FULL TRANSCRIPT
Slava (00:00)
In this episode of Smart Humans, we talk with Raj Gokal, who's the co-founder of Solana and president of Solana Labs. He tells us about his point of view on the crypto industry and how Solana was able to compete and break away from all the other competitors in the L1 ecosystem. He talks to us about his predictions for 2025 and why he thinks it'll be the greenest of green years and it's massively bull vision.
He gives us more examples about use cases, using Solana, and what the future holds for five years out. And finally, he gives us his predictions for investments, both public and private, for three years out.
Slava (01:07)
Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Smart Humans. Super excited for today's guest. We have somebody who's helping to build the entire ecosystem for crypto. So we have Raj Gokal, the co-founder of Solana and also the president of Solana Labs. Welcome Raj to the show.
Raj (01:25)
Hey Slava, thanks for having me.
Slava (01:27)
Yeah, this has been a little while in the making, so we're super excited to have you here. Let's always get started with the basic first question, which is, how did you get into this world? How did you get into alts? How did you get into entrepreneurship? How did you get into crypto? Where did it all start? Start from when you were a kid. We want to know how it all came about.
Raj (01:45)
Yeah, sure. Yeah, it really did start when I was a kid. My household got like 28K internet when I was, I think about seven. And my brother got me a computer in my bedroom when I was about nine years old, is before anybody that I knew in my neighborhood or in my friend circle.
And I just was always upgrading to the latest thing, just scrounging money to get whatever I could. So got through 50K internet and begged my parents to upgrade to DSL so the line wouldn't drop every time they picked up the phone. And in the meantime, I also just started picking up a lot of creative software and website design. And I would say where I spiked most was in design. I just loved it. I was doing things like wireframes before.
I knew that was a thing. I was just drawing websites on paper and thought it was really amazing that you could make these things. So I've always been kind of an amateur coder and designer. When I went into college, I went to NYU for a year and then transferred to UPenn. And I ended up going more into business and finance and wanted to get into the finance side of technology because I think
My mind is a little bit more analytical. I got talked out of being more of a software engineer, even though those are my favorite courses. And I wanted to keep my options open. I never like to kind of lock myself down to one skill set. I'm sort of a generalist at heart. So my journey as an entrepreneur, I started in venture capital at General Catalyst Partners in Boston. I...
left and moved to San Francisco to start a medical device company, actually more like a consumer glucose sensor company. So that was where I raised my first seed round and that company ended up raising like 20, $30 million. It was around the same time as Theranos, so not a great time to be in the blood diagnostic space, but the product worked and it was a very minimally invasive sort sandpaper feeling sensor.
And now you see the kind of vision of that product playing out with things like levels and it actually creates a lot of behavior change, which is awesome. So for seven years I was in health tech and the last company that I was a part of was Omada Health. was leading product management and the guy that led data science there introduced me to Anatoly.
who's the main founder of Solana. He had the whole vision back then for how to scale these distributed systems called blockchains because he had done that for years and years before. that was my big switch was I stopped banging my head away in health tech where it seemed like the incumbents and the regulators really had kind of a vice grip on innovation and it was really tough to get things through in a few years. It always took decades.
And instead I said, let me spend six months helping a really amazing technologist just get a chance of having their vision hit reality. And then that six months turned into now seven years. So I got into crypto by supporting Anatoly and supporting the vision of Solana because it is like the broadband to dial up for crypto before we got into the scene.
There was no such thing as high throughput blockchains. They didn't feel like the regular internet transactions took, you know, tens of minutes to settle. It was several dollars. So it just felt like this really, you know, not scalable version of something that might be really special. So that's how I got into, you know, into crypto. And, and I guess you could say alts.
Slava (05:47)
Yeah, I love that background. Thanks for starting when you were seven years old with the 28K. What year did you graduate from Penn?
Raj (05:53)
2010.
Slava (05:54)
Nice. So I'm a Quaker as well. So always love having a fellow Quaker on the show. So 2010 Bitcoin's already out. Are you aware of Bitcoin or not even yet, you know, when you graduate?
Raj (06:06)
I became aware of it in 2011 because, you know, no matter what I was ever working on, I always looked for the smartest, weirdest engineers and spent all my evenings with them. You know, drinking, playing poker, know, hacking on stuff, brainstorming, arguing, debating. And most of them always came back to, well, you know, one of our best engineers at our first company,
was just like, he called a meeting and he called us all over to his house and he was just like, you know, I think this Bitcoin thing might be a really big deal. And this was in like late 2010, early 2011. And he kind of explained the idea of just replacing accounting and ledgers with something that nobody controls. And that concept made a ton of sense and it was really interesting, but...
