PS: Checkout the Snapshot newsletter: a byte-sized email newsletter filled with the biggest updates from Solana ecosystem teams and builders. ~5 minute read. Every 2 weeks. 👉 https://solfate.com/snapshot
Notes from the show
In this conversation, Nick and Matty discuss the Solana Global Hackathons and the launch of Colosseum. Matty shares his background in crypto and how he got involved with the Solana ecosystem, starting at Solana Labs and then to Solana Foundation.
They explore the unique structure of the Solana Global Hackathons, which focus on driving long-term sustainable startups in the ecosystem. Matty explains the decision to leave the Solana Foundation and start Colosseum as an independent organization to build a product specifically catered to running hackathons.
Nick and Matty Tay discuss the Colosseum accelerator program and venture fund, which invests in the top teams from the hackathons. Matty covers the terms and requirements for Colosseum funding, including the 7% equity stake and the remote nature of the accelerator program. They also highlight the value of the network and mentors provided by Colosseum. Matty Tay explains the importance of having a
strong idea and a well-structured pitch in order to win a Colosseum hackathon. He also shares tips for creating a compelling submission video. Finally, they discuss their excitement for projects that utilize token extensions and open up new markets in the ecosystem.
Takeaways
The Solana Global Hackathons are structured to drive long-term sustainable startups in the ecosystem. Colosseum was launched as an independent organization to build a product specifically catered to running hackathons.
The Colosseum accelerator program and venture fund invest in the top teams from the hackathons.
The Solana Foundation aims to enable other organizations in the ecosystem to take over initiatives and build products. Coliseum offers $250K for 7% equity stake in a remote accelerator program.
The program provides access to a network of mentors and connections through the Solana Foundation.
Winning a Coliseum hackathon requires a strong idea, a well-structured pitch, and a demo that showcases the chosen features.
Submission videos should be concise, under three minutes, and include team background, product description, market potential, traction, and a demo.
PS: Checkout the Snapshot newsletter: a byte-sized email newsletter filled with the biggest updates from Solana ecosystem teams and builders. ~5 minute read. Every 2 weeks. 👉 https://solfate.com/snapshot
Notes from the show
In this conversation, Nick and Matty discuss the Solana Global Hackathons and the launch of Colosseum. Matty shares his background in crypto and how he got involved with the Solana ecosystem, starting at Solana Labs and then to Solana Foundation.
They explore the unique structure of the Solana Global Hackathons, which focus on driving long-term sustainable startups in the ecosystem. Matty explains the decision to leave the Solana Foundation and start Colosseum as an independent organization to build a product specifically catered to running hackathons.
Nick and Matty Tay discuss the Colosseum accelerator program and venture fund, which invests in the top teams from the hackathons. Matty covers the terms and requirements for Colosseum funding, including the 7% equity stake and the remote nature of the accelerator program. They also highlight the value of the network and mentors provided by Colosseum. Matty Tay explains the importance of having a
strong idea and a well-structured pitch in order to win a Colosseum hackathon. He also shares tips for creating a compelling submission video. Finally, they discuss their excitement for projects that utilize token extensions and open up new markets in the ecosystem.
Takeaways
The Solana Global Hackathons are structured to drive long-term sustainable startups in the ecosystem. Colosseum was launched as an independent organization to build a product specifically catered to running hackathons.
The Colosseum accelerator program and venture fund invest in the top teams from the hackathons.
The Solana Foundation aims to enable other organizations in the ecosystem to take over initiatives and build products. Coliseum offers $250K for 7% equity stake in a remote accelerator program.
The program provides access to a network of mentors and connections through the Solana Foundation.
Winning a Coliseum hackathon requires a strong idea, a well-structured pitch, and a demo that showcases the chosen features.
Submission videos should be concise, under three minutes, and include team background, product description, market potential, traction, and a demo.
Cofounder & GP @ColosseumOrg | Previously @Solana | Not Financial Advices
What is Solfate Podcast - Interviews with blockchain founders/builders on Solana?
Interviews with blockchain founders and builders on the Solana blockchain. Hosted by two developers building on Solana, by Nick (@nickfrosty) and James (@jamesrp13).
James:
Hello hello and welcome to another episode of the Solphate podcast where we interview builders and founders in the Solana ecosystem. This is a fun one, I think I hope it, James? I wasn't there for it. So, Nick, who did you talk to? And tell me about the conversation.
Nick:
Yeah. So, yeah, James James was not here for this conversation. Phenomenal conversation, James. You you really missed out.
James:
The best one because I wasn't there. I mean, what are you saying?
Nick:
Maddie Maddie. It was Maddie. Maddie from Coliseum, formerly at Solana Foundation. Maddie is is the Solana Global Hackathon guy. He's he's the hackathon guy.
Nick:
He's been running the hackathons that the Solana Foundation has been doing for 3 plus years now. And recently, Maddie actually left the Solana Foundation to start a new company that's exclusively dedicated to hackathons and an accelerator for the salon ecosystem. So it's called Coliseum, coliseum.org. They right now, actually, is the the current global hackathons going on. Renaissance, cool name again.
Nick:
Not quite as good as Grizzlython, I think. Grizzlython was a really great name.
James:
I don't know, man. Renaissance is pretty dope.
Nick:
I don't know. No one can spell it, though.
James:
That's, I mean, that's accurate. That's true. It's impossible to spell Renaissance. Yeah.
Nick:
But, yeah, it was it was a great conversation. So I talked with Maddie about why leave the Solana Foundation to do all things hackathons. We talk extensively about the accelerator program that Colosseum has. So the the goal of it is effectively like y c like y combinator for the Solana ecosystem. At a high level, you participate and you win the Solana Global Hackathon put on by Colosseum.
