Solana Founder Raj Gokal Shares MINDSET SHIFTS That Built $83B Company

Raj Gokal 0:00 I would be in San Francisco, in Silicon Valley, in the technology industry, starting companies over and over and over until something really worked. Having a really good co-founder relationship is the most important part-

Marina Mogilko 0:11 Mm-hmm

Raj Gokal 0:11 ... of starting companies. I spent a year starting, like, nine companies.

Marina Mogilko 0:16 How did you decide when to give up on the idea?

Raj Gokal 0:18 Did not say to myself, "I'm gonna go spend the next 10 years working on this with Toly." What I said is, "I'll give Toly six months."

Marina Mogilko 0:25 How do you feel about that?

Raj Gokal 0:26 I love roller coasters. I love diversity of experience in life. I like experiencing the highs and lows.

Marina Mogilko 0:31 Hello, guys. Welcome to Silicon Valley Girl. We have a very special guest today, Raj of Solana. Oh my God, you're building something exciting, something that is valued at $73 billion. Solanas are trading 1 to 3 billion worth of coins every single day. And today we're gonna talk about your story, how you built it, how you came up with the idea or how you joined, uh, the team, and how you started the team. Can you tell me about your entrepreneurial journey? 'Cause I looked at your LinkedIn, and you started so many companies before. You did so many things. Uh, can you tell me about your-

Raj Gokal 1:06 Sure. Yeah, I d- I don't even list all the companies that I, uh, have started on there, 'cause most of them were failures. I think that was always my commitment to myself, was that, um, you know, I would be, uh, in San Francisco, in Silicon Valley, in the technology industry, starting companies over and over and over until something, uh, really worked. Um-

Marina Mogilko 1:26 Mm-hmm

Raj Gokal 1:27 ... and, uh, so yeah, my journey started with, um... The first company I started was in my, you know, very early 20s, uh, with, uh, one of my very good friends from college. We started a glucose sensor company for consumers and athletes. So it didn't get all the way to market. It got acquired by a company, uh, called One Drop.

Marina Mogilko 1:45 Mm.

Raj Gokal 1:45 Um, and that was the beginning of my journey in-

Marina Mogilko 1:48 Your first company got acquired.

Raj Gokal 1:49 Yes, uh-

Marina Mogilko 1:50 That's amazing

Raj Gokal 1:50 ... r- my co-founder really did, did all of the, the work.

Marina Mogilko 1:53 Mm.

Raj Gokal 1:53 I left before the acquisition, um-

Marina Mogilko 1:55 Yeah. But still

Raj Gokal 1:55 ... because it was... Yeah, it was, it was gonna be a long slog.

Marina Mogilko 1:58 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 1:58 And, and, you know, that's, uh, I think

Raj Gokal 2:00 one of the big learnings that I had, is that having a really good co-founder relationship is, uh, is maybe the most important part of starting-

Marina Mogilko 2:09 Mm-hmm

Raj Gokal 2:09 ... uh, companies. To me, it's all about the journey together. Um, and, uh, I would, I would never see myself being, like, a solo co-founder. Um, Ashwin, my co-founder there, uh, led that company for another, I think, six years after I left, and he got it acquired. And, uh, you know, hopefully that technology will see the light of day soon. But, um, the other learning there was just that, you know, in a very regulated industry, you know, if you're going to really rebuild a critical part of the stack, you should be very aware of, you know, how valuable your product is, and, uh, how and when you're gonna run up against the forces that tend to wanna keep things the same. So, um, I spent the next six years afterward, uh, in health tech. I was at a company called Omada Health, where, uh, Balaji was actually on the board. And, and that was where I started to learn about crypto. Um, but in, in, in all the companies in health tech that I started and, and helped, um, uh, you know, co-found and, and was part of the founding teams, what I noticed was that, you know, the health plans, the insurance companies in the US, and the regulators, you know, mainly the FDA, were... You know, they're just extremely risk-averse, and they hold all the keys. Nothing gets paid for, um, and nothing gets to market without the approval of a very small set of, you know, very powerful decision-makers.

Marina Mogilko 3:26 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 3:27 You know, I, I always wanted to try and rebuild an industry like healthcare or finance or education, these, these big regulated industries with giant incumbents that had kind of avoided, through one way or another, getting completely blindsided and rebuilt with technology. Like, that is what I think, uh, is, you know, some, some of the biggest set of opportunities in the next 20 to 50 years, is rebuilding those industries.

Marina Mogilko 3:52 Yeah.

Raj Gokal 3:52 Um, what I realized about healthcare was just that the incumbents are incredibly powerful, and there's not really a quick way to, uh, displace those incumbents. I think now you start to see things like, you know, Apple is making a lot of the sensor tech that u- that unlocks data, that unlocks insights, um, more of a consumer purchasing decision instead of a, you know, um, health plan purchasing decision.

Marina Mogilko 4:18 Mm.

Raj Gokal 4:18 So the cracks are showing, but it takes a, a large company like Apple or Amazon, um, or Google, who's doing Verily, to start to, uh, actually attack that industry.

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Raj Gokal 5:40 So a lot of people ask, "How did you get into crypto?"

Marina Mogilko 5:42 Yeah.

Raj Gokal 5:42 I, I think crypto, um, just conceptually is rebuilding finance without having to get the permission-

Marina Mogilko 5:49 But it's still a very regulated service. It's a very regulated industry.

Raj Gokal 5:52 It is.

Marina Mogilko 5:52 So you're switching from one very regulated [laughs] industry to another.

Raj Gokal 5:55 Yes, but, um, you know, a lot of existing regulation in finance is, it was written with intermediaries in mind.

Marina Mogilko 6:04 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 6:04 The idea that, you know, there is no such thing as peer-to-peer lending that regulation cares about. There's only, uh, lending that we care about when there's an in- intermediary, which is called a bank-

Marina Mogilko 6:15 Mm-hmm

Raj Gokal 6:15 ... uh, that facilitates that lending. And so, you know, the, the fact that finance is built around intermediaries, and that's what are, what is being removed in crypto, I think, um, is, is what unlocks the ability for crypto to really rebuild that industry much faster than, than healthcare can be rebuilt.

Marina Mogilko 6:31 Mm.

Raj Gokal 6:31 Right now, you can't deliver care, um, without a doctor in healthcare or wi- without somebody who's, you know, a licensed professional. That may change over time, but we're not quite there yet. In finance, we have the ability to have a peer-to-peer relationship, remove that intermediary-

Marina Mogilko 6:46 Mm-hmm

Raj Gokal 6:46 ... replace them with k- with technology. And so, um, it's a lot harder for, you know, those big incumbent forces to, uh, decide what gets used or not. At the end of the day, if, if people want something like crypto, if they wanna, you know, trade tokens, NFTs, they can. Y- there's no, there's no stopping it. Also, crypto is global. It's, it, it, it immediately became a global phenomenon. Everybody in every country, uh, uses crypto. And so, you know, the regulatory risk, the legal risk, and, and the market risk all get much more diversified. There, there are always- You know, when, when crypto's dead in the US, um, it, it can be huge in Korea.

Marina Mogilko 7:25 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 7:25 If, you know, if the US government is not, uh, interested in facilitating crypto startups and allowing them to flourish, you know, Dubai and Abu Dhabi and Singapore and, and London, like, all these other places will compete on, uh, on creating a better regulatory environment. So I think crypto in that way, you know, a lot of people think that it's being held back or it's, it's, uh, you know, the world isn't ready for it. I love it. I think it's moving super fast, um, relative to something like, you know, healthcare innovation in the US.

Marina Mogilko 7:55 But when you entered the market, healthcare is pretty much stable, right? Yes, it's very regulated, but it's stable. You know, we see it growing, et cetera. With crypto, it's just up and down. And I think the first time we met, the first question I asked you, how do you mentally handle that? Did you think about it going into the industry, and how has it been so far?

Raj Gokal 8:15 I think any, any really important innovation is very volatile at first-

Marina Mogilko 8:22 Mm-hmm

Raj Gokal 8:22 ... when it enters the market, and as it proliferates.

