srvo · connection layer

Mycelium

A forest is not a collection of trees. It is the living network beneath — the substrate that moves nutrients, warnings, and trust between everything that grows in it. Mycelium is that layer, for the communities you care about.

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First public bloom — hardware meetup, April 23, 2026

What it is

A substrate, not a banner.

Mycelium is the connection layer beneath the events, conversations, and communities hardware engineers care about. We capture engagement, surface trust, and grow a living graph that sponsors become part of rather than stickers on — anchored to the physical world through NFC cards that replace the swag you’ve been buying with something people actually keep and use.

The parent project is srvo. Mycelium is the layer underneath. Verticals like Kit, Prism, The Table, and Starcrafts are built on top of it; they’re the trees. Mycelium is the wood wide web connecting them, and the substrate where new verticals can grow.

Biologists call the underground fungal networks that hold forests together the wood wide web — Paul Stamets, Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life. Forests are networks, not collections. We’re building the human analog: not the content (that’s the trees), not the tools (those are the products), but the substrate that lets communities engage deeply with the things they care about and carry that engagement into durable, trust-weighted relationships.

The model

Bloom & harvest

When Mycelium covers an event, we call it a bloom — the moment the hidden network fruits visibly and engagement becomes data. The harvest comes after: the value we extract from the bloom and deliver to sponsors and community members in measurable form.

Traditional sponsorship sells attention. Mycelium sells a share of the harvest — captured engagement, brokered introductions, intent matches, and durable graph growth that emerge when a real community engages with your brand.

You don’t rent a banner. You plant a spore in a substrate that grows over time. Every bloom adds to your standing in a trust-weighted graph of the community you want to reach.

Bloom

Day of the event

The hidden network fruits. Attendees tap NFC cards, engage with sponsored corpora, declare intents, leave reactions, and seed the trust graph in real time.

Harvest

30 days after

Qualified introductions brokered through the graph, engagement reports with segmented metrics, durable presence in the persistent community record. Specific, measurable, auditable value.

The physical layer

NFC cards, not QR codes

Every attendee at a Mycelium bloom receives an NFC card. Tap it against your phone — the bloom’s engagement surface opens instantly. No QR scanning, no URL typing, no app install. A two-second gesture replaces a fifteen-second friction.

This is not a marketing gimmick. Mycelium is a cyber-physical system: digital substrate anchored to real-world objects. The cards are the hardware side. In a room full of hardware engineers, hardware matters.

And here’s where the sponsor economics get interesting. Traditional sponsorship spend includes branded merchandise — t-shirts, stickers, cheap USB hubs — most of which ends up in landfills within a year. Mycelium offers a direct replacement: pay for the NFC cards as sponsor-branded merchandise. Instead of handing out t-shirts, you hand out functional hardware that opens your Mycelium presence on tap, carries your brand, and is small enough to keep in a wallet.

Every future tap refreshes your visibility. Every card in a wallet is a reminder that you’re part of the substrate.

191 Blank cards in inventory
26 Events using this stack
70+ Active NFC users today
NTAG216 Rewritable, 496 bytes

Fallback: every card also carries a printed URL and shortcode. The ~20% of attendees whose phones have NFC disabled can join manually. The Kit stack has been running this configuration at 26 events; the friction is manageable.

Sponsor tiers

Plant a spore. Share the harvest.

Mycelium sponsorship is a new category of value on top of whatever you’re already doing at the meetup — qualified introductions brokered through a trust graph, durable presence in a persistent community record, co-owned content, and branded physical cards that replace swag with utility. Sponsors don’t trade an existing line item for Mycelium; they add Mycelium as the depth tier underneath their existing presence.

Spore

$1,500
per bloom

The entry tier. Plant a spore in the substrate.

During the bloom
  • Brand listed in the event directory
  • Logo and description attached to the event corpus (durable record)
  • Inclusion in the post-event recap artifact
  • Mycelium-branded NFC cards distributed to attendees
During the harvest
  • Aggregate engagement report for the bloom
Cards included
  • Mycelium-branded cards (no sponsor branding at this tier)
Best for Smaller companies testing Mycelium. Early validation with minimal commitment. A presence commitment, not a marketing campaign.
Sponsor logos

Contributor

$3,000
per bloom

You’re part of the flush. You contribute something to the community.