Timing is really important, right? So I paid attention, I invested a little bit of money, but not enough to make a big difference in my life. And I especially started paying attention when the ICO boom on Ethereum happened, because it was clear that there could be a new asset class of digital assets and that you would just see this explosion. And then that was 2017. Yeah.
Slava (07:24)
Where you're at?
Raj (07:29)
2016, 2017 was when Ethereum really started to become feature complete and have tokens launching. And then 2017 was this big ICO boom. It was also when CryptoKitties happened on Ethereum, which was the first, more or less the first NFTs. And so there was this game that felt like Neopets from the early internet days, but they were assets that you could actually own.
And that game really broke Ethereum at tens of thousands of users. And that was the moment where I wasn't sure that crypto could be useful for millions of people. But when you see the infrastructure breaking from demand of something so small, normally there's something bigger there.
And that was when everybody I knew started telling me that I should talk to Anatoly because they kind of knew how I operate with like a really, you know, genius, eccentric technologists. I just get everything out of their way. That's what I love doing. And they're like, you know, this is one of them. You got to talk to them. And I still was a little on the fence. But when he quit his job at Dropbox, he was leading compression there and
you know, it pretty cushy job. He had a lot of responsibility. It's important work. And when he quit, I said, all right, I gotta have coffee with him. And it pretty immediately became clear that this was the biggest swing on any product or tech platform that I could be part of, you know, that I'd seen yet in Silicon Valley. So I decided to, you know, throw all my time towards it.
Slava (09:18)
Amazing, you said something in passing, which is you like hanging out with the weirdest, smartest engineers. Can you just expand on that? Like, who are those people? Why are they the ones that you choose? How do you choose them? What does it mean hanging out with them? Like, how does that creativity work for you? Just, can you double click on that?
Raj (09:35)
Yeah, hard to sum it up. know it when I see it and I feel this way about certain founders too, that I've tried to kind of put a set of rules or green flags around. But I would say one is there's the term truth seeker that I always use and that means a lot of things. means they're not just looking for
you know, money or stability or career. They see their work as a way of like understanding the world and how it operates and how people behave and, know, what, what new behaviors about humanity and its relationship to, to reality might, might look like and how technology can unlock that. And they get intellectual stimulation from seeing their work unlock these new behaviors and patterns and models because it just makes them feel like they understand the world better. So.
There's this kind of relentless like trying to understand things at their deepest level. And I think, you know, there are some people who do that out of sort of, you know, just competition. Like they want to understand and sound smarter than other people. There are some people that, you know, that do it in a silo. They don't really care about collaborating with other people to build that understanding. They're happy to just kind of read books and build understanding that way and have it.
you know, be in their own head. And then there's this person in between that's not doing it for glory or, you know, or to impress other people. And they're not just doing it for themselves. They really like working in a team. And they see a lot of value in conflict with others and debating ideas because it gets you there faster. And that's the type of engineer that like, you know, I don't know where they come from and what their common thread is, but when I see them, I just always, you know,
I pay a lot of attention. keep them in mind. I want to see what they're doing and what they're thinking about. And when there's commonality in the things that they get excited about, think it's the strongest signal I can think of. And that was what it felt like in 2017, looking at the crypto industry. would say maybe two years ago, that's what AI looked like. It was clear that a lot of the best engineers in the world were seeing the most opportunity there.
And yeah, I think we'll see shifts in what these types of engineers care about faster and faster and recognizing that as important.
Slava (12:09)
Awesome. So covering the categories in the alternative investment space, how do you like to invest your capital? mean, obviously you have a lot of your net worth in Solana. You must be bullish on crypto in general, but how do you think about investing into like yield, like real estate or private credit or other pre IPO companies or angel investing or other crypto investments? How do you or art and collectibles? How do you think about these asset classes and investing at all into any of them?
Raj (12:39)
Yeah. So let me start by saying that when I was working in W2 jobs, I never contributed to a 401k. I paid off all my student debt as fast as I could and lived in as small and cheap and cockroach infested places as I could until I was out of debt. And then I balanced my lifestyle a little bit more, but mostly was just saving money.
And I was my number one metric was what is my runway if I quit my job? Because I knew I was going to have to do that to start a company and then either the company succeeds or it fails and I'm back relying on my runway or I've extended the runway through an exit on that company. so that series of leaps using my capital base as a war chest and just runway to survive.
was like the entire game. So I wasn't really investing. The only stuff that I invested in back then were with less than 5 % of my net worth, I was investing in public markets in founder led companies. And I bought them when they hit times of distress or there's a turnaround or there's a major PR crisis. The markets were panicking.
