March 15, 2024 • 35 mins
This week on The Index, host Alex Kehaya welcomes Matty Taylor, former Head of Growth at the Solana Foundation, who left to co-found Colosseum. Known for organizing some of the largest blockchain hackathons in the crypto space, including Grizzlython and Hyperdrive, it's a great conversation about hacking innovation within the Solana ecosystem.
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Alex Kehaya (00:06):
Welcome to the Index Podcast hosted by Alex
Cahaya.
Plug in as we explore newfrontiers with founders,
developers and investors,building the next wave of the
Internet.
(00:34):
Hey everyone and welcome to theIndex.
I'm your host, alex Cahaya, andthis week I'm excited to
welcome Maddie Taylor,co-founder and general partner
of Coliseum, which runs crypto'slargest hackathons, accelerates
winning founders and invests inbreakout startups.
On Solana, maddie, I've knowneach other since, I guess,
almost three years, because Istarted at Solana definitely
(00:55):
after you, but we've both beenin the ecosystem for a while,
super excited for Coliseum andto hear more about your journey
building it.
Thanks for coming on the show.
Matty (01:05):
Yeah, thanks for inviting me, Alex.
Yeah, happy to jump into whatwe're working on with Coliseum
and just generally what'shappening in the Solana
ecosystem.
Alex Kehaya (01:13):
So happy to be here , yeah, so maybe start off with
just how did you get here?
I think it's had kind of anincredible journey and I would
love for you to share thatGenesis story with folks
listening.
Matty (01:25):
Yeah, I guess it starts probably for me in college, when
I was going to school and I wasstudying economics and I was
taking a fair amount ofmacroeconomics classes and it's
pretty surprised at just howcentral banking worked.
And at around the same time, Ihad some friends in my dorm room
(01:45):
that were mining Bitcoin usingthe free power of the dorms
before they shut it down.
The confluence of those twothings where I started learning
about Bitcoin for one reason orthe other, got really into it,
was thinking about it in thecontext of, yeah, what I was
learning about as part of myeconomics major and ended up
writing my thesis about Bitcoinand some stuff going on in the
(02:06):
mining industry at the time, andso kind of just fell down the
proverbial rabbit hole at thatpoint and never really got out.
And so, yeah, at the time thereweren't really any crypto
companies other than, likeCoinbase had just started at the
time, but other than that, itwas hard to work in that
industry.
I went to work at a paymentscompany in San Francisco called
(02:28):
Square.
That's where I met one of myco-founders, so we were on the
same team.
During lunches, we justcontinued to talk about Bitcoin
and crypto and what was going on.
And then, obviously, the 2017bull market rolled around and
started to get more interestedin Ethereum, and actually, both
him and I we decided to jump towork at this DEX protocol called
(02:49):
ZeroX, which is one of thefirst decentralized exchanges on
Ethereum, and worked there fora couple years.
And then, obviously, solanowent to Mainnet.
I had been following itsomewhat closely pretty early on
, but I always thought that whatthey were saying, or what they
were claiming the system coulddo, was pretty outlandish.
When I went to Mainnet, though,I mean, a lot of their promises
(03:10):
came true, which was prettysurprising, and at the same time
, raj and some recruitersreached out to me to be their
head of growth at Solano Labs,and so joined their team kind of
in the middle of the DeFisummer of 2020, which was a
pretty chaotic time for sure.
Yeah, I guess the rest ishistory, but I can jump into any
part there if you want.
Alex Kehaya (03:31):
I find that so interesting because, like me, we
both came through reallyEthereum.
So I started out working atthis company called Orchid and I
knew a bunch of the guys thatyou probably worked with at
ZeroX, and being at a DEX duringDeFi summer and deciding to go
to Solano is especially forsomeone who is skeptical of
(03:51):
Solano's technology is kind ofcounterintuitive.
I mean, especially today we seehow the vitriol of crypto
Twitter that's anti Solano fromsome people in the Ethereum
space and I think that there'sactually a lot more support than
there are people anti.
These are the anti, negativepeople are louder.
What was that decision makingprocess like for you?
What pushed you over the edgeother than just seeing it go
(04:13):
live?
What gave you the conviction tomove?
Matty (04:16):
Yeah, I think it was a few things.
One is just that I met Raj andAtoli and they're sort of like
forces of nature and they prettymuch soul-pilled me in a sense.
And yeah, I mean, a lot of itwas just meeting them for the
first time and getting to knowthe early team and yeah, so that
was part of it.
The other part of it was that,even going back to the 2017 bull
(04:39):
market, like there wasobviously crypto kities got
released and it was kind of oneof the first applications or
uses of Ethereum that was reallyin demand.
In it Obviously skyrocketed thefees to the point where
everyone was like, okay, we gotto scale ability problem here,
where, even like one moderatelyused application or game, I
guess it was basically pricedout the entire market of using
(05:03):
the chain, and so people evenbefore that were starting to
talk about rollups and shardingand how the system was going to
scale over time, and it justfelt to me like that was not the
right way to scale it and, asthese things were coming to
reduction, they were veryunderwhelming on the scale,
ability and performance thatthey were providing applications
(05:23):
and thinking about, like a lotof the startups in the space of
the time.
You don't have time to wait adecade for things to scale.
You need the system to scaleimmediately to find product
market fit.
I mean, every day is a battle,right as a founder and so I just
thought that like there had tobe something else out there in
the market, and obviously therewas these next generation
(05:45):
blockchains that were kind ofbeing created in like 2018 and
we're all launching around 2020.
So I started to dig into that abit and found that obviously,
solana was very different inarchitecture and it was kind of
hard to understand initiallybecause it was so different than
what I had been hearing overthe last six years around, like
how Ethereum was going to scale.
(06:05):
Yeah, I think it was just thatit kind of blew me away that it
worked when it went to mainnet,and then there was also some
initial traction.
At the time, it was like I sawthat like FTX had announced that
they were going to build anon-chain order book, right,
which was really appealing to mebecause that's, yeah, serum,
which you know, going back to 0x, that was like sort of 0x's
(06:28):
vision for Ethereum was to buildthis on-chain or this order
book system rather than an AMM,and so I'm you know it was
always partial to that designdecision and so I thought it was
really interesting that it waspossible on Solana, and so it's
kind of a confluence of allthose reasons made me kind of
make the jump and, yeah, happy Idid.
Alex Kehaya (06:49):
It's interesting to me how similar your story is to
mine.
I say almost exactly the samethings.
Back in late, like December of2020, I started thinking about
moving from where I was and Ilooked at every single L1 that
was live at the time and Solanowas really the only one that I
saw that made any sense, in thatI'm not an engineer, but I had
(07:13):
read all the white papers forevery single one of them and
then I talked to dozens of teamsbuilding on those chains to
hear what their experience waslike and Solano was.
Even then it was still like theeasiest, actually
permissionless place to go andbuild a product that could scale
.
And then I saw Serum and I waslike, wow, this is actually
working.
It's actually working Like lookat the volumes in Serum.
(07:35):
This is all on chain.
It's an order book, even the UI.
Looking at the UI and watchingtrades go through in real time
was amazing.
Having experienced the pain oftrying to do transactions on
Ethereum and spending I thinkI've probably spent like $1,000
before doing a transactionduring D5 summer but the one
thing I want to double tap intothat I think is really important
for founders listening andfounders that are going through
(07:57):
Coliseum is Raj and Toley havelike this incredible ability to
sell why they're building Solanoand to recruit people.
Like it was one of the thingsthat really stuck with me.
I didn't even want to be hired,like I was looking at working
in a space but I really justwanted to like run my own thing,
and Raj like convinced me tojust go all in on Solano.
(08:19):
I was red-pilled on thetechnology.
I kind of figured that outmyself.
Like Solano is going to be awinner.
He and Toley like I feel likethey have this really incredible
ability to recruit talent andto retain talent.
Like there's like hardly anychurn that I've seen, like very
little relative to how manypeople are there, and I think
for founders, this is a reallyimportant thing to remember.
