Early Days of Ethereum

Stephen Dao Hui Hsu is an American physicist, AI startup founder, and former university administrator. He holds a PhD in physics from UC Berkeley and has held faculty positions at Yale, the University of Oregon, and Michigan State University, where he also served as Vice President for Research.

Connection to Ethereum

Steve Hsu played a key connective role in the early Ethereum ecosystem. In mid-2014, Kieren James-Lubin — who had been a longtime reader of Hsu's blog — reached out to him about Ethereum after becoming involved with the project through his father Joe Lubin.

Kieren forwarded Steve the Ethereum white paper, and Steve in turn connected Kieren with James Hormuzdiar, an old friend who was a physicist and software developer. As Jim recalled in Episode 1:

"Steve called me up and he's like, this guy Kieren just called me up. And you have to go look at this Ethereum thing."

Jim read the white paper and was immediately drawn in by the idea of incentivization on the internet. He went on to build the Haskell Ethereum client and co-found BlockApps with Kieren and Victor Wong.

Steve also helped connect the early Ethereum community to the academic and technology worlds. Through Steve, Kieren met Ben Lorica at O'Reilly Media, which led to the Crypto Economicon conference in January 2015 — a pivotal gathering that brought together many future blockchain leaders including Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood, and others.