E98: Solana's Leading Expert Explains How It Hits $1,000

30:40um so like i'll obviously i'm not like a psychopath so i'll like be like okay let's celebrate christmas whatever sure but like internally i'm like this is so fucking weird like what why not just you know think for yourself to some extent um so and then like it one of the interesting things is like that wasn't like the only hardship at the time um obviously i didn't the language um i went to like the poorest school possible i think in niagara falls it's like ranked one of the worst high schools uh in like the worst elementary school uh i got like uh we were like staying in a church for a little bit and like i got bed bugs and like i was like just dying everywhere my dad would just stay up the entire night with like a slipper and just chill all the bugs.

31:30I think this is like so weird. And like, it was just like hard, but like I had internalized it so much that I started coming up with like my own theories where I was like, okay, so what? You know, like whatever. So what? There's bed bugs. So what? The school sucks. So what? I can't speak the language, whatever. And there's not really a support system. We also didn't have money. So like my dad was on welfare. So I was like eating some awful food. Oh my God. It was bad. But I was like, internally, I was like, it doesn't really matter. Like, so what? And then actually, one thing that I found fascinating was like, it's like, okay, if I can make it through this, then I can kind of just do anything.

32:14And so I kind of just started having a lot of confidence, like way too much confidence. Like my family would be like, you're way too cocky and all this stuff. I was also like pretty fat as a kid, like straight up fat. But I was a team captain for all the sports, and so I was like, that's not going to stop me. And so I kind of developed these mindsets and these kind of different mental models very early on. And then years later, when I started actually reading stuff in English, I found out that that was the Stoic philosophy. And I was like, oh shit, like these guys actually already came up with this thousands of years ago, much before.

32:56I'm not as smart as I think. This has already been thought of by everybody else. So, yeah. Hey, when shift happens, family. Time to toast our partner, Devin. They're taking luxury wine to the blockchain with their super fun concept called Uncorked to Earn. Buy your favorite wines, enjoy unique experiences, and get an airdrop each time you open a bottle with your friends. Cheers to Devin for bringing transparency, authenticity, and exclusivity to the fine one's industry. What does the stoic philosophy say about hair loss? Because you joke a lot about hair, so I had to ask, right? When did you start losing your hair?

33:35And in the context of what you just said, how did you feel? Oh, yeah. So I actually used to have really long hair. um i've shown some pictures of this and people don't believe me um like like long hair i used to look like like a typical canadian hockey person like uh it's called the hockey flow um and i was at like queen's university which is like everybody's like a tall white guy with like long hair and stuff and blonde girls and so it was like very uh in line with that and um uh i i i think i looked really good and i was like pretty self-obsessed in a sense And so I did this program called Apple Math in Queens, which is like a double in applied math and engineering, communications and computing engineering.

34:28And I never went to class, right? I didn't go to class at all. But my roommate, who's now my co-founder, did. And so what I would do is I would play video games basically every day or go to the gym or do something weird and then never do class. But then like the last two weeks of school, I would cram the shit at, like I would just read the entire textbook at like this weird stack where I would take 200 milligrams of caffeine, eight milligrams of ephedrine and like an aspirin. It's called the ECA stack. And I would do that three times per day. And it gave you like really good focus. So like, this is like Adderall.

35:07This is just like coffee and like stimulants an insane amount. And I would just basically devour textbooks and study for everything. Actually, my econ class, because I took an econ elective. So this is kind of where it ties in the story. In fourth year, because I just had always skipped electives. I was like, fuck this. I don't care about electives, whatever. You need them to graduate. You need them to, like it's actually the degree requirements. And so the last year at university, the last semester, I had like nine classes and like they have all hard classes, like advanced math where we share it with like PhD math students and stuff.

35:48And I had an econ exam the day after and I had never went to class. I had never even looked at a textbook and I was like, I need to learn microeconomics in one night. And I was like stressed. And so I was like, fuck this. And I just shaved my head because it was like, I was like, oh, it's getting heated here, or whatever, it looks weird. I'm sick of kind of trying to fix it all the time. So I shaved my head. Did fine on all the exams. But then like roughly like when it started growing back, I was like, fuck, it's not really growing back as well as it used to. But I didn't think of anything of it.

36:29And then I went to Turkey and people were like, hey, are you like losing hair? And I was like, no, that's crazy. Like, what do you mean? I'm 21 or 20 or something. I'm not losing fucking hair. Like, don't be an idiot. Sure enough, though, it never actually grew back quite that well. It was just always growing back thinner, some, like, bald spots. And I was like, oh, fuck. It's actually not going to happen. But Turkey is the hair transplanting chapel of the world. And I think that's where Elon Musk went. There's pictures of him before and after and all the stuff. And I was like, okay, I can probably just get a transplant.

37:04So I just always kind of delayed it. And then I was like, you know, I saw how they did the procedure, which is like disgusting. They like take some donor things or something. They just like literally put it in your head. And then like I saw the memes about like Turkish hairlines instead of like Turkish airlines. Because every time you go to like the Istanbul airport, just a bunch of dudes with like this weird, bizarre look. And at the time, because I've always been into like super into fighting and whatnot. One of my idols like Jason Statham. and I'm like you know who's pretty fucking handsome like that guy is really good looking because I was watching his movies I was looking at this bender of Jason Statham movies and I was like you know what like fuck this like if if he can pull it off I can pull it off why not and uh I used to just kind of like go to the shower and then like be like okay what would I look like if I didn't have hair and so I would like kind of like pull it pull a batch and like look at myself and I even like would take pictures of myself and I like remove the hair and be like Like, does this look fine?

