Alliance Talks to Starpower: How Did Web3's YC Rise?
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Alliance Talks to Starpower: How Did Web3's YC Rise?
"An important point about Alliance is that we don't actually pick specific directions—we pick founders."
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsGuest: William Robinson, Head of Alliance & Accelerator Mentor
Host: Laser (Co-founder of Starpower)
Starpower is honored to welcome William Robinson—Head of Alliance and a seasoned mentor in the crypto space—to share his invaluable experience at the intersection of crypto and energy. This episode dives deep into discussions around Starpower’s upcoming mainnet launch and the challenges and opportunities facing DePIN projects. Will also shares insights from mentoring multiple successful startups in the accelerator, highlighting how high standards and rigorous expectations drive explosive growth, as well as why he believes in and chose Starpower. Through this conversation, we explore how DePIN can bridge Web3 and energy management, paving the way for smarter, more efficient energy networks.
Audio transcription and translation are generated by GPT and may contain errors. Please listen to the full podcast for accuracy.
Background Story
Laser: Hi Will, it's a real honor to have you as our third guest on the DePIN Power podcast. Before we dive in, I’d like to share some context behind today’s episode. Starpower recently graduated from Cohort 13 of the Alliance Accelerator. And you—you’re one of Alliance’s most respected mentors, and arguably the most popular mentor among our cohort. Since we're preparing to launch our mainnet in the coming months, we wanted to invite you for an in-depth discussion. Today’s conversation will focus on Alliance, DePIN, and your insights from mentoring hundreds of projects. What advice do you have for founders? Let’s start with you introducing yourself—your background, and what drew you to Alliance.
Will: Sure, happy to. My name is William Robinson. I’m the Head of Alliance and also a mentor in the Alliance Accelerator. I’ve been with Alliance for three and a half years now, going through ten cohorts, mentoring roughly 200 teams. My background is a bit unusual. I spent three and a half years at Grant Thornton as a crypto auditor, helping companies that hold crypto assets on their balance sheets communicate with regulators. For example, if you're a foundation or fund based in the Cayman Islands holding crypto assets, you need to report to SEMA, and SEMA requires auditors to sign off on those holdings. If you're the Ethereum Foundation in Switzerland, you also have reporting obligations. Same goes for global exchanges. So I worked deeply with these organizations for about three and a half years, ensuring they held crypto properly and understood the risks—essentially mastering enterprise-level, government-recognized compliance controls. That’s actually why Alliance first hired me—to bring a new perspective grounded in institutional-grade compliance. Before that, I had a PhD in game design and taught game design for about seven years. My core expertise is mechanism design, which is actually how I got into crypto. I was researching how to modify game design in digital environments to influence player behavior. Then my cousin Dan, a researcher at Paradigm who entered crypto earlier than I did, told me, “You should leave game design and work on mechanism design in crypto—it’ll be more interesting and impactful.” He was right on both counts. Making games is nothing like playing them—it’s far more tedious. So I’m glad I made the switch. At Alliance, I help teams with many things: fundraising, Demo Day prep, compliance, gamification strategies, community growth, and more. As community lead, beyond all other responsibilities, I aim to be the friendly face of Alliance—the person who makes people want to join and stay in the community.
Laser: Yes, and you also help teams graduate successfully with high-quality outcomes.
Will: Absolutely. Setting high standards is a skill that takes time to master. When I first joined Alliance, I lacked the confidence—and even the social skills—to tell founders they were doing poorly and needed to work harder and smarter. But after so many cohorts, it’s now easy to clearly point out where founders are going wrong on their path to Demo Day, and how I can help them improve.
Laser: Yes, I’ll be honest—I personally grew a lot through this process. I think we exchanged over 30 emails refining my pitch deck and Demo Day video. So yeah.
Will: That’s not even a lot—some teams hit 95 emails. You could’ve pushed harder.
Advice for Founders
Laser: Haha, yes, I know. So I’m truly grateful for your insistence on high standards. I believe it’s what enables all our projects to graduate with quality—and what’s driven Alliance’s success, especially this year. You mentioned mentoring around 200 projects. Do you have any particular insights? What are the key traits of teams that succeed after months of mentorship?
Will: It depends on the project’s direction and the type of problem they’re solving. In consumer-facing areas, successful teams are those that iterate quickly. It’s a hits-driven business—meaning you need to try many times, build many products. For instance, Pump.fun built three products during their time at Alliance; only the third one took off. The first two went nowhere. Many game projects regret not building enough prototypes early or exploring more possibilities. So I look for teams that are flexible and willing to change their minds—which means they must deliver fast and have strong technical capabilities. I think this aligns with Y Combinator’s philosophy of selecting teams rich in engineering talent, so they can rapidly ship an MVP.