And, you know, my bet was always on management for a technology company and then being founder led and just the kind of grit that that brings you to solve really hard problems. an example is like, you know, I think my favorite example, because I made a killing on this, was Netflix when they had the flickster thing where they tried to separate the subscription DVD business from the streaming business.
and charge separate prices for them. And people started canceling and, you know, was, it was like delete Netflix. It was, it was a huge crisis and their stock just plummeted. I don't remember how much it was, but I think it was at least like 30%. And I just thought to myself, like, these are the guys who converted a mail order DVD business into the world's largest online streaming business. And they've got a line of sight into publishing their own content. Like this is a
a wildly dynamic business with founders who, you know, can, they can, they can deal with some stuff. I'll bet on this. so that was, that was my, you know, very early foray into investing. It was more just about understanding founders, you know, betting on and believing in, in, in great founder CEOs. And it was all technology businesses. I also invested in Tesla and did really well with that, but those were more like, you know,
my way of just extending my runway through concentrated bets. I'll sort of fast forward because in between, you know, I would just say I was not investing really, I was just investing all of my time into, you know, the startups that I was doing. But these days, you know, I think you brought up a few categories. I think real estate is something that in my family, we've always...
kind of viewed as like the ultimate asset class. It's just, you know, for all the usual reasons. But, you know, I haven't actually done any myself. I've just been kind of flirting around with it. And then I think at some point I might buy some sort of residential homes. And I think that might be my retirement is sort of just like, you know, being a landlord and managing different multifamily residential properties. And then, you know, the...
I do a lot of angel investing, mostly in crypto, mostly, again, know, crazy founders that I'm backing for who they are and their wild ambition and just the energy they have to go after it. So I've done things in crypto, in fintech, in, you know, hardware and computing and space, like launch companies, just all that stuff. And I, you know, I'm fine with it all going to zero. I just...
would love if any one of them ends up being a transformative product and being part of that journey is really special. And then collectibles, same thing. A lot of it is just dogfooding Solana and dogfooding crypto. So tons of digital collectibles. I would say it makes me feel like my early internet self just kind of catching memes and trends and narratives and...
and watching online communities form and making bets on them is really fun and interesting. And then I recently got into watches a little bit. I don't know if that fits into sort of the collectibles category. Yeah.
Slava (17:36)
Absolutely, watches right up there with cars, alcohol, sports cards, absolutely.
Raj (17:41)
Yeah. So the reason I like watches, I never really got it at all. I've actually always been like an Apple watch guy, but, I, I met someone who just said, you know, just buy, buy one and see how it feels. And if, if you get the right model, you know, when you sell it, you might make a little bit of money or you might lose a little bit, but it's not, you know, it's not a $10,000, expense that you can ever recoup. It's actually easy to get in and out of. So I did it and,
And I kind of, and then they sent me a video of John Mayer describing his relationship with watches on Hodinkee in a podcast interview. And the way that he talked about each of his watches being sort of like a portal in time where, you know, he had this one Rolex Submariner that he always was wearing at the beach.
So every time he puts it on and he looks at that dial and the dial kind of draws you in, it's very beautiful and intricate. He feels like he's at the beach. And in that video, when you see him looking at the watch, you can kind of see that he's like transported. And I think as I get older, I realized like that's what collectibles are for me. They're like foot marks that connect you to different points in time. I used to also not be into scotch at all. I thought it tasted terrible.
And I asked somebody older at some point, was like, just, you gotta sell me on this. Like, do people love scotch? And I remember he had a glass of, think, like, it was like an Au Bon 12 year. And he said, this, I drank this with my father before he died, you know, 10 years ago. And every time I drink it, I think of him. And so to...
Slava (19:25)
So you like, do you like PD now or you prefer, you know, nice and smooth?
Raj (19:30)
Yeah, my wife and I actually went and did, I rented a BMW and drove left hand in Scotland and we went and toured some distilleries and yeah, we love the good Petey stuff. We're very into Scotch now. I don't collect it or anything, but I just think, you know, for me, that's what collectibles are. It's a very personal journey. And if you end up making any money off of it, that's great. But the way you develop good taste and fine gems is through your personal.
know, turning with those things.
Slava (20:01)
Amazing. Are any of your investments these days yield oriented? Meaning, is it all wealth creation? Or are you getting any stuff where you're getting back five, 10, 20 %?
Raj (20:10)
There are some, so there's a ton of just like money market accounts and stuff that I don't really track. I just have a banker that manages that stuff. And then there's a big class of like delta neutral yield bearing funds that try to be as delta neutral to crypto volatility as possible and deliver good cash on cash returns.
You know, I've experimented with those a little bit, but, you know, everything that I do that's investing in liquid assets is more kind of dogfooding and just trying to build more understanding about how crypto might impact or rebuild these capital markets or dogfooding things that are already crypto based.