Nick:
You become eligible to join their accelerator program. They do, I want to say it was a 250 ks investment for 7%. And they give all sorts of mentoring and connect you with other founders and and all of these amazing tools, all driven through the Colosseum platform. And it's so cool. It's gonna be such a great resource for everyone in the ecosystem, not even to mention typical global hackathons are are so amazing.
Nick:
Bullish on seeing how many submissions we get for this one. I think the last one was like 70900. It was it was wild. So many.
James:
I fucking love it. That's, that's awesome. I'm I'm gonna have to go listen to this episode. I don't normally listen to them since I'm normally part of the conversation, but this is one I'm gonna listen to. It's gonna be great.
James:
Before we dive into that, though, quick, you know, just shout out to to things in the ecosystem and and companies in the ecosystem that we're partnered with. Wanna shout out Phantom, the preferred wallet of the sulfate Love Phantom. Ecosystem my company. Dev list, etcetera. We also wanna just say again, if you haven't joined the Devlist, like the Sulfate Devlist, join join the Devlist.
James:
Right? Solfate.com/dev list. It's, it's gonna be it's we're we're gonna verify that you are a developer, and we are going to make that list available to different projects in the ecosystem so that you can get, you know, airdrops and stuff. Don't miss out on bunk again. Right?
James:
Like, you don't wanna miss out on the next bunk. We wanna give everyone opportunities to fumble their bags over and over and over until they don't fumble them.
Nick:
Oh my goodness. James, you're the worst. Not financial advice.
James:
I mean, look. I I don't want you to fumble your bags. I I just wanna give you many opportunities so that you learn not to. Right? Like, that's that's all.
James:
That's all I'm saying. Did I hit a sore spot, Nick? Did you No.
Matty:
Did you sell your
Nick:
rocket tool? We we do have some we do have, like, some exciting things coming up for the dev list. There'll be, some information put out on the sulfate blog and, on the sulfate.com/dev list page itself. So keep your eyes open.
James:
I'm learning about this live as we're recording an intro from from Nick.
Nick:
Plont Thickens. Plont Thickens.
James:
I'm stoked. Nick, I'd love to hear what these what's what's happening here. But we're gonna
Matty:
get to
Nick:
talk about about Colosseum and Maddie. Yes. Let's dive into the details. Let's go do that.
James:
Love it. I think it's great.
Nick:
Nothing in this podcast is or should be considered financial advice. Any opinions and thoughts expressed are solely those of the individual. They do not represent the opinions of any entity. Enjoy. So, Maddie, let's let's talk about Colosseum and Hackathons and and you, a lot of people in the salon ecosystem know who you are, at least tangentially whether or not they realize it or not.
Nick:
But, you know, used to run hackathons at Solana Foundation and now at Coliseum for the Global Hackathons. And let's let's talk about that, man.
Matty:
Yeah. Thanks for thanks for inviting me. Yeah. Happy to dig into what we're doing at Coliseum and also, yeah, the past and Solana Foundation. So happy to jump into it.
Nick:
Cool. Let's, do you wanna start with how you got into crypto and and Solana specifically? I think I've heard some of this story before, but, I think it was only when we were in person. So
Matty:
Great. Yeah. No. Can can get into that. So, yeah, I guess I got into crypto, specifically Bitcoin in college.
Matty:
And so I, I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Bitcoin. I was just studying economics at the time. And there was this phenomenon happening where there was this mining pool called ghash. Io and it, it was getting pretty close actually to getting basically 50% of the hash rate of the Bitcoin because that, you know, that opens up a bunch of attack vectors at that point. So, I was, yeah, really interested in Bitcoin and and particularly the the mining, industry at the time.
Matty:
And, yeah. So I wrote my thesis about that. And luckily, yeah, I never actually quite reached 51%. And an interesting thing happened where it got very close, but then a lot of people self selected to leave that pool and distribute to other pools
Nick:
That's good.
Matty:
To kind of maintain decentralization without any sort of incentives or anything like that other than, like, we wanna make sure that Bitcoin is sort of sufficiently decentralized. So, yeah, I thought that was really interesting. And so, you know, I've been obsessed with crypto ever since then and obviously learned about Ethereum along the way. Actually, I learned about Ethereum because Vitalik was a pretty active user of bitcointalk.org, where a lot of the conversation around crypto and Bitcoin was at the time. And so I heard he was talking about this, you know, basically, you know, he was playing around with this thing called COLOR coins, which were like a very v one, you know, sort of take on tokenization of other assets beyond just like Bitcoin itself.
Matty:
And so he was, like, getting into that. And, yeah, that kind of evolved into, obviously, Ethereum because he wasn't able to basically get a lot of features he wanted to implement on Bitcoin. It was just not feasible. And so, yeah, I really got into Ethereum as well. After graduation, I worked at Square, which is just a traditional payments company.
Matty:
But then shortly after, I jumped to one of the first DeFi projects called 0X, which is a DEX protocol even today on Ethereum. And it's become actually like an aggregator similar to like Jupiter on Solana. And so worked there for a bit, but then, yeah, kind of some early on in 2020, right around when Solana was going to mainnet, I got introduced to that team and, the Solana Labs team at the time. And, yeah, I talked to Raj and Anatoli and, yeah, they pretty much, convinced me to to go work in that ecosystem, or or what was any, you know, a small ecosystem, I guess, at the time.
Nick:
And so Budding ecosystem. Yeah.
Matty:
Budding ecosystem.
Nick:
Growing growing fully from the ground up.
Matty:
Yeah. It was, serum by FTX or some engineers at FTX, and that was that was about it. But, yeah, happy to jump into any part of that.