Marina Mogilko 8:26 People think that, don't know. [laughs]

Raj Gokal 8:27 I don't know. I mean, you know, um, in the internet boom, the, the dot com boom and bust was very volatile, right? People who had built, you know, a lot of expertise and skills in, uh, in very hard trade work, um, learning how to develop software, um, you know, uh, getting funding, building giant teams, building headquarters, like, all of that got wiped away, um, you know, when the bubble burst. And so, um,

Raj Gokal 8:52 I think anything that's important inherently comes with a lot of, you know, great speculative energy that overheats the space, and then it dissipates. And, uh, I almost think that the more valuable it is, the more transformative it is, the, the more those, you know, bubbles and bursts will, will come and, um... And I think the world's also just getting faster, right?

Marina Mogilko 9:12 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 9:13 Um, it's easier to get to 100 million users of a thing now than it was 10 years ago or 10 years prior. If you look at the curve of, you know, adoption of, um, electricity and, uh, and light bulbs, and telephones, and, and then internet, and mobile, uh, and, um, you know, and now crypto, uh, and AI, the curves are just getting much, much steeper.

Marina Mogilko 9:35 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 9:35 You can get to 100 million or a billion users much faster. So, um, you know, I think that speculation and that excitement is actually justified because these things can transform our lives very quickly. Um, but in the moment, in the, you know, the three or four years of doing a startup within that, um, very volatile, uh, long-term trajectory, it can feel pretty, you know, uh, pretty up and down. And it, and it has. I think I always tell myself, you know, when I go through something like that, um, this is why I got into it. I love roller coasters. I love, you know, I love diversity of experience in life. I like experiencing the highs and lows. Um, and I think it's a lot of fun to see what remains constant through those great, great highs and great, great lows because that's where you start to see, you know, truths about what it is you're building, and what's valuable, and, and what you're gonna be doing, you know, 20 years from now. And, and that's often hard to, hard to zero in on in a, in a fast-changing world.

Marina Mogilko 10:33 Yeah. But, like, also with crypto, my concern, for example, if I'm building something in crypto, a lot of the ups and downs actually depend on people believing in it, right? 'Cause sometimes, okay, we have fundamental factors, but here I feel like for crypto, belief is this fundamental factor. And in the era of social media, if somebody starts, "Oh, let's, let's just sell Bitcoin, it's a scam," and, like, the whole crypto industry goes down. How do you feel about that? 'Cause, like, with medical industry, right, we're still bu- and healthcare has been around for-

Raj Gokal 11:02 Mm-hmm

Marina Mogilko 11:02 ... hundreds of years. So it's different. And, like, I feel... I want to understand your mindset around that.

Raj Gokal 11:08 That's a... It's a good point. I think, you know, for something like, let's say, Bitcoin, belief that it's valuable is a fundamental property of that asset.

Marina Mogilko 11:19 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 11:19 And then Bitcoin is the bellwether asset for all of crypto. It's the oldest. It's the one that established the idea that decentralized ledgers-

Marina Mogilko 11:27 Yeah

Raj Gokal 11:27 ... could exist at all. So y- you know, if you're thinking about, uh, the store of value use case, belief that a digital asset that isn't backed by a physical asset or a government is a very important property for that thing to retain its value and become more stable. I would argue that we're past the point of Bitcoin being, um, on a shaky foundation of, of belief with humans, who is, uh, you know, institutions who are the stewards of capital for less sophisticated people. So, you know, you see ETFs being filed and approved from big institutions like BlackRock. Um, and uh, you know, you see that they're not just, um, doing that as a, um, you know, a small feature. Uh, the- actually, the CEO of BlackRock goes on, you know, Bloom- Bloomberg all the time and, and talks about, uh, what he understands to be the value in something like Bitcoin.

Marina Mogilko 12:20 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 12:20 Um, and governments, right? Um, El Salvador, um, and, and others now starting to think about Bitcoin as something like a, um, you know, a non-state, uh, backed currency that they can treat as legal tender. Three years before that, you know, in 2017, 2016, back to 2014, it was basically a crazy idea. Like, no- just nobody, no- nobody really thought it would work, um, s- you know, six, seven years ago. Um, where we're at now is I think the onus is on the non-believers to prove, you know, w- what's gonna, uh, shake this thing off course because it's kind of been through everything.

Marina Mogilko 12:59 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 12:59 So I think, you know... Uh, and that's the store of value use case. I think belief is important for that because it's just, it's just value. I mean, gold is a multi-trillion dollar asset-

Marina Mogilko 13:08 Yeah

Raj Gokal 13:08 ... um, for that reason.

Marina Mogilko 13:09 Art.

Raj Gokal 13:09 Uh, art is, you know-

Marina Mogilko 13:10 That is stored somewhere you don't see it. [laughs]

Raj Gokal 13:12 Right. And I think, I think... My belief is that Bitcoin has solidly crossed the chasm into that class of store of value. Store of value is very mature in its adoption curve.

Marina Mogilko 13:22 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 13:22 Um, I think payments is, um- ... immature with end consumers, but, you know, we see, like, Visa using Solana for settlement between banks and merchants, and issuers, uh, using Solana.

Marina Mogilko 13:36 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 13:36 And, um, you know, so using USDC on Solana. So that's a, a large institution with great opportunity cost, with a great technical team who, um, you know, l- uh, looks at the state of the technology and, and bets independent of the market cycles that, uh, the future of settlement will happen on these rails, and they're starting to build it, right?

Marina Mogilko 13:57 Interesting.

Raj Gokal 13:57 And, and, and you see the same thing with Stripe, who just restarted their, you know, crypto payments, um, acceptance. Uh, and John Collison demoed, um, Solana USDC-

Marina Mogilko 14:07 Mm

Raj Gokal 14:07 ... onstage, and it was instant.

Marina Mogilko 14:08 Mm.

Raj Gokal 14:08 And so, you know, for them, the speed and, and the reliability of a network like Solana was very important. So, you know, in payments that's starting to happen. Um, in all the other use cases, I think there, there's a lot of volatility, but what makes me really happy is that similar to the, you know, um, 1995 to 2005 window of, of internet adoption, it was never just one thing.

Marina Mogilko 14:33 Mm.

Raj Gokal 14:33 Right? It was, it was important to get your email address, 'cause, you know, generally that would be s- you know, your, um, your username and, and it would be a way that you access a lot of different services. But every month, every quarter, there was always something different, and then it emerged, you know, uh, over time, the, the main ways that a billion people would wanna use that.

Marina Mogilko 14:55 So you joined, uh, you start... Sorry, started Solana-

Raj Gokal 14:58 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 14:58 ... when it was still not obvious. Like the-

Raj Gokal 15:00 Yes. And that's, that's right. So, you, you know, at the time in 2017, 2018, um, where were we at? Basically, Ethereum had proven that beyond store of value you could have a programmable layer for, um, decentralized applications of any type to run on, you know, not just a decentralized ledger, but really, like, a decentralized database.

Marina Mogilko 15:22 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 15:23 So that was a super new, novel concept, but CryptoKitties hit, you know, tens of thousands of users on Ethereum, and the gas fees started to go way up, and the latency was very high. And, you know, it was an incredible accomplishment to build what they built, and it's still, you know, underpinning this, this giant on-chain economy. Um, but it was clear that if the scale was being l- uh, stress-tested and, and sort of cracking at the seams at that level, then we needed to explore very different options for scaling blockchain.

Marina Mogilko 15:58 Mm.

