Pete Wylie, Chief Operating Officer at AVAX One, recently served as a judge of the Avalanche Build Games, an inaugural six-week builder competition that drew more than 2,000 applicants and ultimately funded over 50 teams to shape the future of enterprise blockchain technology.
Twenty projects advanced to a final judging phase, where Wylie and nine other judges evaluated pitches on product quality, idea potential, and execution ability. The three grand prize winners were Meridian, an institutional credit infrastructure platform ($100,000), Forg3t Protocol, an AI compliance and machine unlearning dashboard ($75,000), and The Grotto, a custom Avalanche L1 built around indie game publishing ($50,000).
In this Q&A, Wylie gives us his unvarnished view on the competition and the projects he found most promising for the Avalanche ecosystem. He draws from two decades of experience founding and investing in early-stage companies, ranging from serving as CFO of Napster to co-founding student loan optimization platform Gradible (acquired by CommonBond, where he later served as CFO as well).
Q: What do you think will be the long-term impact of the Avalanche projects building in this competition?
Wylie: The word “community” gets used loosely, but what I actually observed across these teams was a level of collegiality and generosity that I don’t always see. Teams were rooting for each other. A number of participants mentioned they’d been building on Avalanche for years and already knew other teams in the room. That’s not a zero-sum environment, and that matters enormously for how an ecosystem compounds over time.
The diversity was also notable. Real-world assets backed by physical gold, trading platforms, collectibles, sophisticated DeFi yield strategies, AI compliance tooling. These weren’t fifteen copies of the same product. That breadth, combined with the right support structure and continued backing from the Avalanche Foundation, Ava Labs and AVAX One, gives these projects a meaningfully higher probability of success than if they’d been left to build in isolation.
Getting the zero-to-one phase right is the first crucial step to building to one hundred. This program did a good job of giving a lot of projects a real start.
Q: You’ve spent a career evaluating early-stage companies. What was your read on the overall quality of the cohort?
Wylie: There was meaningful dispersion. Twenty projects made it to the final phase, and not all of them were at the same level of development. But the energy and the range of approaches being taken was genuinely impressive. The ones that stood out to me had made real progress in a six-week window, which is a meaningful signal about the founding team.
At this stage, I’m not primarily evaluating the product. I’m looking at the founders and their approach to their market. That was true here as well. Some of these teams had two or three years of experience. Others had thirty years of experience in a completely different field and saw a real opportunity in blockchain. That kind of smart, opportunistic thinking is exactly what you want to see.
Q: Were there any patterns in the projects that were the most promising?
Wylie: The projects with the most momentum were the ones where the “why blockchain” question had an obvious answer. For institutional credit infrastructure, for AI compliance with auditable on-chain evidence, for agentic payments, the connection to what the Avalanche network specifically enables was direct and defensible. Those teams had made the most progress because they weren’t spending cycles justifying the premise.
The teams that stood out here were well-rounded across product, idea, and distribution. Some had a major advantage because they were building adjacent to an existing business or industry background, which gave them resources and operational instincts that pure blank-canvas founders don’t always have. I try to factor that in when weighing what different teams accomplished.
That said, some of the solo founders building from scratch impressed me enormously, and they’re the ones who I think benefit most from continued support after the competition ends.
Q: What does that ongoing support look like from AVAX One’s side?
Wylie: We’ve committed to ongoing mentorship and office hours for any finalist participant. Across our team, we have deep experience across every pillar of building: technical, legal, financial, operational, and scaling. For the solo founders who are doing this alone, we want to be a genuine thought partner, not just a transactional relationship.
The prize winners obviously have a significant additional advantage. A hundred thousand dollars in non-dilutive capital is enough to start building toward a larger raise and cover six to nine months of runway, depending on team size. That’s a meaningful difference between getting the zero-to-one phase right and running out of road.
Q: How does AVAX One think about these companies beyond the competition itself?
Wylie: We’re actively tracking all of the finalists and thinking about potential partnerships over time. A competition like this is a great discovery mechanism: It separates the teams that have true motivation. You can see the people who really want it, and those are exactly the kind of people you want in your orbit. In my experience doing M&A, the quality of the team behind the business is almost always the determining variable.
Q: What made the Build Games format so effective?
Wylie: Running a decentralized online competition had real advantages. It put all the energy into what happened after the kickoff: the building. The alternative would be an in-person bootcamp format, but what these companies actually need is to be heads-down building. The structure kept administrative overhead low and kept the focus on what teams were shipping.
One thing I observed that I thought was particularly valuable was the learning that happened across teams. Participants were invited to watch the full slate of pitches. If you’re a first-time founder, seeing how other teams present, hearing what questions judges ask, and then applying that to your own business is genuinely valuable. The compressed time frame made all of that more intense and more useful.
