Interview source: Silicon Valley Girl
Compiled and edited by: BitpushNews
Introduction: In this interview, Solana co-founder Raj Gokal shared his entrepreneurial journey in the cryptocurrency field, his cooperation with co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, and Solanas growth and future vision. He emphasized the importance of a good co-founder relationship to entrepreneurial success, and delved into the value attributes of Bitcoin, Solanas technological innovation, the potential of NFTs, and the application of DePIN (decentralized physical infrastructure network) in business. In addition, Raj also reviewed the most difficult moments in Solanas development and shared his firm belief in the future development of the cryptocurrency industry.
The following is the full interview, which has been edited for easier reading:
Moderator: lRaj, you are building an exciting project, and Solana is now valued so high. Today, we want to talk about your entrepreneurial story and how you built Solana. Raj, your LinkedIn profile shows that you founded many companies before joining Solana. Can you share your entrepreneurial journey with us?
Raj Gokal: I didn’t list all the companies I started because most of them failed. But this has always been my promise to myself - I will keep trying to start businesses in the technology industry in San Francisco and Silicon Valley until I find a direction that is truly successful.
My earliest entrepreneurial experience was when I was in my early twenties, co-founding a glucose sensor company with a good friend from college, mainly for consumers and athletes. Although it did not enter the market in the end, the company was acquired by One Drop. This is the starting point of my entrepreneurial journey.
Host: Was your first company acquired?
Raj Gokal: Yes, but it’s mainly due to my co-founder. I left before the acquisition because I realized it was going to be a long process. This experience taught me an important lesson - finding the right co-founder is one of the most important things in entrepreneurship. For me, entrepreneurship is all about going through this journey with the right partners, and I never thought about doing it alone.
My co-founder Ashwin continued to lead the company after I left, and it was eventually acquired about six years later. Hopefully, that technology will be available soon! This experience also taught me that in a highly regulated industry, if you want to reinvent a critical part of something, you have to understand the value of your product and when you run into vested interests that want to maintain the status quo.
Host: Later you entered the field of health technology?
Raj Gokal: Yes, I spent the next six years in the health tech industry. I worked at Omada Health, which introduced me to cryptocurrencies. I founded or participated in several startups in the health tech field, and I found that health insurance companies and regulators (mainly the FDA) in the United States are extremely conservative and hold the power of decision-making in the entire industry. Without their approval, no new products can enter the market and cannot be paid.
I have always wanted to use technology to reshape these fields. Because the giants in these industries have long avoided reform in various ways. But then I realized that the vested interests in the medical industry are too powerful and it is almost impossible to shake them in the short term.
Of course, the situation is slowly changing, for example, Apple is developing a lot of sensor technology that allows consumers to directly access health data without having to rely on insurance companies. These changes need to be driven by technology giants like Apple, Amazon, and Google.
Host: So how did you get into the crypto industry?
Raj Gokal: Yes, the crypto industry is also strictly regulated, but there is one difference - many regulatory rules in the financial industry are formulated around intermediaries. In the traditional financial system, all transactions must be completed through intermediaries such as banks, and cryptocurrency is to decentralize, which allows us to reshape the industry faster.
Unlike the medical industry, where you can’t bypass doctors or licensed practitioners, in the financial sector, we can directly conduct peer-to-peer transactions. This makes it more difficult for cryptocurrencies to be completely controlled by existing financial giants.
Host: But the volatility of the crypto market is very high. How do you adjust your mindset?
Raj Gokal: Any truly important innovation will experience dramatic fluctuations when it first enters the market. The same was true during the Internet bubble, when many companies experienced a roller coaster of ups and downs, but the companies that remained in the end became industry giants.
I think the more disruptive a technology is, the bigger the bubble and shock it will experience. We are now seeing that the development of technology is getting faster and faster, and the user growth curve is getting steeper and steeper. From electricity, telephones, the Internet, mobile devices to todays AI and cryptocurrency, the speed of technology adoption has greatly accelerated. Therefore, the speculative sentiment in the market is understandable because these technologies can indeed quickly change our lives.
Host: But compared to the medical industry, the value of cryptocurrency seems to rely more on peoples belief. If a celebrity on social media spreads the message that Bitcoin is a scam, the entire market may be affected. What do you think of this?
Raj Gokal: This is a good question. The value of Bitcoin does rely on peoples belief, but this is also one of its core properties. Bitcoin is a bellwether for the entire crypto industry. It is the first asset to prove that decentralized ledgers can exist.
