Clay Robbins, co-founder of Colosseum, welcome. Thanks, Peter. Good to be here. Yeah, it's been a while. We've known each other for, I don't know, a bunch of years now while you were at 0x, a while ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's blast from the past. But yeah, it's great to see you and it's awesome that we're both still playing around with Magic Internet Money. It's good. It's fun. mean, I can't leave the space. So it's just a blast. Well, you've kind of bounced around and have led some pretty neat projects, know, first at 0x, I think, and then you ventured off into the venture space with Slow and then now you're leading Colosseum. Would love for you to kind of take us through your journey into crypto. I actually don't know what your life entailed before crypto and so I'm curious about that and then we'll get into Colosseum. Sure. Yeah, it really is just, I guess the through line in my career is money movement and I think increasing forms of efficiency. So I started my career about a decade ago, a little over a decade ago now at Square, sort of in the heyday of what was known as sort of the emergence of fintech. And there I was building traditional payment systems, obviously saw the issues in, you using 1970s era file transfer technology, um, in, a world that was increasingly connected and, and, um, where money movement needed to be faster and faster and those systems just couldn't handle it. Um, and so the, the advent of Bitcoin obviously is a, uh, a massive, um, you know, sea change in, how money could move, uh, in the age of the internet. Um, and Square itself was an early adopter there in 2014. They're actually one of the first companies to build, um, Bitcoin acceptance into their e-commerce API. so that plus meeting who eventually became my co-founder at Colosseum, Matty Taylor at Square were sort of my two forays into crypto. But it took until about 2018 before I decided to leave Square and join 0x Labs where we were building early decentralized exchange infrastructure in Ethereum. Obviously, got to see the emergence of DeFi around us, but also the limitations that were a key part of Ethereum's journey in terms of being so successful that the scalability problem got pulled forward much, much sooner than I think anyone anticipated, though it was a known issue. And after about three years while I was at 0x, I spent a bunch of time angel investing. and wanted to take a shot at doing it full-time. So decided to join the team at Slow Ventures to help lead all of our early stage crypto investing at the seed stage alongside Sam Lesson. And while I was there, they were seed stage investors in Solana, obviously coming from the Ethereum ecosystem. I had known about Solana, we had thought about, you know, with things like 0xAPI, do we expand it to Solana, which was very, very early back in those days. And ultimately we decided to remain focused on the Ethereum ecosystem, but in the seed at Slow, I got to have sort of a front row view of the emergence of the Solana ecosystem. And one of the key drivers of that was this initiative that that Maddie started when he was at Solana Labs, which was the the online hackathons. These were sort of a crucible of innovation, experimentation and developer acquisition. And interestingly enough, also became a huge lever for startup creation as well, too. So, you know, the staff that that we love to cite at Colosseum is 80 % of all the venture backed startups in the Solana ecosystem have their genesis in one of these events. And so saw that happening from the seat at SLO. Maddie and I had been looking for an excuse to work together for years and years. I should note, we also worked together at 0x. And so that's what we decided to do, is come together, start sort of an operation that spun out the online hackathon component, rolled it into the Colosseum brand, and then we raised a $60 million venture fund alongside it to help back startups at the earliest stage coming out of these events. That's awesome. I remember the early days of Solada. I don't know if you knew Austin, but he was one of the community managers, I believe. And he helped now co-founding double zero. They just announced today. Yeah. holy cow. Okay, I'm actually, okay, now I'm putting the two and two together. Okay, now that's awesome. I remember those early hackathon days and I looked at like, you know, just in the Solana socials and like, you know, they would announce like X number of people have signed up and then the hackathons were amazing because they weren't just hackathons, but they were also talks and panels. It was like this online event. And I thought, okay, this is really cool what these guys are doing. And I was also surprised at how active and how many registrants there were. I just wasn't, I had come from like the ETH global world. so, and so I kind of knew that, you know, there's a lot of developers getting into the space, but I just didn't know at the time how, how, how active the Solano ecosystem was. And so that's really cool that you guys are at Colosseum and you're, you're, you're doing it. Yeah, I mean, I would say like I too grew up at the ETH Global Hackathons, which are a fantastic operation. I would say the two key differences are one, the IRL versus online components. you know, these online hackathons that were created were kind of born during the COVID era where gathering in large places with a bunch of people close together was kind of out of favor for good reason. And then two was the timing component. you know, if you're, you're familiar with these global, but they, they largely run over a weekend, right? So folks will come build for 48 hours and create sort of a flimsy MVP of a product. And usually that product kind of falls by the wayside with the passage of time, right? But, you know, obviously there are exceptions to that rule in