Nick:
That's pretty interesting. I've heard I've now heard we did the episode with, Brandon, McMillan, I believe is his name, from Phantom, Phantom and then, David also from Phantom. And, like, I think all 3 of the cofounders of Phantom all came from 0x as well. So I don't know. That's that's super interesting that, like, you also came from 0x.
Matty:
I had a a small role in that. So, actually, when I Bringing them
Nick:
over to build on some
Matty:
of that. Yeah. So I worked with them closely, obviously, at 0x. But, yeah, they were they were thinking about leaving and starting they were just basically, you know, engineers and designers really fed up with head of mask as a lot of engineers are in in the EVM Ecosystem. And I think they just wanted to sort of create a competitor, and they were trying to figure out where they wanted to build that and, yeah, introduce them to Raj, and I guess the rest is history from there.
Matty:
But, yeah, those are awesome.
Nick:
Nice. That's that's nice little, like, you know, small world sort of thing. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
Nick:
Thanks for the background and because, like, a lot of people know that you well, at least used to work at the Solana Foundation running the hackathons. And, you know, I've never personally really seen any information out there about, like, your background or, you know, how you how you got there. And, you've been running the hackathons at the Solana Foundation for 3 plus years, and, you know, the hackathons are hands down one of the biggest growth drivers of the salon ecosystem, like massive, massive numbers on submissions. 1 of the biggest, if not the biggest online global hackathons. And every single time we do one, it it's bigger the next time.
Nick:
Like, that's no small feat for sure. And that's that's definitely a large part of of how you and and the people that have been running those hackathons for years have decided to do them differently than typical hackathons, typical bounties, which like I just came from Denver and participated in support of the Denver Hackathon there. They called it Build Week or whatever. And those hackathons are just not structured anything like the Solana Global Hackathons. So the question that I would love to know is why did you decide or the the team of Solana Foundation and Labs at the time decide to structure the Solana Global Hackathons the way we do have them now, and and why did it it stay that way?
Matty:
Yeah. It's a good question. Partly, I think luck, but partly, you know, I think, we we just thought about it from first principles. But, at the time, when we started the hackathons, it was in the middle of COVID or, like, very, very early on in COVID in 2020. And so just off the bat, you weren't going to do anything in person.
Matty:
So that was like something very, very different. It's just like it was going to be online. The other thing is that I had gone to a bunch of, like, ETH Global events, like ETHSF, ETH NYC. And, you know, I've done hackathons, and I, you know, actually run a couple at 0x. And one thing that was pretty clear was that they were pretty ephemeral.
Matty:
And so the goal with ours has always been to drive long term sustainable new startups, basically, in the ecosystem rather than focusing, I think, what traditional hackathons are, which is more just in the pure spirit of experimentation, which we still want. Like, that's still really important that we have new developers and, other folks, you know, experimenting with the technology, learning about open source crypto development. But we also wanted to attract, you know, high quality founders to build actual startups and use the hackathons as sort of their their first engineering sprint, to to do that. And so, automatically, we needed to extend the length of the hackathon beyond just, like, the course of, like, a week or a couple days. So that's why they're, you know, about 5 to 6 weeks long.
Matty:
They're online only to try to lower the barriers of attending one of these things. You know, you have to get a visa to go to ETH NYC, for instance, if you're, like, from many different countries. And so, we just wanted to open up the playing field. We wanted to attract the right type of builder slash founder. And that also led to, over time, removing things like specific bounties that you see at at hackathons.
Matty:
So a common thing you see is that, like, your company really wants their technology being used, so they sponsor the hackathon, and then they host a prize for, like, the best project that integrates with their technology versus, and then that sort of incentivizes a bunch of developers to come in and sort of like try to pick off bounties and pick up cash awards along the way. But that that's
Nick:
It's just bounty hunters come in just trying to check a box and it's like, that's not useful that much.
Matty:
Yeah. And so what we wanted to do was just sort of developers to come with their own sort of creative ideas. Obviously, the one, you know, basically requirement and the only requirement from a tech standpoint is to integrate somehow with Solana. But other than that, we sort of wanted to clear the space for developers to use whatever technology they felt actually was, like, a means to an end, and actually to, you know, build a product that people would wanna use. And so, yeah, that's why we removed things like, you know, typical bounties that you see.
Matty:
And, yeah, so those are some initial things that there were, you know, that we started with and have evolved over time. There's a lot of other stuff. We could spend a whole podcast on how we run hackathons differently than than traditional hackathons. But I think off the bat, that maybe gives people an idea of kind of where we started from.
Nick:
Okay. Yeah. That's that's super helpful for people that have not, like, personally experienced the hackathons or or maybe have only experienced Alana ecosystem ones and and tried to do, like, the bounties at other hackathons. And, like, yeah, it's like the whole the the specific bounties of use our tech to do X, use our tech to do Y, you just get so much low quality submissions from that and you don't build a sustainably because it's a pure marketing thing at that point. Like, a it's a pure marketing thing.
Nick:
You don't really get that good of submissions like we have. I we get I would love to talk more about submission reviews because like I got to participate in the hyperdrive reviews and there's so many low quality projects that submit that literally for, like, bounty specific tracks of, like, integrate to do x, and they just try to check the box and hopefully spray and pray submissions at every single blockchain hackathon, and it's it's wild.
Matty:
Yeah. Yeah. No. Sorry. Go for it.
Nick:
No. No. No. Go ahead.
