Startup Studio

Basics

• Accelerator program to mentor budding entrepreneurs in the space. The program, dubbed “Startup Studio,” is set up by IDEO CoLab Ventures, a venture arm from design firm IDEO, and aims to help blockchain startups with product design, user testing, hiring, finance, law and engineering, through one-day workshops.
• IDEO CoLab has been active in the blockchain space since as early as 2015, and has (info comes from 7-2019) worked with Augur, a decentralized platform for creating predictions markets, as well as privacy-centric cryptocurrency startups Zcash and Grin, among others. 
• Participating startups can choose to go to a specific workshop at “no cost,” Lee said.
• Known attenders: protocol 0x, crypto lender Dharma and crypto derivatives exchange dYdX

Team, investors, etc.

• Ian Lee; managing director of IDEO CoLab Ventures
• Fidelity, Deloitte, Amazon, Ethereum Foundation, Stellar Foundation, Coinbase-backed NEAR Protocol and Messari (which itself got funding from IDEO CoLabs in 2-2019) are some of the program’s other partners. About 15 other firms are backing the blockchain accelerator program.

From The Block:

Amazon, for instance, will provide resources on how to build and deploy services on top of its Amazon Web Service (AWS) infrastructure, Lee told The Block.

Deloitte, on the other hand, will offer workshops on the journey and lifecycle for blockchain firms from an accounting, tax, and structuring perspective, while Fidelity’s Center for Applied Technology will help them explore, accelerate, test, as well as partner on “compelling new opportunities” in the financial services space, Lee said.