the Ethereum ecosystem. But the way that the Solana hackathons were defined were One, was, was, you know, all online and two, it ran for six weeks as opposed to, two weeks or sorry, two days over, over a weekend. And so, it was geared towards sort of teams coming together and saying, Hey, we have a product hypothesis. We want to spend six weeks, you know, and treat it as sort of an engineering sprint to decide, Hey, is this something that we want to continue with full time or, you know, will we reload for the next one? And so it created these great sort of. episodic events for founders to come and pressure test this hypothesis and importantly compete publicly too. I mean, think the beauty of hackathons is the willingness for folks to come and say like, hey, my idea is not that precious. And I think it's something that should exist in the world, but it's also useful to pressure test it against all of the other ideas that exist in different corners of the internet. so that component is actually super cool. And, and, and so, yeah, that was, that, was one, one part of it. And then I think too, is, know, for, for years, Solana tried to sort of say, Hey, let's just like, acquired developers from the EDM ecosystem. but they realized that actually the better strategy is to try to grow the pie in terms of the, universe of developers that are building on chain is actually quite small relative to all the developers that exists in the world. And so let's. try to dip our rudder into that stream, is much larger. And hopefully some cool things can come out of it, which clearly has happened. Last night I met with Yash from SendAI and part of our conversation was how he got into crypto and he got into crypto in the Solana ecosystem almost right away. He never even dabbled in the Ethereum ecosystem. And so we explored that a little bit because I'm used to kind of the ladder where you start in Ethereum and then you kind of, or some other ecosystem you end up in Solana. Mm-hmm. but he was like in Solana from the beginning and he's still in it and he's like a warrior for Solana. And so I was just really curious about that, but it does underscore your point that, you know, it's let's just grow the pie. It's not taking developers from other ecosystems, but these are developers that are coming from the web two space. They want to get into web three. Let's get them started in the Solana space. That's really, really cool. Now, On the Colosseum site, I just want to read this and then kind of get your reaction. I kind of want to frame it in terms of like a marketing funnel. And I feel like it kind of is a little bit. So Colosseum is an organization that integrates three pillars, hackathon, accelerator, and venture fund. then in the next paragraphs, Colosseum runs the Eternal Challenge and online hackathons for the Solana Foundation and the broader ecosystem. We believe these competitions are the best mechanism for attracting and discovering the most talented crypto builders globally, which you just kind of described. I'm curious about that. Like, why do you feel that that's it's the online hackathon, the five week hackathon is like the best competition is like the best mechanism for finding the best web three builders in salon ecosystem. Yeah, mean, think competition is great because you need to have some level of confidence in the idea that you're building to... go and take the difficult step of actually joining one of these competitions, right? And I think there's a lot of power in folks being willing to be wrong publicly for whatever reason, or at least using that as a way to pressure test their idea. I the cliche of iron sharpens iron, I actually think that that's true in the context of these events. And then the online component, I think, is more, you know, it's it there is the convenience factor of All you need is an idea and internet connection to join one of them which I think really democratizes access and and and creates a real meritocratic system whereby the best ideas should in theory, know assuming that the judging panel that we have and ourselves are thoughtful in sort of the evaluation which I think we are should, should rise to the top. so, those are kind of the core tenants that, I think about is competition is great for, reinforcing, you know, idea refinement. And then, and then the, online component really provides the access such that it doesn't matter where you sit globally. you, you can, you know, go and compete, which, opens up the aperture to a broader set of ideas. I agree with that. it also kind of supports the principle, like, go where the developers are. You can't always go geographically where they are, but in an online world, mean, anyone can come. Anyone can participate. And I think that's so much more welcoming. Let's back up a little bit. You mentioned you started your kind of crypto journey at 0x in the Ethereum ecosystem. I'm curious to hear from you on kind of like the... like how you got into the Solana ecosystem and kind of your thoughts on the differences between the two ecosystems. And I just wanna kind of point out really quick, I met with Jill Gunter last week and we had a pretty good, I think she was at slow with you. We had a good conversation around like the differences that she sees and she gave this analogy of like the the cathedral and the bazaar. And I don't know if I totally buy into that analogy because I don't know, I haven't totally reflected on it, but it sounds great. And my experience with both is that both are kind of a cathedral and a bazaar anyway. And so it's not really either or. But I'm curious to see your kind of how you got into the Solano ecosystem. You mentioned that you first got introduced to it while you were at SLO, but I guess what made you kind of jump into it like head first and like this is where you're gonna kind of spend your