(08:40):
Like you constantly have to bealigning the people you work
with and the people you recruitwith the mission and vision and
they do a really good job onlike a regular basis of making
sure we all hear that.
I think it's worth noting.
I don't know if you havethoughts on that too, but no, I
completely agree and I'm surewe'll get into this.
Matty (08:58):
but, like, a lot of folks coming through our hackathon
are sort of like technicalfounders and they always think
like, well, I need to hiresomeone that's like a salesman
to go pitch my product.
But if you look at like someonelike Anatoly, he is the lead
developer kind of formula iswhat Solano could be.
He's also the first likesalesman, right.
He's out on Twitter everysingle day, marketing it,
(09:20):
evangelizing it.
Vitalik is also like this,right, where he obviously had
the vision for Ethereum, builtcomponents of it and then was
just basically on the road,right.
He's been on the road for likeseven years, right, just going
to every single Ethereum event,evangelizing and basically being
a business development personfor the broader Ethereum.
(09:40):
Because Anatoly is just thesame right.
I think that's one thing wealways want to impart with a lot
of new founders, especially ifthey're technical, is that you
also have to be the storyteller.
You also have to be thesalesperson that gets people to
care about why they should useyour product.
I think that's a good thing tolearn from those folks.
The other thing about thetalent thing with Solano Labs
(10:03):
and Solano Foundation is that,yeah, the churn is low and those
organizations aren't very bigin the first place, but even of
the people who do leave, they'redoing things like what I'm
doing, which is like theyliterally are starting companies
.
But yeah, we're trying to buildand grow the Solano ecosystem
even outside of the foundation,which is probably the end state
anyways.
(10:24):
Right, like if you look at theEthereum Foundation or kind of
like, the direction that SolanoFoundation's headed is like a
lot of the core initiatives andthe ecosystem are kind of being
decentralized, right, and Ithink that's really healthy for
like the broader, like socialdecentralization layer of Solano
.
Alex Kehaya (10:39):
At least the people I've talked to that I work with
at the foundation.
We all buy into that, like thisidea that we want to work as
much as possible, work ourselvesout of the job and like and
it's already happening, right.
So I think that's what.
I think Solano community is incharge of the network.
It's incredible to see.
Let's talk about a little bitabout.
How did you get pulled intothat hackathon stuff and how did
(11:01):
that start?
Because it's been an amazing, Iwould say, center of growth for
the ecosystem and, incrediblyimportant, is one of the main,
if not the main, funnel forattracting high quality
developers to build.
But how did that start?
What was the process?
I really feel like this issomething other teams could
replicate and need to thinkabout.
Just tell a story and thenthoughts on what made it
(11:24):
successful and maybe some of thethings that didn't work, that
you tried hard, lessons learned.
These are the things I'mcurious to learn about with the
hackathon piece.
Matty (11:33):
For sure.
We tried a bunch of differentthings that haven't worked, but
the hackathons definitely have,and one mental framework that I
think marketers and people ingrowth need to have is that a
lot of Web2 companies have grownthrough one or two channels or
programs that have acquired aPareto distribution of customers
(11:53):
.
Like 80% are coming from one ortwo channels, and I think, if
you think of L1 blockchains asthe same, it's not surprising
that when we ran the numbersrecently and looked at all the
venture funding rounds of allthe Solana startups over time,
80% had their genesis in thehackathons.
Where that started was that atthe time when I joined, there
(12:17):
were only a few developers and acouple independent teams trying
to build on Solana.
Whatever Chewing glass is whatpeople said back then, because
it was so difficult, and so wewere trying to figure out one.
How do we just get corecomponents into the ecosystem?
How do we get our first Barlinprotocol, our first wallet?
That's not solid, which was anopen source, not a fully backed
(12:41):
team at the time.
So there was like individualthings that specifically the BD
team was working on to try tofill out.
But more what I was interestedin is how do we bring in a
scalable and repeatable way, abunch of developers and,
specifically, startup foundersthat could bring their own
creative ideas and product ideasand build them on the network,
(13:02):
and so that was a genesis forthe first hackathon that is
carried on today.
The first hackathon was actuallycalled Wormhole and it was
based around this the launch ofWormhole, the bridge protocol.
So we named it Wormhole becausewe were like, oh, we're going
to just have people build onWormhole and try to get
(13:23):
applications built using thatsystem.
But Wormhole never launched intime and so we just decided
we're just going to call itWormhole and regardless and just
have people build whatever theywant to build.
And at the time I think we gotover 60 product submissions,
which was insane for the Solanaecosystem.
They're just really, reallythought that was magic and we
(13:45):
decided to double down andobviously triple down on it with
Coliseum.
So, yeah, I'm happy to jumpinto more into the hackathon
stuff, but yeah, that was kindof the genesis.
Alex Kehaya (13:54):
It's been incredible because that was the
first one, and 60 back then itsounds like a small number.
It was 60, more than just ahandful that we're already
building on the network, and howdid you get from there to where
you are today?
What has the growth been like?
And I think also talk about afew examples of companies that
have gone with just an idea andgot fully funded through that
(14:16):
process.
Matty (14:17):
Yeah, I mean we have some listed on our website,
coliseumorg.
It's like Tencer, the foundersof, like Gito Labs, marinade,
stepin, genopets a wide varietyof different products and, in
the ecosystem, their foundershad their genesis in the
hackathons and I would say howwe've scaled it up from 60 to
where we landed most recentlywith Hyperdrive, which is over
(14:39):
900.
I'd say that we haven't treatedit like a traditional hackathon
.
So, like, first of all, they'reall online.
There are a very long period oftimes.
There are five to six weeks.
Usually hackathons are somethingthat you just go with some
friends for like a weekend,drink a bunch of Red Bull and
like sleep in sleeping bags orwhatever and try to produce
something like a proof ofconcept.
(15:00):
But our hackathons are muchmore advertised and messaged and
structured around being startupcompetition.
So they're not just fordevelopers, although, like, a
lot of just regular developersuse it as a way to experiment
with the technology.
They're very much focused and alot of the awards are pretty
much only focused on teams whoare using it as their first
engineering sprint to go launchtheir product, and so a lot of
(15:23):
the structure around that hasbeen developed and evolved over
time to fit that specific targetand goal.
So that's generally what we'vedone.
And then there's also like themarketing channels we use around
it.
We treat the hackathon not likean event.
It's a product in itself andthe product is marketed in a
very specific way, with specificmarketing channels that we've
(15:44):
evolved over time.
So that's kind of how we got towhere we are today.
Alex Kehaya (15:49):
And as far as funding goes, like, what's the
latest on how much fundingcompanies have raised in total.
I just think that's a reallygood data point so people know
how effective this has been.
Matty (15:59):
Yeah, just looking at like publicly announced
fundraising rounds, it's around600.
What we have heard privatelyit's probably 600 million total
and cumulatively, privatelywe've heard it's probably closer
to like 650 million.
But I think that's somethingthat I've tried to work on a lot
with.
Some folks is like after thehackathon there's obviously a
(16:20):
lot of promising founders, howdo we help them get connected
with VCs?
And this is a lot of thegenesis right for Coliseum,
where it's like formalizing thatinto an actual program running
the hackathon, running anaccelerator for the promising
winners and actually backingthem to give them the bridge
financing they need to get to aproper seed round, because
(16:40):
oftentimes even the best teamstake several months to a year to
raise that seed round aftercoming out of the hackathon.
And so that's why you know oneof the reasons why Coliseum
raised Adventure Fund to investin them right after the
hackathon at the pre-seed levelto help them bridge the gap to
get in front of seed investors.
Alex Kehaya (16:58):
Yeah, and that's a somewhat new thing.
So tell me more about the fund,like what size is it and what
kind of checks do you?
Matty (17:03):
write yeah, just overall, how Coliseum works is we are
going to be running thehackathons.
You know this is our bread andbutter of how we've been growing
the Solana ecosystem.
We'll continue doing that forthe Solana Foundation and the
broader ecosystem.