38:05Whatever. And one of the issues with going bald is like, if you don't have a good head shape, you're fucked. Like one of my friends is like a sissy. He was like a pear. It looks really bad. But I remembered in grade six, my French teacher, who's like obsessed with me because I learned French faster that time, was like, you know, you have a really perfect, like oval head. And I was like, okay, I have a good head shape. Fuck it. Right. I just, shaved it. I went bald. And at first it was like a shock. I was like, oh my God, I look like a terminal patient. Like I'm dying. I'm 25. Like, why do I look like this?

38:41And like for like an hour, I think I was depressed. I think for that hour. And then I kept watching Jason Seda movies and I was like, no, no, all I need to do is like get a bit jacked and lose some weight. And I think it looks fine so i started kind of just faking it for a bit um like the confidence i was self-conscious for probably a few months um but then i was like this she looks pretty good um and once i started the company i was like this actually is also kind of like a superpower because people think you're way older than you are and so they take you seriously but then also like women uh and people think I'm like coping around this or something, but like you stand out much more if you're bald, which can be a bad thing, right?

39:28People are like, oh, this is a bald guy, whatever. And it generally is a bad thing in most cases, but like, that's not set in stone. You can also make it into like a, an edge in a sense. Like if you're super noticeable, people just pick you out. And so I would kind of just like flirt with girls and whatnot when I was single. Um, and I was like, you know, this is actually, uh, it works pretty well. Like I'm able to kind of, uh, get girlfriends, go on dates, all this stuff. Nobody actually seems to care. People don't care. Yeah. Back to that, right? People don't care. Yeah. And it's like, I was kind of like, you know, just get over yourself.

40:08Nobody gives a shit if you don't have some hair, like whatever. Um, and over time I was like, this is actually sick. And now you could not pay me to get hair on my head. I actually love not having hair. I've, like, kind of made it into a meme, right? Like, it's like, if you want to increase your CEO skills, you have to shave your head. I mean, it's kind of one of the big memes with Brian also. Yes. From Coinbase, right? And, like, Brian doesn't even have a beard, so, like, he's really, like, he looks like Chas for the ghost. And, I mean, I love Brian, but, like, I think he can pull it off, too.

40:44And then, I don't know. It's just, some of the things are super weird that you notice. Like, you look at all the movies, and the hero is almost never a bald guy. It's very rare. Versus the villain is always bald. There's Voldemort, or Bane, or Lex Luthor, or Ching Paine. It's just this weird thing where not having hair is this frowned upon thing societally, in a sense. But again, it goes back to my thing of these movies are fucking arbitrary. like it's it's not actually it doesn't have to be that way and women love villains right so you have the tattoos and you have the bald hair yes like that is why you're angry yes at the conversation with mike novogratz actually we talked about like getting bald and all that stuff and he was like yeah you know it was also hard in the beginning but at some point i realized there's many things that come with that which you know you can kind of justify to yourself high to a certain level all that stuff which is very manly and actually ultimately can really attract yeah makes sense it's actually like one of the things people don't understand about being bald is like they're like oh this is like super easy to maintain whatever you don't have this hair it's way harder to maintain because if you don't shave every day or every other day or something you start looking ridiculous like you start getting the weird gary genzo look where the hair grows on the sides and like you don't want that as a 28 year old okay uh you need to be like bald bald for it to actually work um so it's actually a lot of work to maintain and there's the beard too now to maintain which probably takes a lot of time too the beard is weird because girls think like every girl that i've been with is like they like me because like they think i'm whatever handsome and stuff at first and later they're like you should shave the beard or something i'm like what the fuck do you mean like if i shave the beard i'm gonna look ridiculous us um and so yeah okay let's start with a serious topic crypto that's why we're here today yes how did you get so fascinated by the world of crypto so in undergrad i was a math major and i took some courses like pure cryptography and my roommate liam was like mining some weird shits like raven coin or something um remember that coin yeah and like our school super small school but like people were randomly already into crypto like um the core team for maker dao um and like nansen well not nansen he was the head of strategy nansen but like people were already big on ethereum and bitcoin and um i just like a random interview where this guy's like oh we're going to use the blockchain to like improve the education system and like it it sounded really stupid to me and i was like this is not gonna work whatever and because i was so theoretical at the time i was like you probably need a phd to do anything meaningful in crypto and like that was my um kind of quick judgment and i was obviously wrong but so i never looked at it further than that but i did go into finance um so i worked in a bunch of the big banks in canada and i also did like uh digital payments like atm payments card payments and stuff like that for a few startups and i noticed like how i hated it uh the payment systems are super shit um if you know how like the current bank system works.