time. Yeah, no, mean, Jill's a great perspective on it. And hilariously, we live relatively close to each other and catch up on this pretty frequently where obviously she at Espresso is working to connect a lot of the disparate components of the Ethereum ecosystem today. And then we're a coordinating mechanism for Solana. So we love to compare notes on sort of what's happening. And so that's awesome that she was on. I think that my introduction to it, was a few fold. mean, one of the interesting things is even in the original implementation of 0x, the ideas around the limitations of Ethereum were built into the original framework. It was a central limited order book. You had off-chain relay with on-chain settlement. And so that design mechanism in and of itself is indicative of the limitations around gas costs being untenable in the context of submitting orders, canceling orders, all the things that a traditional market maker would do when providing liquidity on an order book. so one of the first things that I saw in the slanted ecosystem was you could have fully on-chain order books that could exist in earnest without those limitations. And so that to me was novel. I think more broadly, the The thing that was interesting to see over the time at Slow was the way in which the developer ecosystem had gone through sort of this crucible of crisis, right, with sort of the collapse around FTX, the 2222 sort of fallout, and has reemerged with sort of a core nucleus of developer culture and, you know, PTSD and scars to show similar to what Ethereum has gone through. But if I were to compare the key differences today and look like when we started Colosseum, we originally asked ourselves the question of, we do this as a hackathon platform for all of crypto broadly? the decision that we came to was, hey, that's a great vision long, long term. But what we saw was especially if you take sort of the venture fund perspective of how do you underwrite like a team that's building on optimism versus Arbitrum versus blast versus Binance Smart Chain versus Avalanche versus Solana, et cetera. Like it just became really, really difficult to form a cogent strategy in terms of the fund. And two, you know, if you're building this platform, you want to be able to build it around a playbook that, you know, you feel confident in that you could replicate long-term. so. for us, you know, the combination of Maddie's background at the Salana foundation and the fact that the cost of experimentation candidly for, you know, this long tail of developers is so low. I think was, was ultimately what, what led us, us to this decision of like, Hey, let's focus on Salana because we think that there is, you know, an asymmetric opportunity, especially circa early 23, right? With soul at, you know,$13, $14 when we kind of decided to leave our jobs and do this in earnest. That was certainly not a consensus opinion. And so I think that that was one of the key drivers. two is, I spend a lot of time talking to developers. And one of the things that I hear a ton, especially at the application layer, which we have sort of a long standing thesis that works sort of on the... at the dawn of the application era in crypto. And if you think about sort of the entry point for developers into building on chain, right? The decisions that you have to make in terms of building in the Ethereum ecosystem are like, what L2 do you build on? And that decision is a weighty one because it defines sort of the trajectory of everything from the security model that you're going to have to come up with. the ecosystem that you're going to have to get support from, the relative competition to other chains and their, their sort of roadmaps and the trade-offs, right. And, and so, you know, when you're just trying to build a simple, you know, call it swap interface or whatever, that's a lot to have to think about prior to sort of going and building on, on one of these L2s. And, know, that's where sort of the, the monolithic architecture of, of Solana is quite, you know, useful is that you can abstract a lot of that to sort of the main chain. And it's really just go build something novel and interesting that people want to use at the application layer and, and all else is sort of handled. and, know, we, I think that the, the, that is a very, basic and, you know, in some ways, mercenary way to view the world in terms of, of how sort of the developer landscape has, it currently sits, but I think it's, it's apt in terms of like, You don't want, you know, it's in the same way of like application developers today in traditional web to don't build with on-prem databases. They just use the cloud. Right. And so, I think the less that you can, you know, introduce this, this cognitive burden in terms of, application development, the faster, you know, the pace of innovation will go cost of experimentation is lower. And hopefully that nets to, to, you know, more interesting products that people want to use being built. Yeah, I agree. As I reflect on the differences between, based on my experience, and my experience is limited, but I have spent a lot of time with developers. It feels like there's a class of developers that are more attracted to the Ethereum ecosystem because there's less handholding. It's more of infra-focused, highly technical, which is... not to say developers in the Solana space aren't, but what I see in the Solana space is that developers are really interested in building kind of consumer apps or apps that are like very, close to the end user. Whereas on the Ethereum side, it's, still kind of very kind of bottom of the stack kind of developer where they're very interested more in infrastructure. That's kind of what I see a lot. And And because the Solana developers, they're interested in just building novel, interesting apps at the consumer level. It's