Thoughts on Team Size
Laser: This year, many people have asked me why Alliance has incubated so many successful projects. From your perspective, what drives Alliance’s success? Not just this year—but over the past few years, and looking ahead to future cohorts.
Will: We've had some outstanding startups in past cohorts—Stepn and Pendle, for example. This year, Pump.fun gained massive attention, and we’ve seen notable success in consumer applications. When your wins come from consumer apps, more people hear about you because more people use them. Stepn reached a $22 billion market cap at its peak—an incredibly successful company. Pump.fun targeted the entire crypto Twitter audience, so everyone eventually heard about us. Our success became widely known. But the truth is, we play a small role in these teams’ success. About 90% of their trajectory was already determined before they joined Alliance. We’re great at attracting applicants. Then we work hard for them, so they go tell others: “Apply to Alliance—they’ll really help you.” Pump.fun, for instance, was referred by another team. Around 60% of our teams come via alumni referrals. It’s a snowball we’ve been rolling for years. In Alliance’s early days, we even worked for free. We helped teams with no visibility because no one knew or trusted us. But if we could prove value without expecting anything back, why not? Once we proved ourselves, those teams spread the word. That’s how we attract top-tier talent.
Once teams join, there’s one thing we focus on: keeping them focused—on product-market fit. We don’t tell them to launch a token, teach tokenomics, or help with hiring. In fact, we often help them fire people. I’d say teams usually get smaller during the program, not bigger, because we know how crucial it is to maintain a lean, agile team to achieve product-market fit.
Laser: Yes. So the best teams attract the best teams. And I remember when we first met online months ago, you said a team’s collective IQ drops as it grows larger. I remembered that insight and applied it. Compared to then, our team has shrunk by about a third.
Will: Wow, it worked. Yes, David Vorik taught me that. He’s the founder of GLOW, another energy-focused DePIN project. He learned it from his time at Sia and passed it on to me. Every time your team doubles in size, its IQ drops by about 5 points—from 1 to 2, 2 to 4, 4 to 8, every time. And the same happens with your user base. Your first 10 users are brilliant, but the next 10 know less about crypto. When you reach a million users, you must design the simplest possible product. I think that’s a brilliant insight.
Laser: Yes, I think it’s not just intelligence—team efficiency also declines as size increases.
Will: Absolutely. Efficiency really does drop with scale. You spend more time managing and coordinating instead of executing. That’s why many fast-growing companies hit bottlenecks. As teams grow, communication costs rise, decision-making slows, and information flow breaks down. We’ve experienced this ourselves. We’ve learned a lot—especially about when to scale and how to preserve agility and efficiency. A small, high-performing team can react quickly—that’s critical for product iteration and market adaptation.
Selecting the Right Founders
Laser: Yes. Another broad question I’d like to ask—this year you’re also looking at the next cohort, Cohort 14. What trends are you seeing? Any hot topics?
Will: The biggest trend in crypto right now, from our vantage point and based on founder applications, is the convergence of AI agents and meme coins. There’s a wave of AI culture being tokenized. Many strong founders are applying with these ideas. We still see classic concepts from the past four years—ideas that keep improving over time.
Will: A key point about Alliance is—we don’t pick directions, we pick founders. If the best founders are building games—even though the gaming market is small—we’ll work with them. We don’t just look for execution strength, but for founders who can contribute to our community. We want people who think critically, find the right ideas, and above all, pivot and find their path.
Laser: So you prioritize people over trending narratives or hot sectors.
Will: We can’t afford to invest in hyped-up ideas. For example, if you were building a Bitcoin L2 a year ago with a 20-person team, your valuation might be $50M while ours would be $5M. When topics are hot, we can’t compete. That forces us to think contrarian, to anticipate market shifts six months ahead. Sometimes we make strategic investments in trending areas via side funds, but that’s not part of our core accelerator program, which makes up the vast majority of our investments.
Laser: Yes, the best people often take the road less traveled. So you focus on the future—what’s next season, what’s the next move. Your approach sends leading signals to the industry. This year, I believe it will set the tone for the year ahead.
Laser: This resonates with our own journey. When we started Starpower two years ago, the term DePIN didn’t even exist. Now it’s a major narrative—but we’ve already been building for two years. Like you mentioned, you mentored GLOW, another DePIN project. What’s your take on DePIN projects? Are they harder to acquire users? Can they serve as a bridge between Web 2 and Web 3?
