James Carlin || X: @jamesfcarlin

For the past eight years, HBO's Silicon Valley has been my absolute favorite TV show. With the blend of nerdy tech humor, quirky characters, and startup pandemonium it’s priceless.

Among the cast, Russ Hanneman stands out as a comically quirky and profane billionaire, and throughout the show he obsesses over being part of what he calls the three comma club (aka a billion+ net worth).

Putting Russ’s, how would I put this, unpalatable demeanor aside, he does make one very valid point.

Reaching a billion dollars, or a billion anything really, is a big f-ing deal.

In the business realm, "unicorn" denotes companies boasting over a billion dollar valuation—a status every VC and entrepreneur chases. Yet, I'm intrigued by another elite group: the billion user club.

Consider the sheer scale of a billion users: only a handful of global companies, like Meta, Google, ByteDance (TikTok), and Tencent (WeChat), command over a billion monthly active users. The pressing question then becomes, how can the Solana ecosystem aggregate over a billion users to their network, as Anatoly ambitiously predicted would be achievable by 2027?

A common thread among these tech behemoths is their provision of indispensable apps needed by effectively everyone. Consumer apps tapping into a Total Addressable Market (TAM) limited by internet connectivity is a vast and lucrative business.

And that, in a nutshell, is my proposal.

To grow to a billion people, make something a billion people would use.