like the, what we're seeing is like a lot of really neat, I think innovation that you don't, that we haven't seen really on the Ethereum space because people are still, developers are still kind of stuck on like infrastructure kind of questions. And what that tells me is that it's attracting Each ecosystem is attracting the type of developer that is kind of needed at that time. Which again underscores the point of, it's like the ecosystem is growing. Like the pie is growing because Solon is attracting developers that want to build consumer apps. And that's actually what it's really, really good at. Whereas on the Ethereum side, they're still kind of stuck on the infrastructure side, which is fine. because that's kind of like by choice in a lot of ways. But a lot of that cognitive burden has trade-offs. Is that kind of how you see it a little bit? Yeah, I think that your point around the developer ecosystem is a reflection of the problems of the moment in the ecosystem is I think an apt one, right? Where today, you know, the majority of the Ethereum ecosystem isn't yet. ready for scaled applications to exist in earnest. so scalability and infrastructure layer problems are the things that need to be solved. And so I think that's correct. I would say though to pick on Solana maybe a little bit is one of the things that Ethereum has done a fantastic job around is they have an incredible culture around research. that slow sort of methodical academic exercise of, you know, trying to find optimal solutions for the problems that the network faces. And that exists in Solana to some degree, though it is far more informal and much less a part of sort of the developer culture. I do think that, you know, the counter to that is that they're quite fast at iteration and implementations on the main chain. that, don't let, you know, the enemy of perfect or good be, be perfect. and so, that, that component of it, I think is, is still, something that Solana can, can improve on because you, you need continued experimentation on the main chain, in order to, you know, maintain that, differentiation, right? And so things like fire dancer are sort of. a long standing effort that the foundation has put a lot of time and effort and resources behind that hopefully can be a net new unlock that sort of maintains the advantage around speed and cost and scalability. so there is some of that, but it's, I would say it's far less academic, which I do think that some of that is healthy to have as part of the developer culture. Yeah, and I think culturally leaning towards pragmatism, I think is really, really healthy. Because there's, you on the one hand, if it's like, it's if it's if the ecosystem is like over index on the research side, it just doesn't produce enough like, I guess, interest and excitement and kind of evangelism that you kind of see on the Solana side. On the Solana side, it's like there's just a lot of pragmatism. It's like practical, meritocratic. based on competition. These are kind of things that like values that I can relate to and I support and I see that in the Solana ecosystem and you're seeing in these applications that are just highly scalable applications with tons and tons of users and transactions that I mean, it's just very impressive what's going on. Let's switch to Colosseum. In my mind, I kind of frame I frame almost everything as a funnel, I guess, but it feels like there's the hackathon piece and then there's the accelerator and then the venture fund. Do you view Colosseum as a funnel like that or am I oversimplifying? No, I mean, this is one of the things that I've convinced myself I get to do two things at once, which is, you know, oftentimes in, in venture and in startups, right. You kind of have to choose a mode with which you're within, which you're operating. So you're either, you know, a builder and an operator, or you are an investor and those tend to be mutually exclusive, but We really try to treat sort of the Colosseum platform and the hackathons themselves as a product. And so that to me gives me the opportunity every day with Maddie and Nate and the rest of the team to build and improve that product. to your point, improve the funnel such that the quality of talent that is being attracted into these events. The aperture through which we can acquire folks is larger and larger every time we run one. And to the experience for people coming in is improved such that there is less and less drop-off between like, hey, I click the button to start building and I actually get through to submission. so we try to invest up and down the stack in terms of that process. then the fund itself obviously has the... traditional investment underwriting components to it that we care a lot about. We try to be the first hire to anyone that we give money to and bring into the accelerator program. And hopefully that creates a more efficient on-ramp for teams to get from idea to implementation to actually going and deciding, I can quit my full-time job to go do this in earnest. so that's a lot of how we think about it. Funnels, perfect description. I love it because as an entrepreneur, mean, it's like, have so many things on your mind, right? It's like, should I leave my comfortable day job to like become an entrepreneur? And if I do that, like, do I have enough support in terms of like building this product on marketing the product, accounting operations? Like there's just so much going on and it feels like Colosseum is like kind of a, like a warm welcoming place that can help you help the entrepreneur. kind of get going so that they can focus on building something. Yeah, I just on that point, just briefly, like it is hilarious. The amount of time that I've spent, especially in like the first two weeks of, you know, after the hackathon and we've, you know, had teams accept offers and see