People of IOG: Dan Friedman

Charles introduces Daniel Friedman, a polyglot friend and one of the earliest people to work with the company.

The People of IOG series exists to introduce the people behind the scenes who build Cardano and the ecosystem.

Dan was born in Kiev in the Ukraine during the Soviet era, and puzzles over why English says the Ukraine.

Born in the 1970s, his memories are of a middle-class 1980s Soviet childhood.

1980s Kiev felt about fifteen years behind the West, with disco still popular, including the German group Dschinghis Khan.

Media ran on contraband: forbidden Western movies and Beatles music copied tape to tape to evade the censors.

Possessing banned media could be reported to the authorities and was punishable by jail time.

He was born under Leonid Brezhnev, who ruled nearly twenty years and hardened contraband and drug laws.

Leaving the USSR meant years of paperwork, since you could not freely cross the border without papers and bribes.

The emigration process took about three years, from late 1986 until leaving in summer 1989.

His parents kept the plan secret, fearing violence against Jews known to be trying to leave the country.

He inherited his father's love of music, recreating a weekend mixtape of ABBA, Boney M, and Dschinghis Khan.

As a child he loved astronomy and chemistry, and science teachers let him use the school telescope after hours.

He was fascinated by growing copper sulfate crystals on strings from saline solution.

Soviet schooling inducted children into communist youth groups from age eight, the Little Octobrists wearing a young-Lenin star.

Older children became Pioneers with red scarves, a preteen version of the communist party.

As one of a small Jewish minority he faced open anti-semitism and discrimination at school.

From second to fifth grade he was beaten daily by gangs of boys until he switched to a more tolerant school.

The USSR was officially atheist but had synagogues; he lived near one of only two in Kiev, in the ancient Podil district.

A rabbi he met there set him on a lifelong path of figuring out what kind of Jew he is.

Jews were blamed from both sides: as outsiders and via the anti-semitic conspiracy that Jews created communism.

His father was a Soviet Air Force officer and engineer, kept stationed near the Afghan border for years because he was a Jew.

His father escaped the military only by feigning dementia after a foot injury to get a medical discharge.

His father wrote a dissertation on artificial intelligence in the mid-1980s.

His father was a cyberneticist who managed the IT center of the Soviet state athletic-goods sector.

He was eight and living in Kiev during the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Reactor number four melted down, worse-managed than Three Mile Island, and burned for months.

The government hid it, and soldiers were sent to clear radioactive debris by hand and died.

The truth came out only when fallout drifted over Finland and Western friends phoned to warn his family.

Authorities mismanaged the crisis, washing streets in a way that only moved radiation into the water supply.

His father stayed to guard the home while he and his mother fled to his grandmother's in Moscow for the summer.

The government cancelled direct Kiev-to-Moscow trains, forcing a day and a half of hopping local trains.

His maternal grandfather was a puppeteer, whose name Aron he later gave to his newborn son.

Emigration came in waves the government opened about once a decade; his family caught the 1987 to 1989 wave.

Openly wanting America was defection, so families arranged an Israeli relative to petition for their release.

Leaving required crossing out of the whole Eastern Bloc through Poland to a neutral country, for them Austria.

At eleven and a half, boarding the train out, it hit him he was leaving forever and he cried the whole way.

The family spoke almost no English, mainly Russian and Ukrainian, when they set out for America.

A Jewish-American organization, HIAS, sponsored their journey and expenses, later repaid.

To raise money they brought a suitcase of Soviet goods, pottery and painted wooden spoons, to sell to dealers.

In Austria about twenty Jewish refugees shared one room on cots for roughly two weeks of processing.

Processing then moved to Italy, home of the nearest consulate conducting political-refugee interviews.

Dan's family stayed near Rome in a seaside town, renting a room from a landlord named Mario.

A language-barrier comedy: Mario's come here gesture was mistaken for go away.

Refugees could not work, surviving on relatives' money, selling goods, and barter while awaiting status.

The US interviews gauged sincerity, asking why they wanted to immigrate and how they were discriminated against.

Families gathered daily at a square to hear which had been approved or denied refugee status.

The refugees came from all over the USSR: Russia, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Central Asia.

Refugees who were denied could not go back but had to reapply, sometimes waiting eight months or more.

A family friend was denied, stayed alone for eight months, and made it to the US a year later.

Being told you could go to the US made you the cool kid, like Willy Wonka's golden ticket.

Dan's family landed in New York on August 14th 1989, glimpsing a faint green Statue of Liberty.

