Happy 2nd Birthday Tech Fleet!
Written by Elizabeth Amaya, Devon Coleman, Kathleen Hansen, and Morgan Denner
Elizabeth is current project lead for Tech Fleet/Earth Hero mobile app project; Devon Coleman is a current UX research apprentice for for Tech Fleet/Earth Hero mobile app project and Tech Fleet Infrastructure team member; Kathleen Hansen was a lead UX writer for Tech Fleet/Beela phase 3 and is a Tech Fleet alumni. Morgan Denner is the founder and CXO of Tech Fleet.
They grow up so fast…
June 29th marked Tech Fleet Community DAO’s 2 year anniversary! Woo!
As we pass this milestone, it’s a great time to reflect on Tech Fleet’s growth over the years and look ahead. We’ve been busy with lots of new projects and initiatives as a web2 and web3 apprenticeship agency and startup incubator. This article takes a look back at our impact the past 2 years, covers our accomplishments in Q2 2022, and provides a look ahead to the rest of 2022.
Tech Fleet alumni data (June 2020–June 2022)
Tech Fleet’s mission is to create an opportunity for new grads and career transitioners to build experience so they can get a full time gig in their field. What really matters is what’s been happening after apprentices and leads complete a Tech Fleet apprenticeship.
Over the last 2 years, we have a 78% hiring rate as of June 2022. We have a lot more new Tech Fleet alumni coming out of apprenticeships on an ongoing basis.
Here are some of details of the kinds of people we’ve helped so far:
Where do they work? 64% of graduates so far found gigs on product teams working full time, while 36% of Tech Fleet alumni pursued freelance and agency gigs.
65% of our hired graduates went on to either do full cycle UX Research / Design, or just UX/UI design. 22% of our graduates headed to the pure UX Research side and we have a growing presence of product management alumni. In the future, we expect to see more hiring data for web developers, product managers, UX writers, content strategists, and more roles we are recently adding to Tech Fleet apprenticeships.
Q2 in review
Q2 was filled with milestones for our community. For the first time in Tech Fleet history, we started development apprenticeships on top of UX and product management apprenticeships. We continued to work with our client Beela, a non-profit organization helping women and non-binary immigrants in Sweden start tech careers. Two apprenticeship teams just finished a cross-functional effort for Beela: a re-design of their current website and a build out of Beela Hive, a platform built for mentorship and learning.
We also kicked off several projects in June. This is the first time Tech Fleet has ever taken on 4 projects at the same time.
Current Summer 2022 projects in the Fleet
Ruminate (Phase 1) — Food system issues are complex. Ruminate is a nonprofit innovation lab that helps businesses find effective solutions so they can contribute to a sustainable food system. The team’s working to research, design, and build Ruminate’s “Feedback” Platform that helps small food businesses test and evolve new product ideas.
Earth Hero Mobile App (Phase 1)— Earth Hero is passionate about saving the earth. Their app allows users to monitor their emissions and earn achievements for completing sustainability tasks, such as drinking plant milk and turning down your water heater. Tech Fleet apprentices are currently working to build out new community-focused features, which are intended to promote user engagement and positively impact climate change.
Kadet Wallet (Phase 1) — A team of apprentices and leads are creating a cross-chain Kadena NFT and token wallet app that is designed to be easy to use whether you’re familiar with blockchain or not. This is Tech Fleet Community DAO’s first incubated product and it will serve as the foundation of Tech Fleet’s web3 pursuits. As an incubated product of our DAO, the future of the product and future decisions made for this wallet will be decided by a governance model, either Tech Fleet’s $FLEET token or Kadet’s own governance token. All revenue that this wallet generates in the future, whether it be through swaps or DEX aggregators or bridges or fiat-to-crypto purchasing or anything else, will go to the Tech Fleet Community DAO treasury. The DAO will decide how it gets dispersed to incubate new products, fund new apprenticeship efforts, provide for operational efforts, or anything else.
The Serious Type (Phase 2) — The Serious Type is a non-profit that empowers youth to express themselves on a social media platform with a purpose. In phase 1, we researched, designed, and tested a mobile app for The Serious Type. For phase 2 of the project, our team will continue building the vision, designing, and coding the app. Their work will lead the way to a Phase 3 with continued work.
Introducing the Tech Fleet Advisory Board
As Tech Fleet continues to grow, an advisory board of rock stars has been formed to help guide our DAO’s future trajectory and help our members develop. The advisory board will be contributing their expertise in a number of key areas for Tech Fleet including guidance on growth strategies. This is just the beginning and we expect to have many more opportunities for the Advisory Board to help shape the future of Tech Fleet!
So, who are these amazing people? The current members of Tech Fleet’s first advisory board include:
- Ginny Hong is UX manager for Centene Corporation. She’s one of the OG’s in Tech Fleet and we wouldn’t be here without her guidance and mastery leading new teams to success throughout 2020 and 2021.
- Teri Perona is another OG in Tech Fleet. She was an apprentice from the first Tech Fleet project and also served as a project lead. She then landed a role as a lead UX designer at Mindgrub, an agency in Baltimore. She pays it forward by helping other apprentices to succeed and providing thought leadership to the Tech Fleet community.
- Erik Axelsson is a manager for the Outcomes department at CareerFoundry and has partnered with Tech Fleet’s mission since late last year. Erik has the finger on the pulse of global tech industry needs. Erik will pioneer the first ever dedicated apprenticeship for CareerFoundry graduates in Tech Fleet as our first “apprenticeship as a service”.