Matty:
No. I was just gonna say, like, you know, we we still get, you know, fair fair amount of people who are, you know, yeah, hackathon hunters, and that's fine. They're actually like you know, what's amazing and why I actually think the hackathons have been so successful is probably been, like, how we structured them and the marketing channels and everything that we've done around them. But partly, it's just because, like, Solana has such strong product market fit with developers, I think, where even some of those bounty hunters, they will come into our hackathon, and normally, when they would just sort of leave and go off to the the next one, they maybe stick around because, like, no. This tag is awesome.
Matty:
I can actually maybe stick around for a while and actually build, like, a product, on, you know, on this blockchain. And so, you know, we're welcoming any type of developer that wants to participate in these because I think it's sort of like dip your toes in and then kind of get baptized in the process. That's a
Nick:
good way to phrase it.
Matty:
Yeah, I
Nick:
guess that's true. Like, I we I remember for Hyperdrive and Grizzlython, there were a couple of teams that submitted that, like, had build had done the the the hackathon bounty hopping. And some of those teams are still here building an ecosystem, and they they basically stopped building on other chains. So, yeah, I guess that's fair. That definitely that definitely happens.
Nick:
Alright. So let's the Colosseum. So I I got the lucky chance when we were at, San Francisco, the at the Solana Foundation off-site, right before you had left Solana Foundation, actually. We were talking about this, and I was I was very intrigued. We talked about what the idea of Colosseum is before it was, you know, publicly announced and you leaving foundation to do this.
Nick:
So let's can we talk about, what is Colosseum? How is it different from how you were running hackathons at the Solana Foundation? And and why leave the Solana Foundation to actually do Colosseum and and continue to spread the gospel of Solana through hackathons?
Matty:
For sure. So Coliseum at a high level is 3 integrated components. 1 is the online hackathons. This is what we've been talking about, and we'll be running those in a very similar fashion to how we've been running them in the past with the Solana Foundation. Obviously, we're trying to evolve them over time and improve them.
Matty:
But, you know, structurally they're still focused on startup founders and, yeah, the output is that we get a lot of really interesting startups that are eventually bringing you know, raising venture funding and that, bring, you know, users on chain. The second component is new, which is a lot of, more around support of the the highest quality winners. So we have this new accelerator program where we'll be taking roughly the top 10 to 15 teams out of every hackathon, investing in them through our our venture fund that we raised at the pre seed, and accepting them into our, like, 5 week, accelerator to help onboard them into the ecosystem, give them the capital that they need to kind of continue building, and obviously get to the point where they can go usually from DevNet, where they land in the hackathon, maybe to a mainnet implementation and the ability to actually, like, pitch pitch seed investors, at at our demo day. And so we have a whole, program around this, whether it's, you know, mentors, from the ecosystem who had won hackathons in the past, or, you know, top ecosystem founders who can give people advice on how to build, you know, an awesome project in the Solana ecosystem.
Matty:
And so, that's at a high level what we're doing structurally. The other big thing, and this relates to kind of the second part of your question about, like, why leave the Solana Foundation and why start Coliseum as an independent organization is that not only did we have to raise a venture fund, and do this accelerator, which was gonna be very difficult to do at the Solana Foundation. The second part is to build an actual product around this, which is another thing that was probably not gonna happen at the Solana Foundation. And so through just my experience running these hackathons and sort of stitching together a bunch of, like, components like Typeform and Google Drive and, Devpost and, like, you know, just trying to basically use off the shelf solutions to to run these very custom competitions that we'd evolved over time was not really working out well. And so we thought, what if we just build a new product from the ground up, specifically, you know, to cater to how we run hackathons, which is pretty unique.
Matty:
And so that evolved into the point where not only were we thinking about, okay, how do we build a product to more efficiently, you know, run hackathons, you know, take in submissions, judge those submissions, but also sort of pre and post hackathon support. So pre hackathon support is how do I find teammates, right? So we built out this whole, like, co founder matching platform or where they're located or their skill set to sort of and then DM them directly in the application to find if there would be a good fit to go compete in the hackathon and ultimately, like, start a startup around. So that's one part is just, like, team formation is really important. The second feature that we launched with, which is this product forum.
Matty:
So people are always wondering, like, where what idea should I use? Or is this a good idea in the place to even go compete in the hackathon with? So we built this forum where people can post their product ideas, comment on them, before hackathons, start. So that hopefully by the time we are actually running the, you know, the hackathon on the platform, you have your team, you have an idea, well beforehand, so you can compete more effectively in competition. And so that's all housed in in what the product is today.
Matty:
And obviously, we're gonna evolve it over time. And then in terms of the post hackathon support, which is more what I mentioned with the accelerator, that experience is also based on a private section of the application that we built, but it's it's just for the top, 10 10 to 15 teams coming out of the hackathon that we invest in. So that's it at a high level of what we're doing with Colosseum. And that's why maybe this makes sense to you and your listeners is that, like, we couldn't do all of those components within the Solana Foundation. The Solana Foundation is amazing and they support the ecosystem through a variety of different initiatives.
Matty:
But if you're looking to double and triple down and, like, build an actual product and raise a venture fund and dedicate all of your time to this specific growth funnel, you have to spin it out basically to a new independent organization. And so it's beneficial to us because we're focused full time on this now. And it's beneficial to the foundation and the ecosystem because there is now a full time team that this is all that they're doing is just focus on this one particular, section of ecosystem growth.
Nick:
Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. It's like as also as an employee a current employee of Solana Foundation, like, I I get this, but a lot of people in the ecosystem don't. And it's, like, one of the ideas.
Nick:
And I've, you know, like I said, I've been in ETHDenver the last week and I've been trying to spread this idea more and more like internal of the Solana Foundation. For all the listeners, there's an idea that like Solana Foundation, like we work very differently than most other blockchain foundations. First of all, we don't want to own products. The community should own products, and they should they should do all of these things. And one of the how does Dan Albert like to say it?
