Orchid’s Team: Cypherpunks who came together to enable a surveillance-free internet
The CEO who co-founded the oldest crypto hedge fund (Pantera) in USA, A co-founder who created Cydia-the AppStore used on over 30 million jailbroken Apple devices, A co-founder who created the first interactive online banking software for Wells Fargo, and a co-founder who was one of the core developers of Ethereum that helped launch Ethereum in 2015.
Team is undoubtedly one of the criteria we use to assess the quality of a startup. A talented team is perhaps the most important factor that makes or breaks the success of a startup. If you are here reading this article, you perhaps do have some interest in discovering Orchid and judging whether or not the team is competent enough to execute on the promised vision. In this article, I seek to bring to your attention about professional achievements of Orchid’s co-founders, their relevant work, their ethos, and what made them join hands for creating Orchid, a decentralized VPN to open internet to everyone.
Dr.Steven Waterhouse CEO @ Orchid
Steven is one of the most prominent thought thinkers in the blockchain space and is the former CTO and co-founder of the oldest crypto venture fund in US- Pantera Capital, where he led venture investments in 20 Blockchain startups from 2013 to 2016 deploying $25m. Some of the notable investments include Bitstamp, Xapo, 21, Chain, Circle, Korbit, Civic, Zcash, Polychain Capital.
Steven was a board member of the prominent cryptocurrency exchange- Bitstamp from Jan 2014 to July of 2016
His prior work before entering the blockchain space includes him being a co-founder and CTO of a publically listed company RPX (Nasdaq: RPXC), and a director and founder of the Honeycomb product group at Sun Microsystems.
His academic background involves him receiving his Ph.D. in Engineering from Cambridge University, specializing in speech recognition and machine learning, where he was awarded the Isac Newton Prize for outstanding research.
It was in 2017 when Steven Waterhouse decided to co-found- Orchid Labs after noticing the growing trend surveillance and internet censorship.
Jay Freeman, co-founder & CTO @ Orchid
Jay Freeman is popularly known online as “saurik”, is best recognized for creation of Cydia for jailbroken iOS devices, the alternative to the App Store for jailbroken iPhones, iPads, and the iPod touch, used collectively on more than 30 million devices worldwide. Its SDK, Cydia Substrate, provided a platform on which thousands of developers were able to create and deploy extensions and modifications to the stock behaviour of Apple’s software. The Cydia Store, an integrated payment solution, allowed homebrew and open source developers to monetize their work.
Some of his personal projects include the following-
Anakrino — first C# decompiler for Microsoft’s .NET
Chora/SVN — web client for Subversion, beating ViewSVN to market
Cycorder — first high speed (MJPEG) video recorder for the iPhone
Cycript — highly compatible JavaScript->Objective-C bridge
Cyrket — Android Market client for desktop web browsers
FQL/JDBC — JDBC driver for Facebook’s FQL
ircWAB — HTTP based IRC client, without Java or Flash
Java/iPhone — port of Java to the iPhone (with Objective-C connectors)
Menes/C++ — high-level platform abstraction and utility library for C++
Nmap+V — original versioning port scanner with XML scripting
s3fs — in-kernel, high-performance Linux filesystem for S3
Substrate — powerful code modification and insertion platform
Telesphoreo — distribution of Unix software for modern smartphones
Quotes — Facebook application for sharing what your friends have said
Brian J. Fox, co-founder @ Orchid
Brain Fox is a computer programmer, open-source advocate, and a co-founder of Orchid Labs and holder of fifteen patents.
Fox was the first employee of the legendary programmer Richard Stallman’s Free Software Foundation, wherein 1985 he created the GNU Bash Shell.
In 1995, he created the first interactive online banking software for Wells Fargo.
Over the last three decades, Fox has founded multiple technology companies, as well
as not-for-profit organizations dedicated to open source voting systems.
Fox received his master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence from MIT. He did B.S. in Information and Systems Sciences from the University of Stockholm, where he also minored in mathematics.
Gustav Simonsson, co-founder @ Orchid
Gustav Simonsson is a developer, blockchain expert. Simonsson helped launch the Ethereum network in 2015 as one of the core developers on its security team.
He specializes in full-stack development, with experience in complex backend systems,
blockchain systems, FinTech, payment processing, and telecom. He is also an advisor to Metrnonome.
HOW THEY ALL CAME TOGETHER
Steven’s existing concerns about privacy and surveillance got activated while working with people like Zooko (founder of Zcash). In late 2016, after leaving Pantera, Steven started introspecting more profoundly about privacy; he was thinking about ways to rebuild systems today that have security and privacy as default in rather than the option of adding it later. Then he was SIM swapped. This incident galvanized him to take a hands-on action, to do something really instrumental in the privacy domain. After going over multiple business models, he came across the VPN space, noticing the flaws in the existing VPN industry (data harvesting, lock-in effects, central point of failure) he felt blockchain as the panacea for the existing woes in the VPN industry. Steven then met with Brian Fox, who introduced him to Jay Freeman. The team was later joined by Ethereum core developer Gustav Simonsson. All of these co-founders were staunch proponents of open-source technology and an ardent believer in the cause for the internet to be open and surveillance free; hence Orchid was born.
