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From Harvard at 18 to Building Crypto's Fastest Exchange | Vlad, Lighter

July 27, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

From Olympiad Prodigy to Exchange Builder: Vlad's Operating System

Vlad Novikovski started competing in academic Olympiads at age twelve, eventually making the US team for both the International Physics Olympiad and the International Olympiad in Informatics. He nearly completed a hat trick by making all three—math, physics, and programming—but missed the math team. For Vlad, the competitions were never just about winning. They created a virtuous cycle: he was good at the material, so he competed; winning was fun; and most importantly, he met other like-minded people. At the US Physics Olympiad training camp, two of the co-founders of Anthropic were there. At the Informatics Olympiad, he met the first CTO of Facebook. The early 2000s cohort, he notes, produced an unusual concentration of founders and leaders—including the Vice President—possibly because they were the first generation to grow up with the internet.

The Data Epiphany and the Harvard Optimization

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What you'll learn

  • 1 From Harvard at 18 to Building Crypto's Fastest Exchange | Vlad, Lighter
  • 2 (01:01) **Olympiad Origins** - Vlad explains his path through the US Physics Olympiad, Informatics Olympiad, and Math Olympiad, including his near-"hat trick" of making all three teams
  • 3 (04:23) **The Real Prize: Network Effects Among Prodigies** - Vlad reveals that the most valuable outcome of the Olympiads was the people he met, not the medals
  • 4 (07:49) **The Joy of "Genius Problems"** - Vlad describes his favorite type of problem: ones requiring an unusual sideways insight
  • 5 (11:19) **From Olympiads to High School Fame** - Vlad and one of the hosts shared the same high school (Thomas Jefferson), and Vlad traces how his cohort's skills later manifested in industry
  • 6 (13:34) **Discovering Data Science Through Failure** - Vlad's realization that he loved working with real-world data came from an unexpected source
  • 7 (14:35) **Finishing Harvard at 18: A Life Hack, Not a Competition** - Vlad explains how he completed Harvard in 2.5 years by optimizing the system

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Show Notes

What does it take to build an exchange that refuses to choose between speed, cost, security, verifiability and composability? Lighter founder Vlad Novakovski joins David to trace his path from international Olympiads and Harvard at 18 to Citadel, early machine learning, Lunchclub and an 18-month ZK engineering bet.

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00 A Particular Set of Skills
11:33 Harvard at 18
19:03 Citadel and the Search for Alpha
25:14 Machine Learning Before the AI Boom
36:46 ​​Finding Elite Talent Early
41:39 The Lunchclub Matching Problem
45:11 Pivoting Into Lighter
51:18 The 18-Month ZK Engineering Bet
56:38 Lighter’s Five Pillars
1:00:04 A New Generation of Exchanges

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RESOURCES

Vlad Novakovski
https://x.com/vnovakovski

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