Nick:
We should all be actively working to put ourselves out of a job. So that way the Solana Foundation can spin down. Like, that's the goal of the Solana Foundation, which is, you know, a long term goal for sure. But it's more and more things like this that get spun out and and the ecosystem takes over them. It makes it so, like, the foundation can get to where it's the the community is able to do all of these things on their own and require less and less support from the foundation.
Nick:
And it's it's working for sure too, which is also amazing to see.
Matty:
Yeah. No. I I think that's right. I think, yeah, it's been interesting to kind of see how the foundation has evolved over time. I think, think, you know, when I think about the Ethereum Foundation on one end of the spectrum and maybe, like, a new layer one ecosystem that just spun up, I feel like the Slanted Foundation is somewhere in the middle where, personally, I don't think the Ethereum Foundation actually does much at all, versus, like, the Solana Foundation is still very important in the ecosystem.
Matty:
But, you know, like you said, they are trying to, you know, basically enable other people in the ecosystem who can dedicate their full time and attention and capital to specific initiatives because they're gonna be able to run it better. And honestly, the incentives are aligned as well. So like when you think about Coliseum, people ask us, so why didn't you just, like, do what Eth Global did, which is basically running, like, an events company. Right? Why isn't that, like, your business model where you sort of take a fee for running hackathons or events, hacker houses or whatever it is, for the ecosystem?
Matty:
And the problem with that is sort of aligns with why, you know, why we're a venture fund, which is that we want to be aligned with actually, like, breakout startups that bring out actual on chain usage. And so that's where we're optimized for, is is that specific, sort of alignment with what we want to see in the ecosystem. I think that's really healthy.
Nick:
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense, especially on like the venture side of, you know, it's it is having that perfect alignment. You know, it's it's and I hate using this word, but it works so well. It's symbiosis. It's a symbiotic relationship.
Nick:
It's, you know, synergistic, you know, super corporate kind of word. But it's it's true. It works. And it's, yeah, it's nice when it all works out. And actually, so let's talk about the accelerator.
Nick:
Let's talk about this this venture fund. Like, what does it actually look like? How does someone who is submitting for, in this case, Renaissance Hackathon is the name of the current one that officially launches basically right now. Or I guess it's already been announced, but it's like officially starting right now. How does someone participate in the accelerator in the the venture funds?
Nick:
How does that process work from the perspective of someone who submits, a hackathon submission or a project submission?
Matty:
Yeah. So from our perspective, you can think of, yeah, Coliseum is sort of like the YC for Solana, except the big difference is instead of a written application, like a college style sort of application, you have to go win our 5 week hackathon, which we think is actually a way better way to evaluate potential
Nick:
Stronger signal. Stronger
Matty:
signal on, you know, an early co founding team. And so from the developer standpoint or the co founding team standpoint, they have to compete. The only way to get accepted in the accelerator is they have to go compete in our hackathon, that we run with the Solana Foundation. They have to be selected even as a winner. So there's around 40 individual prizes that you can win.
Matty:
That basically guarantees you, 1, you're going to win your prize in the cash, the USDC amount, associated with it. But also guarantees you basically an interview and consideration for the accelerator program. So after, basically, you've been determined as a winner, the Coliseum team will basically, review all those submissions and talk to all those founders through an interview process, and then accept 10 to 15 teams after each hackathon to basically invest at that point. So our deal is 250,000 in pre seed capital for each team. And then you automatically get, accept you know, put into the next batch, for the accelerator program, which lasts roughly another 5 weeks, and then culminates in in a demo day where we invite a bunch of seed investors from across the crypto venture capital ecosystem.
Nick:
Okay. What are some of the terms on that 250 ks? So you said it's per team. I know it's a venture fund. Like what's the approximate percentage?
Nick:
Does that change based off how many team members there are? And then what do you have any other like because a lot of a lot of funds like YC and, you know, these assorted bootstrappy type funds, they all do typically require like you must quit your job to go full time on doing this idea. And some of them require in person, which I think YC used to require in person, but maybe does not now because COVID and all that kind of stuff. What are some of the additional terms that are that are set on those?
Matty:
Yeah. So it's 250 k for 7%, which is represented as a SAFT
Nick:
Okay.
Matty:
Plus token war. And the other requirements are, yes, you have to be working on this full time. This is any investor these days basically requires that to to receive any sort of amount of institutional capital. You do not have to be in person with us. In fact, we we want it to be fully remote, just like the hackathon and many for the same reasons that we want to run the hackathon remotely, the Accelerator should be run remotely because it allows just more access to talented builders across the world.
Matty:
And there's some other benefits to that as well. And so, it's yeah. It's a little bit different. And then it's much shorter than a than like a Y Combinator batch where we've talked to many different Y Combinator founders who've gone through that program. And the number one thing that they say they get the most value out of is just, like, getting connected with the right network of other founders.
Matty:
And so that's a big part of our program where we have this roster of mentors. You can go to coliseum.org to see who those are, but it's a lot of the top ecosystem founders. And it's us and, you know, our connection with the Solana Foundation. And, you know, our goal is to 1, give you the capital that you need to feel comfortable, like, quitting whatever you're currently doing, getting the connections you need to continue building or go to market advice or whatever you need to get from DevNet, where you end up with a hackathon, to closer to MainNet by the end of our accelerator. And getting to the point where you're sort of refining your pitch your product vision so that when, you know, you're able to pitch, you know, seed investors at our demo day, you can put your best foot forward.
