E119: Solana CoFounder: How Solana Mobile is Building the Future of Crypto

30:21So I thought that I had enough kind of a unique approach that it was worthwhile for me to go and pursue it. And my wife actually is the one that really pushed me to take the leap. She was at Columbia when Facebook was just starting out. And she was working at a competitor. and it was this kind of growth go-to-market fight between Facebook and I forget the Columbia one. And there's a moment in there's these kind of moments in Silicon Valley history where there is this new meta comes out whether it's AI or crypto or social networks and there's a whole rush of people trying to build companies around it.

31:11And you actually really do have about a six month window to raise capital, get a team together, and then go have a shot at it. And if you wait too long, even if you have a great idea, it's just there's enough competitors out there that VCs have moved on. They're like, okay, I already have a portfolio company they're invested in, so I'm conflicted out, right? So then it's hard for them to take a swing at it. So you kind of have to actually go for the gold rush, if you will, if you're really interested in it. so she kind of told me I had she's been married to me so she knows my personality so we have a kid what's your personality like?

31:55well I had to between child, job and side project I had to pick two and the child is mandatory so really only I had to pick between the side project and the job I couldn't do both because there's no way for me to like go to work, then come home after work, spend another eight hours, right? And ignore the family and everything. So that's what made you start Solana, your wife telling you, hey, listen, you can pick two out of three, job side hustle or child, but child, no choice, job or side hustle. Yep.

32:42how long when she told you that how long did it take you to say fuck the job about two days honestly it was very fast and then I was like okay once I decide something I move pretty quickly and what's funny is the Dropbox people were like hey this happens all the time if it fails in six months he can just come back. Which is true. Which is I think why a lot of folks underestimate just the huge benefit of being in the Bay Area. You just have so many companies that are constantly hiring good engineers. No matter what people tell you about AI transforming software development, it is, but there's always room for great engineers like an editing company, including Solana Labs.

33:37So if you're a great engineer, reach out. I mean, I spent a couple of weeks here, I told you, before interviewing a bunch of people, Brandon from Phantom, the three guys. And I just realized, I mean, if I take my phone, which is an iPhone, it was built here. If I look at the five apps I use the most, they're all built here. And then all these folks now, the previous Facebook, Twitter, etc. all building in crypto. It's incredible. And at the same time, it makes sense that everything comes from here when you see. If everything comes from here, probably everything is going to come from here. Because you can feel when you go to three offices, they say, we had the same office and we had the Facebook, right?

34:22They kind of take the culture and you can lower this kind of fear of failure, as you said, because you can just go back to all these companies that are the big companies in the world. It's incredible. Yeah, the freedom to fail here is very unique. And it's very forgiving. So I don't think there's another place in the world. It is changing now. I think crypto itself, I think, has transformed how people can raise money and where they can kind of set up shop and build. But I think for the most part, Silicon Valley. What actually I think is going to happen is you don't have an opportunity to build a second Silicon Valley.

35:08That's the internet and crypto. Crypto itself is now the second Silicon Valley. It's very hard to compete with both the existing physical Silicon Valley that's already established and now this internet-based one, which is the crypto land. I think those two are effectively going to prevent any other city or area from gaining any repeatable traction. Absolutely. Because if you're here, you realize, I mean, yeah, in New York, it's also big, et cetera, but we always think our crypto is all this online thing, but I'm interviewing everyone from Silicon Valley and they're all connected in five different fashion.

35:52And this, whether it's an online thing or the new internet, it's people working together and you feel it basically you feel the difference it's kind of a no brainer just like being here I'm realizing you co-founded Solana Labs what is Solana if you had to explain it to your mom your mom is an engineer it doesn't count if you had to explain it to my mom she's not an engineer it's a cheaper way to send money so I can explain that part

36:32or if she is from Eastern Europe then you can say it's money that the government can't steal from you that's another way you can explain it

36:46you mentioned before at this kind of Eureka moment I thought I was so smart and because you kind of discovered this thing called proof of history? Can you explain that to a normal dude like me? I'm not technical. The funny thing is I don't even think it's needed. This is the funny thing. But the technical term is it's a verifiable delay function. What does that mean? It's a way to produce a piece of data that when you receive it you can estimate how much time it took to generate it. with some hard boundaries. Because you can say that the fastest chip anyone could make is this fast, and there's no way to speed up the process that we used, like the algorithm, the math that was used to generate this data, you know that it took at least 10 milliseconds or 100 milliseconds.

37:45So then you can create a clock that nobody has control over that everyone can agree on. That was kind of the idea. And why you need a clock is basically, it's almost easier to explain it in radio terms. So if you remember your physics, radio waves interfere with each other. That's why sometimes you have static when you're messing around with old school radio that's analog, right? You have these knobs and stuff. If two towers transmit at the same time over the same frequency, those radio waves interfere. So the first protocol people built was called time division multiple access, where they give each tower a synchronized clock and they alternate by time.

38:31So tower A goes on second one, tower B goes on second two, and they just alternate. And there's no collision, and you can get up to 100 % of channel utilization this way, meaning that in any given moment in time, there's no interference and somebody's transmitting signal. Make sense? kind of like from a high level. Like if you and I talk at the same time, you get noise. So we have to take turns. So we need some protocol for that. And we can use a clock. And that means if you and I both have a clock, we don't have to talk to each other when we hand off the turns. I just know I always talk in minute one.

