Special: Solana (with CEO Anatoly Yakovenko)

**Ben Gilbert** (0:33)
I'm Ben Gilbert, and I'm the co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund, PSL Ventures.

**David Rosenthal** (0:40)
And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:45)
And we are your hosts. All right, David, on our last episode, we covered the history of Ethereum, what it is, and of course, we speculated on its future. But a big outstanding point at the end of the episode was, with all this excitement around DeFi and NFTs and decentralized apps and, I mean, this decentralized world computer has gotten really slow and really expensive.

**David Rosenthal** (1:11)
It's really slow.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:12)
Yeah.

**David Rosenthal** (1:13)
Yes, it is.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:15)
Sure, the Ethereum community has plans for how they're going to fix this. But listeners, as many of you heard, there are other credible blockchains out there to build applications on top of.

**David Rosenthal** (1:26)
I was trying to do some DeFi stuff the other day, no joke. And gas fees were 50, 60 bucks. It was crazy.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:34)
Brutal. That's close to an all-time high. It's wild. Well, one credible alternative blockchain that David and I have been particularly interested in is Solana. So on today's episode, we are joined by Anatoly Yakavenko, the founder and CEO of Solana Labs. Solana Labs is the company that spearheads the development of the Solana blockchain. And just to set some context, they recently raised $314 million, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital. Yes, that is pi hundred million dollars. And they have a market cap of all their coins right now, right around $10 billion.

**David Rosenthal** (2:13)
Both so fun and so crazy. A couple of years ago, if you were going to say like, make a joke, oh, we're raising pi million dollars, you would raise like $3.14 million or maybe $31.4 million. Wow. just the scale of all this is incredible.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:26)
Yeah, it's wild. Well, if you are new here, you should join us in the Acquired Slack. And if you like this episode, you will love the community discussing crypto in our digital assets channel. You can join at acquired.fm slash slack. And thank you to listener and community member austin Fedra, not only for setting up that channel and curating that community and keeping it awesome, but for his work at Solana and introducing us to Anatoly to make this episode happen. So thanks so much to austin.

**David Rosenthal** (2:55)
Huge shout out.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:57)
This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (3:02)
So crusoe, as listeners know by now, is a clean compute cloud provider, specifically built for AI workloads. NVIDIA is one of their major partners, and literally crusoe's data centers are nothing but racks and racks of A100s and H100s. And because crusoe's cloud is purpose built for AI and run on wasted, stranded or clean energy, they can provide significantly better performance per dollar than traditional cloud providers.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:28)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:33)
The other element that makes crusoe special is the environmental angle. crusoe, of course, locates their data centers at stranded energy sites. So think oil flares, wind farms that can't use all the energy they generate, etc. And uses that power that would otherwise be wasted to run your AI workloads instead.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:51)
Yep. obviously, it's a huge benefit for the environment and for customers on costs, since crusoe doesn't rely on the energy grid. Energy is the second largest cost of running AI after, of course, the price you pay NVIDIA for the chips. And these lower energy costs get passed on to customers.

**David Rosenthal** (4:08)
It's super cool that they can put their data centers out there in these remote locations where quote-unquote energy happens, as opposed to the other hyperscalers such as AWS and Google and Azure, who need to build their data centers close to major traffic hubs where the internet happens because they are doing everything in their clouds.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:24)
Yep. If you, your company, or your portfolio companies would like to use the lower cost and more performant infrastructure for your AI workloads, go to crusocloud.com/acquired, that's crusoecloud.com/acquired, or click the link in the show notes. Well, listeners, as you know, this is not investment advice we may hold. I think we even will talk about on the interview with Anatoly that we do hold Solana. And yeah, you should make your own independent research decisions before buying anything, whether it's a cryptocurrency or a stock or anything like that. And the show is for entertainment and informational purposes only. Now on to our conversation with Anatoly Yakavenko, the founder and CEO of Solana.