Matty:
And so that we feel can all be done within the course of, like, a 5 week program, which is a much less of a time commitment, I would say, than than a traditional accelerator. But we think we can give you the value, that the traditional accelerator is just at a much quicker pace. The other thing is that, you know, we can't talk about a lot of the features that we've built out privately in the application, but we think, you know, all founders who go through our program will have access to that forever. And so, you know, that's a resource that they can use well beyond just, the extent of our 5 week accelerator program.
Nick:
Okay. Okay. And you're you're piquing my interest. Like, I wanna see those private features, but that's okay. It's okay, Matty.
Nick:
Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense the way, like, you know, requiring full time. That's, you know, know, a lot of most pretty much everyone does. 7% seems relatively low compared to a lot of, a lot of incubators.
Nick:
They typically require 10 as usually as a minimum. And then sometimes vary that a little bit by based off how many founders are there sort of thing. Why why the 7%? Yeah. We we actually felt it's, like,
Matty:
sort of in line with where the market is right now. It's, yeah, it's a little bit lower than you would get at, like, a YC. But, you know, we I think actually YC has gotten in a little bit of trouble with other kind of seed and series a investors because as they've moved sort of up, you know, into those levels of ownership, which affects people's ability to raise from a traditional seed investor quite a bit. And so we want to be there early on to help teams when basically not many people are willing to back, you know, a 5 week old hackathon team, and give them the money, you know, enough ramen money, basically, to get to the point and the connections to get raise a seed round. But we don't wanna get into the business of competing at the seed and series a to, like, lead rounds or anything like that.
Matty:
We don't wanna have such a large percentage of someone's tokens applied that it will deter future investors, from also investing. So that's those are some considerations that we've put into it. But it's still enough of a meaningful percentage for us where if know, the project does well long term, you know, we can we can make money from it and continue running the hackathons and accelerator and, you know, keep keep the lights on.
Nick:
Yeah, that's fair. Does because Colosseum have a preference on because like not every project or company has tokens or plan to have tokens. Some very clear up front, like, hey. We want a token. Some very clear we don't based off of where they are in the world and their countries, you know, requirements and and laws and stuff around tokens.
Nick:
Does Colosseum have a preference on projects that have tokens or think about tokens or or vice, typical tick typical equity?
Matty:
We don't have, we don't have a preference. We when we looked back at, I guess, the last 3 years of hackathon winner data and, you know, venture funding rounds that have come out of it, it seems like there's a there's a pretty big split, between equity based startups and token based, projects. And so, you know, we we believe that, like, the founders probably know better than anyone else which model they should choose for their particular project, and we wanna support the founders in in what they believe in. That can create kind of a sustainable business for themselves and and their communities around those products. So, honestly, we do we don't have a preference.
Nick:
Okay. That's cool. Alright. I wanna change gears a little bit. We've talked about what Colosseum is and and what the benefits many, many, many benefits of of becoming a winner and participating and and all of that.
Nick:
But let's talk about how to how to become a winner in the global hackathons for the salon ecosystem. Like I got the chance to participate in reviewing projects for hyperdrive and I think Grizzly thon as well. I got a chance to look at like 2 or 300 submissions, and I was just trying to like look at as many as possible. So many cool things got built. Some people were able to ship a lot, some people a little.
Nick:
The the split on the founders of who were developers, who were not developers was also very interesting to me. So I would love to hear it from from from you. You are the hackathon guy. What sort of things do people look at the all of the reviewers and everyone who's reviewing the submissions, both from the, the technical side and from the like product not so technical necessarily side? What are those requirements to be a winner?
Nick:
Like, what what looks good, and and what should people really strive for?
Matty:
Yeah. It's a good question. So we actually just published a blog post and sort of a guide on it was entitled, How to Win a Coliseum Hackathon. And it kind of goes deep into each kind of component of how you should be, like, structuring your time building in the hackathon, what to versus not a good idea. And, you know, I won't repeat all of it here, but TLDR, we think that 1st and foremost, when judges and ourselves as the Coliseum team are reviewing projects, It's really important to have like a decent idea at first because that's what people are gonna look at first.
Matty:
They're gonna look at your product presentation, the video that you submit and your slide deck and see like, is this even a good idea to spend 6 weeks building, before they even get to the point where they look at your code repo. And so that's the first sort of thing of why we suggest, like, actually, like, spending like close to like 5 days at the very end of the hackathon just focused on like how you're going to pitch what you built in the demo that, you know, you built during the hackathon. And so the presentation and then like The pitch is real. Yeah. The pitch is real.
Matty:
You got to explain why this is, like, a big idea, why you, you know, your team is best suited to go build this, like, why there's a good, like, founder market fit, not just potentially good product market fit. What and explaining, like, why you chose the the features that you did for your demo. I think that's a really interesting thing that I particularly look at is, like, you wanna create this demo in the course of 5 weeks. What you know, you obviously can't build everything. Right?
Matty:
Like, you you gotta choose a couple, you know, features that you think is are most important that would impress people about what you're trying to build or the bigger vision of what you're trying to build and, like, which did you choose? Because I think that actually mirrors sort of, like, the characteristics of a very high quality, you know, high performance cofounding team or because that's what they're doing every week. Right? They're deciding, okay, like, how do we choose which features to build next? How do we get feedback from folks that are, you know, our users on which features to build?
Matty:
And so that a lot of the best teams honestly is like, can you exhibit, like, that you've been taking early customer beta feedback even very early on the hackathon? So you'll see, like, Chase Barker and myself, like, yelling on Twitter that you need to create a Twitter account or you need to create an X account early on. The reason why we're saying that is not to necessarily go market yourself early. It's more like go put yourself out there, put up the bat signal so that you can get at least some initial beta feedback basically on what you're building real time as you build it out during the course of the hackathon because that's going to really help you prioritize what you're actually building for the demo. And so these are all sort of, you know, things that we touch in the blog post and the guide and, highly recommend people, you know, look through that after.