Raj Gokal 15:58 Right? Um, and, and it was clear that every path for scaling would be funded and, uh, and would be explored. Because, uh, investors understood, you know, users understood, the media understood that, um, this thing really had a chance, uh, but it was largely infrastructure, uh, uh, bottlenecked. So a lot of infrastructure got funded. Solana's approach was w- our belief was that sharding, so splitting these networks into many networks that interoperate in order to scale, should be the last thing we do to scale blockchain. The first thing we should do is parallelize transaction processing-

Marina Mogilko 16:37 Mm-hmm

Raj Gokal 16:38 ... and create a shared source of time across the network that doesn't require trusting a centralized entity-

Marina Mogilko 16:44 Mm

Raj Gokal 16:44 ... to coordinate messaging, so that you could have a high throughput, non-sharded, single global state machine-

Marina Mogilko 16:51 Mm-hmm

Raj Gokal 16:51 ... uh, that would scale with Moore's law. So, um, y- you know, our bet was let's just go build the thing we, uh, know would be designed today, given what we know about the limitations of Ethereum scalability. Let's build, uh, with Moore's law in mind, uh, assuming that, you know, hardware's gonna get cheaper over time, which it, it has. Um, and, uh, and let's build it from scratch, uh, just optimizing in every single engineering decision for performance-

Marina Mogilko 17:21 Mm-hmm

Raj Gokal 17:22 ... so that if there's some high performance thing that comes up that people really need a, you know, the most scalable, the most fast, uh, the most cheap blockchain for, we'll have the best thing for that.

Marina Mogilko 17:33 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 17:34 Um, and we didn't really have many opinion- opinions about what that would be. I, I think at the, at the time there were a lot of writings and podcasts, and I mean, it was just information overload about how the world could be changed with blockchain. Uh, it's, it's like being in, you know, the mid-'90s and, and trying to imagine YouTube and Uber and, you know, Instacart. It, it's u- it's useful to dream. But more importantly, like, what gets built first, what unlocks that thing getting built, um, you know, and, and how do you give that thing a predictable path to scale as soon as it starts to work? Because if something works-

Marina Mogilko 18:10 Mm-hmm

Raj Gokal 18:11 ... you know, we've seen this in technology, it can go from 30,000 to 30 million to 3 billion users-

Marina Mogilko 18:16 Very fast

Raj Gokal 18:16 ... very quickly.

Marina Mogilko 18:17 Yeah.

Raj Gokal 18:17 So you wanna be in a, in an environment where, um, you're not scale constrained to see, you know, could CryptoKitties have become a 3 million user application in six months? Like, maybe, right? But it became clearly c- cost prohibitive to participate in.

Marina Mogilko 18:33 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 18:33 So, so our bet was, like, let's just focus on scale and, uh, hope that the, the use cases come, and then what we found is they came

Raj Gokal 18:42 very quickly.

Marina Mogilko 18:42 Can you talk about the idea itself? Who came up with this idea? Did you have background, like understanding whatever you're telling right now, if you were, like, in medical startups, right? Um, can you talk about that transition?

Raj Gokal 18:55 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 18:55 And how'd you find your co-founders?

Raj Gokal 18:57 Yeah. So, um, the credit I think ha- has to completely go to Anatoly-

Marina Mogilko 19:02 Mm-hmm

Raj Gokal 19:02 ... uh, because Anatoly's whole, uh, career was in scaling distributed systems. He-

Marina Mogilko 19:08 How'd you meet?

Raj Gokal 19:09 Um, so at Omada, there was a guy named Eric Williams, who was a, a former particle physicist, and he ran data science when I ran prod- product management.

Marina Mogilko 19:18 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 19:19 And we found a very good, you know, almost co-founder relationship within that company, um, where we worked very closely together. We were, you know, we were probably working 100 hours a week. We had, you know, teams that we formed. And so it felt like a startup within a startup, and we worked very well together. Um, when I left Omada to start... I was gonna start some new company. I, I went through-

Marina Mogilko 19:40 What was company number, uh, [laughs] of yours?

Raj Gokal 19:43 Uh, so Omada was company number two, and I, I was early but not a co-founder.

Marina Mogilko 19:48 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 19:48 And then I spent, um, a year starting, like, nine companies, and that's, uh, that's-

Marina Mogilko 19:53 Nine companies in a year.

Raj Gokal 19:54 That's like a whole other story. Yeah, yeah. But all of it was in, within health tech. Right?

Marina Mogilko 19:58 Okay. One question-

Raj Gokal 19:59 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 19:59 ... to that year, 'cause I feel it's very important for people who are watching, how did you decide when to give up on the idea?

Raj Gokal 20:05 Great question. So my approach was at first it was very thematic and it was outcome driven. I wanted to create a product within health tech that would reach product market fit quickly, be capital efficient, raise as little money as possible, deliver some value that was newly technically possible, uh, and then be able to expand the product offering from there to rebuild other parts of the stack in healthcare. Otherwise, I wasn't interested. I didn't wanna make a product that, you know, made a billion dollars and then you sell it and then, you know, no health outcomes are changed. Mm-hmm. For me it was healthcare is just like super broken. We have to find the wedge to rebuild it. Yeah. So I, I get one was ambition, right? Is did I see that possibility on a, on a reasonable timeframe within any product that I started and, and built. Number two was, um, the, the team, right? So- Yeah. So how do you find the right person for every- So th- you know, all my time in Silicon Valley was spent... And in college, really my whole life, all I was doing was meeting people and evaluating whether we could build something together, right? Yes. And then if it wasn't them, did they know somebody? You know, I would, for me, finding, it's like looking for a, for a, a life partner, right? Mm-hmm. It's, it's you're, you're always looking. You, you can't not be looking. Mm-hmm. Um, and you know, that's how you expose yourself to more luck. And so, uh, you know, I, I had, uh, engineers that I had worked with, um, people that I'd went to college with, people that they knew, people I met over coffee. I was always starting from somewhere. What's the one thing we can experiment with? Can we hack on a weekend? Can we build, you know, an MVP of, of this product? Um, can we just hack on something on the weekends that is not even the product we wanna work on just to see if we work well together, right? Mm-hmm. It's sort of like, I think musicians- Mm ... in studios sometimes. They're just constantly having people come in and out to see, like, does our style match? Mm-hmm. 'Cause again, to me that style match, if you're gonna go through this crazy rollercoaster that you, you couldn't possibly foresee what you're about to go through together, the match is really important. So, um, so within, through the year, you know, I did hit a point where I said, "I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm done here with, with this class of ideas." And I'll tell you- Were, were those the same co-founders? Or like- No. It was, it was many different teams. New. Oh, wow. Yeah, many different teams. I probably worked with 30 people differently. Did you launch them simultaneously, all of them? No, no. No? It was, I- One by one? Okay ... I had a, I had a whiteboard with, um, kind of like a Kanban board of i- you know, filtering from ideas to, you know, what was actually being built to what was... You know, I got into like co-founder negotiations with people at, you know, where we're talking about equity split and we're talking about how much money do we raise and we're, you know, like planning out our, our life together. And, and you know, I probably hit three or four of those where I just realized like, I don't feel like I can do this for the next 5 or 10 years with this person. N- none of them felt, uh, the same as when Eric, the, the, uh, particle physicist told me, "You have to start spending time with Anatoly." Next time I heard about him was Eric just saying like, "Toly thinks he might wanna get into crypto and he thinks scalability's a big problem and he thinks he knows how to solve it and he, you know, can't stop thinking about it and you need to talk to him." Mm-hmm. So, um, I started having coffee with Anatoly and, you know, the realization I had was, okay, this... First of all, remember Balaji was on the board of Omada. He had left to start Earn, Earn.co and, um, uh, and, and many of the engineers, um, that I had worked with over the years had jumped into the Ethereum ecosystem or were like, all they wanted to do at night was, was work on crypto stuff. So I had been following and I had been like investing a little bit, not enough to make real money.