- Jason Buhle is the Managing Director of AnswerLab. Jason is also a UX graduate lecturer at USC, and helps keep their program competitive to industry needs. As an industry expert Jason knows the client-facing world and what it takes to succeed in Tech with client-facing roles.
- Jonathan Bond is the Head of Product Design at Better Agency as well as a lead mentor at Product Hive. He’s on a mission to give back to new UX’ers in the field and has signed up to help aid in knowledge gaps before and after apprenticeships.
- Andy Rogers is a Tech and development veteran based out of the UK with extensive experience and is a known spokesperson and contributor in the Flux and Kadena communities today. His experience in blockchain and the technical side of product will help Tech Fleet mold its decentralization and blockchain components and beyond.
- Colton Schweitzer is the co-founder of Kickass UX, a UX/UI online bootcamp based out of Seattle, WA. Colton has lots of experience founding startups and will be helping Tech Fleet in its operations and growth moving forward.
We’re excited to have a robust group of industry leaders on its Advisory Board to guide it to becoming a truly global organization that helps nonprofits and impact organizations make change in the world while providing opportunities for apprentices to build their craft
Here’s what’s next in the second half of 2022
Tech Fleet’s “Apprenticeship-as-a-Service” launches — Among the list of firsts, Tech Fleet is launching Apprenticeship-as-a-Service this summer. This is a brand new service where Tech Fleet Community DAO runs a client-facing apprenticeship project and allows only specific bootcamp or college graduates to apply (or some other specific criteria) giving them the chance at getting the on-the-job experience right before they get into the field. For our pilot, Tech Fleet’s partnering with two, count ’em, two bootcamps (to be announced)! Recent graduates from these bootcamps will be offered an 8-week apprenticeship to build a web application product for one of our clients. Apprentices will receive a paid stipend. This is only the beginning of Tech Fleet’s Apprenticeship-as-a-Service.
Miners of Kadenia and Tech Fleet’s Pact Internship — Together on a mission to grow the development talent on the Kadena blockchain, Tech Fleet Community DAO and the Miners of Kadenia are partnering up to offer the first Pact Internship, managed by Tech Fleet. Interns will spend 8 weeks working on the MoK game alongside team developers and performing Tech Fleet sprints. Interns will receive a stipend. We are providing non-developer resources from an operations standpoint and will run the project with a scrum master/project manager. Pact interns should have experience with Pact coding smart contracts and be ready to jump right into the MoK development team day-to-day.
Pact Apprenticeship opportunities for those with 0 experience — Tech Fleet Community DAO is committed to building the talent pools for web3 across all blockchains. We’re starting with Kadena and Pact, our beloved “homebase” on the blockchain. Tech Fleet will incubate more Kadena projects beyond Kadet wallet and offer apprenticeship and lead opportunities for growing developers, designers, researchers, and product managers for Kadena.
Kadena Block Explorer V2 and more incubated Kadena products— Yes, that’s right, Kadena Block Explorer V2. We said it. Tech Fleet’s ‘product incubation’ services will continue after we finish the first phase of the Kadet Wallet project. The Kadet wallet will continue being built out, and Tech Fleet will start creating more incubated products in Q3. All of the products we incubate will be built by the people learning their craft in Tech Fleet apprenticeships. We have plans to build some more fundamental Kadena blockchain decentralized apps, incubate several web3 startups on Kadena, and offer our services to other blockchains to incubate across web3. There are some really exciting entrepreneurial efforts being hatched in Tech Fleet, and there will be more web2 and web3 startups spawned.
Tech Fleet Portal dapp: Token launch, exclusively minted NFT collections, on-chain governance, staking, and more — We will work towards the Tech Fleet Portal dapp and on-chain governance. The dapp will be hosted decentralized on Flux network. We’ll build it out in chunks as we move into late 2022 and iterate further into 2023. The first planned milestone for our portal in 2022 is token/NFT mint (using the Marmalade protocol for NFT) followed by on-chain governance and staking.
Continued industry partnerships and community talks — In an effort to continue growing our community, we plan on partnering with additional industry organizations:
- Tech Fleet has been on a couple of community chats so far, and we will continue being guests on podcasts and AMA’s.
- Other bootcamps will offer Tech Fleet’s Apprenticeships-as-a-Service for their graduates and students to gain experience the Tech Fleet way.
- Company-sponsored Tech Fleet training programs in specific skills, such as development, Agile, Product Management, UX Research, UX/Product strategy, or any talent roles the organization’s trying to build up.
Incorporating the DAO — We will be looking to incorporate in the U.S. after understanding how to comply with the latest regulatory landscape in the U.S. Either DAO members will require the $FLEET token, or one of our NFT, or both, to get DAO perks. Exciting details to come in the near future.
Initial Dex Offerings (IDO’s), raising funds, and generating revenue— Tech Fleet Community DAO is going to start generating revenue with paying client projects for UX, Product, and Development-related work across web2 and web3. On top of that we’re going to pursue as many IDO’s as we are able to host on Kadena for international investors, and potentially other platforms of crowdfunding to U.S. and international investors. All of this will help us hire resources, scale operationally, grow our research and design and development talent in web2 and web3, take on more client work, generate more revenue, build more dapps that generate revenue, and offer more apprenticeship opportunities at every step. The more revenue the DAO generates, the more the DAO members receive in their share of the profits/revenue in the future. More details to come as we plan.
Tech Fleet Website — FINALLY https://techfleet.org will launch to production.