We'll then basically narrowdown the winners so there's
usually 40 winners.
We'll narrow it down evenfurther to the top 10 to 15
teams and right after thehackathon, basically offer them
(17:25):
acceptance into our acceleratorprogram, which is another five
to six weeks, which is much morefocused on getting them from
DevNet to Mainnet, getting themthe connections that they need
to continue building theirproduct and, you know, find
product market fit.
And we have a whole roster offormer hackathon winners that
have become top founders andother, you know, founders from
across the ecosystem that haveagreed to be mentors.
(17:47):
And then we're running a demoday right to help them get their
seed round.
But up front we basically offerthem a pre-seed check of
$250,000 each.
So that's awesome.
Alex Kehaya (17:59):
That's great.
Yeah, I think that's reallyneeded.
I've worked with a decentnumber of teams in Solana, some
of whom I've invested in some ofthem that I just advised, but
to help them with that process,because a lot of people,
especially going through ahackathon like they haven't.
There are definitely a decentnumber of teams that have never
raised money before.
Actually, one-on-one book I'vebeen re-recommending I kind of
forgot about it until recently,but it's Venture Deals by Brad
(18:22):
Feld.
I think that's a really goodbook for some founders who
haven't raised before.
To just check out.
There's a little bit of adifference in crypto without
things are structured, butoverall, the things that are in
that book will save you a lot oftime and money and make sure
that you don't sign a dealthat's really bad for your
company.
I think that's one thing that Ilike about the Accelerator is
(18:42):
you can actually provide a safespace for people to raise.
It's kind of how YC works.
If you're a bad actor, investorand people find out about it,
you're not invited to that partyanymore.
I think that's pretty important.
Matty (18:54):
Yeah, there definitely are bad actor investors that are
very short-term thinking, thatpair it as VC's, which are
purportedly very long-termthinking.
In crypto specifically, I thinkthere's a lot of dynamics that
we offer to teach about as partof the program where to talk
about Venture Deals, you don'twant to give up too much of your
(19:16):
company or raise too much money.
I think we saw this with thelast round.
People optimizing for the mostmoney get in big trouble when
the market turns around becauseif you're valuating, do a seed
round at 300 million posts.
That's the watermark for you.
If the market recedes and youdon't fulfill that 300 million
(19:37):
dollar post, you're going tohave to do a down round, which
is not good.
Taking more money is not alwaysthe best decision.
Then, obviously, you throw inthe whole token component where
it's like maybe you only need toraise one round before your TGE
.
You have a token and that'sfunding your operations.
There's a lot of differentdynamics that are unique to
(19:58):
crypto that I think we can helpfounders with.
Alex Kehaya (20:01):
Yeah, I think that's a really good point.
There are definitely a lot ofthings that are unique that they
just won't know until they findout the hard way in some cases.
I think that's why that theaccelerator is extremely
valuable.
It sounds like you said younarrow it down to 40 teams per
cohort.
That's what you're thinking.
Matty (20:18):
We have 30 to 40 winners per hackathon.
And then of those we'llinterview all of them, basically
those 30 to 40, that's the onlyway to actually get considered
for the accelerator so you canapply to the accelerator other
than going and winning ourhackathon.
It's the only route in.
And then from there, from those30-ish teams, we'll choose 10
(20:40):
to 15 to actually invest in andaccept it in the accelerator.
Alex Kehaya (20:45):
Nice.
What are you most excited about?
You just started Coliseum.
It's getting off the ground.
I think you got your first.
When's the first hackathonhappening?
Matty (20:55):
March 4th through April 8th.
Okay, and you run anaccelerator batch right after.
Alex Kehaya (20:59):
I guess part of my question is what inspired you to
go out on your own?
I think that's an interestingtopic to cover.
And then, in that same vein,what are you most excited about
building this company?
Matty (21:10):
The reason I decided to start this with my two
co-founders is one I reallywanted to work with them.
So these folks are not peoplethat worked at Solana Foundation
Labs.
Clay was an investor at SlowVentures and I had worked with
them previously, like I said, atSquare and ZeroX, so we had a
long history of wanting to workon interesting things together
(21:33):
and so that opportunity rose.
And then obviously, nate, who'sthe third co-founder he's our
technical co-founder.
He was at Stripe building backat Infrastructure for the last
four or five years.
So, yeah, I think it was justthe opportunity to work with
those guys and build a uniquething that we hadn't seen in Web
2 or Web 3, where we sort oftook the YC model but instead of
(21:56):
a college style writtenapplication use this hackathon
that I knew was already working.
I knew that a lot of greatfounders were already coming
through this and I think wecould just provide an even more
valuable experience for thosefounders if we had dedicated
like a full-time organizationaround it.
So I think it was just theunique model, the value that we
could provide the Solanaecosystem and working with those
(22:17):
guys on fulfilling that vision.
Sorry, what was the second partof your question?
Alex Kehaya (22:21):
What are you most excited about, like?
What are you looking forward toin the next year with building
this company?
It sounds like partly.
It's working with those guys isone part of the answer, but are
there other things that you'rejust like can't wait to see?
Matty (22:33):
Yeah, we can't wait to work with like really talented
founders from across the world,and so I think that's what
really excites me about thisright, there's so many
interesting use cases,especially with sort of like
deep end taking hold in Solana.
But the crypto space generallyI think you know that's one
category of project that we'reinteresting in backing and we'll
(22:56):
have a dedicated track in thehackathon for is just working
with those founders on kind ofwhat they're going to build.
I think that's what's alwaysbeen interesting to me about.
Crypto is just like how itopens up new markets or creates
efficiencies by reducingmiddlemen that are kind of
worthless in a crypto context,in a crypto dominated world, and
(23:16):
so I think, yeah, it's justlearning about all the
interesting ideas that foundershave and helping them kind of
realize that vision throughColiseum.
Alex Kehaya (23:26):
I'm super excited about deep end.
I mean, really, when I came toSolana, that was the thing I was
already thinking about andworking on and I didn't even
realize it was before.
There was a deep end was like aphrase, but it's just this idea
like how do you bootstrap thephysical infrastructure required
to make a network work?
And then obviously there are alot of different iterate.
For me, that context wasvalidators and data centers for
(23:48):
various different networks notjust Solana, but now we've got
decentralized telecoms,decentralized mapping products
that use hardware.
I feel like it's such a greenfield and there's so much
innovation coming.
And then the other one that I'mreally excited about is real
world assets, and you weretalking about like creating new
markets.
We just recently had Todd fromBaxus on the show and they do.
(24:12):
I don't know if you know thatcompany, but they are tokenizing
whiskey.
For me, the why use blockchainfor something like that is
because it creates a new marketfor liquidity for whiskey or for
wine and spirits that didn'texist before.
So a distributor who's awhiskey maker, who has a bunch
(24:33):
of barrels of whiskey sitting ina warehouse somewhere really it
was like tough to get liquidityand a loan to finance their
operations and now you can dothat in a permissionless way on
a platform and stuff like that.
That I think the composabilityand the openness of blockchain
technology on Solana makes itpossible.
I think that's reallyinteresting.
(24:54):
So we're getting close to thetop of the show here and I
always kind of ask this but whatthings have I not asked you
that I should have asked or thatyou wanted to talk about?
Matty (25:03):
I think we covered a lot of it.
I'm curious to know from youroutside perspective, beyond deep
end, what use cases are youwanting to see come out of the
hackathon?
Where do you think the bigopportunities are for Solana,
but just crypto generally overthe next couple of years?
Alex Kehaya (25:21):
So there are some really hard problems that need
to be solved around encryptionand things like zero-knowledge
proofs, fully homomorphicencryption.
I don't know if you've seenMillion Network I haven't had
those guys on the show yet but Ijust read their white paper.
It's an overlay network really.
It's not blockchain-specific,it's not even a blockchain, but
it's kind of like a multi-partycomputation, but better.
(25:44):
I don't want to get into allthe technical details, but you
can go to their website andcheck out their technology.
