Announcing Jericho’s founding team

> *Jericho is the leading, exclusive & global network for web3 builders. 300+ world-class builders from 25+ countries meet, learn and build together in Jericho including builders from YGG, Zerion, Arianee, Sismo, and Messari.*

## From zero to community

Back in September ‘21, Jericho, then known as The Forge, started as a group of friends on Discord. That early group was a few dozen web3 builders mainly from Europe (France, Spain, Portugal, UK).

By building up the brand & community, we managed to:

* Create a double NFT-gated system to generate & process invite-only applications
* Invite top speakers every 2 weeks, including the founders of Polygon, Sandbox, and Near Protocol to Jericho
* Expand the community across the entire world, today having 50% of applications coming from outside Europe
* Grow the community & Twitter by 27% MoM while regulating growth via invites, applications & onboarding quests
* Get a 77 community NPS
* Launch a web2 to web3 talent on-ramping program with Alven & partners like Sorare, Ledger, and Sandbox (89 NPS)

Jericho is now a strong international network of web3 builders (75% founders) helping each other on a daily basis with feedback, intros, & knowledge.

## From one to two

I started and grew Jericho by myself with the help of a dozen Guardians, Jericho’s most active contributors. They’ve been fundamental to Jericho’s success by suggesting improvements, leading initiatives, and voting on applications.

Still, I wanted to find a co-founder to build Jericho with. Entrepreneurship is first & foremost a human adventure, and I wanted to share the full experience with someone.

I met **[Loris](https://www.linkedin.com/in/loris-wintjens/)** around 3 years ago when I was working at The Family and created a community for CTOs (aspiring, early-stage & late-stage). We reconnected when he was exploring web3 after leaving his YC-backed TCP reverse-proxy startup (employee #1 & founding engineer, he built the enterprise SaaS from 0 to 1). Given the early experience with Jericho, I’d figured out exactly what I was looking for in a co-founder and he checked every box. We started working together to test the relationship and those first few months validated our intuition: We are 100% aligned.

Loris is digital-native. He started playing MMORPGs (esp. WoW) at 6, managed a top 1% world LoL e-sport team & learned how to code by himself online starting when he was 12. He hacked his education by skipping classes to work for world-class companies in highly technical environments (i.e. the .NET team at Microsoft & the back-end alert evaluation team at Datadog).

And he’s damn hungry. He’s a tremendously fast & brilliant coder with a strong business sense and insane entrepreneurial maturity. He’s got the steepest learning curve you’ve ever seen and understands what it takes to build a legendary company.

Coupled with my experience building a post-Series A Sequoia-backed company from scratch as part of the founding team, leading community efforts at The Family, & building a community-first travel company, we were a match made in heaven.

> *We’re now ready to tackle Jericho’s next steps together and change the way people work online, building right at the intersection of web3, future-of-work, and gaming.*

## From community to product

![Welcome to Jericho](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/Dp4jeY8Q9tTjz1oaYyPQd.png?height=800&width=1600)

Since day one, our goal with Jericho has been to build a product for builders. After collecting information on builders’ needs for months, we now have a bunch of assumptions we’re going to test with Loris.

I’m extremely excited to take that step, since I finally found someone as ambitious, hungry, & obsessed as I am about the idea of turning work into play - which is and always will be our mission & north star at Jericho.

LFB,
[Vlad](https://twitter.com/0xVladimir)


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To celebrate, **[we refreshed Jericho’s website](https://www.jericho.gg/)** with new colors, 

Anyone can apply to join Jericho

## NFT invites to kickstart our growth

Jericho is a global & exclusive community of web3 builders.

We initiated a double NFT gated system (Hammer to apply & Anvil as membership after onboarding quest completion) that has been extremely useful to control the flow and quality of Jericho members so far.

We scaled Jericho from 50 to 200 members the past few months and it didn’t affect our vibes. By making it hard to apply with an invite-only mechanism, we made sure that applications were only coming from relevant people.