accelerated program that I spend around like entity formation, bank accounts, and, and just the basic, basic building blocks of company building. it's, it's, it's great. but, but it is, is there's a lot of opportunity for, for making that, that, that experience better, which we're trying to do in certain parts. but, but yeah. And the fact that you're there helping the entrepreneur navigate through all of that, which is probably new for a lot of them. It's like, what a huge burden lifted off their shoulders so that they can focus on building something. So that's a big value add. How many hackathons has Colosseum, I guess, had now? So we've run two and had two full cohorts and a demo day on the other side of that eight week accelerator program that takes place on the back of the six week hackathon. And you read it in, I think, the paragraph description, but we also recently launched this perpetual hackathon called Eternal, where one of the things that we were seeing over the last year was that The hackathons themselves are this like very monolithic, episodic event that people have to plan around to, you know, come in and build because the rules state that you can't have, you know, fully built out product when you show up to the event, you can spend a little bit time ahead of it. allow for some leeway there, but we try to keep it honest and fair in the context of the types of products that can be considered for, in the judging process. But Eternal was born out of this idea of The inspiration and the sort of lightning in a bottle moment of starting a company can't be bounded by, you know, a specific set of six week periods during the year. And so what we created was this experience of a self-driven hackathon. That's a little bit shorter. It's four weeks. You come in and within the platform, you can sort of click a button. starts this cool countdown timer over the period of four weeks. And folks can use that as sort of the impetus for creating an engineering sprint with a product and try to bring it to fruition. And then we'll review those on a rolling basis and with the same judging criteria and then a select few of those will come into the accelerator program as well. So we've had two full ones and then I guess we could say we have an always on hackathon running now as well. That's cool. Can you share with us any success stories that you've found in the two hackathons that you guys have had? Yeah, mean, early on, there are a few that even during the course of the hackathon caught our attention. One is a company called Orr that is basically taking the concept of proof of work for the distribution of tokens and then outsourcing the security model to proof of stake on Solana. And through that process of mining or with contributing compute to earn the tokens, they during the hackathon started to create a fair bit of congestion on the network. And so if you want to use that as a barometer for success, that's probably in terms of on-chain activity, the one that we've seen the most of. And then, mean, look, there's... mainnet or test? Yeah, wow. so, you know, we, we framed the accelerator program as, we can help you accelerate from, from test net to main net in a really efficient manner and get embedded into the ecosystem. But hard hat, who's the, the, the developer, and founder of, of, or, said, you know what, I'm just going to ship it to main net and, and see what happens. And the resulting product was, was, Yeah, definitely one that caught the attention of everyone that was looking at the on-chain data, that's for sure. I bet everyone's like, wait, what's this? What's happening? That's awesome. But yeah, mean, the way that we, you we've made almost 25 investments so far and so, and everyone's at a different stage, right? Where some, we're building for six weeks and said, hey, look, like I want to spend some more time on sort of product refinement before I come to Mainnet. And then some have, you know, gone on and raised follow-on funding and are in, you know, the process of building and scaling a team. And each has its own sort of, vertical within which they're building. So we define in the hackathon five to seven different categories that people submit towards with everything from DeFi to gaming to infrastructure. And so we can go up and down the stack of those and I can pick out teams. But yeah, no one has yet eclipsed the on-chain activity, at least if that's the barometer for success of Oar. That's cool. My conversation with Yash last night about Send AI, we talked quite about the Solana agent kit and how that's now like a public good for the Solana ecosystem. Do you envision like one of the categories being an AI or maybe you have already? Yeah, so we ran a white labeled hackathon with the foundation prior to starting Colosseum where we basically use sort of the MVP of the platform. And within that one, we actually did have an AI category. It was probably too early, given how quickly the tools associated with it have progressed. And so with this next one, we are going to have an AI category. But the interesting thing is like, I don't think that AI in and of itself is a mode associated with a company. I think that it's going to weave its way into everything. If you're not using AI to pressure test the security associated with a D5 primitive that you're bringing to main net, what are you doing? It's 2025. We have these things now. And so I do think that there are novel consumer and developer experiences that will have AI as maybe a feature of the product. It's not in and of itself a differentiator in my opinion. Have you had any, know, looking at the cohort of developers that have joined the two hackathons that you guys have sponsored, have you been surprised by some of the people's backgrounds? You know, whether it's, I don't know, maybe they came from a different industry or maybe they're