The theme here is how do youactually make AI work in Web 3
in a way that's usable, that canget adoption by enterprises and
outside of just hobbyist?
I think that there are somemissing pieces around privacy
technology and decentralizedcomputing that are maybe closer
(26:08):
than I thought but still haven'texisted.
That's a really hard problem.
These are like PhD-levelmulti-year research projects,
but I do think that there aregoing to be some interesting AI
applications.
There's a stack of technologythat does exist that will allow
some AI use cases to work thatinvolve blockchain technology
and Web 3 principles in general,but there are also missing
(26:30):
pieces that there's a greenfield.
The other thing that I'm reallyinterested in is somewhat
related, because I still thinkyou need privacy-preserving
technologies to make it work,but it's data markets.
I have a friend who has,through a nonprofit that he runs
, access to two petabytes ofmedical research data.
(26:50):
Researchers put data in thisrepository and it's supposed to
be open, but it's just dumpedinto this tar-Z file and the
data is not sorted at all.
It's really hard to make ituseful for machine learning.
You need that data to beanonymized because it's all
medical research data.
It's got PII in it In order tosolve that problem.
(27:13):
This is again why I go back tothe encryption stuff.
You need some kind oftechnology like that if it's
going to be available in an openand permissionless way.
Right now, the only way to useit is to spend millions of
dollars organizing it which Ithink could be solved by
decentralized compute and to putit in a centralized, closed
server that a big pharma companyowns.
We don't want that.
(27:33):
We don't want one big pharmacompany to be the sole group
that can access this information.
It's super important.
You want researchers to accessit, developers to be able to
access it and build uniqueapplications I think some
combination of Solana, these ZKPor FHE or the stuff that the
NMC, which is what the NealineNetwork is building.
(27:53):
I think some combination ofthat and some of these ideas
around decentralized computingare going to make that possible.
The last one is and it's relatedto deep-in, but I think that
there is becoming a playbook forhow to go from zero to
thousands of nodes for networks.
This is related to deep-in.
Whether you're a new L1 or adeep-in project, there's a stack
(28:17):
of technology and services nowthat's being built.
I think there's still stuffthat needs to be built to make
those successful.
For example I've been thinkingabout is there going to be a
startup that just bundlestogether a bunch of deep-in
projects and products and offersvalue-added services on top?
You can just order it here andyou get a helium hotspot,
something that does IoT viahelium and the HiveMapper tool
(28:38):
and I don't know what the otheruse cases might be but you get
this bundle that you can offerat almost as a franchise model,
with all the management stuffbuilt in.
I think there's going to be.
There's a company calledMycelium.
I think of them as a propertymanagement company.
They just deploy these packagesall over the country and manage
them for you.
They take a fee for managingfor us.
(28:59):
It's kind of a repeat of theold way of property and real
estate, but using these newtechnologies in a more
decentralized fashion.
I don't know, that's a lot ofstuff, but those are the things
that I've been thinking aboutlately that are interesting.
Matty (29:12):
Those are great.
The last thing I think tomention about Coliseum is that
when talking about I always askpeople what I just asked you,
which is what are you excitedabout?
What ideas are interestingright now to you?
We've actually built an actualproduct.
You can go to coliseumorg rightnow.
Sign up for a Coliseum account.
(29:33):
There are two initial productsthat we have.
One is co-founder matching,which is like I'm a single
co-founder or a founder, but Iwant to find a technical
co-founder or vice versa.
There's a way to search for thetypes of people you want to
team up with for the hackathon.
The second thing, which relatesto what you were saying, which
is a product idea for themBasically, there are people
(29:56):
right now there's hundreds ofposts already since we launched
a couple of weeks ago wherepeople are kind of explaining
exactly the stuff that you'retalking about.
There's other people in thecommunity commenting on that,
critiquing that, because onepiece of feedback we always get
at the beginning of hackathonsis like I don't have enough time
to actually even think aboutwhat product to build.
(30:16):
The hackathon just starts, butI want to ideate for a while on
what we're going to build.
People are dumping in all sortsof creative ideas, finding
teammates that way, getting goodfeedback on what they've been
thinking about building.
I highly encourage anyone who'sthinking about joining the next
hackathon to create an accountnow.
(30:37):
Find your team, get somepressure testing on your idea
from the community.
Then, by the time, thehackathon rolls around, which is
also on the platform.
Alex Kehaya (30:47):
Gosh, that's so exciting.
I can think of so many ways forteams to leverage that that to
hone in on their idea and reallyquickly get feedback.
That's the biggest thing.
If you're starting somethingnew, you need to get feedback as
fast as possible from themarket.
Anything you can do toaccelerate that is going to make
sure you don't waste time.
That's the thing you can't getback as your time To find out
(31:07):
what the market thinks aboutyour idea as fast as possible.
I actually have an idea that Iwrote before I joined Solana.
I was thinking about starting acompany around mortgages,
tokenizing mortgages.
I'll post it there because I'mopen source.
I'm not protective about ideasat all.
It's open source everything.
Get it out there, see whobuilds it.
I would love to see somebodytake that and run with it.
(31:30):
I'll be signing up and postingit there.
I'll share it with you when Ido.
Matty (31:33):
Please do.
There's a whole bundle ofthings that we can talk about
relating to founders and howthey protect their ideas, but I
think one awesome part aboutcrypto is that people are a lot
more open to share their ideas,because ideas are actually very
cheap.
There's tons of good ideasthrown around all the time.
It's the execution that'sreally really tough.
I highly encourage everyone toopen up their minds and share
(31:58):
what they're thinking aboutbuilding.
Alex Kehaya (32:00):
I think that's a great point.
I think the moat in crypto.
There's a normal moat in webtwo, which is just execution.
That's the number one thing.
It's like how good can youexecute, which is really based
on your team, how good is yourteam and how good are you at
making sure they succeed?
But in crypto, I think theother thing that is the real
mode is your community, thebuilders that are building
around whatever you're building.
That's the network effect.
(32:21):
People can fork Metaplex abazillion times, but it's used
by the Metaplex standards, usedby everything.
I'm happy to see when W&S comefrom Jupiter another standard,
but even them, super solid team,amazing execution from those
guys.
Lots of funding.
Going to be hard, going to behard to supplant the incumbent.
(32:43):
Now we've seen it happen.
We saw it happen with Tensor.
They went and they have beentaking Magic into the mat.
I love both teams.
It's not impossible, but itreally is about the execution
Right now.
Tensor, they've executed betterfor the last six, seven months.
Matty (32:58):
No, I think that's right.
The upshot of all of this iscompetition is really good.
I think this is something thatwe get maybe some pushback from
where, at least from thefoundation side.
There's always this discussionof do you grow the top of the
funnel, do you get more foundersin the ecosystem or do you
spend more resources on helpingthe existing founders find
(33:20):
product market fit?
I think my vision has alwaysbeen and especially this is why
we've focused on the hackathonsis we just need a ton of
competition in the ecosystem.
That's going to actually justproduce way better downstream
products at the end of the dayfor end users who are Solana
community members.
This is all good for anyone wholoves using Solana as a network
(33:42):
, as a user, which is reallyreally important long term.
Alex Kehaya (33:46):
Well, manny, thanks for being on the show, sure.
Matty (33:49):
Thanks for inviting me.
Yeah, Alex, thanks so much forhaving me.
Looking forward to your forumpost about your mortgage idea.
Alex Kehaya (33:57):
For sure.
Last thing before we sign offhow can people find you and
participate?
We should probably just makesure they know Sure.
Matty (34:04):
Yeah, we're going to be running the Solana Foundation
Hackathon starting on March 4th.
Go sign up at coliseumorg.
You can also follow us onTwitter coliseumorg.
Alex Kehaya (34:15):
If you're spelling challenge, like me, it's
c-o-l-o-s-s-e-u-morg, the Romanway.
Matty (34:22):
Yes, that's right.
All right, thanks, we'll signoff now.
Awesome Thanks.
Alex Kehaya (34:33):
You just listened to the index podcast with your
host, alex Cahaya.
