For years, I told myself I wasn't a founder. Instead, I strive to be a strong operator that makes the founders' dreams come true. Perhaps the avoidance of being creative comes from my Chinese upbringing. As my mother often said: “A gun hits the first bird that pops its head out.”
She didn't want me to be the first bird.
So until recently my career was defined by working hard towards someone else's vision – until I got into crypto. Crypto is self-sovereignty, starting with keeping its own keys. The crypto community promotes ownership by participating. Yes, we all love to see magical internet money rising to the top, but the industry is deep Financial, social and technological implications to our community.
It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to express your raw talent while owning a piece of crypto.
I was very fortunate that my first job in crypto was in business development. Communication. The job gave me an overview of the entire crypto stack: from the base layer (Line) to the middleware (Infra), the user interface (MetaMask).
I was having fun. People started to know me as Shuao Kong, Global Head of BD at ConsenSys, but also as “Brother Bing”, Decrypt columnist and founder of Hotpot DAO.
But a little voice began to grow inside me, wondering: Can you do something on your own?
Most people have an entrepreneurial itch, but most don't. I knew I was primarily driven by three missions: (1) to work on the cutting edge of crypto tech; (2) getting young talent into crypto; and (3) developing crypto products targeted at emerging markets.
While I was checking, my good old consensus network magic came into play. ConsenSys has not only produced many well-known products (including Decrypt), but also inspired a class of crypto founders, operators, investors and rebels who are still pushing the boundaries.
When my former colleague Yi Tang texted me in January, I knew he was ready for something serious. Yi and I have been at the forefront of bringing Asia Pacific governments and big businesses on the chain in 2018. He is now a prominent crypto investor at Qiming Venture, one of the largest funds in the world.
He sent me a message on Telegram and said, “We have a pretty strong portfolio company looking for a business founder.” MegaETHTwitter handle. Looking through the Github repo I couldn't help but wonder who would bother calling themselves “MegaETH”. I mean, I love getting ETH by name, but Mega 2017 gave it away Iko Trembling.
I was not over the moon.
But I was curious about the technique, so I made an appointment with Yilong, who started MegaETH after completing his PhD in Stanford's computer science department. In his typically calm and steady voice, Yilong guided me through his inspiration, design philosophy and vision.
Simply put: Davis wanted to build a scalable base layer that would allow him to create easy-to-use, fast and cheap crypto-base apps.
The thesis is simple and clever. Ten years later, no one has succeeded in running it. blockchain That's as user-friendly as Web2. SolanaWhile it was a step in the right direction, it still faces challenging challenges and is still in beta. and the Ethereum L2s is only the measurement by mass. Main network 10 times, which is very small.
Since no blockchain is scalable enough, Dapps offer poor performance resulting in poor user experience. I often joke that developers are cheating blockchain because they prefer to put data on-chain instead of on-chain due to poor performance issues.
These are the problems that MegaETH tries to fix.
As Yilong explained the thinking behind MegaETH, there was a beautiful quiet confidence in his voice. Within an hour, it went from “cool tech but so what” to “this thing will make Ethereum cool again.” After the call my mind was 80% mega-lined.
The next day, I met Lei Yang, the third co-founder and CTO. Lee is already a well-known blockchain researcher at MIT. His ability to explain complex blockchain concepts in the most formal way is the best I've seen in crypto.
The MegaETH team literally took shape and I signed on in March to lead all business and marketing efforts.
Obviously, there was a lot of work to do. But it was also beginner's delight. Because we live all over the world, the founding team has never met in person.–Once at ETH Denver and later in Boston, everyone traveled to Leigh's PhD thesis defense. These in-person Hangouts were amazing moments. For example, we learn that Leigh is a fan of rabbits. He actually goes to a park near MIT and eats brownies every week. In that spirit, we're designing a MegaETH logo for the fast-paced bunny rabbit.
Along the way, we're learning about each other's communication styles, diets, and even family members. As I write these words now at midnight in Dubai, my entrepreneurial journey began with some vague instincts, but it really took off when I met the right people.
Many things await me at night. We haven't received funding yet. We are in desperate need of a developer evangelist who can attract devs to our ecosystem. And we don't even have a website yet.
But so far, despite what my mother taught me, I'm pretty good at sticking my head out. And it hasn't been shot yet.
