This article is part of the Internet vs Blockchain Revolution Series. If you are interested in reading the other articles, check out this post . Looking back at the Internet revolution, the founders of a lot of disruptive companies didn’t necessarily had business in mind first but came from various backgrounds, such as hobbyists, researchers from universities, hacker channels, and ex-employees of successful companies. This list is not exhaustive, but we will go through some examples. Hobbyist The origin of began as a hobby, in which Jerry Yang and David Filo, Ph.D. students at Stanford at the time (1994), were collecting and trading new website links during the early time of the web. After discovering , the first web browser, the two became obsessed with the . At the time, it was still possible to visit every single website in existence within a couple of hours, and a few websites appeared every day. Jerry and David’s goal was to find the best websites, sort them according to category and compile them into a list. From word-to-mouth, their public website directory quickly became popular among the first users surfing the web. In a way, the first version of was more of a “glorified list” rather than a technological company but provided tremendous value by aggregating otherwise scattered websites on the web, making them a first mover advantage in the space. Yahoo Mosaic World Wide Web Yahoo Similarly, , Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of , initially started writing forum posts as a hobby for a Bitcoin blog, which offered 5 BTC per piece (around 4 dollars at the time). Cryptocurrency quickly became an obsession for him, and he wrote for the site until it shut down soon due to Bitcoin’s lack of mainstream attention. later co-founded and contributed as a leading writer. Along the way, he came up with the idea of going beyond the financial use cases allowed by and released a whitepaper of a system called in 2013. The rest is history. Vitalik Buterin ethereum Vitalik Buterin Bitcoin Magazine Bitcoin ethereum Researchers from Universities Often, research projects in universities can turn out to become groundbreaking solutions compared to existing technologies. In 1995, the founders of and met at and were looking for a dissertation topic. They had a realization that the web was built on links that linked one page to another. Inspired by the academic world, in which research papers often constructed their arguments by citing other reputable academic papers, you could rank the importance of a paper based on the number of citations. Inversely, a research paper would have more authority if more research papers are citing it. and created the most powerful searching system that ranked web pages based on how important the world thought of them, surpassing any existing search engines such as and etc. They were trying to solve interesting problems and came across some compelling ideas. In the blockchain space, some example of projects that came from academia includes ( ), ( ), ( ), and many more. Google, Larry Page, Sergey Brin Stanford University Larry Sergey Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, AltaVista, Algorand MIT — Silvio Micali The Oasis Team University of California — Dawn Song Thunder Core Cornell — Elaine Shi and Rafael Pass Hacker Channels Picture of the w00w00 team in 2002 It turns out that a lot of breakthrough ideas came from the tech communities, who were trading hacks and sharing new ideas. Sometime between 1997 or 1998, , the creator of , the first peer-to-peer music file sharing Internet Service (which later inspired ), was invited to join the private IRC channel called , an online meeting place for a hacking collective. Members of w00w00 were composed of kids who were anonymously trading hacks that later on formed dozens of technology companies ranging from to . Blockchain also started similarly, in which in 2008, someone under the name of sent an academic paper to a cryptography mailing list proposing a form of digital cash called . Another example was in 2016, an anonymous creator under the name of (name of Voldemort from ) signed into a Bitcoin research IRC channel, and dropped a document titled , providing a radically different approach to blockchain, which later on led to the creation of the projects and . Shawn Fanning Napster BitTorrent w00w00 WhatsApp Arbor Networks Satoshi Nakamoto Bitcoin Tom Elvis Jedusor Harry Potter Mimblewimble Grin Beam Ex-employees of Successful Companies The infamous “Paypal Mafia” and “Coinbase Mafia” During the Internet revolution, the original crew of Paypal went on to create some of the most successful companies and investment firms. Some examples include: with , with , with and other alumni had a hand in founding, funding or contributing to the development of many popular companies such as and etc. so that people in technology often refer to a “PayPal Mafia” that runs Silicon Valley today. In the same way in the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry, ex-employees of went on to create some of the important projects and investment firms, such as etc. Other examples are the co-founders of who also went on to create some of the popular projects in blockchain such as ( ), ( ), ( / ). Early employees of successful tech companies can have significant advantages in gaining hands-on experiences scaling a startup, having a strong existing industry network, as well as seeing new potential business models in an emergent industry. Elon Musk Tesla Jeremy Stoppelman Yelp Max Levchin Slide PayPal LinkedIn, YouTube, Yammer, Palantir, Square Coinbase Litecoin, dYdX, Dharma, Polychain Capital, Scalar Capital , ethereum , ConsenSys Joseph Lubin Cardano Charles Hoskinson Parity & Polkadot Gav Would Gavin Wood — — The Internet Revolution facts are based on the book , written by . Mark Twain once said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme”. We are attempting to draw some similarities between the Internet and Blockchain Revolutions, to help entrepreneurs and investors better understand technological life cycles. Please leave your thoughts and comments below, and hope this article series will have provided some valuable perspectives about the Blockchain industry. “How the Internet Happened” Brian McCullough Author: Remi Gai **Sources:**Book , written by _Brian McCullough_ “How the Internet Happened” https://unblock.net/who-is-vitalik-buterin/ https://www.coindesk.com/information/who-created-ethereum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalik_Buterin