Raj Gokal 23:58 But, uh, my big question was, you know, is this, is this a technology that's going to be impactful on a 20-year timeline or a 10-year timeline or, you know, is it, is it ready for primetime? Mm-hmm. And as I talked to Anatoly, what I realized and what he did a great job of convincing everyone, uh, of, um, was that, you know, scalability was the main problem, like with this distributed system and that we had solved it before. We'd solved it in wireless networks, we'd solved it in the internet, um, we'd solved it in data centers. Um, the principles for scaling these distributed systems are not novel. They- I w- did not say to myself, I'm gonna go spend the next 10 years, uh, working on this with Toly. What I said is, I'll give Toly six months, um, because I think he is capable of doing this on his own. Uh, but I wanna make sure he gets, you know, fun- fundraising done correctly. I know how to do that. I wanna make sure he hires the right first 5 or 10 people. I know how to do that. I think, you know, as important as the, the co-founder relationship is, the founding team and the first 10 people you hire I just think is incredibly important. I think of it like writing DNA, you know? You're, y- you're basically designing what the thousand person organization is gonna look like when you hire the first 10, 'cause they'll hire the next 10 that hire 10 each and then you're just there. Mm-hmm. And, and it happens before you ever thought it could happen so quickly. Yeah. Um, and I, I had seen it before. I'd seen how the DNA of a company and a team can go off track. It can get conflicted. It's, you know, it's, um, th- th- those early decisions are very important. So I, I just said I'll give Anatoly six y- six months of my time full time. I'm just gonna dive all the way in and, um, you know, I really just wanna see this vision that he has of this architecture see the light of day. Mm-hmm. If I'm confident it'll see the light of day, then I'll come back to the health tech stuff. I'll think about what I really wanna start and I'll look at things that are more thematic, um, uh, around outcomes that I care about that I'd been spending my time around. I think that was partially just my way of convincing myself to- Make such a big switch so quickly as well.

Marina Mogilko 26:11 Interesting. So-

Raj Gokal 26:11 Right? It was, it was not actually that big of a commitment

Marina Mogilko 26:14 ... from what I'm hearing, you're basically, you are deciding on whether to participate in an idea or not. First of all, the idea itself, but second, the team, and it's actually the most important, right? This is why-

Raj Gokal 26:24 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 26:24 ... you switched ideas that much.

Raj Gokal 26:25 I think that that was a big mental switch for me. I, I decided that it was more important to spend my time with someone that I knew I worked well with, and that I knew was probably the best in the world for the problem at hand-

Marina Mogilko 26:39 Mm-hmm

Raj Gokal 26:40 ... whatever the problem was-

Marina Mogilko 26:41 Mm-hmm

Raj Gokal 26:42 ... uh, rather than focusing on the problem and trying to assemble the best team for that problem.

Marina Mogilko 26:46 So you're basically the business person, right? You take someone who's very deep into a topic, and you do the business part, like hiring, fundraising, right?

Raj Gokal 26:54 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 26:54 So that... And that's your role in Solana, right?

Raj Gokal 26:56 It was six years ago. Now I'd say it's a, a totally different role, I think. Um, I wear many different hats, um-

Marina Mogilko 27:03 Can... And, and can you explain the whole, like, thing? 'Cause you have Solana Labs, you have Solana Foundation.

Raj Gokal 27:07 Mm-hmm.

Marina Mogilko 27:07 How, how does the structure work for a person who's coming from standard business background, like the ownership?

Raj Gokal 27:15 Mm.

Marina Mogilko 27:15 What... Like, how do you... Because the money, like, the valuation that's traded on the market is different from the company's valuation, right?

Raj Gokal 27:22 Right. Right.

Marina Mogilko 27:22 Can you explain that a little bit?

Raj Gokal 27:23 Yeah. So, you know, keep in mind, uh, to me, the, the gold standard here is Bitcoin, right? Bitcoin doesn't have a, a central, you know, foundation or planning organization. It, it really is completely com- community driven. Um, Satoshi w- w- is or was a person or a group of people, we don't even know. Um, and, and that identity has now disappeared. You just don't hear from Satoshi. So I think, um, an important component of crypto networks is that, uh, uh... Well, I think this anyway, is that they eventually become something like a complete public good, like the internet. There's no... Nobody cares about what companies are maintaining the internet. They're, they're out there somewhere, um, and, and they have less power than everyone else that's building on and using and, and, um, and contributing to the internet as a public good. Um, so I'd say we're very far along on that, uh, roadmap for even Solana at this point. Ethereum, uh, is, is similar. But, um, uh, the organizations that Anatoly and I started were Solana Labs and Solana Foundation. And, uh, Solan- at this point, you know, they're very small, dozens of people. Um, you know, and w- uh, people leave all the time to go start new companies on, on top of the f- the, the network. Um, but Solana Labs focuses on building products, um, mostly on top of the Solana network. So, uh, it started by building, uh, reference implementations for DeFi, borrowing and lending protocols, um, you know, uh, AMM protocols, the types of things that people would trade and, and, uh, and participate in finance, uh, using. Um, it also built Metaplex, um, which is the NFT, uh, protocol that underpins all the NFT marketplaces that are now all multi-billion dollar businesses.

Marina Mogilko 29:13 How does this company get paid?

Raj Gokal 29:14 [lips smack] Um, so it, you know... It, it launches these products, and it takes a very small percentage of ownership as if it were, like, an investor in those products.

Marina Mogilko 29:25 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 29:25 Um, and again, it's a very small team, so it doesn't need to

Raj Gokal 29:28 make that much money.

Marina Mogilko 29:29 But, um, like, I'm trying to understand. So you start Solana, for example, right? So you basically take some coins to operate. They grow, and this is how you grow your capital. Is that correct? Or, like, if people invest in you-

Raj Gokal 29:40 Hmm

Marina Mogilko 29:41 ... the investment itself, they buy Solanas. They don't just give you money. 'Cause I'm try- like, from... Because if we're talking about Satoshi, right?

Raj Gokal 29:48 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 29:48 If they're raising money, like, how [laughs] does that happen?

Raj Gokal 29:50 Right, right. Well, um, you know, I think there was a big, uh, shift. So when Ethereum launched, um, and it launched its ICO, people were able to buy... Anyone was able to buy, uh, you know, ETH, uh, from, from the-

Marina Mogilko 30:04 Yeah, and that was, like, the foundational model for-

Raj Gokal 30:06 Right, right

Marina Mogilko 30:06 ... a lot of startups back then. Yeah.

Raj Gokal 30:08 After that, um, you know, it became clear that that would not be okay-

Marina Mogilko 30:13 Mm-hmm

Raj Gokal 30:13 ... in the US. You can't just sell, you know, tokens, um, uh, in an open market to anybody-

Marina Mogilko 30:18 Oh, I remember that-

Raj Gokal 30:19 ... you know, whether or not they're accredited

Marina Mogilko 30:20 ... that year.

Raj Gokal 30:21 So-

Marina Mogilko 30:21 It was crazy.

Raj Gokal 30:21 Yeah. It's-

Marina Mogilko 30:22 Everybody ICO'd. [laughs]

Raj Gokal 30:23 Right, right.

Marina Mogilko 30:24 Yeah.

Raj Gokal 30:24 So, so we, you know, we started in a time when it, it... You had to be much more cautious, you had to be much more compliant. So, um, you know, uh, the financings in the early days were sales of SOL, and it was through SAFTs. Um, and those were, uh, tokens that were held back in the genesis block when the network was created. Um, and it was very small. You know, like, the first, um, funding round was $20 million.

Marina Mogilko 30:49 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 30:49 And many of the other networks had raised, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars-

Marina Mogilko 30:53 Mm-hmm

Raj Gokal 30:54 ... uh, through their token sales. Um, but it was all through, you know, um, accredited, uh, investors in the US and, uh, and then also offshore.

Marina Mogilko 31:02 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 31:02 Um, and so there were a lot of, you know, protections put in place to-

Marina Mogilko 31:05 Mm-hmm

Raj Gokal 31:05 ... to stay compliant on that front. But, you know, it, it is different from a centralized business because w-

Marina Mogilko 31:10 Yeah

Raj Gokal 31:11 ... we don't, as the... These, uh, these organizations don't take fees from the network, right? Um, just building products on top of the network is profitable enough to keep, uh, a good group of engineers, um-

Marina Mogilko 31:23 So basically, you build the world. You're building something in that world.

Raj Gokal 31:26 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 31:26 You're making money with something you've, you're building in that world.

