Bitstarter: Why James Altucher, TAOX, is backing Bittensor’s first accelerator

By @macrozack, Chris Zacharia

When you really get down to it, it’s actually pretty simple. Start-up success depends on one vital element: integration.

Adapting to your surrounding ecosystem – of builders, businesses, and backers – is the difference between shooting up and crashing down. 

And on Bittensor, it’s even more urgent. A Bittensor subnet is like a start-up, but in 5D. Mining, validating, reward functions: they’re complex, ever-changing elements, and that’s before you get into hiring, scaling, and commercials. 

So unless new subnets are properly upskilled from the start, chances are they’ll struggle – not just to break through, but to break even. 

That’s why we launched Bitstarter: an independent crowdfunding accelerator that enriches new teams with end-to-end integrated support, from litepaper to launch. 

But we can’t do all of this ourselves. We need the real experts: the subnet owners, ecosystem experts, and protocol custodians who know TAO through and through. 

That’s our Advisory Panel: one for each element of Bittensor, to offer aspiring subnets the assessment, assurance, and advice they need to succeed, before they go live. So that when they do launch, they can hit mainnet running.

So when it came to appointing an Advisor to advise aspiring teams on the real-world business fundamentals – funding, commercial modelling, scaling – there was only one man for the job. That man is James Altucher.

James has founded 20 businesses. He’s written more than half a dozen books, countless blogs, and still finds the time, energy, and enthusiasm to back new projects. When I first pitched him Bitstarter, he was about to jump in a taxi, heading from the Macrocosmos office to another business meeting. His immediate response?

‘Can you launch it now? This week?’ 

Answer: of course not. At that point, we had a domain name and a few ideas. 

But James’s reaction completely justified my conviction in him. We ended up standing on that street corner for almost an hour, bouncing ideas back and forth, in the zone and immediately in sync. 

Anyone who knows James well will recognise that this isn’t out of the ordinary for him – it’s in his nature. Energy, instinct, and an eye for turning a good idea into a great one: James is a one-man start-up accelerator. And that’s exactly what we need.

By providing expertise across every vertical early on, and giving aspiring subnets a platform to pitch the proposal, Bitstarter offers a new way to access the protocol – and accelerate.  

This is how we accelerate aspiring AI visions into realized, real-world innovation – capable of competing with the biggest, while maintaining the open-source, decentralized principles core to Bittensor, and key to all. 

No one is better suited to shaping early-stage start-ups than James. But through TAO Synergies, he can do more: James can bridge the business world with Bittensor. He knows how to build back-end investment and boost front-end products. 

And yet James gives start-ups something more valuable still: the absolute fire of his enthusiasm. Put simply, James’s imagination ignites. It sets minds alight, turning initial inspiration into material innovation – again, and again, and again. 

For Bitstarter, James’s addition is incredible; for our aspiring start-ups, he’s invaluable.

Discover aspiring start-ups, pledge TAO, and help give aspiring subnets liftoff – all on bitstarter.ai, live November 17th