Creating space for founders
reflections from designing an accelerator
As the first cohort of the Hook Product Accelerator concludes, I want to highlight some reflections from the experience.
For context, the Hook Product Accelerator is a 6-week program built for DeFi founders focused on sharpening product development and strategy.
The 12 teams varied in both stage and background. Some companies were just months old, while one was gearing up for a Series A. Founder backgrounds spanned an equally broad spectrum, from whitehat hackers and repeat founders to seasoned operators from companies like ByteDance.
Our goal was both to help the companies make significant progress and also uncover what founders need from programs like this.
Creating space
One of the purposes of an accelerator is to simply create space for founders. Sometimes in crypto things move so fast that founders are pressured to as well. Creating space introduces time, which creates new opportunities to think through product, understand who you're building for, and critically, to invalidate assumptions if needed.
The focus on validation led to clarity. Lighthouse had been developing a bond marketplace as part of a broader product suite, but through the program shifted their focus entirely to this product, leading to conversations about the viability of such a market, which they'll continue to iterate on post-program. VII Finance and Eirene gained clarity on their positioning, namely refining the type of customer they will build for, as not all DeFi participants are motivated by the same things.
Shared experiences
We spent time studying successful accelerators and learned that in-person experiences inherently create more valuable environments for founders. Given crypto's global nature and the localized nuances in every country, restricting participation to founders who could make it to NYC (where we are based) would be limiting.
We got creative about connecting remotely. One particularly effective approach was Gatheraround breakout sessions, combined with structured group chats with ground rules. This created a peer-driven environment where founders became each other's resources, sharing hard-won insights and providing honest feedback on everything from pitches to positioning statements.
Because our founders were building in similar categories, there was an added benefit of them being actual target users for each other's products, whether as traders, MEV actors, or LPs.
We constantly adapted our approach based on what founders needed, even if it meant scrambling to put together a last minute session, because making founder time valuable matters much more than a polished program.
The job
The job of an accelerator is to help companies not die. By increasing survival odds, it boosts their chances of eventual outsized returns.
This is also why programs are sometimes better off not being standardized (YC as the exception). The challenges facing DeFi founders are completely different from those building B2B SaaS infrastructure, so you need some specificity at the earliest stage.
Running a DeFi-specific program taught us that while general startup principles apply, founders in this space face unique challenges that deserve dedicated frameworks. We touched on DeFi topics case-by-case at a high level: liquidity design, LP partnerships, understanding the DeFi user base. For future programs, we want to go deeper by developing comprehensive frameworks around these core building blocks, potentially getting more technical in our approach.
Acceleration vs. velocity
As startup literature teaches, velocity is everything at the early stage, both as an indicator of scale and as a signal to investors.
However, what may matter more is acceleration, the rate of change in a team's ability to execute. Are they simply moving fast, or are they getting better at moving fast?
Brett from Prelude Ventures pointed this out well.
Execution > tech
In communication, technical founders naturally tend to lead with the tech. While you might expect them to also spend an equal amount of time on their technical aptitude, they don't.
What counts is a founder's ability to execute and evolve their approach, not the technical innards, especially to an investor or customer. A track record of building and rebuilding tells a much more compelling story that can be more impressive than recounting the features a product has or will have. Since technical founders naturally lean toward the latter, we often had to encourage teams back to the path of the former.
The goal was an intentional program that fulfills the needs of the founders we were serving. The outcomes were there, with teams gaining clarity and confidence on product direction.
The program: designed to adapt
As mentioned, our teams were at different stages of their journey, which shaped our approach, pushing us away from a rigid curriculum toward something that evolved as teams made progress.
We established a flexible framework for the 6 weeks, with content shaped by feedback from the applications and interview process and ongoing weekly input.
Many of the teams were at the validation stage, testing key assumptions about their products. We wanted to enhance their approach to conducting user interviews and extracting actionable insights from those conversations.
Aditi led the very first session on how Para thinks about user interviews.
Bhaumik discussed how to apply those user research findings: rather than naively targeting personas or ICPs, founders should identify the specific situation, a moment in someone's life or work, that creates the urgent need for the proposed solution.
To continue on this thread, Jen from Chronicle walked teams through how knowing who you serve fundamentally shapes the entire strategy.
The natural next step was spending time on positioning. We anchored our discussion in April Dunford’s framework for positioning. The goal was to cut through the theorizing that often distorts abstract concepts in marketing and GTM, providing founders with a practical foundation they could immediately apply.
To make this concrete, Straith from the Uniswap Foundation walked us through how they approached positioning for Unichain, sharing the practical steps they took, the frameworks they used, and what they decided to discard along the way.
Building the Hook Product Accelerator's first cohort was as much about learning how to support founders as it was about supporting them. The insights we've shared here will directly shape how we design future programs, always flexible, always founder-first, always specific to the unique challenges of building in DeFi.
Thanks to the Uniswap Foundation for supporting
Huge thanks to our founders: @luduvigo @rahulbarmann @vansh_sahay @0xPolicarpo @0xIngrid @jeffishjeff @wong_ssh @jkm__eth @1a35e1 @yevhenx @LisVikkk @k_f_0909 @0xkdev @robertleifke @mikeghen @VillageFarmerr @dex_chen_V @0xmohmaya @kankodu @0xSky_Official @AlvinYap510