<aside> 🫶 The following is our periodic update for the emotionally invested.

</aside>

Hi!

It has been a fun and wild 4 months. There are inevitably things we fail to capture in these updates - it’s hard to measure the confidence built or friendships made - but here’s what we’ve been up to!

Sessions

• There was too much demand. For the first time, we experimented with 2 weekly sessions. In total, we had 763 unique attendees across all events!
  • It was our most diverse term yet, in many ways. We’ve had the most balanced ratio of technical to non-technical projects, and also our best gender ratio yet.

• We enabled thousands of hours of creative work throughout the term. 49% of all attendees this term were first-timers, working on things they would not have otherwise. Some highlighted projects demoed throughout the term are:
  • Companies and organizations
    • Jennifer Tsai - Nucleate Dojo, a biotech innovation accelerator
    • Om Gandhi - Birbl, a startup providing secure ways for organizations to use AI
    • Mulei Mao - Duckweed hydroponic and plant-based protein
    • Lagan Bansal - Reccs, a startup providing personalized dance coaching
  • Hardware
    • Chris Samra and Avery Chiu - Symphonic, a wearable interface that decodes speech from neuromotor intentions
    • Hudzah Nazoordeen - Modular vertical farms
    • Elijah Kurien and Matt Stokes - Prosthetic arm
    • Davide Radaelli - Robotic muscles to advance biomimetic designs
    • Brian Machado, Ethan Childerhose, Clayton Haight - Bracketbot, a self-balancing robot
  • Artistic
    • Joy He - Mixed media poetry
    • Chantelle Ng - Songwriting about dinosaurs and math, singing
    • Julia Cosma - Painting and other art
    • Adriana Ceric and family(!) - Oil paintings of scenery and cities
    • Bruce Wang - Oil painting portraits of Dune characters
    • Nmeso - Filmmaking
    • Lina Lam - Sketchbook and face painting
  • Research
    • Rikard Saqe - Alternative proteins research
    • Lucas Shu and Tessa P - HRTimelines, an independent trans healthcare research project
  • Software
    • Shahan Nedadahandeh - NERF and Gaussian Splatting experiments
    • Mayank Jain - AI assistant Apple watch
    • Aviral Sharma - Skan app
  • Content++
    • Brayden Petersen and Aileen Luo - The grand story of Socratica branding and graphics
    • Eesha Ulhaq - A YouTube channel on adulting, starting with the how-to on taxes
• 4 Socratica hosts recently supported by Emergent Ventures, bringing us to a total of 9
• 5 Socraticans who received YC interviews, 2 offered a spot.
• 5 Socraticans in Buildspace’s final 32-game show. With Chris Samra and Avery Chiu ****winning it out of 17,000 people.
• Operationally, we smoothed things out by bringing our weekly expenses down by 60%, to be able to serve more people

Symposium

• We collected a lot of feedback to better understand our impact, in the first part, we asked people questions that mapped to our values and to rate them on a scale from 1-7. Here’s a glimpse of them:
  • Kind people: I like the people I interacted with at Symposium (avg: 6.4/7)
  • True Balance and Belonging: I felt like I belonged at the Symposium (avg: 6.0/7)
  • Making Things: I feel inspired to continue working on or start a  passion project (avg: 6.5/7)
  • Silly: Symposium brought out the silliness in me (avg: 5.1/7)

The whole thread on Twitter is really worth checking out!

The whole thread on Twitter is really worth checking out!

https://twitter.com/socraticainfo/status/1731780736015798425

• Record RSVPs - 450 registrations before we closed it, and ~300 attendees. It’s the most we’ve ever had, we weren’t even able to post our final promo video because we had already maxxed our capacity several days before the event
• Demos - Among booths and live presenters, we got to showcase 25 demos