Dec. 18, 2023

Jumping to Light Speed

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More Media & Events

I’m taking a break from additional media and events for the next few weeks while interviewing over 100 founders alongside some Techstars colleagues, mentors, and investors to build the Techstars Web3 class of 2024. Don’t worry though, we’ll be back in 2024 with more virtual and in-person events to bring to life the topics we riff on! 🎸

This Week’s Podcast

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Looking into the Solana ecosystem

I’m joined this week by two of the great people I met at the Solana Breakpoint conference in Amsterdam last month, Amira Valliani, the Head of Policy, and Nick Ducoff, the Head of Institutional Growth - both at the Solana Foundation.

Before my trip to Amsterdam in November for the Solana Breakpoint conference, my engagement with the Solana community over the years had been lacking. At Solana Breakpoint, I found a diverse community with a bunch of smart and engaging people building interesting projects, and I wanted to go deeper, hence this episode.

In this conversation, Amira and Nick both tell their personal stories about their path to the Solana Foundation and what they brought with them into the Solana Foundation from their past lives as startup founders. We also riffed on my observations on the diversity of projects being built on the Solana blockchain from high-volume stablecoin networks to Triple-A games like the massive galactic game world that is Star Atlas, and we also covered what we would all like to see from web3 founders going forward.

Naming the Episode

As all of the interview-style MoneyNeverSleeps podcast episodes are named after hip-hop tracks, I usually ask my guests at the end of a recording session if they’ve got a favorite hip-hop artist. Then, before publishing the episode, I go looking for a track from that artist that fits what we talked about and usually request an image on DALL-E 2 that depicts both the hip-hop track and the topic of the conversation, and I use this for the episode artwork.

Most of the time, this works, and other times…well, even I have limits to my creativity and associative thinking. Amira and Nick both asked me for Jay-Z, and the closest track I came up with was ‘Anything’, as in ‘you can build anything on Solana’.

I didn’t feel like ‘Anything’ would do this conversation justice, so I kept looking. When I’m stuck, I usually default to something by Tribe Called Quest, Public Enemy, Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Eminem, Nas, Snoop Dogg, or of course, the legend himself, Dr. Dre.

So, Dre’s track ‘Light Speed’ featuring Hittman from his 1999 album, 2001, did the trick this week, given Solana’s tagline of ‘powerful for developers, fast for everyone’.

Beyond the tagline, the whole reason I wanted to bring Amira and Nick onto the podcast was to dive deeper into my takeaways from 24 hours at the Solana Breakpoint conference in November.

Beyond the great people I met who are building on Solana, here’s my top takeaway:

If Visa, Worldpay and Nuvei identified the Solana blockchain as the optimal chain on which to build USDC stablecoin-powered credit card network settlements, AND Triple-A games like the high-transaction volume and massive galactic game world that is Star Atlas are also building on Solana, it has got to be pretty damn fast.

Or as some would say….light speed!

What did we cover?

First, a bit of background on both Amira and Nick:

Amira Valliani - Head of Policy, Solana Foundation

Amira runs the global policy team at the Solana Foundation, which supports the decentralization, security, and adoption of Solana, one of the world's most widely-used open-source public blockchains.

Amira is a seasoned startup founder and policy strategist interested in using technology to drive growth while creating a more just economic landscape. Her background extends across the public and private sectors, including having built and sold a venture-backed startup (exited founder/CEO of podcast monetization platform Glow) and serving as a foreign policy aide in the Obama White House.

Nick Ducoff, Head of Institutional Growth, Solana Foundation

Nick leads institutional growth at the Solana Foundation, and he’s responsible for digital assets and permissioned environments. After exiting his last startup, he joined G20 Ventures as a Venture Partner focused on blockchain and B2B SaaS investments.

Prior to joining G20 Ventures, Nick was an angel investor in companies including Flipside Crypto ($50M Series A), Unchained Capital ($60M Series B), Hologram ($65M Series B), and Panorama Education ($60M Series C).

Nick previously co-founded two VC-backed tech companies that were acquired:

Infochimps, founded in 2010, delivers Big Data systems with unprecedented speed, scale and flexibility to enterprise companies, and was acquired by DXC Technology (NYSE: DXC).
Edmit, founded in 2017, helps high school students and their families make smarter college financial decisions and was acquired in 2021.

Very coincidentally, about a month before I connected with Amira and Nick in the context of the Solana Breakpoint conference, two of the stories we covered on MoneyNeverSleeps were in the context of Solana:

Long Take: Visa, Worldpay, and Nuvei settling transactions using stablecoin USDC on Solana (Fintech Blueprint by Lex Sokolin, 6-Sep-23) - ep 231 w/ Alejandro Gutierrez
Just One Game on Solana Is Doing More Daily Transactions Than All of Polygon (Decrypt, 9-Oct-23) - ep 234 w/ Pet Berisha

At Breakpoint, I got to see the latest mind-blowing previews of the Solana-based game Star Atlas (whose builders also built the SAGE Labs game noted above), and I also met the people who worked on the Visa/USDC/Solana project.