If you enjoyed this episode,please subscribe to the show on
Apple, spotify or your favoritestreaming platform.
New episodes are availableevery Friday.
Thanks for tuning in.
Welcome to the Index Podcast hosted by Alex
Cahaya.
Plug in as we explore newfrontiers with founders,
developers and investors,building the next wave of the
Internet.
(00:34):
Hey everyone and welcome to theIndex.
I'm your host, alex Cahaya, andthis week I'm excited to
welcome Maddie Taylor,co-founder and general partner
of Coliseum, which runs crypto'slargest hackathons, accelerates
winning founders and invests inbreakout startups.
On Solana, maddie, I've knowneach other since, I guess,
almost three years, because Istarted at Solana definitely
(00:55):
after you, but we've both beenin the ecosystem for a while,
super excited for Coliseum andto hear more about your journey
building it.
Thanks for coming on the show.
Matty (01:05):
Yeah, thanks for inviting me, Alex.
Yeah, happy to jump into whatwe're working on with Coliseum
and just generally what'shappening in the Solana
ecosystem.
Alex Kehaya (01:13):
So happy to be here , yeah, so maybe start off with
just how did you get here?
I think it's had kind of anincredible journey and I would
love for you to share thatGenesis story with folks
listening.
Matty (01:25):
Yeah, I guess it starts probably for me in college, when
I was going to school and I wasstudying economics and I was
taking a fair amount ofmacroeconomics classes and it's
pretty surprised at just howcentral banking worked.
And at around the same time, Ihad some friends in my dorm room
(01:45):
that were mining Bitcoin usingthe free power of the dorms
before they shut it down.
The confluence of those twothings where I started learning
about Bitcoin for one reason orthe other, got really into it,
was thinking about it in thecontext of, yeah, what I was
learning about as part of myeconomics major and ended up
writing my thesis about Bitcoinand some stuff going on in the
(02:06):
mining industry at the time, andso kind of just fell down the
proverbial rabbit hole at thatpoint and never really got out.
And so, yeah, at the time thereweren't really any crypto
companies other than, likeCoinbase had just started at the
time, but other than that, itwas hard to work in that
industry.
I went to work at a paymentscompany in San Francisco called
(02:28):
Square.
That's where I met one of myco-founders, so we were on the
same team.
During lunches, we justcontinued to talk about Bitcoin
and crypto and what was going on.
And then, obviously, the 2017bull market rolled around and
started to get more interestedin Ethereum, and actually, both
him and I we decided to jump towork at this DEX protocol called
(02:49):
ZeroX, which is one of thefirst decentralized exchanges on
Ethereum, and worked there fora couple years.
And then, obviously, solanowent to Mainnet.
I had been following itsomewhat closely pretty early on
, but I always thought that whatthey were saying, or what they
were claiming the system coulddo, was pretty outlandish.
When I went to Mainnet, though,I mean, a lot of their promises
(03:10):
came true, which was prettysurprising, and at the same time
, raj and some recruitersreached out to me to be their
head of growth at Solano Labs,and so joined their team kind of
in the middle of the DeFisummer of 2020, which was a
pretty chaotic time for sure.
Yeah, I guess the rest ishistory, but I can jump into any
part there if you want.
Alex Kehaya (03:31):
I find that so interesting because, like me, we
both came through reallyEthereum.
So I started out working atthis company called Orchid and I
knew a bunch of the guys thatyou probably worked with at
ZeroX, and being at a DEX duringDeFi summer and deciding to go
to Solano is especially forsomeone who is skeptical of
(03:51):
Solano's technology is kind ofcounterintuitive.
I mean, especially today we seehow the vitriol of crypto
Twitter that's anti Solano fromsome people in the Ethereum
space and I think that there'sactually a lot more support than
there are people anti.
These are the anti, negativepeople are louder.
What was that decision makingprocess like for you?
What pushed you over the edgeother than just seeing it go
(04:13):
live?
What gave you the conviction tomove?
Matty (04:16):
Yeah, I think it was a few things.
One is just that I met Raj andAtoli and they're sort of like
forces of nature and they prettymuch soul-pilled me in a sense.
And yeah, I mean, a lot of itwas just meeting them for the
first time and getting to knowthe early team and yeah, so that
was part of it.
The other part of it was that,even going back to the 2017 bull
(04:39):
market, like there wasobviously crypto kities got
released and it was kind of oneof the first applications or
uses of Ethereum that was reallyin demand.
In it Obviously skyrocketed thefees to the point where
everyone was like, okay, we gotto scale ability problem here,
where, even like one moderatelyused application or game, I
guess it was basically pricedout the entire market of using
(05:03):
the chain, and so people evenbefore that were starting to
talk about rollups and shardingand how the system was going to
scale over time, and it justfelt to me like that was not the
right way to scale it and, asthese things were coming to
reduction, they were veryunderwhelming on the scale,
ability and performance thatthey were providing applications
(05:23):
and thinking about, like a lotof the startups in the space of
the time.
You don't have time to wait adecade for things to scale.
You need the system to scaleimmediately to find product
market fit.
I mean, every day is a battle,right as a founder and so I just
thought that like there had tobe something else out there in
the market, and obviously therewas these next generation
(05:45):
blockchains that were kind ofbeing created in like 2018 and
we're all launching around 2020.
So I started to dig into that abit and found that obviously,
solana was very different inarchitecture and it was kind of
hard to understand initiallybecause it was so different than
what I had been hearing overthe last six years around, like
how Ethereum was going to scale.
(06:05):
Yeah, I think it was just thatit kind of blew me away that it
worked when it went to mainnet,and then there was also some
initial traction.
At the time, it was like I sawthat like FTX had announced that
they were going to build anon-chain order book, right,
which was really appealing to mebecause that's, yeah, serum,
which you know, going back to 0x, that was like sort of 0x's
(06:28):
vision for Ethereum was to buildthis on-chain or this order
book system rather than an AMM,and so I'm you know it was
always partial to that designdecision and so I thought it was
really interesting that it waspossible on Solana, and so it's
kind of a confluence of allthose reasons made me kind of
make the jump and, yeah, happy Idid.
Alex Kehaya (06:49):
It's interesting to me how similar your story is to
mine.
I say almost exactly the samethings.
Back in late, like December of2020, I started thinking about
moving from where I was and Ilooked at every single L1 that
was live at the time and Solanowas really the only one that I
saw that made any sense, in thatI'm not an engineer, but I had
(07:13):
read all the white papers forevery single one of them and
then I talked to dozens of teamsbuilding on those chains to
hear what their experience waslike and Solano was.
Even then it was still like theeasiest, actually
permissionless place to go andbuild a product that could scale
.
And then I saw Serum and I waslike, wow, this is actually
working.
It's actually working Like lookat the volumes in Serum.
(07:35):
This is all on chain.
It's an order book, even the UI.
Looking at the UI and watchingtrades go through in real time
was amazing.
Having experienced the pain oftrying to do transactions on
Ethereum and spending I thinkI've probably spent like $1,000
before doing a transactionduring D5 summer but the one
thing I want to double tap intothat I think is really important
for founders listening andfounders that are going through
(07:57):
Coliseum is Raj and Toley havelike this incredible ability to
sell why they're building Solanoand to recruit people.
Like it was one of the thingsthat really stuck with me.
I didn't even want to be hired,like I was looking at working
in a space but I really justwanted to like run my own thing,
and Raj like convinced me tojust go all in on Solano.
(08:19):
I was red-pilled on thetechnology.
I kind of figured that outmyself.
Like Solano is going to be awinner.
He and Toley like I feel likethey have this really incredible
ability to recruit talent andto retain talent.
Like there's like hardly anychurn that I've seen, like very
little relative to how manypeople are there, and I think
for founders, this is a reallyimportant thing to remember.
(08:40):
Like you constantly have to bealigning the people you work
with and the people you recruitwith the mission and vision and
they do a really good job onlike a regular basis of making
sure we all hear that.
I think it's worth noting.
