What are my strengths?\n- No forethought and no when to quit, but has drive to put something out into the world\nWhat do I need to improve on?\n- People skills could be improved\n- Very profit driven\nWhat do I want in a job?\n- I want to work like a dog. I want to work at a place where people are encouraged to sleep under their desks and pull all-nighters. I’m not sure why I’m like this, but I’ve noticed that I can’t sit too still and do nothing, I’m always building side projects(Kinesis, Stardust, Klade) or working for Risk Harbor/Yoz/0xFoobar during school and my internships - I feel like something is missing if I don’t have a project I can throw myself in. Maybe things will change, but I would have to wait and see and I think it would be more fun this way in the first place. (want to prove something to myself)\n- Somewhere with high upside and is has a long term vision\n- I want to work with smart, brutally honest, and quick learners. I want the people I work with the call me out when I make mistakes.\n- In person\nAbout Me\n- Basic stats + story of how you grew up\n○ In my early life up to the end of middle school, I honestly don’t remember doing much besides going to school, going to a Chinese afterschool, and playing a bunch of different sports(cross-country, track, basketball, soccer). I also went to church and did a bunch of Boy Scouts related stuff which is honestly pretty underrated - I don’t think there are any other organizations that let a 14 year old plan a 12 day trip to the middle of the New Mexico Desert whilst having to worry about transportation, airfare, gear, and keeping everyone alive lol. I also played this one video game called Realm of the Mad God, where you go around and kill enemies with other players. This lowkey taught me a decent bit about economics - supply and demand, liquidity, stores of value, how to scam people, etc,\n○ During high school, I was lucky enough that my friends in middle school knew a bit more of how one is “supposed to” play high school, so I did clubs like DECA and FBLA at their recommendations. I actually made a few good friends in FBLA and DECA, mostly because I went super try hard. Lynbrook was really good at this event called Parliamentary Procedure, which was essentially a set of rules that maximize the efficiency of organizational meetings, most commonly used by stuff like the English Parliament and the US Congress. Unfortunately, this meant memorizing this really old book called Roberts Rules of Order which was 1100+ pages. We also memorized the exact wording for each of our roleplays which was doubly painful since there were probably a few hundred prompts and a few hundred different responses to these prompts. Luckily, I’m still pretty good friends with one of the people I did Parliamentary Procedure with so I guess it was worth it in the end. It also showed me that you can control the outcome of seemingly random “businessy” competitions where you are judged on more subjective indicators. Before, I thought judging for business case competitions was super random and arbitrary when in fact you could break down what the judges wanted to see, even when the judges themselves didn’t know exactly what they wanted to see. (We also won 1st in the section, 2nd in the state, and 3rd at Nationals lol using tricks like these) Unfortunately, I didn’t figure out DECA until senior year, but you can just read the DECA tips section if you want to win at DECA.\nI honestly don’t have many key people in my life that I can recall influencing me directly, rather, it’s probably been people influencing me indirectly via osmosis. I’m guessing that my academic success was at least partially influenced by the people around me, my parents had some influence but I think it was mostly my peers that drove me to do the things that one needs to do to become “successful”. For example, I only learned about SAT prep from my peers, not my parents. I needed to find my own free SAT classes online and practice tests which I would probably not have done without my friends pressuring me by comparing my SAT scores to theirs. When my friends started taking AP Classes, I felt like I needed to keep up and ended up taking 10 APs over 2 years, self-studying most of them. I’m super privileged - grew up in the Bay Area at a good to elite high school without having to worry about anything but school and my interests - yet my parents never pushed me to do better in school(only had a 3.8 uw gpa) or to do cookie cutter extracurriculars(they were fine with me quitting piano and band)\n- Past professional life\n○ I think doing computer science would have been much less fun without my peers. We managed to gamify the worst part of computer science, the job and internship hunt. Additionally, classes are hard but being able to bond through shared trauma is another huge benefit of the Berkeley computer science curriculum.\n○ I think one interesting thing is how I ended up working in crypto. As a freshman, I tried to do basically everything. I tried Berkeley clubs(got rejected from all of them), worked in a chemistry research lab to see if things other than computer science were worth doing, did research through the haas neuroeconomics labs to see what applied computer science was like, and took as many classes as I could. However, nothing really interested me, since the cool things one could do in each of these programs were limited by my experience. Thus, I needed to find a field where one could make major contributions without having any experience and a nascent field was best for this.\n○ I quit my haas neuroeconomic lab with one of my friends that also worked there and started building stuff for crypto. I worked on that project for a bit over a year and eventually went and joined a crypto startup that I found on discord after the project died. Afterward, I ghosted that startup to work on my own project again. I just find it super interesting that all of these events couldn’t really have been predicted from one timestep back. In high school, there was no way I could have predicted that I would be working in a research lab at a business school. While working at the research lab, I had no idea my next step would be to work on something in crypto. And while working on our project, I had no idea I would leave that to become an employee of another crypto startup.