Matty:
But those are some of the things that we look for, both, you know, initially through the presentation, but also like once you dig into the code and looking at the demo that they create over the course of the hackathon, like why they built what they did, is also really important.
Nick:
Yeah. And we'll definitely link in the show notes the link to that blog post for sure. And and I especially as someone who got the the unique opportunity to participate in review reviewing some of those submissions, all of the stronger submissions typically did have like they built up their Twitter presence. They they did actually get the product feedback. Like, it makes sense when you say it.
Nick:
But like people, it's just like another thing that people don't often do. But share like if you're building for the hackathon, share it on social tag me tag tag Maddie tag Chase Chase will retweet basically everything. I'm sure Maddie will too. And if I see it, I probably will, too. And get feedback like that and get feedback on your pitch.
Nick:
A lot of people submitted for, you know, they would try to do like a really long pitch and try to speed up the audio just to get within the time requirements. And it makes it really difficult to actually absorb the information of what the pitches. But share share your ahead of time on Twitter. Like, why not get some feedback on it from people?
Matty:
Yeah, there's this guy, Burger.
Nick:
Early feedback is so good. Yeah. I love Burger Bob.
Matty:
Yeah. This guy, Burger Bob, you can take it even a step further and basically just vlog your entire experience every day working in the hackathon, which he did, which was interesting.
Nick:
Built in public?
Matty:
Yeah. Yeah. Into an extreme. I think the the other thing that, about Burger Bob and that we recommend, you know, that's something that we look at, a lot is sort of the endurance of of Teams. So one thing that we see that's really positive is our teams entering multiple hackathons.
Matty:
So he was one of them where he had entered multiple hackathons. The tensor guys entered multiple hackathons. This is a common theme. Fluxbot team entered, like, I think, 4 or 5 hackathons before winning last time. So this is actually something that we wanna see over time is teams who are trying something in 1 hackathon and sort of like follow the idea maze to another idea, try it out in the hackathon, Does it work or not?
Matty:
Pivot to something else. And so we wanna see people sort of yeah. The term is, like, explore the idea maze, which is sort of like a Balaji ism, I think, originally. And it's it's just, like, really important to see people committed and also just continually iterating and shipping because that's exactly what they're gonna do in real life when when they're just actually working on a start up every single day. Right?
Matty:
They're they're constantly just iterating, pivoting, like, trying to find that initial seed of product market fit.
Nick:
Yeah. Balaji Balaji's got so many great quotes. I want to meet him so bad. What are, what are some of the things that you look for in the submission videos? Because, like, that is like the pinnacle of whatever someone has built over the 4 or 5 weeks, depending on how long they spend on the video and getting this video published to the world.
Nick:
So that way people can can view it. The not only the reviewing submissions team, but, you know, everyone else on social media drum up that social buzz. What kind of stuff do you think makes a really good submission video? And what what are some of the common things that you've seen that just make it either really hard to review the submission or just is it immediately an immediate deterrent for that submission moving on to the next stage?
Matty:
Yeah. This is something we also touched on in the post. But the You should
Nick:
have read that before I showed up.
Matty:
No, no, no, no. It's good to kind of verbalize it in the podcast. So one thing off the bat, like use this product or something similar called Loom. So the best presentations are under 3 minutes and they use a slide deck and then they have a Loom, which is basically just a recording through your webcam where you're sort of talking over the slides that you're presenting. So it's sort of just mimicking what a product pitch would be like.
Matty:
So in format, that's what we recommend. In terms of, like, what the content of each slide should be, we've kind of broken it down into 6 components. One is the team background. This is just, you know, founder market fit. Like, why who are you guys and, like, why are you building this?
Matty:
2nd is just, like, the product description. Like, what is what is the actual product? What does it do? What market are you going after? The second is like why this is a good product to build.
Matty:
So kind of combining why you think this product is gonna open up a new market or make an existing market more efficient, why your team and your background is well suited to go build it. 4th thing is, this is a good idea, not only because, like, there's demand for this, but there's actually potentially, like, an entire either global demand for this or it could open up a completely new market that didn't exist before, thanks to crypto. Some of the best examples of this, I think, have been, you know, obviously, in traditional web 2, which is like Google. Right? Like, basically, opened up an entire new market for ad you know, online advertising, through, like, AdWords and such.
Matty:
Like, that is such a good business model that couldn't have existed before. To a to a lesser extent, you can have, like, things like deep end protocols, right, where, like, the way that they're sort of improving, like, physical infrastructure networks, whether that's, like, Airbnb for GPUs, for AI startups, which is like IO.net, or, you know, Helium, which is like, you know, mobile, you know, infrastructure, or, you know, HiveMapper is that they sort of open up a new market for each of those industries to make them more efficient, and ultimately cut down the costs for end users. And so I think we just wanna hear kind of, like, why this is such a big market to go after and why, you know, you're well suited to go, build it. 5th, so second to last is this kind of goes back to the what we were saying about, like, getting feedback from users is, like, what what traction do you have? Like, what are your initial beta users saying?
Matty:
Like and this can be just one dude that you're talking to on Twitter, right, that that responded to your, like, tweet about your product. Right? Like, why why is it not just you that think this is a good idea, but there's other people that you're thinking like, oh, there's even an initial user base here if I go and actually build this product. So and even some teams teams get, like, even further than that. Right?