During the bloom
  • Everything in Spore, plus:
  • 1 service offering listed in the engagement interface (workshop slot, tool access, consultation, early product access)
  • Your offering is discoverable by attendees searching for matching intents
  • Co-branded reference in the post-event recap
  • Co-branded printed labels on NFC cards — your logo on every card attendees take home
During the harvest
  • 1 brokered introduction from a Mycelium member whose declared intent matches your offering
  • Service offering remains in the continuing graph for the 30-day harvest window
Cards included
  • Up to 150 co-branded cards included
Best for Companies with a clear product or service to surface. Mid-level commitment, qualified connections coming out of the event.
Sponsor logos

Partner

$6,000
per bloom

You’re part of the substrate. Your cards are the attendee swag.

During the bloom
  • Everything in Contributor, plus:
  • Sponsored themed corpus at the bloom (co-curated with Mycelium)
  • Featured placement in the engagement surface — your content is found first
  • Trust-graph endorsement from Anthony, visible as a formal edge in the graph
  • Sponsor-branded premium black NFC cards — your logo, tagline, and colours on the front
During the harvest
  • 3 brokered introductions (instead of 1)
  • 30-day priority surfacing for new intents matching your offerings
  • Formal engagement data report with segmented metrics
Cards included
  • Up to 250 premium sponsor-branded black cards included
Best for Companies that want real community presence and want to replace traditional swag with functional branded hardware. Anchored to the $6,000 product-launch price point most sponsors already understand.
Sponsor logos

Deep Partner

$10K–$12K
per bloom

Woven into the substrate. Named chapter in the persistent tree. Premium branded hardware.

During the bloom
  • Everything in Partner, plus:
  • Co-authored content piece (blog, video, whitepaper) jointly produced with Mycelium
  • Named chapter in the persistent tree — your sponsorship becomes durable community record
  • Priority matching — relevant intents see your offerings first, bloom-wide and harvest-wide
  • Premium custom-designed cards with optional foil, emboss, or spot-UV
During the harvest
  • Unlimited brokered introductions within your targeting rules
  • Quarterly strategy call with the Mycelium team
  • Co-authored content artifact delivered as a finished, co-owned piece
Cards included
  • Up to 400 premium custom-finished cards included
Best for Companies serious about community presence and growth. Top-of-menu for a single-bloom commitment.
Sponsor logos

Substrate Partner

$120K–$150K
per year

You are part of the substrate itself. Your roots grow through the mycelium.

During the bloom
  • Deep Partner benefits across every bloom Mycelium covers in the year (target: 12+ blooms)
  • Branded sub-corpus you own, curate, and control
  • Event speaking slots at Mycelium-covered events (subject to curation)
  • Named long-term sponsor in the persistent tree, visible across years
  • Ongoing custom card supply usable outside Mycelium events as standing branded hardware
During the harvest
  • Roadmap input via quarterly strategy sessions
  • Early access to new Mycelium features and tools
  • Custom integration of your offering into Mycelium’s workflow
Cards included
  • Unlimited custom-branded cards across every covered bloom
Best for Companies with long-term commitment to the community. Paid quarterly. Annual term = ~15–20% discount vs. 12× Deep Partner. The Mycelium-native equivalent of the year-long sponsor slots.
Sponsor logos

First-bloom pricing. These rates anchor to Anthony’s proven sponsor numbers ($1K email blast, $2.5K event, $6K product launch) and will rise after launch. First-bloom sponsors get the lowest rates Mycelium will ever offer, and their names land permanently in the persistent tree as early contributors to the substrate.

Side offerings. Paid matchmaking at $100–$500 per successful brokered introduction, co-branded NFC sticker packs at $500 per event, standalone service listings at $200/month. Not the primary sales targets — the long tail for smaller participants.

FAQ

Answering the obvious questions first.

