“We Said No to Every VC” - Marinade’s Michael Repetny Champions Freedom and Decentralization

Marinade Finance, one of Solana’s oldest DeFi protocols, is pushing native staking to new heights. From its humble hackathon beginnings, Marinade is now leading the charge toward institutional staking adoption and offering the best native staking yield on the market.

In an exclusive interview with SolanaFloor, Marinade DAO Core Contributor Michael Repetny outlined the motivations driving Marinade’s success.

Who is the Head Chef in the Marinade kitchen, and what advice does he have for the Solana ecosystem’s emerging builders?

Life Before Crypto

Long before moving onchain and building decentralized systems, Marinade DAO contributor Michael Repetny was enamored by the freedom and potential of the internet. At the tender age of 13, Repetny built an e-commerce site for his mother’s business, kickstarting a fascination with optimizing traffic generation through SEO.

While still in high school, Repetny and his friends began building and optimizing e-commerce sites for clients worldwide. As his client base expanded, so too did Repetny’s skillset. What began as a hobby to support his mother’s business became a full-stack digital marketing agency, offering everything from SEO to Google Ads campaign management.

“I’ve been fascinated with the idea of an open internet since I was young. It didn’t matter to clients that there was a 13-year-old on the other end, as long as we delivered. That opened up so many opportunities for me and my high school friends to create things. We started building websites, e-commerce platforms, and advising people on how to drive traffic to their sites”

After learning the ins and outs of digital marketing, the natural progression was to transform his expertise into a scalable SaaS platform. 

While studying for a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration and Management at the Prague University of Economics, Repetny co-founded Zeerat, a web analytics company that equipped businesses with a more complete understanding of user behavior.

Repetny and the Zeerat team were invited to the Y Combinator Class of 2014. However, Repetny believes this may have been the beginning of Zeerat’s downfall. After receiving VC funding, Zeerat fell into complacency, eventually getting out-executed by rival companies.

“In the end, we didn’t succeed. We spread ourselves too thin and took VC money, which only prolonged the project’s eventual failure because we never really found the right market fit”

Repetny briefly returned to digital marketing consultancy, but his entrepreneurial spirit was piqued. The future Marinade co-founder yearned to build more creative and valuable application, but grew frustrated with his reliance upon engineers and sought greater freedom and independence.

“When I was younger, I was focused on designing websites. But I wasn’t coding or programming them myself. At one point, I realized, ‘I’m too dependent on other people.’ That’s when I decided to dive into programming. I learned React and started building things on my own. The turning point for me was deciding that I didn’t want to rely on anyone else.”

The Birth of Marinade Finance

Repetny’s first brush with crypto came years before his engineering career began. The entrepreneur first became enthralled by the promise of freedom through decentralization as early as 2015 and began dipping his toes into “stateless money” and self-custody.

“I found the concept of decentralization and digital gold fascinating. Growing up in Prague, in the Czech Republic—a post-communist country—the idea of true ownership resonated deeply. It’s a part of our nature to value freedom, never take it for granted, and fight to protect it”

Years later, Repetny’s exploration of the engineering and programming world eventually brought him to back to crypto. He joined multiple hackathons as a React engineer, which reimagined his understanding of how programmable money could be used to bolster financial inclusion and give users greater freedom and control over their wealth.

Repetny’s continued involvement in hackathons eventually helped him build an expansive professional network of fellow engineers. At the time, “every other team would be building liquid staking on PolkaDot and Kusama”, giving Repetny ample experience in this sector ahead of the hackathon that would change his life forever.

Three days before registration closed for the Solana DeFi Hackathon in February 2021, Repetny and a random assortment of Discord friends took the plunge and put their liquid staking concept to the test.

“There was this thing called Solana. What was it? We didn’t really know, but the application deadline was only three days away. So, we thought, ‘Why not? Let’s sign up and see what happens.” 

Marinade Finance secured third position in the 2021 Solana DeFi Hackathon, opening the floodgates to VCs and investors thinking they’d uncovered the next unicorn startup on an upcoming network. 

“In February 2021, we participated in a hackathon with Marinade. After that, dozens of VCs approached us, practically throwing money at us. But we said no to every VC because we were building something fundamental to Solana.”

However, Repetny drew on his experience with Zeerat and rejected support from VC firms. Marinade Finance instead choice to build organically from the ground up, championing the fundamental crypto values of freedom and decentralization. Repetny and the Marinade team viewed their product as a public good and essential service for the network.

“Lido Finance, an Ethereum-based platform, wanted to either buy us out or have us build Lido on Solana. At that point, we had a budget of around $80,000 for six months and a team I’d met on Discord. The question was: can we make it work?”

Despite acquisition attempts from liquid staking giants like Lido, Marinade Finance stuck to its guns. 

With six month’s lead time before mainnet launch and a mere $80k in savings, Repetny and the Marinade team got to work building one of Solana’s most essential DeFi applications, which had amassed over $1.8B in TVL (Total Value Locked) by November later that year.

Today, Marinade Finance remains a cornerstone of Solana DeFi. While alternative protocols from Solana’s genesis have faded into irrelevance, Marinade brushed off the FTX collapse. 

Marinade now boasts the highest native staking rate in the Solana ecosystem, and is the staking provider of choice from institutional players like Bitwise EU, who recently announced their Solana Staking ETP.

Why Solana?

Like many OGs, Repetny’s experience during Ethereum’s fabled DeFi Summer led him to explore alternative chains.

“After DeFi summer, I was experimenting with Ethereum, but the fees were insane. I’d have to wake up early in the morning just to catch a time when they were low enough. That’s when I started exploring other blockchains. What drew me to Solana—and kept me there—was that it felt closest to Web2 in terms of usability and performance”

While Repetny’s decision to build on Solana was driven a hackathon inspired twist of fate, Marinade’s Head Chef asserts that Solana’s speed, scalability, and unparalleled user experience give it a considerable advantage over rival L1s.

However, that doesn’t mean that the network is without its challenges. In Marinade’s early days, Solana’s consistent outages made it difficult to establish trust in the chain and onboard users. 

This negative perception still lingers, a fact Repetny believes still damages Solana’s reputation in the wider crypto community.

“I’ve always been bullish on technology, but the truth is, the tech itself doesn’t always matter. Perception can kill it, in my opinion.”

Despite these concerns, Repetny acknowledges that Solana has made considerable progress towards improving its security and stability. Consistent growth in the number of validators, and the advent of new validator clients like Firedancer are definitive steps towards building a more resilient network.

Advice for Emerging Founders & Developers

Michael Repetny’s entrepreneurial journey has been far from smooth sailing. However, as any founder will tell you, learning from your mistakes and applying your experience to new endeavors is a key part of any success.

Marinade’s decision to refuse VC funding may have been considered questionable at the time, but the team’s commitment to freedom and decentralization has helped establish Marinade as one of the most flexible and resilient teams on Solana. 

Marinade is completely free of the VC control that often plagues crypto startups, allowing them to build with the community and network’s best interests at heart.

When asked what advice he would pass on to the next generation of emerging founders, Repetny asserted the importance of hackathons.

“My advice? Participate in a hackathon. Solana’s hackathons are among the best and most well-executed in the crypto ecosystem. So, go for it—build something and experience it for yourself.”

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