Some observations from referring 63 founders to
@alliance
, maybe helpful for others:

1. Too many people building prediction markets still, what you think is a novel company is a weekend feature for incumbents who've raised a billion dollars and already have distribution.
2. Too many perp dexes and leveraged trading products still, their "novelty" is usually stacking leverage on already leveraged assets aka cascading catastrophe for users. If you burn the user once, they won't return.
3. Lot of agentic use cases, the low hanging fruit (agentic commerce, agentic coordination/unification) is less exciting personally. But a few novel applications across healthcare, science, gaming stood out to me.
4. Solana and Hyperliquid reign supreme, Base is a close 3rd. No Monad, MegaETH, Ethereum, etc. This is maybe an Alliance alignment issue or a larger preference trend for builders.
5. What many builders believe is unique and new is most likely already being done by another person in my DMs. The immediate opportunities are very obvious and $500K might not be enough to take on Stripe and Ramp, find new avenues where you have an unfair advantage and asymmetric opportunity.
6. Not a lot of "cypherpunk/privacy" builders, I think there's still massive opportunities in resilience, networking, shielding, identity for both crypto and AI use cases that I would've loved to see more of.
7. Manners. A please, thank you, and professionalism in cold messages go a long way.

https://x.com/sxtvik/status/2060431173625540631