Happy summer and happy end of Q2! Welcome to the Summer of Love (a term coined by dear friends at Kernel) and, for Alexandria, the summer of building, because this update brings huge news: we’ve built our founding engineering team!

This letter is coming to you from Amelie, your CEO and co-pilot. We are currently cruising at an altitude of 33,000 feet. Please sit back and enjoy your flight.

Updates from Q2

Introducing the team

Welcome to our new engineers!

We are delighted to introduce:

• Full stack developer Rory Ou. Previously: KERNEL, HackerOne, CoverHound.

• Full stack developer Gary Lasker. Technical advisor Gary is joining the team in a deeper capacity. Previously: Raytheon, Mitsubishi, founding engineer at early Internet startups ActiveIQ and Pepper Computer. Gary built the Ubuntu Software Center at Canonical.

• Full stack developer Robyn Choi, specializing in front end. Previously: Write Together, Best Frontend and Best Curation Hack at Lens Protocol Hackathon 2022; AutumnAI; Diligence; SkyBox Labs.

• Smart contract developer Kelton Madden. Previously: Idea Market, the “decentralized court of public opinion.”

On the founder side, Amelie and Sonia have found their niches: Amelie as CEO and Sonia as CTO. Both are deeply involved in product and vision, while Amelie takes care of the business side and Sonia, the technical.

NYC in June

Amelie and Sonia attended NFT NYC this year and had many information-rich conversations with other builders (and we were delighted to meet up with some of you!) At the Alexandria Space Librarian Happy Hour, new and old friends drank cocktails named after ancient goddesses and walked away with book recommendations, dreaming of the next great digital Library of Alexandria.

Amelie spoke on the panel Poetry and Literature in NFTs, sharing her visions for disrupting the publishing industry with web3 and speaking alongside prominent web3-native poet-performers. Afterward, she had quite a few authors and founders approach her in the hallway and online, laying foundations for future partnerships.

Sonia attended a Public Goods Conference in NYC. She resonated with their thoughtful approach of building long-term infrastructure and got leads for making crypto libraries useful to larger markets, including the backend for public libraries. She is in early discussions with machine learning engineers and researchers at Mila Quebec in Canada to do decentralized training and information retrieval on Alexandria’s books.

Amelie ran Treehouse in early June with the wonderful Khushi Shelat. Treehouse is a co-living community for women and non-binary founders and its first iteration took place in New York’s Lower East Side. The two-week experiment accomplished the team’s goals to help founders at varying stages create close connections and learn together. Treehouse housed 12 women founders and welcomed 15 more from around New York and featured talks including Molly Bloom, Sangeeta Mudnal (Director of Products at Amazon), and Lucy Guo. Many thanks to Bain Capital Crypto for sponsoring. Plans are underway for future iterations of Treehouse co-organized by other women founders: next up, Europe in January! If you’re interested in sponsoring future Treehouse events, please contact Amelie and Treehouse organizers at teamattreehouse@gmail.com.

Coming up in Q3

MVP: V0

We’re building our MVP and in beta testing mode, aiming for launch in the fall. Our new team of experts will accelerate our progress.

The MVP includes:

• An author publish flow for creating book NFT collections.

• An inaugural collection of books from our development partners.

• A library and e-reading experience.

What’s next after the MVP?

• The API, making web 3 book infrastructure available to other businesses, protocols, and institutions.

• We’d love your input! What features and markets should we prioritize with V1?

️ Asks:

• We are looking for the right brand designer or design team. With the scope and audience of our MVP clear to us, we want to invest in a brand that will share Alexandria’s mission with readers, authors, and distribution partners. We are considering a brand that feels like “web 3 Internet Archive” — serious, technical, and modern.

• Partnerships. We’re open to discussions with existing platforms for whom our book NFT functionality can be useful.

We’ll touch base again at the end of Q3. This is your co-pilot Amelie speaking — thank you for joining us today. The weather looks great today and we should be getting good views of the city below as we descend.

With love,

The Alexandria Team 🏛️