buildspace

» see buildspace.so as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

buildspace sold a deadline. You signed up and got six weeks, at the end of which you had either shipped the thing you said you would ship or you had not. There was no curriculum in the usual sense and no credential at the end. The product was a cohort of strangers working on their own ideas at the same time, plus a date.

Farza Majeed started it in December 2019. The first version taught people to write Solidity and deploy a contract, which in 2021 and 2022 was the most oversubscribed subject on the internet, and buildspace rode that wave into a ten million dollar round led by Andreessen Horowitz with Y Combinator and Protocol Labs alongside. The valuation reported at the time was a hundred million dollars.

The pitch Majeed used in interviews was Hogwarts for builders, and the atmosphere really was most of what you were buying. It worked. Roughly 125,000 people went through buildspace programs over its life, more than 30,000 of them through Nights and Weekends, the six-week accelerator that became the main thing the company did.

Then on 23 August 2024, with the cohort model working and the money still in the bank, it stopped.

~ the dossier ~

~ nights and weekends ~

The format is the part worth recording. Six weeks and a public demo at the end, with a daily pressure to post whatever you had managed that day. It borrowed the shape of an accelerator and removed the equity, along with the implication that you were starting a company at all. Plenty of people came out of it with a weekend project and nothing more, and that was allowed.

By the fifth season it had moved well past crypto into whatever people wanted to build, which in 2024 mostly meant AI projects. The company's own framing on its last day was that it had been the biggest school in the world for people who wanted to work on their own ideas. The claim is hard to check and not obviously wrong at 125,000 participants.

~ the letter ~

The announcement went out from Majeed's account at 17:11 UTC on 23 August 2024. It opened with "I have some tough news. Today, buildspace is closing." The first lines then spent their time listing the reasons that did not apply, investor pressure and runway among them, before saying that the actual reason was a bit more personal. A longer letter followed.

The personal reason was burnout. Majeed had been running it for nearly five years, said the company was the strongest it had ever been in community and in progress, and said he could not find a direction worth pursuing. He wound it down and returned the remaining capital to the investors, which is the detail that separates this from most shutdowns. There was money left and he gave it back instead of spending it hunting for a pivot.

~ hi. this was buildspace. ~

I was forty, in Ankara, with a day job in drone vision while this was happening, which is close to the wrong distance from a program built for people with a free evening and an idea they had not started yet. What I recognize is smaller than the company. Giving yourself six weeks and telling other people the date is a trick that works, and it does not need ten million dollars behind it.

buildspace.so is still up, and it is a tombstone that knows it is one. The page repeats "hi. this was buildspace." four times over, and under it: "we were the biggest school in the world for people who wanted to work on their own ideas." Past tense throughout, with two links, one to the final letter and one to the final video. No shutdown FAQ and no redirect to an acquirer. The page says what it was and lets you go read the reason if you want it.

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