Joining Succinct

Written in June, hope to release this on early September. Sorry if this writing is all over the place, it's written in late night.

 

So, I'm close to finishing my military service. I now have the power to make my own choice, and not be stuck somewhere just because I have to deal with the military things. Preparing for this new chapter in life, I took some moment to take a look back at my life. I realized there's a clear pattern and a common "theme" that plays out repeatedly. It's actually pretty simple. 

 

I notice all the time that "active/aggressive decision making" usually lead me to good results, but I'm not exactly the most active decision making person in nature. This means that either have to love something so much that I am willing to do the active decision making to pursue it, or someone just spoon-feeds me an opportunity to easily make an active decision. Therefore, I tried to do the right things at the right time with the right people so that these types of decisions come naturally. I'm lucky that I can be bailed out even though I handled my career like this - I have to be thankful for my great friends who connect me to great people and opportunities.

 

So all I had to do was, when people feed me a nice opportunity, I just had to seize it. For example, back in 2020, a CTF team named Defenit invited me to join their team to solve cryptography challenges. That team had strong people, and was connected to more strong people worldwide as well - so for me to join a competitive cybersecurity environment, that opportunity was given to me on a platter. If I decided to go passive there, then my life would have changed a lot, probably for the worse. I imagine I'd do nothing but try to get good GPA. Of course, to my credit, to seize that opportunity well I had to solve cryptography challenges well, and that I did at the time. 

 

It's interesting on how my ZKP career started too. My first look at ZKP started back in early 2021 when a friend at MIT invited me to an Ethereum study group, where we could decide to focus on ZKPs. I naturally chose ZKPs since I was already doing CTFs at the time, and there I met none other than the Brian Gu. This would snowball into me being invited to SBC side events in 2022/23, something I never imagined would happen back in 2021. Imagine if I was passive when my friend fed me that opportunity - that would suck. 

 

Something that's even more crazy is how my ZKP security career started. During my times where I grinded CTFs, sometimes our team Super Guesser and Perfect Blue would collab together. Also, due to our grinding, (especially in 2021) many in the CTF community knew about my abilities. It just happened so that Zellic's founders were the same folks as top CTF team Perfect Blue's founders - so they gave me a chance to collab with Zellic to do some ZKP audits. Thanks to this, I was able to grow my career despite being in military service. 

 

So, 2022 SBC side events. I was invited to go there thanks to 0xPARC and folks at the company who were wise enough to allow me there as a company travel. I was mostly just watching people talk and tried to understand what was going on, as I was quite introverted and didn't have much to talk about. I remember watching Succinct Labs talk about ZK Light Client back in 2022. To be really honest at that point I thought they were kinda insane (as in, wtf is that even possible) then later I realized that they are indeed cooking something. We had a brief interaction in 2022, just me talking some stuff about how Bulletproofs work, but somehow they remembered me. By the time 2023 SBC came, many things changed: I had an actual ZKP security career now. The folks at Succinct put trust in me to audit their stuff - even their important product SP1. This was another factor that helped grow my career despite being in military service. 

 

From these experiences, I began to believe in two things. The first is that active decision can definitely snowball into greater things, and the second is that I'm actually quite good at driving this snowball. I think my routine looks something like "be fed a great chance to make an active decision", "make the active decision", "cook hard so that the active decision ends up being the correct decision to make". I guess I'm good at making whatever decision I made a good one. Here's another example from 2022.

 

In 2022 I had to make a choice: a decision to go to either ChainLight or KALOS. I chose KALOS at that time in hopes of getting more control of how I'll cook, which it did, but at costs I didn't anticipate. It was clearly the harder path, and the stuff I had to deal with were much more complex than expected - but with the help of the teams mentioned above, I was somehow able to make it work.

• It turns out that me joining KALOS snowballed into very talented people like Jinu, Jade, Sihoon joining.
• I realized that I couldn't get much help from the business/management side, especially in getting technically strong clients. This meant that I had to carry the entire operation - to do ZKP work, I had to go further than just being good in ZKP. For this, I worked in more dynamic ways to improve my career - and succeeded. To the management's credit, once they realized that I can actually pull this off, they supported me with company travels (zkSummit10/11, etc) and respecting my decisions on how I'll do everything.
• Ultimately, as the saying goes, weak men create hard times, but hard times create strong people. 

Anyways, the conclusion so far is 

• active decision making always proved to be good for my career, but I'm not an active person 
• to do active things, I need to be fed a great chance to make active decisions
• once I make that active decision, I'm good at doing active things to make that decision a good one 
• I'm a strong believer of active decisions snowballing into greater things, as I have experienced it

So naturally, as my military service was slowly but surely coming to an end, I had to decide what to do. It was either

• continue my career doing ZKP Security, where I believe I already proved myself to some degree
• do something more different, joining a product team and doing a mix of security, research, and engineering 

Both of them are quite hard in terms of difficulty, but in my state the latter was definitely the more grinding, more learning, more dynamic, and more active idea. What's a better team to do this than Succinct, a team that I already have close relations with, and is prepared? 

 

With joining Succinct, I'm hoping to repeat what I have done over the last few years. Make an active, dynamic decision that was gifted by both my past works and the team, make that decision a good one by cooking hard, and snowball it into something great. I imagine joining a product team make the possibilities limitless, which is cool. I'm also excited to be coworking with a very strong team. 

 

Also, I guess I should write something about the cryptographic aspects. I like the core value of ZKPs - a cryptographic proof of integrity. Reducing trust with cryptography always sounds like a good idea. However, if your only market fit comes from reducing trust, you really need a good doubtlessly secure system behind it. Why use a system that removes the need for trust when you can't even trust the system added, right? Currently, the ZKP systems developed are quite hard to use, and easy to make mistakes. I should know, I audited these stuff. It's pretty easy to figure out that at the current state it's quite hard for ZKP to scale at large (even without considering the performance stuff) when writing circuits is this mind-boggling. Of course, I'd like ZKP to scale since I agree with its values. The solution here seems to be a secure zkVM. Also, coming from security side of things, I always enjoyed the open-source ethos of the community a lot, and codebases that weren't open sourced annoyed me a bit. So, it seemed to me that the right thing is to build an open source zkVM. This turns out to be what Succinct is building right now! I also practically know the core internals of SP1, and can confidently say that this code is pretty good. Also, most signals around me (friends and people I respect, and the general vibe check) pointed that Succinct is a great team to join :)

 

Also, note that in the zkVM scenario a lot of ZKP audit cases reduce to simply auditing the codebase that is compiled to the zkVM - I mentioned this in the zkSummit11 talk I gave. This also supported my decision to move to the building side of things as well. 

 

In any case, I'm happy to announce that I'm joining Succinct. I'm doing plenty of security work of course, but am expecting to do researching and engineering as well. Excited to work with a strong team and get a building experience. Hoping I can cook something good.