39:10You always talk in the even minutes. I talk in the odd ones, right? It's 2018. And you go out there with this new architecture and new way of doing blockchain, right? How easy was it? I was talking with Stephen from Arbitrum the other day, and he was saying, I mean, Ethereum was there, they're building this kind of layer too. But even for them, coming up with a different approach was extremely hard to, I mean, he said because he had really good credentials on the academic side, it was kind of not too hard to raise money, but to have people to even accept a new idea was very hard. Yeah, that took a lot of work.

39:51Basically, people discounted us and didn't think it was going to work. And then even if it works, does anybody need it kind of thing. So that took a while. And also didn't understand the implication of it. And this is where I think people, going back to that example, if you and I have to take turns, We have to have some protocol to take a turn. You say, I'm done. Then I say, okay, I see you're done. Now I'm going to talk. And this is what most blockchains are like. And because there's this protocol between us taking turns, there's a gap in when actual data is transmitted because now you're taking this time to go do this thing.

40:40So this idea of adding a clock and using 100 % of the bandwidth, people just didn't understand that was important. But that's what effectively allows the chain to scale with hardware. And we've seen now, I think, there's been better consensus protocols and stuff that can achieve similar effect without the need of proof history in a simpler way. And the industry has gotten to understand that that's really, really important. So that's been kind of the name of scaling. It's like, how do I utilize hardware 100 % of the time without any of these gaps or inefficiencies? Because once you do that, then you're done.

41:25And a year from now, you're going to have better chips, better networks. And that's kind of like, going back to my Qualcomm days, that's when I knew it was done, is if I can write the software such that next year the hardware just makes it run faster. There were people that got it, and that's the reason why they invested. And there were a bunch of people that didn't get it and dismissed it. But I'd expect every idea that's kind of worth pursuing to be on that edge. And what I've heard people describe it as like, what you want to be working on is like black licorice. I don't know if you ever had it.

42:05It's a candy that like 95 % of people don't like. so it's got this like weird medicinal taste uh so if you build something that everybody likes it's too generic and kind of boring and there's already too much competition for that but if you build black licorice you get a niche of people that are like oh man i've never had this before it's great and that's your nugget that's where you start with and if you're lucky you change the market and the landscape because you're so right that it now shifts and that becomes a more dominant thing. But it's hard to predict, right? Nobody knows what that happens but if you build for the majority of people's opinions or it's very unlikely that you'll discover that.

42:58The reason you got into crypto and that Bitcoin interested you, I mean you're an engineer so there is definitely the engineering side but Probably also you saw the price moving. That's what attracted people initially. Well, if the price didn't move, we couldn't then pay for the GPUs. Absolutely. So what really, I think, kind of pushed me over the line was that Ethereum scaling issues were very familiar to me. Because you have this single computer that's replicated, so you can't speed it up easily. and you're trying to make everybody in the world trying to get everyone in the world to use it so it's a very resource constrained environment and I spent 10 years, 13 years working on embedded systems where every byte in memory allocation counts so looking at Ethereum design and this idea that we can use 100 % of the bandwidth my back of the envelope paper math was like it's going to be a thousand times faster so there was like a product that I understood which is software that people run on a computer smart contracts and it's very resource constrained a problem that I knew who to solve and I had like a solution that was on paper a thousand times better so to me it was kind of a no brainer to go take a swing at it this weird thing in crypto where because you said before we have this kind of new we have this new approach some people will not believe in us 95%, 5 % will believe in us, will invest, then we're building, right?

44:39But you build, but you don't know. I mean, deep inside, you know that you believe in yourself, right? But you don't know if this is going to get any adoption. And then there's this very weird thing, which is a token that has a price that is moving a lot, right? And that people, when the price goes up or goes up a lot, people will think a certain way about your protocol or your project while you are building this thing that you hope gets real traction, which is not just the price of a token moving, right? So 2018, 19, 20, you're fully locked in, you build your protocol, and then the price goes up like crazy.

45:19Well, that happened way after. It was 21 at least. How is that linked? How is that linked to you being locked in every day and building Solana that the price does whatever. 500x. How do you stay locked in when this happens? Because probably it messes with your mind. For whatever reason, myself and Raj and all the founders were pretty skeptical of the price. So what we cared about, do we have enough runway to support the engineers and keep building? that was the important part. And then the price itself was like, I don't know if it's real. If it went up 500x in whatever x many months, it can go down 500x in x many months.

46:11At least I've been trading long enough in real markets where you know that it's actually easier to go down. And when we started, when we launched Mainnet, It was literally like, we decided, okay, we got it to work. The network was stable for weeks. That was our signal. We got two weeks of downtime. We were running out of money. We had nine months of runway left. And it was basically do or die. And we said, okay, we're going to launch. And two days after we announced, we're going to launch. both Bitcoin and the normal markets dropped like 70 % because of COVID. So you have this like, oh man. We called her, the investors that we talked to were like, we don't know what's going to happen.

