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Migration and innovation are hot-button issues the world over. Amid rapid change, there are calls to slow or halt both the movement of people and the growth of new technologies. As a human being, I understand the fear of rapid change. But as an immigrant and an entrepreneur, I have also seen up close how powerfully these forces can advance human flourishing.
I was born in another country—both physically and philosophically. My first language is not English, and the social and political systems I was born under would be unfamiliar to most Americans. Yet as an immigrant to the United States, I also share its most common origin story. And as a technology entrepreneur who believes in the transformative power of decentralized blockchains, I’m following in the footsteps of those who left their birthplaces for a new homeland, where they invented new technologies and spread new ideas.
In Search of Freedom
My story is both unique and universal.
In the 1980s, my native Hungary was under the heavy thumb of Soviet communism. It was a place where individual enterprise was stifled by a government that valued conformity over innovation. It’s hard for people born and raised in the U.S. to truly understand what it was like to live in Eastern Europe—in a place that saw three revolutions in three adjacent countries over a decade, as the specter of Russian domination loomed next door. Eventually, my parents made the decision to leave.
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The contradictions of my early life shaped the path I have traveled since. Exposed, up close and at an early age, to the tyranny and intellectual stagnation of centralized systems of control, I pursued avenues of personal growth and exploration wherever I could—through human connection, the arts and technology.
At every turn, my family supported and challenged me. My father, whose successful trucking business kept him on the road for most of the year, was a key figure in my life. When he was home, our house became a nexus of discussion about technology, philosophy and the future.
We spoke of cloud computing and artificial intelligence at the dinner table more than a decade before most of the world would hear those terms. My father saw in technology a vast new frontier. He saw values of individualism and capitalism driving a new kind of revolution—not political but technological—in data, automation, and finance.
Looking Ahead
In our adopted state of Ohio, my parents, ordained pastors who met in the seminary, poured their energies into building a Presbyterian church. They built an orchard and 15 greenhouses, a reflection of the unyielding work ethic they instilled in my brothers and me. For them, labor was love. Faith was a path to freedom and service; it was not about blind obedience but reason, choice and the beauty of the individual.
My brothers and I were encouraged to read voraciously, to think critically and to “go outside”—to always stay in tune with the world to understand how it was evolving. Dostoevsky, whose banned works my parents had secretly shared and discussed back in Hungary, was a particular lodestar.
I almost ended up pursuing a career in music. Between the ages of 16 and 18, I was heavily invested in drumming and seriously considered climbing the ladder of international courses and competitions. But I was ultimately drawn to technology. Its underlying logic, and seemingly endless potential, fascinated me.
Building an Open-Source Future
Eventually, I studied computer science at the University of Akron. There, I fell headfirst into open-source software and became “red-pilled” on the power of startups and entrepreneurship.
After college, I managed to raise some VC funding and founded my first company. That first venture taught me resilience; I discovered that building something from scratch was as much about endurance as it was about ingenuity. A second startup, focused on AI tooling built on a very early version of ChatGPT, showed me the power and potential of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Then I discovered blockchain.
For me, blockchain was a revelation. Here was a technology that tied the various strands of my intellectual and professional journey together. A technology that could make centralized abuse of authority, of the kind my parents had fled from in Eastern Europe, impossible. A technology that could open up the benefits of finance to people all around the world.
I saw it as the ultimate open-source project. Crypto offered a new way to create value, one that didn’t rely on traditional, gate-kept VC funding models. Whereas conventional startups raised millions of dollars to develop proprietary products behind closed doors, crypto was open-source by nature. The code is available for anyone to use, fork and improve. Value isn’t captured through ad revenue or data mining but through the token itself. Users who contribute to the ecosystem are rewarded directly, creating a self-sustaining economy that grows as the network expands.
When I founded my current project, I considered applying to the venerable accelerator Y Combinator. Instead, I joined the Avalanche ecosystem, drawn by its vision for a decentralized world and its technical approach to scalability.
In an important way, this brings me full circle, back to the values of independence and self-sufficiency my parents instilled in me. They left their homeland so that I could grow up in a place of opportunity and instilled in me their belief in the primacy of the individual. Now, I am continuing to drive that vision forward across the ever-expanding horizon of decentralized technology.
Steven Gates is CEO of Multisig Labs, the creator of GoGoPool, a decentralized staking protocol on Avalanche founded to simplify the process of launching and validating layer-one blockchains.