\n○ In the meantime, I also worked one summer at the NSA. Originally, I wanted to work there since I wanted to know a few random things like what crypto systems does the government know how to break and what parts of the US government are controlled by who but at the end of the day I just thought it was really cool and that it was an opportunity I would never have again. I don’t think I learned too much technically, it was more high level architecture, what is possible and not possible, and a lot of systems reliability engineering principles(read the google SRE book if you want to know what I did during this internship). Another thing I took away was the ability to move to a new city and establish routines, find friends, and generally survive. I met some really cool people at my apartment, such as a Harvard lawyer who works at the white house(ex. SEC) and a basketball trainer who used to train Jalen Smith(Indiana Pacers)\n○ The summer afterwards, I did an internship at Coinbase which looking back, I shouldn’t have done. It was mostly grunt solidity, typescript, and Go work that wasn’t very fun and everyone there was super depressed since 18% of the company was laid off on the second day of work and coinbase wasn’t doing anything cool that I thought it would. However, this gave me time to go to Seattle for a month and meet some pretty cool people like the Eigenlayer team and Thomas.\n○ Finally, I did a lot of stuff in crypto: see below for more info.\n- Any life goals?\n○ Still figuring this out\n- Do you do anything for fun?\n○ Play basketball/soccer, sports where there is some level of teamwork involved and that forces you to immerse yourself in that game.\n○ Some other random stuff I’ve tried recently that I’ve enjoyed:\n§ Writing - both technical content as well as reflections like this. Weird since I hated writing in middle and high school\n§ Climbing - both outdoor and indoor are really fun, but I need someone with experience to take me outdoors and indoors is too expensive/too much of a commitment to buy a pass\n§ Skiing/Snowboarding - incredibly fun and expensive sport, however, I kinda get bored skiing/snowboarding since after a while even the double blacks don’t provide the type of challenge and fear I crave. Maybe teaching others is a good alternative that might make things more fun?\n§ Chess - mostly as a crutch for short term entertainment instead of playing more traditional video games\n§ Going to Hackathons - I feel like suffering together for long periods of time is the quickest way to make friends, and as such, hackathons are a perfect place to do so. Also, usually prizes are pretty decent for the amount of work you put in and I think I’ve figured out a way to win the game of hackathons.\n§ Hiking/Outdoors stuff - Vanilla hiking is kinda boring, unless the scenery is crazy(unlikely since I’ve seen most types of views). One thing I realize I enjoy while hiking is peer pressuring my friends to go swimming in the nearest lake/river on the hike, it makes things seem more visceral and real.\n§ Finding Free Food - Hillel, VC dinners, club events, finding free food not only gives you free food, but also an excuse to do whatever the free food providers are doing, which is usually something new.\n§ Traveling - But am I just traveling since I’m running away from my problems or is there something I’m chasing after? Traveling is lowkey pretty fun though, and I feel like no matter where I go I know someone there or I can make friends pretty quickly if I’m by myself which makes traveling so much more fun. Also, ever since I stopped grinding at life, I feel like traveling is 10x more fun since there isn’t really work stuff I’m always thinking about\n- When were you most happy?\n○ Doing dumb stuff with friends, such as going to a random barber in Mexico and telling them to cut it however they thought looked good.\n○ Also, it sounds weird but sometimes I’ll really enjoy coding. I vividly remember being really happy while working on the Penn blockchain hackathon project\n- Who do you respect? If no one, are there parts of anyone you respect?\n○ I respect anyone who has ever built anything. Just the willingness to build something and bringing it into the world is something I wish more people would do\n○ Also, I really respect anyone that went through difficulties in their childhood to get to where they are today
\nCrypto things I’ve done in the past\nFrom most recent to least recent
\nStardust Built a p2p lending platform for ETH San Francisco. Honestly, this idea has been floating around in me and a friend’s head - here’s a brief description:
\nOur initial focus is semi-locked tokens - strong liquidity for the underlying, despite these derivative tokens difficult to list within a money market. This represents assets like LSDs (rpETH, stETH, etc), timelocked LPs (Chicken Bonds) and, veTokens.\nWe know what happens when things go right – Aave listing stETH and the corresponding looped leveraged resulted in billions in TVL for both Aave and Lido. We also knows what goes wrong with these derivative tokens. Manipulable oracles, in addition to low underlying dex liquidity have meant that it can be difficult to use these derivatives in a money market context.\nThis is why we’re taking a different approach to lending for these assets, a physically settled P2P lending market for these assets.\nWe built it out and got interest from DAOs that wanted to get cashflows from their holdings, like Alchemix, Redacted Cartel, and M11 Credit as well as made it to the final round of the AllianceDAO and Geometry accelerators. However, I then got cold feet from doing this startup for two reasons: firstly, I wasn’t sure if this is the problem I wanted to work on for the next 3-5 years and secondly, I wasn’t sure if I was good enough to found a startup. Because of this, I decided to stop working on Stardust and stepped back from crypto altogether.\nWebsite: https://stard.st/
\nKinesis Labs I wanted to get some experience running a DeFi project, so ran this saddle finance fork on Evmos and added some features like dynamic fees! Got to ~600k tvl and learned a bunch about how DeFi really works behind the scenes. Made enough mon\ney from this and Risk Harbor to give myself some time to sit and think about what to do next which is really helpful.