Looking under the hood though, both financial transactions and game transactions need to be on a lightning-fast blockchain. So, what may seem like two examples of teams building on Solana at either end of the universe (finance and gaming) are actually close cousins of each other with the scalability demands of both.

❓I asked Amira and Nick if we can expect more of the same diversity of Solana-based apps or if things will eventually go in a specific direction.

🔎Nick looking across the universe of apps being built on Solana:

“The Solana blockchain is extremely fast, cheap, and secure, and that enables all sorts of different utility. We don't know what people are going to innovate and create but we want to support that innovation and that new value creation.

“It could be in gaming, infrastructure, physical infrastructure, it could be in institutional finance. We're seeing these incredible use cases that were not previously possible on a blockchain but now possible because of the extremely fast, cheap, and secure nature of Solana's blockchain. I think for Solana, diversity of utility is a strength because we've achieved broad adoption.

“But if you haven't achieved that broad adoption, then focusing on a niche makes sense. We're starting to see more layer one and layer two blockchains zero in on their go-to-market niches, and that isn't to say that we won't focus on specific verticals, but I think our breadth is our strength.”

🔎Amira highlighting one of her favorite projects on Solana as a bellwether for the breadth of applications:

“We might see sort of some of these use cases cluster around certain verticals. Blockchain has all kinds of use cases, but I think there's always going to be a pretty diverse breadth of people using blockchains for use cases that we really could not have predicted.

“One of my favorite use cases on blockchain is Helium, and they’re building a distributed 5G network. It’s a community-powered 5G network where anyone can buy a hotspot, stick it on their house, and help create 5G for their community in a way that is much more affordable than some of the legacy carriers.

“If you ask most people in the general population about blockchain today, and you tell them that there's a really cool blockchain company that's providing 5G and competes with your cell phone network, they would be like, ‘get out of town, this stuff is just a speculative currency, isn’t it?’

“No one would have predicted in 2017 that a distributed 5G network could have been one of the use cases of blockchain.”

“And then you realize there are all these companies building on top of Helium with these really interesting use cases. I met a team that was using Helium's radio receivers (that form part of the Helium network) to track lions in the Maasai Mara because it was much more efficient than using existing radio technology. So you can never really guess what people build.

“We provide the resources and support to the ecosystem to further whatever their vision is and then sit back and watch what happens. I think we'll see some pretty broad use cases - if you look back 15 years ago at what people might build on top of smartphone app stores, you probably wouldn't have guessed that a big use case is going to be home-sharing or ride-sharing.

“We're just starting to crack the surface of how people might use blockchain, and so I think you should expect a lot of really interesting ends to that puzzle.

Lessons learned and other founder-life anecdotes

🔎Amira on a lesson learned from her life as a startup founder that she has brought with her into the Solana Foundation:

“Being a founder and working in different businesses has given me a really deep appreciation for what it means to found a company and the challenges that founders face in particular. These [challenges] are really difficult to appreciate, not just for people in government, but people in general who haven't had the chance to be a founder themselves.

“The challenges of being a founder are pretty singular and hard to imagine. Being able to take that lens and talk to policymakers, and also do a lot of work directly with founders [engaging with the Solana Foundation] and be able to understand what they're going through is so powerful. [Being a founder] is a lonely job, and it's a hard job and it requires so much clarity all the time.

“When you see a company thriving and you see a great pitch from a founder or you see the business growing and people attaching themselves to it, it feels like success was already fated. But for the person or people who came up with the idea to build that company, there was so much that was not written yet.

“There's so much they had to figure out, and being able to appreciate that and understand what it's like to be on that side of the table is one of the most powerful lessons that anyone operating in [business] can learn.”

🔎Amira connecting the dots between the founder mentality and her policy role:

“If you look at Congress, it is slow moving. It's really hard to get a bill through but if you actually spend time in the shoes of someone who is in one of these jobs, thinking every day about what they can do to make the country better….I know there's a lot of politicking that goes on and a lot of skepticism around Washington, but you don't take a job on the Hill, at the State Department or at the White House and just grind yourself away for a decade, 15 years, whatever it is without some dedication to the cause.

“These are not glamorous roles. They require a lot of grinding and it's really because people want to make the country a better place, a safer place and do right by people. And I think being able to appreciate that and communicate the considerations that someone who is reading threat analyses or tying to parse through new technology.

“Being able to communicate those challenges to founders and people operating in this space has been really valuable and I’m proud that I'm able to do that work.”

🔎Nick on the tokenization of real-world assets:

“BCG did some analysis for the World Economic Forum last year, and they predicted by 2030 that $16 trillion of global illiquid assets will be tokenized. And that's actually their conservative forecast - their upside forecast for that period, which is only six years away, is that as much as $68 trillion of the market will be tokenized in that period.

“I don't know whether it's five years, two years, 10 years, but the train has left the station. When I talk to leading global financial institutions, they're all investing in blockchain, both in back office efficiencies as well as new products for a world that is increasingly 24/7/365.

“Markets want to be fast and markets want to be efficient. Blockchain enables all of those things and Solana is very well suited to become the leading blockchain as tokenization becomes a reality.”

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