#496: Stani Kulechov on Decentralized Lending

**Anthony Pompliano** (0:00)
What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to The Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off.
Stani Kulechov is the founder and CEO of Aave, a leading startup in the decentralized lending space.
In this conversation, we discuss decentralized finance, improving user experience and user interfaces, onboarding more developers, disrupting the banks, and decentralized lending.
I really enjoyed this conversation with Stani, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into the episode though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Exodus. They're leading the world out of the traditional financial system by building beautiful and user-friendly blockchain products. With its focus on design and user experience, Exodus has become one of the most popular and loved cryptocurrency apps. It's supported on both desktop and mobile, allowing you to sync your wallet across multiple devices so you can have access to your funds anywhere. You can instantly exchange around 100 different cryptocurrencies straight from your wallet.
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**SPEAKER_2** (3:08)
Anthony Pomppliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

**Anthony Pompliano** (3:34)
All right, guys, bang, bang. Got Stani here. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this.

**Stani Kulechov** (3:40)
Thanks, Anthony, for having me here, pleasure.

**Anthony Pompliano** (3:42)
For sure, let's just jump right into your background. You've built one of the more popular DeFi protocols, but before you did that, you had kind of a whole nother career. So talk a little bit about your background and before you found Bitcoin, crypto, blockchain, Ethereum, et cetera.

**Stani Kulechov** (3:59)
Yeah, totally. I think I've been in this space now, roughly in general, building things in blockchain over four and a half years, and pretty much kind of like smart project-based applications related to finance. And before that, actually, I was in the legal industries and also I started to study law before that. So I'm kind of a by education, a lawyer. And the reason I actually went to law was because before that I was building financial applications, Web2 applications. So practically what think that is today, new banks and so forth.
And I started practically building products very early.