Three ways to increase the surface area of good serendipity.
Graduation Speech at GIST (Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology)
Dear GIST Graduates,
I am truly honored to be here to celebrate your graduation from one of the most prestigious science and technology universities in the world. When I was asked to deliver this commencement address, I thought a lot about it. Similar to you, I had studied at a science and technology university, but since I didn’t graduate, I questioned whether I am qualified to speak in front of you on this special day. However, I realized that, unlike some of the other great commencement speakers, I’m not as far ahead of you in age or experience, so in some ways I thought I may come instead as a peer kindred in spirit.
Today, I’m going to talk about how to make a lot of good coincidences. As they say, life is a series of coincidences, and coincidences matter. For example, I first became interested in science and technology because of a serendipitous event in my childhood. My parents were not versed in science, and for me, it was a gift from my uncle when I was six years old that made the difference. One day he took me to a stationery store and said he was going to buy me a car. I had no experience with motorized machines, so I was expecting a car toy with wheels. What he got me instead was a minicar with an electric motor, which was a big shock for me at the time. As I flipped the switch and watched the little machine roar to life, I think I began to fall in love with the magic of science.
I’m sure you have some memories similar to mine: the serendipity that led you to study science and technology, the serendipity that led you to GIST, the serendipity that led you to choose your major, and the serendipity that led you to make other important choices.
We all encounter such serendipitous opportunities in our lives that can alter the courses of our lives. Of course, not all coincidences work in our favor. There are good and bad coincidences. I studied computer science and industrial engineering as an undergraduate, so I often think of many problems in terms of optimization programming with an objective function. If you ask me about the objective function that makes life worth living, it is to “increase the surface area of good serendipity.” So how do you increase the surface area of good serendipity? I have three principles that have helped me thus far, which I hope to share with you today.
The first is to step out of your comfort zone and make uncomfortable choices.
It’s comforting to follow the mainstream of your community and take on predictable challenges. But the flip side of that is that it means you’re clearly not growing above average. If you never step out of your comfort zone, you’ll never grow the breadth and depth of your experience. If you follow what everyone else is doing, you’ll end up with a resume that looks like you lack character, and you’ll never get good returns on your investments.
I’ve made a few uncomfortable choices in my life that somehow made me different from my peers. First, I remember entering a computer science program that was at the bottom of its popularity in 2002 when the dot-com bubble burst. At the time I was thinking about where to go to college, and I was heavily inspired by Bill Gates’ The Speed of Light. The idea that the internet revolution could change the world by starting a “business that moves at the speed of thought” with a single computer intrigued me and made me choose computer science as my major regardless of the criticisms of the IT industry.
I started my first business in 2008 when there was a widespread perception that if you start a business, you’re doomed. A decisive influence on my entrepreneurship was the time I spent in my third year of university, when I took a leave of absence to explore my career via two internships in Seoul: one at a global IT company called Sun Microsystems (now acquired by Oracle), and the other at a startup called Allowworks, founded by my high school senior and Futureplay founder, Junghee Ryu. Both were great companies, but there was a big difference in orientation between a large corporation and a startup, and I was more excited about the latter’s approach to creating innovative services that didn’t exist in the world. Taking a leave of absence and spending time at two completely different companies was an uncomfortable decision that put me a year behind my classmates, but it ended up being more stimulating and educational than my courses. I also met so many mentors who have shaped and supported my career path.
Diving into a new field, gaining knowledge in an unfamiliar area, and meeting people from different backgrounds than your own is exhausting. But I’ve seen many times in my life, directly and indirectly, that pioneers who make brave choices are unfairly rewarded many times over, not just a few times over, but tens of times over. So I have decided to be wary of staying in my comfort zone for the rest of my life.
The second is to establish my own perspective that subverts the conventional rules.
I’ve often had fundamental questions about the rules that are set by society, and I think it has to do with my natural grit I’ve had since I was a child. In a nutshell, it was important for me to think that nothing in the world would be taken for granted. This mindset helped me to build a startup and to get into the blockchain and Web3 industry early on, which is where I am now.
Knowre, a company I co-founded in 2012, had a vision to provide personalized math content to students using artificial intelligence algorithms. The idea was that it was very inefficient to give students of different knowledge levels the same paperback book and have them work through the same problems from start to finish. This was right after the iPad was first released, and the consistent feedback I got from many angel and institutional investors was, “Math should be done with pencil and paper, not on a computer.”
