Bankless · Monday, July 27, 2026
Vlad Novikovski explained his accelerated path through Harvard, completing his degree in two and a half years by taking extra courses and leveraging AP credits. He framed this as an optimization problem, seeking the benefits of graduate studies sooner. This drive was fueled by an early ambition to become an entrepreneur, inspired by a childhood viewing of a program about Bill Gates.
“I finished high school at 16 and Harvard at 18. So yeah, I was- You finished Harvard at 18? Yeah. Yeah. How does one do Harvard in two years? Well, two and a half. Two and a half years. Yeah. How does one do that?”
“Well, that was more of a competition between me and myself. No one else was really trying to do that. I mean, I looked at it, like I talked about thinking outside of the box, right? Like, the way I looked at it was, you know, assuming I... These days, probably someone like me would have dropped out and gone to, like, you know... start, you know, build a protocol or build an AI model or something. But back then, that was rare.”
“My dad and I watched the TV program about Bill Gates. Uh-huh. And, you know, I thought that was pretty cool that you could, like, you know, build software and, you know, create a great business around that. Mm-hmm. So building a company has always been something that you wanted to do. Yes. Yeah? Yes. When did you first know that?”