\nWebsite: https://kinesislabs.co/
\nEvmos Intern I wanted to help out some of my friends(ex-blockchain at berkeley) with Evmos, and created the Evmos Intern account to grow DeFi on Evmos. I also wanted to see if growing a project via constructive and positive tweets would be different from throwing fud and technical explanations on twitter. Here are some sample tweets:\nhttps://twitter.com/evmosintern/status/1548737661950521344\nhttps://twitter.com/evmosintern/status/1548737976561045504
\nParadigmEng420 I wanted to grow an anon twitter account, just to see if I could. I got the perfect opportunity when the Nomad bridge got hacked. I was pretty early to the hack, as only ~40 minutes had gone by since the initial hack transactions. I then took a few hours to look into how the hack worked and published a tweet thread explaining the technicals, frontrunning samczsun’s inevitable thread. I went from 0-1k followers from that thread.\nhttps://twitter.com/ParadigmEng420/status/1554249610574450688
\nThe second big thread was the aptos fud thread. Since aptos mainnet had just been announced and most of crypto twitter hated aptos, it was the perfect time to publish a hit piece to gain traction off that sentiment. I threw together some lies and half truths about the aptos tps and the token distribution and went from 1k-5k followers off that tweet.\nhttps://twitter.com/ParadigmEng420/status/1582121408548651009
\nWormhole explorer Wormhole has a rate limit, where only a certain amount of value can be sent cross-chain in any given day. This was a CalHacks project that tracked past on-chain transactions on Wormhole, but also off-chain transactions in their gossip network to make sure any transactions sent wouldn’t be rejected by their guardians. I worked on this with 3 other members of blockchain at berkeley.
\nJump Crypto liked the project enough such that they ended up paying blockchain at berkeley to work on two continuations of this project for 15k each which was pretty cool.
\nMuteswap I worked on this project with 0xfoobar and his team, mostly along the lines of research and business development. At the end of the day, the legal risk of this project was simply unacceptable to us since it is basically a glorified tornado cash + uniswap and tornado cash had just gotten sanctioned so we agreed to shut it down.\nhttps://twitter.com/muteswap
\nRisk Harbor This was my first serious foray into crypto. I mostly did contracts and integrations for them, growing from 0 to 200 million TVL, writing wrappers that would programmatically detect whether a given DeFi protocol had been hacked and automatically pay out insurance if there had been a hack.
\nKlade This was my first crypto project, we built a way for bitcoin miners to hedge increases in hash rate. Unfortunately, it went nowhere, mostly because a) the mechanism was not capital efficient and b) we didn’t understand business development(or anything for that matter).
\nBefore Crypto\nFirst coding experience was writing games with tynker\nI didn’t get comfortable enough with building hackathon level projects till the 11th grade, where I started doing a lot of “NLP” projects for hackathons, which basically meant using the Amazon Alexa SDK(back when amazon docs were super ugly) and feeding it a series of hardcoded Q&A logic or using basic word vectorization tools like GloVe and word2vec.
\nNon Crypto\nWorked on Coinbase NFTs\nWorked at the NSA\nDid research using NLP(GloVe) at the haas neuroeconomics lab
\nShorter Crypto Experiences\nGovernance at Blockchain at Berkeley: Delegate on Aave, Compound, Dydx, Optimism, Uniswap Ex: Maker, FEI, Soon: Euler
\nBasically, we vote yes on everything until something big comes up, then we wait for the big boys like jump and a16z to call us and tell us how to vote.
\nQuickfire\nFavorite Project:\nFavorite Github Repo:\nMost bullish on:\nLeast bullish on:
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