Slava (20:58)
Just to double-click, the Delta Neutro Fund, that's a crypto fund or that's a public markets fund.
Raj (21:03)
Delta Neutral Crypto Fund.
Slava (21:05)
Got it, got it, okay. Cool, and then last question. I don't even know if this is appropriate, but as part of your crypto investments, are any of them into non-Solana based things, i.e. some of the other tokens?
Raj (21:16)
I think so I have some angel investments that I did just because the founders were so awesome. And, and I mean, the ulterior motive is like I was investing to build a relationship to get them to build on Solana and some of them didn't. through that, I have some things that were not built on Solana that I think have done, you know, okay. And, and then, you know, I've always owned Bitcoin. think Bitcoin is, you know, it,
Slava (21:22)
Right.
Right, right, right.
Got it.
Raj (21:46)
I kind of believe the religion around Bitcoin. think it's going to outlast all of us. It's going to be thousands of years from now, still a very hard and reliable money. It's wild that it's gotten to this level of global mindshare and adoption. And so I think everybody should own a little bit of Bitcoin.
Slava (22:05)
Are you continuing to buy today in the 90s or are you just riding what you have?
Raj (22:10)
Just writing what I have because my overall beta to crypto as an asset class is so high that it doesn't matter what I do within it.
Slava (22:17)
Makes sense. all right, here's a high level question. What do you think of today's market? What do you think of the stock market? What do you think of the economy? What do you think about this post Trump election situation? I'm not asking for your politics. I'm just asking for your, you can take it wherever you want, right? There's been a pop in crypto. There's been a pop in stock markets. There's been discussion of rates. So what does Raj have to say about where we're at?
Raj (22:38)
Mm.
Slava (22:46)
and give us any perspective in today as it rolls into 2025.
Raj (22:51)
Yeah. Boy, where do I start? Well, I think if you look back at my career, have, you know, I was very inspired by things like Airbnb and Uber that were in these like very regulated categories where it was, you know, under the guise of a free market, but it really wasn't. You have to, you know, have a license and be zoned or have a medallion to run a hotel or a cab business.
When those products broke through the regulatory barriers and rebuilt those categories, it was objectively better. Like it's just a better experience. It's higher GDP. It produces more value. It captures more value and customers are more happy. I think my hope with the new administration is that this department of government efficiency and just the slashing of regulations is going to be like the biggest
you know, macro boon that we could pot that may not be fully priced in right now. I think, you know, interest rates dropping is probably at least somewhat priced in, you know, is it going to take a year or two or months for interest rates to return to, you know, to where they used to be? Not sure, but everybody's already kind of thinking about that. I think the really big, you know, potential black swan is just
massive cuts in regulations and regulatory agencies that really, now I've gotten to understand a little bit more intimately through my work where these regulations come from, where these agencies get their power, what motivates them. And it's just awful. It doesn't really make a of sense. So all that is to say, I think the boom across asset classes leading up to and after the election is,
I think it's pricing in real value that will be unlocked if US regulatory environments become more business friendly. And I hope that will happen.
Slava (24:53)
So if you were gonna give like a street light color for 2025, are you green, yellow, red for 2025? I know I'm massively simplifying things here, but what's your perspective?
Raj (25:05)
I mean, like the greenest shade of green. Yeah, I mean, I've I have I don't think I've ever been more excited and optimistic about the capital markets, you know, the the business environment, the regulatory environment, the positioning of of, the US economy, the tailwinds of.
Slava (25:08)
You're super green. Okay.
Raj (25:31)
I think tech is going to continue to be a larger and larger driver of GDP. so, you I was always waiting, like, when, when will AI really get cracked? what, know, the idea that, that the Turing test is already now just like something completely in the past. You can absolutely fool anybody on the planet for virtually $0 into believing they're talking to a human when they're really talking to a computer. I think having these, you know,
these value drivers in terms of innovation filter through into all of our products and services and create efficiency and create more GDP is like, it's hard to imagine how the magnitude of what might happen. So I'm very, I'm excited. I think it's like we're in the golden ages.
Slava (26:20)
The greenest shade of green. I think that's the quote of the podcast so far. So we have different levels of sophistication of folks listening. So can you tell us what is Solana and how is it different than the others that exist before, during, and after it? just like, let's start there.
Raj (26:38)
Yeah. So I think for people who know very little or nothing about crypto, it is important to start with Bitcoin, which Bitcoin is a network of computers running the same software that created a distributed ledger. And that ledger only keeps track of one asset and the movements of those assets. It's just Bitcoin. So it's Bitcoin, the asset and Bitcoin, the ledger.
is the Bitcoin network. Ethereum came along a few years later and said, what if we could have a distributed network of computers that maintain a ledger, but it's really for like any asset, anybody can make their own asset. And that's where the ICO boom came from. were tens of thousands of tokens made. So this is where the idea of like a smart contract platform that's a ledger for any token came from.
