Special: Solana (with CEO Anatoly Yakovenko)

Acquired

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

Venturecapital, Ma, Investing, Acquisitions, Startups, Vc, Investment, Business, Technology

4.8 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 19 July 2021

⏱️ 72 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We sit down with the hottest new protocol layer in crypto today: Solana, and its cofounder Anatoly Yakovenko, who is the CEO of Solana Labs. If you listened to our Ethereum episode or follow crypto even at a cursory level, you've likely heard of Solana and its ability to scale transactions thousands of times higher than Ethereum. And, unlike other so-called "ETH killers", Solana is doing so in production today with large and real applications. We dive into the project's history coming out of the 2017-18 crypto winter, how it works and what's ahead now that they've recently raised $314m (yes that is Pi $million) from a16z and Polychain Capital, with their native SOL tokens currently trading at a market cap around $10B (!).

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Topics covered:

Anatoly's background as a wireless engineer at Qualcomm, and how it led to a fundamental discovery of how to improve crypto system scalability
Solana's role in the crypto protocol ecosystem and why there's a need for it (and why it can and will exist) alongside Ethereum versus "killing" it
Starting Solana during the 2017-18 crypto winter, and how it forced them to focus just on building and shipping versus raising and posturing
Bootstrapping adoption with the mining community (Solana's "true believers") and the early and ardent support they provided
Where Solana falls on the Vitalik "Scalability - Security - Decentralization" trilemma, and why Solana's superpower of maintaining composability is so attractive

Links:

Solana: https://solana.com
- Solana on Twitter: https://twitter.com/solana
- Solana Hackathon submissions: https://airtable.com/shriNT26cAZeDJagn/tbl5fZ4E1BBbVAttW
FTX: https://ftx.us
Audius: https://audius.co

Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to this special episode of Acquired, the podcast about great technology
0:29.9	companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert and I'm the co-founder and
0:34.9	managing director of Seattle based Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund PSL Ventures.
0:40.0	And I'm David Rosenthal and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco.
0:45.6	And we are your hosts. All right David, on our last episode we covered the history of Ethereum,
0:52.4	what it is and of course we speculated on its future. But a big outstanding point at the end of
0:58.7	the episode was with all this excitement around DeFi and NFTs and decentralized apps and
1:05.0	I mean this decentralized world computer has gotten really slow and really expensive. It's really
1:12.1	slow. Yeah. Yes it is. Sure, the Ethereum community has plans for how they're going to fix this.
1:18.8	But listeners, as many of you heard, there are other credible blockchains out there to build
1:24.9	applications on top of. I was trying to do some DeFi stuff the other day. No joke and like
1:30.1	gas fees were 50, 60 bucks. It was crazy. Brutal. That's like close to an all-time high.
1:36.8	It's wild. Well, one credible alternative blockchain that David and I have been particularly
1:42.3	interested in is Solana. So on today's episode we are joined by Anatolia Yakovenko, the founder
1:48.5	and CEO of Solana Labs. Solana Labs is the company that spearheads the development of the Solana
1:54.0	blockchain. And just to set some context, they recently raised $314 million led by
2:02.2	Andrews and Horowitz and Polychain Capital. Yes, that is pie $100 million and they have a market
2:08.7	cap of all their coins right now right around $10 billion. Both so fun and so crazy. A couple of
2:15.3	years ago, if you were going to say like make a joke, oh we're raising pie million dollars, you
2:19.1	would raise like $3.14 million and maybe $31.4 million. Wow, just the scale of all this is
2:25.3	incredible. Yeah, it's wild. Well, if you are new here, you should join us in the acquired Slack.
2:31.4	And if you like this episode, you will love the community discussing crypto in our digital assets
	...

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