Matty Taylor is the Co-founder of Colosseum. Previously, Matty was the Head of Growth at the Solana Foundation, where he kickstarted the Solana hackathon program in 2020. Over the past three years, that program cumulatively resulted in over 60,000 participants, 4,000 projects launched, and $600 million in venture funding for winners. Top Solana ecosystem founders from Tensor, Squads, StepN, Jito, and dozens of other leading projects got their start through Solana Foundation hackathons. Matty previously worked at 0x Labs and Square (now Block).

In this conversation, we discuss:
- Solana ecosystem
- Creating the Y-Combinator of Solana
- 3 pillars of Colosseum: hackathon, accelerator and venture fund
- Bonk DAO
- Bonk bot
- Solana hackathons
- Working at Square and 0x
- Sphere - the on-chain version of stripe
- The rise + fall + rise of Solana
- DePIN + AI on Solana
- Creating markets around social media

Colosseum
Website: www.colosseum.org
X: @ColosseumOrg
LinkedIn: Colosseum

Matty Taylor
X: @mattytay
LinkedIn: Matty Taylor

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#314: Matty Taylor, Co-founder of Colosseum, on Solana, Hackathons, and Growing the Solana Ecosystem