Clay Robbins: Building Colosseum, Solana’s Largest Hackathon & Accelerator with 80,000 Participants

“Sub three, though, is sort of like... Yeah, is like the, I guess, gold standard for when you cross over to kind of doing something special in the marathon. And for me, it's like just a natural extension of a lot of the endurance training that I've done. And it's funny, like, I've done a bunch of different endurance events, but had, up until this past year, never done a marathon. And when my old boss from Slow, Sam Lessin, found out that that was the case, he publicly on his podcast, like, challenged me to run a sub three marathon. And so, yeah, I put, you know, a great training block in. And just, you know, the most important thing, honestly, is like showing up to the race healthy and getting to the starting line. Because a lot of folks overtrain, they get injured, and then, you know, wheels fall off.”

“And so that helps us triage the top part that we want to review first. And from the 2,000 or so submissions that we get each hackathon, we distill that down to about 150 that we then go and interview. Each project gets two sets of team members' eyeballs on them. We have mentors, founders, other investors in the ecosystem that represent a judging panel that evaluates those projects from that subset of 150, and then that gets cut down to about 40 that are considered for category winners down to honorable mentions for the non-dilutive prize money, and then we distill it down to about 10 to 15 that we invest in at that 250k check size and then bring into the accelerator program.”

“We recently, in the last cohort, rented an office in San Francisco for two weeks of the Accelerator. And the feedback at the end of that was, hey, guys, do you have somewhere where we can just stay longer? And we looked around, like, well, we only have this for two weeks. And so, that then precipitated, hey, we need to actually go and get an office so that, you know, not only can we have people stay longer than the program itself, but I think, too, in starting something by yourself, right, or with one other person, and especially if you two are remote at the outset, like, it's a pretty lonely endeavor.”

“The thing that's changed, at least within Coliseum, is for us to be, I think that we've like, oriented more and more towards the individuals rather than the ideas. Because at the end of the day, the ideas are pretty pliable in terms of a direction a product can take. And I think early on we may be overindexed on having to have the perfect marriage of the two. And that led to like the biggest disagreement because we were not arguing over the person, but we were arguing over the idea that they had and the merits that are associated with that.”

“It becomes very clear over the course of a conversation, whether someone is looking to us for validation that their idea has merit, versus basically not caring and being like, I'm going to will this idea into the world, whether or not you guys agree with me or not. I do think that really lobbing in these sort of grenades that pierce the veil of like someone's confidence and seeing that their ability to kind of take that in, but, you know, answer the question constructively, I think is, is, you know, the thing that we see a good bit of.”

“The other thing that they taught me that is still true with what we do day to day is they frame every investment memo in what is the 10x case and what's the 100x case. Meaning the 10x case is, hey, with these dollars, you believe there's a 10x value. And usually that's around a single particular product hypothesis. And then the 100x case is like, what is the unreasonable thing that could happen with this company that in retrospect is going to be perfectly reasonable.”

“There was a company called Orr that came through. Hardhat Chat is an Anon developer that built Orr. It was a store of value that was built on top of Solana. They basically used a proof of work mechanism, but then settled to Solana. And throughout the hackathon, it actually broke Solana or was very close to breaking Solana. And so we saw this and we were like, this is one of the coolest things we've seen in a long time. Ultimately, what Hardhat landed on was like, it actually isn't proof of work, it's gamifying the experience around mining. So he actually created a consumer application that does that. And now that's one of the top revenue generating applications on Solana.”

“MetaDao is another one that has sort of wandered through the idea of being amazed under the umbrella of these different types of companies that can be governed, but this concept of futarchy, where decision markets rather than one token or one share, one vote govern sort of the direction a corporation can take. It's, for whatever reason, just because the world is weird, aligned very closely with the founder type that we like, where in order to have a token from essentially day one with your company, you have to be essentially a public market CEO where you're communicating, hey, here's what we're doing, here's why we're doing it and kind of managing the expectations of a market, but as a like pre-seed or seed stage company.”

“I think that the impact of AI and, you know, vibe coding and all of that is like, it certainly democratizes the ability to express an idea in code, and that puts a little bit more emphasis for us, again, on the individual behind that. But also, importantly, it really creates an emphasis on the execution of that idea. Because, like, I think at least the current subset of tools that people have at their disposal is quite good at getting from, like, zero to one. But then to take that to something that is, like, maintainable production-level code over the long term and, like, has a product that is truly differentiated, that's, like, the magic.”