Bitcoin has gone through various challenges over the past few years, but it has still survived. Now, we see financial giants like BlackRock launching Bitcoin ETFs, and CEOs are discussing the value of Bitcoin in public. In addition, some countries, such as El Salvador, have already adopted Bitcoin as legal tender. These trends show that Bitcoin has grown from a crazy idea to a truly globally recognized value storage tool.
Host: So you think Bitcoin has crossed the gap of faith?
Raj Gokal: Yes, Bitcoin has entered an asset class similar to gold and art, it is a decentralized, global store of value.
Of course, it’s still early days in the payments space, but we’ve already seen Visa choose Solana as the settlement network between banks, merchants, and card issuers. This shows that even companies with large technical teams and huge opportunity costs are beginning to adopt crypto technology.
Host: How do you view the future of this technology and make judgments independent of market cycles that future settlement systems will be built on these chains?
Raj Gokal: We have seen some companies start to lay out, such as Stripe re-launching the acceptance function for crypto payments. In the demonstration, John Collison showed a USDC transaction on Solana, which was completed almost instantly. For them, the speed and reliability of networks like Solana are crucial. So, in the payment field, we have seen some progress.
But in terms of other use cases, the market is still quite volatile. However, this reminds me of the popularization of the Internet between 1995 and 2005. At that time, the Internet was not just a single product, and new things appeared every once in a while. At first, people needed an email address because it was the way to access various services, and over time, different major applications gradually emerged, eventually bringing billions of users to the Internet.
Host: You joined Solana when it was not yet widely recognized. What was the opportunity?
Raj Gokal: Yes, that was in 2017-2018. At that time, Ethereum had proved that blockchain is not just a tool for storing value, but also a platform for programmable decentralized applications. The concept was very novel, and projects like CryptoKitties emerged and attracted tens of thousands of users, but the high gas fees and network latency that followed showed that Ethereums scalability was facing huge challenges.
The bottleneck of infrastructure is obvious, and the consensus in the industry is that new expansion solutions must be explored, so expansion research in various directions has received funding support. Solanas idea is that we believe that sharding should be the last expansion option, and the top priority should be parallelizing transaction processing and creating a decentralized time synchronization mechanism in the network. This will allow us to build a high-throughput, non-sharded global state machine that can scale with the advancement of Moores Law.
Host: So, the idea is to start from scratch and focus on optimizing performance?
Raj Gokal: Yes, our idea is to start from the scalability problem of Ethereum, assume that hardware costs will continue to decline, and take advantage of Moores Law to design a new system. Every engineering decision we make revolves around performance optimization, so that when a truly high-performance application scenario emerges, our platform can become the best choice.
Host: In the initial stage, did you have a clear idea of the specific application scenarios of blockchain?
Raj Gokal: Actually not. There was a lot of discussion about how blockchain could change the world, just like in the mid-90s, people were trying to imagine the future of YouTube, Uber, or Instacart. While these visions are valuable, it is more important to first build an infrastructure that can support future applications.
We believe that truly successful products can grow from 30,000 users to 300 million or even 3 billion users in a short period of time, so the infrastructure must be able to support this level of expansion. For example, is it possible for CryptoKitties to grow to 3 million users in six months? Maybe, but the high transaction costs at the time made this unfeasible. So, our bet was: solve the scalability problem first, and then wait for the application scenarios to emerge naturally. It turns out that these applications came faster than we expected.
Host: Regarding the idea of Solana, how did you form a team?
Raj Gokal: The idea came entirely from Anatoly (Yakovenko). He had been focusing on the scaling of distributed systems, and we met at Omada. At the time, I was working closely with a former particle physicist, Eric Williams, who was in charge of data science and I was in charge of product management. Later, he told me that Anatoly was working on the scalability problem of blockchain and was very passionate about this direction. He suggested that I meet Anatoly.
Host: Before this, you were mainly engaged in health technology startups, right?
Raj Gokal: Yes, Omada was my second company, and I was not a founder, but I was involved very early. After that, I tried nine different medical technology startups within a year.
Moderator: Nine companies in one year? What is that process like? How do you decide when to give up on an idea?
Raj Gokal: At the beginning, my thinking was result-oriented. I wanted to make a product that could quickly find product-market fit, be capital efficient, technologically groundbreaking, and achieve impact with minimal funding. I didnt want to just create a company that could make money, but I wanted to truly improve the healthcare industry.
There are two main criteria for judgment: 1. Is there enough potential - does this product have the opportunity to change the industry within a reasonable time? 2. Team matching - are the partners and the team suitable?
