Alliance 🛠 How to Find a Winning Idea and Team in Crypto

foreign [Music] if you're a builder I promise this will be the best 20 minutes of your next three days because we've worked with over 150 startups in the last three years many of which are the who's who of crypto at the earlier stage so we learned a lot of lessons and we're going to distill all these lessons with you uh in the next 20 minutes so we've worked with for example synthetics Xerox kyber tensor step hand at the earlier stage and of of course many failures and so we're going to share some of the key ingredients for success and failures with you guys in the next 20 minutes so we're going to talk about today how to find a winning idea and also winning team in crypto so myself Imran where Partners online style will be giving presentation for about five minutes each so how to find the winning idea in crypto um one of the best ways to build a winning ID to find a winning idea in crypto is to build something that you yourself want to use and that should be fairly intuitive I'll explain why why that's the case because and this is not really unique to crypto by the way building a startup is almost like finding a secret and it takes a long time to find that secret it takes a lot of really good intuition into the market that you're operating in and guess what if you are the user of your own product you're going to have the best intuition about the market that you're operating in fairly intuitive um I'll give you an example uh tensor which is now the number one nft Marketplace on Solano we supported them at the earlier stage those guys when they apply to a line cell they were building something completely different they were building a some random nft pricing protocol uh obviously we knew it was not going to work but these guys have been in Solana inductees for two years before they applied and so they really and they were degents themselves they were inactive Traders themselves So eventually they built they had this idea of building it in Ft Marketplace for pro Traders such as themselves and every time I talked to them every time they talk to us about a new feature a new product idea it's always about oh would I want to use this myself and that's always one of the really great ways likely ways for you to find a good idea and this is not just unique to crypto it's everywhere in startups so that's one the second way um to build um to find a really a winning idea in crypto and unfortunately this is gonna sound pretty discouraging because the way to find winning ideas is to be in the space for long enough at the time and really focus on the space full time day in day out for a long period of time and that usually takes one to two years at least and why is that the case well that is the case because crypto is such a counter-intuitive space right I'll give you some of the things in crypto that are counter counterintuitive that even web 2 people don't really appreciate so for example in crypto if you build decentralized applications you're not supposed to move fast and breakthroughs because crypto handles money so if you move fast and break things you can lose for good you're going to lose your reputation for good so that's one of the counter-intuitive things um that crypto is about so and it takes a long time to appreciate these things so being in crypto for long enough of the time will help unfortunately a lot of Founders coming from web 2 especially in the bear Market they pivot back into web 2 including AI or whatever or whatever the latest hype cycle is they pivot back right before the critical juncture of that one or two years right before the time they find that secret that I was talking about and you don't want to do that you want to stick to crypto for at least enough time for you to develop the intuition the next way to find a winning idea is to explore uh the intersection of your previous domain uh of expertise and crypto this one should be also fairly intuitive helium is a very good example if you guys know helium that's the uh decentralized HubSpot Network and the founder Amir he spanned almost a decade in network engineering and at some point uh he was like maybe I can apply the idea of Bitcoin this decentralized compute using tokens to internalize people to participate in the network and so that's how she figured out the idea of of or the original idea of helium and so if you come from for example uh I don't know Imaging like uh aerial Imaging right like drones or whatever you can think about maybe using drones to capture images uh in a decentralized network and build some sort of Google Earth kind of product for example um think about some of the ways in which crypto could potentially help with your existing domain of expertise so these are some of the ways to find winning ideas now what are some of the ways not to find winning ideas and this will sound really controversial talking to users is actually usually not the way to find the winning idea I'm not saying you should not talk to users talented users is absolutely critical but some of the best ideas I've seen they always come from organically come from their intuition intuition is is where the best ideas come from almost all the time you should talk to users once you have the product out and learn why people do or do not use the product again this touches on the three points that I brought up before especially the second point of being in crypto for a long time and develop the intuition so talking to users counter-intuitively is usually of course there's always exceptions but usually it's not the the best way where the best ideas come about and the next one is uh reading thesis that VCS put out uh some of you are laughing because you do that I can tell you do that and I'll tell you why this is not a good idea there's a couple reasons um one is every time you read a thesis that VCS put out chances are especially the the super famous popular VCS on crypto Twitter chances are 10 000 other people read the same thing and I know this for a fact because every time some someone I don't know Kyle samani or Paradigm or whatever every time they put out a thesis we receive a bunch of applications to allow yourself that are building the exact same thing and this is a really bad idea because if you just decide to build something because BCS think it's a good idea you don't fully understand again like you don't have the intuition the Deep intuition as to what why this product matters and you're competing with 10 000 other applications and this is why it's not a good idea to read uh to use this VC what vs put on on Twitter as a uh the the the the key determining factor for why you want to build a product so uh very straightforward uh I'll pass it over to to Imran to talk about how to find uh the best teammates to work together on hi guys so the next five to ten minutes I'm gonna help you think about how to find the right co-founder or to hire a first like employee in your company but primarily this is about finding your first co-founder and the reason why I think this is important is because primarily in hackathons when people are meeting with others just to figure out an idea they typically may have no idea that they may have a lightning the bottle moment and when they do then that co-founder is the co-founder for the rest of your life right so what I want you to do is to within the next five to ten minutes uh I'm gonna help you assess who is going to be the best team member for you to work with for the next 10 years and the first is the why the what and Synergy can you align on ideas quickly is like