And as I mentioned earlier, Ethereum was and still is incredibly slow. And the path to scaling that network involved making many more networks and then connecting them together. And Solana's approach was, how do you make one network that is as fast and cheap as the physics will allow for? So you want to get, you know,
the latency of a transaction propagating through the network, being validated, being confirmed, and being appended to this immutable record that is very difficult to change. You want that to be as fast as possible. In fact, you want to try and get it to be as close to the speed of light around the Earth as possible. So it's like a couple hundred milliseconds, which is where we're at for Solana.
That's kind of the block times are 400 milliseconds. And then you want the cost to be as close to the cost of what it takes to run the bare metal machines that run the software for the network as possible. So we took this extreme approach, kind of like Elon did with rockets. He said, like, what's the cost of the raw materials to make a rocket? And let's try and get our launch costs to as close to that as possible, amortized over many more launches because they're reusable.
For Solana, the question was, what do you have to do to start to approach those limits? Because we were way off. We were off by on the order of 10,000x when we came in. Now we're on the order of 10x. And we think we can get that to within 1x or 2x. And the way we did that was, first of we had to rebuild the blockchain from scratch. Everybody else was forking things and configuring.
combinations of consensus from here and a virtual machine from here and a smart contract scripting language from here. We rebuilt everything ourselves. And then the big unlock was parallelization of transaction processing. So without getting into too much detail, it's just basically Bitcoin and Ethereum had no ability to process transactions except in serial.
process one after the one before it was completed and propagated and confirmed through the whole network. And in Solana, you can generate transactions, validate them in parallel, and still maintain ordering. And the innovation there, if anybody wants to read about it, is proof of history, which gave, in these distributed systems, you need a clock to synchronize all that messaging. And that was kind of the big, really simple unlock that we built the whole network around. okay, so going...
much more high level. Today, what it looks like is, you know, it's a global computer that is usable for any kind of financial program. And it turns out everything is a financial program. Everything is a marketplace. Like, you can launch Uber on this because what is Uber but a wrapper on top of a ledger that keeps track of who took what ride at what point and paid how much to who else.
You can launch decentralized Airbnb or a bank where people are lending peer to peer and the blockchain is simply acting as the ledger. But on Solana, all of this feels really fast. It feels almost free. It's so cheap. And there have been thousands of developers that have built applications and infrastructure on top of Solana. And it's pretty routinely.
I mean, since we started, we've been processing more transactions per day than every other blockchain combined. It's at tens of billions of transactions, tens of billions of NFTs, and there's something like, I think, close to 100,000 new tokens launching every day on the network. There have been millions of users. So it's quite a big network. It's the third largest behind Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Slava (31:52)
So thank you for all that background. You're not the only ones who thought of, let's try to do Ethereum better. So why is it that Solana has been so successful and has so much momentum while others have not been able to keep up? And obviously you have the parallelization of the transaction processing and all the great innovation, but I'd like to believe that there's other smart people in the world, yet you guys are crushing it. Is it just quote unquote execution?
or is there some other secret stuff?
Raj (32:22)
Well, I think back in 2018, when we really started going after this problem and assembling the team, most of the way that that big, big wave of capital and startups had already like announced they had already raised many of our competitors had raised, you know, a hundred to two, $200 million plus one of them was called EOS. It raised $4 billion in, in ICF. So the market.
Slava (32:50)
ICO being initial coin offering, which is like an IPO in the public markets, but that's what the term was used when these things were happening when the crypto companies went public, quote unquote.
Raj (33:00)
Right. So not all the companies were doing ICOs at that point, but EOS did do an ICO and it raised 4 billion. Some of the others like Polkadot and Avalanche had raised like hundred, 200 million dollars. So when we started, I think there was sort of this, you know, industry wide assumption that the winner had already been funded and had already been started. One of those companies was going to win. But when we looked at them, they were all
different versions of sharding and they were all targeting something like 100x improvement over Ethereum. So, you know, I would say we were kind of okay being, you know, unpopular and controversial, but shooting for the most extreme solution. And I think it was actually good that we were under capitalized because it forced us to focus. A lot of those companies, you know,
that had no product, but they had hundreds of millions of dollars, I think in their heads they thought, we've got years of runway. We could solve this in five years and it'll be fine. Or we can take our time on the tech and we'll build our community and make sure we have this big audience and that people know our brand. And that way when we launch our product, it'll be to great fanfare and everything will go smoothly. Nothing ever goes like that.