Matty:
Some teams, launch on DevNet and have, like, a Discord of, like, early users, and there's, like, a bunch of feedback that they're actually getting. Or there is, like, more enterprise use cases where, like, teams have, you know, even lined up, like, integrations with existing protocols in DeFi or whatever saying, hey. Like, we've already talked to the founders of these x, y, and z protocols. If we build this, we know we have a customer in those 3. So that's the initial traction slide, if that's applicable, is also very helpful.
Matty:
And then the last piece, which can be somewhat the bulk of it, which is just the, the demo itself, we wanna see kind of you walk through, like, the a brief demo of what you built beyond just, like, us testing it, personally, you know, from your from your GitHub. So I think, yeah, just seeing what you built and why you built it, is is very helpful. So, hopefully, you can wrap that up in the course of, like, 3 to 4 minutes in terms of a pitch, and that should be pretty, pretty good. But That's a lot
Nick:
of info to put in 3 minutes.
Matty:
A lot of but that's like that's like the, the in terms of the access Standard
Nick:
standard pitch kind of stuff, though. Yeah.
Matty:
Yeah. Like, you you wanna make it concise. You wanna tell your story as succinctly as possible. And so we we think that's enough time. For for for reference, y common in your demo day, the max pitch length is 1 minute.
Matty:
So
Nick:
Really? I didn't realize it was that short.
Matty:
Yeah. Okay. It's very short.
Nick:
Interesting. All right. Maddie, this is this has been so great. I'm thank you so much for for coming in and answering all of this. These seemingly random questions that I've asked you.
Nick:
The I just have one more question, and then we'll we'll wrap this up since we're getting close to time. What are you most excited to see for a project submission? Like, everyone's everyone's in the blockchain space if, you know, if you especially if you work full time in blockchain, everyone gets, like, weirdly excited about certain things. Like, right now, my weird excitement is token extensions. Like, there's so many cool things you can build with token extensions, especially with, the token metadata.
Nick:
Like, I can just just start coming up with all sorts of random ideas, and I'll probably use one of those to build a hackathon project. Well, like, what are you most what are you personally most excited to to see built in the ecosystem, whether or not it's a hackathon submission? This this already could be, like, a product that is already being built now. Like, what do you think is the coolest in the ecosystem?
Matty:
To yeah. It's a tough question because timing really matters in start ups. And so I don't know. There's, like, a Marc Andreessen quote. I I forget exactly what he says, but it's like, there's no bad startup ideas.
Matty:
They're just too early.
Nick:
There's just
Matty:
bad timing? Yeah. Just bad timing. And so there's a lot of stuff that I've, you know, gotten excited about over the years in crypto that just, you know, haven't materialized because there's it's just too early. There's some infrastructure issue that's preventing it from proliferating.
Matty:
And, you know, you saw that whatever in the 2000 Web 2 bubble. So, you know, what happened, you know, a decade later where a lot of these, like, on demand services companies actually took off when they didn't in, the first iteration of the web. And so I think some things that sound good often are too early. I think, you know, luckily, we are, you know, in in a world where Solana exists, and so I think the scalability and the infrastructure issue that a lot of teams have had up until date is actually, like, solved, to a certain extent, at least getting to, you know, critical mass of of users. So that's unlocked things like Deepen.
Matty:
I think they they couldn't have sort of existed before without a high performance chain link salon. And so, you know, we have a whole deep in track that we're, you know, excited to see what people build. And then, yeah, I agree with you. Like, honestly, like, token extensions are, like, the most powerful tool, I think, in crypto right now that a lot of people aren't even aware of. And so we've already been getting a lot of like, so if you go to our platform, coliseum.org, there's a lot of people actually already starting to post ideas about, like, ways to utilize token extensions and projects.
Matty:
And so I don't know what's gonna come out of that, but I think, yeah, token extensions unlock a ton of different use cases. So, yeah, we'll see. The best ideas are also stuff that, like, you couldn't ever imagine, to be honest. Like, you know, obviously, there there was some sustainability issues with the economic design, but, like, I remember reviewing Stepin as a hackathon project. I think this is at the end of, like, 2021.
Matty:
But, like, that was the weirdest sounding product idea I've ever heard.
Nick:
That's fair.
Matty:
But it, like, you know, exploded, because it opened up sort of, like, a new market that that couldn't exist without crypto. And, like, you know, I I'm looking also you you asked me, like, what do you look for in terms of product submissions? I'm also looking for things that sound pretty weird, but that through the presentation, you're like, no. Wait. That that actually makes some sense.
Matty:
Like, that this could be actually a market that they could open up, thanks to this this product. So, yeah, we'll we'll see what comes out of Renaissance.
Nick:
Okay. Well, yeah, this I'm I'm so excited to see what people build both on, you know, on social media. And if I get a chance to to participate in some of the submission reviews, I'm I'm so excited to see what comes out of it. We're we're getting really close to time here. I'll I'll just the last thing I'll say is, if there's anything like I've asked you a bunch of questions about about Colosseum and hackathons and stuff.
Nick:
Is there anything that you want to touch on that we haven't already talked about or any last minute, chills or plugs that you wanna put out?
Matty:
No. I I really appreciate the time chatting. I love, yeah, chatting with you about all this stuff, and, yeah, I hope to involve you in the judging for Renaissance. But, yeah, I mean, if you're a builder out there, obvious plug is go sign up for Renaissance. Go register.
Matty:
You know, start a Coliseum account. Register for the hackathon. Go build. And, Yeah. We're I'm looking forward to seeing everyone's submissions.
Matty:
Yeah. Thanks for having us.
Nick:
Alright. Coliseum.org. We'll have the link for, coliseum and the blog post in the show notes. Thanks everyone for listening on this episode and we'll catch you in the next one. Bye.