44:17It's like 1985 programming languages doing some bizarre shit that makes no sense and super inefficient. And that story that I said earlier about like, we had to move money from Australia to Canada once. And I saw how hard it was and I was like, and I knew like about crypto and I was like, why not just like use USDC or like even Bitcoin or something? And people were like, like that's a scam. and this was like 2020 or 2021 or something. And I really did not like that answer. And I was like, it clearly solves a problem. And like within two or three weeks, I was working at Coinbase before they went public.

45:00So I joined Coinbase. At Coinbase, I was on a team called Ledger, which is basically a team that builds APIs for everybody else within Coinbase to build products. So Coinbase.com, Coinbase Advanced Trading, Coinbase Wallet, they all use these APIs that we built. And then Coinbase also has like a super smart culture internally and everybody's super involved with crypto. Well, not everybody, but like certainly the earlier hires, the newer hires aren't really crypto native. And so there were all these channels internally, like DeFi farming strategies, NFTs and all this stuff. And I would just play around with all the chains on my own.

45:41and on the weekends or just during the late night, I was like, I feel so annoyed by not knowing all these systems. And so I like would study the white papers. I read like the Avalanche white papers, Solana, Polka Dots, ICP even like everything. And I would also like just build stuff for fun. And I built a few EVM things. and then I was like Solana seems interesting because the white paper is like a communication system like a radio system and that was my undergrad and I was like this actually is a very interesting way of scaling um and it seems to be like kind of not consensus for some reason so I bought Solana but I also started building on it at one point um I had built you know like back in the day when nfts were a thing um there would be like these sales bots or like listings bots on the discord where it's like oh like a new rare nfp got listed or like somebody would sell nft for like 500 000 everybody would comment like free or something because they thought it would went for like 10 million at one point like 90 of all those bots on all slanted discords were just bots that i built just for fun um and then similarly there was no explorers there was no block stores there was no analytics sites and these nft influencers on twitter would say some bizarre shit like oh this nft is like popping off or minting out whatever but then i would and like nobody could check but then i would look at like the the distribution because i would write index on my own to like see what they're doing and it's like this guy would like mint like 900 to himself and then be like yeah it's being sold out quickly and i'm like are you fucking stupid it's a public blockchain like everybody can see what you're doing um and and so um i would like reply guy them and at this time i had like basically no followers um like less than a thousand um so i basically just kept doing that for a bit and i also noticed the industries like ethereum let's say bias people would like write threads about how Solana's shit all the time.

47:59But like they would never talk about the downsides of Ethereum. And I was like, this is kind of weird. And this is also the case within Coinbase, which, and I was like, but these people are smart. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, why are smart people like just totally not being very balanced here? So I was super annoyed by that. And so people would like say a bunch of shit on the internet and write these posts. And I'd be like, actually, that's kind of incorrect because here's actually how it works. And I mean, I started doing that. I never stopped. But I also even started doing it within Coinbase.

48:36And then basically like one day, I had always wanted to start a startup since like 14. I didn't know they were called startups at that time. I just said, I'm just going to start a company or invent products or something. and then yeah one day i was just like i think i don't quite remember the exact story but like we were building a product within coinbase and like i was like we should add solana to this and they were actually okay with it like okay sure let's add solana but like on ethereum you could use like ether scan apis to bootstrap something super fast on solana you had nothing uh i was like i can just build this out but like that's gonna take a while and i was like wait a minute why not Why not just start this company myself and I'll sell it to Coinbase later or something.

49:18And so I started the company in like fast forward two and a half years. We actually did sell it to Coinbase. So they're a customer now. So it did work out. But that was like the story, I guess. Let's start with the kind of going on in on Solana. I, so, Andreessen Horowitz, the VC firm, Ben and Mark have a podcast where they talk about random ships, startups, whatever. And, like, one day they talked about, like, nicotine. And they were, like, I think they were talking about, like, hey, is it, like, a new topic? Does it help you think better and stuff? And I had always been scared of it. at the time I was kind of fat as well.

50:04And I was, because I wanted to like start vaping because I was like nicotine drives your appetite, whatever. I've never seen a fat guy that smokes cigarettes in Europe or something or in Europe in general, but whatever. And I was like, but I was super scared of smoking because my lungs, whatever. I didn't want them to get damaged. And I didn't know these things existed until Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz on their podcast was like, they were talking about nicotine about how it's like a stimulant and stuff and I think they said like okay like maybe we should experiment with it like they were going to experiment with it I was like hold up like these 50 year old guys are taking this thing and I'm not like what the fuck's happening here and so I went to the store and I just picked one up and at first it was like oh my god like a huge kind of um it makes you dizzy and nauseous and all this shit but then I kind of like confirm biased myself i was just looking at all these things and it's like yeah i can like delay cognitive aging and like it can help boost memory and stuff and i was like sure whatever i'll convince myself that this is probably not a horrible thing to take and then i like um i obviously tweet a lot and and do a lot of marketing and like that's a creative endeavor which i think benefits highly from putting your mind in alternate states so you can kind of like have different states of mind and then mix them up and then come up with new ideas and so that's why i started um and that's it doesn't do too much for me honestly like it maybe helped me think faster in some regards trips appetite so that i don't have to be distracted with food but that that's kind of it so it helps you be more creative i think so it's very hard to measure creativity but i think it does i just released a podcast with jesse pollack from base okay last week and we talk about him vaping he has a crypto punk right as a profile picture and there's a vape so ask him why do you have a crypto and then i ask him your crypto pay pun vapes do you and then he started to explain that he actually vapes but not nicotine he evades weed because it enables him to open kind of new pathways so he's like when i have a big problem to solve i vape some weed and then i go for a run and i've been so richard oh shit wow that's intense uh i personally don't i mean i used to smoke oh man in university me and my roommate we would just every night like i would just we would smoke weed and then i would always come up with like random physics theories and i was like oh like what if humans are just electricity like can i be electric man or something and he actually videoed it and he like blackmails me with it all the time now as a joke um but then i realized like once you're sober let's say all the shit you said was super dumb and it's like it's not super helpful but with nicotine it's like it doesn't feel like anything so it's just like perhaps like five percent difference or something so and if you're drinking which in crypto i mean you don't have to drink but like there's a lot of networking events and I also like just having like a random drink to again be creative and stuff.

