Week 4 at the Techstars Blockchain Accelerator Program

As we’re publishing this fourth reflection of ours on Tuesday night, it means we’ve managed to organise our work better than last week — thank you, thank you. May this journal be the indicator of our management and team skills. This time, I will just cluster the events by type since the days are so blended together anyway.

Mentor Madness is gone for good

No worries, another type of madness is coming for sure.

Nevertheless, the end of such a big epoch for us deserves to be properly evaluated. Without much further ado, we feel it was successful. The final count of mentors that showed us their interest in becoming our lead mentors was 30, which is exactly 50.8% of all the mentors we’ve spoken to. The percentage makes it very serious, see?

We were super happy about such results and choosing the final four as our leads wasn’t easy, however, we did it. To really make the most out of this opportunity, we also decided to actively keep in touch with the whole pool of mentors and use this powerhouse to crush this. This how we do it!

Besides getting so much attention from others, the past four weeks really taught us a thing or two — both on a team and individual level. At least Roman claimed that each one of us had grown professionally a lot. Our moms are proud as well.

Masters of ceremonies

When it comes to the team stuff, we put the new team routines to work and started seeing some real tangible results. We are much more connected with the Prague-based team and are about to start testing the company-wide daily standup at 8 in the morning in NY (2 in the afternoon in Prague).

We’re still doing a daily status sharing after work at night, now starting strictly at 10pm and spending a maximum of one hour on it. Normally, during these statuses, each of us reflects quickly on the day, in two categories — the ‘could be better’ and ‘good’. After the round, once everyone has shared their status, we wrap it up by discussing whatever we feel is useful, and then the work stops. Still, this may feel a bit harsh (it’s still a bit late) but without this schedule, it used to go out of control and was really bad sometimes.

Sports & activities

I was talking about hard times in last week’s issue and how doing some sports helps us to cope with the stress. Last week, Techstars, together with the partners, prepared two more opportunities for us to reveal some steam after work. AWS hosted lunch and dinner in a ping pong bar on Wednesday and later that week, we managed to bowl and play some more ping pong again (it was much better this time, however, Roman still holds the title).

We also ate quite a lot, that’s important to mention — these dinners are usually decently supplied so next time we’re bringing lunch boxes with us for sure. Of course, the therapy wouldn’t be complete without going to the sauna, steam room, gym and for a walk, this time to Brooklyn, Williamsburg, and Central Park.

Saying goodbye to Matus

Last but not least, we had to say goodbye to Matus, since he needed to fly back to Brno as he’s expecting a baby! Thank you for all the hard work, fun, and the very structured way of working which the team had no choice but to pick up (was worth it). Veracity Protocol is a better company because of you.

We’ll still keep working together and we’re looking forward to the next chapters of this long-distance relationship.

The fifth week will be going down in history as the week of preparations for the fundraising rounds. We’re looking at a bunch of different materials from the investment strategy through scenarios of an investment deck.

And one more thing. Jakub managed to attend a workshop he loved, that was a great moment of this week.

“Veracity Protocol brings a new authenticity standard of fingerprinting physical objects to combat counterfeits. Thanks to computer vision and machine learning, we identify unique material characteristics and use them for future protection, verification and visual inspection. Unlike tags, chips or markers that need to be embedded and can be removed or tampered with, our solution works with items’ surfaces even when damaged and is still 100% tamper-proof.”