I don't know if you havethoughts on that too, but no, I
completely agree and I'm surewe'll get into this.
Matty (08:58):
but, like, a lot of folks coming through our hackathon
are sort of like technicalfounders and they always think
like, well, I need to hiresomeone that's like a salesman
to go pitch my product.
But if you look at like someonelike Anatoly, he is the lead
developer kind of formula iswhat Solano could be.
He's also the first likesalesman, right.
He's out on Twitter everysingle day, marketing it,
(09:20):
evangelizing it.
Vitalik is also like this,right, where he obviously had
the vision for Ethereum, builtcomponents of it and then was
just basically on the road,right.
He's been on the road for likeseven years, right, just going
to every single Ethereum event,evangelizing and basically being
a business development personfor the broader Ethereum.
(09:40):
Because Anatoly is just thesame right.
I think that's one thing wealways want to impart with a lot
of new founders, especially ifthey're technical, is that you
also have to be the storyteller.
You also have to be thesalesperson that gets people to
care about why they should useyour product.
I think that's a good thing tolearn from those folks.
The other thing about thetalent thing with Solano Labs
(10:03):
and Solano Foundation is that,yeah, the churn is low and those
organizations aren't very bigin the first place, but even of
the people who do leave, they'redoing things like what I'm
doing, which is like theyliterally are starting companies
.
But yeah, we're trying to buildand grow the Solano ecosystem
even outside of the foundation,which is probably the end state
anyways.
(10:24):
Right, like if you look at theEthereum Foundation or kind of
like, the direction that SolanoFoundation's headed is like a
lot of the core initiatives andthe ecosystem are kind of being
decentralized, right, and Ithink that's really healthy for
like the broader, like socialdecentralization layer of Solano
.
Alex Kehaya (10:39):
At least the people I've talked to that I work with
at the foundation.
We all buy into that, like thisidea that we want to work as
much as possible, work ourselvesout of the job and like and
it's already happening, right.
So I think that's what.
I think Solano community is incharge of the network.
It's incredible to see.
Let's talk about a little bitabout.
How did you get pulled intothat hackathon stuff and how did
(11:01):
that start?
Because it's been an amazing, Iwould say, center of growth for
the ecosystem and, incrediblyimportant, is one of the main,
if not the main, funnel forattracting high quality
developers to build.
But how did that start?
What was the process?
I really feel like this issomething other teams could
replicate and need to thinkabout.
Just tell a story and thenthoughts on what made it
(11:24):
successful and maybe some of thethings that didn't work, that
you tried hard, lessons learned.
These are the things I'mcurious to learn about with the
hackathon piece.
Matty (11:33):
For sure.
We tried a bunch of differentthings that haven't worked, but
the hackathons definitely have,and one mental framework that I
think marketers and people ingrowth need to have is that a
lot of Web2 companies have grownthrough one or two channels or
programs that have acquired aPareto distribution of customers
(11:53):
.
Like 80% are coming from one ortwo channels, and I think, if
you think of L1 blockchains asthe same, it's not surprising
that when we ran the numbersrecently and looked at all the
venture funding rounds of allthe Solana startups over time,
80% had their genesis in thehackathons.
Where that started was that atthe time when I joined, there
(12:17):
were only a few developers and acouple independent teams trying
to build on Solana.
Whatever Chewing glass is whatpeople said back then, because
it was so difficult, and so wewere trying to figure out one.
How do we just get corecomponents into the ecosystem?
How do we get our first Barlinprotocol, our first wallet?
That's not solid, which was anopen source, not a fully backed
(12:41):
team at the time.
So there was like individualthings that specifically the BD
team was working on to try tofill out.
But more what I was interestedin is how do we bring in a
scalable and repeatable way, abunch of developers and,
specifically, startup foundersthat could bring their own
creative ideas and product ideasand build them on the network,
(13:02):
and so that was a genesis forthe first hackathon that is
carried on today.
The first hackathon was actuallycalled Wormhole and it was
based around this the launch ofWormhole, the bridge protocol.
So we named it Wormhole becausewe were like, oh, we're going
to just have people build onWormhole and try to get
(13:23):
applications built using thatsystem.
But Wormhole never launched intime and so we just decided
we're just going to call itWormhole and regardless and just
have people build whatever theywant to build.
And at the time I think we gotover 60 product submissions,
which was insane for the Solanaecosystem.
They're just really, reallythought that was magic and we
(13:45):
decided to double down andobviously triple down on it with
Coliseum.
So, yeah, I'm happy to jumpinto more into the hackathon
stuff, but yeah, that was kindof the genesis.
Alex Kehaya (13:54):
It's been incredible because that was the
first one, and 60 back then itsounds like a small number.
It was 60, more than just ahandful that we're already
building on the network, and howdid you get from there to where
you are today?
What has the growth been like?
And I think also talk about afew examples of companies that
have gone with just an idea andgot fully funded through that
(14:16):
process.
Matty (14:17):
Yeah, I mean we have some listed on our website,
coliseumorg.
It's like Tencer, the foundersof, like Gito Labs, marinade,
stepin, genopets a wide varietyof different products and, in
the ecosystem, their foundershad their genesis in the
hackathons and I would say howwe've scaled it up from 60 to
where we landed most recentlywith Hyperdrive, which is over
(14:39):
900.
I'd say that we haven't treatedit like a traditional hackathon
.
So, like, first of all, they'reall online.
There are a very long period oftimes.
There are five to six weeks.
Usually hackathons are somethingthat you just go with some
friends for like a weekend,drink a bunch of Red Bull and
like sleep in sleeping bags orwhatever and try to produce
something like a proof ofconcept.
(15:00):
But our hackathons are muchmore advertised and messaged and
structured around being startupcompetition.
So they're not just fordevelopers, although, like, a
lot of just regular developersuse it as a way to experiment
with the technology.
They're very much focused and alot of the awards are pretty
much only focused on teams whoare using it as their first
engineering sprint to go launchtheir product, and so a lot of
(15:23):
the structure around that hasbeen developed and evolved over
time to fit that specific targetand goal.
So that's generally what we'vedone.
And then there's also like themarketing channels we use around
it.
We treat the hackathon not likean event.
It's a product in itself andthe product is marketed in a
very specific way, with specificmarketing channels that we've
(15:44):
evolved over time.
So that's kind of how we got towhere we are today.
Alex Kehaya (15:49):
And as far as funding goes, like, what's the
latest on how much fundingcompanies have raised in total.
I just think that's a reallygood data point so people know
how effective this has been.
Matty (15:59):
Yeah, just looking at like publicly announced
fundraising rounds, it's around600.
What we have heard privatelyit's probably 600 million total
and cumulatively, privatelywe've heard it's probably closer
to like 650 million.
But I think that's somethingthat I've tried to work on a lot
with.
Some folks is like after thehackathon there's obviously a
(16:20):
lot of promising founders, howdo we help them get connected
with VCs?
And this is a lot of thegenesis right for Coliseum,
where it's like formalizing thatinto an actual program running
the hackathon, running anaccelerator for the promising
winners and actually backingthem to give them the bridge
financing they need to get to aproper seed round, because
(16:40):
oftentimes even the best teamstake several months to a year to
raise that seed round aftercoming out of the hackathon.
And so that's why you know oneof the reasons why Coliseum
raised Adventure Fund to investin them right after the
hackathon at the pre-seed levelto help them bridge the gap to
get in front of seed investors.
Alex Kehaya (16:58):
Yeah, and that's a somewhat new thing.
So tell me more about the fund,like what size is it and what
kind of checks do you?
Matty (17:03):
write yeah, just overall, how Coliseum works is we are
going to be running thehackathons.
You know this is our bread andbutter of how we've been growing
the Solana ecosystem.
We'll continue doing that forthe Solana Foundation and the
broader ecosystem.
We'll then basically narrowdown the winners so there's
usually 40 winners.