47:06We don't know if the fund is going to be active in a couple of weeks. So you guys, you're on your own. I had Tushar on the podcast and we talked about that moment. And he said that one of the biggest mistakes they've done is they didn't wait out the crash. They actually kind of panic sold and then got back in. So even them were massive believers. I mean, I don't know, but they were massive believers and very successful at what they do. Obviously, you have this very, very weird moment where no one knows what the fuck happened. And you might think it could be the end of the industry. Yeah. So when I tell founders that have tokens, is that the only runway that's real is treasuries, not even cash in a bank.

47:55Because as that four years unraveled, you saw banking failures. So if you have treasuries and treasurydirect.gov, that's real cash in the bank that you know isn't going to disappear. And this is what you can count on as runway. Everything else you have to think of as a hot wallet. So you have three months that is what you're risking in a bank, and that bank could fail. That's what you're doing. Say we have three months in the bank, all the rest is in treasury. Yeah, and this is my advice to founders to not pay attention to the token price, but really care about their runway. Is it a common practice in Silicon Valley to have three months of cash and then the rest in treasury?

48:40It is now, because Silicon Valley bank failed. I think people are far more careful now and far more serious at least. I hope the investors are telling their founders to pay attention to banking failure risk because it's real. So yeah, for whatever reason, maybe through the trauma that we share through building Solana and the ups and downs, we just don't assume the token is going to be anything. it might be worth nothing tomorrow it might be doing great, who knows whatever goes up too quickly must come back down that's the rule? that's the typical rule but over the long term, the very long term the market does weigh quality over the short term who knows and for founders to succeed in an open market they need to go focus on quality over a very long period of time So usually if you're going to get product market fit, you're not going to get it right away.

49:46You have to kind of be early enough to grind and iterate and like really suffer through years of finding like your power users and finding that nugget that works. And then you kind of get lucky that you were early enough at the right thing and the market rapidly expands and you benefit from the three years of grinding during that expansion. Napoleon Bonaparte said, my downfall raises me to infinite heights. You went from zero in 2018 to hero in 2021, to being ridiculed and even hated in 2022, when FTX, which had a big affiliation with Solana, collapsed. If I was a fly on the wall in your living room or in your office between the 2nd and the 12th of November, 2022, when FTX collapsed?

50:35What would I have seen? So we were, I was really worried about the founder, like by that time, there was a really good group of founders that were building on the network and they were raising money and they had like kind of this long pipeline of products in development. I was terrified that they all had their funds on FTX because the catastrophe would have been that FTX collapsed and the entire ecosystem's runway is now dead. And luckily, it was actually a pretty small percentage, but some really great founders got totally screwed, like Armani, Backpack. They just raised a big round. They kept all their funds on FTX, and it was effectively locked.

51:20The crazy kind of upside from that was that they couldn't hire. so they had a small amount of runway left. They had to keep their team small and they just worked harder. They really just did everything they could to go dig themselves out of that hole and launching Mad Lads, which I think that was a turning point in that six or seven months where things seemed really, really dark outside of Vitalik's tweet. People credit it to saving Solana and I'm like 50-50.

52:01As a next question. If the time ever comes that I can lend a hand to Ethereum, I absolutely will. That's my next question. Yeah, I absolutely will. I think he's a gem and awesome founder and I think truly an example to follow. But I think Backpack and building Madlads and kind of jump-starting the NFT community and kind of product cycle, like really, really shifted everything. How do you deal with FUD on a personal level when all the haters come out to celebrate your downfall? So... Like you're now, like the slow thing. I landed in the States in 92. My parents got me a computer and I was like an RC Chats, throughout basically my adolescence and since then.

52:57So I was born in the FUD. I was born in the FUD. So to me, it's just part of the sparring online is you're just kind of in this shit show, constantly fighting people. It's kind of fun. It's almost fun. I would say it is one of the fun parts is being able to argue with anyone on the internet about these random things. So in a way, that part never bothered me. Some smart people tell me there is an earnest, smart developer community in Solana and now that the awful opportunistic money people have been washed out, the chain has a bright future. Hard for me to tell from the outside, but I hope the community gets its fair chance to thrive.

53:46This is a tweet from Vitalik Buterin. the co-founder of Ethereum, on December 29th, 2022, about one month after the FTX collapse. You said before, I mean, my question is, how much impact did this simple tweet have on the Solan ecosystem? You said 50-50. It made me feel like not alone, right? Like that there is people in crypto that actually care about what we're working on and building. And that's kind of like always been true behind the scenes. Actually, I respect the Ethereum core devs a lot. They're awesome. They're doing really good work. And I think, I can't think of one that I have a bad relationship with.

54:29Even like Justin Drake, we will argue on podcasts or whatever, but I think he's awesome. And we talked about verifiable delay functions or whatever for years and stuff. So I don't, it was awesome to see it publicly and I think really helped. Ethereum is in a bit of trouble lately and they have a lot of internal questions how much do you feel I mean it's not as obviously not as bad as what happened two years ago but how much do you feel like personally you did you tweet something did you say something or you feel like it's not your place to come and say hey guys look like we've been in a dark moment in a difficult moment and Vitalik came like now it's my turn to go and I think Ethereum is actually fine.