How do I know what the harvest is actually worth?
After the bloom you receive a formal harvest report with measurable engagement data: how many attendees engaged with your content, what they asked, which intents matched your offerings, which introductions were brokered, which offerings were saved to personal corpora. You audit the value directly. Unlike banner impressions, the value is specific and measurable.
Why NFC cards instead of QR codes?
NFC is a 2-second tap. QR is a 15-second scan-then-type. At a live event with 100+ attendees, that delta is the difference between 80% engagement and 20%. More practically: NFC cards are a hardware product, and at a hardware meetup hardware matters. The cards are the physical anchor that makes Mycelium a cyber-physical system rather than another SaaS product.
What happens to the NFC cards after the event?
Attendees keep them. Unlike branded merch that gets thrown away, NFC cards are useful: a gesture-shortcut to your Mycelium presence, a business-card equivalent, small enough to slip into a wallet or stick to a laptop. Your brand rides along. Every future tap refreshes your visibility.
What if an attendee doesn't have NFC enabled on their phone?
Every card also carries a printed URL and shortcode so non-NFC users can join manually. Mycelium sends a pre-event announcement explaining how to enable NFC on major phone models (most phones have it on by default). The Kit NFC stack has been running at 26 events with 70+ active users — the friction has been manageable in practice.
What if the bloom under-performs?
Mycelium is early. Engagement at the first few blooms will be exploratory by definition. Flat-rate pricing means you are not paying based on engagement volume — you are paying for a position in a substrate that is compounding. If a specific bloom genuinely disappoints, Mycelium will work with you to adjust or credit the commitment. We want you to come back for the second flush.
Can I target specific kinds of attendees?
Yes. At Partner tier and above, you define targeting rules for brokered introductions (role, company size, location, declared intent categories). Matches are filtered through your rules before delivery.
What happens to my presence after the 30-day harvest window?
At all tiers, your bloom presence and engagement data persist in the event corpus forever. At Contributor and above, your service offerings remain in the continuing graph. At Partner and above, your corpus chapter becomes durable community record. At Deep Partner and above, your co-authored content lives permanently. At Substrate Partner, your branded sub-corpus is yours as long as the partnership continues.
Is my engagement data private?
Aggregate engagement data is shared with you. Individual attendees’ names and contact information are not shared unless they explicitly opt in through the Mycelium introduction flow. Brokered introductions always require explicit consent from both parties.
What counts as a "brokered introduction"?
An introduction is brokered when Mycelium matches a declared intent from a community member against your offering, proposes the match to both parties, and both parties agree to proceed. The introduction is delivered with context (what the member declared, why Mycelium matched). Not a cold email dropped in an inbox — a warm, contextualised, consented connection.
Can I bring my own content into the bloom?
Partner and above: yes, subject to Mycelium curation. Sponsored corpora can include content you provide or reference. Co-authored content at Deep Partner is jointly produced with your input. Substrate Partners can own branded sub-corpora that they curate directly.
What's the commitment timeline?
Per-bloom pricing is per-bloom — no ongoing commitment. Annual Substrate Partner is a full 12-month commitment, paid quarterly.
Can I upgrade tiers mid-year?
Yes, at any time, by paying the delta. A Contributor who wants Partner access for a specific bloom pays ($6,000 − $3,000) = $3,000 to upgrade for that bloom.
How does Mycelium prevent spam or low-quality sponsors?
All sponsors are vetted by the Mycelium team before onboarding. We are selective about who joins the substrate because the quality of the substrate depends on the trustworthiness of its members. Mycelium reserves the right to decline sponsorships that do not fit the community’s interests.
How does Mycelium relate to the hardware meetup's existing sponsorship menu?
Mycelium is a new category on top of the meetup’s existing menu. Sponsoring Mycelium does not replace any existing meetup sponsor slot; it is complementary. Existing sponsors can add Mycelium as a depth-tier investment or treat it as a pilot for a new category of community engagement.

First public bloom

April 23, 2026 · hardware meetup.

Mycelium’s first public bloom is the hardware meetup on April 23, 2026. Expected attendance: 100+ hardware engineers, builders, researchers, and community members. A live demonstration of everything above: NFC cards in pockets, bloom surface in phones, sponsored corpora in the room, harvest reports in thirty days.

The event itself is not a sales pitch. Sponsor conversations happen before April 23. The meetup is the bloom — a demonstration of what the sponsors already bought, and a living first chapter in the persistent tree. First-bloom sponsors shape how every subsequent bloom delivers value.

We’re booking first-bloom commitments between now and April 20 so we can prepare bloom-surface assets, encode and produce branded NFC cards, and pre-attach your brand to the event corpus before the 23rd. If you want in, the door is still open.

Date April 23, 2026
Audience 100+ hardware
Commit by April 20
Claim a tier Review the tiers
Closing posture

Plant a spore. Share in the harvest.

Mycelium is an early, opinionated, vision-driven bet on a specific idea: that the connection layer underneath communities is where the most durable value lives. First-bloom sponsors are coming in early, paying fair pilot prices, and helping shape how the substrate grows.

If you’re the kind of company that wants to be part of the thing from the beginning — not the kind that waits for everything to be proven — this is the moment.

We’re not asking you to believe in banner impressions. We’re asking you to plant a spore, share in the harvest, and help the mycelium grow.

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