Raj Gokal 31:29 Yeah. Yeah, that's right. And I... You know, again, I think, um, there's a world where, uh, the, the, the network can build all the products that it needs, the ecosystem can build all the products that it needs, and there's, there's very little expertise that that original group of developers can have that-

Marina Mogilko 31:45 Mm-hmm

Raj Gokal 31:45 ... uh, that outcompetes, you know, the, the, the world of developers that are building on the network. And if that's the case, like, you know, Solana Labs just goes away. Um, and same with Solana Foundation, right? Um, it is... You know, it manages a treasury of SOL tokens. Um, the main focus for Solana Foundation is just improving the decentralization and censorship resistance of the network.

Marina Mogilko 32:07 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 32:07 So, you know, tokens are, um, delegated to new validators who are, um, you know, who can't necessarily compete in this, uh, group of, you know, many thousands of validators competing for stake. Uh, you know, it helps to have a little bit of a boost, uh, when you get started. So the, the S- Solana Foundation delegra- delegation program, um, does that delegation and then pulls the, the stake away as these validators get more mature.

Marina Mogilko 32:32 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 32:32 So, um, uh- You know, the, the foundation, uh, I think in the long term has... The scope decreases over time.

Marina Mogilko 32:41 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 32:41 Um, and it, it, it really, you know, focuses on these foundational things that are sort of 100, 100-year problems.

Marina Mogilko 32:47 Yeah.

Raj Gokal 32:48 Um, you know, in the interim, there are things that the foundation can do that it's very difficult for any other actor in the ecosystem to, to do. So for example, if Visa is, uh, asking about, you know, the design of the network and, um, and they have a, a, a team of engineers kicking the tires, and they want their questions answered, they're gonna wanna come to, you know, some of the people who built the network. And, um, and we're not in a, a phase yet, I hope we'll get there, um, uh, relatively soon, where Visa doesn't have to talk to anybody to build on Solana. Um, I, I think we're actually... We, we may be there this year-

Marina Mogilko 33:24 Yeah

Raj Gokal 33:24 ... because I, we see a lot of things, like PayPal just started, um, uh, issuing their stablecoin on, on Solana. The Stripe, um, integration, like, I, I don't... That, that just happened, right? People just know how to build on the network now, the same way they know how to interact with email protocol or-

Marina Mogilko 33:39 Mm-hmm

Raj Gokal 33:39 ... internet protocol. So, um-

Marina Mogilko 33:40 Do you get anything from those projects?

Raj Gokal 33:43 No.

Marina Mogilko 33:43 No.

Raj Gokal 33:43 No.

Marina Mogilko 33:43 So they're just independent, and if they talk to you, that's just basically, you just explain how it works-

Raj Gokal 33:48 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 33:48 ... and that's it.

Raj Gokal 33:49 I think there, there, there are opportunities for these organizations to make a lot more money than they do.

Marina Mogilko 33:55 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 33:55 But that's not the focus. Um, you know, because if there's a profit motive to extract value from the network, that's a business that somebody else could be running.

Marina Mogilko 34:06 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 34:07 And it's more of a public good. It's more, um, of a, you know, uh, equal fair playing field if those businesses actually start and do those things as independent companies.

Marina Mogilko 34:20 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 34:20 So you wanna see many companies providing a service.

Marina Mogilko 34:22 So you, you wanna see the world grow.

Raj Gokal 34:23 Yes. Yeah, the-

Marina Mogilko 34:23 You don't wanna just extract profit from it because it, uh, doesn't-

Raj Gokal 34:27 Yeah, it's-

Marina Mogilko 34:27 ... it hurts the growth.

Raj Gokal 34:28 Yeah. I think it's, um, it's about, uh, contributing to the network being as diverse and, um, and self-sustaining and self-growing-

Marina Mogilko 34:37 Mm-hmm

Raj Gokal 34:37 ... as, as possible. And again, I think it's, I think it's there. It's very hard to see what parts of the ecosystem aren't, you know, growing on their own at this point. Um, you know, most of the time when people ask, "What did, what did you do to make X happen?" I tell them, "Well, I learned about X the same way that you did, through the press or, you know, through Twitter."

Marina Mogilko 34:59 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 35:00 Um, and that's a cool feeling. Uh, that means that it's very organic. It's,

Raj Gokal 35:03 it's happening on its own.

Marina Mogilko 35:04 What's your role right now?

Raj Gokal 35:07 Yeah. So I'm on the board of the Solana Foundation.

Marina Mogilko 35:09 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 35:09 Um, and I am president at Solana Labs.

Marina Mogilko 35:12 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 35:13 So Anatoly and I spend our time at Solana Labs mostly, um, focusing on, on new products like, uh, like we launched Saga, the, the mobile device, and-

Marina Mogilko 35:22 Yeah

Raj Gokal 35:22 ... um, and there's a, a follow-up to that coming. Um, there's a bunch of products that we just work on, uh, on building and delivering to the market at Solana Labs. And then Solana Foundation, you know, it has a, a really great team, and so I check in with that team from a board level. Um, but I'm not part of the day-to-day operations at foundation.

Marina Mogilko 35:40 But you're the co-founder, right?

Raj Gokal 35:41 Yes.

Marina Mogilko 35:41 Formally.

Raj Gokal 35:42 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 35:42 And how... Can you say what's the stake, or how is it even defined in a company like this? Do you get, like, Solanas as a founder?

Raj Gokal 35:50 Yeah. S- so we, um, the founders, the founding team, uh, got some... And you, this is all public, it's on the blockchain, right? But, um, there were tokens held back for the team to be able to compensate the team that-

Marina Mogilko 36:03 Mm-hmm

Raj Gokal 36:03 ... that contributed to building the network.

Raj Gokal 36:06 And, and, um, I think the same is true of a lot of open source software operating systems, um, you know, dev tooling. People build software sometimes just because it's useful, and they want it to be used, and they want it to solve a problem. In crypto, the, the to- like, tokens are useful because these are protocols that manage and govern real-world value that is, uh, tradable for real money and assets, which means they are at risk. There's a, you know, there's a, um, there's an opportunity to, uh, gain a lot of value if you can game that system in some way.

Marina Mogilko 36:43 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 36:43 And so one way to think about tokens is that they are simply a spam prevention mechanism. Uh, you can't just access this protocol for free because that means you would do all the things you can, uh, do for free with a protocol that might want, that might game it.

Marina Mogilko 36:58 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 36:59 You would spam it, and you would, you know, flood it with transactions, and, and you would try to DDoS it, and there's all these things you can do to manipulate the protocol if it's completely free.

Marina Mogilko 37:08 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 37:09 And so you need some mechanism to be able to pay for access to that protocol.

Marina Mogilko 37:12 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 37:13 And that's one way to think about what tokens are. It's just spam prevention.

Marina Mogilko 37:16 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 37:16 It's like if email, uh, cost, you know, 1/1000 of a cent to send an email. Well, what company would you go to to pay them? There's not a company. You, you have to have a mechanism for paying a protocol to use it. And so a lot of people who, who designed the early internet and, and were part of early companies, like Mark Andreessen, um, talks about this with Netscape. They say, "If we could go back, we would have some form of value and spam resistance and, um, and the ability to pay to use open protocols."

Marina Mogilko 37:47 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 37:47 "It would probably look something like crypto if we had thought about, you know, the second, third-order effects of, of not having that thing."

Marina Mogilko 37:54 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 37:54 Um, and... That different. Um, it is, it is new, and, and I think the way that companies start, um, tends to be, um, a- I- i- it's a bit of a, it's a bit of a mind shift for somebody that's used to, like, startups with equity and stuff.

Marina Mogilko 38:10 Mm.

Raj Gokal 38:10 But, but I would, I would just think about it more as, like, how do you build open source software that's spam resistant? Um, and I, I don't think anybody serious is really thinking too much about, like, exits and stuff. You know? The Saga was the first device that we launched. Um,

Raj Gokal 38:27 that one, uh, is sort of a higher-end device. You know, it's made of titanium. Before the, the iPhone was made of titanium. It was designed by the, the lead architect of the iPad Pro, so a really sort of higher-end, um, you know, crypto device that had no restrictions on NFTs or tokens. Um, so in the App Store, uh, you know, today as a developer, you can't really launch anything you want using crypto. It's actually very restrictive.

