Announcing First Principles: Rare conversations with the pioneers behind key computing technologies
We’re excited to announce First Principles, a special limited series from a16z crypto about foundational computing concepts that underpin things we use in our world every day. We interview the very people — Nobel Prize winners, Turing Award (often referred to as the “Nobel Prize in Computing”) winners, and Gödel Prize winners — who pioneered significant concepts, let alone entire fields. More on who below.
The foundational concepts span distributed systems and consensus protocols; economics, mechanism, and market design; cryptography, from digital signatures to zero knowledge; and more. These are all important domain areas that have been around for a long time, but have become even more important in the context of blockchains today. People often tell the story of the first Bitcoin whitepaper as if it were a holy relic that appeared out of nowhere in 2009 — yet the ideas in it (and evolving in blockchains since) were founded on the above “first principles” from decades before.
First Principles shares the war stories from the people who have not just done deep theory, but helped put that theory into practice. Ultimately, the series is an homage to scientific research and distilling a problem down to its essence. “If you get it just right”, host Tim Roughgarden observes — the basic definitions, the abstractions, the language — then it will inevitably surface (and resurface) many generations of technology later, in ways the pioneers could never have foreseen. It pays off in the short term, in the satisfaction of solving the problem that motivated you in the first place — but then it pays off over and over again as the technology evolves.”
For those working in or using blockchain technologies, the broader idea behind First Principles is that crypto’s hardest problems — decentralized coordination, verification, incentives, adversarial behavior, trust — are deep systems problems rooted in decades of computer science and economics. This series is a guide to that lineage, as told by the people who helped build it.
But beyond those interested in blockchains, First Principles is a love letter to a researcher finding their way in the modern world — or anyone navigating “crazy career” twists and turns. This series is also for anyone who wants to understand more about how things work under the hood, given “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. And it is for anyone who is just curious, at a higher level, about where ideas come from, how they evolve, and how they spread in the world…
The expert voices in First Principles
Hosted by a16z crypto Head of Research and professor of computer science Tim Roughgarden — who conceived “First Principles” based on his years of educating students in computer science first at Stanford University and then at Columbia University, and on his popular YouTube channel throughout (more on his background below) — the interviews feature the following special guests, listed in series order.
~On distributed computing, we interviewed two of its field-defining pioneers — Barbara Liskov and Leslie Lamport — both winners of the ACM Turing Award:
Barbara Liskov (MIT) won the Turing Award in 2008 for her contributions to the “practical and theoretical foundations of programming language and system design” — many of these concepts were foundational in object-oriented programming computer languages, among other things. The Association for Computed Machinery (ACM), one of the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, also especially noted the significance of Liskov’s contributions “related to data abstraction, fault tolerance, and distributed computing”.
Leslie Lamport (most recently at Microsoft Research) won the Turing Award in 2013 for his “fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of distributed and concurrent systems” — including the Byzantine General’s Problem as applied to mission-critical coordination systems for NASA and others. The ACM also lauded Lamport’s invention of concepts such as causality and logical clocks, safety and liveness, replicated state machines, and sequential consistency.
~For economics, we interviewed pioneers in the key areas of market design and auction design — Alvin Roth and Paul Milgrom — both winners of Nobel Prizes in Economic Sciences:
Al Roth (Stanford University), who is working in the areas of game theory and experimental economics, won the Nobel Prize in 2012 (jointly with Lloyd Shapley) for their “theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design”. As the Nobel committee observed, knowing “how to bring different players together in the best possible way is a key economic problem” with many applications, and through empirical studies and lab experiments, Roth explained how markets function not just in theory but in practice.
Paul Milgrom (Stanford University) won the Nobel Prize in 2020 (jointly with Robert Wilson) for “improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats”. Auction design underpins many online marketplaces and protocols today, but Milgrom was once described as “the world’s leading auction designer” for the physical world as well — having helped design many of the auctions for radio spectrum around the world in the last thirty years, including the spectrum auctions conducted by the FCC in the United States.
~In cryptography, we interviewed three pioneers in public key encryption, proof systems, and zero knowledge — Ron Rivest, Shafi Goldwasser, and Noam Nisan:
Ron Rivest (MIT; also a founder of Verisign, via RSA Security), works across cryptography, computer and network security, algorithms, voting security, and other areas. But he is best known as the co-inventor (with Adi Shamir and Len Adleman) of the RSA cryptosystem — putting the “R” in the “RSA” — an “ingenious contribution” to making public-key cryptography useful in practice, for which they won the Turing Award in 2002. The RSA method, which relies on the fact that “nobody has yet developed an efficient algorithm for factoring very large integers”, is critical in the public key cryptography systems widely used for secure data transmission today. Rivest also co-authored the seminal textbook Introduction to Algorithms.
Shafi Goldwasser (MIT) won the Turing Award in 2012 (along with Silvio Micali) for “transformative work that laid the complexity-theoretic foundations for the science of cryptography” — and in the process “pioneered new methods for efficient verification of mathematical proofs in complexity theory”. Among her many accomplishments beyond these areas, Goldwasser helped pioneer interactive proof systems, which have tremendous significance today well beyond blockchains, including in zero knowledge systems and in SNARKs — two primitives that are useful in other industries as well.
Noam Nisan (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, also Starkware), focuses on algorithmic game theory, learning in markets, and more. He won the ACM’s 2012 Gödel Prize (along with Amir Ronen, and two other groups of researchers: Elias Koutsoupias and Christos Papadimitriou, as well as Tim Roughgarden and Éva Tardos) for their contributions “to understanding how selfish behavior by users and service providers impacts the behavior of the internet and other complex computational systems”. Nisan (with Ronen) coined the term “algorithmic mechanism design”, which combined ideas from economics and game theory with concepts and techniques from computer science. Nisan also edited and co-wrote the textbook that defined the field of Algorithmic Game Theory.
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The First Principles series also features a16z crypto research partners (in order of appearance) Ittai Abraham, Scott Kominers, and Justin Thaler — as well as a16z crypto Senior Research Advisor, Stanford University professor of computer science, and Co-director of the Stanford Computer Security Lab Dan Boneh — each joining the conversations per their own research expertise and interests.
Finally, more about the host: Tim Roughgarden works on the design, analysis, applications, and limitations of algorithms; and on game theory and microeconomics — especially as applied to networks, auctions, and blockchains. [See, for example, his paper analyzing Ethereum’s transaction fee mechanism design; and his paper introducing LVR, a much-needed framework to help liquidity providers to think about whether and when to provide liquidity to an automated market maker — an important question in decentralized finance.]
Also a 2012 Gödel Prize winner, Roughgarden oversees the a16z crypto research lab — which covers the foundational areas featured in First Principles. He also co-wrote the textbook (along with Nisan and others) defining the field of Algorithmic Game Theory, which brought economics more centrally into the field of computer science through applications like real-time advertising auctions, which were business models for the early internet; and auctions that governments used to allocate licenses for 5G. A few years ago, Roughgarden also released Algorithms Illuminated to teach the basics of algorithms, as he describes it, “in the most accessible way imaginable”.
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Please subscribe to our YouTube channel to get regular releases from the First Principles series, and also subscribe to our newsletter here.
- Share one of our trailers here on X (also available on LinkedIn) — or see also this short series overview
- Watch episode 0 introducing distributed computing and blockchains here
- Watch episode 1 with Barbara Liskov here
~Sonal Chokshi, Angel Gehr, Robert Hackett, and Stephanie Zinn, with Drew Coffman
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