Huge yes from me. As a developer in North America, nobody knows about Polkadot or initiatives there. As someone who has lived in both places, it has always surprised me how much greater the awareness of Polkadot is in Berlin/Lisbon/etc. When you begin living in the U.S, all people talk about is Solana/Optimism/Polygon/Etc. It's very evident in recruitment information. Most of these protocols all have physical "hacker houses" in NA (event separate from their usual office space), where they entice devs with different events. These are the sorts of places that are at the forefront of the minds & talent that Polkadot needs. If you know anything about the Silicon Valley or NY Tech Quant bro, if you want them to invest their time & effort, you need to actually be consistently competitive on all fronts.

Imagine being a founder for web3 in the U.S.A:

• live in HCOL area (San Fran/NYC/Seattle)
• Senior devs expect 130-250K + Health Insurance + "cool perks" like free lunch and sky diving budget, or they just go to FAANG or another startup with the funding to give them that
• you compete with some of the most renowned VC investors & funds for funding, against some of the most world-class teams in the world
• what will you choose to build your scalable web3 company on: Something with a 24/7 presence in your area, or take a chance on a mostly-unknown protocol from another continent?
  • Projects with a presence in the Area:
    • VCs know about project
    • VCs are familiar/friends with the people who lead said project
    • if you are in a crisis, VC has direct line to people who can help you out, in the same timezone.
    • VCs and Projects are both invested in building the talent in the area, so you can be sure there will be a supply of devs to build the project
  • Projects w/o present:
    • something where to get the support you might need you will need to take a 9+ hour flight everytime/work around timezones?
      • When your startup is on fire and you need a rescue, you don't want your lifeline to be asleep
      • need to probably import devs from Europe, incurring costs you don't want and lets be honest, Europeans don't want to live in a place w/o free healthcare and shitty public transit
    • You want devs in your area to have the skills for building your protocol. You don't want to import devs from Europe, or pay for remote European devs in a diff timezone
    • not in the pop-culture web3 zeitgeist. Less hype = less investment, more marketing on your part to convince devs/investors/people to trust your project.

You will 100% take the chance on a project with builders in your area, that is actively pursuing building the skills of those in the area so you can be more sure of consistent talent.

Considering Polkadot as a 11 Billion Dollar Market Cap protocol, there should be absolutely no excuse for not being competitive at this stage. If Polkadot fails to achieve this competition, it will certainly continue to lose ground to more visible projects.

Put simply, Polkadot just isn't a topic of discussion for startups looking to break into the web3 space in NA. Devs will go through Optimism, Arbitrum, Base, ZkSync, Solana, Polygon, before even giving a drop of thought to Polkadot. I think many Polkadot NA devs relate, when Polkadot is brought up to the everyday web3 dev here, the answer is "I heard they're doing some really cool stuff over there at Polkadot, don't know much about it though" and the buck stops there. Resume discussion of Optimism/Base L3 scaling.

It's an unquestionable fact that NA has the most powerful, well-funded, and well-respected VC firms in the world. if Polkadot is to have any chance of success with the big boys, it needs to step up and break into this market.

Hello @Transistor,

Thanks for the proposal. I'm rejecting it for a single reason: the duration of the funding. Funding should be initially for single-year only. I understand that you have to make a 3-year lease, and the 3-year lease you found is an advantageous one in the area, but I reject the idea that the treasury should take the risk of all these 3 years on behalf of you guys.

What I would support? Treasury funds you for a year (plus the security deposit, possibly), you present your work to the community at the end of the year, and the community funds you for an additional year if your work so far justifies the investment. If you're too successful, why not fund you for an additional 2 years? This way, should you fail to deliver at the end of the first year, the treasury has lost the investment for the first year, and you're left with 2 more years of the lease on your lap. This is the right way to incentivize this funding.

Otherwise your stakes is next to zero. Complete risk shouldn't be on the shoulders of the treasury, ie the community, share it if you have so much confidence in your project.

Best regards,
kukabi | Helikon