BIG IDEAS BY NEW ECONOMIES How Solana Survived When Most Other Coins Fell | Anatoly Yakovenko Story
Nov 9, 2025
Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder and CEO of Solana and former Qualcomm engineer, shares the inspiring journey behind Solana's rapid rise as a leading blockchain. He discusses the importance of stablecoins for crypto's future and the challenges faced during the FTX collapse. Anatoly highlights how Solana's resilience led to innovations like the MadLads NFT launch. He also envisions a world where a single high-throughput blockchain facilitates seamless financial transactions and global access to capital.
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Eureka Moment: Time-As-Data Idea
- Anatoly describes a eureka moment where he encoded passage of time as a data structure to avoid block collisions.
- He calculated this would yield 1,000–10,000x more throughput than Bitcoin or Ethereum at the time.
Commit Fully Or Don't Start
- Commit fully when you decide to start a company; you can't do a job, be a parent, and build a startup part-time.
- Act fast during hot windows because missing them can mean you never catch up.
Pitch A Thousand Times To Improve
- Raise relentlessly: Anatoly took ~1,000 investor meetings to land lead commitments.
- Use repeated pitching to refine your message and place the highest-value investors near the end.