Host: How do you find the right partner?
Raj Gokal: During my time in Silicon Valley, I was constantly meeting potential co-founders. My thinking was that finding someone you could really work with for the long term was as important as finding a life partner. I would constantly meet with people to see if we were compatible and to see if they knew the right people.
Often, we would code together on weekends, or even work on a small project first, to see if the collaboration would flow smoothly, just like musicians often jam with different people in the studio to see if the styles fit.
Host: After trying multiple startup projects that year, how did you finally decide to join Anatoly?
Raj Gokal: I tried many times, and even went deep into the stage of discussing equity distribution and financing planning with some people, but in the end I didn’t have the confidence to work with them for a long time. However, when Eric told me that Anatoly had a deep understanding of blockchain scalability and couldn’t stop thinking about this issue, I decided to meet him.
Anatoly made me realize that the main bottleneck of blockchain is indeed scalability, and we have solved similar problems in other fields, such as wireless networks, the Internet, and data centers. Blockchain is not the only distributed system that needs to scale, so we can learn from existing solutions.
At the time, I didn’t want to invest 10 years into this project. I just wanted to give Anatoly six months to help him raise funds and recruit a team correctly. I know how to build a startup team, and the first 10 people have a huge impact on the future of the entire company. In the process, I gradually became attracted by the potential of this project and finally decided to devote myself to it full-time.
Moderator: It sounds like the criteria for your decision are first the idea itself, and then the team, and the team is the most critical factor. Is this also one of the reasons that prompted you to change direction?
Raj Gokal: Yes, that was a big mindset shift for me. I realized that instead of focusing on a specific problem and then assembling the best team, I could spend my time working with someone who I knew I could work well with, and who happened to be the best person in the world to solve that problem.
Moderator: Can you explain the overall structure of Solana? For example, Solana Labs and Solana Foundation, what are their respective roles? If someone comes from a traditional business background, how would he understand this structure, such as ownership, valuation, etc.? Because the trading price of Solana tokens in the market and the valuation of the company are two different things, right?
Raj Gokal: Yes. In my opinion, the gold standard of the industry is Bitcoin. Bitcoin does not have a centralized foundation or management organization, it is completely community driven. Satoshi Nakamoto is a person, or a group of people, whose real identity we dont even know, and that identity has disappeared and will never appear again. Therefore, I think an important feature of the crypto network is that it should eventually become something like a public resource, just like the Internet. No one will care who maintains the Internet because it is a decentralized ecosystem, and the companies that maintain it are just part of it, and their influence may even be smaller than the developers who actually build, use and contribute to the Internet.
From this perspective, even Solana is currently moving in this direction. Ethereum is in a similar situation.
Anatoly and I created two organizations: Solana Labs and Solana Foundation. Now both organizations are very small, with only a few dozen people, and many people will leave to build new companies and start businesses in the Solana ecosystem.
Solana Labs is primarily focused on building products on the Solana network. Initially, it built some DeFi-related reference implementations, such as lending protocols, automated market makers (AMM) protocols, etc., which are the infrastructure people need to conduct transactions and financial activities. In addition, it also launched Metaplex, which is the protocol that supports all NFT markets, which have now grown into multi-billion dollar businesses.
Host: So how does Solana Labs make a profit?
Raj Gokal: Solana Labs will launch these products and hold a small stake in them, just like an investor. But our team is small, so we don’t need to make a lot of money to stay afloat.
Moderator: So, assuming you created Solana, you would keep some tokens to support operations, and as these tokens increase in value, your capital would also grow? Or would investors buy Solana tokens instead of giving you direct funds? Im trying to understand this process from Satoshis perspective. If you want to raise funds, how would you do it specifically?
Raj Gokal: Yes, Ethereum did an ICO when it was launched, and anyone could buy ETH, which became the basic model for many similar projects. But later, in the United States, regulators made it clear that tokens could not be sold to anyone at will, regardless of whether they were qualified investors or not.
When we started Solana, we could no longer issue tokens to raise funds as casually as Ethereum did, so we had to be more cautious and comply with compliance requirements. Our early financing method was to sell SOL tokens, but through SAFT (Simple Agreement for Future Tokens). A portion of these tokens were reserved at the genesis block for early financing.
At that time, the funds we raised were very small, for example, the first round of financing was only 20 million US dollars, while many other networks raised hundreds of millions of dollars during the same period. However, our financing method complies with US regulatory requirements, and the source of funds is mainly qualified investors in the United States and overseas investors.