We'll narrow it down evenfurther to the top 10 to 15
teams and right after thehackathon, basically offer them
(17:25):
acceptance into our acceleratorprogram, which is another five
to six weeks, which is much morefocused on getting them from
DevNet to Mainnet, getting themthe connections that they need
to continue building theirproduct and, you know, find
product market fit.
And we have a whole roster offormer hackathon winners that
have become top founders andother, you know, founders from
across the ecosystem that haveagreed to be mentors.
(17:47):
And then we're running a demoday right to help them get their
seed round.
But up front we basically offerthem a pre-seed check of
$250,000 each.
So that's awesome.
Alex Kehaya (17:59):
That's great.
Yeah, I think that's reallyneeded.
I've worked with a decentnumber of teams in Solana, some
of whom I've invested in some ofthem that I just advised, but
to help them with that process,because a lot of people,
especially going through ahackathon like they haven't.
There are definitely a decentnumber of teams that have never
raised money before.
Actually, one-on-one book I'vebeen re-recommending I kind of
forgot about it until recently,but it's Venture Deals by Brad
(18:22):
Feld.
I think that's a really goodbook for some founders who
haven't raised before.
To just check out.
There's a little bit of adifference in crypto without
things are structured, butoverall, the things that are in
that book will save you a lot oftime and money and make sure
that you don't sign a dealthat's really bad for your
company.
I think that's one thing that Ilike about the Accelerator is
(18:42):
you can actually provide a safespace for people to raise.
It's kind of how YC works.
If you're a bad actor, investorand people find out about it,
you're not invited to that partyanymore.
I think that's pretty important.
Matty (18:54):
Yeah, there definitely are bad actor investors that are
very short-term thinking, thatpair it as VC's, which are
purportedly very long-termthinking.
In crypto specifically, I thinkthere's a lot of dynamics that
we offer to teach about as partof the program where to talk
about Venture Deals, you don'twant to give up too much of your
(19:16):
company or raise too much money.
I think we saw this with thelast round.
People optimizing for the mostmoney get in big trouble when
the market turns around becauseif you're valuating, do a seed
round at 300 million posts.
That's the watermark for you.
If the market recedes and youdon't fulfill that 300 million
(19:37):
dollar post, you're going tohave to do a down round, which
is not good.
Taking more money is not alwaysthe best decision.
Then, obviously, you throw inthe whole token component where
it's like maybe you only need toraise one round before your TGE
.
You have a token and that'sfunding your operations.
There's a lot of differentdynamics that are unique to
(19:58):
crypto that I think we can helpfounders with.
Alex Kehaya (20:01):
Yeah, I think that's a really good point.
There are definitely a lot ofthings that are unique that they
just won't know until they findout the hard way in some cases.
I think that's why that theaccelerator is extremely
valuable.
It sounds like you said younarrow it down to 40 teams per
cohort.
That's what you're thinking.
Matty (20:18):
We have 30 to 40 winners per hackathon.
And then of those we'llinterview all of them, basically
those 30 to 40, that's the onlyway to actually get considered
for the accelerator so you canapply to the accelerator other
than going and winning ourhackathon.
It's the only route in.
And then from there, from those30-ish teams, we'll choose 10
(20:40):
to 15 to actually invest in andaccept it in the accelerator.
Alex Kehaya (20:45):
Nice.
What are you most excited about?
You just started Coliseum.
It's getting off the ground.
I think you got your first.
When's the first hackathonhappening?
Matty (20:55):
March 4th through April 8th.
Okay, and you run anaccelerator batch right after.
Alex Kehaya (20:59):
I guess part of my question is what inspired you to
go out on your own?
I think that's an interestingtopic to cover.
And then, in that same vein,what are you most excited about
building this company?
Matty (21:10):
The reason I decided to start this with my two
co-founders is one I reallywanted to work with them.
So these folks are not peoplethat worked at Solana Foundation
Labs.
Clay was an investor at SlowVentures and I had worked with
them previously, like I said, atSquare and ZeroX, so we had a
long history of wanting to workon interesting things together
(21:33):
and so that opportunity rose.
And then obviously, nate, who'sthe third co-founder he's our
technical co-founder.
He was at Stripe building backat Infrastructure for the last
four or five years.
So, yeah, I think it was justthe opportunity to work with
those guys and build a uniquething that we hadn't seen in Web
2 or Web 3, where we sort oftook the YC model but instead of
(21:56):
a college style writtenapplication use this hackathon
that I knew was already working.
I knew that a lot of greatfounders were already coming
through this and I think wecould just provide an even more
valuable experience for thosefounders if we had dedicated
like a full-time organizationaround it.
So I think it was just theunique model, the value that we
could provide the Solanaecosystem and working with those
(22:17):
guys on fulfilling that vision.
Sorry, what was the second partof your question?
Alex Kehaya (22:21):
What are you most excited about, like?
What are you looking forward toin the next year with building
this company?
It sounds like partly.
It's working with those guys isone part of the answer, but are
there other things that you'rejust like can't wait to see?
Matty (22:33):
Yeah, we can't wait to work with like really talented
founders from across the world,and so I think that's what
really excites me about thisright, there's so many
interesting use cases,especially with sort of like
deep end taking hold in Solana.
But the crypto space generallyI think you know that's one
category of project that we'reinteresting in backing and we'll
(22:56):
have a dedicated track in thehackathon for is just working
with those founders on kind ofwhat they're going to build.
I think that's what's alwaysbeen interesting to me about.
Crypto is just like how itopens up new markets or creates
efficiencies by reducingmiddlemen that are kind of
worthless in a crypto context,in a crypto dominated world, and
(23:16):
so I think, yeah, it's justlearning about all the
interesting ideas that foundershave and helping them kind of
realize that vision throughColiseum.
Alex Kehaya (23:26):
I'm super excited about deep end.
I mean, really, when I came toSolana, that was the thing I was
already thinking about andworking on and I didn't even
realize it was before.
There was a deep end was like aphrase, but it's just this idea
like how do you bootstrap thephysical infrastructure required
to make a network work?
And then obviously there are alot of different iterate.
For me, that context wasvalidators and data centers for
(23:48):
various different networks notjust Solana, but now we've got
decentralized telecoms,decentralized mapping products
that use hardware.
I feel like it's such a greenfield and there's so much
innovation coming.
And then the other one that I'mreally excited about is real
world assets, and you weretalking about like creating new
markets.
We just recently had Todd fromBaxus on the show and they do.
(24:12):
I don't know if you know thatcompany, but they are tokenizing
whiskey.
For me, the why use blockchainfor something like that is
because it creates a new marketfor liquidity for whiskey or for
wine and spirits that didn'texist before.
So a distributor who's awhiskey maker, who has a bunch
(24:33):
of barrels of whiskey sitting ina warehouse somewhere really it
was like tough to get liquidityand a loan to finance their
operations and now you can dothat in a permissionless way on
a platform and stuff like that.
That I think the composabilityand the openness of blockchain
technology on Solana makes itpossible.
I think that's reallyinteresting.
(24:54):
So we're getting close to thetop of the show here and I
always kind of ask this but whatthings have I not asked you
that I should have asked or thatyou wanted to talk about?
Matty (25:03):
I think we covered a lot of it.
I'm curious to know from youroutside perspective, beyond deep
end, what use cases are youwanting to see come out of the
hackathon?
Where do you think the bigopportunities are for Solana,
but just crypto generally overthe next couple of years?
Alex Kehaya (25:21):
So there are some really hard problems that need
to be solved around encryptionand things like zero-knowledge
proofs, fully homomorphicencryption.
I don't know if you've seenMillion Network I haven't had
those guys on the show yet but Ijust read their white paper.
It's an overlay network really.
It's not blockchain-specific,it's not even a blockchain, but
it's kind of like a multi-partycomputation, but better.
(25:44):
I don't want to get into allthe technical details, but you
can go to their website andcheck out their technology.
The theme here is how do youactually make AI work in Web 3
in a way that's usable, that canget adoption by enterprises and
outside of just hobbyist?
I think that there are somemissing pieces around privacy
technology and decentralizedcomputing that are maybe closer
(26:08):
than I thought but still haven'texisted.