53:18I stole that from David Ogilvie by the way. He was like the grandfather of advertising. It actually counter affects the sedative effects of alcohol. So you can have like some filters turned off in your brain but still be alert and I find there's like this weird zone where you can kind of just go out in there bang some tweets or ideas and stuff that I find helpful. Talking about banging tweets which you do a lot, right? I have to get back to kind of like the beginning of the Your Solana story, right? Online one. And I have to quote our common friend, Miao, the co-founder of Jupiter, who is one of the podcast sponsors.

54:00Miao wrote an article at the end of 2023, right? Referring to a year prior to that. So I'll take a few chunks and then I'll ask questions that hopefully make sense based on those kind of chunks. he wrote he's only a small merth now but within the year we'll grow into the most formidable fire-breathing dragon in the whole city loved by some feared by all avoided by bodies my first question is entrepreneurs and investors usually they rely on patterns to build judgment right what other catastrophic events happen in your life as an entrepreneur investor that made you realize that the collapse of FTX was a huge opportunity for you to step in and become a leader in the Solana ecosystem at the very moment where others were leaving because they thought that it was the end of Solana.

54:53Yeah. I mean, it wasn't hard. I think people kind of always think it was like this super difficult moment. And I guess it was for some people, But for me, we had a company. I mean, we have a company, Helios. And so what had happened was like, obviously, FTX came out as a fraud. And one thing I didn't understand was why everybody was saying Solana is dead after that happened. Because based on my understanding, like the last thing FTX released on Solana was a horrible NFT marketplace that totally tanked. And then their last few investments were like Aptos. and like other blockchains. And so I think they were like helpful in like 2020, like during the super early days.

55:42But by 2022, they really weren't doing anything except dump on retail with horrible tokenomics and shit investments. And so I actually, my first instinct was like, oh, this is awesome. I was like, wait a minute, like now this predatory person, team, whatever is gone. so now the ecosystem can be way better. But like for some reason, nobody saw it that way. They're like, Solana's only successful because of this thing. But like, I was like, that they wouldn't do anything to help the chain. Why is it successful because of them? I think they like helped get attention towards the chain during the early days.

56:21But since then, I hadn't seen them do anything useful. And at the time, Solana had like some outages in the previous months. and, you know, I was talking to Tolley and stuff. And I saw like the solutions they proposed to fix those things. And I was like, oh, this works. Like this will solve the issue. And I was like, sweet. Like now there's no more priority to tokenomics. And there's like a new engineer system kind of coming online. We still have a bunch of customers with Helios. We saw like some more of a downtick, but like overall the trend was, like you follow the developers and the developers were still building on chain.

57:02and like I put those things together and I was like what the fuck like what how is everybody so bearish right now and then you know you start to realize how stupid CT is where it's they look at the chart they they look at the chart and they're like okay the price is going down therefore the chain sucks and it's like you don't have full information or you don't understand full information or you simply don't have the balls or you don't have or you're just thinking arbitrary you're you're you're an ape you're just memetically copying other apes you're not actually thinking and so i would see like all these posts saying the most bizarre shit like the l1 wars are over or like solana's dead and like i have a lot of screenshots of those by the way um like gigabytes worth of the shit and i was like these guys are gonna get so fucked like this is so incorrect.

57:59And I was like, not only am I going to, with my team, help build better solutions to make the blockchain work even better, I'm also going to invest in better companies. But then also I'm going to smack people in the face, hypothetically speaking, on the internet who say this dumb shit with just facts. I mean, none of my arguments were opinionated. I mean, they were opinionated in the sense that obviously I have strong opinions, but they were always backed up by something. and that was it and i was like che you're wrong here's why you're wrong and turns out they were wrong so you know uh i think it's gary v uh i saw a couple of years ago he was saying the real entrepreneur is the guy he was uh i think it was just bookmarking all the tweets and then he was like you know what the real entrepreneur is the one who bookmarks or screenshots and then comes back one two three years later and then just like say what now bitch yeah i mean it's like it's like that michael jordan thing where it's like somebody will do literally anything like maybe they winked at michael jordan or something he'd be like and i took that personally and it just gets rattled and and i'm like kind of the same i'm like you fucking dicks like what how dare you like try to shout an entire ecosystem with false information and do horrible charts and stuff like, I'm going to get you.