Slava (34:23)
I've heard that story so many times. Too much money is rarely a positive thing.
Raj (34:29)
Yeah, it really, it really is. mean, my favorite thing is talking to entrepreneurs that are, you know, weeks away from running out of money. Cause that's like, there's like a special drug that releases in the body when you've got weeks of runway and a lot of people are depending on you and you've got this big vision. Like that's where all the magic is, you know? Like if you, absolutely. Yeah. You're, you're a honey badger backed into a corner and your survival instincts turn on and your whole brain starts to rewire.
Slava (34:42)
you
Darwinism kicks in.
Raj (34:59)
towards non-delusional solution-oriented action. You're not seeing the world as you wished it was over the last few years when you were diluting yourself into thinking this was gonna be successful. You're seeing it as it is and as you have to react to it. And it's very clarifying. So we hit that moment many times. It was hard. It was hard to get money. Nobody believed us.
They thought even if it did work, nobody would need this kind of throughput on a blockchain. Everything was still at that sort of crypto kiddies level of adoption. were thousands of users in crypto. there was just no reason for anyone to invest and that made us very focused. And it gave us a lot of time to kind of mold and form the DNA and the culture of the initial team.
And we've always stayed small. We've never done any layoffs. It's still dozens of people working on this, not hundreds or thousands. That's another thing that a lot of competitors ended up doing. We had competitors routinely sending four or five salespeople after every one company that was building on Solana just saying, hey, will you switch? And I'm just wondering to myself.
How are you paying five, like we don't even really make much money off of this customer or user. How are you justifying this? And so yeah, I think a lot of competitors just really were overcapitalized and then they over hired and they just assumed that success would come rather than forcing themselves into a corner and solving real hard problems.
And I'm sure there's a hundred stories I could tell you about those problems for us.
Slava (36:50)
What's one case study or use case that you like today that you want to tell the audience about that because of Solana it exists?
Raj (36:58)
Yeah, think one of the most tangible ones is called HiveMapper. So HiveMapper sells these like $100 to $200 dash cams. if you've ever watched TikTok, you see lots of dash cam footage these days. People have dash cams that capture car accidents or people trying to steal their car. It's just a useful thing to have. So the product stands alone as a useful thing because it's a nice 4K dash cam.
But it's also capturing images of the road as you drive. And it's uploading those images of the road to the HiveMapper network, which is a decentralized protocol built on top of Solana that pays out tokens for data that's contributed to filling out a crowdsource map. So this map now.
has remapped 20 % of the world's roads in less than a year and a half through drivers that are simply responding to incentives. They see that they can earn money. They're already driving a semi-truck. They're already driving an Uber. They're driving a cab. And they already need a dash cam. So why not put it up and earn some honey tokens? And what's really cool about this is, first of all, you think about how capital intensive it was for Google to build the first street maps.
Slava (37:59)
wow.
Raj (38:25)
data set. Like I remember as a kid watching, they look like the autonomous cars of today, the ones with the lidar, but they had these big camera rigs on top and these white vans are driving through every neighborhood and Google has paid to outfit the vans, buy them, put drivers in them and put them on every road in the world to get street view data. And now you can do it in a distributed way through token incentives.
for a tiny, tiny fraction of the cost to people that are already on the road. I think that's wonderful. But also, it's not just decentralization for decentralization sake. People aren't just doing it because of the ethos of crypto or they believe we need to have a non-Google map and that's important for humanity or something. It's like, because you have people on the road all the time responding in real time to market incentives,
If there is a car accident or a construction site that really needs a refreshed image, you can dial up incentives in that place and get people more motivated to go there and fill out high frequency data sets. and today, HiveMapper is already feeding into a large share of the top 10 mapping services. So these enterprises are buying the data from this distributed network.
And so I think what you might imagine soon is you get into your Mercedes and Mercedes is buying data from the HiveMapper network. And when you see a warning that there is a car accident on, you know, highway 75, 30 minutes from work, you're not just guessing about is this a, you know, is this a major accident? Is it a bumper? Should I get in the left lane, the right lane? You'll see real time 4K images of the accident.
on your GPS display. So this product is part of a category of products that are primarily built on Solana called D-PIN, which is D-E-P-I-N, which stands for Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks, which means you're taking physical hardware and you're incentivizing users to deploy them at scale to build a network that would typically take years and billions of dollars to produce.
The same thing is happening with wireless networks. So Helium has built a global 5G wireless network with people just plugging in hotspots into their cable modems. There's a company called Teleport that's basically decentralized Uber. People are putting cars out for token incentives and drivers. There's a bunch more.
