In Episode 6 of Exponential, Dylan Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Pond, joins us to unpack a fast-emerging frontier: helping early-stage AI startups launch, scale, and find product-market fit through a new kind of internet-native capital platform.
At a time when AI tooling is accelerating and the barriers to launching new products are dropping, Pond is building infrastructure for what comes next — connecting early-stage founders with capital, distribution, and feedback loops in real time.
“Pond is an early-stage AI startup marketplace,” Dylan explained. “We help AI projects scale and get funded. Everything else — DevOps, infra, go-to-market — follows from that.”
The problem: Small teams, big friction
Dylan's own journey into the space came from experience. While trying to build and fund his own AI startup, he ran into a core set of inefficiencies: fragmented funding pathways, distribution bottlenecks, and heavy infrastructure demands. For many AI founders, especially those targeting narrow but valuable use cases, the venture capital model didn’t fit.
“You’re either OpenAI and raising $40 billion, or you’re one of the tens of millions of teams building useful niche applications,” he said. “For those builders, funding is still way too slow and too centralized.”
On top of that, the path to reaching users is increasingly steep. “Most people don’t have an audience,” Dylan noted. “You might build a great MVP, but without distribution, how do you compete with YC-backed teams already dominating channels like Product Hunt?”
“Everyone talks about product-market fit, but first you need a fast way to test whether anyone wants the thing you’re building.”
The marketplace model
That’s where Pond comes in. Inspired by Amazon’s early model of serving e-commerce vendors, Pond offers infrastructure, analytics, and distribution for early AI teams. But its twist lies in how ideas move through the platform.
Projects don’t raise capital the traditional way. Instead, they go through a public evaluation process. The Pond community reviews MVPs, go-to-market strategies, and incentives — then votes on which projects deserve to move forward.
“We don’t bet on ideas — we bet on MVPs and distribution strategies,” Dylan said. “The committee — the community — is the judge. And the market decides who gets backed.”
“A capital market is just a facilitator. It doesn’t create value. What creates value is the product, the application content.”
Dylan is clear-eyed about the limitations of internet capital alone. “Liquidity is not the hard part,” he said. “Crypto has plenty of capital. What we lack are real use cases. Our job is to help productive AI teams find traction faster.
Why crypto scales AI
For Dylan, crypto is more than just a funding mechanism — it’s the native scaling layer for the next generation of software. He sees parallels between past tech cycles and what’s happening now in AI. In the PC era, internet platforms like Amazon unlocked scale. In mobile, it was Uber and others. Now, as AI matures into a productivity engine, crypto offers the coordination and incentive rails to match.
“Only crypto can match the pace and efficiency of AI,” Dylan said. “Smart contracts let you program incentives directly into your product. That creates alignment — between builders, users, and capital — from day one.”
“We never had a shortage of liquidity. We had a shortage of use cases.”
Pond’s long-term vision reflects this thesis. Right now, the platform is focused on AI applications — but like Amazon’s journey from books to everything, Dylan sees room to expand. For now, the AI tailwinds are strong: increasingly powerful tooling, global interest, and a steady flow of teams looking for better launch paths.
“Building an app is going to get easier and easier. Our role is to match that speed—to accelerate not just success, but failure too.”
What it means for builders
Pond isn’t just a place to raise capital. It’s a new interface between the AI frontier and the liquidity waiting to support it.
The platform is currently onboarding projects on a rolling basis, and as interest grows, Dylan sees potential for cohort-based launches and community-wide participation in startup discovery.
You can find Exponential on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. Whether you’re a builder, investor, or simply someone fascinated by the future of computation, we hope you’ll subscribe and join the conversation.
