Tate started building on the Permaweb while in high school during the middle of the first wave of COVID. His foray into Arweave began with storing study guides that were being repeatedly deleted from the students' shared drives. He subsequently built nest.land, where developers can store code modules on the Permaweb for safe-keeping. In short, this was just the beginning. After creating both Verto Exchange and ArConnect (the popular browser extension), his latest venture is Community Labs.
Community Labs, also referred to as "CLabs" just raised $30 million to fund their efforts in creating fundamental technology and protocols geared towards the Arweave ecosystem at large. This is a significant raise (possibly the largest to date in the Arweave ecosystem), and one that represents the opportunity available for both developers and entrepreneurs looking to build the next web.
With an emphasis on both "structured" and "unstructured" time throughout his day, Tate continues to actively invent and collaborate with his growing and distributed team. Considering the fact that most of what is being built has never been done before, the model of unstructured time can enable more creativity and freedom to think differently. While the company is relatively new, those involved via investments/advisors and beyond have a lot of experience that they are bringing to the table.
CLabs already has four ventures underway, three of which are protocols enabling further enhancements for the developer experience. Enjoy this episode, Tate shares his story, philosophy on building, and the path forward for the Arweave ecosystem and CLabs.
Check out CommunityLabs.com, in addition to ArConnect.io.
Also, be sure and follow @onlyarweave for all things Arweave related.
