(2021-08-07) Season2 Of Athens A Collective Vision

Season 2 of Athens Research — A Collective Vision. Athens Research is a private, open-source tool for high-tech R&D teams solving moonshot problems (Grand Challenge). Dynamically create, connect, and compound your research and documentation using a collaborative knowledge graph.

we are pivoting from PKM and creating a new category, CKM. Our end vision is to create a Collective Brain, a social network for learning, collaboration, and innovation. We believe the first killer use case will be with high-tech moonshot research teams. (collecctive intelligence)

Season 1 of the story of Athens Research wrapped up 3 months back, leaving you with a few cliffhangers.

In the beginning came the Call to Adventure. It was simple: make Open-Source Roam.

After months of diligent effort, we were accepted into Y Combinator (YC).

At YC, we found our mentor. Michael Seibel, the head of Y Combinator

Season 1 came to an exciting end with us raising a $1.9M seed round

Season 1 has drawn to an exciting end. We are now in the unknown terrain of the “Special World.”

While we have already built a heroic team, our second challenge remains open. That challenge is to make it through Startup Wilderness: a time when a startup seeks to discover their reason for existence, and the reason why the market wants them to exist. How does one make it through Startup Wilderness? By building something 10 people love and something that would make people very disappointed if they couldn’t use us today

Through extensive user interviews, we learned that users wouldn’t be very disappointed if they could no longer use Athens. That was because there were and are alternatives to Athens in the Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) space. (compelling)

Rather than directly compete in the PKM space, we have decided to create and lead a new category, Collective Knowledge Management (CKM).

We believe that the most learning comes from collaboration. We believe that the hardest problems can only be solved by multiple minds. And, we believe the greatest meaning comes from our connections with one another. Apollo 13 (moonshot), Bell Labs, and Xerox PARC were small, focused teams who created change on a global scale.

Collaboration isn’t just for tiny, elite teams, however. Large decentralized groups of “hobbyists” can accomplish great things too. That is, in some ways, the story of open-source, from Wikipedia to Linux to our little project, Athens Research.

Real-Time Collaboration (RTC), Athens’ top priority, is the first step towards multiplayer interaction.

we are designing RTC as a generic protocol that can support arbitrary backends and frontends

A Collective Brain could help us work together to solve humanity’s moonshot problems: extending longevity, eradicating cancer, and stopping climate change.

In Reinventing Discovery by Michael Nielsen, Nielsen describes his vision of The Era of Networked Science.

We are reinventing discovery, and the result will be a new era of networked science that speeds up discovery, not in one small corner of science, but across all of science.

Just as the First Internet evolved in academic circles to become the World Wide Web we know today, so technical users can lead the way to a much longer journey. The goal for Athens is to serve everyone.

We would love to collaborate with: Researchers who might have PhDs doing R&D for “moonshot” projects; Researchers in AI, biotech, hard-tech, financial services, crypto, think tanks, and academia; Researchers working in teams of 2-10. (bootstrapping)