55:18The fact that people are arguing and that Ethereum itself responds to that argument and changes means that it's going to be fine. It's a painful process to shift direction or shift architecture and stuff like that. and it's hard to do that when you have a$250 billion or$300 billion asset. The bigger the asset, the harder it is to do it. But Bitcoin is completely frozen so it cannot change and this is probably to me the riskier part is being completely like what do they call it? Ossified. So you think Bitcoin is more at risk than Ethereum just by the mere fact that it can't really change? Unless they got really lucky and just nailed the use case so perfectly, which is possible.

56:18Interesting. Makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I don't think you need any more technology to build a digital gold. If that's the use case that has real global product market fit, Bitcoin's already there and doesn't need change. But I think smart contract platforms are just more amorphous. they're harder to pin down the requirements are much larger so they need to be I think more mutable and I think Ethereum is going to change and will probably be fine it's got a bunch of really smart people working on it absolutely, I'm actually interviewing many of them on this podcast and that's when I realized these guys are at another level, for sure Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in raising every time we fall.

57:13this is a quote from Nelson Mandela Solana went from a near death event in late 2022 to one of the most flourishing and used blockchain within barely two years what are the key elements that had to come together at the same moment for this to happen we had to have built a product that was differentiated enough black licorice that people there was a core group that loved it and I didn't have this as like a grand strategy or anything. A lot of it was necessity. Like we just, we raised a small amount of funds relative to our competitors. Like I think altogether pre-launch we raised like 22 or 23 million dollars.

57:58Sounds like a lot, but engineers are expensive and that was not a ton of money compared to like 100 mil or whatever that Hedera raised or 100 that Avalanche raised And all these kind of competitors had enough funding to, I think, build a much bigger feature set, which actually prevented them from building black licorice, like finding that nugget that people would choose over anything else because it solved a core problem for them. So I didn't have enough funding to build EVM support, which is kind of the obvious thing. All the developers are using EVM, so if you're building a blockchain, you need to have EVM support.

58:42But the cost of making EVM fast is very, very huge. Monad spent three or four years, a bajillion dollars in development to optimize it. So we didn't have that. So I knew how to build fast virtual machines because I spent my career working on virtual machines. So we built one that we knew could showcase that the network is going to be really, really fast. And even though it was awkward to program, we initially just had support for C, which is kind of a very low-level language, and then Rust, which is not a standard smart contract language, but is becoming more so now. But basically, we kind of went into our own little territory, and we built something that was truly differentiated.

59:28It was cheap, it was fast, it could handle a large concurrent load of a lot of users and use cases. Even though there were a ton of bugs along the way. We basically had, the joke is I have this eight innovations kind of articles that I've published. What are the eight optimizations we did? Each one of them could have been the eight bugs that we had that all bit us in the butt at one point or another. but not all at the same time, luckily. Yeah, I had Brandon sitting exactly where you're sitting from Phantom and I asked him, what's one of the reasons they built on Solana? And he said, because I just sat down with Tully and Raj and they never kid themselves about having everything figured out.

1:00:16Yeah. It's very practical, right? Like in opposition to very theoretical, it's a very practical Silicon Valley tech approach. Yeah. I wouldn't even call it Silicon Valley tech. It was just very engineering minded. We had a specific set of problems we wanted to solve. What was the inflection point or key moment in the last two years that changed the game for Solana? I think my stress level started to kind of reduce around the MadLabs launch. And this is after kind of the, I think that previous cycle was very stressful because things were just growing so quickly and constant bugs and congestion and all this stuff.

1:00:59But finally around Cano's, it's summer, three years ago at this point, there was the Helium blockchain. They moved to Solana and MadLots launched on the same day. And the priority localized fee markets, all this stuff worked. It wasn't perfect. and there were a bunch of bug fixes then, but these things worked well enough to where it was obvious to me, okay, it's going to be a bunch of work to fix these bugs, but the design is good, and we can actually handle a bunch of stuff concurrently. And the community wasn't dead. The MadLabs thing was very well received and blew the records on NFT volumes and stuff.

1:01:45So it seemed like there were users, There was content, there were product developers. All this stuff was actually working without a ton of support from me or from anyone else. And then I think for whatever reason, things really picked up. I think probably because of the products that I've been building for the two years prior were mature enough to then launch tokens and do full integrations and the ecosystem exploded. i had mert one of the two best customer support officers or reply guys at solana he's actually the one who made this happen shout out mertz you're obviously the other top customer support officer at solana why should every founder ceo be the customer support officer i think you start i think you always should talk to the users because you kind of need to know their pain points um like the way i hired in my philosophy in early stage company development was that I could build the whole product myself.

1:02:53So if I had enough time, I could have coded up all of Solana. But I had to move faster than that. That's where you raise money. Because you have this window to actually execute on. So when I hired somebody, it would be to give them a task that I'm working on. I'm working on it because it's important. It's high priority. since I'm already working on it and know how to do it so I can evaluate if they do a good job or not. And when I'm doing this stuff, I talk to the users who I'm building this for. So I need, in fact, I encourage all the engineers to work openly in Discord with the validators. So when we release code that falls apart or doesn't do something, the validators can literally yell at the engineer that wrote that line of code.