## Time to change the rules

We are entering a new stage at Jericho.

We decided to reduce the friction and let anyone apply to join.

> **👉 [Apply to join Jericho](https://airtable.com/shr8SeKKTQlnJJpO4) 👈**

While applications are not invite-based & token-gated anymore, **we do not intend to lower the bar**. On the contrary, we will take more time to analyze each application as they aren’t filtered via invites.

Jericho’s entrance remains effort-based rather than capital-based and this won’t change. New members will still:

* Join Jericho as Apprentices
* Complete an Onboarding Quest
* Get the Anvil NFT (membership) when they’re done

Announcing Operation 3: A web2 to web3 talent on-ramping program

**Jericho and Alven are launching Operation 3** to help the best web2 operators learn about web3, connect, and find their next position at a web3 organization.

[Alven](https://alven.co/) as a crypto-heavy venture firm and [Jericho](https://www.jericho.gg/) as a global community for web3 builders have been exposed first-hand to web3 builders’ biggest pain: Finding the best talent to grow their project.

In addition to the difficulties every tech company faces today in the global talent war, the struggle is even greater for web3 projects. Complex value chains, new business models and community dynamics, opaque jargon, and compensation schemes make it difficult for the best tech talents to understand what project they can join and how their skills and experience can be leveraged in this new paradigm.

> Operation 3 is a community-driven learning and matching talent program which selects the best tech talent interested in web3, helps them learn to be fluent in web3 through a combination of content, mentoring, and workshops, and matches them with selected web3 partners looking to recruit experienced and web3-ready talent.

The program is designed for experienced tech operators (4y+ work experience) in software development, marketing, product, partnerships, HR, finance, and any other function in a scaling tech business who want to learn the basics of web3 from the best. You will learn about decentralization, how to build blockchain products, how to make your products mainstream, how to gather and animate communities, and specific use cases in DeFi, gaming, and open web.

Around 40 top talents are expected to be joining the program and 14 companies partnered with Operation 3 for this first edition: [Ledger](https://www.ledger.com/), [Sandbox](https://www.sandbox.game/), [Sorare](https://sorare.com/), [Zerion](https://zerion.io/), [Kaiko](https://www.kaiko.com/), [Stake DAO](https://stakedao.org/), [Blackpool](https://blackpool.finance/), [Kiln](https://www.kiln.fi/), [Sismo](https://www.sismo.io/), [Angle](https://www.angle.money/), [Morpho](https://www.morpho.best/), [Coinvise](https://www.coinvise.co/), [Cryptio](https://cryptio.co/), [Immortal Game](https://immortal.game/).

> **Apply to join Operation 3 by completing the form on the website below👇**
>
> [https://www.jericho.gg/operation3](https://www.jericho.gg/operation3)



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Duration: 6 weeks
Starting date: May 30th 2022
Cost: Free

The Forge becomes Jericho

## We started building

From a group of friends passionate about web3 entrepreneurship, The Forge became an attractive & popular brand in the space.

These past months, we created a double-NFT [gatekeeping system](https://twitter.com/theforge_land/status/1466499472557551623), invited top web3 founders [for AMAs](https://twitter.com/theforge_land/status/1464586642325491712) (from companies such as Polygon, Nansen, or Sandbox), and launched an [investment vehicle](https://twitter.com/theforge_land/status/1508735163760459779) among many other things. By controlling the flow & quality of our community, we managed to create a safe space in web3 far from spam, noise, and fomo.

## For the Builders

From day one, we stood up for the Builders. Those who are entering web3 to shape the future, not to make quick bucks.

“The Forge” was a good incarnation of this positioning, but we quickly noticed three limits: genericity, singularity & inclusivity.

We wanted something unique, open, strong. We still wanted it to be a place with historical references.

> We chose **Jericho**.

