Uploaded May 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Toly on how he got lucky with his early hires at Solana:
"I was pretty lucky that a lot of the folks that I worked with at Qualcomm were kind of itching to go do something else. And it was very serendipitous, because these are folks with like 10+ years experience in really, really low level hard operating systems or protocols. Like one of the folks that worked on the Solana protocol literally worked on the LTE spec.
So people that have like really in depth understanding of networks and operating systems, GPUs, CPUs, like low level chips. The pitch that I gave to them was like, 'You're going to go get a different job anyways, you're kind of bored here. So you could do this as like a sabbatical, take six months, we'll see where we end up.'
And I was able to hire like basically experts in their field that I knew really well, and we were able to hit the ground running and build a really, I think, state of the art network that proved to be ahead of all our competitors at launch by 10 miles at least."
– Solana Founder Anatoly Yakovenko on the New Economies podcast with Ollie Forsyth
Watch the full interview:
youtu.be/HCW2ASm5Kdg?si=BGebhO_2qFZH6xVe
Toly on how he got lucky with his early hires at Solana:
"I was pretty lucky that a lot of the folks that I worked with at Qualcomm were kind of itching to go do something else. And it was very serendipitous, because these are folks with like 10+ years experience in really, really low level hard operating systems or protocols. Like one of the folks that worked on the Solana protocol literally worked on the LTE spec.
So people that have like really in depth understanding of networks and operating systems, GPUs, CPUs, like low level chips. The pitch that I gave to them was like, 'You're going to go get a different job anyways, you're kind of bored here. So you could do this as like a sabbatical, take six months, we'll see where we end up.'
And I was able to hire like basically experts in their field that I knew really well, and we were able to hit the ground running and build a really, I think, state of the art network that proved to be ahead of all our competitors at launch by 10 miles at least."
– Solana Founder Anatoly Yakovenko on the New Economies podcast with Ollie Forsyth
Watch the full interview:
youtu.be/HCW2ASm5Kdg?si=BGebhO_2qFZH6xVe