1:03:39And that iteration cycle can be faster and faster. So you need that customer service energy, I think, as part of early product development. And I kind of never gave that up. I think it's important to always talk to your users. Because I still feel like, even though I no longer have commit privileges, I haven't for a couple years, on the main repo, I still feel like if there's a bug that somebody yells at me, I could go fix it. I can't force push anything anymore. We just talked about what a founder CEO should do. What should a founder CEO not do? Yeah, I think hiring well is probably the most important thing.

1:04:31And then to me, that starts with being able to build the whole product. So I think it sucks if there's only a single founder. You need a couple co-founders, but usually there's two that matter that really drive everything. And one of them needs to be able to build the whole thing. It's a red flag if there's a team where one of the founders can't say, I can build the whole thing myself. I was talking many, many years ago when I started my first company with the founder CEO of Checkout.com, which is a sort of Stripe competitor. and he was actually telling me exactly that he was like you need to dominate your company is another way to say that you need to understand everything from A to Z about your company otherwise you're in trouble he was actually a solo founder solo is hard it's too lonely that's why I wouldn't recommend it I mean some people can do it but it's a lonely job

1:05:37how do you find a great co-founder? it's dumb luck I love the honesty dumb luck happened a few times in your life I basically quit my job and my wife is working and supporting us and there's no way I'm going to just let that happen forever so I gave myself six months and that meant moving as fast as possible during that six months so I got introduced to Raj through a friend of mine and I was just like you you're just going to do all this it was just trust without knowing each other we met briefly before and the person that connected us was a really good friend of mine whose judgment I trusted so that was a very if it wasn't for him introducing me I would have ignored it and I pulled my friends in that I've worked with, played sports together with, so I trusted them.

1:06:40I trusted that I could redline them. The reason I pulled my friends in, the specific friends that I pulled, was because I knew that I could put a lot of pressure on them and they wouldn't crack. And the kind of pressure that you can't really ask out of an employee. The co-founders you can put a lot of pressure on. because your wife says you need to, we have a child, you need to take care of the child. And then you choose between your job or your side hustle. Then you say, I go for a side hustle. And then she supports you for six months financially while you start. Amazing. You said, I didn't have this master plan or strategy, right?

1:07:24In the last two, three years, things happen, right? how did this meme coin thing started to happen and become so big on Solana started with the first big meme if I remember where it was Bonk how did that happen yeah again no like I heard about Bonk when it launched so it was truly out of that NFT community that like was kind of that was more like The NFTs started more, I would say, it's not strategically, but it was at least reactive. NFTs were blowing up in Ethereum and people were asking us, why don't you guys have NFT support or whatever? Bartosz and Jordan, these two engineers, really, really good product builders, basically built out the NFT standards in 48 hours and just launched them.

1:08:22And these are open source standards that anyone could use. And they did a good enough job where users, like creators could like self launch and do their own thing. That's always been our philosophy is just unblock the creator, the dev to just go click, do JavaScript. Like you don't have to mess with smart contracts and go launch it on their own. And I think that created this culture of like kind of people experimenting and launching NFTs and a bunch of stuff broke and there was congestion and all sorts of things. But the people were still there. So despite the FTX crash and all this other shit that happened, that same group of people that have had experience launching NFTs and stuff, they just decided to go launch Bonk.

1:09:14and I think because the users were there and the ecosystem was in this relative low point it was starving for something new and it was new and fun and kind of innocent and it was like a fair launch so it just kind of took off usually what's weird with crypto is that you have a bunch of people that experiment and mess around with things. And they're just launching stuff for fun. And they get a hit. Something works and it catches virality and it becomes huge. And then people are like, I want to replicate that. And then it spirals into like, oh, I see people are making money there. Not only am I going to replicate it, I'm going to find a way to maximally extract dollars out of it.

1:10:09And that's when the meta dies. So the bonk was like in that early stage where people just having fun and it caught fire. I have to ask, because as I said in the beginning of this podcast, when you were on your way here, you just tweeted fartcoin coded. You also tweeted, I just want to go on record that I was the first to call for fartcoin strategic reserve. What's the deal with fartcoin? I just think it's funny. It's just so stupid and dumb.

1:10:45That's what works. That's what people like. They want entertainment. That's stupidity, right? It's absurd, which makes it funny. And I think kind of like takes away. There's too many people that are way too serious in the space.

1:11:04so like to see something absurd succeed it like makes the world more enjoyable we talked about Bonk one of the really cool things about Bonk is that it was airdropped to people it was airdropped to people who bought something called the Solana mobile phone and the airdrop at some point covered the phone's costs which made people even more crazy about the whole meme coin thing. So the phone was essentially free, at least at a moment in time. Yeah, the phone thing was also kind of a... People made fun of it and called it a bull market idea. Why? My question is, why would the company behind one of the fastest growing blockchain networks, Solana, launch a mobile phone?

1:11:58Well, Labs is like a place to go build companies and startups and then they get spun out. Like Metaplex, the whole NFT standard, that was one. And there are founders that join Labs and then get hooked on something and then they go build their own company. So that kind of happens all the time. But mobile was like my baby and it's because I work at Qualcomm for such a long time and it kind of As soon as I started taking crypto seriously, my instinct was there is a whole stack for secure element and trusted display embedded in these chips. It was developed 10 years ago at this point for making cryptographic signatures be as secure as a ledger.