Will: DePIN projects do require smarter user acquisition strategies. Take GLOW—they’ve recently achieved huge success in fundraising. While they have a solid protocol and product, solar farms hesitate when moving from Web 2 to Web 3. Their solution was radical: directly buy these solar farms, acquire them, boost profitability, and force integration into the Web 3 ecosystem. It sounds crazy, but it works. For such protocols to succeed, you need to reason from first principles—and David Vorik excels at that. As a founder, he focuses on solving the most important problems, not getting distracted by trivialities.
Will: Most DePIN projects today rely on token airdrops to attract users. But I believe airdrops only work if your protocol delivers immediate, tangible value. If people come only for the token, it’s hard to manage. I like Starpower’s Starplug because it regulates energy usage and saves users money—providing useful metrics. It’s a strong product even without a token. With a token, it becomes more compelling, enabling faster network expansion and ultimately forming a real energy market.
Energy DePIN
Laser: Over the past three weeks, I’ve met about 60 people introduced by you post-Demo Day. Many asked about tokens, especially user acquisition. For projects like ours, real-world demand already exists. Whether solar panels, outlets, or batteries, Web 2 users will buy these devices. What we’re doing is layering token incentives on top of this infrastructure, accelerating network growth. With enough users, supply-side revenue thresholds drop, creating a new revenue layer. This is exactly how DePIN projects can bridge Web 2 and Web 3.
Laser: I’d like to expand on this, especially since you mentioned both GLOW and Starpower are energy DePIN projects, and we’ve recently secured funding from top-tier VCs. You mentioned energy companies in Montreal, Canada were running virtual power plant operations a year ago. How can DePIN help the energy sector tackle climate change?
Will: Let me provide some context. Virtual power plant initiatives in my region began about two years ago. The Quebec government holds a monopoly on energy production and controls most supply. Despite generating abundant cheap hydroelectric power, grid balancing during peak hours remains challenging. To address this, the government launched the Hilo program, encouraging residents to adjust their energy consumption—like pre-heating homes before peak hours or turning off water heaters at midnight. This helps regulate the grid more efficiently and avoid waste.
Will: I think this is a smart approach to making the grid more intelligent, and virtual power plants are key to achieving that. When you applied to Alliance, I was one of your strongest advocates because I saw the technology and its immense potential. I believe virtual power plants can effectively address energy consumption issues and help combat climate change.
Will: Any solution that optimizes energy use benefits climate efforts—one of the greatest challenges of our generation. Crypto can play a pivotal role here by coordinating people globally. Projects like Starpower and other DePIN initiatives exemplify this—using blockchain and token economics to coordinate individuals and resources, positively influencing the grid and advancing sustainable energy adoption.
Laser: On why we built this project, let me add my perspective. As someone who’s been in Web 3 for nearly seven years, I deeply want Web 3 to make a meaningful impact on the real world. For the past decade, Web 3 has felt like gambling—but I believe it will become a massive industry, much like the internet 20 or 30 years ago. The motivation behind Starpower is to use Web 3, blockchain, and token economics to drive initiatives that benefit society.
Laser: Also, responding to your point about “coordination”—the last word in DePIN is “networks.” Using blockchain and Web 3 tokenomics, we can coordinate people globally at low cost to achieve things previously impossible. That’s the unique power of DePIN.
Advice for Alliance Applicants
Laser: Final question—if a founder wants to apply to Alliance, or is interested in Web 3, what advice would you give? What should we be building?
Will: For founders applying to Alliance, here’s my advice. If you want to join our community of 300+ founders and receive the support you need, tell us who you are and why you *must* do this. What makes you different? Some founders have Ivy League degrees, were IC 12 at Google, or won Olympic medals. But we care more about the unique motivation and drive behind the founder. Starting a company is painful—you need a very special reason to endure it.
Will: If you have a powerful driving force—even if it’s awkward or seems silly—don’t hide it. The entrepreneurial journey is full of hardship. Only strong emotional drivers lead to success. That’s my advice to applicants.
Laser: Thank you for that. Indeed, we’re often the kind of people who gather to discuss and share ideas about making a difference in the world.
Will: Honored to be part of it. Wishing you all the best.
Laser: Thank you, Will. That’s all for today—really appreciate your time.
Will: Thank you, good luck to you all.
Disclaimer: This interview is for informational purposes only. All content represents the personal views of the guest and does not constitute investment advice. Starpower and its guests make no investment commitments or guarantees regarding any content, opinions, or statements made in this interview.
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