An idea is not a startup, and a business is not a startup either. “With AI, you don’t necessarily need to spend a million dollars on hiring an engineering team first. You can just build a prototype. It doesn’t have to be good. It doesn’t have to be polished or anything.” “A startup is a different thing. A startup is something that starts very small and gets very big.” “Even $1 in revenue is infinitely better than $0 in revenue, because it’s a psychological hurdle that people will click the button to give you money.” @mert of @helius at Solana Summit Serbia

The Solana Summit Serbia aftermovie opens with a line about the Balkans: "People have been marching through it for centuries, always on their way to somewhere else." This August, more than 80 speakers came from all over the Balkans, and from as far as America, the UK, Germany and India. 1,500 people filled two packed stages at Sava Centar, 13 startups pitched live on Demo Day, and 20+ side events took over Belgrade. To every speaker, sponsor and guest, and to the whole @Solana community, thank you for taking this so far past our expectations, it means a lot to us, and we plan to keep building from here for many years to come.

wrapped up solana summit serbia last week & my head's still in belgrade. prolly the biggest solana event in europe this summer. 70+ speakers, serbia's assistant minister on stage, tokenization of securities on the table with @solanafndn & @solanapolicy. - marko set the tone early. "solana is to finance what netflix was to entertainment & amazon was to shopping." - mert on stage on why you build on solana, core devs pushing block times toward 300ms, down from 400 a few weeks back. - the @lagunacarta mktg panel was one of the sharpest of the whole event. - interesting convo between @realrockychung & @ramzyyalii to help understand where tokenized equities actually stand today. i got to speak on stablecoins on solana representin @reflectmoney with @altitude & @sp3nddotshop. - altitude turning solana into the account businesses run on. - sp3nd letting anyone spend stables on anything. - reflect putting structure around risk & opened its first tranched market on syrupUSDC with @maplefinance during the week. frontier traders hosted the most fun competition ive ever seen. eight traders, real capital on @phoenixtrade, down to a 1v1 on the main stage in the closing hour. s/o to @simonmolitor, @yo_itsmatt, @businessmngr. watching the solana @ecosystemcall run live from the main stage hit different. demo day said it louder than any panel could. @seedplex_io first, @hobba_io second, @jurassicfi third. tokenized dinosaurs, beehives, silver, equity. the balkans aren't waiting for permission to bring real assets onchain. 45+ side events turned belgrade into one big lobby. - monkedao w @supersimon77 @zCase_ @bibseebliss brought 100+ monkes out to celebrate five years. - solflare's rooftop views were unreal. - superteam connect proved you just need good people & an open sky. real credit to marko, matija, superteam blkn & the entire crew for pulling this off. getting ready for breakpoint now. europe's stablecoin & rwa race is on and it's running on solana.

We're in! We got accepted! @ThalerFinance is one of 10 teams at the @magicblock Founders Camp, Bangkok, Sep 21st to 30th. Ten magical days of shipping market-neutral yield vaults with @priyansh_ptl18 See you there with @SolanaFndn and @SuperteamTH!

1/ Mindshare Summit was a blast! 15 talks, 3 panels, and one of the most goated speaker rosters! Every speaker got 5 minutes to dive into a marketing topic of their choosing, and we only had one ask: get people to leave with something actionable today. Here's how it went:

Great time at the Solana Summit last week @SuperteamBLKN Hobba secured 2nd place on Demo Day 🥈 Amazing conversations on the future of RWAs and why Solana is inevitable. Borrow Better 🟢

Belgrade Blockchain Week @belgradebw 🇷🇸 Two co-hosted side events, a VC panel, and a week spent with founders and investors across the @solana and @ethereum ecosystems — a busy week for V3V Ventures at Solana Summit Serbia and @ethbelgrade. We co-hosted two founder × investor gatherings around Solana Summit: • The Solana Mixer, together with @SuperteamBLKN and Elevator Ventures • A second gathering co-hosted with @superteam, focused on bringing together the Solana Summit Demo Day founders and investors including @RockawayX and @AccVentures Furthemore, V3V Partner Stan Nedic (@0xstajus) participated in the Solana Summit VC panel and the VIP / Speaker Dinner, as well as @ethbelgrade and other gatherings throughout the week. It was great to spend time with the @SolanaFndn, @superteam, @solflare, @TenderlyApp, @DeFiSaver, @0xCurvy and many others. Belgrade hosted 45+ side events running across the week, but more importantly, a genuinely strong concentration of founders, capital and ecosystem talent. The Balkans continue to be one of the more underrated Web3 pockets in Europe — and one we’re happy to keep showing up for. Shoutout to @SuperteamBLKN and @ethbelgrade for putting up a great show 👏

