Stani Kulechov on: saving six months for a computer, dropping out of high school, and building AAVE

Mon, Mar 2, 2026, 12:00 AM

Stani’s story is a story about perseverance. His dad worked logistics and his mom was a nurse, and in 1997 his dad saved for six months to buy a computer because that’s how long it took on their salary to afford one for their kid in Finland. Stani was playing ice hockey and Counter-Strike and being what he calls “wild but nerdy,” and he started coding at 13 and dropped out after his first year of high school because he wanted to program full time, just quit, then years later had to go back and finish so he could get into university. His first Reddit post about lending against ETH got downvoted, people initially were saying it was a pointless idea, why would you ever borrow against your crypto, and today Aave has processed over $1 trillion in loan volume and that pointless idea became the infrastructure. He named it Aave, which is Finnish for ghost, because “we are kind of like the ghosts behind the scenes,” a protocol that runs itself, built by a dropout from a small town whose dad worked six months for a computer. The part that got me is that almost a decade in he keeps saying building has to be fun, if it’s not fun you shouldn’t be here, and he throws raves for his community and still shows up to every conference and still talks to new builders and still ships, and the guy who got laughed off Reddit built a trillion dollar protocol and is still here, still building, still having fun doing it.