Slava (41:08)
love those examples. Crowdsource Google Maps, amazing for like, I can't imagine what fraction of a cost. Give me a prediction. Obviously we're entering 2025, which is the greenest of the green. So if that's only one year forward, what does five years forward look like for Solana? What does Raj want to see for Solana, crypto and the space five years out?
Raj (41:33)
Yeah. So I think we're at a point now where, you know, not only is the infrastructure usable, it's an easy, fast, super cheap experience, but also, you know, what we call fiat on ramp. So the ability to take real world dollars and assets and put them on the chain is getting way simpler, way smoother. So the movement of, you know, your dollar from your checking account.
into an on-chain dollar and into the on-chain economy is going to get so fluid that you're not necessarily even going to know the difference, you're going to see and feel the difference when it matters, which is you'll have access to those assets when they're on chain 24-7. No intermediary can ever get in between you and your access to those assets. You can send them to who you want to. You can move them across countries. You can move them between accounts. You can lend and borrow against them.
You can split them into infinitesimal fractions and put them all over the place. So this much more intimate, tactile feeling of ownership of things that are digital assets is going to happen at scale. I think two things are going to happen. One is there are, let's start with what I consider the boring one, but what everyone's excited about, which is your existing assets, your existing equities, let's say, instead of Apple stock.
that is held by a brokerage and traded through a clearing house and you need a while for the trade to propagate and you might not have permission to do it for whatever reason. And then it just sits there. You'll have a digital version of this Apple stock that you can withdraw, that you can borrow and lend against. You can send a fraction of it to a friend as a thank you for letting him borrow your iPhone or something. And...
You know, Apple could also provide that thing as something like points in their apps, right, as a loyalty product. you know, existing equity is coming online. And by the way, all that is on top of just the fact that there's a very simple thing you can't do today, which is trade Apple stock 24 seven. You can't do that. Robin Hood has made it easy to trade 24 five, but not 24 seven. So.
you know, actual 24 seven trading of these assets will be possible. I think, you know, there's also a time for non non US people that opens up when you have that which is emerging markets get exposure to dollar denominated assets. So if you're in a high inflation country like Argentina, you don't have access to all of the dollar based, you know, assets.
in the US that we take for granted as very clean, safe, productive capital. So that will unlock for the rest of the world and it will happen on chain. So that's kind of the first thing, is the metric we care about is how much of the world's finance gets moved to on chain. We want it to be something like 10 % or more, eventually maybe 100%.
And I would also include payments in there. I stable coins are a massive use case. Dollar backed assets that you can redeem for a dollar at any point means that it's reliably worth one dollar per coin. And that's already being used globally to the tune of tens of billions of dollars for things like cross border payments. And so that'll happen. The second thing is just wilder. It's just crazier because we're in a world now where, you know,
I remember when 140 character limits on Twitter got released and some people thought it was revolutionary and other people couldn't understand why it was so revolutionary that my grandma can talk about the cup of coffee she's having in the morning. But the revolutionary thing was that everyone could be a publisher. Everyone could publish information, news, facts, data, opinions, and the barrier was incredibly low.
the curation for other people to consume that information was consolidated in one place. And it was a little more obvious to some than others that we might someday get to this point where when billions of people are on that network, there is something like a, it's like a hive mind. The information is so high throughput that there are these...
trends that propagate through it and it really impacts the way we live and the way we make decisions. And we see that now, right? Twitter impacts elections, it impacts culture, it impacts everything. If you can do the same thing with an asset. So if you think about public companies, think something like 0.4 % of all companies are public. this highly accessible, highly liquid, highly public
of financial information and consumption has only been accessible to a very small amount of companies. Now anyone can publish an asset. I'm not even going to speculate about what those things might be. It's as weird as speculating about, you know, the president being a Twitter president in 2010 or 2009. But I think it's, you know, one way to think about it is that there is...
There are rational assets, there are real world assets and there are irrational assets, which are things that exist purely in the digital realm. And we're seeing it happen. mean, it's super odd. It looks like a toy. Today there are these things called meme coins, tens of thousands of them being generated every day. A lot of young people really love producing them and trading them.
If you see things go viral on TikTok right now, chances are there's 30 or 40 different tokens competing to be the meme coin version of that viral meme. And I just think of these as like the first apps in the app store. The iPhone was a very serious platform, a very serious piece of technology, but like the first 10 apps were like, press this button to make a fart noise, or here's a picture of a
of a Sapphire that glimmers when you tilt the phone and it costs $10,000 for some reason. The first apps were so crass and simple, but they proved things out. And as we built out on top of those user behaviors, it led to things that were much more valuable and that we didn't have a word for. Like it's wild that when the iPhone came out, not one single person ever
Forecasted that something like uber would exist when when the iphone first came out there was no you know Nobody put together the simple three things you need it. need a gps You know you need enough adoption of the phone that that most drivers have it and most users have it And you need battery life, you know that can carry that connection through an entire ride and not cut out and you know
And so sometimes it really takes a few simple ingredients for something really incredible to happen. And I think in crypto, what I'm excited about is more of that irrational, know, non real world set of assets. And, you know, there's a lot of ideas about what that looks like.