That's a really hard problem.
These are like PhD-levelmulti-year research projects,
but I do think that there aregoing to be some interesting AI
applications.
There's a stack of technologythat does exist that will allow
some AI use cases to work thatinvolve blockchain technology
and Web 3 principles in general,but there are also missing
(26:30):
pieces that there's a greenfield.
The other thing that I'm reallyinterested in is somewhat
related, because I still thinkyou need privacy-preserving
technologies to make it work,but it's data markets.
I have a friend who has,through a nonprofit that he runs
, access to two petabytes ofmedical research data.
(26:50):
Researchers put data in thisrepository and it's supposed to
be open, but it's just dumpedinto this tar-Z file and the
data is not sorted at all.
It's really hard to make ituseful for machine learning.
You need that data to beanonymized because it's all
medical research data.
It's got PII in it In order tosolve that problem.
(27:13):
This is again why I go back tothe encryption stuff.
You need some kind oftechnology like that if it's
going to be available in an openand permissionless way.
Right now, the only way to useit is to spend millions of
dollars organizing it which Ithink could be solved by
decentralized compute and to putit in a centralized, closed
server that a big pharma companyowns.
We don't want that.
(27:33):
We don't want one big pharmacompany to be the sole group
that can access this information.
It's super important.
You want researchers to accessit, developers to be able to
access it and build uniqueapplications I think some
combination of Solana, these ZKPor FHE or the stuff that the
NMC, which is what the NealineNetwork is building.
(27:53):
I think some combination ofthat and some of these ideas
around decentralized computingare going to make that possible.
The last one is and it's relatedto deep-in, but I think that
there is becoming a playbook forhow to go from zero to
thousands of nodes for networks.
This is related to deep-in.
Whether you're a new L1 or adeep-in project, there's a stack
(28:17):
of technology and services nowthat's being built.
I think there's still stuffthat needs to be built to make
those successful.
For example I've been thinkingabout is there going to be a
startup that just bundlestogether a bunch of deep-in
projects and products and offersvalue-added services on top?
You can just order it here andyou get a helium hotspot,
something that does IoT viahelium and the HiveMapper tool
(28:38):
and I don't know what the otheruse cases might be but you get
this bundle that you can offerat almost as a franchise model,
with all the management stuffbuilt in.
I think there's going to be.
There's a company calledMycelium.
I think of them as a propertymanagement company.
They just deploy these packagesall over the country and manage
them for you.
They take a fee for managingfor us.
(28:59):
It's kind of a repeat of theold way of property and real
estate, but using these newtechnologies in a more
decentralized fashion.
I don't know, that's a lot ofstuff, but those are the things
that I've been thinking aboutlately that are interesting.
Matty (29:12):
Those are great.
The last thing I think tomention about Coliseum is that
when talking about I always askpeople what I just asked you,
which is what are you excitedabout?
What ideas are interestingright now to you?
We've actually built an actualproduct.
You can go to coliseumorg rightnow.
Sign up for a Coliseum account.
(29:33):
There are two initial productsthat we have.
One is co-founder matching,which is like I'm a single
co-founder or a founder, but Iwant to find a technical
co-founder or vice versa.
There's a way to search for thetypes of people you want to
team up with for the hackathon.
The second thing, which relatesto what you were saying, which
is a product idea for themBasically, there are people
(29:56):
right now there's hundreds ofposts already since we launched
a couple of weeks ago wherepeople are kind of explaining
exactly the stuff that you'retalking about.
There's other people in thecommunity commenting on that,
critiquing that, because onepiece of feedback we always get
at the beginning of hackathonsis like I don't have enough time
to actually even think aboutwhat product to build.
(30:16):
The hackathon just starts, butI want to ideate for a while on
what we're going to build.
People are dumping in all sortsof creative ideas, finding
teammates that way, getting goodfeedback on what they've been
thinking about building.
I highly encourage anyone who'sthinking about joining the next
hackathon to create an accountnow.
(30:37):
Find your team, get somepressure testing on your idea
from the community.
Then, by the time, thehackathon rolls around, which is
also on the platform.
Alex Kehaya (30:47):
Gosh, that's so exciting.
I can think of so many ways forteams to leverage that that to
hone in on their idea and reallyquickly get feedback.
That's the biggest thing.
If you're starting somethingnew, you need to get feedback as
fast as possible from themarket.
Anything you can do toaccelerate that is going to make
sure you don't waste time.
That's the thing you can't getback as your time To find out
(31:07):
what the market thinks aboutyour idea as fast as possible.
I actually have an idea that Iwrote before I joined Solana.
I was thinking about starting acompany around mortgages,
tokenizing mortgages.
I'll post it there because I'mopen source.
I'm not protective about ideasat all.
It's open source everything.
Get it out there, see whobuilds it.
I would love to see somebodytake that and run with it.
(31:30):
I'll be signing up and postingit there.
I'll share it with you when Ido.
Matty (31:33):
Please do.
There's a whole bundle ofthings that we can talk about
relating to founders and howthey protect their ideas, but I
think one awesome part aboutcrypto is that people are a lot
more open to share their ideas,because ideas are actually very
cheap.
There's tons of good ideasthrown around all the time.
It's the execution that'sreally really tough.
I highly encourage everyone toopen up their minds and share
(31:58):
what they're thinking aboutbuilding.
Alex Kehaya (32:00):
I think that's a great point.
I think the moat in crypto.
There's a normal moat in webtwo, which is just execution.
That's the number one thing.
It's like how good can youexecute, which is really based
on your team, how good is yourteam and how good are you at
making sure they succeed?
But in crypto, I think theother thing that is the real
mode is your community, thebuilders that are building
around whatever you're building.
That's the network effect.
(32:21):
People can fork Metaplex abazillion times, but it's used
by the Metaplex standards, usedby everything.
I'm happy to see when W&S comefrom Jupiter another standard,
but even them, super solid team,amazing execution from those
guys.
Lots of funding.
Going to be hard, going to behard to supplant the incumbent.
(32:43):
Now we've seen it happen.
We saw it happen with Tensor.
They went and they have beentaking Magic into the mat.
I love both teams.
It's not impossible, but itreally is about the execution
Right now.
Tensor, they've executed betterfor the last six, seven months.
Matty (32:58):
No, I think that's right.
The upshot of all of this iscompetition is really good.
I think this is something thatwe get maybe some pushback from
where, at least from thefoundation side.
There's always this discussionof do you grow the top of the
funnel, do you get more foundersin the ecosystem or do you
spend more resources on helpingthe existing founders find
(33:20):
product market fit?
I think my vision has alwaysbeen and especially this is why
we've focused on the hackathonsis we just need a ton of
competition in the ecosystem.
That's going to actually justproduce way better downstream
products at the end of the dayfor end users who are Solana
community members.
This is all good for anyone wholoves using Solana as a network
(33:42):
, as a user, which is reallyreally important long term.
Alex Kehaya (33:46):
Well, manny, thanks for being on the show, sure.
Matty (33:49):
Thanks for inviting me.
Yeah, Alex, thanks so much forhaving me.
Looking forward to your forumpost about your mortgage idea.
Alex Kehaya (33:57):
For sure.
Last thing before we sign offhow can people find you and
participate?
We should probably just makesure they know Sure.
Matty (34:04):
Yeah, we're going to be running the Solana Foundation
Hackathon starting on March 4th.
Go sign up at coliseumorg.
You can also follow us onTwitter coliseumorg.
Alex Kehaya (34:15):
If you're spelling challenge, like me, it's
c-o-l-o-s-s-e-u-morg, the Romanway.
Matty (34:22):
Yes, that's right.
All right, thanks, we'll signoff now.
Awesome Thanks.
Alex Kehaya (34:33):
You just listened to the index podcast with your
host, alex Cahaya.
If you enjoyed this episode,please subscribe to the show on
Apple, spotify or your favoritestreaming platform.
New episodes are availableevery Friday.
Thanks for tuning in.
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