Jericho is timeless - it’s the oldest city in the world. Edifices Jericho’s builders erected stood the test of time for 10 millennia. It’s where various clans from the desert gathered to pioneer large-scale cooperation, communal labor, & agriculture.

A historical cradle of human civilization.
A haven for builders in the middle of nowhere.
An ode to building enduring structures.

## And we keep on building

We gather many types of builders inside our community - founders (+75%), operators, contributors, investors - and we want to build a tailored experience for each & every one of these categories.

> It’s time for Jericho to accelerate its growth with more community initiatives, and product development.

We have some exciting and crazy ideas in mind. If you’re interested in joining Jericho, [grab a Hammer](https://mirror.xyz/jerichogg.eth/_sZWnqtDlWcEMT3NxZ-gVOTHXhWP760HZMR3upSdJaU), and apply.

Jericho opens its gates

Getting involved in web3 is probably the best career move one could do right now. But navigating web3 seas and its turmoils isn't an easy task. Worse than that, imagine building something in web3 with zero market visibility and drastic trend shifts happening from one week to another.

DeFi, NFTs... So many products have been built in the last couple of years for traders. Builders are still underserved in the ecosystem.

## Signal > Noise

At [Jericho](https://www.jericho.gg/), we are creating a **safe space for builders** whether they are DAO contributors, NFT collection launchers, crypto entrepreneurs, or VCs. Anyone contributing to moving this space forward.

We launched our Discord in September '21 and quickly felt the enthusiasm as 100 people organically joined it within a week. Based on wise community feedback, we decided to close our gates. We didn't want it to become yet another Discord server that you put in a folder, mark as read every day, and finally mute forever. Nurturing quality and avoiding spam was our main priority as any builder's scarcest resources are time and focus.

In the meantime, the community grew stronger. We structured our activity with first contributors, launched initiatives, and invited world-class speakers to share their building experience with us. These were perfect foundations to work on an inclusive-yet-qualitative gatekeeping system.

## Gates, not moats

Learning and meeting like-minded people online shouldn't cost insane amounts of ETH. Still, ensuring quality and flow control is an absolute must to keep the community safe and engaged.

What we came up with is a **double-gated NFT system**: A **Hammer** NFT to apply to Jericho and an **Anvil** NFT acting as lifetime access to the community.

![The Hammer](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/fknMDy3YEUgp9uiLBG-JE.png?height=1600&width=1600)

This is how it all unfolds:

* Every builder in Jericho has 1 invite she can share with friends.
* Invites are Hammer NFTs minted on Polygon.
* The Hammer doesn't give access to Jericho. It's a pass to apply.
* Our Guardians review every application.
* Accepted members join as apprentices. After accomplishing simple quests, they get lifetime access in the form of an Anvil NFT.
* Declined applicants can transfer their Hammers to friends or [sell them on OpenSea](https://opensea.io/collection/the-forge-hammer).

## Three options to apply

1. Get a Hammer from [one of our builders](https://www.jericho.gg/builders). You can [fill in this form](https://www.jericho.gg/hammer) to notify them you’re looking for a Hammer.
2. [Buy a Hammer on OpenSea](https://opensea.io/collection/hammers-of-jericho) from former applicants. You can always place a bid if none of them is one sale.
3. Bring value to Jericho. Be inventive & make sure we notice.

DMs are open on Twitter if you have any questions.

We're excited about welcoming new members. 
 Time to build ⚒️


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Kudos to the Guardians of Jericho who made it all possible 🤍

[0xKipit](https://twitter.com/0xKipit) (tech), [0xMikado](https://twitter.com/0xMikado) (tech), [0xSorcier](https://twitter.com/0xSorcier) (community), [RIGHTCLCKSAVEAS](https://twitter.com/RIGHTCLCKSAVEAS) (community), [albiverse](https://twitter.com/albiverse) (community), [0xRoch](https://twitter.com/0xRoch) (community), [BoninTom](https://twitter.com/BoninTom) (community), [impresario_nft](https://twitter.com/impresario_nft) (community).