The Weird Corners Matter

We get asked a version of the same question all the time:

“What do you invest in at Colosseum?”

It’s a reasonable question, but it’s also usually the wrong one. It assumes the answer is a category, a sector, or a thesis that fits neatly onto a slide. DeFi, Infrastructure, Consumer, AI, whatever the latest narrative might be.

The honest answer is that we invest in founders who are early, slightly uncertain, and working on projects that they’re passionate about and don’t fit neatly into existing narratives. 

That has been true for me long before Colosseum existed.

I (like Matty and Nate) have spent a large part of my career around hackathons. That includes watching a small team ship Bitcoin acceptance at Square during a hackathon, seeing how internal hackathons shaped product decisions at 0x Labs, spending years close to the builder energy of ETHGlobal, and eventually working with the scale and ambition of Solana’s hackathons.

Colosseum was founded along that arc. Not because hackathons suddenly became interesting, but because they had been quietly important for a long time.

One pattern has held across every cycle. The work that ends up mattering rarely starts where people are paying attention.

This year, announcing the winners of the Cypherpunk hackathon live at Breakpoint made that especially clear. Our team reviewed every submission. We saw how much effort went into projects that most people will never hear about. Standing on a large stage announcing a small number of winners was meaningful, but not just because of the winners themselves. It mattered because it represented a much larger body of work that usually stays invisible.

Hackathons work because they compress time. They force decisions. They surface ideas before they are obvious, before they are well explained, and before there is consensus that they are important. They aren’t endpoints. They are inputs.

The mistake people make is treating them as outputs.

Something similar happens with new technology more broadly. When systems emerge, the first instinct is to ask how they fit into the present. How they map onto existing institutions. How they replicate familiar behaviors more efficiently.

That instinct is usually backwards.

Technology is upstream of culture. It shapes what becomes normal later, not what feels reasonable now. The projects that look unnecessary or strange early on often become irreplaceable once the world reorganizes around them.

In hindsight, one of the most important insights in crypto may not have been technical at all.

Satoshi seemed to intuit that a generation of builders was emerging who would be constrained in ways previous generations were not. Students and young engineers who could no longer recreate the same financial foundation as their predecessors simply by participating in existing systems, extracting value, and locking in gains.

Whether intentional or not, Bitcoin arrived at a moment when many people sensed that the old ladders still existed, but no longer reached the ground.

That realization did not produce resignation. It produced experimentation.

When systems stop compounding for newcomers, people don't wait for permission. They start building alternative institutions. Most of those attempts fail. A small number matter enormously. Culture catches up later.

This is why the weird corners of the internet matter. They are where people work on things that don't yet have language, categories, or validation. They are where future norms begin forming before anyone recognizes them as such.

Colosseum exists to help foster an environment where weird ideas can become commercially viable and globally scalable. We run hackathons because they are one of the most reliable ways to surface early conviction and force momentum. We back founders early because clarity about timing usually arrives after the important work has already begun. We stay optimistic not because progress is guaranteed, but because we have repeatedly seen it come from places that initially looked unimportant.

If you are building something that doesn’t yet make sense to most people, that’s not a signal to stop. It’s often the opposite.

Most meaningful technologies don't start by fitting neatly into the present. They start by enabling futures that have not arrived yet. They are built by people willing to keep working in the arena without applause, without certainty, and without a clear map.

That has been true for as long as the Colosseum team has been paying attention.

So when people ask what we invest in at the Colosseum, the answer is simple. We invest in the people building before it makes sense. I don’t expect that to change.