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

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (0:01)
You're now plugged in to The Delphi Podcast. Hey, everyone, welcome back to The Delphi Podcast. Today, I'm thrilled to be in person in San Francisco with Clay, one of the founders of Coliseum. I came here yesterday, was blown away and said, let's do a podcast. So here we are. So thanks for coming up.

**Clay Robbins** (0:19)
It's best. It's the first podcast from our new office here in San Francisco.

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (0:22)
I wish I could pan just to show everyone.

**Clay Robbins** (0:24)
Yeah, it's a claim.

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (0:25)
I'm so jealous. There's so many open seats, breakout rooms. It looks great.

**Clay Robbins** (0:29)
Yeah. Very empty right now though. Well, it won't be soon. Yeah.

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (0:32)
You'll be home soon.

**Clay Robbins** (0:33)
Yeah. Yeah.

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (0:34)
So the numbers around Coliseum are nuts. I wrote them down. Eighty thousand builders have applied, 6,500 products launched, and $700 million raised by products that have been through your hackathon.

**Clay Robbins** (0:49)
Yeah.

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (0:49)
That's crazy.

**Clay Robbins** (0:50)
Yeah. I mean, it's one of those things where when we started out and you're at effectively zero, it's wild to think about what it could become. But it turns out that there's a lot of excited people to build things on chain that are in different corners of the Internet across the world. So it's a lot of fun. And we wouldn't be anything without the folks that came and showed up and built. And so it's a good start. We got a lot more to do still though. Nice.

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (1:17)
We're going to dive into it, but I want to open with a better question, more fun question. So I asked Michael Rinco, used to be at Delphi, now at Coliseum, what to ask you. And his first question was, how do you run sub two hour marathons? I thought that was a great one.

**Clay Robbins** (1:30)
Yeah, I mean, sub two would be better from the world record. Sub three, though, is sort of like...

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (1:35)
Probably what he meant.

**Clay Robbins** (1:36)
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 I think a lot of the sort of collective knowledge that I learned from endurance sports, you know, leading into that were a huge factor in being able to do it. 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... Where did you do it? So I did three marathons last year. First one was in Oakland. And then I did San Francisco, which was brutal, but went well. And then I finally did New York. And I went sub-three in both Oakland and New York.

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (2:50)
That's crazy. What is that? What's pace per mile on that?

**Clay Robbins** (2:53)
That's like 651, I think, is the target pace.

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (2:57)
That's like if I'm sprinting for like two minutes.

**Clay Robbins** (3:00)
Yeah, well, but then you go and like hop on a treadmill and try to do what Elliot Kipchoge or any other professionals do. And that is true sprinting. It's nuts.

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (3:08)
So tell me a bit about Coliseum. I share the stats. I think everybody knows a lot about you as Solana's leading accelerator, hackathon, fund. Maybe let's start with, we'll start wherever you'd like.

**Clay Robbins** (3:21)
Yeah, I mean, so we run the world's largest online hackathons, online being an important component of that. And, you know, the question when you're putting together a venture fund and the fund strategy is like, what's your differentiation in sourcing? And for us, it is those hackathons where we're fundamentally believe that people coming in, competing publicly without regard for an idea being too precious and doing so on a global scale. Plus the fact that when you submit to Coliseum, you submit everything from your GitHub repo all the way through to a three minute pitch. It really forces people to constrain the type of product that they're building originally, but also demonstrate their technical capacity to build and how they tell the story about the product. And so for us, it's a great way to screen for talent that wants to come and build a real product that makes a dent in the world. And so that's how we source all of the companies that we bring into the accelerator program. But it's early, right? These things run for six weeks and people treat it like an injuring sprint or an epic to kind of get a product that maybe is deployed on test net but still has a bunch that's left to do from either like a security and audit standpoint, a go-to-market standpoint, a team construction standpoint. And so that's where the sort of second half of Coliseum comes in, which is the accelerator program where we provide a bit of dilutive capital, 250k invested in the company and then spend eight weeks with the teams, some of whom will be here next week for the next program. And then ultimately, that culminates in a demo day where investors from across the ecosystem who work with closely come and see what folks have built. And in some cases, people don't need to raise additional capital because crypto is quite capital efficient in certain sects.