Xoogler.co: First NFT celebrating our community
Since its foundation in 2015 over drinks hosted around Google I/O, the Xoogler.co community has been a hub for the ex-Google ecosystem who are interested in entrepreneurship. We organize over 300 meetups, and formal events every year, have an active Slack group and also invest in each other's ventures either directly or through the Xoogler Fund and/or Syndicate with over 2,000 investors. Since inception, our community has invested in over 60+ companies and had many exits and unicorns.
We’ve been constantly motivated to do better. A question we started asking ourselves is how do we find a better way to build communities or groups, foster more startups and reward members and external partners to engage, participate, foster collaboration and drive value creation.
A few months ago, we started on the journey to find answers. This is where we started engaging and discussing the potential of using blockchain from our Xoogler Blockchain Group—whose members have created some of the most successful blockchain protocols and projects such as Litecoin, FalconX, Harmony, Solana, Electric Capital, OpenSea, along with many others who are now considered thought leaders in the blockchain ecosystem. This is also a great example of the quality of talent and depth of knowledge in the Xoogler community.
After countless discussions and feedback sessions, we arrived at the conclusion that we are uniquely positioned to build an ecosystem leveraging blockchain. The first step in that direction is the launch of the first Xoogler NFT.
We wanted a way to say thank you and show appreciation for our volunteers, startups and investors. We have minted a unique 3D NFT that reflects the value of the community and our common roots → The NFT features a rocket venturing into space, paying homage to the moonshot thinking. We also included “Stan” the famous dinosaur on Google’s campus as a reminder to never become irrelevant. We’re excited to build value and community alongside this elite group of entrepreneurs and investors as we embrace blockchain as an enablement layer to turbocharge our community and help others. We’re reserving the NFT #1, and NFT #2 for Larry and Sergey - because why not :)
Each attendee of Xoogler’s most recent blockchain demo day in July will receive an NFT. This NFT can be used to gain priority access to future Xoogler.co demo day events including the next Blockchain Demo Day in November. The Xoogler community’s NFT collection will be minted via Rally, a leading crypto platform for creators. Because the NFT is minted and stored on the $RLY sidechain of Ethereum, it can be exchanged without fees or intensive energy consumption. Rally co-founder and SuperLayer Labs Managing Partner Kevin Chou is an advisor to the Xoogler community. Thank you as well to Mahesh Vellanki, Amit Ranade, Bela Pandya, Ira Lam, Stephanie Pereira, Tu-Anh Dang-Tran, Kurt Patat and Joe Coufal from the Rally team for helping launch Xoogler’s first NFT!
To view the Xoogler NFT collection check out nft.rally.io and buy one if you’d like.
In the coming days and weeks we look forward to sharing more about our plans as we embrace blockchain. and tokenize our communities. You can review our FAQs for more information.
Join us during one of the following Q&A sessions to learn more, just reply to this email with your preferred day and time to be added to the calendar invite.
Tuesday 9/21 at 6pm PDT / 9pm EDT
Wednesday 9/22 12pm BST / 1pm CEST / 4:30pm IST / 7pm SGT / 9pm AEST
Wednesday 9/22 6pm PDT / 9pm EDT
Thursday 9am SGT / 11am AEST
You can read more about the announcement here and in The Information.
Thank you again for being a part of this community. We look forward to improving it to better serve you and all of Google’s alumni.
Watch this space for more...
Chris, Ankit and Kushagra