Marina Mogilko 38:54 Mm.

Raj Gokal 38:54 And the App Store fee model of, like, 30% of digital content doesn't really work if I create an NFT and wanna sell it to you. I don't wanna pay a 30% fee. You don't want it th- 30% to go to Apple.

Marina Mogilko 39:08 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 39:08 This is, this is a peer-to-peer relationship.

Marina Mogilko 39:10 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 39:10 So a lot of the models for things that we've seen on desktop in crypto don't work well in the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store. Turns out a lot of people are fine with that [laughs] in the US. So, so 20-

Marina Mogilko 39:21 So they, they have two phones

Raj Gokal 39:22 ... 20,000... Yeah, there were 20,000 Sagas ever produced.

Marina Mogilko 39:25 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 39:26 Um, they all sold out within about two days in, um, uh, late 2023.

Marina Mogilko 39:32 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 39:33 And what we've seen is, you know, there are crypto power users who if they're in the US and they're, um, primarily using an Apple phone, they will carry two phones. Um, a lot of people use it for work. They use it for trading.

Marina Mogilko 39:46 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 39:46 Um, they use it to sign transactions for things that are really, you know, time-sensitive.

Marina Mogilko 39:50 This isn't really a phone. Do people use it for calling at all?

Raj Gokal 39:53 I don't know. We don't ha-

Marina Mogilko 39:54 Oh, y-

Raj Gokal 39:54 ... track analytics or-

Marina Mogilko 39:55 Okay

Raj Gokal 39:55 ... anything like that, but I, I, I know that I've called people, and they said they were on their Saga.

Marina Mogilko 40:00 Uh-huh. Interesting.

Raj Gokal 40:00 So it, it works for phone calls.

Marina Mogilko 40:01 Interesting.

Raj Gokal 40:01 It's an Android phone. Um-

Marina Mogilko 40:02 But I feel like the, the use case will be, like, yeah, transactions on-

Raj Gokal 40:06 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 40:06 ... right.

Raj Gokal 40:07 Yeah, and, and, you know, Ledger also has launched, like, an E Ink display-

Marina Mogilko 40:11 Mm

Raj Gokal 40:11 ... that's, um, a more, um... You know, it's just a more configurable interface

Raj Gokal 40:16 for interacting with, uh, with transaction signing, but they're less focused on that thing coming with you everywhere you go. What we see with Solana across the board, if you look at, like, NFT traders on slower networks like Ethereum, um, the, just the same user behavior of trading NFTs will be 5 to 20x, uh, higher frequency on Solana. It's a very highly engaged user base. Um, and so, you know, I think unlocking the mobile side was a really important bet to make, and there were no other players in the industry that, um, seemed ready or willing to make that bet, so, so we made the bet. Um, tw- after that 20,000, what, what's been amazing is that now there have been over 150,000 pre-orders for the next one.

Marina Mogilko 41:03 Mm.

Raj Gokal 41:03 Uh, yeah, so you know, um, uh, 20,000 is enough for proofs of concept.

Marina Mogilko 41:09 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 41:09 150,000 is more than most consumer apps in crypto today, actually. We haven't started delivering those devices yet.

Marina Mogilko 41:16 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 41:17 But what we see is developers lined up to build for those devices because it's actually competitive with their total addressable market of crypto native users on desktop.

Marina Mogilko 41:28 Mm.

Raj Gokal 41:28 So, you know, we called it Saga because it's... we knew it was gonna be a long story. This is not the type of bet that plays out in one year or two years.

Marina Mogilko 41:35 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 41:36 Similar to launching the network, um, and betting that at some point high performance applications would be needed, this is just a, a bet that you have to keep doubling down on and, and keep investing in. And, um, the signs are, are really good, even if early, uh, that, that people really want something like this.

Marina Mogilko 41:52 Mm-hmm. Was it your idea to launch it?

Raj Gokal 41:54 Um, I think so. Anatoly definitely, uh, was beating the drum hard when he started talking to mobile developers about the idea that we had to, we had to release this valve. Uh, we could not continue to wait on Apple or Google-

Marina Mogilko 42:12 Yeah

Raj Gokal 42:12 ... to change their policies. And I think the breaking point was around that time of some of these mobile apps that went viral on Solana, we expected that the next WWDC conference, there would be something announced. Users are asking for it. Twitter is lighting up every day with people who are imagining a better way for interacting with crypto, um, through the App Store. Wallet interfaces and deep linking was just very broken, and, and you're having to create all these workarounds. Um, you know, the, the, the wallet, uh, development teams and, and app development teams were on these very long release cycles where they have to work through the Apple Store policy. So what we expected was that all of this, um, signal would be reaching Apple and that they would have some really great product announcement. Um, anything.

Marina Mogilko 43:01 Mm.

Raj Gokal 43:01 There was just nothing. Remember what I was saying about incumbents. Like, Apple is the incumbent. Their business model is 30% of digital content.

Marina Mogilko 43:09 Mm.

Raj Gokal 43:09 Uh, they are one of the business models to be disrupted by crypto-

Marina Mogilko 43:15 Mm

Raj Gokal 43:15 ... if this all succeeds. Um, so they're not really incentivized to be forward-leaning on, on enabling it. Um, so, uh, yeah, you know, I think as an industry it's important that we invest in mobile, um, and we don't wait for these giant, you know, um, computing industry incumbents to give us permission. Um, it's important to create that pressure through whatever provides value to users enough for them to adopt it.

Marina Mogilko 43:40 Uh, can you imagine me in two years using Solana phone? What would be for? 'Cause I only... For example, like, I only buy crypto and store it. That's it. I don't transact in crypto. But in the ideal world-

Raj Gokal 43:51 Mm

Marina Mogilko 43:51 ... uh, with your projections.

Raj Gokal 43:53 I'll give you an example of something that's happening right now that is... Y- you know, you might laugh at this example, right? But there are 23,000 new tokens being launched on Solana every day. Um, and they're being, it's, it's, they're being launched and created almost as easily as, uh, someone could ... publish a video on YouTube or, um, or post a, an image on Instagram. Mm-hmm. It's, you know, uh, a- NFTs, um, as an example, you know, two years ago, before compressed NFTs on Solana, it was, you know, thousands of dollars to make, um, 10,000 NFTs. And then compressed NFTs brought that cost down to, um, you know, basically like $100 for a million. Mm-hmm. Um, so it's basically free. It's, it's, it's as cheap as sending an email. In some cases, it's actually cheaper. Yeah. It's cheaper than, like, using Mailchimp to reach your audience. Mm-hmm. Right? What happens if NFTs are just a, a mode of communication to, uh, a large audience, where they actually own the message that's being received- Mm-hmm ... like a letter. Mm-hmm. Um, same thing with tokens, right? Mm-hmm. Uh, you know, what happens if, uh, the way to reach an audience is through, uh, launching a token and interacting with them through that asset? Um, it's, again, it sounds super weird to think about, but it, it is happening, right? So, um, you know, those, uh, 23,000 tokens are being launched through platforms where users can basically click a button, launch the token, it has an image, and they have the few people that were all, um, uh, conversing about that asset in a comment thread. Mm-hmm. And that's the proto-community for that token. Mm-hmm. And then you see, you know, um, uh, celebrities launching these tokens now, and, and, and they're engaging with their audience, uh, through, through that asset. So I think you as a content creator, um, uh, it, it may sound really foreign to, uh, to use a platform like this to, to engage with your audience through, but, um, the, the important part is 100% of the revenue goes, is, is shared between you and your audience. Mm-hmm. Um, you can participate, uh, in things with your audience, like investing in them, them investing in you, um, you know, uh, there's basically infinite design space for how, like, equity and value transfer and ownership can be c- created within the system. When does the SEC come in [laughs] with- I mean, I think, um, so right now, the, the, the meme coins and, um, and the sort of like, uh, throwaway just dog tokens and stuff, they're, they, they say that they're exactly that. It's just- Mm ... it's just for fun, right? Um, I think, uh, you know, I don't really have an opinion on, on how regulation comes in. Um, but, uh, you know, there's a, like I said earlier, the regulation is built around intermediaries. They're, it's not really been designed for a situation where there is no intermediary. No. Um, and, uh, you know, I think what's important to, to sort of look at is what were these creators doing before, um, that's being replaced? Mm-hmm. What tends to be, uh, the, the, the, the trade-off is I was posting to Instagram. I was on a centralized platform where I could be censored, and where, you know, a large percentage of the revenue that's being generated does not go to me. Mm-hmm. Um, it's an ad-supported model where I'm incentivized to create click- clickbaity things that I don't necessarily want to create. Mm-hmm. But I'm feeding into the algorithm to, uh, draw eyeballs for the platform, and so that's what they promote me for. With direct crypto-based relationships, and again, it's very early in, in this, right? But th- there is none of that. It's y- what you're buying is the asset from the creator, and 100% of the revenue goes to the creator, and, and all you have is the contract between the two of you of, of why that thing happened. Mm-hmm. Um, I think, you know, it's, it's, it's very early, but, um, it doesn't seem to be going away. Mm-hmm. So what I would say is, like, in two years, in five years, um, what I tend to see is every year there's some big breakthrough of, like, what people use crypto for- Mm-hmm ... that is sort of unrecognizable from what happened before. And, uh, and I think that's, that's one of them, is this, um, this idea of creators, uh, with tokens and NFTs instead of, uh, you know, video content or images. Interesting. Yeah. So like in communicating through NFTs, that's an interesting concept. Yeah. Like you're holding my NFT, so you're