1:12:49So all this technology is available in your phone. There's no reason not to surface it. It's just there's not enough demand or adoption or whatever happening in the normal kind of financial industry to where crypto is accepted yet. So my thought was that there is an opportunity to make something better for users, so a more secure, kind of slicker signing experience, and an opportunity to make something for developers, which is get rid of the 30 % fees. you have a crypto-friendly app store. That was the thing. And the phone is like, this is the tricorder from Star Trek. This is the coolest piece of technology anyone's ever made.

1:13:36It's a whole computer in your hand that's connected to the entire world. Which means also it's extremely hard to disrupt. Yeah. If you have one big winner in the web tool world, right, in the normal world, or two big winners, it's very hard to disrupt. My question is, I am a Web3 user and lover. I'm not a DJ. I buy a new iPhone every two to three years. So do I. Exactly. You have an iPhone. Why should I or why should you? And you say, this is your baby, right? Why should I or why should you not buy an iPhone this year and get ourselves a Solana Seeker, which you called the definitive Web3 mobile device?

1:14:17So there's people that are so plugged into the iPhone ecosystem that they can't switch. Part of that is because a lot of the, at least corporate security is all set up around iPhones. So if you have a job that has security, managed software, you're probably stuck in an iPhone. Some support Android, but most of them actually recommend iPhones. But you can get a second device. So that could be your NFT crypto phone. And you should have separation between those two because one is financial, one is not. But a large part of the world is not stuck in iPhone land. And 80 % of the mobile sales actually are outside of the US.

1:15:00So only 20 % of the sales happen in the US. So the rest of the world is actually much more friendly. You're not banned from dating apps if you have a green bubble. for most of the rest of the world Android works well and what I see is right now there's this I think if you waited too long Apple and Google will eventually add crypto support because I think crypto adoption is inevitable but until they add it natively it's an opportunity to create a wedge and onboard a bunch of crypto users to a new platform Right now, Seeker is at about 150 ,000 pre-orders. And it's a sizable developer ecosystem.

1:15:50But if it gets to a million plus, then I think it's long-term sustainable. And then it would be hard to actually disrupt that. So it's basically, if you're a crypto user and you want to have a much more secure phone, get that as a second phone where you do all your crypto stuff on and you are much less likely to get hacked or to lose your crypto? You should use it for hot wallets especially. For cold storage, I would recommend you use a hardware wallet or a combination of... If you really geek out on it, use three different hardware wallets, quads, multi-sig, then you have redundancy across a bunch of stuff.

1:16:31Cold storage is separate, right? You should always have a cold and hot separation. But for hot wallets, you're still under this constant threat vector every time you sign something. It could be a malicious transaction. The app store model, why are apps more secure than websites? There's moderation and curation, and that reduces a whole bunch of threat vectors. The single key phrase that is managed by the seed vault and not re-entered between all these applications, that's another way to reduce a whole bunch of threat vectors. You mentioned Seed Vault. The Solana secure has something called Seed Vault, which is powered by the crypto wallet Solflare.

1:17:15What the hell is Seed Vault? And what is Solflare doing in this equation? So when you look at mobile crypto apps right now, there's this weird tension between the app wanting to have great user experience and asking users to create an in-app wallet that's specific to the app. And your standard wallet, like Fandom or whatever, that's your central wallet. And then having to switch between the two. So having to cross applications, all this stuff. Or God forbid, people take the seed phrase that they use in Fandom and enter it in the app as well. So now they've risked their entire crypto portfolio that's in Fandom to this application.

1:17:57Don't do that. Do not share your seed phrase between apps or wallets. So the seed vault is this piece of attack that keeps that seed very secure, but the wallet can be shared between applications. So you're not dealing with this kind of thing. The goal is to have the first Saga device has this implemented. The UX is clunky and there's a bunch of work that's done in Seeker to make it more like Apple Pay. So literally when you sign, it kind of looks and feels like Apple Pay. What's the role of Solflare in that? They're an awesome wallet company that the mobile guys thought was the best to partner with.

1:18:44So they're providing the technology and kind of the deep integration. What's the end goal with Solana Mobile?

1:18:56To disrupt the duopoly. That's a good one. I think that would be a massive success. A single participant, even a small one, can change the market equilibrium. Right now Apple and Google are not competing hard enough to where they're really trying to bring down costs for developers. They're all sitting very comfortable taking a 30 % fee. When people talk about crypto disrupting a bank that takes 50 basis points. 30 % is 3 ,000 basis points, a lot. The goal of Mobile is obviously to succeed as a phone company. And it's hard. When we sold 20 ,000 phones, I didn't see a path to sell to a million, but I saw a path to sell 150 ,000 units.

1:19:52And now that we sold 150 ,000 units, there is a path to sell to a million, but I don't know how the hell we're going to sell 10 million units. But you just do it one step at a time. What does accelerating mean? Increasing velocity. I'm just thinking like the public here is like normal people, right? I'm trying to get a lot of people who are non-crypto people, not like the crypto Twitter echo chamber. And we do that through YouTube, right? Where there's like 2 billion people that we have potential reach. you see all these people talking about acceleration, acceleration. I mean, tech already, right?