totally brand new developers, yet they succeeded in the hackathon. Have you had any aha moments like that? Yeah. I mean, this is one of those things where you build something and you, you hope people use it in a certain way. And then when they do and do it in in a much more scaled version of what you had previously imagined, it's, it's pretty cool. like the platform itself now has, almost 40,000 registered developer profiles across, I think it's like a hundred and 190 countries or something like that. so we've got like, a fair bit of global coverage. so within that, like that in and of itself is cool. And then in the hackathons themselves, we see everything from high schoolers in Malaysia that are doing a class project as part of their submission for their CS class through to multiple time founders that are using it as, again, like an engineering sprint to go pressure test an idea. founder from our first cohort, a guy named Ryan, started this company called MeshMap, which is a deep-in network that is focused on generating these really high-fidelity AR maps so that for everything from games to in-person experiences, you have high-fidelity data that you can use for crafting those. But he joined one of the hackathons with this idea. And as we were getting into interviewing him for the accelerator, we learned that he previously had built a company called Jump Bikes, where if you were living in San Francisco circa 2014 to 2018, you were definitely on one of them. was a bike sharing company that sold to Uber for something like $200 million. And so to have that... you know, as sort of one end of the spectrum. And then you have, you know, high schoolers doing class projects on the other. It's, it's, it's really a broad spectrum, which, you know, I think to me is, is an important characteristic of one of the things that, you know, the hackathon serves as, which is as a public good, right? It's, it's, you know, free and not gated to, come and join and, and, and build in, one of these things, which I think, you know, whether it's your first on chain product or you know, your second startup, that after an ex a successful exit, like you can come and do it. which, which I think is, is, a really special component of it. Now, for something like this to be successful, the onboarding tools for developers, mean, they have to be really, really good so that they can join a hackathon and then be able to have all the docs and libraries available. And they could just search on their own and be able to start building with very little kind of handholding. Was that a, I guess, as you guys were thinking and designing Colosseum, was that a concern at all in that? that maybe the docs were not ready or you were already comfortable that Solana had its kind of docs in order. Now, go ahead. Yeah, I was gonna say, mean, yes. And the developer experience can always be improved. Even Stripe, just sort of what many people cite as like the pinnacle of easy developer experiences are continuously investing to improve the products and the DevEx and the docs associated with it. And I think there's a saying, amongst the developer community around building on Solana is you have to chew a little bit of glass to do it. Right. And so there, it is a barrier to entry, but I think that it's also a great filtration mechanism in terms of yes, it is a democratized in terms of the access point, but to get through the process of development, I think does show some level of technical confidence. Now, you know, sitting where we are today and the state of these sort natural language coding tools that abstract this even further for folks, I do think that that barrier is gonna continue to get lower and lower, which in some ways is a good thing because it broadens the scope of experimentation and the types of ideas that can be brought to fruition, but it does make our jobs. harder to some degree in terms of being able to evaluate the talent associated with at least the technical implementation of it. Now you need both sides, right? You need the technical implementation, but you also need the business sense of how do you drive distribution once this thing exists in the world and what is the novel value proposition and user experience that you're creating. So you need both. But. I do think that that artificial barrier is lowering with every passing day as these tools get better. Yeah, I guess you want kind of a good balance between you want the developer experience, you want it onboarding easy, but not too easy. Because as you said, a filtration mechanism that helps you kind of filter out, They were willing enough to do the research on their own to figure this out. And that tells you a little bit about the resiliency that's available in the developer. Let's talk about how are you marketing? the number of developers in the Colosseum database or in the Colosseum kind of registration is huge. How are you finding these developers and how are you, I guess, marketing so that you can gross membership and subscriptions and entrance? Yeah, I mean, I think that the, have been really fortunate to have great partners in the Solana Foundation in so far as we run the official online hackathons for the foundation. And so they have a massive megaphone that, you know, has already been, you know, coordinating developers for years and years. so that, that can't be discounted at all in terms of the impact from a marketing perspective. And then even within specific markets, we have a partnership with a group called Super Team that has specific country leads whose remit is to drive developer education and acquisition in particular markets. And our hackathons are one of the center points of that strategy. Because if you get people building, get them into a hackathon, they're their likelihood to stay and continue experimenting is quite important. And I would say