However, this model is different from traditional centralized companies. Our organizations do not charge fees from transactions on the network. Just building products in the Solana ecosystem is enough to support an excellent engineering team.
Host: Are you building an ecosystem, developing products within this ecosystem and making profits from these products?
Raj Gokal: Yes, thats right. I think at some point in the future, the network itself can meet all needs, and the entire ecosystem can build all the products it needs autonomously. The original development team no longer has a unique professional advantage, but the entire developer community drives the development of the ecosystem. If that happens, Solana Labs may no longer exist.
The same applies to the Solana Foundation. It currently manages a treasury reserve of SOL tokens, with the main goal of increasing the decentralization and censorship resistance of the network. For example, the Solana Foundation supports new validators who may find it difficult to compete in the early stages by delegating tokens. The foundation provides a certain amount of support and gradually withdraws these delegated funds as they mature.
In the long run, the Solana Foundation’s responsibilities will gradually decrease, and it will eventually focus only on those core issues that will truly impact the next hundred years.
But at this stage, the Foundation can do things that are difficult for other ecosystem participants to do. For example, if Visa wants to evaluate the design of the Solana network, their engineering team needs to do a deep dive, and they want to communicate directly with the people who originally built the network. At present, we are not yet at a fully mature stage, and Visa still needs to consult with the Solana team. But I expect this situation to change soon, and it may even happen this year.
PayPal has already issued their stablecoin on Solana, and Stripe just completed its Solana integration. These things happened not because Solana Labs got involved, but because developers are already familiar with the network, just like they know how to use email protocols or Internet protocols.
Host: So these companies, like PayPal and Stripe, do they pay you any fees?
Raj Gokal: No, they are completely independent. If they come to us, it is only to better understand how the network works.
Moderator: So these companies don’t pay you anything? And Solana Labs or the Solana Foundation doesn’t get any direct benefits from these projects?
Raj Gokal: Yes. We can actually generate more revenue in different ways, but that is not our goal. If an organizations primary goal is to make a profit from the network, it may be more like a commercial company than a public infrastructure provider. We would rather the Solana ecosystem grow autonomously rather than relying on Solana Labs to intervene.
Our goal is to make the entire network more diverse, sustainable, and self-growth-capable. At this point, I think the Solana ecosystem has basically reached this state. A lot of times, people will ask us, What did you do to make X a project? In fact, we know the same thing about the project as they do, which is to learn about it from the news or Twitter. This feels great and means that the development of the ecosystem is organic and self-growth.
Host: So what is your specific role now?
Raj Gokal: I am currently a member of the board of directors of the Solana Foundation and the president of Solana Labs. Anatoly and I focus our efforts on Solana Labs and developing new products, such as the Saga phone, which we launched and has a follow-up version coming soon. In addition, we are also developing and launching other new products at Solana Labs. The Solana Foundation also has a very good team, and I participate in the management at the board level, but I am not responsible for the day-to-day operations of the foundation.
Moderator: So you are a co-founder of Solana, right? From a company structure perspective, how is your share or equity calculated? Will the founding team receive Solana tokens?
Raj Gokal: Yes, our founding team received some tokens. This information is public because it is all recorded on the blockchain.
When the genesis block is generated, we reserve a portion of tokens to reward team members who contribute to the network construction. This model is also common in the field of open source software, such as operating systems, development tools, etc. Many people develop software not for direct profit, but because they hope that these software can be used to solve real problems.
But in the crypto space, tokens have an additional role: they are not just an incentive mechanism to reward developers, but also assume the functions of network governance and security. Because these protocols manage real-world value and involve assets that can be converted into fiat currencies, they are easy targets for attacks.
In a way, tokens are like a spam prevention mechanism for the network. Without tokens, anyone can abuse network resources at will and cause the system to crash. Therefore, holding tokens is not just an economic return, it also means a contribution to the security and long-term development of the network.
Moderator: How to prevent potential attacks and abuses in the design of encryption protocols?
Raj Gokal: You might try to attack the protocol by swiping, by flooding it with transactions, you might try to do a denial of service attack, and a lot of ways you could manipulate the protocol if it was completely free. So you need some mechanism to pay for using the protocol. And thats one way we can think of tokens, its like an anti-spam mechanism. Just like if the cost of sending an email was one thousandth of a cent per email, what company would let you pay? Theres no company, you have to have a mechanism to pay for using the protocol. So, a lot of the early designers of the Internet, including people like Mark Andreessen and the founders of Netscape, they would say that if they could go back in time, they would think about a form of value and anti-spam mechanism that would allow you to pay for using an open protocol. If we can think ahead to the second and third order effects of not having this mechanism, it might look like cryptocurrencies today.