Slava (49:05)
Amazing well, I think you have to come back and we have to discuss all of those different ideas and recipes for success We're down the stretch here. Everybody wants to be as smart as knowledgeable as you Raj So what is it that you like to read watch or listen to? to be you
Raj (49:19)
I read the economist. I listened to all in podcast, stuff you should know podcast. I read the wall street journal. and I really like the Matt Levine, money stuff, column. And, I actually don't even know it's in, I think it's in Bloomberg or, one of those magazines, but.
He as a writer, just always has these really insightful analyses of very topical subjects.
Slava (49:52)
And the last question that we ask everybody, which our listeners love to hear, which is three years out, give us a prediction today that you think will stand strong at that time. So one pick in the public markets, give us a stock, and then one pick in any category in the private markets, whether it's crypto, a watch, a scotch, anything you want to say that will have increased in value over the next three years.
Raj (50:15)
Okay, so let's say public company. I think OpenAI will be a trillion dollar public company.
Slava (50:26)
They are private, so that will be your private pick.
Raj (50:29)
Well, I think they'll go public within the next three years and they'll become a trillion dollar. Okay, so that doesn't count.
Slava (50:33)
Though that's why, it could be your private, because the public pick, they have to be able to go get it today if they want to, which open AI they can get, but it's in through the private market, so it's more opaque. But that could be your private if you want. Up to you.
Raj (50:39)
get it today, wow.
Okay, Okay, sure that that can be my that can be my private. I'll say
Slava (50:50)
Go tell us why. Sorry, open AI why? Go ahead.
Raj (50:52)
So I think there's this question of whether value accrues to companies that build foundational models, foundation models, since there are open source alternatives like llama. But I think open AI has the eyeballs, the relationship with the user, they have the product development expertise and they're constantly ahead of, you know, new business models like perplexity and other competitors that are trying to fight for that, you know, that that user relationship.
for AI products. And I think that's the part that it's easy to devalue because it could go away anytime. If you lose the product teams and stop iterating, it'll go away. But I think they, know, the cat's out of the bag. If you're one of the best, you want to go work at OpenAI. And once that starts rolling, it doesn't stop until you're a trillion dollar company, unless something cataclysmic happens.
Slava (51:47)
You know, I love it. And what's your public?
Raj (51:50)
I would say, I would say in video. So, okay, so in video, a lot of people think there's no way it can be, you know, it can sustain and it can keep growing. But I think that, you know, I'm hyper bullish on AI. I think even if it falls way short of our expectations, you know, I would bet that it's worth more in three years than it is today. And most people would not.
say that I think a lot of people are very pessimistic about Nvidia and think it's overinflated and unsustainable.
Slava (52:24)
Amazing. Well, we've covered so much in this conversation from starting at seven years old with your 20, 28 K internet, obviously getting a computer early when you were nine, moving from health tech to crypto, which most people have not done that shift, getting exposure to BTC in 2011 and navigating, you know, the ICO boom in 2016 and 17. And then you get the intro to Anatoly, which is super exciting. You love to find those super weird smart.
engineers who you call a truth seeker, which probably is how you look for your angel investments these days as well. You always have loved founders. You're a sucker for them, whether it's Netflix or, you know, in the public markets, et cetera. These days now you're more into some angel investing and now you found the way with watches and Petey scotch, which I love personally. And you're viewing the market. It's very simple. The greenest shade of green is ahead of us. So everybody get excited for 25.
And obviously Solana has done so many things well, but being able to create the proof of history, having parallelization of transaction processing, which no one else figured out before that. You were able to go up against war chests of L1 competitors and crush them, which is absolutely amazing. Mostly by staying scrappy and always being really smart ahead of others. Now you have this whole ecosystem of products and apps. HiveMapper sounds amazing. Other deep end products, but also Helium and Teleport sound interesting.
You gave us lots of suggestions as to what to look out for, whether it's the economist, Matt Levine, All In, and you gave us your two picks for three years out, which we'll argue about OpenAI, but it is still private. I'm not arguing that it will be successful. And then Nvidia, which already is at three and a half trillion reporting tonight. And we'll see if it's headed to 10 trillion or not. Thank you very much, Raj.
Raj (54:00)
All right, thanks Slava I'll be back. Take care.