Raj Gokal 48:29 getting some deals or whatever. Another one, so are you familiar with, like, the DePIN use cases? So DePIN is decentralized physical infrastructure networks. So any network that is really composed of hardware that gets distributed and activated, um, as fast as possible, and the value of the network is commensurate with the number of nodes or pieces of hardware in the network, um, uh, typically, historically, it would be, like, a very centralized, um, very well-capitalized business that would deploy this type of infrastructure. So let's say, like, a wireless network. Mm-hmm. To make a wireless network that's actually usable for 5G is incredibly capital intensive. And, um, and so ultimately it's like tens of billions of dollars, maybe hundreds of billions of dollars to, to stand up a network like that. Well, Helium is an example of a, a network, uh, built on Solana where instead of, you know, Verizon, uh, going through all of that and then owning the network forever, um, any contributor to the network can just, uh, contribute to the bandwidth, uh, required for a 5G network to, to operate by renting out their excess internet bandwidth from their home. Mm-hmm. The way they do that is they just put a node. They put a hotspot- Yeah ... in their home. So there's two million people around the world running hotspots that, uh, underpin a decentralized 5G network. Interesting. I'm, my phone is running it right now. So it's $20 unlimited per month, uh, to use this decentralized Verizon. Wow. And it didn't take, you know, 10 years or 15 years. It didn't take

Raj Gokal 50:02 government subsidies. Um, and it- Basically a Silicon Valley show happening in real time. [laughs] Yeah, exactly. Right. Wow. And, and, uh, you know, it's not just in, in wireless. So, uh, Hivemapper is doing the same with maps. Mm-hmm. So if you remember, you know, you, you've been here in Silicon Valley. You, you remember seeing the Google Street View cars. Yeah. Right? With the big camera- Yeah, yeah ... on top, driving every road in the whole US, and now the whole world. That's like tens of billions of dollars to, to outfit those cars and, um, you know, and, and, and finance the data collection to feed into a map, which ultimately You know, they charge exorbitant fees for, for API access too. Um, and they use it as a consumer-facing tool that they sell ads against. Um, instead, what Hivemapper is doing, and it's actually a much more competitive product, uh, is that they just pay using tokens for people to put a, a dash cam in their car-

Marina Mogilko 50:53 Mm-hmm

Raj Gokal 50:53 ... that's recording 4K footage, and they, just like Uber, they'll have hotspots. So if there's an accident that happens, it'll be, you'll earn more by going to that, that area. Or if you happen to be driving by there-

Marina Mogilko 51:05 Mm-hmm

Raj Gokal 51:05 ... you'll be more incentivized to turn on your, your dash cam and, and record. That way... You know, we're not there yet in terms of the, the usage of, of that, uh, network, 'cause they've only, only remapped 20% of the world's roads in a year, which is impressive.

Marina Mogilko 51:19 Yeah.

Raj Gokal 51:19 It's impressive. But it's, it's not fully done yet. When it's fully done and you have, you know, this high-frequency 4K imagery of a- of, of road events, if you or I are, are driving down the road and we know there's an accident up ahead, we're not just gonna see a little icon. We're gonna see the actual image, we're gonna know what lane it was in, we're gonna know that a piece of the bumper is in the third lane over, uh, you know, and, and we'll be able to make better decisions about driving.

Marina Mogilko 51:44 That's-

Raj Gokal 51:44 So-

Marina Mogilko 51:44 That's just fascinating.

Raj Gokal 51:45 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 51:45 This, these use cases that are offline, uh, semi-offline, this is fascinating to me.

Raj Gokal 51:51 Yeah. DePIN is, um, is early, and there are, some of the most talented founders in crypto are, are building in DePIN.

Marina Mogilko 51:59 And they're using Solana coins. Yeah.

Raj Gokal 52:00 Yeah, both of those are built on Solana. Also, Teleport is built on Solana, and that is, um, an early Dropbox engineer has built basically decentralized Uber.

Marina Mogilko 52:09 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 52:09 So instead of 30% of your fare going to Uber HQ, um, you know, 100% of your fare is going to the driver.

Marina Mogilko 52:18 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 52:18 Um, and there's a lot of other infrastructure-

Marina Mogilko 52:21 And-

Raj Gokal 52:21 ... you need to build to make that work, but they actually did the work of building those things.

Marina Mogilko 52:24 And so you, and they build contracts between you and the driver, and the contract has als- all the rules? Like, does it remove Uber-

Raj Gokal 52:34 Like trust and safety-

Marina Mogilko 52:35 Yeah

Raj Gokal 52:35 ... and that?

Marina Mogilko 52:35 Yeah, exactly.

Raj Gokal 52:36 Yeah, no. So they've built, uh, tho- those are the hard things, right? If you-

Marina Mogilko 52:40 Yeah

Raj Gokal 52:40 ... call the driver-

Marina Mogilko 52:41 Like, who comes in if something happens

Raj Gokal 52:42 ... and they don't show up, you know? Um, yeah, or if something happens.

Marina Mogilko 52:45 Yeah.

Raj Gokal 52:45 Like, you need, uh, basically decentralized versions of all of those, uh, parts of Uber's product offering.

Marina Mogilko 52:53 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 52:53 'Cause they, everybody just thinks, oh, iPhone came out, and then, and the next year there was Uber.

Marina Mogilko 52:57 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 52:57 No, it was years.

Marina Mogilko 52:58 Yeah.

Raj Gokal 52:58 It was years, right? So, um, so I think, again, I, I see these signs and I see the, the signs of a, a marketplace maturing and ecosystem maturing. I always would like it to go faster, but, uh, it's hard to imagine it going faster. It's actually moving pretty quickly.

Marina Mogilko 53:13 So question to you now. You've tried so many companies. Is this the one that you're gonna stick with for a long time, or you still have the ambition to change healthcare?

Raj Gokal 53:23 Well, I mean, I would love to see healthcare get rebuilt, and I track things, uh, in that industry. Um, I just went to Brian Johnson's, um, uh, reveal event for, uh, New Limit, which is his longevity company.

Marina Mogilko 53:39 Mm.