too, as a side note, I think failure is a feature as part of this, where if you come in and you don't win one of the events, I think that the people that come back for a second or third or fourth event actually are going through that process of winding through the idea maze or multiple idea mazes to land on something that that is truly novel, which I think is awesome and sort of a net benefit to Solana that compounds over time, the more people that come through. But then I think more broadly, like, Matty on the team has an incredible finger on the pulse of, I think, the zeitgeist within crypto. Each of the hackathons that we run have their own theme and flavor that we try to match with sort of the moment of the market and sort of the vibe. And so I think that, that, you know, that can't be discounted either in terms of creating a unique experience every time. So it's not just like, you know, if I were in charge, it was, it would be like Colosseum hackathon two and Colosseum hackathon three, but to actually go through the effort of like refreshing the brand for each such that it makes it feel like people have an affinity for each event. And people talk about, Hey, when I participated in, you know, radar versus Renaissance versus if you go back to sort of the Solana events, there's one called Grizzly Thon that occurred in the middle of the bear market, right? And so it makes them accessible. It makes them more fun. And I think that that's an important component just in terms of not making it feel like a chore and making it have a little bit of character to it and personality to it separate and apart from sort of the development experience. It makes it fun, memorable, and something to talk about. And that's really cool. Now, when you structure these hackathons, since they're online, are you able to focus on a specific geography or no? I mean, no, that our hope is that people from all corners of the globe come. and, know, even one of the interesting things that we've seen, as, part of this is the, the AI translation tools have gotten so, so good that you have teams that are coming to these events that don't speak a word of English, that are able to put together a really polished presentation as part of their submission that is in English. but then you meet with the teams and, it's, it's, you know, total language barrier that, that you have to work with through translation to kind of get to, some of the answers to questions. And so, yeah, for us, the geography is, is not, terribly important. We do have some limitations around, like, if we are going to pay out prizes, it can't go to sanctioned countries, et cetera, et cetera, which like, that's, that's, you know, unfortunate, but, but it's, it's, you know, we have to comply there, but, but yeah, beyond that. No specific geography. I was just curious because we're seeing a lot of kind of in Southeast Asia, a lot of gaming projects, right? Or developers that are interested in gaming. And almost every project I know wants to have some kind of presence within Korea, but it's like kind of hard. And so I'm curious to know if you're able to focus specific hackathon cohorts from like specific regions, because that would be a value add, I think, too. I'm thinking... kind of top of mind right now just because I met with a project that's very interested in entering Korea and growing a community in Korea and they're having a hard time. Yeah, I mean, the we've unwritten teams and obviously had participants from from every major continent and geography. think, you know, part of market entry that's difficult with Korea is the centralized exchange infrastructure and onboarding is so gated to locals that there's there's that component that's that's quite difficult for any sort of custodial product. But then to Yeah, there's there's, you know, the community and marketing angle that I think is difficult to do unless you have sort of the underground knowledge to enter the market. so, you know, sweeping generalization, but I do think that if you are going to expand there, you you either need to have started there or you're going to need to hire someone that has the underground knowledge. I don't think that there's sort of a carbon copy of a market entry plan for there. Yeah. So going back to Colosseum, so as you, now I'm thinking like end to end, you know, framing as a funnel, you you find the developer, through the hackathons, you find developers that are just like, just, you know, amazing that they, and then they, they win or they enter in the accelerator and then they eventually get funded. Mm-hmm. But that's kind of almost, these are like different milestones in the end-to-end journey of kind of starting a project or a company. Once they've been funded, like what's the role of Colosseum at that stage? Do you help them with like helping them grow their community? I guess what happens at that point? Yeah, so we have a stable of mentors that are represented by everything from some of the most successful founders in the ecosystem to Raj and Toli to developer advocates and service providers within the ecosystem such that if you join the Accelerator program, you will be embedded within the Solana ecosystem from day one. And that can take the form of a million different things, whether it's like, getting better, cheaper access to RPC service providers so that your platform is more performant to on ramps, to legal services. And then obviously, distribution is a huge component of it. And so within that, the mentor network and also the cohorts themselves are great mechanisms for finding your first customers if you're a developer-focused product or If you're a consumer facing product, many of the mentors themselves and us on the Colosseum team are power users of many of the products on chain today. And so it's a great mechanism for product feedback and