59:21Like that was kind of my thought. He shall vigilantly scan the expensive skies day and night, not just replying, but becoming the reply guy. Fudge shall be eliminated. Mistakes will be corrected, sometimes politely, sometimes annoyingly, but never wrongly. All who read his replies should be enlightened. Why is the reply job one of the single most important jobs in a crypto ecosystem? It's actually like a very fundamental reason. The only way progress is made and errors are corrected and knowledge is created is through discourse. Okay. Which is to say somebody said something, there's an opinion, perhaps it's backed by some data.

1:00:13and the free market of ideas then battles it out. And then the idea that's, you know, least wrong kind of, you know, sort of wins, right? Until a better idea comes along and then something like that. So being a reply guy is important because in crypto, due to the incentive structures, which is like very short-term incentives and people are obviously swayed by price more than brains, let's say, combined with the social aspects of crypto, which is like, it's just a very social system. Not only intrinsically in terms of like social consensus, but also like, since you have like all these markets, people want to feel like they're making the right choices.

1:01:04So they just always talk about these things. But then also people aren't building too much and so people will just yap. And so you bring all these things together, you have this kind of social system where people just, you know, they'll say their opinion. And like, generally speaking, I don't assume intent too often. Like, I don't know if they're trying to be malicious or something. And so I try to just look at what they said and I look at the argument and I'm like, that is false. And I know that it's false because I've done the work to kind of research this. And it's like, okay, if you know that, but you don't comment, then you've kind of just cheated everything because you have all this knowledge, but you're not using it.

1:01:50So like, what are you doing? And like, one of the things people will say is like, well, you're never going to change somebody's mind. And it's like, okay, that might be correct if it's a one-on-one private chat, but on Twitter, everybody sees everything. And so if somebody's saying something and broadcasting it up to the world, like, you know, Solana's centralized, and I know that it's not, I'm not going to change that person's mind. But, like, whoever reads that can now see both sides of the argument, and then they can decide for themselves. So, like, being a reply guy, it's not just a crypto thing.

1:02:28It's important in everything. It's important, like, literally everything. It's super important. And like, Reply Guy is just crypto is branding a bit, but fundamentally, that's just how humans learn and create knowledge. If you've like read like a David Deutsch book, everything is conjectures and then criticism and then criticism leads to new conjectures and then criticism, etc. And then the idea is to keep reducing the errors such that you have something approximating truth fundamentally. Like that's what science is, right? Science is basically trusting in the ignorance of experts, I think, is what Feynman said or something, which is like, there's these established ideas.

1:03:14And the only way science moves forward is like, yeah, I think that idea is wrong. And here's like a better way of thinking about it. And then you kind of have all these things, you know, like, no, the earth is not the center of the universe. Actually, the earth rolls around the sun, right? That's basically just being a reply guy to the church. And I think it's just, that's just like a very deep belief that I have, that you have to have this battle place of ideas. How do you put food on the table or build a big company when you spend your days replying to people on Twitter? Well, the most important thing is you need to have a really good team.

1:03:56So Helios is three co-founders, me and then Nick and Liam, who are my university friends since 10 years ago and roommates as well. So I know them very well. I trust them deeply.

1:04:40And they do the engineering. We have better BD than me, better legal than me, et cetera, all these things. And so it's about kind of just putting together the best team. That's like the most important job of the leader. And, but the other half is telling the story and, well, you know, not only doing sales and marketing, which goes in with this, but recruiting. And then like, obviously we're deeply mission centric. like we believe like our mission statement internally is um accelerating world computing and like a part of that mission is making sure that that mission is resonant with as many people as possible so like if i'm not talking about our mission then perhaps i don't believe in it too much right and i can't really back it up and so So fundamentally, it's like, I want crypto to succeed and proceed because, you know, earlier about basically my life mission.

1:05:49And I think the way to do that is twofold. One is you need to obviously build the thing. You need to ship. You need to build products. You need to iterate. You need to improve these systems. But then the other part is like, you need to argue. You need to debate, you need to tell the vision, you need to recruit, you need to dispel things. And like, you can't just do one, is kind of how I look at it. But also, like, people also kind of get this wrong where they're like, oh, you just kind of tweet every day or all day. It's not correct. Like, I mean, right now, I haven't tweeted in a very long time.

1:06:30Maybe, I don't know how long it's been. it's very quick to tweet um like on the just the realistic aspect of this i don't schedule tweets i don't take like an hour of drafting a tweet i'll just have an idea and i'll tweet it right away and it'll take me a minute and that's it like it doesn't actually take that long by the end of the year all shall be educated a new generation of sheet posters and reply guys for Solana, who have been inspired and empowered. And all but the blindest maxis of them all shall see the light. How much of an impact do you think you personally had on Solana, going from$8 after the FTX collapse to today, two years later, being the fastest horse on this new crypto cycle?

1:07:18I've kind of wondered this, and then I was like, it doesn't really matter what my answer of this is it's i've talked to a lot of people um all these conferences but also like private meetings that nobody really sees and stuff um government people vcs institutional people um so i've had i've been fortunate enough to kind of talk to all these very you know uh influential people let's say i don't i don't know but like one thing i know if somebody i think like sent me this presentation from like another blockchain and like their mission was cultivate a hundred merts or something that's the next question and um that's not the first time there's like a podcast episode with like toli and blockworks and blockworks got uh jason is like man like every time i talk to one of these l1s and l2s their mission is to get like a mert on their chain and like i see this on the internet all the time too.