Dan's family flew on to Philadelphia, where established 1970s-wave Soviet-Jewish friends already lived the American dream.

At JFK he was struck hearing English really spoken for the first time after only studying it in school.

Automatic supermarket doors in Italy fascinated him as a kid from the Eastern Bloc.

A vivid memory: leaving the USSR, border guards X-rayed his father's tennis racket, mistaking its hanging ring for contraband.

In Philadelphia public schools, a mostly Black student body was his first real culture shock and a crash course in Americana.

Nobody spoke Russian, so he had to learn English fast in ESL, his own American teacher bridging the gap.

His English clicked on the third day, and within six to eight months he could communicate properly.

Summer camp and reading books were what truly cemented his English, a lesson he applies to every language.

His mother, a concert pianist and theatrical historian, first found work washing dishes and playing piano at a Russian restaurant.

His father, a cybernetics researcher, took IT and teaching jobs, eventually working at Campbell Soup's IT center.

In about five years the family went from a one-bedroom apartment to a suburban house living the American dream.

As a child he dreamed of being an astronaut, studying astronomy and astrophysics, and nearly pursued aerospace engineering.

He reflects that he wanted to be an explorer more than a scientist, drawn to the final frontier.

Late-1980s Soviet cooperatives ran video salons showing American films; his school screened Star Wars, out of order.

Asking to watch Star Wars in America, a friend put on Star Trek: The Next Generation instead, making him a lifelong Trek fan.

Coming of age in the mid-to-late 1990s, he landed his first jobs at the start of the dot-com boom building websites.

He was an entrepreneur, pitching internet malls to local chambers of commerce and charging shops to build their pages.

His first browser was Gopher on CompuServe, before Mosaic and Mozilla arrived.

He integrated a real-estate listings database into a website in 1997, enabling early online property search.

He compares the dot-com boom to the blockchain boom: the internet then was niche, not yet mainstream.

In 1999 McGraw-Hill hired him to analyze why its twelve websites got no traffic, examining meta tags.

Like blockchain now, established firms could not buy the knowledge and needed the hacker kid to leapfrog.

He joined Tubridge, a content-management pioneer, over twenty years before WordPress made publishing seamless.

Tubridge's system embedded a Java widget so editors could publish directly, eliminating whole teams of webmasters.

With JP Morgan backing and stock options projected to split, he expected to be a millionaire before twenty-five in San Francisco.

A year and a half later the roughly billion-dollar company collapsed, undone by too little sales and a retracted IPO.

He watched the dot-com bust unfold like the fall of Rome, weekly firing lists reminiscent of the film Office Space.

Packing up his cubicle, he had put his heart into the company's vision and had to find something new to believe in.

The crash built lasting resilience: when stuck he now refuses despair and pushes toward his destiny.

After the bust he hopped between IT jobs making good money but suffered a crisis of faith wanting a bigger life.

A Star Trek TNG convention in Pasadena in 2003 drew him to stay in California and reconnect with his artistic side.

He studied acting at the Beverly Hills Playhouse under Allen Williams, learning communication more than acting.

He moved from acting into filmmaking, directing, writing, cinematography, and running his own small studio.

He grew disillusioned with a Hollywood that preached progressiveness but ran on the casting couch and sexism.

Stuck and unhappy doing IT for Honda, he resolved that his life needed to be big and serious.

In 2012 a vivid dream of being in a bright high-rise in the East convinced him to flip his life upside down.

He weighed Japan against Sri Lanka, the latter for his love of Arthur C. Clarke who lived there.

A second dream of a synagogue in Japan settled it, choosing Japan over booming China.

He chose Osaka, inspired by a dream and Ridley Scott's Osaka-set film Black Rain.

Knowing no one and no Japanese, he sold his car, quit Honda, and flew to a guesthouse in Osaka.

He left the head office of Honda America in Torrance, a place people built careers to retire from.

His first weekend he found the synagogue in Kobe and his fellow Jews, an easy way to make friends in Japan.

His best friend Nicolas Despopolous helped him get established, make business contacts, and start earning yen.

He came to Japan with suitcases of business suits, intent on doing business and building a life, not just visiting.

He likens his move to his parents' immigration, reliving at 35 the fresh start they made in their 40s.

Becoming fluent in Japanese took a few years; he jokes the verb-final grammar makes it sound like Yoda.

He learned Japanese not from anime or manga but through human connection, building speaking skills in conversation.

He practiced by frequenting old-fashioned mom-and-pop coffee shops called kissaten, chatting with owners over morning service.

His first book in Japanese was Murakami's Norwegian Wood, a plunge into sadness written in old-style kanji.

