In 2019, Dom and I started a company most people thought wouldn’t work. EasyA was always different. But for two brothers who’d just left their jobs to go all in, there was no going back.
As we embark on our journey to go public, I thought you should know a bit more about why we started EasyA, the early days, and where we’re going next. Our story is about two brothers who refused to settle, and never betrayed the fire burning in their hearts. This is, of course, about you understanding what EasyA is. But it’s also about showing you that anything is possible. Just two brothers against the world.
Our journey begins on a little island in the Atlantic, in an ancient city called London. Dom was born two years before me, and as the firstborn, he loved the attention. But much to the dismay of little Dom, I was on the way. And as someone who’s always been early to things, I decided to emerge from my mother’s womb two weeks ahead of schedule. So when I popped out to greet the world, Dom’s first words to my father were: “Mummy not nice”. Little did he know at the time that I’d be the best thing to happen to him!
Early is something I’ve always excelled at. I was early to crypto in 2013, when I stumbled across the Bitcoin white paper and started mining it. Bitcoin was $100. XRP was $0.005. I was early to AI, when I built the first application to help blind people see. The two technologies fascinated me. As a teenager, I could barely contain my excitement at being able to play and contribute to such powerful technologies.
Dom and I shared an immense passion for technology. We’d run speed tests on our computers, competing to see who could get theirs to run the fastest. And those competitions would later help me find the best clock speeds for mining crypto. I was obsessed with computers. While most kids my age were having fun saying three and four-letter words that can’t be written down here, I had my equivalents: CPU, PSU, GPU, FPGA, ASIC. My parents wondered what I was doing in the basement. They found me spending countless hours wiring things together, piecing together motherboards and finding spare parts wherever I could lay my hands on them.
That year I took my first computer science course at Stanford University. It was a magical time. And around this time was also when I locked in. I embarked upon what would become a more than decade-long monk mode. A marshmallow test on steroids. And it started working. I won a place to study at Cambridge University. A university that laid the groundwork for modern science: where Newton formulated the laws of gravity, and Alan Turing gave birth to computer science and AI. At Cambridge I locked in again. Every scholarship was within reach. And each one fell into my hands, one by one. Triple first: the best scholar my professors had ever seen. What did it feel like? I was filled with immeasurable happiness. But at the same time immense pain: the price to pay for attaining greatness.
Dom won his scholarships at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Wharton School. He breathed the same air as Elon Musk, Donald Trump and Warren Buffett.
Both of us won prized jobs at the best New York firms in the world: Goldman Sachs, Blackstone, Sullivan & Cromwell.
But something wasn’t right.
How could we have the greatest impact possible on humanity? The answer certainly wasn’t by sitting in a cubicle in a concrete cage.
So we left our jobs.
We threw everything away and started EasyA.
From big, fat New York salaries, down to annual earnings of precisely $0.
We moved back in with our parents (and I am forever grateful to them for feeding us over those difficult months when nothing seemed to work). We coded EasyA in our childhood bedrooms. And when our eyes became blurry, we hopped on our bicycles and started flyering to get the word out.
We were working harder than we’d ever done. And yet nothing worked.
But we didn’t give up.
We kept shipping updates to the EasyA app. Day in, day out. Most apps ship updates once every week or two weeks. We shipped multiple times per day.
And we got out there. We started networking, meeting the people who’d need EasyA.
And little by little, day by day, night by night, things slowly started coming together.
The first $10, the first $1,000, the first $10,000. The first $100,000, then the first $1,000,000.
Dom and I have never forgotten how hard it was when we first started out. Our ambition is bigger than it’s ever been before. In our lab we’re working on technologies which, if we’re successful, will fundamentally change humanity for the best.
For most companies going public today, the listing is an exit. It’s a time when investors get their money back after years being trapped. Dom and I never raised money from external investors. Today, we still own 100% of EasyA. We didn’t need to go public. Staying private is far easier. But community is everything for us. We’ve reached an inflection point in EasyA’s trajectory. We're building things within our lab that we believe will bring a step change in humanity. And we want to bring our community and users along with us on this journey. We couldn’t have done it without you, and we won’t do it without you.
We’re firmly in research and development mode. We’re going to take big swings at some of the biggest problems in the world. Many of those swings will fail, just like most of the app updates we shipped when we first started failed. But just like when we first started, we won’t ever give up. Every swing we take compounds. And just like a champion boxer who never gives up, we'll keep fighting until we win.
AI and blockchain are two of the most important technologies in the history of humanity. Our ambition is to lead the world in both of them, and we’re going on this journey together with you.
we're making it happen.
@kwok_phil · AI tools
