Last week on Backdrop was our biggest yet — at least 65 people connected over a post or DM. It’s still just a tiny fraction of the connections we hope we can facilitate in the future via the Open Work Graph, but thank you for continuing to show up and help us get there. There’s officially way too much for me to cover in this email.

Backdrop members are shipping

Need a reason to connect or collaborate with another member? Check out some of the things people have built over the past week. And if you’d like to include something of yours here next week, drop it in this post.

• Nene just launched season 2 of the Artizen Prize for Human Creativity, a $50k grant program to fund creators from oil paintings to open source. 

• Richie and our friends at Clarity launched QUESTS and are looking to onboard beta testers. QUESTS lets contributors create a professional landing page that showcases their best projects—verified by their peers.

• Anthony brought Seed Club Ventures out of stealth mode. SCV is a $25M venture DAO investing in the future of internet-native organizations — we’re proud to be a portco.

• Jordan and the Chainverse team released the Chainverse API, with two endpoints to start — Identity Enrichment & Search, designed to accelerate user acquisition for protocols and marketplaces. 

• Eliot Couvat released The Modern Web3 Community Builder, a handbook to help turn your idea into a cultural movement.

• Ben Turtel dropped the Kazm API which allows clients to get programmatic access to unified member data (Discord, Twitter, on-chain, 1st party) and activity.

Looking for teams that want to build with us

Work is multiplayer, and we’re getting ready to roll out an initiative to route more connections and opportunities to some of the amazing teams we have on Backdrop. To do that we’re looking for 5-10 teams that are aligned to our mission and are interested in working side by side with us. I’m going to reach out to a few of you directly, but if your team is interested let me know here or DM me. 

Other highlights from last week

• We shipped curated email digests — based on your profile and your activity in the network, we’ll suggest posts and people that are relevant to you. If you’re not getting stuff you find interesting, try updating your profile!

• On that note, we had some incredible posts last week, like Graham Novak (former instigator @ ConstitutionDAO) looking for a designer to help build out a brand/landing page for his new company, Anthony (partner @ Seed Club Ventures) looking for help creating a research report on Foundations/grant programs in Crypto and AI, and Aleena (super connector @ Backdrop) getting a lay of the land of where people go to find paid opportunities in web3. Check out all the posts at backdrop.so/posts.

• We hired Kiana Pirouz as our Head of Growth & Community! You’ll hear a lot more from her soon, but help us give her a warm welcome or reach out with what you hope she can do to help you get more value out of the network. 

That’s my best effort to summarize the past week in this email — if you have any feedback or ideas on how I can make this more useful as we continue to grow, I’m all ears!

-Joey

P.S. If someone shared this newsletter with you and you aren't a Backdrop member yet, message me or apply to join.