He recalls Japan's unspoken rules, like which side of the escalator to stand on in Osaka versus Tokyo.

The blunt Osaka Kansai dialect, used for gangsters in film, suited his direct personality in Japan's rudest city.

IOG's early Honmachi office in Osaka is where much of this story with IOHK begins.

Charles frames the lost lore of IOHK's earliest days, now a company of hundreds across forty countries.

In the beginning the whole company fit around one ten-seat table in the shared Osaka office.

Nicolas Despopolous referred Dan, who knew co-founder Jeremy Wood, leading to his interview.

Dan was hired as project manager for the Cardano pre-sale, then in its second tranche.

Charles recalls the OG crew: Jeremy, Nico, Ari Levy Cohen, Ricky Wakai, Christian Lindeneg, and researcher Mario.

Mario, a head researcher at Tokyo Tech, joined around the same era as Dan.

Charles notes they built the first crowd sale to do KYC, since no existing software could do it the way they needed.

Dan's team wrote the compliance app in Meteor with over 300 pages of documentation, a famously poor framework choice.

In an hour-long Skype interview Charles promised a science-driven ecosystem and one of the best blockchains in the world.

A natural skeptic, Dan was surprised his BS meter stayed quiet, sensing Charles's grand vision was the real deal.

Dan braced to be happy with 40 percent of what Charles promised, and says nearly all of it came true.

With no brand or reputation, Charles hired the first academics in Ukraine, bringing in Roman Oliynykov and Mario Larangeira.

Through Nicolas Bentanicus and Vassilis Zikas they courted Aggelos Kiayias for a year to write the first paper.

Charles candidly describes the imperfect original Ouroboros team, including Bernardo David, and how they wrote the protocol anyway.

Serokell was given the RS Coin project as a trial before being trusted with building Cardano.

At Corfu, Greece, RS Coin's authors George Danezis and Sarah Meiklejohn praised Serokell's implementation.

Dan took a three-day crash course in Haskell for his interview, having previously only used Lisp for robotics.

Coming from Java, he found Haskell's laziness and lack of mid-execution checkpoints deeply counterintuitive.

Charles admits much of the early Haskell was wrong by Haskell standards, later fixed by people like Eric de Castro.

The early team worked brutal sixteen-to-eighteen-hour days building Cardano, while Ethereum Classic was outsourced to a separate firm.

Charles recounts pursuing Galois, then hiring Well-Typed's Duncan Coutts for the networking stack after their Cloud Haskell work.

Dan describes Duncan Coutts as a colorful, classically trained actor who played in The Three Musketeers.

Jokes about jolly Duncan's soul being slowly crushed from Malta to Lisbon, like Requiem for a Dream.

Dan became IOHK's business-development special forces, parachuting into the Eastern Bloc, most notably Georgia.

After the pre-sale he unified the siloed teams, creating the weekly technical report and daily touchpoints.

He brokered communication between team leads like Serokell and others, with Darko and Philipp Kant already aboard.

Georgia surfaced through emails forwarded from Charles and contacts including the Bitfury and Emurgo people.

Giorgi emailed inviting IOHK to Georgia, and the shared Russian language and post-Soviet bond built instant rapport.

Dan stresses making genuine human connections in business, reading people and aligning fiscally and ethically.

He pitched Charles on Georgia in Tokyo, and around the same time a New Balance authentication deal came in overnight.

In Georgia they gave lectures on Ouroboros at universities with Esko and Peter Ghazi, and worked with the innovation authority GITA.

Cultivating ministries and the prime minister, they built the relationships behind Charles's July 2019 state visit.

Charles recalls meeting Georgia's prime minister in jeans and tennis shoes during a gout attack, amid its red meat and wine.

Admires how Georgia cleansed itself of corruption in one generation, even firing and retraining its entire police force.

Georgian history comes up, from warrior Queen Tamar to Ottoman influence and the Tbilisi warm-springs baths.

IOHK is running a credential-verification program in Georgia that could grow into national ID, payments, and tourism.

Charles frames Dan's around-the-world arc: from Ukrainian refugee to the American and Japanese dreams to success in Georgia.

Dan credits his communist-era five-year-plan mentality for keeping him organized and driven.

He recalls Charles crawling out of bed after being bedridden to do a Tel Aviv meetup right after Georgia.

Dan says building the Cardano ecosystem with Charles gives his work meaning beyond a job.

Charles closes noting smart contracts coming soon and over 110 deals in the commercial pipeline, hoping to work in Ukraine one day.