Host: So in a way, you think there are some similarities between cryptocurrencies and early internet protocols?
Raj Gokal: Yes, it was definitely new, and I think the way the company started, especially for people who are used to equity in startups, was a mindset shift. But I prefer to think of it as how to build open source software to fight spam, and I dont think any serious person would think too much about things like exit. Saga was the first device we launched, it was a high-end device, made of titanium, long before the iPhone had titanium, and it was designed by the lead designer of the iPad Pro. It was a real high-end crypto device with no restrictions on NFTs and tokens. Today, on the App Store, as a developer, you cant publish crypto-related content as you please, in fact it is very restricted, the fee model of the App Store, like 30% fee for digital content, for me, if I create an NFT and want to sell it to you, I dont want to pay 30% of the fee and I dont want 30% to go to Apple. Its a peer-to-peer relationship. A lot of the models we see in crypto dont work in the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store. It turns out that there are a lot of people in the United States who are happy with it.
Host: Can you give us a brief background on the Saga device? It seems to have been quite popular in the market.
Raj Gokal: A total of 20,000 Saga devices were produced, and they sold out in about two days at the end of 2023. We found that heavy crypto users, if they live in the United States and use primarily Apple phones, usually carry two phones. A lot of people use it for work, for transactions, and for signing very urgent transactions. Its actually not much of a phone, and some people actually use it to make calls. I dont know if we have the tools to track and analyze it, but I know someone once told me that they received a call on Saga. Its an Android phone, but I think its use case will be more for scenarios such as transactions. Ledger also launched a display, which is a more configurable interface for interacting with transaction signing, but they are not so focused on making this device available anytime, anywhere.
Moderator: It sounds like the use cases of Saga devices are very diverse. So, in what aspects does it have obvious advantages compared to mainstream platforms such as Ethereum?
Raj Gokal: We see that the frequency of NFT transactions on the Solana network is 5 to 20 times higher than the users of slower networks like Ethereum. It has a very active user base. So I think unlocking mobile is a very important bet, and no other company in the industry seems ready or willing to make this bet. So we made this decision. As for the sale of 20,000 devices, it was just a proof of concept. We have seen that there are now more than 150,000 pre-orders, and the number of pre-orders for the next batch of devices is far greater than the number of users of most applications in the crypto industry today. We havent started shipping these devices yet, but we see that developers are lining up to build applications for these devices because they are actually a very good match for their target market. So, we call it Saga because we know this is going to be a long-term story. This is not a bet that will pay off in one or two years, similar to the decision to launch the Solana network and bet that there will be a need for high-performance applications in the future. You have to keep increasing your investment.
Host: Are there any challenges in the success of the Saga project? For example, the game between large technology companies?
Raj Gokal: We thought that all these signals would eventually reach Apple and we expected them to have a great product launch. However, the result was absolutely nothing. You see, as I just mentioned, Apple is an existing giant, and its business model is to extract 30% fees from digital content, which is a business model that is potentially disrupted by cryptocurrency. So, Apple is not in a hurry to make positive changes in the crypto space. As part of the crypto industry, we should invest in mobile instead of waiting for these giants to give us permission.
Host: Can you imagine using the Solana phone in two years? For example, I just use it to buy cryptocurrencies and not conduct any transactions, but if it goes according to your expectations, what will the future look like?
Raj Gokal: There is a phenomenon that 23,000 new tokens are released on Solana every day, which is almost as easy as posting a YouTube video or Instagram picture. Take NFTs as an example. The cost of issuing NFTs on Solana used to be thousands of dollars, but with the development of compressed NFT technology, the cost of issuing 10,000 NFTs has dropped to $100 or even less. Its almost as cheap as sending an email.
Imagine if NFTs were just a way to communicate with a large audience, and the audience might even own the message they received, just like a letter. The same is true for tokens. If you interact with your audience by issuing tokens, it could be a whole new way of communicating. Although this idea is strange, it is actually happening.
Creators can interact with their audiences through tokens, and 100% of the revenue is distributed directly to the creators. You can co-invest with your audience and support each other, and the design space is almost unlimited.
Compared to centralized platforms (such as Instagram), creators are no longer incentivized by advertising support, do not have to produce content that caters to algorithms, and avoid the platforms revenue deduction. Based on a direct relationship based on encryption, there is only one contract between creators and audiences, no intermediaries, no advertising. Although this is still in a very early stage, it looks unlikely to disappear.
