alignment with OP Ecosystem Goals

Weight: 30%, this criterion evaluates how well the project supports and strengthens the Optimism ecosystem.

  • How well does the project align with the ecosystem’s mission and objectives?
  • Does it address a critical gap or pain point within the ecosystem?
  • Will the project attract more users, developers, or partners to the ecosystem?
  • Does the project encourage the adoption of the OP’s ecosystem and stack?
  • Will the project strengthen collaboration and interdependence within the ecosystem?

Social Impact

Weight: 25%, this criterion assesses the project’s ability to create meaningful social benefits, with an emphasis on equity, accessibility, and public goods.

  • Does the project improve access for underserved or marginalized communities?
  • Does the project offer open-source tools, knowledge, or infrastructure for collective benefit?
  • Does it empower communities economically (e.g., enabling wealth creation)or socially?
  • Does it improve ecosystem literacy for technical and non-technical audiences?

Market Potential

Weight: 20%, this criterion evaluates the project’s ability to address a significant and growing market.

  • Is the target market large and growing?
  • Does the project have a unique selling point (USP) or strong differentiation?
  • Can the project scale efficiently across geographies or customer segments?

Feasibility and Progress

Weight: 15%, this criterion examines the practicality of the project’s plans and its current stage of development.

  • For mid-stage projects, is there a functional product or prototype? For early-stage, is the roadmap realistic?
  • Are the project’s financial plans realistic and sustainable?
  • Are key risks identified, and does the team have a plan to mitigate them?

Team Setting and Capability

Weight:10%, this criterion measures the competency and structure of the project’s team.

  • Does the team have relevant experience and expertise in the target industry?
  • Has the team demonstrated the ability to deliver results and adapt to challenges?
  • How many ongoing members are working on the project?

We will be having calls with the project builders and internally evaluating based on the matrix above. We will also share this document with the builders as their first touch point.

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