1:08:23It's like, well, the problem is Ethereum doesn't have a merch or like the problem is something that doesn't have a merch. And I'm kind of like, this is kind of weird.

1:08:30So I think, you know, it seems like people think I've had an impact.

1:08:38Something that people who I don't know is like, there's a lot of really powerful people in crypto that aren't published and they're on Twitter, but they're not and stuff. Super rich, insanely. Like it doesn't even make sense. Um, and these people are really friendly to me because they think I'm like one of the main reasons why, you know, they're, you know, bags, let's say, uh, that's saved. Um, so I've certainly, but then, you know, there's other people who are like, actually, I think most people know that I've tried my best, at least. Fundamentally, it's impossible for me to answer that question.

1:09:29I think quantitatively, Helios specifically has had a big impact just due to the amount of customers, because I can see the number of customers and revenue, customer testimonials and stuff. I can look at that and be like, okay, yeah, we've definitely helped here. And the numbers can speak for themselves. On the more social side, I don't know. I just kind of try to do my best and see what happens. We've come such a long way since the disastrous end of 2022 in crypto and in a Solana ecosystem. How does it feel today to have been the most outspoken character on Solana when everyone was against you and mocking you and to not be proven right?

1:10:16I don't think we've been proven right. I think... I mean, I'm still paranoid pretty much every day, and I message this totally on Slack every day or every other day or something. And I was like, dude, why the fuck are you working on a phone? You need to come back to the L1. You need to ship stuff. We're going to fall behind. We need to compete. We need to kind of keep going. and then he'll give me some, totally like saying random debate shit for its own sake. And so we'll go back and forth.

1:10:51Like what it feels like is, I think it's just, I'm just more paranoid. Like it's like we've come this way, but like that doesn't mean shit if we can't keep accelerating. Like, we ship fast. We have a good blockchain. It still has a lot of problems. But like... And like, there's like this new PSYOP narrative where people think like Ethereum is the underdog. And I'm like, what the fuck? Like, it's by far the biggest in market cap. It has by far the most ecosystem teams. It's been around longer. It has more institutional adoption. that basically has everything more, but somehow the social narrative is that Ethereum is the underdog because the chart didn't go up for four months.

1:11:42And I'm like, okay, this is not a good setup. Everything Salon has won, which it hasn't. There's a lot of work to do. And the competition

1:11:58has a lot of advantages that are ignored. Like, for example, elders are centralized, obviously. Um, currently they probably will get decentralized, some of them. But that means they can ship much faster. On Solana, if you want to ship an upgrade, it's going to wait half a year. And then it's a thousands of machines to actually upgrade that. And there's all these weird technical nuances. Whereas like in L2, they're like, okay, code update. That's it. It's like a super huge structural disadvantage. And like people don't care about decentralization. Like I do. But like, you know, they'll compare like an L1 or L2 with one sequencer's TPS numbers to Solana's TPS numbers.

1:12:43And I'm like, this is like such horrible framing. Like this is an L1 blockchain with thousands of nodes doing, you know, 2000 TPS versus one centralized AWS server doing 500 TPS. And you somehow think that the L2 is the underdog. Like it makes no sense to me. and so anyways not to ramble but like i would say i feel paranoid which is like i don't know i think like the kobe's like job not finished thing is like overplayed but like that is how it is um there's a shitload of work to do and we need to that's why i always say accelerate because acceleration is not about going fast and then staying at that pace.

1:13:27Acceleration is the rate of change in velocity, meaning you need to keep being faster and faster and faster. Um, it doesn't matter if you're going 200 kilometers an hour or something, you need to go 210, 220, 240, 300, break the fucking speed of light, you know, break the sound barrier. Um, and so we have a lot of work to do and we need to go faster and And no one should be content. Everybody should be super paranoid. Absolutely. I think the paranoid side is like, is the most, is definitely the most important aspect. Because the opposite of that is what complacency, right? Is what kills successful companies.

1:14:13What is Helios if you had to explain it to a grandmother? Home Depot for internet apps. That's, if it was my grandmother, I would say it's basically that. Just imagine a hammer and a nail, but on the internet. Right. They're tools to help you build things. In this case, help you build crypto applications, but she doesn't know what a crypto application is. Why did you start Helios instead of any other crypto company? Yeah, so this one's easy. I mean, something that I've always been super annoyed by is the lack of applications in crypto, the lack of useful applications in crypto specifically. At the time, when I was about to start Helios, it was like, okay, it was going to be multi-chain.

1:15:03It was like, okay, Ethereum, EDM chains, and Solana. them. But then you kind of realize that like building something for everybody means you're building it for nobody. Like your focus is to split quality stuffers. And so I have to make a decision to, okay, where do I build? And taking kind of my fundamental problem, which is the lack of useful crypto applications into account. It's like, okay, how do I change this? Right? How can I make an impact is that there's more useful crypto applications. Obviously I can tweet, but like fundamentally there needs to be some other things to help with that.

