Anatoly Yakovenko was a kid when he came to the U.S. He was enamored with programming when he was a teenager. The dot-com boom was in full swing and there was a possibility of writing a piece of code that could solve a huge problem for the world and become the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.
When the dot-com bubble burst, some advisors told Yakovenko that computer science was not a good career choice. After a failed startup, Yakovenko stuck with it, and after 13 years working on distributed systems, he left.
Yakovenko had an idea. He was working on a side project with a friend. To offset the costs of setting up all the graphics processing units, the duo began mining. Yakovenko was already aware of the markets. Yakovenko, riding the highs of two coffees and a beer, ended up staying awake until 4 in the morning and had a lightbulb. He realized that the passage of time could be used as a data structure to help order transactions and events on the block chain. Proof of History and Solana use a consensus mechanism known as Proof of Stake to verify transactions. Greg Fitzgerald and Stephen Akridge were also brought on by Yakovenko.
The project was initially called Loom, but it was changed to Loom Network. Since many companies have named themselves after places in the state, Yakovenko thought he could do that as well.
Yakovenko is dressed in a gray sweatshirt, shorts, sneakers, and a black baseball cap, and he looks like a lot of the other developers.
According to those who know him, Yakovenko is a systems engineer through and through. The way Yakovenko talks is very technical and analytical, with a mixture of calm and nervous energy.
Since he's too jittery to drink coffee, his go-to fix is tea or a decaffeinated Americano. If I can get on a bike for two hours, I come back refreshed and have a lot of decisions made. Yakovenko is an underwater hockey player and an ironman. He claims he could swim three lengths of the pool without taking a breath in his prime.
His dedication is applied to more than just his physical activities. He says he first met Yakovenko at his friend Eric Williams' house before the group went on a camping trip together. He remembers Yakovenko, who was working at the time, laying on a leather, brown couch and staring off into the distance.
Gokal, who hails from a healthcare startup, joined the company at the end of last year. He says Yakovenko is so absorbed in his work that he is in another world. He sees all of us laughing, and he said, "You're eating dog food, right?"
Anne Sraders and Declan Harty wrote a feature on Solana in Fortune. You can read the complete story, including which big investors think the company has a chance at building a core layer of Web3 and why Sam Bankman-Fried is a believer.
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