196109
Rae

@raechellambert #196109

Building IRL community at scale on River https://getriver.io (backed by @balajis.eth & @solanafoundation) | For fun:🚴🏻‍♀️💃🏻
506 Follower 63 Following
Got to tell my story of making IRL community happen at massive scale, the notions of centralized and decentralized community, and why I’m trying to rewire everyone’s brains around small in-person gatherings

Thanks to @alys-key for taking the time to understand what we’re building at River and how we got started here on Farcaster

Wouldn’t have happened without @ted helping me get in front of @balajis.eth
Someone told me their strategy is to work W2 until 50, bank a bunch of money, and then find a business to buy & operate.

I cannot stress this enough: get in the arena now, even if it's small.

You may think you're learning a lot while working at a big company. You're not.

Reading Zero to One will not cut it.
How to start a startup:

1. Find an unsolved problem a lot of people have (way harder than it looks)

2. Have a unique insight (generally from personally living the problem)

3. Have the social capital to recruit talent and either have or raise money (takes years)

4. Stay ruthlessly focussed and ship fast for days/ weeks/months/years on end
Recently joined the most based community on Solana $DEGOD
River just raised a $1.6M pre-seed round!

We're building an events platform for global brands to let members from their community host on their behalf.

We're thrilled to partner with Blue Wire Capital, Blockwall, Blockchain Founders Capital, Solana Foundation, Very Early Ventures, and LAUNCH for our pre-seed round.

15 months ago I had an insight while building community for The All-In Podcast. I couldn’t find an event platform that would let fans host their own events without data sharing issues and tons of work.

So Jason Calacanis suggested we build one. He invested along with @balajis.eth

We’re super proud of how much we built this past year with just $150k angel round. Our MVP has powered community events for The All-In Podcast, Bryan Johnson, My First Million, Tim Ferris, Superteam, DeGods, Solana Foundatjon, and more.

We’ve already had over 2,000 events, produced by 3,000 crowd-sourced hosts with 55k attendees.
Brought the River team to hike an overnight up Mount Washington. Spent the night at Lakes of the Clouds hut. Had 2 sunny days in a row!

Team flew in from Austin, Lisboa, Brazil, Warsaw, and Zurich 🗺️
Hey, I’m Rae and I’m figuring out Farcaster. I came on here last fall to pitch my idea for a community-based event platform to @balajis.eth and it actually worked (he invested). (Thanks to @ted for telling me about his AMA in here!)

I’m building IRL community at a massive scale for Solana Foundation, Superteam, All-In, DeGods, Tim Ferris and a bunch more through River, my in-person event and social platform.

I honestly did not set out to start a web3 company (barely understood what web3 was last year) but delightfully, that’s how it’s turned out.

I’ll be sharing the River journey as we go and I’d love to have you follow along.