1:15:42And I figured the best is like, make it much easier for developers to bring ideas into life. So like this, this concept of, I have an idea, I'm going to make it into a product. The time between those two steps needs to be as short as humanly possible so that there's as many apps as possible. And if there's as many apps as possible, then the chances of one of those turning out to be a useful app that's actually used with PMF is greater. So it's just the highest kind of leverage thing that I think I could do. And then at the time, Ethereum wasn't scaling, like it was still the L1. And there was like, basically what needs to happen is you need to have the merge.

1:16:22So go from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake on Ethereum. You need to have 4.8.4 go live, you need to go like, you know, blob space, you need to get all two to work, you need to get all two to kind of go to stage zero, stage one, stage two, dank sharding, all these different things. And I was like, okay, if you keep multiplying all those events together in their condition on each other, the probability of building a useful application on Ethereum keeps getting lower and lower every time you multiply one of those conditionals together. versus on Solana, it already works. It already scales, but working on it is shit.

1:17:00And it also obviously has problems. But I was like, okay, those are solvable problems. You know how to solve them. We've done this in school. We've done this in our careers. All we need to do is be super opinionated and then pick the best playground for enabling applications. And at the time, that was Solana. I do think it's still Solana today, but that was kind of the criteria. What does Founders Fund investing in Helios, the Home Depot for Solana, say about the big money's long-term belief on the Solana ecosystem as a whole? Well, you know, VCs don't look at two extra returns. They look at$1 ,000 ,000 ,000 extra returns, right?

1:17:42That's the game of venture capital. Every investment that you make must be able to return the entire fund, in a sense. And Founders Fund's a big fund. And I do think it's, maybe I'll tell the story some other time as well, but like, founder of Peter Thiel is like the main reason why he started a startup. And so it was like pretty interesting that like, I was reading his book Zero to One, like four years ago, and I was like, I'd finish in one day. And I was like, hmm, that's a good point. Maybe I should start a startup. And then now like he's investing in my company. So that's like a, you know, felt pretty nice.

1:18:21I don't know if it's my happiness, but I was like, yeah, sweet. For one minute. Yeah. Then back to work. Well, it means that they think the ecosystem is going to grow. Right? Like, because a VC only makes an investment if they think there's asymmetric upside. And so they think there's asymmetric upside, obviously. They also invest in companies that are in line with their kind of values, which is like pretty much in line with Peter Thiel's values. like, um, like a contrarian opinionated founder, right. Um, kind of being the best choice in a given market, like not being in like a super crowded market and being like a marginal player, but like being able to capture 80 % of a market and like kind of being able to expand from there.

1:19:10Um, so I think a lot of those values fit. and I think basically like if Solana is to grow then she always will obviously grow and then if you execute right which we will we will capture most of that upside I mean like we released a validator just as like a last second thing five months ago or something and now we're the only validator and at the time I was uh we had like an internal all hands and we were number 80 or something and I was like because Coinbase or Galaxy which were massive obviously are number one and I'm like yeah I'm pretty sure we can be number one like there's there's no real reason why we can't be and like my team was like I don't know about that like whatever weird CEO talk and stuff I was like I don't know like we'll make it happen um and then we did and we can execute really well and it's like now it's about like okay people think my competition is like other rpc providers or other developer platforms or something but it's not um sure maybe on like a one week one month time horizon whatever but like that's not how i think um my competition is people not building on solana okay um so base and i know you know jesse will kind of say all these things like oh no like this is too small of a pie like we're collaborating to like bring everybody on chain stuff and like yeah that's correct but like there's obviously competition there it's not like if you're a developer you need to pick are you going to pick base or are you going to pick solana right like and it's like yeah you can pick both but now everybody's going to do that and so in In the case that it is competitive, which does exist, life is competition, business is war.

1:21:06I will win that. Okay. And that's the mindset. So anyways, TLDR is Founders Fund. I mean, they haven't told me this, but obviously they believe this. They think Solana will grow quite a bit. And it has to grow asymmetrically for it to be worth a venture investment. You tweeted the greatest quote of all time. is this one by Young. You are what you do, not what you say you'll do. Simple, but so true. Why do so many people just talk? It's just, it's much easier to talk than do. I think it's as simple as that.

1:21:51People really love like,

1:21:59feeling empowered by reading motivational quotes and like bookmarking all these things and like saying, oh, I will do that and whatnot. And like that gives them a dopamine release. But then like once you actually do it, you're like, fuck, this sucks. Like, what do you mean I have to do worse? What do you mean I have to exert energy and go against, you know, inertia and stuff? And like, that's hard. And so talking is much easier. but also um you can bullshit with talking easily you can't bullshit with doing and so that's like it's just a numbers game talking will always be easier and like it will also like for example let's say you want to optimize for being happy perhaps you'll play video games and you'll feel happy okay good but like perhaps like it's kind of the same thing with talking which is like okay i want to look successful or i want to feel like i'm doing something okay i'll talk and then maybe i'll get like a like and it's like you think you kind of you trip your system and i think you've done something you have not done that much i had to read this yesterday actually i saw that which is like, oh man, this pisses me off so much.