Two years later, five years later, as the crypto industry continues to break through, the relationship between creators and audiences will become increasingly difficult to identify. Interacting through NFTs and tokens to create new value exchanges is an important innovation in the crypto field.
DPIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network) is a new use case that increases the value of the network through distributed activation of hardware. Traditional wireless networks require a lot of capital investment, but through DPIN networks like Helium, anyone can participate in the construction of 5G networks by connecting their home hotspots to the network.
Hive Mapper is a similar example. It incentivizes users to install car cameras and record 4K videos by paying tokens to create a decentralized street view map. This method is more cost-effective and flexible than the traditional Google Street View shooting method.
Another example is Teleport, a decentralized Uber platform created by a former Dropbox engineer. Unlike traditional Uber, drivers can get 100% of the income, without the platform taking a cut.
Host: You have tried so many companies, is this the project you will stick to for a long time?
Raj Gokal: I hope the medical industry can be rebuilt. I am paying attention to this field, and there are also practitioners in the crypto field returning to the medical industry to innovate, but I am not ready to do so yet.
I think Solana still has 99.9% of its potential to be developed, and it is moving steadily towards that goal. There is nothing that can stop it from solving this problem. Many people have said that Solana will die, but in fact that is just the source of our motivation. This kind of negative feedback is a value signal for entrepreneurs, which can make us stronger.
Host: Have you ever thought about giving up?
Raj Gokal: Yes, but I never give up. As long as I persevere, I can get through every difficult situation. I am an entrepreneur in my DNA, and the Solana ecosystem also attracts these tenacious entrepreneurs. Each of us inspires each other.
Host: You’ve been through a lot of tough moments. Can you tell us what was the most difficult moment in your journey to build Solana?
Raj Gokal: I don’t know which one is the hardest. If I had to pick one, it would probably be those moments when a lot of people thought Solana should die. There were times when the entire crypto industry didn’t believe in Solana and thought it should die. One thing Anatoli taught me is that when people have such strong opinions about you, it’s actually a very valuable signal. It can be a driving force, even though it’s negative, but it’s an energy and you can feel it.
However, I don’t think that all these negative voices are meaningless. I believe that most people mean well, and if they make negative comments, there must be something true in it, and it is an opinion that you should listen to. For any entrepreneur, the worst thing is not being criticized, but no one pays attention to you, and there is no signal. If you post a YouTube video and there are no views, likes or dislikes, then you have learned nothing and there is no feedback at all. Getting negative feedback at least allows you to know what is wrong, at least you know what people think of you. So for any entrepreneur, whether it is positive or negative feedback, it is a valuable signal.
Host: Have you ever thought about giving up?
Raj Gokal: A lot of times. To be honest, Im not a strong willpower person, Anatoli is a real ironman challenger. He is an endurance athlete, and I have never done these things before. All my endurance training was honed when I was building something valuable. But as I mentioned before, all the work you do is to be able to do it with the people you work with. If you can tell yourself that even if the whole world collapses and everything goes back to zero, and the work you do is no longer valuable, but you are still willing to work with your team members, then you can at least survive and get through it. And time always changes everything, and the worst times are temporary. You just need to stick to it day by day, and things will change.
Host: Did you have a similar mentality in the early days of your business?
Raj Gokal: Yes, exactly. Entrepreneurship is about failure and not knowing what difficulty you will encounter next. If you fail in three companies, you will think that maybe it is time to leave Silicon Valley and go somewhere else. I set the most basic requirement for myself at that time, that is, as long as I don’t succeed, I will continue to start a business until I find a successful path. In fact, I told myself that if I start 100 companies, I will still start a business when I am 90 years old. I have this belief until these things can succeed.
Host: Is your mindset different now than before?
Raj Gokal: Yes, now I feel that the DNA of the Solana ecosystem is this spirit of perseverance. Every entrepreneur comes to Solana with that perseverance and determination, and they want to work with like-minded people. In fact, now I feel that I may be the least perseverant person in the entire network. The real perseverant ones are those founders who build and contribute to Solana. Seeing their perseverance inspires me to be more tenacious.
Host: Will you focus on these entrepreneurs rather than the comments on social media?
Raj Gokal: Yes, external noise is always there, the key is to stick to your goal. No matter what happens in the outside world, you have to focus on yourself and those who share the same goal. You will always find unlimited motivation from it.
