Stani’s 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. He started coding at 13 and dropped out after his first year of high school because he wanted to program full time. His first Reddit post about lending against ETH got downvoted, people initially were saying it was a pointless idea (aka why would you ever borrow against your crypto???). Yet today, Aave has processed over $1 trillion in loan volume and that pointless idea became the infrastructure. Aave, 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. This is Stani’s story, OFFSTAGE.