1:23:09Like people will say, oh, like Ethereum has a marketing problem. And like the best founders I know are like the ones who are shit posting on Twitter all the time and stuff. And like, no offense to those people. But like the people being referenced in those are people with zero product live. Okay. And I'm an investor in some of them. and so I obviously believe in their ideas and it's not them that's saying this obviously so the fault isn't with them it's that people look at that and they're like oh this guy throws good parties they talk all the time on Twitter they get likes great founder this is what we need it's like you're an idiot like you cannot just talk you must do and talk you can't not do just one and Steve Jobs is a good quote on this right like

1:24:04he likens it to thinking and not talking. So like he says, you know, the greatest people in the history have been both the thinker and doer in one person, right? It's very easy to think and say, oh, I had this idea. It's very hard to actually tighten the screws, line up the gears, make sure the tolerances are right, make sure that you can bring it to market, all this. That's so hard. and like you know he gives the example of like you know leonardo the benshee didn't just have a guy off to the side saying oh what should we paint in three years and what strategy should we take it's like no the guy was like studying anatomy he was sculpting he was building helicopters while painting he was doing all these things he was a good chemist he was mixing the pigments he didn't just have this guy thinking for him.

1:24:56You have to both think and do. In this case, for an entrepreneur, not only do you have to think and do, you have to think, do, and sell. And sell generally means talk. Now, the talk doesn't have to be on Twitter. You don't have to be a shit poster. A good example is Bridge that just got acquired by Stripe. They weren't talking on Twitter. They were talking on Zoom calls and closing deals, right? That's also a thing. Talk doesn't mean shitpost on Twitter. Talk means sell. And selling means selling yourself to employees, to customers, to investors. You're always selling. What's keeping people from actually starting that company, quitting that job, losing those 20 pounds, getting that dream girlfriend, getting those abs?

1:25:43It's just mindset. It's always mindset. I will take zero excuse. on this. People, especially people in Turkey, because I'm Turkish, I can say this. They'll say something like, oh, but the VCC in here isn't good. Or like, oh, but the government does this here. It's like, fuck off. I don't care. Who cares? Nobody cares. It doesn't matter. Just do it. Go somewhere else then. Right? Like the same example, I'm Swiss and people in Switzerland are like, oh man, but in Silicon Valley, blah, blah. I'm like, just fucking move there. Yeah. I move there. It's like, I don't have money to move there. It's like, okay, make money.

1:26:18what do you mean like or like or like um you know uh you can always create an excuse for anything the only way to get through this stuff is to be an unstoppable force that can overcome excuses so because like there's always an obstacle always like always there's an obstacle and it's always mindset um like i was in turkey uh i was in canada um i can't eat food I have a swallowing problem. You know, there's always an excuse. It's just like all these guys who are like, oh, I can't catch a break. It's like, fuck off. Like, what do you mean you can't catch a break? You just don't be a bitch about it.

1:27:01Just go forward. Make it happen, right? Or what's the alternative? You don't make it happen. Okay. You didn't make it happen. What are you going to do? Just say that? And say, okay, have fun with that. Like, you're going to die soon, And then you're going to be, when you're nine, you're going to be like, ah, shit, I should have just done that. I should have just made it happen. It's like, yeah, you should have. And now it's too late. And so my advice would be, you can just do the thing. There'll be many reasons why you chant, but you just need one for why you chant. And then you need to pursue that one, right?

1:27:43you can really do and again this is like a Steve Jobs thing where it's like everything you see around you that you call life was like made up by people 100 % that are no smarter than you everything they just did it if you can just do something and there's something else that doesn't output maybe it's not the right output maybe you messed up or something sure whatever but you still did something like you have a lot of agency over the world and you know people always say like oh I want to change the world and they like talk and do these lobbying shit it's like okay let's try changing something concrete first and see if you can do that and I kind of start expanding from there right like anyway it's just mindset it's just you you you need to just

1:28:32believe that you can do something um it doesn't matter how unrealistic it is realism is stupid i think like you i mean look it if if you have hard numbers you're working with or something where you need to be like oh like we need to be profitable to survive as a company it's like yeah okay that's fair obviously but if it's like, ah, we can't make money because we didn't talk to Silicon Valley people. It's like, what? What do you mean? Talk to them. Or first of all, why do they let you? There's people who did that without Silicon Valley. Like, stop making excuses. So just fucking do the thing. What's your biggest prediction for the next 12 months?

1:29:22My biggest prediction for the next 12 months. Trump will be president. I mean, I actually don't know. I haven't actually checked the numbers on that at all. Oh, Fired Answer will go live within the next 12 months. That's one prediction I feel confident in.

1:29:45Solana will have another outage is another prediction, which is bullish. Yeah, people. Honestly, I don't know. If there's like a more specific context, I can probably answer that better. But thank you so much for doing this, man. Of course. Thanks for having me. That was a great conversation. And as a manlet myself, thank you on behalf of many others who, for spending your days, educating people on the solar ecosystem and fighting all this fud day in and day out, even when the world was against you. Even if you didn't want to admit it before, I think that the solar ecosystem wouldn't be here without you.

1:30:28And so I hope you can take a minute to appreciate what you've done and to take some well-deserved pride. Thank you. Thank you.