You may know Elektra as one of Frank Miller’s better known comic book characters. The Greek-born Marvel superhero is a highly-trained assassin who first emerged in Daredevil #168 as a love interest of the eponymous hero. That was meant to be her only appearance in the series, but she kept coming back. She died and was resurrected, eventually becoming the second incarnation of Daredevil, armed with a litany of skills and powers, from martial arts mastery to the ability to glimpse future events across precognitive visions.

Every Friday, in the basement of a tall grey building in the middle of an unsuspecting London alleyway, a different Elektra crew gathers, united by a different kind of future vision. Web3 founders and startup folk have been assembling in the Elektra coworking space since January, convening under these auspices as “The Web3 Talent Network.” Through cohorts and events, Elektra is priming a community of investors and builders who are looking to reshape the world using blockchain and other tech.

Maddy Bergen

When I arrived last Friday, there were about 10 people scattered around the room, neck deep in some startup fare. Despite being underground, tall window wells brought in natural light that was showered across a dozen or so tables. Plants and a Roy Lichtenstein print colored the mostly white space. 

I sat down at one of the empty tables and waited to meet co-founder Maddy Bergen, whose ties to Greece, early career successes – she’s a two-time founder who scaled her first business to 50 clients by the ripe age of 18 – and seeming ability to discern future trends may just have you invoking the comic book heroine.

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Bergen was born in London and has spent her life living between the UK and Greece. She nurtured a love of technology from an early age, devouring books about artificial intelligence and developing her proclivity for math. Math brought her to physics and engineering, and eventually to the stock market. Inevitably, stocks introduced her to crypto and the startup world, and then carried her into the orbit of venture capital (VC).

Elekra Ventures web site

Bergen spent stints at Creator Fund and Elixir Capital before linking up with her cofounder, Bruno Delvaux, a crypto trader and DeFi enthusiast she’d met at Peter Symonds College. Together they started Elektra in January 2022, endeavoring to fill the web3 knowledge gap that exists in traditional VC.

Bergen and Delvaux initially focused on running cohorts to improve investors’ ability to evaluate blockchain startup opportunities, an approach that helped earn them partnerships with funds and ecosystems like Polygon, Solana and Developer DAO. But when the bear market hit, investments – and mainstream interest – in crypto slowed. 

“[In the bear market], I think people found it more difficult to convince other investors within their firm on why they should be doing crypto deals – especially when they see such high volatility in the markets. And then Terra Luna happened and then FTX. One thing after the other just makes people very conscious, and it then causes crypto believers to have to continually explain,” Bergen told me. “It’s very difficult trying to explain crypto to someone who doesn't understand it or doesn't necessarily care that much to understand – [when] you can only see the markets.”

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The co-founders began to broaden their scope, expanding further into tech and exploring new ways to utilize their space. “The London web3 community is very small,” Bergen said. “I feel like tech is the closest to web3, and I meet so many people who don't understand web3, so there's an opportunity there to actually educate people. That's why we're also looking to run different initiatives and workshops, to be able to deliver not only to a web3 native audience, but also a crypto curious audience.”

To accommodate that cross section, Bergen and Delvaux created flexible terms for joining Elektra, prioritizing the creation of a space where people can meet one another and establish professional relationships – without the cutthroat temperament that permeates comparable founder communities. “Essentially we just want to create a space where people can feel the most comfortable that they can,” Bergen said.

Elektra runs “practice pitches” on a regular basis, for instance, where founders early in their journeys pitch to a VC feedback panel and about 15 to 20 audience members. It’s a low-pressure space for healthy feedback that can flourish into real relationships. Already there have been moments of serendipitous connection, where two separate hiring founders met and enlisted new team members. 

Elektra’s goal is to continue supporting that kind of connection, cultivating the community en route to the launch of a membership plan, a fund and an accelerator by the end of this year. Bergen also sees this first space as a testing ground that could precede an expansion, across London and beyond, as Elektra seeks to elevate and develop the next generation of builders — a web3 talent community now armed with a litany of skills and powers.

“Our larger vision here is number one – obviously get a unicorn – but also a large part of it is that if we do want web3 adoption, there has to be that intersection and support system,” Bergen said, “which is exactly what we’re trying to do.”