I got to design Solana Summit Belgrade @SuperteamBLKN The biggest event I've done so far, probably not the last Big thanks to the team for the trust, I couldn’t be more proud 💛

We didn’t win Demo Day. But we left Solana Summit Serbia with 150 new users, 11 expert meetings, two company conversations, and a much bigger to-do list. My honest recap of the week with @Cognios_io:

When I first started talking about @Solana a few years ago, the comments were mostly the same. "Ah, it's just another L1. It will never work. It goes down all the time." Funnily enough, some of the people who told me that were sitting in the room this week. Around 1500 people filled Sava Centar for Solana Summit Serbia. Investors, developers, founders. Some of them flew in, some of them built here. A few numbers I shared from the stage: this January Solana processed more than 150 million real user transactions. Firedancer has cleared 600,000 TPS in test environment. Out of 500 trillion dollars in global assets, 56 billion are already represented on Solana. And the part I'm most proud of: with @SuperteamBLKN we helped our founders raise more than 9 million dollars, and our community earn more than 2.5 million, across 10 countries. If you were there, you are early. Solana is to finance what @Netflix was to entertainment and @Amazon was to shopping.

It was a pleasure to have you all at @SuperteamBLKN's Solana Summit Serbia! Half the core team got the conference bug that's going around, but luckily, the other half is also cooked. Job's nowhere near done tho, gotta keep rising by lifting others. blkn/acc

We’ve helped 15 startups raise $45,000,000 from over 137,000 people on the internet. Now we want to help consumer app founders do the same. On top of giving them up to $10k/mo in marketing/ad spend! DM me if you want to win

still bullish 5 days later 40+ ppl packed into Solana GTM After Hours in Belgrade it was raining nobody cared @instantfinality pulled up builders pulled up founders pulled up no panels no pitch decks just people from the Solana ecosystem connecting and cooking balkans are waking up!!! @SuperteamBLKN x @instantfinality

I came back from Belgrade yesterday and I'm still thinking about the Serbia Summit. @SuperteamBLKN not only killed it, but they also made everyone feel AT HOME. It looks natural and easy from the outside, but anyone who's organized an event at this scale knows it certainly isn’t. Of course, the @SuperteamTR builders were there too. 🇹🇷 We hosted a small beer meetup, and friends from other Superteams and across the ecosystem joined us. The Solana community is full of unfiltered, unique, exceptional people. Being around them makes me grateful to be part of this ecosystem again and again. Came back feeling more than ready for the next season. Thanks to everyone who made this summit what it was 🫶🏻

A Canadians review of Belgrade and Solana Summit Serbia 🇨🇦🤝🇷🇸 - fantastic fresh food, coffee, beer - very warm weather 25-35C - kind, welcoming people - @SuperteamBLKN did a great job and raised the bar even higher for the 4 Solana Summits that are left this year. - @SolanaFndn Frontier Traders is an interesting new initiative i see a lot of potential in. - @solflare is such an amazing team from top to bottom, rooftop views are unreal. - @MonkeDAO blew it out of the park with 100+ monkes coming to the side event, celebrating 5 years. - @LucidDrakes with the best cocktails in a highly curated side event - @altitude is getting into the events game in a serious way, cant wait to see what they do next. - @superteam members meetup showed all you need is a chill outdoor venue and good people Building trusted relationships and having candid in person conversations is so valuable in this day and age. With meeting recordings, agentic summaries, AI digital scraping of chats and logs, and scams/hacks, im seeing a huge shift away from digital relationship building and a seeing a general distrust of socializing on devices. IRL is the alpha. note: i need to find avjar in Toronto, its so good