The Solana Incubator: Finding Crypto's Next Breakthrough App | Emon Motamedi
🎯 Summary
Podcast Summary: The Solana Incubator: Finding Crypto’s Next Breakthrough App | Emon Motamedi
This episode features an in-depth discussion with Emon Motamedi, Head of the Solana Incubator, focusing on his approach to fostering sustainable, real-world adoption startups within the Solana ecosystem, particularly following the recent Solana Accelerate conference.
1. Focus Area
The primary focus is on startup building and idea generation within the Solana ecosystem, emphasizing the shift from low-hanging fruit applications (like basic DeFi primitives) toward real-world adoption and sustainable business models. Key themes include navigating rapid market shifts, encouraging non-derivative innovation, and leveraging Solana as infrastructure for broader consumer applications.
2. Key Technical Insights
- Evolving Solana Core: The conversation noted a shift in core Solana development focus, referencing the update to the Agave client and the rise of Onze as a key client developer, suggesting a dynamic and competitive environment even at the protocol level (contrasting with past focus on Fire Dancer).
- Mobile-Native Focus: The Incubator is actively seeking and supporting startups building applications with Solana Mobile in mind, recognizing mobile as a crucial vector for mass adoption.
- Viral Growth Mechanisms: Discussion highlighted the importance of embedding viral growth hooks directly into the User Experience (UX) flow, referencing historical examples (like Hotmail footers) and recent successes like the Believe meme coin launchpad.
3. Market/Investment Angle
- Increased Competition: The Solana ecosystem is maturing, leading to intense competition in previously uncontested sectors (e.g., aggregators like Jupiter now facing new lending/aggregator rivals). This forces genuine innovation beyond basic protocol replication.
- Sustainability Over Hype: Motamedi stresses a principle of avoiding purely trend-driven projects. He advises founders to focus on long-term vision and on-chain revenues/profitability rather than relying solely on VC funding or token appreciation, noting that “the quicker something grows, the quicker something falls.”
- Infrastructure vs. Crypto-Native: A key distinction is made between applications built for the crypto audience (often speculation-based) and those that use crypto merely as infrastructure to support broader, non-crypto-native use cases. The latter is seen as the path to sustainable, mass-market PMF.
4. Notable Companies/People
- Solana Incubator/Salana Labs: The organization running the program, now focused on developing startups rather than core protocol development.
- Nikita Beer: Advisor to Solana Foundation/Labs, brought in to mentor Cohort 2 teams. He is cited for pushing founders to think about 10x or 1000x growth rather than incremental feature additions (i.e., taking “big swings”).
- Believe: A recent viral meme coin launchpad (formerly Cloud) highlighted as a successful example of engineering viral growth mechanisms into the product.
5. Regulatory/Policy Discussion
- The recent Solana Accelerate conference included a significant policy track, signaling a strategic push by Solana within the US, supported by the launch of the Solana Policy Institute in the DC area, indicating a focus on regulatory maturity.
6. Future Implications
The industry is moving toward a phase where the “low-hanging fruit” is gone, demanding deeper innovation. The future success on Solana will likely come from teams that successfully abstract the complexity of crypto infrastructure to deliver compelling consumer experiences (potentially mobile-first) that solve real-world problems, rather than just creating new speculative vehicles.
7. Target Audience
This episode is highly valuable for Web3 founders, venture capitalists, ecosystem builders, and product managers operating within or investing in the Solana ecosystem, especially those seeking strategies for long-term product-market fit beyond immediate speculative narratives.
Comprehensive Summary
The podcast centers on Emon Motamedi’s philosophy guiding the Solana Incubator, particularly as the ecosystem matures past its initial building phase. Motamedi discusses the atmosphere following the Solana Accelerate conference, noting a palpable shift in conventional wisdom and increased competition across all sectors.
A major theme is the necessity of sustainable innovation. Motamedi argues against chasing short-lived, trend-based narratives (like recent AI agent launches) because the incentive structure in crypto often rewards quick capital gains over long-term viability. His core principle for incubator teams is to build businesses capable of sustaining themselves through on-chain revenues rather than relying on token pumps or continuous VC injections.
Motamedi shares a detailed framework for startup idea generation, adapted from Roger Dickies. This involves two paths: the traditional “build what you need” approach, and a more structured “graph/vector” method. This latter technique involves mapping technological trends (e.g., AI, VR, Solana developments) against various industries (e.g., travel, dating) to systematically brainstorm novel intersections, forcing founders beyond obvious applications.
Furthermore, the discussion emphasizes the strategic importance of consumer adoption and mobile. The Incubator is explicitly prioritizing mobile-native builders and leveraged the expertise of consumer product veteran Nikita Beer, who encourages founders to adopt a 10x mindset rather than incremental improvements. The ultimate goal of the Incubator is to seed Solana with robust, sustainable businesses that utilize crypto as powerful, often invisible, infrastructure to achieve broad, real-world adoption, moving beyond the current reliance on speculation and stablecoins for PMF.
🏢 Companies Mentioned
💬 Key Insights
"And so with school lunches, they tend to be lower ticket item type purchases... because the end percent fee that the merchant pays is much higher. You know, for a $1 transaction, if it's a 70-cent fee, that's, they're paying 70% in transaction fees."
"let's say you're paying for something that's $1. That might trigger the fixed fee where it's, it's just, hey, you have to pay a 70-cent fee minimum for any credit card transaction."
"let's take that payment, let's immediately put it on stablecoin rails, let's put it in some yield-generating safe asset within Web3, and then let's pass back that yield to the end merchant so that they can use the yield to offset the 3% or whatever it is in payment processing fees that they're going to have to pay on that transaction."
"Easy looked at this challenge a completely different way, which they said, hey, what if we allow consumers to still pay with the same credit cards they're paying today? Is there anything else we can do to solve this challenge?"
"...when I could just launch this very short-term-oriented kind of the token is the product scam and then sell it to US users who have VPNs? The incentives are pretty perverse."
"smarter critiques of the former SEC's approach to crypto is it encouraged some of this negative short-term thinking... and discouraged real-world use cases because why would I try to build out a real business that's going to take years to kind of develop and might fail in the end if I know that the SEC might sue me out of existence halfway through it..."