A well-known angel investor in the industry even laughed hysterically and told me to change my business idea instead of wasting my time with such a strange idea. But I never gave up on the idea that people’s habits would eventually change, and that the medium would inevitably move to computers or tablets to deliver personalized educational content. Although there were many challenges along the way, we were able to grow the business well and successfully sell it to a leading Korean education company called Daekyo.
Meanwhile, I was a developer, so I had a hobby of exploring what was happening in the open source community. The traditional open source community is fairly static. I first stumbled upon the Ethereum community in late 2015, where I found developers I didn’t even know were investing in each other’s projects with Ethereum, discussing and evolving each other’s source code, feedbacking on each other’s work, and growing the community together in a much more open way than a typical startup. I felt a level of high energy that was completely different from traditional open source communities.
I invested all the money I had at the time in Ethereum in early 2016, and 2016 was a very difficult year for Ethereum: a platform called The DAO, which presented a vision of decentralized autonomous organizations, was fundraising exclusively in Ethereum. It became very popular, but then the fundraising platform was hacked, collecting a whopping 1/6th of the total Ethereum circulating supply, and the price dropped throughout the year.
When you’ve invested money and it’s getting hard, you have two choices: you either quit or persevere. Most of the economic organizations that drive the modern world are in the form of corporations. I started a corporation and experienced two exits, but I endured through the difficult times with an almost obsessive belief that a virtual economic organization created on the blockchain, combined with governance, would one day create a new economic organization that would surpass the efficiency of a corporation. This belief eventually led me to start Hashed.
Other rule-breaking questions I’ve had have fueled my work in the blockchain industry are as follows: “Do central banks need to constantly print money to keep it from becoming worthless?”, “Why can’t we put all the assets in the world on a blockchain and trade them?”, and “Will humans spend more of their time in virtual worlds than in the real world?”
In a society where so many things are changing rapidly, driven by science and technology, and where there are so many opportunities and crises, people want to hear from and be with those who have their own unique and unwavering perspectives. This has led me to meet many good coincidences that can change my personal as well as professional ventures.
The last is to identify not as a citizen of a country, but as a citizen of a network state.
Traditional notions of nationhood and borders are blurring at a rapid pace. I think nationality is becoming more of a membership. In fact, it’s becoming much easier to change your nationality and many Koreans are emigrating in search of opportunities. Boundaries are blurring not only between countries, but also between the company and organization you work for. On the one hand, the concept of a job for life is long gone, and more and more people are working across global platforms without belonging to a company.
The media industry is one of the fastest growing areas where networked professionals have become more active. Twenty years ago, if you wanted to create content and get in front of a large audience, you had to get a job at a station or movie studio. Now, as an individual, you can leverage network platforms and communities to get your content out to the world. The people who create content on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitch are not their employees; they are individuals who have built their own expertise and brand across different networks. They are starting to have a much bigger impact than the stations themselves. I believe we will soon see a similar trend accelerate in other industries.
Realizing how to operate with an identity as a citizen of a network state opens up a whole new set of opportunities. You don’t have to live in a specific geographic area to be a part of the network state, and it helps us understand how we can be better connected as global citizens in the digital era. It also helps us take control of our own lives and grow our ability to make an impact globally. With more surface area for activity and influence, we will encounter more serendipitous good opportunities.
As citizens of the network state, we can take a greater interest in global issues. Issues like climate change, cybersecurity, and pandemics have impacts beyond national borders, and as part of the networked nation, we can seek more inclusive and collaborative approaches to these issues.
Here are some of my tips for becoming a network state citizen. Make an effort to connect with world-class experts in your field of interest via Twitter and LinkedIn. Make as many foreign friends as you have local friends, even if it’s not necessarily in your field of expertise, but in your hobbies. Finally, travel to as many culturally diverse countries as time allows and make friends there. You’ll learn a whole different set of experiences and values from friends who have taken a different path in life than the ones you have chosen.
Congratulations again on your graduation, and I sincerely hope that you can expand the surface area of good coincidences even further.
February 16, 2024
Simon Seojoon Kim, CEO of Hashed
