Focus On Building Technology Not The Price Of A Token - Tate Berenbaum
Community Labs’ founder Tate Berenbaum, reflecting on his experience in the tech space, has advised young founders to focus on building technology and developing relationships with people who have similar interests rather than the hype and price of a token.
Berenbaum, who raised $30 million in September 2022 at age 19 for Community Labs, an Arweave-focused software start-up and venture studio, told Archie Whitford of Hansa Network on Web3 Founders’ Podcast that he would have been in a better position if he had followed the advice.
If i had to give some advice i would probably say to focus on building, don’t get caught up in the hype of crypto. I believe really strongly in focusing on the fundamentals and not focusing on the price of a token. Build on technology because you believe in it not because you believe you will make money from it, Berenbaum said.
“For me one of my weaknesses is spending too much time focusing on tech and not enough time developing relationships with people.”
Building and maintaining good relationships with people played a huge role in Community Labs’ success in raising capital, Berenbaum said. He said Arweave’s founder, Sam Williams made him realise the importance of bringing on-board the right people into a project and the value of a good investor.
Beyond building tools that founders could use to easily build on Arweave, Community Labs’ venture studio has been working to help founders take their ideas through different stages until start up. One of the founders is Andres Pirela who is the founder of Execution Machine, a developer platform that provides the ability to create functions that are stored on a blockchain or blockchain-like system such as Arweave.
Berenbaum said the inspiration for Community Labs’ venture studio came during a discussion with Williams on the long term goals of the Arweave ecosystem and infrastructure challenges people go through while building on Arweave.
The combination of these factors made us realise in real time that there was a huge opportunity to form an entity (within the Arweave ecosystem) with goals similar to what Consensys will be for Ethereum… It was inspired by the needs of the ecosystem, he said, adding that Community Labs does research to determine the needs of the ecosystem.