1:20:29It's moving faster. It's like making decisions faster, making those like being in that moment where you're talking to your spouse, should I start this company or not? Two days later, boom. Two days later, you just go for it, right? You sleep on it, feels the decision sits well with you and you just go for it. And you execute and take action. So having agency and taking action is what I kind of think of it. Why do the Solana folks talk and love Acceleration so much? Founding a company and building a product and launching it and getting users, it's a whole bunch of little decisions that people can just not take and delay.

1:21:10And avoiding getting into that moment where you have to make that decision and making it and taking action is necessary. You have to do this a bunch of times to actually ship. So we want people to go take the first step, take the second step, and reduce that time between these decisions and just go for it. One of the biggest arguments of the Solana detractors is that it's a casino chain, that without Memecoins, Solana is nothing. We just talked about Solana Mobile. What are some of the other big things being built on Solana that you're proud of and that have a solid traction? Yeah, Deepin. So this is like kind of, again, people totally discounted it and thought it was dumb.

1:21:58And this is something that I focused on, I think, uniquely out of most crypto ecosystems. I don't think anyone really paid attention to Deepen. But maybe because, again, I spent a career in embedded systems and hardware. It just seems so obvious. So Helium is a really prime example. There's also XNAT. And both of these projects are working on building a decentralized 5G carrier. So why could a 5G carrier even succeed is very much related to physics. So 4G towers have a 30, 40 kilometer range. 5G towers have a 300, 400 meter range. So it's dramatically smaller. You need a much wider deployment of these things.

1:22:45And to go build a tower for a big company like Verizon, and it's a lot more work than for a user, like somebody at home that's like, I'm going to get this 5G cell, stick it in my apartment, just put the antenna out the window, and now I'm providing coverage. So there is this opportunity to crowdfund stuff in the hardware space that's really kind of hard for big companies to compete, simply because they're slower. So as soon as I actually interviewed at Helium, ironically enough, before Dropbox, it was like one of the companies that I thought joining. One of their CTO, Mark, was somebody that I worked with at Qualcomm for like a long time.

1:23:33Super brilliant guy. So it just made sense to me. And I spent a lot of time recruiting. Like every blockchain is good for Deepin. And this is like the thing is most of the blockchain work with Deepin happens outside of the blockchain. The only thing that the chain is tracking is like, you know, each hotspot is an NFT. That's kind of how you think of it. So getting these folks on board just took them convincing that, A, you don't need to build your own chain. This is what I can go spend all my time on. And two, I think what you're doing is really freaking cool. that was it and it's awesome to see I think Helium is at like 300 ,000 users now like users that are using cellular network competing with Verizon basically Xnet is another one that's in that space another one is called Hive Mapper so if you ever used Google Street View like all the camera, kind of those cars that take pictures of all the roads and stuff and cameras, they actually built a decentralized version of that.

1:24:44I think they're at like 20 or 25 % of the world's roads covered. And their fidelity, their data is actually, in some cases, 200 times faster than Google. Because they built these cameras that are designed for taking these photos, they give them to drivers that are the Uber driver, the whatever, the Dasher, whoever else. And there's all these apps exist globally now. It's really, really cool. They stick them on their scooter and their car and they're constantly getting you an updated version of the street as they're doing their job and receiving tokens. And Google can't build that out. They can't build that fleet out, which is, I think, unique and cool.

1:25:33and like if you paid cash for this this is kind of I think the difference like why Deepin works is if you just gave people money the dollar value themselves would be kind of insignificant to excite somebody to do it but getting a token is like is more fun and kind of feels more invested into the ecosystem When people say that Solana is just for meme coins do you have the same I mean, it's kind of like to have the same fun side of your job. You mentioned before. Fighting FUD? Yeah. This is the same fun for you. Like, oh man, just another round of FUD. Yeah, it's like... Or is there a moment at which you get kind of tired of people every time there is an opportunity to come, they just come back?

1:26:21What is the coolest app on the iPhone for you that you can't live without?

1:26:29Twitter and WhatsApp. Yeah. On Telegram. Probably spend more time on Twitter. Take all those applications combined with all the users. Apple makes almost$0 from them in the iOS app store. The vast majority of the revenue comes from games. And the game started as literally the fart app, where you push a button and it makes a fart sound on iOS. That was one of the first games. In fact, Steve Jobs had to comment, We don't need 20 fart apps in the iOS app store. There are so many of them. But the$100 billion worth of sales through iOS, most of that is mobile gaming and kind of silly, dumb, casual stuff.

1:27:16I think meme coins are kind of that silly, dumb, casual stuff that pays for the infrastructure, for Deepin, for everything else. What is Solana's biggest achievement to date? I think we're still processing more transactions than basically all the other major chains and L2s combined per day. It's pretty crazy that five years since launch, with everything being open source, our ID is all being totally open, anyone could go copy this thing. No one has really been able to go forks along and compete with us. What is Serena's biggest problem today? Biggest problem? I'm always focused on, I have a very narrow focus on growth.

1:28:07So I kind of think of one thing. It's a very sprawling ecosystem and there's nothing I can do to make it move faster. But I can focus on just mobile and try to get that to succeed.