refinement. And then a step later is if you're a developer focused product, the hackathons themselves are an incredible distribution mechanism where you have tens of thousands of developers that are showing up. pressure testing the infrastructure and especially if you have a self-service component, you can basically write a bunch of lottery tickets on the next big thing coming from someone that happened to test out your product or piece of infrastructure in one of our events. And so that can't be discounted either in terms of the perspective impact long-term. And so... That is that compounding benefit of the mentor network and the distribution within that mentor network, the hackathons themselves. And then I the last thing I would note is that the network of investors that look to us as sort of one of the main on ramps for startups into the broader venture ecosystem coming out of Solana. And that I think has only improved over time. And I think we have a great relationship with that ecosystem too, because the reality is that while I would love for every company to just raise 250K and be a single developer that becomes a multi-billion dollar company, and that may happen. I wouldn't be surprised if that happened out of one of our events. The reality is you probably need a bit more capital and support and... types of resources on your cap table to help with every stage of a company's life cycle. And so that's where follow-on investors are extremely important in creating that continuity. It sounds like, know, of everything you've described and from what I've learned, you've created like an end-to-end flywheel where, you you find talent, they enter this hackathon, and then they move on down the funnel in terms of accelerator and then venture funding, and then, you know, continued support. That's an amazing thing that you guys at Colosseum have built. And kudos to you and the team. What can we expect in the next little while and I guess what can you share with the audience in terms of like how they could learn more or maybe even get involved if a developer is listening? Yeah. So I mean, Colosseum.org is, the website. We actually have the.com as well too. And I think we'll be rolling over over to that soon. Um, so, so that's probably the, the primary place to learn, um, to learn more. Um, and then upcoming, you know, I think that we are somewhat metronome like in, in so far as we have sort of the, the set events that we're going to run throughout the year. We have eternal, that's sort of the perpetual. opportunity to go and start some, you know, the next big thing on chain. And then we have the accelerator program and demo day is sort of the core components of what comprise the year for us. But I do think that one of the things that we're spending a lot of time on is continuing to invest in the platform itself to improve things like we have a co-founder matching tool today that exists on the platform. It's good, but not great. And I think that, you know, to comprise an initial founding team, oftentimes you have to match complementary skill sets. And if that's not in your direct network, having our platform be a mechanism for that serendipity of discovery and allowing people on the internet to collaborate for a particular product, I think is extremely important in terms of ensuring that the products and the ideas that are coming into these events have the best opportunity for success. and in terms of the experiment that's being run. so I think that's one important thing that we continue to invest in is just improving the ways in which we can create continuity and connection within the platform. Because that only goes to benefit the fund, obviously, which is part of our remit, but then the ecosystem more broadly, because it facilitates higher quality experimentation happening on chain. You know, one thing I thought about but didn't say, but now just was reminded of it as you were describing the co-founder matching tool. You know, in in real world hackathons, you you spend many, many hours just finding your team, finding like your, not co-founder necessarily, but the team that you're going to build this application with. And then you brainstorm like, what should we build? And it's like hours before you actually start doing anything. Mm-hmm. And that's like that kind of like, I consider that kind of like a time trap because you only have a weekend and a real, real hackathon. And so if you can save several hours and avoid all of that and just get to start building, that could be a huge competitive advantage for the team. And that you guys have a, you you're developing or improving the, this co-founder matching tool, you know, kind of speaks to that, that, you know, you want to be able to save these teams their time, some time. Mm-hmm. and help them find their co-founders and team members. And that's really cool. Yeah, no, I agree. I think too, like starting a company and, taking, especially taking venture capital on the, on the other side of making that decision, like that's a big step to take. so, you know, the more that we can facilitate, time spent with, you know, team members that some of whom maybe you hadn't worked with previously, to refine that relationship such that like you can. have confidence in making the decision of, if I'm going to go and spend the next three, five, 10, 15 years of my life building, is this the person that I want to do it with? I think that that's really an important component of the platform and the experience that we're trying to create, because it is an important decision that folks have to make. No, I agree. We're going to share all the URLs and links and the show notes. Clay, thank you so much for spending time with us. you guys have built an amazing company and a huge service to the Solana ecosystem. Thank you. Yep, I appreciate it, Peter. Thanks for having me.