the number one example like if you were to meet with someone and you were ideating on a certain idea that you want to hack on are you able to idate like smoothly with the person that you're talking to um can you support each other through stress so an example of this is being able to under understand if or if not they can help you with the stress and the situations that you can go through and number three is high agency does that person that you're working with have high agency can they take on tasks and know that they can fulfill those tasks so those are some of the things that I would look for when you're looking for a person that you want to hack with and so sometimes when we get uh applications with an alliance we see solo Founders that apply and there's nothing wrong with solo Founders there's many successful uh solo Founders that have succeeded but an interesting story I want to like bring up to you was uh the story of Paul Graham at YC and Drew Houston of Dropbox Drew Houston actually applied to YC two times and he was denied and the reason why he was denied to the program was the fact that he was just a solo co-founder and Drew asked Paul like why can't I just you know build this idea that I had which was dropbox at the time and Paul grab says Paul Graf specifically said is you need moral support and you need someone that can have synergistic value so that you can focus on one area of growth while the other person can focus on the other uh similar with coinbase so you had Fred and Brian and others in the space you need moral support you need someone that can understand you and you need someone that can help ideate throughout the process and so when when you think about looking for a co-founder or a hacker what what are the things that you'd want to look for well there's two ways that you can go about it the first way is are you a domain expert yourself are you do you have a secret that no one else does about the expertise that you have a clear example is what Chao just said earlier with the intersection of domain expertise in crypto if you have that domain expertise then you may want someone that can um you know help you with business and growth let's say you are a business and growth lead um then maybe you'd want someone that has a very deep technical background or a secret that they know that can help support the the project that you're working on and and I think this is a very clear important like message I want to give you guys is that you have to do this early on because if you don't then there is going to be like a lot of overlap and then stress and then it could lead to things that you don't want it to go through so finding that early on is going to be very very important for you uh two is and I think this is the second reason why most Founders break up very early on is the fact that stress is a very you know it's going to happen right you're going to work 80 to 100 hours a week and stress is going to ultimately make or break a startup that's like hands down and so what you want to look for when you're looking through you know the folks that are in this room or outside this room is can they deal with stress do they have emotional High emotional intelligence or EQ and the reason why I'm bringing all this up is because eventually towards the end of this presentation I'm going to give you a five minute test that you could take and use this test to find others and ask specific questions within five minutes to find out if they're a good match for you or not so there's a reason for the whole uh some of the questions I'm bringing up here the third is do they compliment you um because as I've said as I've mentioned earlier is let's just say that you have two technical folks that are co-founders the the biggest problem that I see here is like you know the the different unique insights and advantages that they have when it comes to Building Product and one co-founder could have a very specific Tech stack that they want to work with and that's all they want to work with and I've seen many hackers early on that kind of fight and they end up not delivering a product or even the MVP after the hackathon is done so it's important to really figure out if that person that you're hacking with is going to be aligned in the vision and are they able to complement you in regards to where you're going to go next so here's a quick five minute test uh the questions I ask um and in fact this it turns out these questions um is how the tensor team got started uh and the tensor team if you know is the number one nft Marketplace in Solana and the way they found each other was through this test I gave you a minimal version because this is good for just a hackathon but for a real uh you know startup there is a longer list that I can share with you guys later but I'm going to go through this quickly some is uh some are obvious so I'm not going to go through it but some aren't one question I want to bring up is are you control or wealth oriented I think this is important because um you know some co-founders want control some just care about money and they want to help build a product to a certain point and allow the the the actual founder that wants to lead to take uh leadership and run with it it's easy it's much easier to find this out early on because you know who is going to run what and usually um it turns out to be a good decision and the reason why I bring this up is because many co-founders you'll notice this like you know in mid of growth you'll see like co-founders kind of fighting with each other one wants to be the CEO the other wants to be a CEO then you see this co-ceo role that kind of is given and it's usually a red flag when I when you see a co-ceo role so um that's why I was kind of bearish on Salesforce um uh so that's one question the question second question that I want to highlight is what it like if you are like really serious about starting a startup like if you're here to start a startup you know you the one question you want to ask is where is the your the priority of starting a startup in your life right is it your number one priorities number three you're just here to hack and have fun make friends um you could quickly figure out like who's going to align with you and who's not so I'd say that's an uh number two important question and some of the other questions are you know a little bit more detailed but like what are the things that are important to you like what type of product do you like you know what type of culture do you like um types of uh folks that you want to hire another question I want to point out is like what happens if we if we make no money in 12 months um and then finally here's a second set of questions um if you're to pick one thing what is your superpower I think this is a very another good question that you should ask someone um what role do you have envisioned for me um how do you deal with stress what is your biggest weakness um and at the end of the the project you should kind of like decompress and ask questions in terms of like did you guys enjoy working with each other did you see eye to eye um did the ideas that were generated really come to fruition um and so these are like the set of questions that you should ask when you're looking for someone because this will kind of like boil it down to the people that you really want to align with so that you can start a startup or build an idea here at eat Global and then be able to work on a winning startup idea moving forward uh if you have any questions you can find us at the alliance Booth but uh yeah thank you for coming