1:28:25so it's hard for me to say what's like the biggest single problem it's almost like once I'm focused on mobile I don't care about the other problems if you don't care about the other problems who care about them? somebody somebody who reports to you? no, somebody like most people like Labs is very small, it's like 40 people most of it is working on mobile and there's Solana Ventures So Labs itself is very tiny. I haven't been at the foundation for like three years. I'm not on the board. I suck at management. I don't want to manage. When did you realize that you suck at management? I always kind of knew that.

1:29:12So yeah, and I hired people that could deal with a bad manager. That was... You told them, hey guys, I'm a bad manager, just be ready. If I'm doing your job, if I'm doing your work, if I'm patching your code, you're doing a bad job. That's what you tell them.

1:29:36Maybe I should tell that to people I work with actually. If I'm doing your job, it's because you're doing a bad job. what's cool is that it's not me that even cares about this stuff or even somebody that's at the foundation like the or team which built a proof of work coin on Solana built what's probably going to be the replacement to Anchor which is the toolkit that everybody uses in Solana that wasn't built by the foundation labs, it was built by Armani at Backpack So what you see is that there are tons of problems. The development environment sucks. People are always complaining about like anchor and version mismatch and all this other stuff.

1:30:24And like a ton of, ton of problems that are like, you know, all over the place. But there's somebody that cares about them, that's working on them, that doesn't report to me or to the foundation. This is, I think, been the biggest strength of the network. what's the day that you can look back and say we've made it with Solana I don't know I still like I think as Mert said if anyone that believes that Solana won it doesn't understand how technology or any of this stuff works there's absolutely nothing given for free what's your personal definition of success when all the code that I wrote has been replaced.

1:31:09How about life success? Life? What does success mean to you? To me is when I'm like, you know, second to worst guy on a team, that's when I'm succeeding. Is if I'm like able to compete and grow and get better. So like right now, being in the competition, in the running, to like win it all, if there is a possibility to win it all, I think that is in itself success and it's fun and like I don't know what else I could be working on beyond that are you happy? yeah what makes you happy? again like I think it's the the ability to like compete and change and improve like I'm happy being a crappy surfer if I can go and surf every day and get better it's like I don't need to be the best surfer and then like not get any joy of getting better right?

1:32:04do you still surf? You still do some sport? Yeah, snowboarding, cycling, weightlifting are kind of my three major ones. Surfing is rough. Like SF Ocean Beach is like very fast break. So I've been out there a couple of times, but I'm old now, I get slammed into the ground and I'm like, this is more dangerous than I want it to be. The washing machine. Yeah, that I don't mind. Getting like two foot shore break and catching like a fast wave and just being too slow or too fast and just getting slammed right into the sand. That to me is like the dangerous part. What's the worst advice you've ever received?

1:32:47Shit, I don't remember. I don't know. Too many bad advices? Or too many good advices? I'm bad at listening, I think. That's why I don't know.

1:33:03I'm a bad listener. I don't know if I've gotten that much good or bad advice. How do you deal with your wife if you're bad at listening? She abandoned me. There's a few people that I listen to.

1:33:21How do you want to be remembered? Just as an engineer. I don't need any accolades or anything. What's something you believe in that most people would not agree with? I think the singularity is going to be really slow to get here. I don't know if this is most. There's too many people that believe that we're on the cusp of huge, mediocre, unbelievable growth of science and everything else. I think it's going to be slow and a grind. Why? Why do you think people think it's going to be so fast? And why do you think it's going to be slow? Because they see the progress of AI and they think that it's very rapid.

1:34:01What I actually see is how slow it is to get the exponential rate.

1:34:14The cost of training and everything else is going up quadratically, but hardware is only improving 2x, so you have these two things fighting each other. I think it's still exponential, it's just in a much longer timeline. And this is part of just human growth is like the overhead of us talking to each other and communicating is quadratic. It's a very practical approach again to, you can think like technology goes extremely fast, but humans are humans. It slows down the whole thing, right? But this is also just true of AI. And like, it's true of simulating like atoms and all the really, really hard and early problems.

1:34:55where you have a huge dynamic system, it's just really, really hard to simulate. And you don't get twice as much out of it with twice as much hardware. So I think people are overly optimistic. So that could be one. Another one, I think, which means I don't think we're going to live forever. And I'm fine with that. There's also this cult of living forever. I think that's still probably quite far away. And for that reason too, I think aliens are pretty far away. The kind of the Fermi paradox, I don't think we'll see them and definitely not in my lifetime. If they do, they're so far away that the probability of us connecting is virtually zero.

1:35:51The rational approach would be if we exist, probably something else exists. But if you listen to Elon, he's actually saying there's zero proof that any alien exists, right? Well, the probability of everything going right and right around the same time as us going right for us, that's zero. It increases as you look at the larger and larger universe and radius. but what does it matter to us if there's intelligent life in another galaxy or on the other side of the Milky Way even? It's just too far away that we'll never talk to each other, at least not in any feasible lifetime. And we have enough problems to solve on this planet already.

1:36:37I'm also very optimistic. I think we live in the best time possible and things are definitely getting better. they're absolutely better now almost on everything than 20 years ago across the board thank you so much Natali that was awesome thank you for being so chill laughing a lot that was amazing appreciate it thanks for having me