How Superteam USA Helps Solana Startups Hire, Find Users and Raise Onchain

Fractional executives for 30 teams

Fowler says the Superteam USA team is four people working across the accelerated startups. They help with token raises and work directly with MetaDAO, Metaplex, Meteora, Crafts and others. He says there is no team in the crypto ecosystem, "or even a little bit into AI", that they cannot put a founder in touch with within an hour.

Screening startups, not gathering members

Fowler says the US program is different from the wider Superteam model, which tries to gather as many members of the local Solana community as it can. Superteam USA requires a company first, then checks whether it has a $100,000,000 plus ceiling. He says the team has grown more lenient about Solana integration as it moved into AI and agentic payments. He points to US advantages: lots of VC funding, strong engineering universities and a long history of unicorn startups.

To recruit outside the crypto bubble, he is talking to accelerators and residencies such as YC, setting up a booth at a blockchain conference at UT, and co-hosting a hack night at the Miami headquarters with the Google Gemini team.

What holds token raises back

Fowler argues onchain raises need even more platform options than Metaplex, MetaDAO, Backable, Crafts, Seedplex and Bedrock/Meteora. He says founders do not have time to manage a token community or explain tokens to their VCs, and cannot be worrying about their token going to zero.

AI and the case for distribution

Fowler says AI has cut the cost of design, legal and content creation exponentially and reduced how many engineers are needed. He says non-engineers from traditional finance in the program are building financial tooling and trading platforms themselves. He predicts the founder of the first solo-founder billion dollar company is "probably already born".

Because technology is likely no longer a moat, he says, distribution has never mattered more. Nicky Scannella added that only one or two members took up an offer to appear on the show, and that he got good at public speaking by failing 100 times after first going on stage in 2021.