Solana co-founder Raj Gokal on building a $83B crypto network from scratch

Executive overview

Regulated industries like healthcare and finance resist disruption because incumbents control access. Crypto removes the intermediary layer finance was built around, making it far harder for incumbents to block adoption.

Raj Gokal spent years failing in health tech before co-founding Solana — not because he found the right idea, but because he found the right person. He committed to six months with Anatoly, built the team deliberately, and let the network grow beyond any central control.

The co-founder relationship matters more than the idea: bet on the person first.

From health tech to crypto

• Healthcare incumbents — insurers, the FDA — hold all keys; no product reaches market without their approval
• Crypto removes the intermediary that existing financial regulation was written to govern
• Without intermediaries, regulators have far less leverage; adoption is harder to stop
• Crypto is global by default — regulatory risk is diversified across dozens of jurisdictions
• Volatility in new technology is proportional to its importance; the internet boom-bust followed the same pattern
• Adoption curves are steepening: reaching 100 million users now takes a fraction of the time it once did

Choosing co-founders and ideas

• Raj spent a year starting nine companies across health tech, each with different teams
• His filter: does the idea have a realistic path to product-market fit and is the team someone he can stay with through a decade of chaos?
• He treated co-founder search like looking for a life partner — always evaluating, always testing working chemistry
• Test before committing: hack on a weekend project with a potential co-founder to see if styles match
• He quit three or four deep co-founder negotiations because he couldn't imagine five to ten years with that person
• When Eric (former particle physicist, Omada colleague) pointed him to Anatoly, the signal was different: someone who couldn't stop thinking about the problem
• Decision frame: commit six months, not ten years — just enough to get fundraising done and the right first hires in place

Why Solana bet on scale first

• Ethereum proved programmable decentralized applications were possible, but CryptoKitties stress-tested it and gas fees spiked
• Solana's thesis: sharding should be the last resort; parallelize transaction processing first
• A shared source of time across the network (Proof of History) removes the need for a centralized coordinator
• Build with Moore's Law in mind — hardware gets cheaper, so scale with it rather than against it
• The use cases were unknown at founding; the bet was: build the fastest, cheapest network and the applications will come
• They came quickly

The founding team as DNA

• The first ten hires determine what the thousand-person organization looks like
• Each hire hires ten more — early decisions compound before you expect them to
• Raj's role at the start: fundraising, recruiting, ensuring the architecture would see the light of day
• Solana Labs and Solana Foundation are intentionally small; both exist to eventually make themselves unnecessary
• The gold standard is Bitcoin — no central organization, completely self-sustaining

How the network's economics work

• Early funding rounds were token sales via SAFTs to accredited investors — not open ICOs
• Solana Labs builds products on the network and takes small equity stakes in those products
• Neither Solana Labs nor Solana Foundation extracts fees from the network
• Extracting profit would create a business someone else should be running; it would slow ecosystem growth
• Tokens serve as spam prevention: paying to access a protocol prevents DDoS and gaming

Real-world use cases emerging now

• DePIN (decentralized physical infrastructure networks) — hardware deployed by crowds, not corporations
• Helium: 2 million people running home hotspots underpin a decentralized 5G network at $20/month unlimited
• Hivemapper: dash-cam owners earn tokens for recording roads; 20% of the world's roads remapped in one year
• Teleport: decentralized ride-sharing — 100% of fares go to drivers, with on-chain trust and safety contracts
• Visa uses Solana for settlement between banks and merchants; Stripe demoed instant USDC payments on stage
• 23,000 new tokens launch on Solana every day — creators engaging audiences through token ownership rather than ad-supported platforms

Saga and the mobile bet

• Apple's App Store blocks most crypto use cases and charges 30% on digital content — incompatible with peer-to-peer models
• Solana released Saga, a titanium Android phone for crypto power users, before the iPhone used titanium
• 20,000 units sold out in two days; 150,000 pre-orders placed for the next device
• NFT trading frequency on Solana is 5–20x higher than on slower networks — mobile was the right unlock
• Apple has no incentive to enable crypto; it threatens their 30%-of-digital-content business model

Handling failure and sustained belief

• Raj committed to starting companies until one worked — "100 companies and I'm 90 years old, I'll start the next one"
• Negative public feedback is signal, not noise: zero views teaches nothing; a thousand thumbs-down shows how people feel
• Anatoly reframed criticism: people who care enough to attack you are giving you energy and signal
• The floor question for hard times: if everything goes to zero, am I still happy to show up with these people tomorrow?
• Everything is impermanent; the worst period cannot last forever — chain enough days together
• Solana's ecosystem now self-selects for founders with that same grit, which lifts the whole network