Special: Solana (with CEO Anatoly Yakovenko)

The episode opens on the problem left unresolved by the show's Ethereum episode: a decentralized world computer that has become slow and expensive exactly as DeFi, NFTs and decentralized apps generated demand for it. David's evidence is first-hand — he tried to do DeFi and faced gas fees of $50 to $60, close to an all-time high.

Solana is presented as the credible alternative the hosts have been watching. Anatoly Yakovenko is the founder and CEO of Solana Labs, the company spearheading development, which recently raised $314 million led by Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital against a fully diluted token market cap of roughly $10 billion. The hosts treat the π joke as the marker of how far crypto valuations had traveled: a few years earlier the same joke would have meant $3.14 million.

Two disclosures are made before the interview. The hosts hold Solana, and the episode is not investment advice. And the episode exists in part because of a listener, Austin Federa, who built the digital-assets channel in the Acquired Slack and later joined Solana — a detail that matters because it is the same community path by which the show found the company.

David asks Anatoly to explain a path that differs from most crypto projects: instead of raising heavily first, Solana shipped first. Anatoly's answer is that this was less a strategy than survival. The project started at the end of 2017 and into 2018, at the peak of the cycle, and the crash that followed was fast and brutal — committed funds blew up in front of him, and the answer was simply that they could not fund it.

What the collapse did not take was the team. With enough money for a short runway, Anatoly recruited principal-engineer-level people and senior directors from Qualcomm, many of whom had worked with him for over a decade. His surprise at how quickly they agreed is the episode's clearest signal about why the company could execute: the credibility was personal, not institutional.

The technical bet was equally unusual. Proof of history was Anatoly's own idea, with only a few academics working on related verifiable delay functions, while the rest of the industry went in a different direction. He is explicit that this made fundraising harder, because investors preferred pedigree — an MIT or Ivy League founder — over an unproven design from a Qualcomm engineer.

The runway math is the practical version of the same story: they thought it would take a year, it took about two and a half and cost more, so they hired more than planned and raised a few more times, always operating under two years and often under eighteen months of runway, in a bear market, trying to ship fast enough to reach the stage where users and use cases become possible.

David's summary of the funding environment is that crypto-native investors had either blown up or were committed to other technical paradigms, while non-crypto investors treated the sector as radioactive. Anatoly's correction is that a few funds — Foundation, Slow Ventures, Multicoin — backed them and stayed through every round, and that the validator community became a second and more reliable source of support.

That validator detail is the episode's most transferable lesson about early adoption. These were people deep enough in the space to run every interesting network, they came into every round first without asking questions, and they became the first customers — the first people to run the software, see it fail, and come back. Anatoly's phrase for it is that they dealt with every failure into a facade.

Anatoly's crypto origin is not the true-believer story. He heard about Bitcoin around the 2008 crash, mined a little on a CPU and lost the keys, then watched other people ship the GPU miner he was thinking about and the FPGA miner a month later. His first real lesson came from an ASIC vendor that delayed shipping to customers by six months so it could mine with the machines first — which David calls front-running your customers.

Anatoly's reading of that episode is the useful one: crypto is a peer-to-peer Wild West faithful to its internet roots, and the operational consequence is that you cannot assume anything about the party on the other side. If you cannot verify their keys, and the software is not verifiable, there is nothing to trust.