felt really productive in the last 7 days. i'm starting to see a clearer path for the near future, so i've been able to focus my energy where it was most needed.

i'm spending a lot of time lately talking with many people, including frens, urbe members (who are also frens :) ), and other people i connected with during this crazy year of traveling to web3 events all over the world.

the yr of events is not over yet, but looking back, i can confidently say that the time, effort, energy, and fun that i put into all these experiences has been paying off a lot; "priceless" is the word.

all the connections that i made enriched me a lot and taught me something new, and i'm sure i gave something back.

i'm now trying to bring all of that together in a new initiative that i'm running with my bros orbulo and frankc from urbe.

we are builders who love creating stuff and experimenting with frontier tech, and we are starting to collaborate closer on some projects that we think are cool.

our end goal is to create a flourishing ecosystem of startups and projects in the space, and most importantly, build that in rome, our hometown.

we'd love to get around us more and more people that love building like us, to learn and get inspired by each other, and hopefully end up creating something meaningful.

we don't have a clear plan yet to get there, but we're validating some ideas that we have.

one thing that we know for sure is that we love hackathons and prototyping/shipping ideas quickly, so that's something we will keep doing a lot, creating a pool of mini-projects that from time to time we can pick and decide to push forward.

in the meantime, to bootstrap these projects, we will need some money to still get some food on the table at the end of the day, and there are two ways in which we think we can achieve that.

the first one is for sure by getting grants from sponsors and partners who find our projects interesting. for example, we're trying to bring to life "split3," a crypto-first group expense management app that i built in ethwarsaw with mattiapomelli (a good fren and an incredible builder).

since we built it on top of requestnetwork, we will try to get some support from them and hopefully contribute to bringing more users and volume to their ecosystem.

furthermore, we're trying to involve more partners to support this project and get some sort of combined grants, as we feel like it could speed up development and it's also in the best interest of all these partners to collaborate and add one cool project to their ecosystem.

another way is collaborating with companies or third parties to offload some of their work.

this makes a lot of sense, especially for project-based initiatives that they might want to run, like quickly launching a new prototype or a spin-off experiment.

we like calling this idea the "collective," as we want to bring together great builders that we know, support, and work with them on innovative projects, getting the best out of our network and skills.

hopefully, this is just the start of something bigger that will help us create and support many web3 projects in the future, empowering builders with our network and skills.

and even if it's not the right path, i'm sure that we will enjoy the journey.