Raj Gokal 53:39 So there are crypto people actually going back into, into healthcare and making really, really big, um, uh, innovations happen. I'm not ready to do anything like that right now. So I think crypto will actually come into healthcare-

Marina Mogilko 53:52 Mm-hmm

Raj Gokal 53:53 ... uh, at some point, um, either through, you know, financing great things or, um, through, you know, making the systems better and more transparent. Um, but, but yeah, to answer your question, I th- Solana still has, it seems like 99.9% of the potential is still ahead, and it's on track to capture all of that potential.

Marina Mogilko 54:16 Yeah.

Raj Gokal 54:16 I don't see anything holding it back.

Marina Mogilko 54:18 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 54:18 So just to be close to that and to be able to help and, and see things as they happen and see them up close, and especially, um, just supporting, uh, early-stage founders as they build on top of the network to go and achieve that vision, because it's, that's where it's all coming from now, right? It's, it's seed-stage founders, like-

Marina Mogilko 54:40 Yeah

Raj Gokal 54:40 ... that remind me of myself, you know, 10 years ago, and I just love spending time with them.

Marina Mogilko 54:44 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 54:45 So, uh, I don't see any end in insight to, to that work.

Marina Mogilko 54:48 Awesome.

Marina Mogilko 54:49 My last question. You talked about early founders. Um, what was the hardest moment for you while building Solana?

Raj Gokal 54:56 Hmm.

Marina Mogilko 54:57 I don't know. Everything was crashing. Have you... What were the thoughts were you, uh, that you were having, and advice to entrepreneurs who are going through hard times?

Raj Gokal 55:05 Hmm.

Marina Mogilko 55:06 How do you not give up?

Raj Gokal 55:08 Yeah. Uh, you know, it's hard to pick the one hardest time, I think, without making a whole 'nother episode, um, because there were a lot of very painful times. Um, I'll just say that, you know, a lot of them are, are public, and you can go see the times when, um, you know, I think the whole crypto industry didn't believe in Solana, and they thought it should die, and they... I mean, I could open my phone any, any time and see thousands of comments saying that Solana's dead, it's going to die, and that it should have died, and it should have never existed to begin with. It's a very tribal industry, and, and that's, um, that can be pretty painful. But I think what Anatoly has taught me, actually, is that when people care enough to have that kind of opinion, that's actually such valuable signal, and it's such-

Marina Mogilko 56:03 Mm

Raj Gokal 56:03 ... valuable motivation, and it can be... It's real energy. They're giving you energy, you know?

Marina Mogilko 56:08 But it's bad energy. I don't know.

Raj Gokal 56:10 No. I think that when... I, I, I, I believe that most people are good and they have good intentions, and so if they're telling you something negative-

Marina Mogilko 56:20 Mm-hmm

Raj Gokal 56:21 ... it's coming from a place of truth somewhere.

Marina Mogilko 56:23 Mm.

Raj Gokal 56:23 It's, it's something that you, that you should, that's valuable signal. And the worst thing for any entrepreneur or anybody, you know, that's building as part of a community or a platform, the worst thing is no signal, right?

Marina Mogilko 56:35 Yeah.

Raj Gokal 56:35 Imagine you launch a YouTube video.

Marina Mogilko 56:36 No views. Yeah.

Raj Gokal 56:36 You get zero views, zero thumbs up, zero thumbs down.

Marina Mogilko 56:40 Yeah.

Raj Gokal 56:40 You've learned nothing, right? You have no signal. Um, it's better to get a thousand thumbs down- ... and just know what not to do or know, you know, how people feel about what you're doing-

Marina Mogilko 56:52 Mm-hmm

Raj Gokal 56:52 ... ah, than to get nothing. So I think just looking at, you know, all the negativity that, um, people have to say about what it is that you're dedicating your time and life to as, you know, as like actually energy or, or, um, or input that is valuable is a, a mind shift that, ah, I think Anatoly helped me make.

Marina Mogilko 57:14 Ha- so you had thoughts of giving up or, you know-

Raj Gokal 57:17 All the time. Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 57:17 All the time?

Raj Gokal 57:18 I mean, yeah. It's, I'm, I'm actually n- I don't have that much willpower. Anatoly does Ironman, you know, challenges.

Marina Mogilko 57:25 [laughs]

Raj Gokal 57:26 He's an endurance athlete. I wasn't doing any of those things, right? Um, it, the, the, an- the, all the endurance I ever built up was to try and build something valuable.

Marina Mogilko 57:35 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 57:36 And it really got tested. And, um, and I think, you know, again, going back to the people that you work with, right? Um, if you can tell yourself even if the world collapses and, and it's apocalypse and, and everything goes to zero and, and our work becomes, you know, completely valueless, am I happy to show up the next day and just be with the people that I'm in this with? If you can say yes to that, then you're, y- you'll at least make it the next day, [laughs] right? And, and then it's always just-

Marina Mogilko 58:07 It's a lot

Raj Gokal 58:07 ... a few days chained together, you know, always changes the situation. Everything is, um, is impermanent and, um, you know, the worst time can't last forever. All you have to do is find the way to, you know,

Raj Gokal 58:21 make it to the next day over and over.

Marina Mogilko 58:22 Did you have the same mindset when you were starting companies one after another?

Raj Gokal 58:27 Y- yes, I think so. I just, it, you don't know what you're gonna encounter.

Marina Mogilko 58:32 Mm-hmm.

Raj Gokal 58:33 Um-

Marina Mogilko 58:33 It's just so hard. Like, I mean-

Raj Gokal 58:34 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 58:34 ... if you build three companies, they fail, you're like, "Oh, no, that's it. I should leave Silicon Valley and go somewhere [laughs] else."

Raj Gokal 58:39 I mean, I, that was just m- the most foundational commitment that I made to myself was that I was going to keep starting things until something succeeded, and in my mind I was w- I, I, I said, "If I, if it's 100 companies and I'm 90 years old, I will start the next company," [laughs] you know? Like-

Marina Mogilko 58:55 I love that. I love that mindset.

Raj Gokal 58:56 [laughs] Yeah, you have to be committed to something in that way, I think.

Marina Mogilko 58:59 And then you kind of think of starting a family someday and you're like [laughs] ...

Raj Gokal 59:02 I was never, uh, I never planned on doing anything else until-

Marina Mogilko 59:07 Oh

Raj Gokal 59:07 ... uh, until one of these things worked out. Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 59:09 Oh, interesting. I, I love that mindset. It's like it explains why you started so many companies and kept-

Raj Gokal 59:15 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 59:15 ... starting companies.

Raj Gokal 59:16 Well, the great thing now is I think that that DNA is part of Solana ecosystem. It's part of, like every, founders self-select for Solana because they have that grit and determination, you know, and they wanna be with other people that have that kind of grit and determination. So I actually think I am the least gritty of the people that are building on the network and contributing now, and so they lift me up-

Marina Mogilko 59:40 Mm-hmm

Raj Gokal 59:40 ... because I see their grit and it makes me-

Marina Mogilko 59:42 Yeah

Raj Gokal 59:42 ... wanna be grittier.

Marina Mogilko 59:43 Yeah.

Raj Gokal 59:43 And-

Marina Mogilko 59:43 So you wanna focus on them versus comments on social media.

Raj Gokal 59:46 I think it's good to have people that are focused regardless of the noise that the-

Marina Mogilko 59:49 Mm-hmm

Raj Gokal 59:49 ... external world, um, always relentlessly provides you, right?

Marina Mogilko 59:53 Yeah.

Raj Gokal 59:53 There's always an abundance of that.

Marina Mogilko 59:54 This is so helpful, and I feel like people are gonna learn a lot.

Raj Gokal 59:58 I hope so.

Marina Mogilko 59:59 'Cause you've, you've been through so many things and, like, keeping the positive mindset and winning, uh-

Raj Gokal 1:00:04 Thank you

Marina Mogilko 1:00:04 ... that's amazing.

Raj Gokal 1:00:05 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 1:00:05 Congratulations, and thank you so much for what you're building.

Raj Gokal 1:00:08 Thank you so much.

Marina Mogilko 1:00:09 And thank you for this conversation.

Raj Gokal 1:00:10 Any time.

Marina Mogilko 1:00:11 Awesome. Awesome. That was amazing.